Go Melanie, I thought, turning the last page over on the stack on my lap. But I had to admit, it was not typical of my mother’s heroines to turn from a man of passion to a faulty man who provided a steady hand, if not a passionate one. Was my mother preaching settling? It was a discomforting thought. She’d been so quick to tell me I was wrong about love. But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.
Chapter Fourteen
“Pull over at this store up here,” Paul called out to Trey, who was driving. “Okay?”
Trey nodded and put on the turn signal. In the front seat, Lissa turned around to look at me, raising her eyebrows as she nodded toward the backseat console, where there was not only the standard ashtray and cup holder but also a separate CD player and a video screen. “This car is amazing,” she whispered. I had to agree with her. Trey drove one of those huge SUVs, fully loaded. It reminded me of a spaceship, full of glowing buttons and levers, and I half expected that somewhere to the left of the steering wheel would be a small switch marked WARP SPEED.
We pulled up in front of the Quik Zip and Trey cut the engine. “Who wants what?” he asked. “It’s a long ride ahead.”
“We definitely need provisions,” Paul told him, opening his door. A small, polite chiming noise sounded, bing bing bing. “Beer and . . . ?”
“Skittles,” Lissa finished for him, and he laughed.
“One pack of Skittles,” he said. “Okay. Remy?”
“Diet Coke,” I told him. “Please.”
He hopped out of the car, shutting his door behind him. Trey jumped out as well, leaving the keys in and the radio on low. We were on our way to the drive-in one town over that played triple features on summer nights. It wasn’t a double date, since Trey had a girlfriend at school, and we’d originally invited Chloe and Jess as well. But Jess had to baby-sit, and Chloe, having already dumped her nerd boyfriend, was now pursuing some guy she’d met at the mall.
“If I had a car like this,” Lissa said now, turning around completely in her seat, “I would live in it. I could live in it. And still have room to rent.”
“It is huge,” I agreed, glancing behind me, where there were two more rows of seats before you even got close to the back door. “It’s kind of sick, actually. Who needs this much room?”
“Maybe he buys a lot of groceries,” Lissa suggested.
“He’s a college student,” I told her.
“Well,” she said, shrugging, “all I know is I wish he didn’t have a girlfriend. I’ve decided I like cute rich boys.”
“What’s not to like,” I said absently as I watched Paul and Trey eye the guy behind the counter—it was well-known underground information which Zip clerks checked IDs closely and which didn’t—and make their way to the rear of the store, picking up not one but two packs of Skittles for Lissa on the way. These boys did nothing in a small way, or so I was learning. Everything Paul had bought me in the two weeks we’d been dating had been Supersized or Doubled, and he always reached for his wallet immediately, not even entertaining my efforts to go Dutch every once in a while. He was still Perfect Paul, the Ideal Boyfriend Exhibit A. And yet something in me continued to nag, as if I just wasn’t enjoying this—the fruit of so many years of hard dating work—enough.
I heard a rattling noise and glanced over to my left, startled to see the Truth Squad van pull up right beside us. I started to lean back, out of sight, before remembering that the windows were tinted so black you couldn’t see in. Ted was behind the wheel, a cigarette poking out of his mouth, and John Miller was in the passenger seat. As we watched, he leaned down and pulled on his door handle, and it swung open, but for some reason he forgot to let go and was taken with it, quickly dropping out of sight, the door left ajar.
Ted glanced over at the empty seat, sighed in an irritated way, and got out of the van, slamming his door behind him. “Idiot,” he said loud enough for us to hear as he rounded the front bumper, where we could still see him through the windshield. He was looking down at the pavement. “Are you hurt?”