Free Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones

with a G—it got to where I could hear my voice separate from myself, like another person altogether, and it was then that I knew I shouldn’t have done what I’d just been doing out in the parking lot, over lunch.
    I knew if I held onto my desk, everything would be fine, nobody would know. Except then I was holding onto my desk and the carpet was on the side of my face too, a scratchy red and grey weave I can still feel, and I was trying to speak, to read, and probably was, except Ms. Godfrey was shrieking across the classroom for me, cradling my head into her lap, onto her hand-me-down skirt.
    It was history all over again for her, I know now.
    Just how she’d wanted to hold Tommy Moore, when she thought he was dying.

***
    I should get Rob King and Tommy Moore’s dad out of that road now.
    My best friend from elementary’s big sister knows the story of it, kind of, and told us once when she was supposed to just be watching us. These were the years she was still in a leg cast from their family’s big car wreck in Midland. I never saw her walk without crutches until years after I’d last talked to her brother. I didn’t even recognize her. It’s one of those things I should be able to write better, make real, watching her glide past in a department store, how I felt everything shift around me, like I was in some slightly alternate Midland, Texas now, some charmed, accidental place.
    She was still beautiful, of course. The way she held the tips of her fingers together now that she didn’t have to be gripping foam handles. How happy her hands were.
    I’d been in elementary-school love with her for a while, ever since she let us listen to her Prince record but lifted the needle at certain times, so as not to corrupt us.
    Janna.
    That’s pretty much her real name, sorry. What she told us about what happened over on 1120 that day though, it’s no secret.
    She wasn’t sitting in some window spying on all of Greenwood either, her crutches leaned up against the window. From her house, all you can see is an old buffalo wallow and a flash of blacktop past it.
    No, the reason she kind of saw what happened was that she’d been coming back from town with her mom, one of her doctor appointments. Their long driveway started maybe twenty yards past where Arthur King was parked half in the ditch, half not, his door open.
    Janna was sitting in the back seat, of course, and knew so, so well not to run her leg alongside the driver’s seat anymore. Now she sat in the middle, her crutches beside her, stickers all up and down the wood.
    I don’t even want to write this.
    But. But they stopped, her and her mom, could each see Arthur King stepping from his truck, levering his seat forward, extracting the 870 he kept back there. Not the 16 gauge Belgium-made Browning Auto 5—you don’t let a gun like that bounce around behind your seat, don’t even let your grandkids ever shoot it—but the old pump he carried. Not for moments like these, I wouldn’t imagine, but still: it worked.
    He planted the butt against his thigh, angled it up into the sky, away from any transformer or utility pole, and, according to Janna, looked right into their car when he pulled the trigger. So they’d understand that they had nothing to be scared of, here. That this gun wasn’t for them.
    Janna’s mom, too, that day of their accident, she’d seen some things it’s not my place to mention, so, no, she didn’t go hysterical, start screaming. And Janna, she was in ninth grade that year. She just watched.
    In the silence the shotgun left, Tommy Moore’s dad rose up from Rob King, cut his eyes across the distance, to Arthur King.
    Arthur King didn’t angle the gun down at him, but he didn’t cock it behind his shoulder either.
    As for what they said, I have no clue; Janna’s mom had the heater blowing, the windows all up.
    Or maybe he didn’t even say anything. Because it was all already right there:
What you’re doing for your son,