Bullies Mocked a New Cheerleader at School, Never Realizing Her Father Was a Member of the Hells Angels

Boon understood that. He understood it at a level below thought. He finished sweeping, locked up, drove home. Ren was on the back steps when he pulled in. Same spot she’d been in through most of the fall.

The oak tree bare now against the December sky. The yard quiet. She had tea. She wasn’t looking at her phone. He sat down beside her.

Dalton made his statement today, Boon said. I know, she said. Marsh called the school. Foster told us at the end of practice. She looked at the oak.

How did he seem? I wasn’t there, Boon said. But Marsh said he was prepared. Ren nodded. They sat without talking for a while.

December had settled into the town now. The particular cold that came in early in Tennessee and meant it. The street was quiet. A neighbor’s porch light on down the block. The smell of something burning somewhere, leaves or wood.

The specific smell of the end of the outdoor season. I saw him after school, Ren said. Dalton. Not on purpose, just in the parking lot. Boon looked at her.

He said he was sorry again. She said without an audience this time. He said the first time he’d had other people around and he wanted to say it when it was just the two of them. She was quiet a moment. I told him I knew that it didn’t fix things yet, but that it was a start.

That’s right, Boon said. He looked different, she said. Not happier. Lighter, maybe like something he’d been holding for a long time had been set down. She looked at her tea.

I don’t think he knows yet what kind of person he is when he’s not being the person Pierce made him. She paused. That’s going to take a while to find out. Boon thought about being 24 years old, the first time he’d understood that the options available to him were not limited to the ones someone else had decided on. How long it had taken him to actually believe it after understanding it.

How much happened in the space between understanding and believing? Yeah, he said it takes a while. Mom would have liked him. Ren said the actual him, not the Pierce version. She liked people who were trying.