The streets were still wet, a surprise June storm rumbling through and soaking the cement some hours before. Barbara Allen couldn’t describe what was still happening as rain, though water was still making its way to Earth, but more as spitting. The Texas sky had a tendency to spit more often than it did to rain. As she jumped into another puddle, though, Barbara didn’t much care if it rained or if it spat, so long as the temperature stayed below one hundred degrees. Her Converse weighed her feet down with every splash, sponging up the puddle and wetting her socks and feet, but the extra weight just made each lift off that much more magical, as if she would always be able to fly no matter what attempted to hold her to the ground.

“What a lovely thought,” she whispered to the wet ground, her voice breaking the stillness of the night. “Something right out of a Hallmark card. Or a Lifetime movie.”

Barbara—Babs, BA, Al (how many fucking names could one person actually have anyway?)—descended into another puddle, the resulting splash a nice exclamation point to her self-deprecation.

If she were still a child, jumping into puddles for the sheer hell of it would be considered cute, but at the age of twenty-three it was just childish; if the sun was still beating down in oppressive waves, maybe she could justify to herself acting a fool, but at three in the morning it was just foolish. And yet, splashing around like a childish fool or foolish child at the witching hour was precisely what she was doing. The moon hid behind too many clouds, but even without its wan light, she could reflect on the things that only walking around the suburbs when nobody else showed their faces allowed her to reflect on. There was a strange sort of peace to Lewisville that could only be found in the early hours of the morning, when the goddamn creatures of the night were supposed to be wreaking havoc and terrorizing the world.

“There are no boogeymen or monsters in the suburbs, though we’re still deathly afraid there might be.”

That’s the funny thing about fear, Barbara thought, continuing the conversation with herself in her head, that it exists even when there is literally nothing to fear. Not that Lewisville was the safest town on the planet or anything—God, that guy had chopped up his wife with a chainsaw just a few streets over from where her parents still lived not four years ago—but the fact that she could safely traverse its sidewalks this late at night spoke volumes about the kind of place it was. Her sigh, probably the thousandth one since she had set out on this journey, felt impotent, as she hugged the light pole at the intersection of Garden Ridge and Valley Parkway.

Her feet brought her here for no other reason than for her to stare down Valley, almost able to see where Lewisville ended and Flower Mound began, so she could better contemplate Rich’s comments about her hometown. Her sigh transformed into a laugh, one full of snorts and derisions. Three dates in and he decides to talk about how dangerous Lewisville is, how he hates all the “thugs and hooligans” that call it home, that he wishes that trash wasn’t so close to Flower Mound. It was far from the first time she had such bullshit out of the mouth of someone else (she had attended First Baptist Church of Lewisville for too many fucking years after all), but his remarks had set her off in a way that others’ hadn’t for some reason. So she did the sensible thing and through a drink in his face.

“How can one parasite look down on another parasite?” Barbara Allen asked of the night, still glaring in the direction of Flower Mound. “How can one town’s economy leech off of another’s while doing nothing about a very serious hard drug problem and still claim moral superiority?”

Racism. She knew it came down to the fact that more minorities lived in Lewisville than in Flower Mound and that residents of the latter needed to believe in boogeymen. So even though meth and heroin—to say nothing of oxycodone—was easier to find in Flower Mound than stuck up soccer moms (who, in all honesty, were probably using and selling), Lewisville became the den of monsters and hoodlums.

“Fuck this place,” she said not for the first time in her life, and definitely not for the first time that day. Maybe if she did manage to escape the clutches of the suburbs, she could find some modicum of perspective, could figure out how to change the minds of the uneducated, could fix some of this shit. It was a nice goal to be sure, but she had stopped believing in that particular fairy tale when she stopped going to church. If an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) cut out the cancer, what hope was there for her to do so?

Still, being able to imagine a better world gave her some hope that it was attainable, even if reality weighed that dream down more than the water weighed her shoes down.

