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  “No, I don’t,” Bryce said. This was the first time he’d said anything to Moffett for weeks. “And I didn’t say anything about you. I just told him that the floor was wet. And also, no. I don’t want your job. That’s why I’m going to college. Because I don’t want your job!”

  “You what? Oh shit,” Moffett looked around and then started in real quiet, in that scratchy whisper. “I got the shit in my car man a fucking gun in my car after work I am going to fuck you up man I will kill you. You hear me college boy? Bald fucking college boy? Bald fucking gay ass dinner theater college boy?”

  Bryce could feel himself shaking. He was actually shaking from fear! He had never consciously noticed himself shaking because of anything other than cold before. He turned his back to Moffett, facing the overload of dogs now dangling from his Frankomatic.

  This was when Bryce became aware of himself cinematically, envisioning a camera crew shooting every move. It was the feeling that what he was doing was suddenly worth watching.

  “Fuck this!” he said, his voice cracking, and threw the rod onto the ground. It crashed against the poured concrete floor and the dogs bounced into a puddle of water and fat. He pulled his hairnet off and threw it down. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared. Every small movement felt as if it had a heightened importance, every action choreographed. Bryce was confident that this would be a great film scene. He loved the sensation of being watched. But then the room went dark. The mixing machine gurgled to a stop, and Bryce heard a few dogs fall off his Frankomatic and splash onto the floor. Jesus began to yell in Spanish. Other Spanish answers ensued. Hugo had hit. A red EXIT still glowed dimly in a corner and Bryce began to walk towards it, when he was stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

  “That you?” Moffett said. “Hey.”

  Bryce pulled away.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, man. I can’t see shit. Hey!”

  Bryce slipped and fell onto his hip, then got up and collided with a rolling cart. He pushed it away and rushed to the door.

  Outside, the sun was rising through the chain-link fence, though it was impossible to tell other than the fact that the grey sky was simply becoming a lighter shade of grey in the east. There was no pink glow—it was all extreme rain. It pounded Bryce as he crossed the parking lot at a slow, deliberate pace. He let the water run down his face, from time to time shaking it off or blowing it from his lips. Everyone else was inside, closed in the dark, the Frankomatics just waiting to spring back to life. But even though he was alone in the parking lot, that heightened theatrical rush remained.

  Inside his Subaru Brat, as water puddled on the floorboard, Bryce noticed that he was still wearing the orange boots. It didn’t matter. They could have his Reeboks. He lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. The coverage was all Hugo. They said that it wasn’t clear now if the storm would actually hit Lystra head-on, and this filled Bryce with an improbable rush of disappointment.

  The guard waved at Bryce, and it wasn’t until Bryce was past the gate that he let it out. Huge, snorting sobs. He was vomiting tears. A bubble of snot emerged from his left nostril and popped. He thought of the scene in Red Dawn where Patrick Swayze cried and a snot bubble ballooned from his nose. Just like that, Bryce thought, this performance was real.

  Most neighborhoods still had power. Everyone knew what storms did to Lystra, though. Even weak thunderstorms would knock the electricity out. Because of this, Lizz had asked him to buy batteries on his way home. He stopped at the Harris Teeter, a behemoth grocery store that had recently been built. The lot was unusually full for the hour. Inside, people were preparing for disaster, buying tape, batteries, water. A neighbor, Kenny Craven, was buying meat and gave Bryce the head nod. Bryce found a meager selection of double Ds in the home utilities aisle and took an eight-pack before walking to the end, where the aisle emptied out to the meat counter in the back. This was when he saw his wife and child.

  Lizz was inspecting a jar of sauerkraut and Heath was in his stroller, buried under a miniature yellow raincoat that Bryce had never seen. Lizz had her back to him, and neither she nor Heath had seen him yet, so Bryce stepped back into the aisle. She’ll understand, he told himself. She’ll understand. He nodded his head a couple times, pumping himself up, then stepped around a tortilla display. Cutting the corner tight, he walked headfirst into a solid form.

