Bombshell by Rowan Maness

Author:Rowan Maness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

CHAPTER 14

A low-resolution Google Street View image of 458 Edgeworth Court is projected on the walls of Emma’s room. I recognize it. I looked it up once. The biggest house in the neighborhood, the cleaning lady’s car parked in the driveway.

It’s night. If it’s 10 p.m. in Arizona, it’s midnight in Georgia. Ron’s asleep in his bed. And Emma? Emma is here. In a grainy, two-dimensional facsimile of the middle of her street, watching George’s truck pull up to her house.

He steps out, stuffs a gun in the baggy waistband of his jeans.

“No, George!” Emma calls. He doesn’t turn to look. He moves along the surface of Edgeworth Court, outlined against the picture like a fly on a window screen.

Emma tries to reach him again, screaming.

“It wasn’t me!”

George turns.

“I didn’t text you. I didn’t tell you to come kill Ron. That was someone else.”

“But you want to be with me?”

“No! I mean, it’s complicated—”

He raises the gun.

Like Peter. He’s going to shoot himself like Peter.

“Please go home, George. Promise me. I’ll explain everything in the morning.”

George isn’t pointing the gun at himself. He is pointing it at Emma.

“You don’t love me?”

At first I think the sound is radio static.

It’s cicadas. George’s voice is thrumming with them.

The whole scene fractures, skipping into horizontal bars–

I back away, slamming the door shut on Emma’s room. Running again, down the hallway this time, past doors with lights shining through the cracks, shadows crossing. Impatient shadows.

Make us real. Make us real. Make us real.

All my women are arranged around the pool in the courtyard. Motionless on lounge chairs. There’s murky water in the pool now. It looks like tar, and at first I think that’s where the smell is coming from.

Then I notice their bodies. Soured, rotting.

I look at the face of the one nearest to me.

Rosie.

James’s Soft Robe, the dream girl with my face.

A lizard scurries past and slithers into the pool.

• • •

When I came to, I was barefoot, standing on the six-foot wall that separates my backyard from everyone else’s. I looked around and determined I was halfway to Shane’s house, teetering precariously on a cinder-block ridge five inches wide.

I stepped forward carefully, clutching my phone in one hand, arms extended for balance. Trying not to think about what might have happened if I’d fallen. I felt deeply seen, like I’d spent the blackout being strung up and inspected. Touched without knowing it.

Where had the time gone? I could picture myself climbing on top of the covered Jacuzzi, scraping my knees against the rough wall. But I was watching from across the backyard, one body in the midst of a silent, angry crowd.

Was there, at this very moment, an army of avengers, a legion of the lied-to, marching toward Silver Creek Road? Moving invisible through the resolute night, like the cicadas with their white-noise screeching?

Moving along the grid of backyards, through parcels with varying arrangements of swing sets, pools, and barbecue pits until I got to Shane’s. Plastic toy detritus created angular hills in the dark.

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