_*_ 12 _*_
I didn’t notice too much about his car. It had a windshield, doors, steering wheel, seat belts; that was all I needed. He put the key in the ignition, the engine turned over. He shifted into gear and the wheels rolled.
The gray closed in on me as he was pulling out of the parking lot, right after I gave him the directions. I fought the gray with Dad’s tricks: Say the alphabet. Count in Spanish. Picture a mountain, the top of a mountain, the top of a mountain in the summer. Keep breathing. It took a few minutes but I won. The gray pulled away from my eyes in ribbons and whispered that it would be back soon.
“You zoned out a bit,” Finn said.
“Can you drive faster?” I asked.
“I’m doing the speed limit.”
“Nobody does the speed limit.”
“I do because I am a good driver,” he said. “I’m so good
that when I drove my mom to her podiatrist appointment last Saturday, she fell asleep.”
“Why couldn’t she drive herself? Did her foot hurt?” “That’s not the right question.”
“What?”
“You were supposed to ask ‘Why did she fall asleep?’
The answer was ‘Because I was a good driver.’ Get it? I was so good she was bored.”
“Oh,” I said. “Was that a joke?”
“I thought it was.”
“Not really.”
“Damn.” He put on his turn signal, checked all of his mirrors twice, and eased into the next lane. My right knee bounced up and down as I fought to keep myself from grabbing the wheel and slamming the accelerator to the floor.
The light ahead turned yellow. Finn braked so that the car came to a stop a full second before the yellow turned red. The streets in all directions were empty.
Home. I had to get home.
“No one is coming,” I pointed out.
“What?”
“There’s no traffic.”
“So?”
“So you can go.”
“The light’s red.”
“It’s stuck. Malfunctioning. You can go because the coast is clear.”
“We’ve only been here two seconds.”
“More like two minutes. Go.”
“I get it.” He turned to look at me. “There’s a warrant out for your arrest. You’ve got the FBI, CIA, and Interpol tracking you. What was it—jewel heist? Smuggling pandas?”
“I’m not in the mood to joke around. Even if I were, you are not a funny person.”
The light changed to green.
He accelerated slowly. “Are you sure you feel okay?”
“I’m fine.”
We drove in silence. I dug my fingernails into my palms as we were passed by three cars and a wrinkled old lady riding a pink moped. A block after he turned right (turn signal activated way too early, every mirror checked and checked twice more—for a right hand turn, for crying out loud, a right hand turn made from the far right lane) he eased to another slow stop at a yellow light and nodded to himself as it turned red, as if he were some kind of genius for having predicted that occurrence.
“See?” he asked.
“See what?”
“See what a good idea it was to slow down instead of blowing through that light, the way you wanted me to?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it loudly. The words Just go! appeared above your head in neon-blue smoke.”
“Whatever.”
“No, really. Aha! Look! Cop car just rolled out of the gas station back there and pulled up behind us.”
I looked in the side mirror. The cop’s sunglasses stared at us. His mouth was moving.
Threat
“He’s getting ready to pull you over,” I said. “Are your taillights out? Have you ever been arrested? You don’t have any weed in here, do you? I don’t want to get busted. I can’t get busted. I have to go home.”
“Don’t freak out. You’re not going to get busted.”
My mouth went dry. “Could we be arrested for leaving school?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding?”
I didn’t answer. The light changed. Finn drove with both hands on the wheel, his speedometer slowly crawling up to twenty-nine miles per hour.
“Speed limit is thirty-five here.”
Assess
I turned around and looked over my shoulder. The police car was six feet behind us. “He can pull you over for driving too slow, you know.”
“Not going to happen. We didn’t run any lights nor are we speeding. There just happens to be a police officer driving behind us. He’s probably on his way to a diner.”
I watched in the side mirror, waiting for the cop to hit his lights and siren. “Don’t say ‘nor.’ Makes you sound like a dweeb.”
“Makes me sound like a smart dweeb.”
“Really smart people don’t flaunt it. Besides, ‘nor’ is arcane.”
“‘Arcane’ is arcane.”
Finn stopped at another light. The cop pulled up so close I could see the grill that separated the front seat of his car from the back, where they stick the suspects. My heart started hammering against my ribs.
“I’ll get out here.” I tried to swallow the bitter taste flooding my mouth. “It’s close enough.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I came up to you in the parking lot.” I unfastened my seat belt.
