Petty Theft - Richard Schreck
That first summer back from college, Charlene Posey picked right up with Linda McInnes where they’d left off. They sat in Linda’s pickup in the shade of the neighborhood hardware store taking turns with a bottle of Jack. Linda kept a bottle under the bench seat, wedged in tight with an old sweatshirt to keep it from rolling around under there. The rip in the sweatshirt told Charlene it was hers. One she’d snagged on a nail years before.
Resting between drinks, Linda had the bottle balanced on her leg, her long fingers loose around it. Everything about Linda was long—high school basketball star, eyes always on the tall boys, statuesque if she’d wanted to play it that way. She and Charlene had worked at the Soft Serve during high school, then after graduation, Linda left to be the receptionist for Franklin Dental Associates. Gazing through the windshield, she broke the silence. “You haven’t talked much about college.”
Charlene searched for words. How to explain the months away? How can I even begin to describe the people who’ve entered my life? How to convey the problems I never expected? Charlene and her friends had all applied to the same state universities. On a whim and egged on by a guidance counselor, she had added an application to an elite university. The acceptance letter had shocked Charlene more than anyone.
From day one, she realized she was in over her head. The university had admitted her, but if she wanted to stay, she was going to have to earn it with every single assignment. Halfway through the first week, she was terrified she wouldn’t make it. She forced down her resentment to keep it from disabling her. Panic attacks were relentless. How to explain all that? “It’s great being on my own, for sure.”
Linda nodded. “I bet. Lots of parties?”
Charlene forced a laugh, put her foot up against the dash. “Oh yeah. For sure.”
“Met anybody?”
“Nope. Not looking. Just want to keep it light.”
Hint of a question in her voice, Linda half turned toward Charlene, “That place has a reputation for being a tough school.”
Whatever the reason, it was the right prompt. “Honestly, it is tough,” Charlene admitted.
“Especially my psych class. But I ended up enjoying it the most.”
“Tell me.”
“I really got into it. The professor even suggested I sit in on a couple days of an advanced course she teaches to see if I liked it.”
Linda glanced over. “Really? Why?”
“Well, in the psych class… I kept asking questions about, you know, what makes people do things or why they don’t. When I talked to her about my term paper, she asked me what I was thinking about for a major. She suggested I focus on psychology. What you can tell by talking to people. Just by staying alert, watching people. Noticing details and finding information most people never see.”
Linda lifted the bottle, drank, put it back down. “Sounds like a good fit for you! You’ve always seemed to know what people were going to do before they did it. Maybe you could teach those university people a thing or two.”
Charlene almost snorted. Not a chance.
“By the way ...” Linda’s tone betrayed hesitance. “… heard anything about Leo?”
“He’ll be out on bail today.” At least he’s got a lawyer. Charlene looked out through the windshield, reflected on her life choices. Home two weeks from college and already back helping Linda day-drink her problems away. But she remembered when she’d announced the university had accepted her. Her top choice. Linda had been the only one to say congratulations like she meant it. Her other friends had cooled to her. Charlene and Linda had been chums, confidants chafing at life’s constraints. Then came Linda’s real joy for her.
Leo—he didn’t usually show his emotions, and this was no different. He hadn’t reacted one way or the other to the news she was leaving. She was grateful he hadn’t resented her like everybody else.
She saw Linda and Leo as the only two who were still there for her.
“Leo,” she said, mostly to herself. “I can’t see him doing it, petty theft.”
“‘Cause it’s petty or ‘cause it’s theft?”
“He’s not that dumb is what I mean. So, both.”
Linda lifted the bottle and offered it over, held it out in her right hand, left wrist resting on top of the wheel, long fingers hanging down.
Charlene ignored the bottle. Instead, she stretched out and pushed back against the ripped-up vinyl and worn-down seat foam. “What I think? Somebody framed him.”
Linda wiggled the bottle at her. “Yeah?”
Charlene finally took it, drank, offered it back. Linda slid her hand around it and rested it on her thigh, same as before.
A car rattled onto the gravel parking lot behind them, degraded fiberglass in the hotrod glasspack muffler telling Charlene it was Leo’s Chevy. That and the fact he hit the gravel too fast and skidded. Had to be Leo. She looked over as he pulled in beside them.
