Free The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas

think it’s weird that her daughter was comparing me to a street urchin two days ago and now wants to play dress-up in her room.
    I thank Maggie for breakfast, clear my plate, and follow Callie up to her room. The window is still open, and the boozy stench has been replaced with the wet-earth smell from outside. After it rains in Orlando, the moisture clings to the air until it’s almost suffocating. Here, I smell the rain and I can almost sense how Fayette must have been before people ruined it with all of our ugliness.
    Callie sits down at her desk and begins to braid her hair. “I was thinking last night—wondering why it was Ari. She’s not like the other girls.”
    “Neither was Lori,” I say.
    “Okay, but Ari wasn’t like Lori either,” Callie says, then steels herself, as if she were trying not to be cruel. “I mean Ari was pretty, yeah, but she wasn’t exactly confident. She liked to think she was street-smart, but she was kinda clueless.”
    Nick said Ari had wanted to leave town; maybe she just accepted a ride from the wrong man.
    Or worse,
I think, remembering Marie Durels’s hot breath in my ear last night.
    “Did Ariel have a job in Mason?” I ask Callie.
    Callie gives up on the braid and sets her elastic down. “I don’t think so. She babysat, in middle school, but once her mom went back to work, her dad made her watch Kerry Ann and Dave.”
    I stretch my legs out in front of me on Callie’s bed, my knee giving a little
pop.
I don’t know how to bring up what Marie told me without sounding like I’m accusing Ariel of being a prostitute. My thoughts flick to playing “hotel” in Callie’s house—seven-year-old Ari as the receptionist, wearing one of Maggie’s old blazers and a satin scarf and sitting patiently behind a folding table. No matter what we played, Ariel always accepted whatever role she was given.
    Callie stares at me, catching me spacing out. “What?”
    “At the vigil, Marie Durels kind of insinuated that Ari was, you know…selling herself.”
    Callie snorts. “Your old neighbor? Yeah, she’s super-reliable. Ari wasn’t a
prostitute.
”
    I pull my legs in so I’m sitting pretzel-style. My calves ache from all that walking yesterday. “Marie had to hear it somewhere.”
    “People talk all kinds of shit in this town.” Callie turns back to the mirror, opting for a messy bun instead of a braid. “High school girls don’t turn tricks at the Mason truck stop.”
    Maybe in your world,
I want to say. But I’m not going to take a dig at Callie just because I can.
    “You’d be surprised,” I say instead. “There was this whole story on the news about how girls at Columbia were doing it. They used Craigslist and made thousands of bucks a week.”
    Callie’s lips part slightly.
    “What are you thinking?” I ask.
    “I heard her say something at lunch last year,” Callie says to my reflection in the mirror. “She was asking Nick if she needed her parents’ permission to open a bank account.”
    I examine the filthy bottoms of my socks. “Makes sense if she wanted to hide how much money she was making.”
    “Or because her dad is a total psycho who has to control everything.” Callie’s expression darkens. I know she’s always been terrified of Daryl Kouchinsky. Ironically, she never seemed bothered by my father, with his chaw-stained teeth and shameless weed smoking on the front porch. Probably because for all of his yelling and threatening to beat the shit out of Jos and me, he never actually laid a hand on us.
    “Did Ari say anything else weird?” I ask Callie.
    She shrugs. “I haven’t talked to her since the end of sophomore year.”
    I’m quiet as Callie pulls off the Penn State Twirl Championships T-shirt she slept in. She catches my eyes in the mirror and reddens. Maybe she forgot that we haven’t changed in front of each other in ten years.
    I avert my eyes as Callie puts on a tank top. “What happened between you two?” I ask.
    “What are