Free Perfectly Good White Boy by Carrie Mesrobian Page B

happens at all.”
    â€œOh.” He breathed out a long, visible exhalation.
    I’d figured Eddie wouldn’t like hunting, but we hadn’t done anything together, with no girls at least, in a long time. I just wanted to be normal with him again. Do stuff. Get past the whole broken-nose thing, the whole ignoring him all summer for Hallie thing. We’d picked him up in my grandpa’s Suburban at three thirty in the morning, and Eddie’s mom had been standing on the doorstep in her bathrobe, handing him a little tiny cooler and his backpack, as if he was going to kindergarten or something. She looked at us, all decked out in blaze orange, like we were nuts. Eddie’s dad had been there, too, in his windpants and stocking cap, smiling and putting his earbuds in like he was about to go out for a run. Eddie’s dad was pretty fit, he ran marathons and stuff, but he was the kind of dude who got his hair cut every week and liked to golf for fun, not kill things in the woods. And Eddie had two sisters. It wasn’t a big man cave, Eddie’s house.
    â€œWhy do you want to kill a doe?”
    â€œI don’t,” I said. “Brad’s the one with the doe tag.”
    â€œBut why would you want to do that in the first place? Don’t you want the mothers to live and have more baby fawns and stuff?”
    â€œThere’s too many of them, bucks and does, in the first place,” I said. “That’s the point of the hunting season. To reduce the population. Too many deer, and they’ll starve. The cute little fawns won’t have anything to eat.”
    â€œWhat if the doe is pregnant?”
    â€œShe won’t be now,” I said. “That’s not till spring. Jesus Christ. How come you don’t know all this shit? This is like Science 9 shit, Eddie.”
    â€œIt’s just weird, is all.”
    â€œWhy would you want a doe, though? What’s the big deal with a lady deer? Doesn’t Brad want, like, a giant trophy head with antlers and stuff?”
    â€œShh,” I said. Because I could hear something. That little picky sound deer made. Skittering over stuff. Deer were dumb. They didn’t know how to keep their steps quiet.
    We kept listening, and then soon enough, I could see something. I pointed.
    â€œWhere?” Eddie said, reaching for the binoculars.
    â€œShh,” I hissed at him. I wondered if Neecie’d be able to hear this. Probably not. Neecie wouldn’t be a hunter, if we were cavemen. Some giant creature would probably have eaten Neecie, with her bad ears and all, if she’d been alive back in the Stone Age.
    Which meant probably she wouldn’t be a Marine. Couldn’t pass the physical requirements. They’d talked about that in the sniper-scouts show. You had to pass a vision test, so for sure you couldn’t be a Marine if you couldn’t hear. For some reason, as I raised my shotgun and exhaled, the way Grandpa Chuck had taught me, I was bummed out for her.
    Then the deer stepped into view, right in front of me: a buck, not a big one, but big enough, judging from the size of its rack. And then, in that weird slidey way deer have, instantly there was another beside it. Like a magic trick, like it had slipped out of the other deer’s pocket. Then another. Three of them, pausing in a row. Like they thought it’d be sneakier if they were hiding behind each other or something.
    â€œRight there,” I said as quiet as possible. Pointing.
    â€œWhere?” Eddie looked panicked. Like they were going to attack us or something.
    â€œShh,” I said again. And then, as if they’d heard him, they were running across the cornfield, kicking up frost and dirt, and Eddie was about to say something but I didn’t hear it because that’s when I unloaded the 12-gauge, all five shots.
    â€œJesus Christ!” Eddie said. He’d been knocked with the brass as they’d been spent. I wanted