With another heavy sigh, Barbara Allen took a first step out into the street, intending to walk along Valley Parkway until she crossed from Lewisville into Flower Mound. She never once took her eyes off the cement, off of her own soaked Converse, and so never saw the car barreling down the two lane black top. Its lights were off, this car easily pushing seventy on Garden Ridge, its engine buzzing at a frequency for below the roaring cacophony of her own thoughts.

She should have looked up.

Why didn’t she look up!?

WHY!?

The grill of the car struck her knee, shattering it. Her head smashed down onto the hood, before the force of the impact carried her up and over the car, her somersault ending with a vomit-inducing thud onto the pavement. Barbara Allen’s body twitched once, twice, and then was still, her warm blood pooling out around her mangled corpse.

There was no dignity in her death.

Is there ever really any dignity in death?

“Oh shit! Oh Shit!! OH SHIT!!!” the driver of the screamed from the safety of the front seat. He stopped about a hundred yards down Garden Ridge, exiting the vehicle briefly, looking back at the wreckage that had once been a young woman. His gasped in air, his hands clasped behind his head, as he stared, piss dribbling down his leg as the fear set in. “What did I do?”

The terror of running someone down and of being caught for said crime morphed and coagulated in his stomach as he watched another man step out from behind the same light pole Barbara Allen had just been standing behind and kneel next to her body. The driver scrambled back into the car, fleeing the scene as fast as he had caused, when that man looked up at him. He could see in his rearview mirror that man cock his head to one side, a curious dog in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this random carnage.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Did this witness catch his license plate? Was he going to call the cops?! The driver relied solely on adrenaline and a friendly gas pedal to get away, nudging his Ford Taurus further down Garden Ridge. Thank god she hadn’t broken the windshield when she hit…oh, god, how could he even think that?

The car had more get-up-and-go than most Tauruses, but that probably had to do with the fact that it wasn’t a Ford Taurus. No, as the driver cranked the wheel hard to the left at College Parkway, blowing through the second red light, the silver Pontiac Sunfire’s tires screeched hard as they tried to grip the still-wet cement. Outside, the driver watched as the streetlights all went dark. It was as if someone had flipped the switch to off all of a sudden, so he flipped his lights on.

His headlights refused to cooperate.

A crash from behind him caused him to jump, his teeth almost biting though his tongue as he checked the rearview mirror. A bumper—his bumper!—was on the pavement, the black plastic thing laying there like something dead. The driver chose to ignore the loss, making a wild right off College Parkway, heading into an alleyway he knew well. His headlights finally came on as he entered the alley, illuminating the fences on both sides of the stretch of broken road.

Off in the distance stood the man.

“What the fuck!?”

The driver through his Mustang in reverse, but the engine stalled. He forced the key, hoping beyond hope that the ignition would turn over, but his hope did nothing for him.

The man began walking towards him. There was an unlit cigarette in his right hand, an object he twirled between his fingers like a street magician. His steps were slow, methodical, measured. He was clearly not in any sort of hurry.

The driver sprang from the car, turned tail, and tried to run. There was nowhere to run to however, nothing but pitch black behind him. The road was gone, the entrance to the alleyway eaten up by this oppressive shadow, and the driver began to panic.

The man cocked his head to the side again, his long black hair hiding whatever look he wore on his face.

That darkness reached out to the driver, tendrils of the night snaking around his arms and legs, sliding down his throat and up his nostrils, muffling his screams before he could even think to let them out. Smoke enveloped his insides, a cold numb pulsing through him, probing his insides. His pale skin flashed in contrast to the black around and in him, before sliding off his bones, only to be replaced with darker skin. His melanin levels seemed about as confused as his car had been, unable to decide on a color for any longer than a few seconds. Tan, brown, neon fucking purple. Finally, the inky blackness around settled on mocha, a color reserved for people of mixed ancestry, and the cloud pulled itself away from and out of his body. The driver stared down at his hands, shock and awe giving ground to familiarity. This was the color he had always been.

“Nice car, man,” the man said to the driver, who was still examining his hands. “Got a light?”

“Look, I uh…I don’t want any uh…trouble, yeah?” the driver sputtered.

“After all the bullshit of the 80s and 90s, it’s really nice to see sports cars tapping back into that American muscle of the 60s and 70s. Makes me all nostalgic for a time in which I never actually lived.”

