Chapter 3: Parking Lot Confrontation
The Mustang’s brakes screamed, a metallic protest that tore through the comfortable hang of their Wednesday afternoon. The front bumper stopped an inch from the toe of Garret’s worn Vans, throwing up a puff of oily dust that tickled his nose.
Time didn’t freeze. It just went very, very still.
Garret could smell it first: the burnt-oil scent of the car’s laboring engine, the sharp, menthol bite of Kool cigarettes seeping through the vents. And underneath it, something animal and electric—clean sweat mixed with a pure, potent rage.
The driver’s door flew open with a dull thud. Connor didn’t get out so much as unfold himself, a piece of heavy machinery coming to life. His black hair was mussed, as if he’d been running a paw through it for hours. He didn’t look at Martha Jenkins, who stood three feet to Garret’s left, her skateboard loose in her grip, her laugh from a second ago still hanging frozen on her parted lips. Connor’s bright blue eyes, so much like Garret’s own, were locked on his brother. They weren’t angry. That would have been easier. They were dead calm. A silent-movie expanse of ice.
“Get in the fucking car,” Connor said. His voice was low, but it cut through the lot’s ambient noise—the distant shouts from the football field, the rumble of a departing bus—like a razor. “Before I drag you.”
Martha moved then, a small shift of her weight. “Whoa, dude, chill. We were just—” she began, her voice a forced, friendly neutrality she’d probably used on other pissed-off guys.
Connor’s head snapped toward her. The movement was so fast Garret flinched. Connor’s muzzle didn’t curl into a snarl; it just tightened, his lips pulling back just enough to show a flash of white canine. “You shut your mouth,” he said, the words measured and precise. “Get in the car, Garret. Now.”
The venom wasn’t just in the words; it was in the stillness that followed them. It was in the way Connor’s paw, resting on the roof of the car, had curled until his black claws dug into the metal with a soft scritch.
Garret’s heart was a frantic bird in his ribs. His mouth was parchment. He managed a glance at Martha. Her wide, bewildered eyes held a question, but it was quickly being overwritten by fear.Good. She should be afraid. That was the whole point.
“It’s fine, Martha,” Garret heard himself say. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, too high, placating. “I’ll, uh… I’ll catch you later.”
He didn’t wait for a response. Walking around the front of the car, the heat from the engine radiating against his legs, felt like crossing a no-man’s-land. He could feel the twin pricks of their stares—Martha’s from behind, confused and receding; Connor’s from the side, a physical pressure.
He pulled the passenger door open. The interior smelled like a confession: stale smoke, old fast-food wrappers, the sharp chemical lemon of a cheap air freshener clipped to the vent. He slid in, the leather sighing under him. He pulled the door shut with a soft, solid thunk. The sound of a vault sealing.
Connor didn’t move. He stayed standing there, a tall, black-silhouetted sentinel against the orange streetlight, staring at Martha until, with a nervous hitch of her skateboard, she turned and walked—too quickly—toward the school’s side gate. Only when she’d vanished around the corner did he move.
He got in. The car settled with his weight. The door closed with a heavier, final sound.
For a long moment, there was only the shaky idle of the engine. Connor lifted a pack of Kools from the dash, tapped one out, and lit it with the car’s lighter. The click-whir and the sudden scent of burning tobacco were obscenely loud. He took a deep drag, held it, let the smoke stream out his nostrils in two thin, angry plumes. The tip glowed a furious red in the dim light.
“You have a hearing problem?” Connor asked, his gaze fixed out the windshield, watching nothing.
“No.”
“A memory problem? We had a talk. Two nights ago. At the drive-in. You remember the drive-in, Garret? The fucking art lesson I gave you?” His voice was a low, conversational rasp.
Garret’s palms were slick on his thighs. He could see the crumbling screen, the slow circles Connor’s claw had traced on the dashboard. Think I can get them both in one go? The memory was a cold stone in his gut. “I remember.”
