“Not gonna happen,” I’d replied with a roll of my eyes.
And yet here I am, one year later, filling a grocery bag with four mason jars full of my uncles’ infamous bathtub moonshine, which Dylan promised would be the magic ticket into Michaela Gordon’s almost equally infamous back-to-school Labor Day party.
It’s not like I think doing this is gonna bring Dyl back. Or that she’s peering down from heaven, cheering me on or something cheesy like that.
It’s more like once you see your best friend chopped up into pieces, it changes you. It makes you reexamine your own life and choices. And after five months of this type of introspection, I’ve decided that I’m sick of taking the path of least resistance, sick of trying to stay out of trouble when it always finds me in the end anyway, and sick of letting assholes like Michaela Gordon tell me I’m not good enough to play beer pong with their pals.
To put it simply: I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore. So yeah, I’m going to the party to fulfill a dead girl’s wish. But that’s not all of it. I’m also going to that party to
FUCKING
OWN
IT.
But first I have to get my uncles out of the way.
Unlike most responsible adults, my uncles wouldn’t care about me going to a “my parents aren’t home so let’s drink till we puke” type party or even coming home from that party totally wasted. They would, however, object to me dipping into the moonshine supply for the purpose of handing out free samples.
That’s ’cause making moonshine is the way my uncles earn their living. It’s a family business, actually. They can’t put a sign out front, due to their business being the type of thing that can get you sent to jail, but if they did have one it would say: Hinkton Family Moonshine: Brewing It in Bathtubs and Selling It Out of the Living Room Since 1923.
I realize this sounds sketchy, and you wouldn’t know it by the way we live, but business is good. The same people who call us trash behind our backs come knocking at our door with wads of twenties in their fists. You can see the horror on their faces when they’re invited in and told to take a seat. And when they finally leave with their brown paper bag clutched in their hands, it’s clear they’re thinking that Jet and Rod and Dune are more crooked than the falling-down house we live in and as hard to judge as their dogs who, depending on their mood, might lick your hand or bite it. Yet despite all that, most of them come back for more.
So I understand why slipping a few free jars to my friends is a big no-no. It’s a rule I never considered breaking before because when I get in trouble with my uncles, I don’t get some sissy punishment like getting sent to my room. My uncles always said that if I’d been born a boy, they woulda beaten the hell out of me, but seeing as how I was a girl and more easily broken, they instead punished me by locking me out of the house until they got over being angry at me for whatever I had done. I just hope that this time I don’t make them so mad they change the locks completely.
They’ll be real pissed at me, that much is certain. Not only am I taking the shine, but I’m also using one of their favorite things in the world to betray them: Dinty Moore beef stew.
Inspiration struck this morning as I eyed the stacks and stacks of Dinty Moore covering almost every inch of counter space. My uncles had bought twenty cases off a friend of theirs a few days ago. Half the stuff in our house, from the TV to the toilet paper, fell off the back of a truck and was then sold to us at bargain-basement prices. When I was seven years old, I was terrified of driving behind trucks for fear that big leather couches like the ones my uncles had just gotten would come flying out and smash me to bits.
Now I wander into the living room, where the uncs are watching the three flat-screens stuck to the wall. Die Hard, SportsZone, and some Food Network show play on the respective screens.
I flop down between Uncle Rod and Uncle Jet and watch with