A Crooked Mile (Rust Book 1) Read online

  A Crooked Mile

  Rust, Volume 1

  Samantha Arthurs

  Published by Samantha Arthurs, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  A CROOKED MILE

  First edition. April 18, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Samantha Arthurs.

  Written by Samantha Arthurs.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: A Missing Boy

  Chapter One: A Town Called Rust

  Chapter Two: Profile of a Montana Girl

  Chapter Three: About A Boy

  Chapter Four: Family Dynamics

  Chapter Five: A Study in Brontë

  Chapter Six: Shrinking Heads

  Chapter Seven: Friday I'm In Love

  Chapter Eight: The High School Experience

  Chapter Nine: I Can Change, I Swear

  Chapter Ten: Beauty in the Break Down

  Chapter Eleven: All the World's a Stage

  Chapter Twelve: Falling

  Chapter Thirteen: Cold Hard Earth

  Chapter Fourteen: Action!

  Chapter Fifteen: Tis the Season

  Chapter Sixteen: The Shape of Things to Come

  Chapter Seventeen: The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

  Chapter Eighteen: Blessings

  Chapter Nineteen: Backlash

  Chapter Twenty: A Source of Little Visible Delight

  Chapter Twenty-One: Chasing Time

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Brand New Year

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Right to Remain Silent

  Chapter Twenty-Four: From Rust to Dust

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Lost Boy Found

  Epilogue: Survivor's Guilt

  Jess & Mandi: you are the real MVP's!

  For everyone I know who has ever coped with anxiety and depression. You aren't alone.

  For Christopher, who is missed every single day and who disappeared from our lives far too quickly.

  Prologue: A Missing Boy

  Alec Davis went missing on the first day of January, according to those who had last had contact with him. His parents had called the police to officially file a report late on the third, assuming that Alec would return home but beginning to worry when he didn’t. Twenty-four hours after he was reported as missing the state police became involved, but nobody found anything that even hinted to his whereabouts. It was like he had literally disappeared without a trace, just poof! He just got up one morning and walked right out of existence. Of course that can’t really be true, everyone is ultimately somewhere, but nobody has a clue about where Alec might be. Not even Ramona Sanders, who was questioned several times by both local and state investigators. She was the very last person to have heard from him on New Year’s Day, in the wee hours of mourning to be exact, but she was as baffled as everyone else. Whatever might have happened, wherever he might have gone, Alec had taken great care in making sure his tracks were covered

  Some people, it would seem, just do not want to be found.

  It was the biggest thing to happen in the little town of Rust, Montana, population less than 3,000 people, in quite some time. Though when you live in a middle of nowhere place like Rust, just about anything is considered big news. The real reality of the thing was that by spring planting season, when it was time to churn up the still slightly frozen ground to prepare for planting wheat, even the enigma of Alec Davis would become forgotten. He would just fade into the lore of his small hometown, becoming part of its fiction only to be remembered when there was nothing else much to talk about. That was just the nature of things in small town America; eventually something bigger and more interesting to talk about came along and that was that.

  That was what hurt the most for Ramona Sanders, besides the fact that she could do nothing to help beyond sharing with police what little information she had to offer. She knew better than most what it was like to be forgotten while still alive, so she couldn’t imagine the disquieting forgetfulness that would come with just suddenly being bodily gone. For a while people would talk, would speculate, and would formulate their own conspiracy theories as to Alec’s whereabouts. They would all be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t stop them from talking. Alec had been a popular boy in Rust, a basketball star with a bright future, and his classmates would use that to cling on to for a while.

  Eventually their curiosity and big ideas would turn to sad remembrance. They would mourn him tearfully, whether they had really ever known him or not, and they would mourn his absence at their prom that spring. They would leave his seat empty at graduation, and mention him in their convocation and long winded speeches about good times gone by. A few would even venture to lament publicly, most likely over social media platforms, that they would be going off to college soon but poor, poor Alec would not be going. Or perhaps he would, somewhere out there in the wide world, wherever he was. Though generally high school dropouts didn’t still get to accept their state university basketball scholarships and go on to live such fruitful lives as they all dreamed of.

  No matter who strove to remember him in those first weeks and months, time would ultimately change things. Rust itself was a place worth forgetting about, and Alec was just another casualty. His parents would never forget him though, that was obvious, nor would his brother, Bryson. Neither would Ramona Sanders.

  Ramona. Mona. A girl who wanted nothing more than to be someone, now forever entangled with a boy who wanted nothing more than to be a memory. They hadn’t been branded together intentionally, not really. It had all been quite by accident, with their English teacher Mrs. Connie Bond to blame. If she had just left well enough alone then Ramona would be quietly finishing her senior year of high school, preparing for whatever the world had to throw at her. She wouldn’t be feeling the guilt of having no answers, the pain of missing someone who was quite content with disengaging from everyone around him.