“So what part of ‘stay the hell away from the Jenkins kids’ was unclear? Was it the words? The tone? Should I have used finger paints?”
“We were just talking,” Garret said, the defense sounding pathetic even to him.“After chem. It’s not a crime.”
Connor took another drag. The ember flared, illuminating the hard planes of his face for an instant. “Talking leads to smiling. Smiling leads to thinking you’re friends. Thinking you’re friends leads to you forgetting who their old man is. What he did. What he cost us.” He finally turned his head. In the shadowed car, his blue eyes looked almost luminous. “You get friendly with her, you let your guard down, and then maybe one day you’re in their shitty little house and their dad comes home. And he sees you. And he remembers your mom. And he decides he’s got something to say. You want that conversation, Garret? You think you’re ready for that?”
Garret looked away, out the passenger window at the cracked asphalt. A gum wrapper skittered past in a faint breeze. “She’s not her dad.”
“She’s his,” Connor shot back, his calm finally cracking with a razor-sharp edge. “She eats his food. She lives under his roof. That’s enough. It’s a line. You don’t cross it. For your own good.”
“My own good?” Garret laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. “Is that what this is? This isn’t about me, Connor. This is about you. This is about you and your… your fucking temper. Your grudges. You’re not protecting me. You’re just mad, and you don’t have Dad around to be mad at anymore, so you’re picking the next best thing.”
The silence that followed was so absolute Garret could hear the faint tick-tick-tick of the engine cooling. He instantly regretted the words, wished he could claw them back out of the air.
Connor didn’t yell. He took a last, long pull on his cigarette, then snubbed it out with careful, deliberate force in the overflowing ashtray. He turned the key, killing the engine. The abrupt silence was a weight.
When he spoke again, his voice was different. The anger was gone, replaced by something colder, flatter. It was the voice Garret remembered from late nights at their father’s house, the voice Connor used when Neil was on a rampage upstairs and Connor was making sure Garret stayed small and quiet in the basement.
“Get out,” Connor said.
Garret blinked. “What?”
“Get out of the car. We’re gonna walk. You need a lesson that’s not in a comfortable seat.”
A cold dread seeped into Garret’s bones. “Connor, come on—”
“Out.” The word left no room for argument.
Trembling, Garret pushed the door open and stepped back into the evening air. It felt colder now. Connor got out, pocketing his keys. He didn’t look at Garret. He just started walking, not toward the school, but across the vast, empty expanse of the student parking lot, toward the darker cluster of trees and the old, unused maintenance shed at the far edge.
Garret had no choice but to follow, the scuff-scuff of his sneakers a pathetic rhythm against the methodical, heavy tread of Connor’s boots. They walked in silence past the last streetlight, into the deeper shadows where the asphalt crumbled into weeds. The shed loomed, a squat rectangle of peeling green paint and dirty windows.
Connor stopped, ten feet from the shed’s rusted door. He turned. In the near-darkness, his features were blurred, but his outline was solid, imposing.
“You think I like this?” Connor’s voice came softly. “You think I want to be here, playing fucking policeman? I got my own life. And then I get a call. From a guy who still drinks with Ray Jenkins. He says he saw you and Ray’s girl, looking cozy by the lockers.” He shook his head, a slow movement of disappointment. “I left work for this. Dad was already three beers deep when I walked out. You know what that’s gonna cost me later?”
Garret said nothing. The shame was a hot, sick feeling in his throat.
“You’re right about one thing,” Connor continued, taking a step closer. “I am mad. I’m always mad." Connor doesn't verbalize about Dad and Mom, with their split, and her just letting Garret go… and Dad, with his hands and his belt and his… . His breath a short, sharp exhale. “That anger has to go somewhere. So I point it. At things that can actually hurt you. Because you don’t see it. You’re soft. You got Mom’s soft house, her soft worries. You didn’t get the hard lessons.”
