It was hot. It was always hot. the kind of heat that made your skin slick and your hair sticky. Though Ben didn't mind the Alabama heat. He was used to it by now, working on daddy’s farm in his free time, sitting by the quarry to skip church on Sundays. The heat was a constant. just like how there was nothing to do in this shitty town. 

*he’d get in trouble at school a lot, but he knew the limit- how much he can get away with without getting expelled. His father would hit him for it, getting suspended for punching a kid, mouthing off. Silas Poindexter tried every kind of punishment on Dex. He never realized they didn't fix something that was a mental problem.

It was a particularly hot day in June, mid-summer. Mr Smith across the street died in October of a heart attack, and the for-sale sign out in his yard had disappeared a week ago. The moving truck came a week later. Silas told Ben to go do yard work; so he did, spraying his late mother's favorite rose bush with a hose. 

The family across the street was a man, his wife, and their daughter, you. Ben almost pitied them, if his broken mind understood empathy. Who would ever willingly move in here? The girl was about his age, really pretty, and tall. Not a city girl. No. she looked like she was forced to move from sunny Florida to just outside Daphne in the quiet town of Bluebell on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Ben watched them from across the street for a while. Your gaze met his. And you waved. But he turned and went back inside. Not the most socialable of boys. His unmedicated and untreated BPD, psychopathy, and OCD being a major cause for that.

It was a week after that he finally spoke to you, Scout was your name, which he learned from the town pastor, of course, at the behest of his malicious step-mother. Meanwhile, you had been working in your new front yard, planting flowers and digging up weeds in denim shorts and a tank top. Your dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback by the name of Kida, was lounging on the porch, enjoying the sunshine but hating the humid Alabama heat. He walked up, boots kicking up the gravel. 

“Poor thing ain’t used to heat, huh?” Even with initiating conversation, he was standoffish.