He got out and stood at Charlene’s door. Handed her his bail receipt. “Thanks.” No sign of sorry to hit you up for cash two weeks after you get back.
She reached out the open window to take the slip of paper, dropped it on the seat, reached out again and put her hand on his arm. “You okay?”
“Fine.” His muscles tensed under her fingers.
“What’s your lawyer say?”
“He said I should give the rest of the stuff back.” Leo laughed but it came out harsh. “He thinks I did it.”
“Any idea who did?”
Leo’s eyes shifted off her face, maybe past her toward Linda, maybe not. “Nah.” He pulled his arm back, turned away, stood there staring at the brick wall of the hardware store as if he were thinking. Which she knew better than to suppose, him being Leo. Then he slid back into his Chevy, fired it up, backed out of the space kicking gravel.
Charlene turned toward Linda, brought her left leg up onto the bench seat. “I think he knows who did it.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. You involved in this?”
“No! You?” Linda scowled, closed her fist tight on the steering wheel. “Why’d you ask me that? World look different now you’re a college girl?”
“Some of it. Not all of it. This sounds more like you than him.”
They sat silent, Charlene thinking about loyalties, Linda thinking about who-knows-what.
Finally, Linda muttered, “Okay. Fine. I did it. Happy?”
“And you put some in Leo’s car?”
Linda dropped her eyes, turned her face away. “No, I left some in Leo’s car. Didn’t mean to.”
That was unexpected. They were well versed in each other’s mischief, having exchanged confidences of solo wrongdoings all their young lives. Now, Charlene noted Linda’s fist clenched on the wheel, her averted eyes. Charlene’s voice carried no emotion at all, which meant this mattered, “What, you and Leo?”
“Sometimes. Yeah.” Linda turned her head. As soon as she met Charlene’s eyes, she got that fool-you-with-my-innocent-ways look like she’d tried that time she’d shoplifted costume jewelry at Hurd’s Department Store. The look hadn’t been convincing then, either. “Why? Are you two still …?” Just like she didn’t know.
He had met her plane. She’d expected Linda to be there, but it had been Leo. Said Linda had to work. Got her home after 3:00 a.m. “Why’s he not ratting you out, then? He protecting you from the authorities or protecting his own ass from me finding out?”
Linda shrugged. “You really have to ask?
She didn’t. Charlene swallowed her emotion, got calm as hell. “Now that I know, you going to let him take the hit for this?”
Linda’s face hardened at the question. “It’s me or Leo. You going to keep quiet about it?”
Charlene ran her hand over the rip in the bench seat, remembered putting it there, a careless act in a world she now saw as unsympathetic to careless acts. Her mind filled with classrooms which had left no room for carelessness. Hours of the day in which she had tried to write down every word her professors said in hope of sorting the indecipherable material out later, night after night, panic, despair filling each new day. She had never avoided hard work, but this had been beyond imagining. And then she had found psych. Somehow, it had felt familiar, had given her the courage to keep trying. She had come through the year in one piece, grown in ways unexpected.
Studying Linda’s face, she acknowledged that she had changed in ways that they had not.
In the year away, she had found a different part of herself. Embracing it, she had become unfamiliar to the people she knew—and they to her.
She had moved on.
Again running her hand over the rip in the bench seat, tracing the sharp edges of upturned vinyl, she met Linda’s eyes. “Damn, Linda, this is an old truck.”
Richard Schreck (he/him) is a writer living in Maryland. Richard is the author of over 30 non-fiction works and a former publication editor for TESOL, the largest professional association of persons who teach the English language. “Petty Theft” as well as his fiction in The Mailer Review, Gypsophila, and Backchannels explore a fictional world he began while living on the Gulf coast. Richard is currently writing Brain Game, a sci-fi/techno thriller with a dash of corporate espionage set in Baltimore and New Orleans in the years following Katrina. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, where he began a lifelong interest in technology as a contribution to linguistics and education. Among other fun things, he directed the delivery of the first online university course in central Siberia. See more of his work at richardschreck.com or on Instagram @richardschreckwriting.