He closed the remaining distance in two quick strides. Garret stiffened, but Connor didn’t raise a paw. He just stood there, so close Garret could smell the menthol on his breath, see the faint, faded scar through the fur above his right eyebrow—a gift from a flying bottle cap years ago.
“The lesson tonight,” Connor said, his voice a low, intent whisper, “is that the world isn’t divided into good people and bad people. It’s divided into family and not-family. And the not-family… they will always choose their own. Over you. Every single time. Ray Jenkins would feed you to the wolves if it kept his kid safe, or his pride intact. You think you’re an exception to that? You’re not. You’re just a Mayfield. And that name doesn’t mean a damn thing to anyone but me.”
He reached out then, but not to strike. His paw, calloused and warm, clasped the back of Garret’s neck, not hard, but firm. An anchor. A collar. It was a gesture that was both a threat and the only kind of comfort Connor knew how to give.
“So you’re gonna walk home. Five miles. In the dark. And you’re gonna think about which is worse: the walk, or the fact that I had to be the one to make you take it.” He released his grip, stepping back. “And if I see you with her again, the lesson won’t be a walk. It’ll be with her watching. Understood?”
Garret’s throat was too tight to speak. He just nodded, a jerky motion.
Connor stared at him for another long moment, then turned and walked back toward the Mustang, his boots crunching on the gravel. He didn’t look back.
Garret stood alone in the dark, the taste of exhaust and failure thick on his tongue. He heard the car door slam, the engine roar to life. The headlights swept over him, blinding him for a second before the car pulled away, tires spitting loose asphalt.
Then there was just the dark, and the long, empty road ahead, humming with the distant sound of a retreating engine.
Then there was just the dark, and the long, empty road ahead, humming with the distant sound of a retreating engine.
The sound faded, swallowed by the crickets and the whisper of the night wind through the tall grass. Garret stood rooted, the cold seeping through his jacket. His neck still burned where Connor’s grip had been. Five miles. He could feel every one of them in his already-tired legs.
He walked the first mile fuelled by a clean, bitter rage.
It warmed his blood against the cooling air. His sneakers hit the gravel shoulder with deliberate, punishing smacks. Every rustle in the dense underbrush beyond the guardrail was Connor, materializing to administer some new test, and Garret's heart would leap.
The anger bled away into a dull throb somewhere in his chest, leaving just the chill.
The chemical scent of the refinery by the highway cut through the pine, acrid and throat-tightening. Logging trucks whooshed past, buffeting him with hot diesel fumes, their wake dragging at his jacket. His shoulders ached. Connor’s words spun on a loop in his head: You’re soft. Mom’s soft house. He kicked a rock. It skittered across the asphalt and vanished into darkness.
Headlights bloomed in the distance behind him, approaching slowly.
They didn’t roar past. They just got closer, keeping pace maybe twenty yards back. His pulse began a frantic drumming against his ribs.This was it. Connor was going to idle alongside him, just to watch, to twist the knife. The car drew even, engine a low rumble.
It wasn’t the Mustang.
It was a dented, forest-green sedan, the front fender crinkled like tinfoil. The passenger window rolled down with an electric whine. The interior dome light clicked on. Martha Jenkins was behind the wheel, leaning over to squint at him. Her muzzle was pinched with concern. “Hey. Get in.”
Garret kept walking, gaze fixed on the broken white line ahead. “I’m good.”
“Oh, bullshit,” she said, her voice carrying easily over the idling engine. “You’re walking? For real? What is that, five miles to Sycamore?”
The car crept along beside him. He could feel the word-picture forming—the opening his building would become. He shook his head. “He’ll… It’s fine, Martha.”
“Are you kidding me?” A nervous laugh punctuated her words. “Garret, your brother is a scary-ass motherfucker, I’ll give you that. But holy shit, did he actually just… leave you out here? In the dark?”
A pair of high beams from a semi-truck lit them up, turning the scene into stark, violent color for a second before plunging them back into orange streetlight gloom. Martha flinched, her paw tightening on the wheel.
