The Traveling Vampire Show

“We can throw them away when we get to town,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’ll carry ’em.”

She was about to give them to me when Rusty asked her, “Don’t you want to wear one?”

“Thanks anyway. They’re filthy. You want me to get infected?”

“You can’t walk back to town looking like that. Everybody’s gonna wonder how you got all wrecked up.”

I nodded. “You’d better wear a shirt.”

She frowned at the shirts in her hands. “I’d rather let people see me….”

“You can borrow mine,” Rusty said. He started to unfasten the buttons of the shirt he was wearing.

Shaking her head, Slim said, “It’ll get blood on it. I’ve wrecked enough shirts for one day.”

“I insist,” Rusty said.

“No, really….”

“You can wear Dwight’s shoes….”

“Okay.”

He pulled his shirt off.

“Thanks,” Slim said. She handed the two ruined shirts to me, then stepped closer to Rusty. “You’d better put it on me, though.” She turned her back to him.

He gave me a strange smile—somehow smug and embarrassed at the same time—then slipped the shirt up Slim’s arms and eased it onto her shoulders. “There you go,” he told her.

Turning to face us, she fastened a couple of the middle buttons. “Thanks, guys,” she said.

The shirt was way too large for her. It drooped over her shoulders. The sleeves reached down to her elbows. The single pocket hung below the rise of her left breast. The tails were so long that they completely hid her cut-off jeans.

She looked so cute it hurt to look at her.

I wished I could put my arms around her and hold her and never let go.

Instead of giving it a try, I just stood there, staring at her and feeling like I almost wanted to cry.

I don’t know what it was about Slim.

I’d seen Lee a few hours earlier wearing my brother’s big old work shirt. Even though it fit Lee pretty much the same way as Rusty’s shirt fit Slim, even though Lee was probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, the sight of her hadn’t made me feel like my heart might break.

Maybe because Lee wasn’t cute.

Slim was cute; Lee was spectacular.

I loved both of them. They both had ways of making me ache for them. But different ways. And different sorts of aches. In different places.

“What’s wrong?” Slim asked me.

“Nothing.”

“Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” Rusty said. He led the way, Slim walking behind him.

I followed, staying a few paces behind Slim, watching her.

With only my socks between my feet and the forest floor, I felt pokes and jabs with every step. I didn’t mind, though. I was glad that my own feet, not Slim’s, were the ones being hurt.

When we reached the pavement of Route 3, I said, “Wait up.”

They stopped walking. I checked the bottoms of my socks. They had picked up some dirt and debris, but they weren’t really damaged yet.

“Want your shoes back?” Slim asked.

“Nope. I’m fine.” I pulled off my socks, stuffed them into the pockets of my jeans and then we all resumed our hike back to town.

Chapter Twenty-one

As we entered the outskirts of town, I remembered about Bitsy. She hadn’t followed us, after all, probably so hurt by my betrayal that she’d gone back to her bedroom and cried. I once again felt rotten about ditching her… on top of everything else I felt rotten about.

God, it’s hard not to feel rotten.

I should’ve felt wonderful because we’d found Slim alive and well.

But I didn’t. And I felt cheated because I had to feel lousy about Bitsy and about what we’d done in Slim’s house and about slugging Rusty and about the poor damn dog getting speared and about God-only-knows what else.

On top of all that, it looked as if we wouldn’t even get to see the Traveling Vampire Show.

Things could’ve been worse, though; at least we weren’t on our way to Slim’s house.

When we came to Lee’s block, I saw her pickup truck in the driveway.

“She’s home,” I said.

“How about if we don’t tell her about the dog?” Rusty suggested, looking over his shoulder at us with a pained expression on his face. “Please? She doesn’t have to know everything, does she?”

“She has to know about that,” Slim said.

“We’re not going, anyway,” I pointed out. “So why not tell her?”

Rusty stopped walking, turned around and raised his open hands to halt us. “Hold it up,” he said.

We stopped.

“What if we change our minds?” he asked. “It’s a long time between now and midnight. Maybe we’ll wanta go after all, but we won’t be able to if we’ve already spilled the beans to Lee.”

Looking mildly amused, Slim said, “Oh, you think sometime between now and midnight it’ll turn out that they didn’t gang-stab the dog.”

Gang-stab? Slim sometimes got creative with her language.

“I just mean, you know, maybe we’ll decide to go anyway. Do we really wanta miss the Vampire Show on account of a stupid dog?”

“It isn’t because of the dog,” Slim said. “It’s because what they did to it was heinous. These are heinous people.”

Rusty looked annoyed.

“Abominable,” I explained. “Shockingly evil.”

He glanced at me. “I know what it means. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“I know.”