Free Silence - eARC by Mercedes Lackey, Cody Martin Page B

would be upset about losing his customers to a sports bar in the next town! And you would think he’d do something to get satellite in, even you couldn’t manage to get cable to work. It’s not as if they were unaware that these things existed, after all—people went out of town to shop, or they caught games at bars and restaurants. But…no. The answer, the few times she’d asked an adult—like the lone guy who ran a computer-repair place—why no one tried to figure out why Silence couldn’t support net or cell or cable, the answer was always “it can’t be done” or “it’s not worth the effort” and a shrug.
    It was almost as if, once you left school, you got infected with some kind of zombie-apathy virus.
    In disgust at seeing one more shopping post, she finally gave up on Facebook. She’d managed to send her dad a selfie today, when she’d gone up to Makeout Hill. She’d posed it very carefully, wearing the oldest and most faded of her thrift store finds. So there she was, no makeup, blond hair looking washed out in the overcast, a little thinner than she had been before (which she frankly thought was an improvement, and probably due to having to walk or bike everywhere), and looking more like an advertisement for helping street kids than the selfie on her Facebook page. She’d posed that one carefully too, wearing her best Juicy Couture outfit, makeup and jewelry that showed off her green eyes and good cheekbones, hair she had spent hours on. She’d told him she’d had to buy stuff to wear because she didn’t fit in and anyway, everything she had for summer was too light to wear given how cold it was here.
    Okay, it was manipulative, but Brenda was manipulating him too, and anyway, it looked like the selfie had paid off. The latest email from Dad said he was sending her an L.L. Bean card. So at least she could get stuff that wouldn’t make her look like she was homeless.
    If things weren’t exactly looking up, at least they weren’t quite sucking as much.
    The sound of bottles clinking in the fridge made her decide she might as well take her lappie upstairs and watch a movie. Not feeling like being Mom’s drinking buddy, she reflected cynically. Although, at least last year, when Mom had taken her as a drunken confidant, she hadn’t also offered her beer.…
    * * *
    Friday found her early at the coffee bar, waiting for the others—who surprised her by coming in at five, rather than the seven she had expected. “Did you eat yet?” Wanda asked, as they all came in. She shook her head, expecting the answer to result in them all going over in a bunch to the Burger Shack.
    “Good, then you might as well come along with us,” replied Seth. “Second Friday of the month.”
    “Yeah, it is, what’s that got to do with anything?” she asked, standing up, and slinging her purse over her shoulder.
    “First Methodist does a BBQ for teeeeeeeenz,” Wanda answered, drawing the word out sarcastically. “That means our folks don’t bother feeding us. Fourth Friday is a movie night with hot dogs. Which means our folks don’t bother feeding us.”
    After a moment of thought, Staci identified “First Methodist” as the “okay church that sometimes puts stuff on for kids,” that Beth had told her about. “Okay,” she replied, following them out the door. Free food was free food. It couldn’t be worse than the Burger Shack.
    As usual, the others were on foot, so she walked her bike along with them. The church in question was higher up on the slope that Silence was built on, and she was actually glad she wasn’t going to have to peddle her bike up it. The road they were taking was almost as steep a grade as the one up Makeout Hill.
    When they got to the church—which at first glance looked like something on a New England postcard, all white and complete with steeple, and only at second glance did you notice that the new paint had been slapped over the old without anyone scraping or priming the