  Stepping back, Bryce saw a Harris Teeter employee dressed in white looking down at the floor in befuddlement where a lobster had fallen between his legs. The lobster was alive and still wet, with wide green rubber bands on its claws, claws that were now clicking across the linoleum. In slow-motion panic, an old lady frantically inched out of its path.

  “Oh God,” Bryce said. “I’m sorry.”

  He bent down in an effort to reach the lobster, but then realized he was kneeling in the general vicinity of the man’s crotch and stood, horrified. He looked at Lizz. She looked back, her face contorted with surprise and concern. Bryce noticed a pack of double D batteries sitting on Heath’s lap.

  “No,” the seafood guy said. “That’s OK. That’s OK. I’m fine.”

  “OK. Yeah,” Bryce said, aware that Lizz was now wheeling the stroller towards him. “I’m really sorry.”

  The man started after the lobster.

  “What are you doing?” Lizz said.

  “I’m buying batteries,” Bryce said, holding up the batteries.

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I . . .” Bryce shook his head.

  “What?” Lizz said. She sounded scared. “What happened?”

  “That guy, Moffett. The one who’s always fucking with me?”

  “What?” she said again, though clearly she had heard him.

  “He thought, I don’t know. He just freaked out. He said he was going to shoot me.”

  “What?”

  Bryce watched her freckled brow wrinkle, squeezing her brown eyes into slits.

  “So I quit,” he said.

  “Oh God,” Lizz said, then sighed the longest sigh.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I can’t work there anymore, Lizz. It’s horrible. It’s been horrible.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told you! This guy said he was going to kill me. I hate it there, Lizz. I hate it. I threw a bunch of hotdogs on the ground,” he said, then chuckled. He didn’t mean to, but he was trying to grab another emotion—something, anything other than the disappointment he saw settling into Lizz.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah, I threw those hotdogs down, and then I left. Ugh,” Bryce said. He wasn’t getting this across to Lizz at all. “I mean, he told me he was going to shoot me in the parking lot!”

  “Who was this? What did you do to him, Bryce?”

  “Nothing! That’s the whole thing. I didn’t do anything to him!”

  Bryce thought he’d explained things about Moffett to Lizz before, but then realized that he wasn’t sure if they’d ever even spoken about him.

  “I hate that job, Lizz. I mean . . . I mean, I never even see you. I can get another job. A real job.”

  “OK,” Lizz said. She kneeled down to comfort Heath, who had started to whimper. “OK.”

  Then Bryce made an announcement, one he didn’t even know was true until he uttered it. “I’m auditioning for the Barn Dinner Theater.”

  Heath stopped crying and Lizz looked up. She looked exhausted and the last of Bryce’s heightened sense of theatricality faded away. This was no movie set. It was surely the Harris Teeter. He became fully aware of his condition, that he was soaking, that he was cold, that he smelled like hotdogs, that he was about to fall asleep, that he was now unemployed and had just knocked a lobster onto the floor.

  The people in the aisle had quit staring and the seafood guy was on his knees now, trying to retrieve the lobster from under the tortilla display.

  “Bryce,” Lizz said.

  “Really. I promise this time. I promise. I’m gonna do this myself. I’m going to do it.”

/>   But he didn’t know what he was going to do. Heath was still whining, and Bryce picked him up, glad to have a distraction.

  The next thing that happened was that the electricity in the Harris Teeter went off. There was no flicker, no dropping pitch, no transition. Just immediate dark. It was eerily both silent and noisy, the shock momentarily ceasing all conversation. He could smell the fish, the cleaning agents. He could feel the refrigerated air tumbling out of the dairy section.

  Heath was silently wiggling in Bryce’s arms, and Bryce looked towards Lizz in the darkness. His eyes hadn’t adjusted, though, and there were no windows in the back of the Harris Teeter, so it was blank. There was nothing there, just an empty, shuffling moment of darkness, a void of an oversized grocery store out of which a miniature hand gently attached to his nose.

  friend of the sick

  Grier was fifteen and almost naked, standing in her underwear by the blinking light of the digital clock. It pulsed 4:17 AM, flashing red against a thin body just barely female, two mosquito-bite breasts and no curves at all.

