Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools
Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools
Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools
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her thigh. But I guess I was biting her lip and maybe I was grabbing<br />
a little too hard, see, you know how excited I get sometimes, and she<br />
pushed me off and wiped her mouth and said, No, Honeybee, that’s not<br />
what we’re doing, and I realized we were sliding around on something<br />
uncomfortable. She lifted up a canvas sheet and lit up a flashlight and<br />
shined it on a bunch of metal canisters.<br />
I said, This doesn’t make much sense to me, and she said, This is the stuff<br />
Maloney uses to kill the bees; his house is<br />
right there, and I said, I don’t follow,<br />
but by then I figure she’d already<br />
left me behind, in her head at least.<br />
She pulled her skirt up over her<br />
head, but not in any way that I liked,<br />
because she was wearing black<br />
sweats underneath. She whipped out<br />
this black knit cap and slid it over<br />
her face, and every bit of that brickcolored<br />
hair disappeared. It wasn’t<br />
two seconds before she had gloves<br />
and a ski mask on me, too. As we walked up to his house, it seemed to<br />
me that it didn’t look like the house of anyone evil. River walked around<br />
and looked in all the windows until she found the bedroom, and she<br />
jimmied the window open real quiet. She walked over to me and handed<br />
me the canisters and said, He’s in there asleep, throw them in, and I said, No, I<br />
can’t… your walk is different, and she said, What are you talking about? and then<br />
she said, Never mind, just throw them in. You want me, don’t you? Throw them in.<br />
Even in the dark, even through the slits in her mask I could see those<br />
green eyes, so I figured there was some hope. I pulled the tabs on the<br />
bombs and started throwing them in, one by one. Those things don’t<br />
explode, you know, they just fog up the place, so we had to stand there<br />
for a long time and wait. I started getting nervous. We have to stop it, I<br />
said, he’s asleep and he’ll just breathe it in until he’s dead. She said, Shut up, and<br />
not much after that the upper half of Bill Maloney exploded out of the<br />
open window, red-faced, drooling, wheezing, sputtering. River grabbed<br />
my arm and said, Let’s go, but I didn’t follow her. I looked straight into<br />
the face of Bill Maloney as he hung there. I don’t know who he reminded<br />
me of, maybe Wayne or my own father, maybe the coach or Professor<br />
Whitaker, but he certainly did not have the dead eyes that a murderer<br />
should. On the contrary, his eyes were teary and wild, like something was<br />
being robbed from him but he couldn’t comprehend what. I walked over<br />
and hauled Bill Maloney safely out of his house, and I had to run all the<br />
way back to my double wide on foot, see, because River was already gone.<br />
28<br />
She whipped out this<br />
black knit cap and slid it<br />
over her face, and every<br />
bit of that brick-colored<br />
hair disappeared. It<br />
wasn’t two seconds before<br />
she had gloves and a ski<br />
mask on me, too.