He finally stopped, shoving his hands into his pockets. The acceptance felt like surrendering something vital. “Yeah. He left me out here.”
She leaned further across the seat. Her scent, vanilla chapstick and clean fur, cut through the highway stink. “Look, get in. My parents are in Vegas until Sunday. It’s just me and my shithead older brother at home. He’s cool.”
He felt a flush creep up his neck beneath his fur. It wasn’t the offer that made him warm, exactly. It was the simple, uncomplicated decency of it. A silent car in the night. A secret sofa. A respite from the endless, exhausting tension of his own house, his own thoughts. He imagined just sinking into their living room couch, disappearing for a few hours.
If I see you with her again, the lesson won’t be a walk. It’ll be with her watching.
The threat landed in his gut like a physical impact, cold and immediate. The memory of Connor’s grip on his neck was suddenly more real than the nip in the air.
“Seriously,” Garret said, his voice flat. “I can’t.”
“You can’t?” Martha’s eyes widened. “Garret, what are you talking about? You’re telling me you’re gonna walk five miles. At this hour. Alone.” She made it sound insane, and hearing it out loud, it was. “He’s already left you. What’s he gonna do, drive back and beat you on the side of the highway? Get in the car.”
His brain was a roar. He could practically taste the phantom menthol smoke, feel the watchful pressure of eyes he couldn’t see. Connor knew people. Connor worked in town. A stray night-shift worker could see him getting into Martha Jenkins’s car and mention it later, casually. That’s all it would take.
If Connor’s protection and Connor’s anger were two sides of the same, warped coin, rejecting one meant forfeiting any claim to the other.
“No,” Garret said, the word final. He resumed walking. “Thanks, though.”
Martha let out a sharp, frustrated sigh that sounded close to a hiss. The sedan lunged forward a few feet, swerved, and stopped diagonally across the lane in front of him. The driver’s door opened, and she got out, standing between him and the car’s grille, arms crossed. A scared animal standing its ground.
“Why?” Her eyes were searching his face now, seeing the set of his jaw, the rigidity of his shoulders unablle to find an answer
Garret said nothing. It was admission enough.
Her voice lost its anger, turning just tired. The kind of understanding he never wanted. “Look… I don’t know what went down between you and your brother, but it's none of my business so I won't pry anymore. Sorry."
He looked past her, down the long, dark ribbon of highway. “It’s complicated, Martha. It’s a whole… map. And I just walked off of it.”
The words felt stupid leaving his mouth, parroting Connor’s warped logic.
“Screw his map.” She shook her head. Her ears twitched back. “Fine. You won’t get in. Okay.” She walked back to the driver’s door. For a second, he thought she was going to drive away, prove his whole grim philosophy right—that the world divided into family and not-family, and she’d chosen herself, leaving him to his lesson.
He found he almost wanted it to happen. It would be clean, in a sick way. A confirmation.
Instead, she reached in and turned something off. The headlights died. The engine noise cut. Suddenly there was only the wind, the crickets, and the faint, distant echo of the town. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered, the volume of the new quiet startling him.
She walked back over and leaned against her crumpled fender, facing the same direction he was walking. She pulled a pack of gum from her jacket, offered him a piece silently. “I’m not driving off and leaving you out here in the dark.” She popped a piece in her mouth. “We’re walking.”
Garret stared. “You’re insane.”
“A five-mile walk at night. I might be.” The steady clack of a knot of guardrail loosening carried on the wind. “But you have to see how messed up this is, right? Him leaving you? You just… taking it?”
He did. He saw it. It was the central, exhausting pillar of his life, but hearing it from someone else scraped the wound raw. He saw that judgment in Martha's eyes. Was that pity? For an animal that might not deserve even that?
"We can’t," Garret said, gut twisting. God, he wanted this. The company. The simple, stupid rebellion of it.
