𝐒𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐂𝐇

𝟎𝟏. 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬

𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟖𝐭𝐡, 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟒

On the eve of late September, the trees that lined your street were finally beginning to change and shed their leaves. Soon they would be dead and ugly brown and scattered across the pavement, but your mother would be long gone by then. Maybe sooner if you were lucky. But if you had to be totally honest with yourself, you never really were.

Your house sank into the end of the neighborhood like a leftover set piece from a Stephen King film. Old, forgotten, melting into the cracks of the sidewalk that was more weeds than pavement these days. The Cosmopolitan magazine that you stole from a trashcan in the public park said that September was going to be 'Your Month, Girl!' but all it had brought you so far was a black eye and thirty-six crumpled dollars for the piggy bank.

You could feel the dense weight of the lighter in your pocket before you even picked it up. Twirling it between your fingers, you imagined the fluid gulping back and forth in the little plastic chamber and pretended the fresh bruise festering on your temple didn't ache half as bad as it really did. But thinking about the pain made you even more nauseous than thinking about the clown that may or may not have been living in your sewer system, so you stopped. Instead, you fished the lighter from your pocket and started picking at the grated spark wheel until the flame finally caught and illuminated your fist.

All you could do at first was stare at it until it wasn't enough to hold your attention any longer. By then, you remembered the pack of cigarettes that Simon had stashed in there the last time he borrowed it during a sleepover and pulled those out too. The little yellow flame licked gently at the tip of your thumb, but you just watched. The pain made you angry and the anger had a funny way of shutting off all the useful parts of your brain. Through the ringing in your ears, you shook a cigarette out of the slit in the package and rolled it between your fingers before hovering it over the flame. By the time a familiar police cruiser finally peeled onto your street, half of it was already a pile of ashes on the cold cement step between your bare feet.

You could tell from the way the headlights flickered off as it rounded the corner that it was the sheriff behind the wheel. You watched with diluted interest as the car rolled to a stop in front of your house and Sheriff Goode stepped out onto the curb with his peaked service cap clutched against his chest. He knew the drill by now almost as well as you did. Looking both ways down the dead end street, he pressed the door shut behind him until you barely heard a gentle click. You bit down hard on the inside of your cheek to fight the smile that threatened to grow as he started awkwardly fighting through your weed-dominated lawn to arrive where you were sitting.

Before you even realized what you were doing, you had already wiggled to the side to make room for the sheriff beside you. Sneakily, you shifted the cigarette to your opposite hand in hopes that he wouldn't make such a big fuss about the fact that you smoked. "Only after the big fights," you'd told him once, but he ended up confiscating it anyway. You might have gotten away with it if he hadn't known that The Big Fights were a bi-weekly affair in your household.

Sheriff Goode's utility belt made an ugly plastic scraping sound as he sat down beside you. A year ago, he might have sent one of his deputies to deal with a Shadyside dispute. But they always ended up calling him for backup anyway so now he came alone. To you, that is. You've never seen him anywhere else in this town aside from on your doorstep.

You preferred it this way although a part of you still felt selfish for taking up so much of his time. The deputies liked to flash their lights and tear up your lawn with their brand new tires and pound their fists against the front door until it shook and woke your mom from her blissful post-argument nap. Sheriff Goode never flashed his lights or even turned on the siren. He spoke to you like you were a person, not a crackhead that needed to be coddled off of an abandoned warehouse roof.