THE THREE OF US

When I got there, she was coughing on my boyfriend. She'd been smoking since seventh grade, when we used to sneak out behind the red barn on the Swanson's place and even then I would just stand there watching as she lit up, see her eyes close as she sucked in the sweet black tar, and follow the white smoke she exhaled as it disappeared into the flat blue Kansas skyline. I can still see her sitting on that giant tractor tire, her yellow and white Angel Top blowing in the breeze, her red Conversed feet toeing at the dirt. We were twelve.

Now her laugh was hoarse and raspy and her voice sounded like she'd swallowed every single one of the nails my dad keeps in the garage in that empty Folger's coffee can. She doesn't swear as much these days, not like she used to, anyway, and she's gotten to a point where she can keep a job and, if I go over to see her, which is rare, her apartment is clean more often than not. But, as I said, I don't go much anymore. Mostly, I just see her at the Kmart where she's been working since June.

We're all twenty now, all of us, and these days things count. Like my boyfriend. He's smart and he works hard and he's almost done at the community college where he's studying computers. We have something, he tells me at night, after he drops me off at my house. And I believe him. The three of us have known each other since third grade, when my boyfriend moved her from South Carolina. She and I started in Kindergarten.

But these days, as I say, things count. 

That's why they shouldn't have done what they did.

That's why I've got the gun.

That's why her raspy, nicotine-ravaged voice is the last thing he'll hear.  DFP