Never Tell: Secret One
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Back to the beginning.
All the secrets that a heart can keep. Walking by the mural downtown, Evie noticed this detail the most. The rest of the mural was just okay. The entire wall was painted with a giant heart that had a lock and key in the middle of it. Pretty generic, Evie thought, but the spraypainted sentence at the bottom of the mural really spoke to her.
Evie had a lot of secrets. She was a transplant in this big city, like so many of the people she had come to know at her job. She came from Crested Butte in Colorado and left that small town behind about ten years ago. She figured that after ten years, she could call herself a native to Los Angeles.
Evie had once heard a woman at a bar say, “Only the fucked up transplants land here, and they give L.A. a bed rep. Fucking assholes.” She was kind of insulted by the woman’s comment, but when she thought about it, she couldn’t deny that she was damaged.
Crested Butte was a beautiful place to grow up, all mountains and sky, but she always knew she would never stay there forever. Being shuffled around from one relative’s couch to another relative’s couch due to her dad’s inability to hold down a job had done a number on her. Having a mom that ditched her and her father when she was five did another number on her. It was during this time that the secrets started to pile up.
Secret One
When Evie was seven, she and her dad were staying with his youngest sister who was married and had a son named Dillon who was close to her age. Dillon and his parents lived in a modest home at the end of a long driveway. Behind their house was a giant field that Evie and Dillon would often play in.
The wild grass was just high enough to where they could duck up and down to play hide and go seek. A lot of the time they would lay out there and watch the clouds drifting by, seeing what kinds of shapes they would make against the bright sky.
Before Evie and her dad started living with his sister, she was at a different school and was tormented almost every day. She didn’t have the right backpack, or the same shoes everyone was wearing. Her lunch was nothing more than a bologna sandwich, sometimes an apple, and a thermos of water, which gave her the easy label of the “poor kid”. She was an outcast, and her peers made sure she never forgot that.
So when they moved into her aunt’s house and Dillon accepted her without any hesitation, she thought her luck was changing for the better. Dillon became one of Evie’s closest confidants, and she was grateful for him and his companionship.
One time, Evie and Dillon were just starting to play in the field and it was her turn to be the seeker. She ran this way and that, trying to find Dillon, but he was being stealthily quiet. Suddenly, Dillon pulled Evie down to crouch next to him. He put his finger to his lips and lightly said, “Shhhhhh.” Then he extended his arm and pointed to a nearby coyote pup.
Evie had never seen one in person and her heart swelled at how tiny it was. The pup noticed the two of them but didn’t move. Dillon started to slowly crawl towards it with his hand extended out. He made a clicking noise with his tongue as he inched closer and closer. Finally, he was right in front of the pup, but it still didn’t run. Dillon was able to get a couple of pets across its back before it darted away. Evie was impressed with how Dillon could somehow captivate this wild pup without having it sprint away at first sight of them.
After moving in, Evie was excited to switch schools, and even more excited that she would have Dillon by her side. When it became known that she was Dillon’s little cousin, no one messed with her. At first, this seemed like a blessing to Evie, but she soon realized that this blessing also made her a loner. Since everyone wouldn’t cross Dillon, that meant everyone would stay away from Evie. And even though Dillon was always kind to her, and walked her home every day, she still felt the burden of being labeled and wondered why everyone was wary of Dillon.
On one particular Thursday afternoon, Dillon was silent during their walk home. He usually would rant about his teacher, or talk about this kid or that kid. So when Dillon ran ahead of her towards the house, Evie was surprised.
She figured he must’ve needed to go to the bathroom and couldn’t hold it anymore. By the time Evie made it up the rocky driveway, Dillon was nowhere to be found. The front door was ajar, so she went in and plopped her backpack down on the floor. The house was silent, more silent than she expected.
Evie looked in all the rooms and saw that no one was there, but that the back sliding glass door was open. As she walked out onto the deck, she could see Dillon standing with his back to her in the field behind the house, his wispy blonde hair blowing in the wind. He wasn’t moving, but seemed to be staring down at something on the ground.
Curious, Evie called out, “Diiilllllll! What are you doing out there?” Dillon raised his head, but didn’t turn to look at Evie, so she headed out towards where he was standing. As she got closer, she could see that his hands were covered in blood and he was holding a steak knife. She gasped and this seemed to break Dillon from his trance. Looking at the ground, Evie could see the coyote pup covered in blood; it was dead.
“What happened, Dil?”
Dillon looked Evie dead in the eye and flatly said, “I killed the little fucker. Better not tell.”
Evie and her dad didn’t stay with his sister too long after the incident, and Evie never said anything. After that day, she didn’t walk home with Dillon, she kept her distance at school, and she basically stopped talking to him. He, for his part, became distant from the entire family. Evie never figured out what happened that afternoon in Dillon’s head, and she was too frightened to try and get to the bottom of it.
Years later, Dillon murdered a random man at a gas station. Evie wasn’t surprised when her dad delivered the news.All she could think about was that coyote pup.