I knew where she was. “I’ll be right there,” I told her. “Don’t move.” I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys, locked the house on the way out, and got into the CR-V.
It had turned into a muggy night, but instead of flipping the air on I put down the windows. Fresh air blowing through the car would help wake me up. The drive down to East Broadway took only a few minutes. I trolled slowly down the street. Quite a few young people were walking along the sidewalk, a few wandering down the center of the street, a few holding bottles in their hands. Clearly, a big party had taken place somewhere, no doubt in one of the beach houses where the parents were away.
I drove slowly, not just because I was trying to spot Patty. I didn’t want to run anyone over.
I slowed to a crawl as I reached Gardner, then came to a full stop. There were twenty kids or more milling about behind one of the houses on the south side of the street, which was right on the beach. All the lights were on and loud music blared from inside. Up at the far end of the street, a police car was making its way.
I spotted Patty standing on the curb, a tall boy towering over her, bending down, talking into her ear. She had her head turned, like she didn’t want anything to do with him. I wondered why she didn’t just walk away, then noticed the boy had a grip on her arm.
“Patty!” I called.
She didn’t hear me. The boy was yelling at her.
I had the door open and one foot down on the pavement. “Hey!” I shouted. “Let go of her!”
The boy glanced over, still holding on to Patty. His head wavered a bit and he struggled to focus on me.
“Patty!” I shouted.
She ripped her arm away from the boy and started off in my direction. The boy stumbled after her, saying, loud enough for me to hear, “Come on, come with me.”
She turned back to him, made a jerking gesture with her fist, said, “Do it yourself.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
Her hair was scraggly, and as she approached my car I could see she was walking with a decided limp. She was wearing black shorts that fit her like a second skin, her legs brilliant white in contrast, except for the area around her right knee, which was dark and slightly shiny.
“Hey, Mr. B.,” she said, approaching my window. “Whoa, nice nose job.”
“Get in,” I said. The boy stood in the street, watching us through clouded eyes. “Get lost,” I said to him and got back into the car.
Patty loped around the front of the car, fumbled with the door handle on the passenger side, and got in. She smelled of alcohol.
“Home, James,” she said.
I pulled a U-turn in the street and started heading back toward the center of Milford. Even though I didn’t know where Patty lived, I wanted to get away from all these kids hanging around.
“Where do you live, Patty?”
That seemed to sober her up almost immediately. “Shit, no, we can’t go to my house. Take me to your place.”
“Patty, I have to take you home.”
“If I go home like this, my mom will kill me.”
“I thought you said your mother’d probably already be passed out.”
“If I’m lucky. But if she’s awake, she’s going to have six shit fits seeing me like this.”
She reached down and tentatively touched her knee. “God, does that hurt. I bet it hurts almost as much as your face.”
I flicked on the interior light and glanced over as I drove. Her knee was a mess. “Who did that to you?”
“Okay, so this asshole Ryan or whatever his name was, he drops his beer on the sidewalk just as I’m walking by, right, and there’s glass all over the place? And I’m trying to walk around it, and there’s this bunch of girls who aren’t even from around here, they’re like these skanks from Bridgeport or something, and they start saying something about my hair, and I turned to give them the finger and tripped, right? I hit the sidewalk and there’s this little bit of glass right under my knee but I think I picked it out but what a bunch of assholes, right, they—”
“You might need stitches,” I said. Milford Hospital was only a minute away. “I can take you to the ER, let them have a look at it.”
“Oh man, no, you can’t do that to me. Then there’s going to be this whole sideshow, right? They might even call the cops because I’m not old enough to drink. There’ll be some big lecture, or they might even fucking charge me.”
“You need a big lecture,” I said.
Patty shot me a look. “You think I’m a loser, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “But you make a lot of bad choices.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better, right? That I’m not stupid, I make stupid choices. Well, if you make stupid choices all the time, doesn’t that make you stupid?”
“Who was that guy grabbing your arm?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just some guy wanted me to blow him.”
When I reached Bridgeport Avenue, I turned in the direction of the hospital.