  Alec Davis had changed Rust, at least for a little while. He had changed Ramona Sanders indefinitely, possibly for the rest of her life. Part of her would always resent him, but another part would always be glad to have known him. Mostly she just wished he’d come back, or at least let her know where he was and that he was okay. A text message, a phone call, anything would have been satisfactory.

  She had worked hard to know the person that Alec truly was, and now he was just a mystery all over again.

  Chapter One: A Town Called Rust

  Rust, Montana is the literal definition of hole in the wall. It sits in no man’s land, located off Highway 80 near Hardwood Lake. The nearest city is Fort Benton, located about 70 miles or so away by car, which makes it a rather inconvenient and rare trip to be made. It's a self-contained sort of place, nestled between miles and miles of wheat fields that turn the world from green to gold around July of every year.

  Wheat is what made the town of Rust, and what sustains it still. There isn't much else to be had there, not really, and most people are fine with that. Primarily because wheat is the only life they have ever known, passing down the land as each previous generation grows too old to continue to work it. There is a sense of duty to this sort of life, and a deep sense of pride too. Nobody wants to let their heritage down, and most try their best not to. Some folks, however, just want to leave. It's as though Rust can't contain them, like they're made to see what lies beyond the edges of those golden fields, well past the mountains and into the far flung distance.

  The town itself is made up of a few local businesses that have existed for as long as there have been people who need them. There's a small grocery store, a gas stati
on, and a post office. There's even a diner that was opened up in the 1950s, and that still boasts the same red vinyl seats and peeling Formica table tops that it sported on its original opening day. The elementary school sits right in town, a new building that was built with government grant money just several years before. The old one was torn down to make room for a new baseball diamond, used by the schools and for intermural summer leagues.

  Rust High School, home of the Threshers, sits a little further outside of town on a plot of donated land. It's an older building, built in the 1970s, that has weathered more than its fair share. A tornado in 1993 had nearly done it in, but the town had rallied together and the building still stood. That was because RHS produced one of the few things besides fine quality wheat that Rust had to be proud of, and that was their basketball team. They had won two state titles in their storied history, and had produced several college players. None of them had been recruited by a Division I school but they had still left Rust behind to do greater things, and that was something people from home could be proud of.

  It was early September, and school had only been in session since the 28th of August. They always started late so kids whose families needed help could have them home during the start of harvest time. There were still a few fields that needed tending, but most folks had already gotten their wheat up and prepared for the market. Nobody wanted a field still standing when the cold came creeping in, and in Montana that could happen anytime from September to November.

  Ramona Sanders hated harvest time, even though she knew that it was beneficial to her family’s survival through the winter. Wheat was what put food on the table, and what kept the bills paid. Even though this year had been an even rougher squeeze than the previous year had been, she still hated to see all those beautiful golden fields threshed down to a barren and brown nothingness. She was thinking about that as she rode her bike from the farm to school on that crisp fall morning, admiring the remaining flashes of bright yellow between the mostly empty fields.

  Ramona, called Mona by her family and only in the extreme privacy of their home, had been born in Rust some seventeen years before. She had chosen a particularly nasty winter to come into the world, as her mother loved to tell her, and the snow had been flying. They hadn’t thought that they would make it all the way to the hospital in Fort Benton, and the horrifying reality of possibly having a child in the back of a car by the side of the snowy highway had been enough to keep her parent’s home. They had called Sissy Tabor, a retired midwife, to come out to the house and it was there that Ramona was born. Healthy, pink, and howling as loud as the winds outside.

  Her parents loved to tell her that she was beautiful, as all parents do, but Ramona had a hard time believing it. She thought she looked like she'd been made from the land itself, her skin washed out and pale with freckles across her nose and cheeks, her unruly curly hair the murky color of wheat after a good dust storm had blown through. She got her father’s dark, muddy eyes and her mother's penchant for burning instead of tanning. She envied her six younger siblings, who had no freckles and their mother's gray eyes, but there was nothing to be done about it. She was the oldest Sanders child, and it was somehow fitting that she belonged to Rust just as it tried it’s very best to belong to her.

  Like most kids from her small rural town, Ramona had grown up in a family whose monetary woes ebbed and flowed with market prices for wheat. Some years were better than others, and that meant more new school clothes and new winter boots and maybe some extravagances that they otherwise couldn't afford. More often than not, however, they made just enough to get by and live somewhat comfortably until the next season if they didn’t overspend or nothing broke on the farm. They supplemented their wheat crop with a small stand of livestock, but the few cattle and chickens were mostly for the family. They may not have ever had much, but they'd at least always be able to eat meat and eggs and milk.

  She knew she was lucky, because her family owned the farm that they lived on and had owned it for generations. Some folks had to rent their land, and so a lot of their harvest prices went to paying for the right to stay and grow another season. Add on to that the fact that they also had to rent equipment and it just didn't seem worth it. She often wondered why people would put themselves through the pain of it just to stay in a place so depressed and depressing as Rust, but nobody ever had an answer for her.