Headlights again. Bigger ones. A dirty white pickup with a light bar cresting the rise ahead, moving from the direction they were headed, blinding them. Relief was instantaneous as it barreled past, kicking up grit. But this chapter wasn't ending with that easy escape. And it was not going to divert its path because of another vehicle, either.
"No," Garret whispered, but he was already falling into step beside her, his silence a final, complex type of agreement.
They walked side by side, the beam from Martha’s keychain flashlight a small, inadequate sun cutting a wobbling path on the gravel ahead. The act felt less like walking home, and more like stepping off the edge of every map his brother had ever drawn for him. He didn't know what waited in the territory ahead, but Connor's warning—that the lesson next time would be with her watching—felt less like a threat in that moment, and more like a prophecy already starting to unfold under the indifferent gaze of the highway and the stars.
They walked in a silence broken only by their footsteps and the distant hiss of tires on wet asphalt from the town’s main drag, now visible as a smear of light a mile ahead. Garret’s legs burned, a deep, welcome ache that momentarily muffled the dread buzzing in his skull. He could feel the phantom weight of his skateboard, abandoned miles back. Martha’s sneakers scraped the gravel beside him, a steady, rebellious counter-rhythm.
"Nice night for a constitutional," she said after a while, her voice cutting through the quiet. The attempt at levity was thin, stretched tight.
"Real scenic," Garret muttered, gesturing vaguely at the dark wall of pines and the crumbling guardrail. He appreciated the effort, though. It felt like a life raft tossed into a cold sea.
They rounded the final bend where the highway dipped into the older, maple-lined streets of their neighborhood. Sycamore Street lay just ahead, its cracked sidewalks and modest, single-story houses a tableau of mundane safety. The five-mile walk was almost done. Relief, a weak and weary thing, began to uncoil in Garret’s chest.It died instantly.
Parked under the skeletal branches of the giant oak at the corner of Sycamore and Third, where the streetlight was perpetually out, was Connor’s black Mustang.
It wasn’t hidden. It was simply there, a silhouette, its engine off, its windows a dark, reflective blank.Waiting. The scent of the pavement here was different—wet leaves, someone’s distant fireplace—but underneath it, Garret could almost taste the menthol hanging in the still air.
He stopped dead, his heart seizing. The relief curdled into a sharp, metallic fear.
Martha, a step ahead, followed his gaze. "Oh, you gotta be kidding me," she breathed, her voice a low mix of disbelief and fresh anger.
Garret’s mind raced, scrabbling for a plan. This was the scenario he’d engineered this entire agonizing walk to avoid. His paw shot out, fingers closing around Martha’s forearm, pulling her back a step into the deeper shadow of a hedge. "Wait. Don’t move."
"He can’t see us here," she whispered, straining to look.
"I don’t think he saw us," Garret hissed, his eyes locked on the car. The passenger side faced them. There was no movement, no glow of a phone screen from within. It was just a dark, silent lump. "Look, my brother is there. He’s… waiting for me.See? It wasn’t so bad. He came back. It’s fine now. You should go."
Martha peeled her arm from his grip and stared at him. In the faint ambient light, her expression was pure, unfiltered incredulity. "Dude, what the actual fuck? That’s not ‘not so bad.’ That’s just creepy. He’s just sitting there in the dark? Waiting for you? Like some kind of… stakeout?"
Garret opened his mouth, a ‘thank you’ and a desperate plea for her to vanish on his tongue.
She cut him off before a sound could escape. "Aw, hell no. Nope. I’m coming with you." The decision was final, her voice gaining a reckless, furious momentum.
"What?No. Martha, you can’t—"
"My car is all the way back at the school, genius. You think I’m walking another five miles back?" She gave a tight, sharp smile that held no warmth, only a challenge. "I might as well hitch a ride from your asshole of a brother. Make him waste more gas, right? And I want to scream at him. I mean, not scream, but… you know.Something." She said it with a conviction that completely bypassed Garret’s own horror."Promise."
