There was no such thing as good people.
All his life, those words rang true to Jaylin. There was no such thing as good people. Only people doing good for the sake of themselves.
He saw it in the way his high school crush flew off to Sri Lanka to volunteer with elephants. She said she didn’t like what humans were doing to Mother Earth and left to ease the collective guilt on her shoulders.
He saw it in the way his father swapped his liquor for a bible—the way he prayed to his Christian god every night, the way he repented. But beyond the church doors, Jaylin saw the shrewdness that festered in his eyes. He condemned anything different with the point of his mallet, spoke like he could always taste the bitter ink of the bible. And Jaylin watched that damnation eat away whatever humanity he had.
His father had opened his eyes to the greed of this world. His arrogance woke something in Jaylin. And after he saw it in his father, he saw it at school, on television. He’d come to find that ignorance had a special kind of emanation; you could feel it when it settled into the air, thick, like a smog. But even to think about these things, to want to rise above the crudeness—that was hypocrisy in its own. Because he even saw it in himself on occasion. That urge to be a better person, if only to hate himself a little less. It was a hopeless human flaw, stamped deep down into the bone and he was never going to escape it.
He was human and humans were inherently terrible things.
“Did you see that?” Tisper spun around so fast, her ponytail cut the air with a whip. When she realized that he hadn’t been watching, her cheek-to-cheek smile wilted away and she lowered her archery bow with a huff. “Seriously, Jaylin? I make a perfect shot and you’re in a different galaxy.”
He blinked, roving over to the target board, twenty feet across the field. Tisper had a talent for hitting only the white rows, but today she’d managed a single perfect shot through the heart of the bullseye.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. He’d had too many things on his mind.
If anyone understood him, it was Tisper. Her shrewd expression eased and she twirled around with a sigh, trotting the turf to collect her arrows.
For the past two months, her shooting practice had been his waking call. Tisper refused to practice with the other girls in her archery club and instead, she insisted on coming to the field at a drab and chilly six AM.
Even in the middle of a scorching summer, the track field was an icebox in the mornings. There was a perfectly good club room for practice, open to members all summer long. Jaylin had been there once before, nestled on a comfortable lounge chair in a temperature-controlled environment. But Tisper preferred the bone-chilling cold of an open field—and at the ass crack of dawn no less. As long as there was no one around to accidentally bludgeon with her arrows, her instructors didn’t seem to mind. They’d even let her rent out a shooting board for the occasion.
It was nonsense to drive all the way to campus in the middle of summer, but watching her practice gave Jaylin the opportunity to get out of the house, and for some reason, it gave Tisper the comfort she needed to shoot an arrow straight.
“Guess we should get going, huh?” she asked, marching over to her things. “You’ve got places to be and I’ve got a pinch of summer left to enjoy before school starts again.”
She gathered her equipment into her gym bag and Jaylin tapped out his cigarette on the icy bleachers.
“Mind if we stop by the house to check on Mom first?”
There was a slight catch in her eyes as Tisper glanced to him and slung her bag over her shoulder. She knew not to linger on it. “Sure, Jay.”
He heaved himself up, ass numb from the cold, and they cut through the turning entrance bars toward the busy bus stop at the edge of campus. Summer was a sticky season in Washington. The icy tundra of the stadium would turn humid and heavy once the sun rose over the emerald city, and the earth would breathe a hot sigh on the back of every man and woman caught in her wake.
Jaylin wasn’t a sunshine kinda boy. His heart belonged to the summer storms. The dark and gray and angry.
“Think we’ll have another windstorm this summer?” he asked once they were back in town, sucked into the leather seats of Tisper’s tiny red convertible.
“I hope not. My apartment’s a structural disaster. Every time the wind blows, I’m afraid it’ll go down like a drunken game of Jenga.”
Jaylin shielded his eyes from the beating sun and sighed. Leaving Seattle always left him in a pensive mood. He’d stay in the city all his life if he could afford it—if anyone who made under sixteen-bucks an hour could manage the jarring rent and still have the pennies left over to feed themselves.
