What about your promise to Officer Friendly?
Well, I wasn’t really going to run away. It was more like a test run—kind of a hitchhiking feasibility study. Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted something really interesting.
It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. She’d gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunter’s blind, and she was hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out across the road.
At cars?
That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he started to nod off, the girl would cut loose with another orange.
She didn’t try to hit him directly; that would have given the game away. Instead she aimed for the gas-station roof, which was made out of tin. Each orange would make this big thunderboom when it hit, and the guy would jolt awake and come running out from under the roof overhang just in time to get beaned by the orange rolling down. Then he’d stand there rubbing his head and shouting up at the roof, daring the orange-thrower to come face him like a man.
I watched this happen like five times, and each time, I fell a little more in love with the girl. I kept moving closer to her hiding place, too, until I was right on top of her. “Jeez,” she finally said, “crouch down or something if you’re gonna be there. He’s not that dumb.”
I joined her in the hunter’s blind. She gave this big sigh, like she didn’t really want company, but then she offered me her cigarette pack. I went to take one and realized they were candy cigarettes—so, maybe not a member of my tribe after all. But I took one anyway, just to be friendly.
“So is that guy your brother?” I asked.
“My stupid brother,” she said. “Felipe.”
Her brother was Phil, too?
Yeah. Weird coincidence. And not the only one: her name was Carlotta. Carlotta Juanita Diaz. “I’m Jane Charlotte,” I told her, and she nodded like she already knew that, and said, “You’re staying with the Fosters.”
“For now,” I said. “What about you?”
“I’ve always lived here. My parents came up from Tijuana when Felipe was a baby.”
“Your family owns the gas station?”
“And this place.” She jerked her thumb at the diner. “And my dad’s a deacon in the church.”
“Wow,” I said. “Important people.”
“Yeah, we’re the kings and queens of nowhere, all right.”
Across the way, Felipe had settled back into the lawn chair he was using for a cot. Carlotta handed me the slingshot. “Remember,” she said, “aim high.” I did, and I did manage to hit the roof, although instead of rolling back the orange popped up over the peak and fell down the other side. No matter: Felipe jumped up just the same, and this time, instead of going back to his siesta, he ran inside the gas-station office. When he reappeared a moment later, he was dragging an extension ladder.
“So Carlotta,” I asked, “how long have you been out here doing this?”
“You mean like today, or just in general?”
“This is a regular thing for you?”
She shrugged. “There’s no movie theater in town, so I gotta make my own fun…Here we go.”
Felipe had gotten the ladder set up and started climbing. Carlotta waited until he was on the roof, then used one last orange to knock the ladder away. Game over.