“Did you hear me!? I don’t want any trouble!”

The driver tried to push the man, but the man was faster. He grabbed the driver’s wrist, forcing it painfully up his back, like he was arresting him, before he slammed him down hard onto the hood of the Mustang.

“Her name was Barbara Allen! And you killed her before running away like a goddamned coward!”

“What did you expect me to do!? A black min running down a pretty little white girl in the burbs….fuck, I’ll be lucky if the arresting officer doesn’t immediately shoot me, and will likely get the fucking needle in this state!”

The man let the driver up.

“You aren’t wrong. You still killed her, though.”

“You think I don’t know that!? Fuck, all I can see is her lying there on the pavement…”

“What’s your name?”

“Huh?”

“Your name, kid, what is it?”

“Dante.”

“Well, Dante, I suggest you get in the car.”

The man slid into the passenger seat before Dante could even register that he had walked away. So he got behind the wheel, staring at this strange white boy who was now sitting in his car.

“It’s rude to stare,” the man said, before fiddling with is cigarette again. “Got a light.”

“Sorry man, I don’t smoke.”

“Not even pot?”

“Well, yeah, every now and again. But I don’t have a lighter in here.”

“No bother,” the man responded, his cigarette igniting itself. “Whatever you do, don’t pick this habit up, okay Dante?”

“Yeah okay…I know you?”

“What? Am I shivering?”

“Huh?”

“Not important. Just a movie reference. And in a sense you do, but in another one you don’t. How old are you Dante?”

“Look, man, what is with all the fucking questions?! Who ev-”

The man’s hand went from pale to blacker than black, his fingers dripping little bits of inky darkness onto the seat and cup holders as he reached out to Dante. That darkness began to wrap itself around Dante’s head, only this time he could scream.

“Don’t waste your time trying to ask questions. Just know that if you don’t answer mine, I can get the information I want in other, less savory ways. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just keep that black shit out of me.”

“So long as you talk, deal. Now, how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“And why were you driving like a mad man back there?”

“What’s it matter to you?”

The man punched Dante hard in the face.

“What the fuck did I just tell you about questions?”

“Fuck, man! I think you broke my nose!”

“I did. And it matters because Barbara Allen was going to be a senator one day, was going to change the world, and was going to make a lot of spectacular mistakes in the process. She was going to have such a story to tell. Because she didn’t look up, because you were driving so much faster than you were supposed to be, that can’t happen now.

“Clearly, there’s a reason she didn’t look, a reason you were driving that fast, a reason that she’s dead. There’s a reason that you’re still here, instead of just being an asshole driver who almost hit her. So why were you driving so goddamned fast?”

“Had a fight with my girl. She lives in Denton and I was headed home. I didn’t even see that Barbara chick until it was too late.”

“Honest mistake. Happens to the best of us.”

“I just killed someone, and that’s what you got to say about it!?”

“People die, kid. What else do you want me to say?”

“Something more than that I guess.”

“Barbara Allen may have been young and innocent tonight, but over the course of her life she was going to do some really awful things, some truly horrible things. I’m not too broken up about her death, except that she had stories in her that I wanted.

“The authorities, however, are going to care that she’s now dead. You may not be able to hear the sirens, but I sure as hell can. And you’re right: they catch you, you’re going to die. So I suggest you drive.”

The car started without Dante having to turn the ignition.

“Where am I going to go?”

“Man, I don’t fucking care. I’m just along for the ride.”

“And the stories I’m guessing.”

“You catch on pretty quick. My vote is you head north. You don’t have time to go back from your bumper, so the cops are going to have a piece of evidence tying your car to the crime. The ball is in your court, Dante, next move entirely up to you. I can’t save you from whatever fate is awaiting you anymore than I could save Barbara Allen from you. Or the world from the machinations of Barbara Allen. I guess you saved the world in that regard.”

“North it is I guess,” Dante declared, his fear and trepidation at having killed someone and trying to outrun the consequences of that action returning.

“Now tell me about this fight with your girl,” the man said.