Before he could form another protest, her paw shot out and closed around his. Her grip was surprisingly strong, her palm warm and his slightly damp. It wasn't a romantic gesture; it was an anchor, a tether dragging him toward the confrontation he dreaded most.
"Come on," she said, and pulled.
He was too stunned, too utterly drained to resist. His legs moved mechanically, carrying him forward beside her, their clasped hands swinging between them like a flag of defiance. Or surrender. Every step toward the waiting car was a drumbeat in his ears. He could feel the sweat breaking out anew on his back, beneath his arms, cold and slick.
The passenger window of the Mustang was down an inch. A thin, grey ribbon of smoke curled out, dissipating into the night. They were ten feet away when Connor’s head, a dark shape inside the cabin, turned.
He saw them. It was a slow, deliberate pivot.
Then he did a double-take, his head snapping back for a second look. His gaze didn't linger on Garret’s terrified face. It dropped. It locked onto their joined hands. A suspended moment stretched, thin as a wire. In that dim light, Garret saw the subtle change—the minute tightening around his brother’s bright blue eyes, the way his jaw worked once, silently.
Then Connor moved.
He leaned over, a fluid, casual motion, and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. When he sat back up, his face was transformed. The cold stillness was gone, replaced by a friendly, open expression. He smiled, a wide, easy grin that showed just a hint of teeth. It was a perfect facsimile of warmth, and it chilled Garret to his marrow.
"Garret," Connor said, his voice smooth and welcoming. He leaned over and pushed the passenger door open from the inside."There you are. Was starting to get worried."
Garret’s throat closed. He forced his grip to loosen from Martha’s, his paw coming away damp. He stepped forward on trembling legs, the open door a yawning mouth.
"Hey, Connor," he said. His voice cracked, pitching up into a reedy register he hated. "Thanks for, uh, waiting for me." He glanced back at Martha, who stood her ground a few steps back, arms now crossed, her earlier bravado hardening into a defensive glare. "W-would you mind, um, driving my friend here home too?" The lie tumbled out, clumsy and obvious. "You know, her car is, uh… in repairs. So…"
Connor’s eyes stayed on Garret’s face, that friendly smile not wavering for a nanosecond. His knuckles, where they rested on the steering wheel, were pale beneath the dark fur. He had gripped it so tightly the tendons stood in sharp relief. The calm in his voice was absolute, a deep, placid lake hiding a thermonuclear shockwave. "Of course, Garret. No worries at all. Come on in!"
The sheer, violent normalcy of it was dizzying. Garret slid into the front seat, the familiar scent of smoke and leather closing around him like a familiar coffin. Martha, after a slight hesitation, pulled the rear door open and got in behind Connor.
"Thanks," she said, the word short and clipped, lacking any pretense of gratitude.
"No problem," Connor replied, his tone bright. He put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb with a gentle, almost careful pressure on the accelerator. The car was silent except for the purr of the engine and the sound of Garret’s own blood pounding in his ears.
They drove for a full, excruciating minute. The streetlights strobed overhead, casting Connor’s face into alternating light and shadow, the friendly mask unwavering.
Then he glanced up, meeting Martha’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His reflection showed that easy, charming smile. "So," he began, his voice dropping into a conversational, friendly register. "You’re Garret’s friend. Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name earlier."
It was a landmine, politely offered. Garret knew it. He watched Connor’s paws on the wheel. They had relaxed their death-grip, now resting with an appearance of casual ease. But the fur on the backs of his brother’s hands was still slightly bristled, a subtle, animal tell. Every word Connor spoke was measured, deliberate, and coated in a honey so thick it was suffocating. This was the calm that came before the detonation, the careful, precise arming of a weapon. It made Garret’s skin crawl with a primal terror, a desperate, shameful wish for the raw, noisy fury of a shouted threat instead of this quiet, smiling promise of something much, much worse.