“What are you talking about?”
“If that cop pulls you over, you don’t know me. I don’t go to your school. I bummed a ride from you in the Byrne Dairy parking lot. You were taking me to the bus station, but then I changed my mind. Understand?”
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“Thanks for the ride. I’ll write that article for you. I just . . .” I opened the door. “I have to go.”
Action
_*_ 13 _*_
My father’s legs stuck out from under the front end of his pickup. The toes of his right boot pointed to the sky. The other boot pointed so far to the left it was lying on the ground, like he was asleep, or . . .
My heart skipped a beat, two beats.
He started to whistle. Badly. “Hotel California” by the
Eagles.
I was so relieved I almost barfed.
Spock woofed and Dad rolled out to see why. He sat up
and shaded his eyes, his greasy hands marking his forehead and the gray buzz cut above it.
“That you, princess?”
I bent down to scratch Spock’s ears. “Hey, Daddy.”
The dark blue smudges under his eyes were from lack of sleep, not a fight. He’d woken up screaming three times the night before. He stood up and pulled a rag out of his back pocket to wipe his hands. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I asked first.”
“Teacher in-service,” I said. “Your turn.”
“Water pump is going.”
The pickup, a 1982 Ford F-150 XL with a five-liter, smallblock, V-8 engine, was going to outlive us both. Some days he’d clean and fiddle and fuss over it like the future of the world depended on it being able to shift smoothly and not overheat.
“You should be working on the rig instead.” I nodded in the direction of the half-collapsed barn. The cab of his eighteen-wheeler had been parked there since the day we moved in. “You’ll never get the price you’re asking if you don’t.”
“Selling it as is.” He grabbed a wrench from the tool bench and slid back under the pickup.
I found the other creeper next to the trash can and rolled under the front end next to him. The smell of gas, oil, rust, and coolant relaxed me a little. The half-ton of metal above us kept us safe from everything out there. I took a deep breath and the knot in my stomach loosened.
“Another great day at school, huh?” he asked.
“Hardly,” I said. “Did you play football with Ms. Benedetti’s brother?”
“I played basketball.” He wiped the grime off a nut with his rag. “Lou Benedetti. Haven’t thought about him for years. Big kid, so uncoordinated he could barely walk. Spent most of his time on the bench.”
“You love football. Why didn’t you go out for the team?”
“Because your grandfather wanted me to,” Dad answered. “Get me a quarter-inch ratchet, will you? Ten-mil socket.”
I rolled out, found the right wrench in the tool chest, rolled back under and handed it to him.
“Why were you talking to Ms. Benedetti?” he asked. “Math?”
“She said I should ask you about partying at the quarry.”
“Boring story. Great bonfire, couple of arrests, and one knocked-out tooth. I didn’t do it, by the way.”
“Doesn’t sound boring to me.”
“There’s a lot of stories about that place. Most of them are bullshit, but a couple kids died there. Not at our party. That’s why it was considered boring.”
“Ms. Benedetti called your work number. Whoever she talked to said you quit.”
The wind blew a few dead leaves under the truck. Dad’s mouth tightened. The shrapnel scars along his jaw glowed like a fragments of bone in a bed of cold ash. “What did you tell her?”
“Did you quit or did they fire you?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
His tone of voice meant that the discussion on that topic was officially closed, but he was wrong. The difference between walking out or being kicking out meant everything. Moving back here and getting a job was supposed to keep the crazy away.
“Why was she calling me?” he asked.
“Something about a Veterans Day assembly,” I said. “I forgot the other thing.”
Trish.
Saying her name out loud would be like giving him a cool, sweet glass of antifreeze to drink. It would go down with no trouble, but after a few hours, he’d get a headache and start breathing hard. His legs would cramp up, his eyes would stop working, and he’d slur his words. His organs would shut down, one after another, and he’d die all over again.
“That’s not much help,” Dad said.
“Something about paperwork,” I said. “She said she’d come here to talk to you about it if you don’t want to talk on the phone.”
“She always was a pain in the ass.” He let the loosened nut drop into his palm and removed the bolt. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
Crap. “Then I need a favor.”
He sighed and turned his head to look at me. “What?” “We didn’t have a teacher in-service today.”
I waited for a response. He looked back up at the engine and applied the wrench to the next nut.
“You have to call the attendance office,” I continued. “Tell them I had a doctor’s appointment.”
