The Less Miserables Spot a Liar (2)

(Cont.)

The silence after she left was worse than the confrontation.

Garrett stood there, the heat pressing down on him, his face burning with something that wasn't just the sun. The others were looking at him—Hector with something like disappointment, Tanner with his mouth actually closed for once, Nova with her pencil frozen over her sketchbook. Even Rusty, on his bench at the edge of the lot, had stopped muttering to himself and was watching.

Dusty just looked tired.

"She didn't take it," he said. "You know that, right?"

"I—" Garrett tried to find the words. "I didn't say she did."

"You didn't have to." Dusty rubbed his face with both hands, slow and deliberate, like he was trying to wipe something away that wouldn't come off. "Man, I heard it in your voice. On the phone. You were about to say her name."

"I don't know why I—"

"Yeah, you do." Dusty looked at him, and there was no anger in his eyes. That was almost worse. Just this quiet knowing, like he'd seen this before and expected to see it again, like Garrett was just the latest in a long line of people who thought they were different but weren't. "You looked at who had the least and figured they'd want it the most. That's how it works in your head. That's how it works in everybody's head, when they're not paying attention."

Garrett wanted to argue. Wanted to say that wasn't fair, that he didn't think like that, that he'd never—

But he had. He'd thought it automatically, without deciding to, like his brain had a shortcut labeled "who steals things" and Zara's face was filed there without his permission. Without his knowledge, even. The thought had just appeared, fully formed, like someone else had put it in his head.

"I didn't mean to," he said. It sounded pathetic even to him.

"Yeah." Dusty shrugged. "That's the thing about assumptions. You don't mean to make them. You just do. And then they're out there, and you can't take them back."

Tanner had wandered over, hands in his pockets, looking uncharacteristically serious. "For what it's worth, I thought it was Wesley."

"Wesley wasn't even here yesterday," Hector said.

"Exactly. Perfect alibi. Very suspicious."

"That's not how alibis work."

"I'm just saying—"

"Both of y'all shut up." Dusty looked toward the parking lot, where a familiar truck was pulling in. Rust-brown, one headlight out, exhaust coughing blue smoke. Wesley's dad's truck—or technically still Wesley's dad's, though Wesley was the only one who drove it now. "Speaking of."

Wesley climbed out of the driver's side, moving slow like he always did, like the air was thicker for him than for everyone else. He had a cigarette behind his ear and a bruise on his jaw that hadn't been there last week, yellowing at the edges like it was a few days old. His army jacket was buttoned despite the heat, and his eyes swept the park with the half-focused look of someone who hadn't slept right in a long time.

"Y'all look like somebody died," he said.

"Money's gone," Dusty said. "Ramp fund. Someone took it from the spot."

Wesley nodded slowly, like this was exactly what he'd expected to hear. "Yeah. I know."

"You know?"

"I saw it happen." He pulled the cigarette from behind his ear, didn't light it. Just held it between his fingers like a prop, like a thing to do with his hands. "Yesterday afternoon. After y'all left. I was sitting in my truck, thinking about whether to come in or just bail. Saw one of those burnouts—the one with the Monster tattoo—come out from behind the bowl. Counting money. Looked pretty happy about it."

Garrett felt the ground shift under him. Like the concrete had suddenly gone soft, like he was standing on something that might not hold his weight.

"You saw him take it?"

"Saw him leave with it. Didn't put it together until Dusty called me this morning." Wesley shrugged, the motion small and tired. "Sorry. Wasn't exactly in an observant headspace yesterday."

"You were drunk," Hector said. Not accusing. Just stating a fact, the way you'd say the sky was blue or the concrete was hot.

"Yeah." Wesley almost smiled. "That too."

Dusty was already moving toward the parking lot. "Those a**holes park over by the Quik-Mart, right? Same spot every day?"

"Usually." Wesley fell into step beside him, and something in his posture shifted—less defeated, more alert. Like having a purpose, even a small one, woke up a part of him that had been sleeping. "You gonna do something?"

"I'm gonna get our money back."

Garrett started to follow, then stopped. Looked at the gate where Zara had disappeared. The metal still seemed to be vibrating from how hard she'd slammed it.

"Go," Nova said quietly. She'd closed her sketchbook, was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read—not judging, exactly, but not forgiving either. "Find her. Apologize. Before it gets worse."

He went.

---

She was behind the Cone Mills ruins, sitting on a loading dock with her feet dangling over the edge.

The old factory loomed behind her, three stories of dead brick and broken windows, kudzu crawling up the walls like it was trying to pull the whole thing back into the earth. The loading dock jutted out from what used to be the shipping bay, concrete crumbling at the edges, weeds pushing up through the cracks. Pigeons cooed somewhere in the rafters above, and the air smelled like rust and old water and the green rot of things growing where they shouldn't.

