Chapter Text
One of the many things Harley Keener has learned in the twelve years it’s been since he watched the old dirt driveway’s dust clouds fade away into the night, is that some things are just made for leavin’. Some trucks are made to drive away and never stop. Some screen doors are made to fall off of their hinges, no matter how many times the damn things are replaced. Some mothers are just made to wait up every night for a knock that’ll never come.
The feet of a Keener are something so genetic. It’s a thought that he toys with often, when faced with that invisible line between fighting and flying. Same as everything else, made just for walking right out and never turning back—it’s only fitting that Harley would carry on the wretched tradition of packed bags and tired eyes and a fire burning deep in his lungs. He’d give this old bastard town a run for its money, stir up new gossip across the whole span; “ Didn’t you hear? That Keener kid finally did it—ran away just like his daddy. He always has been no good.” He’d drive the nail into the coffin, further tarnish every memory of his face and name, as if the middle school bruised knuckles and high school blank stares hadn’t done it enough. He’d let the curses coursing through his bloodstream finally get a hold of him.
But Harley is seventeen, and he’s living in denial. He tries his best to stay grounded. He goes to work and goes to school. He watches the kids run wild through the town and watches Abby grow up with them. He watches the lights flicker in the kitchen, watches his mother drop her bags at the door, and sink into the creaking sofa for another miserable night of avoiding the cold, empty bed like a plague. And he convinces himself that this is what home is supposed to feel like. Home is a void. A pit. It’s a swirling black hole that grabs you by the ankle and drags you down into its depths. It’s dark circles and labored breathing and the muffled sounds of yelling underwater.
There’s familiarity in the routine—in the pushing down the yearning for a life that was never his and replacing it with a forged sense of apathy.
He’s got his sister, got his tools, got his mama on the rare occasions that she finds it in herself to look away from the fuzzy TV screen in the brief moments he gets to see her every day. He can tell himself over and over that this is all he needs. This is all he wants.
But he’s so close to graduating. He knows this. Knows that everyone else does just as much. He sees the looks Abby gives him when she talks about school, and the hollowness in each breath his mother takes in. Abby’s got his eighteenth birthday marked on the calendar in swirly purple cursive and his graduation ceremony date just two weeks after in a deep cherry red. Sometimes he thinks about scratching it off with one of his own pens, but he knows acknowledging it will only make it worse.
It’s only a matter of time, and even though this entire life he’s built for himself is a void and a pit and an insufferable black hole, this is the part he hates the most. Not the dust that coats their long-unused kitchen table or the bills all piled up on his desk or the hollow looks in every set of eyes that’ll dare make contact with his own. It’s the notion that one day he’s gonna leave it all behind, and that one day it’s not going to feel like home anymore.
—
The shop he’s spent the last two years in is quiet, aside from the usual clatter of tools and the soft hum of country music that plays on the staticky old stereo and the rustle of Abby digging through his backpack. It reeks of motor oil and rust, but it's a comforting habitat on a sleepy Thursday afternoon. There’s a 2002 Toyota Tundra parked in front of him, long overdue for an oil change, to the point where Harley isn’t sure how the damn thing even runs, but it’s good work to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied.
It’s as nice as he’s gonna get in this dingy old town.
“You’ve gotta organize this better, Harls. I’ve got no idea what’s what in here.”
His sister likes to come in every now and again, when business is slow but Harley’s still got so much work to do that he’s drowning in it, mainly school-related that Abby has taken upon herself to make sure it all gets done, despite Harley never once asking for her help. She sits on top of his comically large toolbox—a very old gift from a very old and very no-longer-present acquaintance—with a pile of folders and a calculator in hand, reads out the questions while he tinkers away, and marks down whatever answers he shoots back at her.
“Trig packet,” he says simply, “blue folder, first thing. And, please, use a different pen—or a fuckin’ pencil, at least. They’re gonna know that’s not mine.”
Abby glances down at the pink gel tip in her hand and frowns. “You’re the worst,” she says, but there’s no malice behind her words.
They fall into their usual rhythm, and it’s a familiar sort of thing. It only takes an hour or so to finish the small pile he’s accumulated, about as long as it takes for him to finish up the truck.
She’s putting away the folder when she springs the question on him for the first time, filling the silence that had just started to settle between the two of them: “What are you gonna do after?”
They hold for a beat.
“Work?” Harley asks, sliding a wrench to her, across the oil-slick floor. He closes the hood of the truck, fishes the key from the pocket of his navy blue coveralls, and adds, “I told you an hour ago that we’re—”
“No, Idiot,” she says, grabbing the wrench. She wipes it on her jeans, and Harley watches as the oil smears across the denim. It almost makes him laugh, small and shallow, because now they really do look related. Almost , though, because he's too busy biting down on his own tongue to get a breath out. “ School .”
Harley blinks. “Tomorrow?” he says, stupidly, because he’s really holding onto the hope that she’s not asking what he knows she really is. "Workin’, I guess."
“You are so dense sometimes. No, like, are you going to college or what?” He’s silent for a beat, letting the words pass through him, getting swept away into the wind. Maybe she’ll drop it. Maybe she’ll turn on her heels and skip away while Harley clocks out. But Abigail is a Keener. She’s twelve years old, five feet tall, but she knows how to stand her ground. “What are you gonna do after it’s all over?”
