Further South by Eryk Pruitt Page A

hers. She'd stolen it from her boyfriend -- ex-boyfriend -- when she'd made out two days earlier. It was also the last time she'd done any crystal, which explained why such problems surfaced for her now. She needed to ditch the car and find another one. Sam would have someone looking for that car, and the sooner they found it, the sooner they'd be that much closer to her. For so long, avoiding Sam had been a game. She could dip in and out of his periphery and the only consequence would be a shouting match, a little session of who could hurt who's feelings, silly revenge fantasies. Most often the result was angry sex, as if the public humiliation dramas were only foreplay. But she knew she had crossed a line and the consequence this time would be more significant.
    She massaged her temples. Since waking up Friday morning, she'd hardly the time or ability to process everything that had happened. Her brain fired through images of Thursday night, the past week, the past month and so on and jumbled them t ogether in a narcotic mishmash of surreal episodes and she constantly needed to remind herself that this was her life. This was not scenes from an after-school special. No, this was her life and if it would just slow down for a second, she'd try and get a handle on things.
    She'd been making mistakes for a while now, starting with skipping a Literature class during her Freshman year, which led to her running into Sam Tuley, and culminating into Friday morning, the day she'd high-tailed it out of Nacogdoches. With the wooded little college town in Deep East Texas in her rearview, she replayed the events of her downfall, wincing with each bad decision she'd made. She watched the horror unfold -- this was her life -- and knew there was no undoing what had been done.
    She met the B oy at the bar on Thursday night. She hadn't seen him around campus, but had she really been going to campus much this semester? He said all the right things. She was in the mood to do all the wrong things. She and her boyfriend Sam were going to the mattresses lately, and not in the good way. It never mattered what started these fights, or even what finished them really. All that mattered was how bad one could hurt the other before it was finished. And this time, Melinda was bound to leave a mark.
    She let him buy her drinks, but that wasn't really necessary. Usually a bump or two of the stuff Sam sold these days killed any appetite she had for booze, but when in Rome ... The Boy figured out the score and asked if he could have some, she said sure, let's go back to my place and party. He was down and she figured this would be the perfect way to show Sam he shouldn't have fucked with her. If indeed he had.
    And by her place , she meant the place she shared with Sam Tuley, her boyfriend of eleven tumultuous months. Ever since he started dealing, the place had transformed from a study pad to a drug den and, most of the time, the phone never stopped ringing. Wanting a little privacy so she could do the deed, she unplugged the line and led the Boy into the living room.
    "You said you had a boyfriend?" the Boy asked. "He won't like, come home and shoot me, will he?"
    "He won't come home," she told him. "Not tonight, anyway. We got into a big fight and a large part of him getting even -- which is the most important part -- is not coming home." The Boy appeared to relax, but Melinda didn't buy it. He never seemed to lose control or get nervous. He seemed to have it all figured out. "I ain't worried though," she said, "because Sam Tuley will always come back for me."
    "What did y'all fight about?" the Boy asked.
    "I really don't even remember." Melinda scooted over closer to him and pulled out some of Sam's shit, dropped a small pile of it onto the back of a CD jewel case -- Skynyrd's Pronounced -- and began to chop out some lines with her student ID card. "All we do is fight anymore. I think it's the drugs, honestly. All the damned drugs. When we met, I thought he