Free The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott Page B

everything in it. This fucking town. It’s all your old history. I don’t belong.”
    “How do we fix that?”
    “I don’t know, but it’s more than that.
You’re
different, too. Nothing about this place has been good for you.” She wanted to say
Nothing has been good since Lonnie Ray Holliday
, but stopped short. “Maybe you don’t belong here either, anymore.” Adding, “And if that’s the case, maybe there’s nothing either of us can do to fix it. Not here.”
    He looked around the kitchen, past her, down the hall where boxes still stood stacked.
    “You’re right, babe, I know you are.”
    In their other fights, he’d step forward now and put his arms around her, wrap her up for a heartbeat or two, and she’d be fine with that. Instead, he stood, arms crossed.
    “Look, give me another couple of weeks. Let me hear back from the DPS lab and make a stab at closing this thing . . . do some good here.”
    She hesitated. “Okay, then what?”
    “Then we’ll leave, if that’s what you want. We’ll leave.”
    If that’s what you want.
    But that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. She wanted
him
to say it, to admit that he was done here and needed to get the hell out of Murfee for both of their sakes. They didn’t have to go back to Waco, just somewhere, anywhere, else. Instead, he was putting it off on her, as if his stake in it—his own unhappiness—carried no goddamn weight at all.
    It was bullshit, unfair, but for now that was all he was willing to give, watching her through the smoke.
    There were other things she could say, a hundred things she knew would hurt him bad—as bad as putting bullets in him. Killing, really, whatever they still had. But she’d given herself to him and wasn’t ready to take it back.
    “Okay, Chris. If that’s what you want. If that’s the way it has to be.” She flipped her cigarette into the sink where he’d been washing dishes, not waiting to see where it landed.

9
    CALEB

    N othing much interesting happens in Murfee.
    Nothing much anyone knows about, anyway. Time here is like a bug trapped in amber,
fossilization
—we learned all about that in biology. Come back a year from now, ten years from now, and Murfee would seem exactly the same. You would be wrong. Our town does a pretty good job of holding her secrets close.
    •   •   •
    Two interesting things have happened in the past couple of weeks.
    First, our new teacher, Anne Hart, has come here from Austin to replace to Ms. Garner, who died in her kitchen. I have her for English, and she’s picking right up where Ms. Garner left off, with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
.
    I’ve already read the book several times and know most of the passages by heart.
    Ms. Hart is a small woman, delicate, much younger than Ms. Garner—who’d long ago fossilized. She keeps her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, kind of like Mom; a look I also like on Amé, although she doesn’t wear it often—or simply won’t—because she knows I like it. Ms. Hart doesn’t use nail polish and her glasses seem a little too large for her face, unnecessary, when she could as easily wear contacts, but there’s a point to them. Sitting at the edge of her desk, talking, trying not to smile or make much eye contact, she doesn’t seem much older than us, but she could be prettier—much prettier, I think—than she’s willing to show.
    Her clothes and glasses and the carefully maintained distance from us are props—all part of a charade, a mask she wears. I recognize it because I wear a mask every morning I wake up here in Murfee. I guess Ms. Hart has her secrets, too.
    Amé already doesn’t like her, but I think it’s a girl thing. Where Ms. Hart is light, Amé is dark—dark hair and eyes and skin—and she’s a hundred percent Murfee. At least one end of Murfee, out past the stadium and beyond Mancha’s, where all the little houses and trailers begin. She speaks Spanish there but never at school and won’t