Instead, he lived on the outskirts of Tacoma: the Coyote Ugly of cities. At night it glowed with all the garish lights of restaurants, bars and coffee shops, but during the day, the sun shined on every open wound in the place. Beyond the outstanding crime rate and the old paper mill that gassed up the air with the stench of rotting eggs, it wasn’t a horrible city to live in. It had its charm, this smelly place.
His home was in a neighborhood far East of the city. So far East, it was hardly in Tacoma at all. Instead of the stench of eggs, this place stunk of burning yard waste and subsidized housing. Scrutinizing his own flaking picket yard fence and overgrown sticker weeds, he decided he couldn’t judge his neighbors for what he saw or smelled coming from their own homes. His was a shit show to rival them all.
The only good thing about this place was what slept inside.
Tisper parked outside at the curb and Jaylin promised he’d hurry as he scurried his way to the front door, kicking off his shoes at the threshold. It was a difficult tiptoe up the stairs—especially when every floorboard protested under the weight of his next soft-footed step. But as he reached her bedroom door, he found her still asleep beneath her quilts, her curly mop of thin blonde hair stuck up in frizzy ringlets.
Jaylin watched her breathe, listened to the gentle snore that whistled from her nose, and stepped backward into the hall.
“Love you, Mom,” he told her, though he knew she couldn’t hear, and left the door cracked an inch to filter light into the room.
Then he tiptoed just as quietly back down the steps and into their cramped little kitchen. On any typical day, dishes cluttered the counters and the sink and the old breakfast nook, collecting dust and mold until Jaylin found the time to do them himself. But today, the sink was empty, the dishes stacked neatly in their drainer. He gave an exasperated sigh at the scent of soap, still fragrant in the air. She was supposed to be resting. Cleaning wasn’t resting.
Jaylin turned his attention instead to a pile of unopened mail, splayed out on the dusty nook. Per usual, several of the letters were addressed to David Maxwell.
David. He couldn’t remember ever calling him Dad. It was always David—sometimes Dick, sometimes Douche, sometimes Rat. Lately, Jaylin had decided that David wasn’t worthy of the title rat. Rats were smart, caring creatures, like his mother. David was a snake, spilling his flesh upon the ground and slithering away long after he’d feasted on the little heart of the smart, caring rat.
Jaylin threw each item in the bin, one by one. A credit card offer, a magazine, a flier for wood-fired pizza—then a letter. A real letter—not addressed to David or Dick or Douche or Rat, but to Resident. Just Resident.
You’re invited, it read. Celebrate 4th of July at the Sigvard Manor.
Hosted by Alexander and Lisa Sigvard.
An address followed, but Jaylin disregarded it. He was piqued instead by the scent of the letter.
It smelled a lot like roses.
Tisper gave an impatient little honk just outside, and fearful she’d wake his mother, Jaylin tore the invitation to bits and tossed it in the bin with David’s letters.
Tisper was still waiting in that little red convertible—the hood down, the music far too loud for this hour of the morning. “Come on, Jay. We’re on a schedule!” she hooted, glossing her lips in the rearview mirror.
His heart panged in his throat as bounced down from the front porch and hurried toward his chariot to hell.
“Will you be alright?” Tisper asked, nudging her sunglasses down to look him in the eye.
Jaylin climbed over the door and strapped the belt over his chest. “For the last time, Tis. Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
She hummed a sound of uncertainty and adjusted the rearview mirror. “You know the deal,” she said, shifting gears, “you change your mind, tell me. I’ll come get you.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, softer this time.
Every day it was the same. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. But the truth of the matter was that Jaylin didn’t know if he’d be fine. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Fine was up in the air, indefinitely.
But he lied that he was. He lied because it made the frown on Tisper’s beautiful, dewy face fade away. He lied because the sight of it festered, guilty in his gut. He lied because lying was quick and easy—and because he was running late to a grueling appointment.
Every Friday morning at nine AM, Jaylin sold his soul to the devil.
And her name was Olivia Black.
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