The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

so rare.”
    No one else, none of the neighbours who claimed to love George, had called or dropped by. The day after George stopped the school shooter, there had been a lineup of cars to come visit and offer congratulations. If Joan hadn’t had Clara, she felt as though she would have walked into the lake with her pockets full of pennies.
    Joan disappeared downstairs to check the laundry and brought up the old dusty hunting rifle that George’s father kept on a rack above the pool table in the basement. It was a .22. She didn’t know how to shoot it. She wasn’t sure it had bullets; they probably didn’t even make them anymore. But it was symbolic. It was too heavy to hold on her shoulder. She’d have to cradle it in her arms around her stomach, knocking objects behind her on the floor as she tried to walk around.
    “I’m not exactly intimidating, but its existence is comforting,” Joan said to Clara, who winced when she looked up from her seat and saw her sister with the rifle.
    “Put that thing away,” she said.
    “I don’t know why the cops didn’t take it,” Joan wondered out loud.
    “You have permits?”
    “Yes, I suppose. I don’t even think it has bullets.”
    “That’s why.”
    “Why do guns freak you out so much? Daddy had about a million.”
    “The city changes you,” Clara said. “I used to see guns and think of dead deer. Now I see them and think about going to the bodega for a carton of milk and getting caught in the crossfire.”
    Joan picked up the phone and called her boss, requesting to cash in her backlogged sick time and take four weeks off. When she hung up, she felt an immediate sense of relief. Saying something as simple, as elementary, as “ I didn’t do anything” seemed entirely beside the point.
    Clara turned on the radio. “Castrate him!” said an elderly voice. The DJ laughed uncomfortably. All the callers to the talk show uttered variations on men will be boys, boys behave badly, young girls dress too sexy these days, Mr. Woodbury’s family practically created this town and we owe him the respect of innocent until proven guilty, every man is tempted. The latter opinion was something that would’ve provoked Joan to rant a couple of days ago, condoning the lack of responsibility men assume for their behaviour . We sexualize youth, every young actress and pop singer, and we have no right to then act puritanical when a red-blooded man has a natural reaction to this display. You can’t put Britney Spears in a thong everywhere and expect men not to want her just because she’s sixteen. Men are animals, after all.
    “Britney Spears?” Clara laughed. “She’s thirty!”
    Joan turned the radio off and looked out the window and when she squinted, she could see that Andrew was lying on the dock, curled up like a toddler.
    BENNIE CALLED AND Joan picked up the phone. He read the victims’ statements over the speakerphone. Joan placed her head down on the table, and Clara took notes on her phone as he read. “He approached Victim A after she had consumed alcohol at the ski lodge. He told her he would walk her back to the girls’ cabin because she felt ill. He asked if she considered him a friend and she said yes, that she did. He then proceeded to tell her that he would inform her parents about the drinking, about her giving lap dances to boys in their rooms, unless she obliged …”
    Joan gripped the arms of the chair and whimpered. Even if they turned out to be lies, those stories were there, obstacles between them, things she couldn’t un-hear or un-imagine. Someone had taken Joan’s only confidant, the one person who actually knew her completely, and her best friend, and replaced him with a monster. The person she knew and trusted was gone.
    JOAN AND CLARA decided to go to the Woodbridge SuperSave grocery store since they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew there. Bennie’s recitation of the victims’ statements was still ringing in their ears. Joan filled