Free Son of Destruction by Kit Reed

that time, out of their heads on Jolt Cola and weed and it was killing Steffy, but she had to play mean bitch and shush them before Mom heard. ‘Shut your hole,’ she told Carter who she really is in love with, and she almost fucking cried. ‘That’s my mother, so shut your fucking hole.’
    If she saw them it would be the end of parties in this house, and Mom would be up her ass with a fine-toothed comb. As it turned out Mom’s mind was on something else. She just flapped like a confused penguin and went tottering off, so, whew.
    It was good she was too distracted to hear them, but as it turns out, Mom was distracted by something really bad. By the time Steffy got home that day she had written a whole cover story that her folks were too upset to hear. Dad was dragging the rollaway bed to the far end of the house and everything was different.
    Thank God for this place. She and Carter and them were rolling out of the Publix with the trunk full of beer and munchies that day. Instead of driving out to Pierce Point to get loaded like always, he broke into this creaky old house and they ran everywhere. In the attic, Carter said, ‘This is the place.’ It was like fate.
Yang
.
    Steffy was all
ying
, ‘And we are the ones.’
    They scavenged outside the big places on Coral Shores and Carter stole some great stuff from his pool house. Jen had an air mattress and pillows and a step-on pump to keep it fat and Billy brought the beer. Their attic looks like home now – except for this ancient dressmaker’s dummy, saying a snotty fuck you to their X-Box posters and Cinemart lobby cards which are kind of mocking her now that she is here alone and everybody else is on the bus.
    If Carter really loved me, he’d have stayed back.
But no, he was like, ‘Come on, it’s fun!’
    Fun just doesn’t seem right to her, given the way things are at home.
    Nobody knows where she is.
    Mom thinks she’s on the class trip to Busch Gardens. Her friends think she’s at the dentist. If Carter really cared, he’d have known that Steffy was too messed up to go. He’d have stayed back with her and they’d be kissing now. They might even be, oh, Steffy’s too young, but she thinks about Doing It; she thinks about it all the time. Alone in the dry attic, she has to wonder: do other kids sneak in here when we’re not around?
    If Carter had stayed back today . . . Yeah, right. Shit. If he wants to get with Jen Cashwell in the back of the bus, OK, let him, Steffy is on to bigger things.
    Like personal space. She only just found out she had one – it was in a magazine Mom had. Unless this is her own personal down time, which people need more than they need beer or weed or even Carter, that she loves so much, heavy-breathing in their ear. It’s hot in here, but she’s cool. Some people would say Steffy was hiding, but she’s not. She just doesn’t want to be around anybody right now, not even Carter Bellinger.
    All Steffy wants to be in the world . . . All she wants to be is alone, which is what she is. Or she thinks she is. Even in a town as safe and sleepy as Fort Jude, you never know.
    Another girl would think the attic was creepy, but Steffy and Carter and them have had so many beers and smoked so much weed and told so many secrets in this old place that it’s like home.
    At this point, it’s better. No parents all undertones, hissing and spitting over things they don’t want her to know about, and no Dad desperately pretending it’s not a fight. No Mom, all smirched from crying and, like, trying to be brave.
    Steffy can hardly bear the sight of her mother these days, trotting around in her perky pastel outfits and heavy makeup, with a lipstick line that she can’t keep straight because her mouth won’t hold still. No Mom for Steffy for a while, thank God, and please, no Dad. She doesn’t know how she feels about Dad, the way he is. He is not bearing up well under the pussy whip, and, what Steffy can’t stand?
    All this, everything