  Owning your own farm and being on par with most other families, however, did not change the fact that high school was its own personal hell. Ramona couldn't remember a time when she'd gotten along well with the 122 other kids in her graduating class, if such a time had ever existed at all. She was a walking, talking target in her worn out sneakers from last year and her collection of t-shirts that she wore in a steady rotation. She never fussed with her hair, it was too messy to fuss with, and she didn't bother with makeup. It would take too much to cover all those freckles, and who had the time for that sort of thing? There was also the fact that, in her younger years, she had spoken with a very bad stutter that had eventually been corrected over time with speech therapy sessions every day after school.

  Kids were cruel, and they did not forget. They were seniors now, preparing for life after high school, but to most of them? She would always be Stuttering Sanders. It was a stigma she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to shake, at least not until she got out and left this dismal hell hole far behind her. This was, ultimately, her dream and goal; to get into college, and to get out of Rust.

  Ramona was still deeply lost inside her thoughts as she reached the school grounds, chaining her bike up to the rack outside. There was a school bus that picked up all the kids in town on a circuit between all the farms outside of town, but she only chose to ride it if the weather was poor enough. Otherwise she preferred to ride her bike, which eliminated at least an extra hour of possible torment each day. It was a small thing, really, but it was a small thing she had control over, unlike so much else in her life. She had no control over things at home, over kids at school, or even over her own social life (of which there really was none). So she took what she could get and was proud of herself for it.

  The first bell rang at ten minutes after eight in the morning, which meant the span of time between seven forty-five and eight oh-five were intensely busy. The hallways were packed as Ramona squeezed her way through, bumped and jostled as though she were invisible. If only that were really, actually true then things might not be so bad. Being actually invisible was a preferable thing to just simply being treated as though you didn't matter. She was just thankful that everyone was to sleepy and harried to bother picking at her as she got into her locker, taking out her books for English and Math, leaving her backpack tucked onto the bottom shelf.

  Having English for first period was not the scheduling preference of most kids, who found the subject far too intense for foggy morning brains. Ramona, however, loved it. It felt like a good start to her day, diving right in without a lull. Not to mention the fact that English was her subject of choice, and that she adored Mrs. Bond. At least she had always adored her before, but that was very apt to change after this fateful morning.

  Ramona sat in the front row on the left hand side of the room, in the desk nearest to the teachers. They had chosen their seats the first day of the year, and she thought that she had picked well. For one, she liked to be closer to the board so she didn't miss anything. Most importantly though was the fact that nobody would pick at you if you were sitting so near to the teacher. It was a tactic, a strategy, and yet another thing she felt she could be proud of.

  Alec Davis, also a senior and a star forward on the basketball team, sat in the back row on opposite side of the room beneath one of the tall windows. He was always one of the kids who was to sleepy in the morning to fully compute the class, sitting with his chin resting in his hand and his eyes heavy, if they weren't completely closed. Ramona never knew if he was actually asleep or not, but there were a few times when she was pretty certain that he was.
If he was already so worn out every morning this early in the semester, she couldn't fathom at all how he'd make it through the rest of the year. Not that she made a habit of thinking about Alec Davis. It was just hard to ignore him because he sat in her line of sight directly across the room, and the sunlight always made interesting colors on his dark hair. Not to mention it could be hard to ignore a guy who was just so tall. It was a commanding presence thing, and not anything to do with him as a person.

  It was because Alec as a person was honestly pretty terrible, or at least not exceptionally nice that she had ever noticed anyway. He hung out with the basketball players and the cheerleader types, all the people who lived to make Ramona's life a living hell. He had been present plenty of times for the torture, and though he hadn't actively participated he hadn't moved to stop it either. Not even that time at the end of year assembly in May when Miranda Clare and Joe Harris had led a chant of Stuttering Sanders after she'd tripped and fallen on the bleacher steps.

  Yeah, he wasn't exactly a stand up type of a guy.

  She was caught up in her thoughts again, tapping her pencil furiously against the cover of her notebook and nearly missing the announcement that Mrs. Bond was making. She shifted her attention over and pursed her lips, sucking in a deep breath when she heard the most dreaded words a teacher could ever utter: you'll be working in pairs.

  There would be a semester long project due in December, just before school let out for the winter break. They would be paired up to work on it, and pairs would be assigned to avoid any wasted time and fooling around. Together they would pick a novel from the twelfth grade reading list, and they would have around twelve weeks to put together their project. It could be anything they wanted it to be, from a play to a newspaper to a video, but they had to show that they had worked together and that they understood the scope of the novel that they had chosen. There were criteria, of course, about what had to be included and what they had to show their understanding of, but Ramona was still stuck on the partner’s aspect.