Garrett stopped at the edge of the dock. "Hey."

Zara didn't look at him. "Thought I said don't follow me."

"Yeah. I heard you."

"And yet."

He climbed up onto the dock, sat down a few feet away from her. Not too close. The concrete was warm through his jeans, almost hot, holding the day's heat like a battery. From here, he could see the highway in the distance, cars moving in little flashes of color and light. Normal people going normal places, not knowing or caring about a bunch of kids fighting over fifty-seven dollars in a dead parking lot.

"Wesley saw who took it," he said. "One of the burnouts. The one with the Monster tattoo."

Zara was quiet for a long moment. A pigeon landed on the dock behind them, pecked at something, flew away. The highway kept humming.

"Cool."

"Dusty and the others are going to get it back."

"Cool."

"I'm sorry."

She turned to look at him then. Her eyes were dry, but there was something raw in them, something exposed, like he was looking at a wound she hadn't meant to show him. The safety pin in her nose caught the light.

"For what?"

Garrett opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

"For thinking it was you. For thinking it before I even knew I was thinking it. For—" He stopped, frustrated, running his hand through his hair. "I don't know how to explain it. It's like my brain made the decision without asking me. Like I already knew who to blame before I had any actual information, and it was you, and that's f***ed up, and I don't—"

"You don't know why you thought it?"

"I don't know why I thought it."

Zara turned back to the highway. The cars kept moving. The pigeons kept cooing. A plane drew a white line across the sky, so high it seemed like it belonged to a different world entirely, a world where fifty-seven dollars was nothing and nobody had to count their nickels.

"My mom's boyfriend," she said quietly. "The one before this one. His name was Dale. He worked at the tire place on Battleground, when he worked. Mostly he sat on our couch and drank our beer and watched our TV and told my mom how lucky she was to have a man around."

Garrett didn't say anything. Just listened.

"He stole her rent money. Twice. First time, she believed him when he said he didn't take it. Must have been me, he said. Kids steal things all the time. She searched my room, went through my backpack, made me empty my pockets." Zara picked at a loose thread on her jeans, pulling it slowly, watching it unravel. "Second time, she didn't have enough to pay, so she told the landlord I did it. Said I was on drugs. Said I was stealing from her to buy pills."

Her voice was flat, like she was reading from a script, like this was a story she'd told herself so many times it had lost its edges.

"I was twelve. I didn't even know what pills she was talking about. But the landlord believed her. So did the neighbors. So did everyone. Because when you look at a kid like me, and you look at a guy like Dale, you know who the liar is. You just know."

"Zara—"

"I'm not done." She looked at him, and there was something hard in her eyes now, something that dared him to feel sorry for her. "That's what happens when people look at you and see broke. You become the explanation for everything that goes wrong. Something goes missing? Must have been her. Something breaks? She probably did it. Somebody lies? Well, what do you expect from someone like that." She almost laughed, a sharp sound with no humor in it. "After a while, you start to wonder if they're right. If there's something in you that takes things, even if you don't remember doing it. Like maybe you sleepwalk or something. Maybe you're a thief and you don't even know."

"That's not—"

"I know it's not true. I'm not stupid." She pulled the thread free, rolled it between her fingers, flicked it away. "But you knowing it's not true doesn't help when your brain keeps telling you otherwise. Yours or mine."

Garrett thought about that. About the way his mind had jumped to her name without permission, without evidence, without anything except a lifetime of little lessons he'd absorbed without noticing. His mom locking the car doors in certain neighborhoods. His dad talking about "those people" when the news showed a crime story. The way certain houses looked on certain streets, and what everyone knew about the people who lived there, even if nobody said it out loud.

"I do this a lot," he said slowly. "Don't I."

"Probably."

"Not just with you. With—" He gestured vaguely at the factory, at the highway, at everything. "Everyone."

"Probably." Zara shrugged. "Most people do. They just don't think about it. It's like—autopilot, or whatever. Your brain makes shortcuts so you don't have to actually look at every person and figure out who they are. It just slots them into categories and moves on."

"That's f***ed up."

"Yeah. It is." She stood up, dusting off her jeans. "But at least you're noticing. That's more than most people do."

She started walking back toward the park. Garrett scrambled to his feet, followed.

"Are we—" He hesitated. "Are we okay?"

Zara stopped. Considered him for a long moment, her head tilted, like she was trying to figure out if he was worth the effort.

"We're not not okay," she said finally. "But you don't get to be cool with me just because you said sorry. You get to be cool with me by being less of an a**hole over time. That's how it works."

"Okay."

"Okay."

They walked back together, not talking. The silence wasn't comfortable, exactly, but it wasn't hostile either. It was the silence of something cracked that might eventually heal, if nobody put more pressure on it.

(Cont.)