  “Uncle Pete!” she called. “Uncle Pete!”

  She could hear him crying—that was what had just woken her up—but it sounded like he was closed into a thick wall. Grier just stood there, blinking, cocking her ear, until finally she found him. He was outside, on the other side of the window, standing on the air-conditioning unit in the rain.

  She slid the window open and rain blew in, cool across her stomach. The neighbors’ houses were all dark, suddenly outlined against a diffuse flash of lightning that swelled dull through the low storm clouds.

  “C’mere sweetie, c’mere,” she said, and Uncle Pete jumped onto the windowsill. Grier burrowed her knuckle into his ear and he started purring strongly, then stepped away for a moment before slashing his claws across her wrist.

  “Sugar!” she said, and grabbed the cat by the skin of his neck. She had seen the vet pick up a cat like this before, but had never done so herself and was somewhat amazed at the maneuver’s effect. Uncle Pete dangled limply from her outstretched hand, emitting a low, guttural moan.

  What she did next was also something she had never done before. But she was home alone, there was a hurricane blowing into town, and she was scared—of the weather, of the solitude, and now also of the cat. She tossed Uncle Pete back into the rain and slid the window shut.

  Uncle Pete was a white Maine coon cat. When freshly brushed, he took up roughly the same amount of space as a fluffed down pillow. Grier cleaned his litter box, fed him, and let him sleep between her ankles at night, but the cat actually belonged to her best friend and neighbor, Fletcher Hayes.

  In May, Fletcher had become sick. It started with a sore in her neck, and then, like lifting an old tire and finding the swarming insect life beneath, they discovered the rest. Lymphoma. Everyone asked Grier about it at school. She gained that strange sudden celebrity, the friend of the sick. Grier promised everyone that Fletcher’s chemotherapy was working, but all she really knew was that it had caused Fletcher to start having extreme allergic reactions to Uncle Pete. When she’d hold him, red blotches would immediately begin to rise on her face. Her nose would run. She’d start to wheeze and itch. Fletcher wouldn’t get rid of Uncle Pete, though. She adored him. So Grier had taken him in until Fletcher was well again.

  Grier couldn’t fall back asleep. The house was too silent, too empty. She was too keenly aware of being inside it alone. Her mother had gone to the coast that afternoon, towards the storm that was due to hit tonight, driving to Wilmington with Fletcher’s parents so they could board up the condo they co-owned. They’d left Fletcher in the care of her older brother Mike next door.

  As the storm picked up, Grier lay awake, concerned about Uncle Pete. He was Fletcher’s constant object of affection. Even though he made her sick, Fletcher still insisted on seeing Uncle Pete at least daily for the kitty kiss. The kitty kiss was what Fletcher called it when she would blow softly at Uncle Pete, who would then lift his nose to her mouth, intently sniffing for as long as Fletcher could exhale, his nose bouncing lightly against her puckered lips.

  Grier had almost decided she needed to go find him, to bring him back inside, when a soft knocking came from the window. She wrapped the bedsheet around her shoulders and slowly crossed the room. This time, it wasn’t Uncle Pete. It was Fletcher’s brother Mike. He was eighteen, and wore a black trench coat, and his hair, usually a rigid six-inch red mohawk, now hung limp and wet across his scalp. Grier’s heart raced as she opened the window.

  “You up?” Mike said.

  “Sort of.”

  “I saw your light on.”

  “Uncle Pete freaked out. Look.”

  Grier’s wrist had three large gashes across it. They were still bleeding. Mike gently held her arm, turning it in the light.

  “Where is he?” Mike said.

  “Outside.”

  “Outside?”

  In the road, a streetlamp lit the rain falling diagonally, tree limbs bent and swaying.

  “I tried to get him in through the window,” she said. “But he was freaking out.”

  Mike kept looking outside.

