“Okay,” I say as I enter his room. “I’m ready and my drink is finished, so we can go now.”
Tyler’s wearing jeans and a faded gray T-shirt. He’s standing by the window, lining up three empty beer bottles on the ledge, and he glances over his shoulder at me. “It’s about damn time.” All at once he knocks them over and then makes straight for me, pulling out his car keys from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I shake my head in disapproval, and I almost reach over to grab them from him, but I stop myself. “You’ve just drunk all those beers.”
“Jesus,” he says. “Fine, I’ll get us a ride. Happy?”
“Yes,” I say as he tosses the keys onto his bed.
He pulls out his phone and calls someone so quickly that they must be on speed dial. The person on the other end of the line answers almost immediately, and I watch Tyler’s face while he talks. “Yeah, yeah, I’m just coming, Declan. Who’s driving tonight?” Pause. “Give me Kaleb. Can you ask him to get over to my place as fast as he can? Couple doors down, actually.” Pause. “Thanks, man. See you in twenty.”
“Kaleb?” I ask once he ends the call.
“Kaleb’s alright,” he says, and then laughs a little as he shifts over to his bedroom door. “He’s in college, but he still looks like a high school sophomore. He knows how to have a good time though.” Pushing open the door, he stealthily edges his way onto the landing and then down the staircase, with me creeping along behind him. We make our way into the kitchen before slipping out through the patio doors.
“Shouldn’t I have told my dad I was going out?” I ask, following Tyler around to the front of the house. “I mean, I get that you need to sneak out, but I’m not on lockdown. He’s going to kill me when he realizes I’ve left without telling him.”
“Don’t get worked up about it,” he tells me. “Just drink a lot and in a couple hours you won’t care.”
Purposely staying away from the living room window, we head down the street, almost six doors down, and then hover on the curb. Although Tyler may be dumb in too many ways to count, he’s smart enough to know how not to get caught. If I’d been doing this on my own, I would have most definitely been stupid enough to get picked up right outside the house, which is also right in front of Dad and Ella. So I have to give him props.
“Is it a big party?” I ask, looking up at him as he leans against the trunk of a tree.
“Not too big,” he says with a shrug, but then he starts chewing his lower lip as though he’s nervous, and I figure he doesn’t want to talk to me. This annoys me, because we end up standing in silence for five minutes until a Chevy truck loudly pulls up next to us.
The window rolls down, and a small guy leans forward and yells, “Get in, bro!” but all I can do is stare at him. Tyler’s right. Kaleb looks like a kid, like his features have yet to fully develop, and I can’t possibly imagine him walking around a college campus.
Tyler steps past and pulls open the passenger door while I force my body up and into the backseat of the beat-up truck. It stinks of tobacco smoke inside and there’s a stack of McDonald’s cups littering the floor.
“Who’s this?” Kaleb asks as he studies me in the rearview mirror. He’s extremely pale, with short, dirty-blond hair.
“My, um…” Tyler starts, but for some reason he struggles to get the words out. He leans forward to increase the volume of the rap music that Kaleb’s playing. “My stepsister,” he finally says.
“Didn’t know you had one.” Kaleb looks at me even harder in the mirror. It makes me feel uncomfortable, but finally he looks away and puts the truck back in drive. He doesn’t wait for Tyler to reply before he moves on to another question, thankfully changing the subject. “So how’ve you been, dude? Feels like I haven’t spoken to you in weeks!”
Because Kaleb is a stranger to me, I keep out of the conversation (I don’t think they want me in it, anyway) and allow them to talk away to each other for the ten-minute journey to the party. Tyler keeps thanking him for the ride, and Kaleb keeps saying it’s no problem, and then they keep nodding their heads to the awful music.
All the while, I stare at the lyrics on my shoes.
When we finally arrive at the party and pull up to a stop outside the small house, it’s a completely different scene from that of Austin’s party a week ago. There’s no one in sight. It doesn’t look like a party at all.
“Are you sure this is the right house?” I ask the second I slide out of the truck and Kaleb locks up.
“Yeah,” Tyler says, nodding to the door as he starts walking toward it. “Remember it’s a smaller party. Twenty people, max.”