Page 31 of You Belong Here

BEFORE: THE LOW BAR

They were a few years older, and I knew them, of course. I knew them from Cryer’s Quarry. From my time dating Cliff in high school.

But we weren’t friends. We were people who once coexisted in the same time and place, and even then there was something about them that made me nervous.

It was the way they moved together, as a pair, and seemed to think the same thing, an idea ricocheting before gaining force—not unlike the connection Adalyn and I had.

By the night I saw them at the bar, enough time had passed that it was as if we had never known one another at all.

We were seniors behind the gates of Wyatt College, traipsing down the hill for a taste of something different.

They were six years out of high school, working construction.

They smelled of manual labor—tar and diesel and tobacco and sweat.

Their bodies had been chiseled by it all, rough hands and thick arms and sun-scorched skin.

They downed mugs of beer like it was water and they were dying of thirst. Cliff had just started working with the crew; his old friends had gotten him in at a time of need.

When Adalyn approached them, pointed toward me by the dartboard, and said, “How about it? You have what it takes? She’s got the best aim in the valley,” they pretended not to know me. That’s how far the chasm had grown.

Even Cliff looked into his drink, then up at me with a head tilt. Well?

I hadn’t interacted with him since that night in the woods during the freshman-year howling. But he must’ve remembered how good I was—must’ve remembered losing to me often on the dartboard in my backyard.

Micah strode toward me, and I shook his hand, rough and strong. He turned my arm over, pulled it closer, and I watched his gaze trail to my wrist, finger on the pulse of the mountains. He raised one eyebrow as if asking: Who do you think you are?

That night, there was a bar full of witnesses who saw me lose, and not on purpose—my hand faintly trembling while I tried to steady my aim.

Who then saw Adalyn double down, raise the pot.

Who saw me lose again, this time on purpose, because I remembered that feeling of being around them—something dangerous steadily growing in the silence.

After, a bar full of witnesses saw Adalyn shrug and say she carried no cash, like that should be obvious. They watched her turn away smiling, like it was all a game.

And then they saw Charlie reach out and grab her arm. Her eyes were wide as she turned back and stared at his thick, tanned hand pressing into the pale skin of her upper arm. A reminder that they no longer played childish games.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She kept her expression stoic, didn’t show fear—maybe she didn’t even feel it. If anything, she appeared surprised. “Adalyn Vale,” she said, speaking each syllable slowly, as if talking down to a child.

She didn’t understand where she was. She didn’t get her place here.

I felt the silence creeping through the room. Felt something else growing in the absence of sound. I took out my single emergency credit card, placed it on the bar counter. “I’ll pay the tab,” I said.

But Micah shook his head. His gaze trailed down Adalyn’s face to her thin neck—I could see her breath coming fast. “We’ll take the necklace,” he said.

The pearls she always wore, gleaming in the dim light of the neon wall sign, caught on the collar of her green short-sleeved sweater.

For a moment, I thought she would balk or laugh.

But she seemed to be waiting for something else to happen—for someone to stop this: the bartender who always flirted with her; the young off-duty cop at the table beside us; me, maybe.

She must’ve been confused. She’d grown up in country clubs where no one would dare grab her arm, treat her roughly.

Where a bartender would take her side, and a cop would always come to her aid.

But these were the things she couldn’t know: The bartender was also a Rivers; the cop, Fred Mayhew, had been in the same graduating class six years earlier. It was the silence, I thought, that surprised her the most.

And then we all watched as she reached up, fingers under her blond hair, around the back of her neck, for the strand of pearls she’d worn every day since I’d met her. Valuable to her, I knew, in more ways than money.

We watched as she placed the strand carefully onto the sticky high-top table, coiled into a perfect spiral.

We left the bar, but we didn’t go home. She stayed in front of the bar window, staring in, like she was waiting for them to look.

“Come on,” I said. But she didn’t. Instead, she waltzed around to the far side of the truck.

She didn’t move fast. Didn’t seem to be in a rush. Didn’t worry about being caught as she slowly dragged her dorm key along the side, over and over.

I couldn’t see it clearly, but I heard it—the scratch of metal in the night as a round of laughter came from inside the bar.

I saw it more clearly the next day. The rev of an engine drew me to the dorm room window.

A single word— TRASH —keyed into the side of the shiny black paint in sharp, angled strokes as the truck slowly crept through campus at dusk.