  “We have to go get him,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Two days after her first round of chemo, Fletcher admitted to Grier in tears that her pubic hair had collected in her underwear and fallen out upon the bathroom floor. That night Grier slept over. Fletcher fell asleep early and Grier stayed up with Mike, running lines from Guys and Dolls, the play they were both performing with the Barn Dinner Theater.

  The main reason Grier had even auditioned was that she knew Mike would be in it. He acted in everything the Theater did. Grier had never acted in anything before, but she had had a crush on Mike since she was five years old and thought this was finally her chance to spend time with him. Fletcher had an uncontrollable jealousy about any of her friends interacting with Mike—less an attachment to Mike than to her friends, it seemed. He was a freak. A theater nerd with a mohawk. Fletcher did everything she could to distance herself from him. Once, during a party, she found Mike making out with one of her swim team teammates—short, blond, cute Ashley Aikens—and proceeded to tip the gasoline out of the neighbor’s lawn mower and onto Mike’s skateboard, then light it on fire in the front yard.

  That night in the kitchen, with Fletcher asleep down the hall, neither of them could remember their lines. After a while Mike said, “You want to just role-play?”

  “OK,” Grier said.

  Mike then closed his eyes and wiped a hand slowly down his face. This was a technique their director, Ms. Astor, had taught them to cleanse themselves of the real world, to enter the realm of acting. Once Mike was clean, he said, “I’m gonna show you what they do at the doctor. It’s like this. They go, ‘I’m going to have to inspect your glands. Turn your head to the side.’ ”

  He inspected Grier’s neck.

  “How does it look?” she said.

  “Bad. Real bad. Let me see your retina.”

  She turned and Mike brought his face so close to hers that she could feel his breath. She wondered if this was what the kitty kiss was like, if this was the way Uncle Pete felt when Fletcher put her face near his, because if so, then it all made sense to Grier, because she wanted Mike to stay there, breathing on her face forever.

  Grier stayed in the guest room that night because she was afraid of waking Fletcher. At some point after Grier had fallen asleep, Mike came into the room. She woke up when he climbed onto the mattress. Neither spoke as he put his arms around her. They just clung to each other as if, if either let go, the other might fall off the bed.

  Outside, Grier’s terrycloth robe quickly grew heavy with the rain. Inland North Carolina always got weather like this, unraveling hurricanes dropping huge amounts of rain as they blew in across the Piedmont. Grier and Mike crossed into Mankin Park, the open plot across the street from their houses, where a small creek ran. The water was just starting to overflow the creek’s banks, ris
ing up a small bridge that had red lines painted onto one of its supports, marking the floodcrests of years past. Five feet in 1973, six and a half in ’82. There were more, some washing off, dozens up and down the concrete. Above ’82 someone had painted WHIRLIES.

  They walked the park for several minutes, looking up into the swaying dark branches, rain dripping into their eyes, slipping on wet grass, kneeling and calling Uncle Pete’s name into bushes, before finally coming to a stop on the bridge.

  “This is pointless,” Mike said, and wrapped his warm hand around Grier’s. It was thrilling, this casual affection unhidden. She imagined them holding hands at school, at the mall. On the front steps. It could never happen, though. Not if there was a chance Fletcher would find out. She let herself imagine, just for a moment, what a world without Fletcher would be like, what new freedoms she would have. She held on to Mike and looked at the water rising dark and glimmering below. She had an urge to dive in and swim through what was usually air. She felt invincible. She smiled at Mike beside her and he wiped his hand down his face. Then he held his hand before his mouth as if he were holding a microphone and said, “I am Walter Teague with your First Alert Forecast! And I’m here live in Mankin Park tonight as Hurricane Hugo moves into Lystra. Here’s a local woman. Ma’am, were you prepared for this storm?”

  He held the invisible microphone to Grier.

  Grier froze. Mike’s hand was so close to her face, almost touching her nose. She could see dirt under his thumbnail, could smell the mud on his hand. She could think of nothing to say. She just stood there and smelled his fingers. This was when she saw the young woman standing on the end of the bridge under the streetlamp like a ghost in a large wool hat, holding an umbrella that glowed red against the darkness. It was Fletcher. She looked around, seeming removed and confused.