First Look: Tell Me One Thing
This excerpt is part of our First Look column, where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks of new and forthcoming books across all genres!
Kerri Schlottman is the author of Tell Me One Thing, publishing January 31st. Pre-order your copy here!
“What’s this package we’re picking up?” Quinn asks. Something in the softness of the dim car lighting makes her imagine a younger version of Billy, the one who was her first kiss, her first everything. When she offered to take a ride in this rusty borrowed car with him, she thought they’d be gone for a few hours. Now, they’ve crossed into Pennsylvania, dropping up and down the mountains, and the summer sun set some time ago. Quinn welcomes the dusk, though, how immediately it tempers the heat of the day, hushes the sunspots in the reflections of windshields and polished chrome, mutes the landscape. She scratches at a scab on her knee, and it protests by picking up a tender pink coastline of skin with it. Joan Jett’s concrete voice on the cassette player sings, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Billy puffs a cigarette, making ghostly circles of smoke that pull apart in the breeze from the open windows.
“Just some pills,” he says as he tosses the cigarette out the window where the red sparks trip across the lane.
“What kind of pills?”
“The kind that shoot you to the fucking moon.” He winks at her.
“I thought this was a little side hustle,” she says, “some weed here and there. Should I be concerned?” But she’s already concerned, has been concerned about his rebelliousness and the way it has slinked into deeper recesses that seem harder and harder to return from.
“Nothing to be concerned about.” He squeezes her knee, and she watches his expression for the slightest indication of anything outside of confidence, but it stays steady. She exhales and it might have sounded like a sigh except the air gushing from the open windows clears it straight away.
Despite the drop in temperature, the summer night air is thick in the hills and Quinn runs her palm against the push and pull of the wind. Inside, the car shudders and the music breaks apart in the boxing beat of the air. She slips off her combat boots and rests her feet on the dashboard, tries to will the tightness in her back to release. Billy glances her way, his eyes dip down her bare legs, and Quinn whips the Polaroid up from her lap to shoot a photo of him. She knows it’ll come out dark but hopes it’ll capture some of the light that plays around him.
“Hey,” he says, but he smiles anyway, a wide one that pulls his thin cheeks up to his eyes and out to his ears. A smile that makes her smile. In her tiny studio apartment in SoHo, Quinn has collected years’ worth of photos of Billy. They chronicle his transition from boy to man, the lanky white arms slowly becoming covered in tattoos, the dark hair growing from a floppy bowl cut to the shaggy twists that can sometimes look greasy but are soft to the touch.
Quinn holds the edges of the photo and watches a ghostly image of him emerge. The light she had hoped to capture illuminates his more dramatic features, frosts his cheekbones, lingers on his lips, puts a bit of glitter in the side of his eye.
“I’m kinda hungry,” she says, but she doesn’t tell him that she’s barely eaten the entire day. She knows he’ll worry. She worries.
“We’re almost there, I think. We can grab something after.” He shifts in his seat and rubs his eyes. Outside, the scenery seems to speed up, the flashy reds and yellows of car lights smudge the awkward darkness of the surrounding trees. Quinn closes her eyes. They were out late last night, well into the morning really. It wouldn’t take much for her to fall asleep. The seatback cradles the heaviness of her head. The restless engine’s shallow vibrations soothe her. She’s on the brink of dozing off when Billy slows down. She opens her eyes as the car labors up the steep incline of an off-ramp, threatens to stall. He guns it through a deserted intersection. Small blinks of light indicate some life around them, but it’s desolate. They drive a short distance toward a half-lit gas station and adjoining truck stop.
“Jesus,” Quinn whispers. She drops her feet from the dash and rolls down the window entirely, leans on the frame. “Where are we?”
“Riverdale,” Billy says. He slows the car to a crawl as they pass a motel with a partially lit vacancy sign, a small church with a boarded-up entrance, a dingy diner, a squat bar with no windows, and finally a trailer park with spotty holiday lights strung throughout in a sometimes-broken circuit. Billy turns right, out of the small downtown, and the car heaves over cratered road, jostling them both. Quinn sits up straighter, slips her feet back into her boots and fights an urge to roll up the window. It’s too warm to do so. The car air is pregnant with a new humidity.
Billy turns into a driveway with a deeply dented mailbox whose numbers are peeling and caked in dirt. A house squats at the end of the drive, illuminated by a bald yellow porch light that flashes on a sagging roof, bricks stacked in lieu of steps, bulky trash bags that litter the sides of the front door. Bugs sweep the light, bump around in its casted fuzzy glow. Billy eases the car to a stop, turns to her. “Stay here, okay?” Quinn nods, grateful that she’s not expected to come along. She watches nervously as he gets out and shouts, “Digger!” And it’s only then that Quinn sees the people sitting in various chairs in the dark front yard. She quickly pulls out her 35mm and snaps several photos through the windshield, though she knows they’ll turn out grainy.
