HUNTER by Cordelia Blanc Page B

It was too bad Greg wasn’t able to enjoy this. Hell, he could have been the one to do all these stupid press conferences. He would have loved them. The reporters would have loved him and believed every word he said.
     
    It wasn’t like that for me. Everything I said raised eyebrows. Everybody looked at me as if I’d let them down, as if I was just another half-brained soldier, trying to make the world feel bad about me. I made the mistake of perusing the internet, where there were thousands of comments calling me a liar, a fraud, and a criminal. They said I should be ashamed of myself. One article I read went so far as to suggest that I was responsible for the death of Sammy Boy, “Just listen to the way he talks in his interviews. He probably got those boys killed. They should lock the bastard up,” the reporter said. If I could’ve had five minutes with that reporter, I would have been locked up.
     
    When I showed up at the address, I thought I’d been duped. The Kyla Rose I knew growing up lived with her wealthy family in the ritzy end of town. I remember her house had vaulted ceilings and a white picket fence and all that shit. She could never hang out because she always had piano lessons to go to, or cocktail parties her parents were dragging her to. The address I’d been given made my little shit-shack look like the goddamned Taj Mahal.
     
    The closer I got to the house, the worse the smell became. At first, I thought I’d stepped in dog shit, but the bottoms of my boots were clean, and it didn’t smell like the product of a dog. It smelled human . The smell was coming from somewhere else. Why was Kyla living in this smelly dump?
     
    I nearly fell through the rotten deck stepping up to the door. I rang the doorbell three times before I realized the thing didn’t even work, but I was afraid to knock and have the whole house collapse. I knocked lightly.
     
    “Just a second!” a voice called out. It was a female voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Kyla’s voice. But I still didn’t believe it was her. The Kyla I knew wouldn’t dare live in a trailer park. Standing there, I could distinctly remember her refusing to go to a party in that very trailer park, back when we were teenagers.
     
    I scrunched the address up and tossed it next to the home, in the mud where grass was supposed to be. Then, the door opened and holy shit, it was Kyla Rose.
     
    Her eyes widened at the sight of me and her lips parted. It looked like she had something to say, but couldn’t. She probably had a lot to say, based on the range of expressions she made. Within seconds, I thought she was going to cry, I thought she was about to slap me, I thought she was going to slam the door in my face, and at one point I even thought she was going to jump into my arms.
     
    “Hey,” I said, killing the silence.
     
    “What are you doing here?” I don’t think she’d blinked yet. She kept looking around, down the streets like some paranoid skid. There was no one there but us.
     
    Her voice brought me back. It was the first familiar voice I’d heard since returning, save for Greg’s—and even his voice didn’t sound familiar since we’d been back. Kyla’s voice sounded exactly the same as five years ago—exactly the same as fifteen years ago, when I was a little, horny thirteen year old kid, trying to convince Kyla to be my first.
     
    “I was in the area. Thought I’d stop by and say hi,” I said.
     
    Her eyes were still darting up and down the street, hardly stopping on me for more than a few seconds at a time. “Now’s not a good time,” she said. She started to close the door on me, but I stopped it with my foot.
     
    We’d known each other for fifteen years but she was treating me like I was some door-to-door appliance salesman. Not even a little ‘Hey Hunter, long time no see.’
     
    “Is everything alright?” I asked, peering into the house through the narrow gap between the door and its