“You’re pretty serious about this.”
“I’m pretty serious about everything. I don’t answer to Jeremiah. Try me. Call me from across the park. I won’t look up.”
“Nerves of steel.”
“Who’s making fun of whom?”
“Whom?”
“English major. I also recite poetry to impress girls.”
This guy is so cute and so close.
I have to lose him.
It would help if I could stand up. But every time I start to lean forward, I get the you’re-going-down feeling in my ears.
“Not me! Plus, sensitive, emotional types can’t even stand me.” Seriously, the lit mag guys treat girls in cheer skirts like a form of plant life. Which doesn’t make a girl exactly long for one of them to throw a sonnet at her.
“Lucky for you I’m so insensitive,” J says.
Not looking at me like I’m any form of plant.
Maybe I do need sugar.
Maybe I could let a nice guy help me out. He’s looking at me so expectantly. Plus, he’s athletic.
“Give it up, J. Go get me an ice-cream sandwich, vanilla inside, chocolate out, okay?”
“No stranger to having guys wait on us, are we?”
“Usually they bring me ice-cream sandwiches on their knees, but I’m giving you a pass. Only because you saved that kid.”
“Only if you tell me your name.”
I’m on such an impulse-driven, plan-defying roll, I don’t even hesitate. “Catherine. I answer to Cat.”
Part 3
27
Jack
I’m sweaty from running and from tension. There’s blood on both of us. And I want to make out with her.
When I was next to her on the bench, her head of curly fake-brown hair was half an inch from my chest, and I wanted to hold her—not in a choke hold. I wanted her skin to skin, her head under my chin.
I was supposed to look into the eyes of the girl who carved up Connie Marino and want to close them permanently.
Instead, all I’ve got is the outline of Don’s plan (find; kill; go to college) fighting a ruinous instinct that would undo the plan in one syllable. As I hand her the ice cream, I want to yell, Don’t! into her ear so loud, it blows out eardrums. Stifling the Don’t! is making me grind my teeth: Don’t run out of the shadows to help the injured girl. Don’t take ice cream from a Manx. And don’t, for God’s sake, tell him your name—your fake name. Don’t tell him anything. Run.
Instead I say, “Hey, Catherine.”
“Cat.” Her eyes are darting all around me, as if she’s calculating which stand of trees she’ll melt into. “Cat’s better.”
I have a knife in my pocket—not a switchblade, a legal knife, but it could carve up a small animal. One thrust of the blade could reach a human heart. Her hair covers and uncovers a vein in her neck. I know where all the fatal points of contact are just underneath her skin.
She says, “Maybe you’re the one who should sit down. You look a little white.”
She takes my arm and I’m down, in the prelude to the hookup with this girl I’m supposed to dispose of. There must be a moral code ancient as hieroglyphics that says you can’t do this, but I stepped off the edge of the moral universe when I turned over the engine in Don’s crap car and rolled out of Summerlin.
“Do you want me to get you another water bottle?” she asks. “I mean, it costs three fifty and it comes from Fiji. It probably cures cancer.” She’s pretty cute, actually, planning her escape route while looking out for me.
“Not a fan of designer water?”
But she’s already shot off to the food truck, fast, with a spectacular stride.
I down sixteen ounces. “Thanks. Jesus, it’s hot.” I’m used to a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, but what the hell, it’s conversation. “I thought El Molino was supposed to be balmy.”
“Do you believe everything people tell you? Does this feel balmy?” She extends her arms, palms up, as if waiting for wads of balminess to land in her hands. She shakes her head. “You might be too trusting.”
I’m drowning in sweat and irony.
28
Cat
Every part of me is perspiring. My hair is perspiring.
My concentration is shredded.
He says, “Do you have a phone number?”
My mouth is dry. My eyes are too dry to blink. It’s distracting to look at him.
“My phone got smashed.” Breathe. “I lost it.” Breathe. “So no.”
He tilts his head the way Gertie does when she’s trying to figure out where her doggie treat went after she already ate it. “It got smashed and then it got lost? This phone has very bad luck.”
Smartass.
“I lost it, like, ‘Oh no, my phone is smashed!’ I’ve lost the use of my phone. My phone is deceased. No phone. Is that clear enough for you?”
I don’t mention that I smashed it under my foot before tossing it down a garbage chute. And then I stomped on the next one. Or that I bought a new one later, but I’m scared to crack it out of its box. Even though the guy who sold it to me swore up and down that it’s an opposite-of-smartphone, with no GPS whatsoever.