In the headlights, she sizes up the guy named Digger the best she can, his meaty neck and the bulge of belly that pushes on his flannel shirt, the arms of which have been ripped off. Behind him, she can just make out the features of the others hanging out in the circle of light from the porch. A girl rests lazily on the lap of one of the guys as she swigs from a paper-bagged bottle. Her legs sway back and forth, not reaching the ground.
Quinn looks at Billy, hoping he’s almost finished, but it’s clear that something has gone wrong. He’s shaking his head. Her own leg twitches as she watches him shift from foot to foot, run his hand through his hair, and she looks around the floorboard for something she can defend him with if a fight is about to break out. But then he’s suddenly back at the car, and he slams the door, slumps down in the driver’s seat. He looks at her. “I’m sorry about this,” he says, “but we have to stay the night here. The guy bringing up the stuff had car troubles and can’t get here until morning. Digger said we can get a room at that motel we passed.”
“Oh fuck, for real?” Quinn rubs the goosebumps from her arms and sighs. This place feels dangerous, more dangerous than the rotting New York City alleys she treks through for shoots. The air is ominously dark, rich with the boozy hubris of the rough looking guys on the lawn, the sulky slumped shoulders of the girls among them. “That motel did not look good.”
“I know, but there’s nothing else around here for miles. I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not stoked about this either. I’ll come back first thing on my own.”
“Can’t we just go?” That hope brings her a split second of ease.
But Billy shakes his head. “I have to get this stuff, Q. There’s only a few people who supply it.” Her concern flares, but she doesn’t say anything about that because right now she’s more concerned about spending the night in Riverdale. Billy twists to watch the driveway as he reverses out, his arm wrapped around the back of her seat. The cratered road, a turn, and she watches the town repeat, now in reverse.
They check into the motel and toss their things inside, not yet ready to see the state of the room. Quinn leaves the 35 but takes the Polaroid, and as they walk to the diner, she shoots a couple of photos. They’re gloomy things when they process. The N in the diner sign flickers and threatens to give out entirely.
They take a seat at the counter next to a trucker whose eyes trail them as they sit. A web of frothy beer clings to the man’s beard. He licks at it but misses. Quinn pegs him to be in his mid-forties based on the lines around his eyes. She stares at his dulled yellow wedding band and tries to picture his wife but can’t. He notices her noticing him.
“What’s that you got there?” he asks, nodding at the Polaroid around her neck. His voice is gravely, older sounding than she anticipated.
“A Polaroid camera,” she says. “I’m a photographer.”
“For the newspapers or something?”
His attention makes Quinn uncomfortable. “No, for art. I take pictures of people.” The heat creeps into her cheeks. She glances around for the waitress, hoping for a diversion to end the growing interest he seems to have in her.
“You want to take my photo, honey?” He smiles, revealing rotted teeth in the back, a layer of brown film in the front.
Quinn hesitates, not wanting to further engage, but there’s a tug in her too because she’s always looking for a good shot. So, “Yeah,” she says, and Billy presses near her, tenting the countertop with his arm. She holds up the camera. The waitress has finally joined them, and she watches from behind the counter, a hand on her hip. “Just be natural,” Quinn tells him in the same way she’s told many of her other subjects. “Do what you were doing.”
He shrugs and starts eating again, and she takes a photo just as he’s swallowing a drink, the bottle coming away from his mouth. She sets the film on the countertop to process. The waitress takes their orders for BLTs and beers, and Quinn captures a photo of her as well.
“Can I see?” the trucker asks, pointing to the nearly finished Polaroid. Quinn hands it over. His thumb makes a grease mark on the front corner.
“Fuck, I’m fat,” the guy says, and Billy laughs. Quinn reaches out, and he hands it back.
“I like it,” she says, ignoring the thumbprint that will never come off now. “You look tired, but relieved. Like, you’re almost there, but this beer and food are everything to you right now.” She blushes again at the way he stares at her as she says this.
“Whatever you say, honey.” He flips some cash on the counter and leaves.
Billy leans his shoulder against hers. “That made me laugh though,” he says, “when the guy called himself a fat fucker.”
“He said, ‘fuck, I’m fat,’ but I like fat fucker better.” Quinn stares at the two Polaroids. While the trucker ruined the one of him with his thumbprint, the other of the waitress is quite good. The photo captures a twist in the woman’s face, a smirk as she wipes the countertop, her yellow and brown uniform blending with the Formica in the fragile outline of her torso’s reflection.
After they eat, Billy convinces Quinn to have another drink at the bar. The place is dim and worn, and when they walk in, all faces turn their way. A game of pool stops in the back. A skinny man with a handgun tucked into the back of his jeans chalks the top of his stick as he watches them. Quinn wants to leave, but Billy is already walking toward two empty bar stools.
Excerpted from Tell Me One Thing by Kerri Schlottman © 2023 by Kerri Schlottman, used with permission from Regal House Publishing.
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Kerri Schlottman is the author of TELL ME ONE THING (Regal House, Spring 2023). Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Dillydoun Review; Belle Ombre; Women Writers, Women’s Books; Muse Apprentice Guild; and The Furnace. She placed second in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, has been longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize semifinalist.