“Sure,” I said.
“Blitz’s dad died when he was thirteen, but he didn’t get his inheritance until he was eighteen. By then, he was already popular. Captain of the football team, homecoming king, you know the type. But when he got that money, his life changed overnight. Suddenly he had an entourage. His family was always rich, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what money would do, but he still went a little crazy. When his mom remarried, he waited until their honeymoon and threw a massive party at the house. It lasted three days and somebody called the cops. It was the first of many parties like that. They were legendary.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. Bobbie and I were six years older than Blitz’s crowd. Not an insurmountable age difference, but more likely an insurmountable difference in priorities. I couldn’t see Bobbie hanging with Blitz’s crowd, legendary parties or not.
Bobbie looked down at her green tea, picked up the mug, and then set it down again without taking a sip. “Blitz had the same problems with substance abuse that I had. The difference was, he didn’t want to get better. That’s how he coped. After one party too many, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. His parents sent him to the rehab clinic.”
“The same one where you went?”
She nodded. “I was there when he checked in.”
“You didn’t need to—”
She held up her hand. “I haven’t taken anything stronger than aspirin since I left. Once a year I go back and visit. I can’t explain why I do it except that I feel like I owe it to them and to myself to check in and prove that I’m still okay, and to acknowledge the role they played in me getting my life on track.”
“So you were there when Blitz checked in.”
“And I was there when he bought his way out too. But he still had to serve two hundred hours of community service. I was planning a city fund-raiser and he fulfilled his community service by working with me.”
“Doing what?”
“Whatever I needed him to do. Twenty hours a week for ten weeks. When you spend that kind of time together, you start to know each other. And knowing what I knew, I wanted to help him. Blitz started those two hundred hours as a spoiled rich kid who was barely legal, but by the time his sentence was up, I’d gotten to know a whole different person. He was just like every other kid who is a big shot in high school and realizes that life isn’t what he thought it would be. He acted out for attention. He kept throwing the parties because people expected him to throw the parties but he knew his popularity had nothing to do with who he was. People weren’t coming to his house because they were his friends. He resented being popular for his money, and he never got over his dad’s death.”
I thought back to the day Blitz had been at Disguise DeLimit. My first impression had been spoiled rich kid who gets whatever he wants, but he’d changed when I gave back his money. When Grady came back, he’d said that Blitz felt bad for the way he’d treated me, and I hadn’t believed it. Now I was left wondering if that was the case, if Blitz had gotten so used to people wanting nothing more from him than an envelope filled with cash that he didn’t know how to handle my rejection.
“What happened after his sentence was over?” I asked. “Did he ever come back to help you?”
“He helped the only way he knew how,” she said. “He donated money.”
Nothing I’d learned about Blitz Manners had prepared me to discover he had an altruistic side. If it hadn’t been Bobbie talking, I don’t know that I would have believed the information.
“Do you have proof of this? Donation receipts or thank-you letters?”
“No. He didn’t want any kind of credit other than knowing he was doing something good. But every couple of months he showed up with an envelope of twenty thousand dollars in cash.”
Chapter 13
INVOLUNTARILY, I GLANCED out the window at my scooter again. It stood out by being kitschy in its mod appearance, an anachronism among the rest of the everyday vehicles parked around the area. It was the first time I wished I drove a dirty old car like everybody else.
“Margo, your scooter is safe. There’s a special place in hell for the kind of person who would steal a scooter from outside a nonprofit that sells teddy bears for charity. Everybody knows that.”
“Sorry, I got distracted,” I said. “What did you do with the rest of the donations that Blitz made?”
“I put them in the bank. Why?”
“Did you tell anybody about them? After what happened?”