He whacked the nut with the handle of the wrench.
“Please, Daddy?”
A few flakes of rust landed on his face. “You promised, Hayley. We came back here so you could go to school.”
“We came back so you could get a normal job. And keep it.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“It is the same subject. You quit. Why can’t I? Let me take the GED and I’ll start online classes in January.”
“What, you’re going to be my babysitter now?”
I didn’t answer. He hit the frozen metal with the wrench over and over, rust raining on his face. The clanking sounded like a cracked bell getting ready to break into pieces.
“Well?” he demanded.
I had to change the angle of attack so he didn’t feel like I was disrespecting him.
“It’s not about babysitting you,” I said, “it’s about saving me. That place is awful. They have lockdown drills in case of a terrorist attack. Do you really want me to spend every day in a place like that? Making me go there is cruel and unusual punishment.”
The stubborn nut finally moved. He cranked it a few times with the wrench. “Spare me the Eighth Amendment.”
“I’ll make you macaroni and cheese every night for a year if you let me quit.”
He spun the nut off the bolt with his fingers. “Nonnegotiable.”
“I’ll start tonight,” I said. “Mac and cheese and mashed potatoes with bacon.”
“You’re going to school like all the other seniors.” He brushed the rust off his face. “But I’ll lie about the doctor’s appointment if you get me the vise grips and a beer.”
_*_ 2 _*_
Gracie texted me at 11:30 that night: fin wants your number who?
adrkabl fin no
ynot cuz
ynotynotynot
cuzcuzcuzcucuzcuz
I’d been cyber-stalking Trish for hours. She didn’t have any social media pages, at least not public ones. I found a couple of people from her high school class trying to track her down for a reunion, but no one knew where she was. They had all tried the phone numbers and addresses that I found in Texas, Nebraska, and Tennessee, but she wasn’t to be found.
Gracie buzzed me again:
y dos he wnt yr nmbr?
dunno ask him
Trish was mentioned in her mother’s obituary from three years ago. A couple of months after that, she was arrested for drunk driving. The paper didn’t cover her trial, if there was one. She probably slithered out of that, too. I texted Gracie:
so?
sowht
why does he want my number?
1 sec
I pulled a lighter out of the top drawer of my desk and lit a vanilla candle. The smell of mold from the wet insulation in my ceiling was getting stronger. (The roof leaked for a few weeks when we first moved in. It was going to be a while before we could afford to replace it.)
fin sez u stol hz pen
he’s a liar
he wnts it
I don’t have his pen
hes a swmr
?
finz a swimer buterfly u shuld c him nakd
the abs omg
when did you see him naked?
swm teem sutes betr thn nakd
*team
remove head from gutter, G
is he a good swimmer?
made states
he wnts yr lawrs number lawrs?
*lawyers
I peeked out of the curtains. Dad was still in the driveway.
he wnts yr crimnl hstry
tell him I killed my last lawyer cuz he annoyed me
I slipped my finger under the flap of Trish’s envelope and ripped it open. The sharp edge of the paper sliced into my fingertip. I swore and stuck my finger in my mouth.
he wnts 2 no if yr gay
yes
???? r u shur
you’re not my type G
wats yr typ?
people who can spell
fin sez he kn spl
It was cold outside, forty degrees. My father was still out there working on his truck, in the cold, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He said he didn’t feel anything.
I pulled my finger out and looked at it under the light. The cut was invisible until I pressed my thumb just below it. Blood welled up, a wet balloon that burst and dribbled over my thumbnail and dripped onto the envelope. I pulled the letter out of the envelope, keeping it folded, and smeared my cut on it.
My phone buzzed again.
do u no how mny grls wnt fin 2 cll?
cll?
*call
g’night G zzzzzzz
I turned off the phone, opened the top drawer of my bureau, and pulled out my hunting knife from under my pile of socks. (Dad bought it for me in Wyoming when he decided that I was old enough to walk alone at night from the truck to the truck stop bathroom.) I sliced the letter into paper ribbons and stuffed them in the envelope, then carried it, along with the candle, into the bathroom. After I shut and locked the bathroom door and turned off the light and opened the window, I held the envelope into the flame of the candle and watched in the mirror as the fire ate through the paper until I had to drop it in the sink so I wouldn’t get burned.
wtf??
????!!!!????
rilly????
want to go out with me? J ???
chill, im not gay