Page 32 of Soul So Dark

I notice she’s only used present-tense when referring to Evie. I also can’t help but appreciate Dallas’s extreme opinions on game preferences. There has to be a story there, which I plan on finding out about later.

“So, you’re an RPG kind of girl, huh?”

“Yes,” she says resolutely, “and I know thatTomb Raider’snot, but it still has some RPG elements, so it’s a good compromise. And I like the story,” she adds with a smile.

Dallas starts crawling back into the middle of the bed with the controller, but then hesitates for a moment before looking up at me. “This one’s not multiplayer, though,” she squints, “sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I kick my boots off at the end of the bed and take a seat on the bed, leaning back against the wall. “What else do I have to do tonight?”

“Where’d you come from, anyway?” she asks as she starts the game.

“Aiden’s house,” I reply with a side-eye, “Col was there, too.”

She whips her head around. “Nuh-uh.”

“You could come hang out there with us,” I tease.

“I hate Aiden,” she snaps, whipping her head back to the TV.

Damn.

“Why?”

Not that it’s a surprise. There are three kinds of people; those who are in love with Aiden, who he summarily ignores, those who despise him, and us. There’s usually no in-between. But Dallas’s quick and definitive response catches me off-guard.

“Because he does things just to be creepy. Like jiggling my doorknob whenever he walks by my room.” That sounds like Aiden. “And ever since third grade, every time he sees me, he comes up behind me, grabs my face, and kisses me on the cheek.”

That one gives me pause. “Really?”

Although menacing, it also sounds completely unlike Aiden. If anything, he would ignore someone like Dallas. I also give pause at how unsettled it makes me that he touches her like that, but I don’t know why.

My eyes drift over the vibrant pink walls to the photo frames on her shelves. A silver one engraved with her name in curly cursive lettering catches my eye. She’s standing among three other girls, all of them scrunched together smiling at the camera. Dallas’s crimson grin spreads across the entire lower half of her face and it’s clear from the pointed ears and literal black catsuit that she’s dressed as Cat Woman. One of her friends is dressed like Poison Ivy and the others as Lynx and Harley Quinn.

“Why’d your parents name you Dallas?” I ask as she pops off a couple shots at a jaguar that lunges at her as she sprints through the jungle.

“It meansfrom the valleys,” she replies. “My dad picked it. His house in Colorado is in a valley that’s covered with wildflowers in the summer. They’re all over the hillsides and it looks like some psychedelic trip when they’re all blooming at once.”

All I know about Dallas and Colson’s father is that he’s a cattle rancher and they go out there to visit him once a year on either Christmas or Easter. Colson always looks forward to it because there are real mountains with wilderness instead of the vast expanses of cornfields here.

“So, it’s got nothing to do with Texas?”

“No,” she smiles, “have you ever been to Dallas? It’s hot and it sucks.”

“No,” I chuckle, “but a lot of my family’s still in Texas. You know, the parts that didn’tusedto be Texas.”

“Are you from there?” she asks, leaping off a riverbank and swimming into an underwater cave.

“No, I was born here. But my grandmother still lives there, and if I want to talk to her, it has to be in Spanish.”

“I’m terrible at Spanish,” Dallas says wistfully.

“I can help you out, you know.”

She shoots me the wildest side-eye I’ve ever seen. “Like I’d ever ask you.”

“Why not? You asked me to comehere,” I argue, “that’s a bigger deal than conjugating verbs. Besides, you’re probably not as bad at it as you think.”

“Mrs. Johnson thinks so,” she mumbles.