The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels) by Julia Keller Read Free Book Online

sell hot dogs, which at least would’ve justified the stupid name, a charmless bit of illogic that drove Carla crazy whenever she came in here and slid into one of the crappy plastic chairs bolted to the greasy floor. If she didn’t have to, she’d never be wasting her time in this joint, and she always wondered why anybody ever came in here willingly.
    Then she remembered. If you were an old fart, they gave you your coffee at a discount.
    So there you go. There’s your reason to live. You get a dime off your damned coffee.
    Freaks.
    Carla was vaguely ashamed of the flicks of menace that roved randomly across her mind, like a street gang with its switchblades open. She knew she was being a heartless bitch—but hell, they were just thoughts, okay? It’s not like she’d ever say anything rude out loud.
    She was bored, though, and speculating about the old farts was recreational.
    To get a better look, without being totally obvious about it, she let her head loll casually to one side, like a flower suddenly too heavy for its stalk, and narrowed and shifted her eyes, while keeping her chin centered in her palm.
    Now the old men were laughing again. They opened their mouths too wide, and she could see that some of their teeth were stained a weird greenish yellow-brown that looked like the color of the lettuce she’d sometimes find way in the back of the fridge, the kind her mom bought and then forgot about. It was, Carla thought with a shudder of oddly pleasurable repugnance, the Official Color of Old Man Teeth.
    She didn’t know any of them. Or maybe she did. All old men looked alike, right? And old towns like the one she lived in—Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, or as Carla and her friends preferred to call it,
The Middle of Freakin’ Nowhere
—were filled with old men. With interchangeable old farts. It was just another crappy fact she had to deal with in her crappy life, on her way to what was surely an even crappier future.
    Her thoughts had been leaning that way all morning long, leaning toward disgust and despair, and the constant proximity of gross old men in the Salty Dawg was one of the reasons why.
    Another was that her mother was late to pick her up.
    Again.
    So Carla was pissed.
    They had agreed on 11 A.M. It was now 11:47. And no sign of good old Mom, who also wasn’t answering her cell. Carla Elkins was forced to sit here, getting free refills on her Diet Coke and playing with her french fries, pulling them out of the red cardboard ark one by one and stacking them up like tiny salty Lincoln Logs. Building a wall. A fort, maybe. A greasy little fort. She’d just had her nails done the day before over at Le Salon, and the black polish—she was picking up another french fry now, and another, and another, and another, while her other hand continued to prop up her chin—looked even blacker by contrast with the washed-out beige of each skinny french fry.
    Her mother hated black nail polish, which was why Carla chose it. She wasn’t crazy about it herself, but if it pissed off her mom, she’d make the sacrifice.
    The Salty Dawg was right down the street from the Acker’s Gap Community Resource Center—the RC, everybody called it—which was a long, square, flat-roofed dump of a place with ginormous plate-glass windows cut into three sides of the icky yellow brick. Somebody’d once told Carla that, a million years ago, the RC had been a Ford dealership.
    That was Acker’s Gap for you: Everything had once been something else. There was nothing new. Nothing fresh or different. Ever.
    She had to endure her court-mandated Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC on Saturday mornings, 8:00 to 10:30, during which time the counselor would go around the circle and ask each of them what she or he was feeling.
What I’m feeling
, Carla wanted to say,
is that this is a lame-ass way to spend a Saturday morning.
But she didn’t. Usually, when her turn came, she just scooted a little bit forward and a little bit back