He sits on it for a minute, wiping his face and hands with a once-blue shop rag before tossing it into a pile of equally soiled cloths. Abby pauses her packing up, opting to burn a hole into the fabric of Harley’s far-too-big work clothes with her simmering stare, big brown eyes trained on his frame. “Wake up at eleven for once,” he settles on, his tone cautious but joking. “Hell, maybe even eleven-thirty, if I’m feeling dangerous.”
“In a dorm room?”
“I’m sorry?”
“In a dorm room,” she insists, more statement than question this time around.
He unbuttons the coveralls, careful not to get too much grime on the clothes he’s wearing underneath as he slides them off. His red flannel is waiting, slung over the white plastic fold-up table; he tugs it on over his shirt. “No, Abbs. In my bedroom—here. With you snorrin’ next door and Mama’s Hallmark movies goin’ in the living room.”
“So you're not gonna go?”
“No,” he decides, but even Harley himself can’t tell how much meaning there is behind his promise never to walk away. “I’m not runnin’ out on you, kid, don’t worry about it.”
But something passes through Abby, something he can’t quite explain; she doesn't say anything, lips pressed tight into a straight line as she resumes her clean-up. And for someone who complains about Harley's organizational skills, her movements are hurried and careless. She stuffs everything into the same folder and shoves it further into the mess.
“Okay,” she finally breathes out.
Foreigners from up North aren’t uncommon—always passing through, to any town with more to offer—and more often than not, Harley hears all of the ravings across the small little diner about the South’s known hospitality and all that. Bullshit, if you were to ask him, because friendly faces aren’t something he himself has ever taken too kindly to. Not that he sees them thrown in his direction all too often.
Rose Hill is a bastard town; church ladies live to gossip and school kids live to tease. Small, too, all the news traveling faster than light across its span. Being a kid with no dad and a mom left pregnant without a dime to her name sticks like the duct tape that holds together their battered door frame, and it only grows with age, a mold taking over the body.
Harley was twelve years old when he decided that it was better to have everyone scared of him than the other way around, so instead of biting his tongue, he started throwing his fists. A temper just like his daddy , they’d always say, whispering amongst their booths about the kid sat alone in the corner, suspended again and again and again. Even when he grew out of it, when everyone started leaving him be for their own sakes, the whispers stuck like glue.
No one smiles at Harley as he clocks out. No one waves as he throws his toolbox in the trunk of his too-nice-for-a-guy-like-him car. And he doesn’t make any effort to, either.
But Abby grins and waves enough for the both of them. And she gets it all back, every ounce she gives.
He can’t hold it against her—she’s just a kid, after all—but he can’t understand it, either. How they don’t give her as much hell as he always caught. Maybe she was just young enough when the news was still fresh. Maybe he took enough of the blow that there was none left to hit her. Maybe she’s just that likable, and Harley’s just that sour.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all.
It probably doesn’t matter at all.
Abby likes to ride with the music up, the windows down, and her feet up on the dash. It used to drive him crazy, but sometimes, when she’s paying him no mind, he almost laughs.
Today, Harley watches her horribly belt out some Taylor Swift song from an old, scratched-up CD, with his sunglasses from the glove box sitting way too big on her face. He watches cars pass by beside them, laughing through their windows at the show she’s giving the whole street, and between watching the road and turning his head to tell her how stupid she looks, he almost breaks his neck. But it’s a good day—a rare occasion with no screaming and fighting and storming out the front door.
Once or twice a week, since Harley learned to drive, he and Abby ride down to the retro diner on the corner of Main Street and Bakers Avenue—old and rickety, with more ammonia than aesthetic appeal—to steal whatever moments they can. They park behind the building, in the section marked Employees Only ; Abby waves hello to a woman behind the counter and asks for Macy Keener.
If their little hometown is anything, it's a town stuck in traditions—even for Harley, as unenthusiastic as he is about spending his time and money on cracked leather stools, sitting uncomfortably underneath peeling yellow wallpaper and the flickering orange glow of fluorescent diner lights. Some things are hard to break, especially under prying eyes with all of their thoughts and expectations and Abby's incomprehensible excitement about the same greasy, mundane food and flat fountain soda and awkward words traded with their mother in her scarce spare moments.
From diner food to workin' to death to church-going on Sunday, Rose Hill has a funny way of forcing a routine. Like miners falling in line.
But it's nothing Harley would ever bother changing—that's what he tells himself, at least. If the tide wants to carry him off, then the tide can carry him off. There's nothing he can do about it, really, even if he wanted to.
But he doesn't.
He doesn't have the effort to care.
“What can I get you two strangers?”
Harley looks up from whatever nonsense Abby had been saying—that he had been preemptively ignoring in favor of brooding in silence—and meets her hazy brown eyes. She doesn't hold his gaze, though; she hasn't in a very long time, and Harley's been sure since he was six that she never will again.
But Abby's beaming, just as she always is, their awkward moment from the auto shop already melting off of her consciousness. “I don't know, stranger. How 'bout you decide?”
Macy smiles, but it doesn't quite meet her eyes. “So the usual, then?” And Abby nods. “You too, Har?”
He doesn't say anything—he never does—but she reads his nod nonetheless.
The usual.
It's always the usual.