MALHUER chapter one,part one

now the boxes were packed tightly and securely in the back of the pickup,covered with a tarp in case of rain and secured with bungee cords.
"thats it" sophia said as she packed one last box underneathe the already hulkingmass making the chevy nova look like some kind of mechanical camel as she and grady prepared to traverse the desert of south east oregon to some oasis in idaho,she never really thought it would be with someone like grady, this 18 year old guy,kind of a screw up, begining an uphill battle with a downward spiral,she had seen this kinda thing before,perfectly aware that he probably had no ideawhat direction he was going in like some lemming into the water,to be swallow up and have his husk tossed to the shore of the world,even if he is still breathing and twitchinghe will not be who he was,not as able toto focus or think as well as he could before,and it didnt seem like those were particular favorite passtimes of his,anyway, so if hehe ever decided to grow up,if he had the chance,f he didnt end up in a pine box before he turns 20,stumbling through anykind of education was going to be even more of an obstacle courseand he will be even less up to it,even less than now,she thought as she looked at him,confused eyes and greying skin furthered by his weight loss she swears he must weigh 10 or 15pounds less than when she 1st met him, and that was only four months ago.
No, she was hoping thatwhen she finally made her escape,it would be with a girlfriend;hoping she would be able to obtain as much,in the two years since she realised who she was,or as the rednecks would say WHAT she was;to hell with them,she thoughtthere were others like her here,she knew it,but she also knew it was hard to find those who would admit it,other than the hefty,bull dyke typesand she wasnt interested in them,i mean if your interested in girls, she rationalised,wouldnt it be most logical to appeal to other girls who like girls by being femenine,not like a man ,muscular and unlike a woman? she looked herself over in the mirror at night,over many nights,actually;to herself she admitted that you could kinda classify her as a bit of the bull-dyke lesbian,not that she was a weight lifter or anything;but she had some extra baggage and her hair never really would allow itself to be styled,so she just left it out in a pony tail and often wore a baseball cap or to take away further from her femeninity, a john-deere cap.
she theorised that such feelings of alienation were what made her feel close to grady brown.
he was another local freak,only she didnt do quite as well in the flaunting of it as well as grady did, he ofter decared himself to be proud to be immoral,immorral by these peoples standards,at least;fuck morality if you consider christianity to be the main conduit of morality,he would say as he pointed out what he percieved to be hippocracies,the wealthier folk about town(although calling anyone in a town of less than 1900 wealthy may be a bit of a stretch of the imagination)he would say they all had a lotta balls to be chastising him andhis addictions or whatever percieved deviation he partook,while they would spend their saturday nights on the town pickling their livers and picking up prostitutes,some of whom grady says are cousins of his,making nasty in their pickups and not hesitating to smack their wives aroundif they asked where they had been that night with a little too much accusation in their voices,but always up and ready for church on a sunday morning.
grady never really made an effort to hide his utter disgust of christianity,in fact, he flaunted it like a trophy of some sort,and maybe for him it was;sophia had heard that gradys father claimed to be a christian,and the stories about gradys fatherwere things she didnt even want to contemplate,maybe that was why grady was such a train wreck, the whole idea that someone can have his mind and in someways,his body marked by things that make people want to vomit if they even hear only part of the story,maybe that was the story with grady:he had puked awayany compassion towardspeople who were trying to life in a strait-and narrow manner,using the same methods his father always claimed to adhere to,and with his body and soul purged of the ability to care about people there was a hollowness and that was what he embraced,that nothingness,that was god to him,he proclaimed,somewhat off the mark of any recognised religion or philosophy,like zen or atheism,or even satanism,although the last one didsome kind of appeal to grady,perhaps it was just to appear being the exact opposite of these people,gradyalways wore black,saying it was symbolic of the nothingness inside of him,but he would also use a permanent marker and draw a pentagrma on his handand enjoyed flashing it to the little old ladies dressed in white on their way to church on sunday mornings, have fun in my house, he would say to them. sophia wondered how grady would keep himself entertained in twin falls