“Tweaking?”
“Yeah. You know, zooming … on meth.”
“Oh.” I stopped and readjusted my backpack on my shoulder, trying to process what she’d just said. Meth. Crystal meth. I’d never seen anybody on drugs before. I’d never even seen anyone smoke pot. At least, not that I knew of. A lot could happen without me noticing. But still. I’d never really even thought about meth. The idea of someone’s mom doing it blew my mind.
“Don’t know why you’re surprised,” Bo said. “Ain’t uncommon around here.”
“It’s not?”
Bo snorted. “You really are blind,” she teased, slapping me on the arm. Then she headed off down the hallway, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll see you after school.”
“Where’d the money come from, Bo?”
My hands tighten around the steering wheel. “What money?”
“The money you bought the car with,” Agnes says. “Where’d it come from?”
I take a deep breath. In the backseat, Utah shifts and lets out a long, bored groan. We’re all stuck in this car, and there ain’t no way I can avoid this question. I’m surprised it took this long for her to ask in the first place.
“I … I stole it.”
“What?”
“Mama’s been dealing,” I say. “Has been for the last few months. I knew where she was keeping the cash, so I took some before I left.”
“Oh,” she says.
She sounds awful relieved. Like she expected me to say I’d robbed a liquor store. Guess I can’t blame her. That’s the kinda thing people in my family do. I used to think I was different, but in the last twenty-four hours I’d taken my mama’s drug money and stolen a car. A Dickinson through and through.
“But if you have money, why do we have to find your dad?” Agnes asks. “Aren’t we looking for him so we can get some money?”
I keep my eyes on the highway, letting the pavement and the road signs fill my vision. I can’t look at her. I can’t lie to her face.
“It ain’t enough,” I tell her. “We just spent most of it on the car. What I got left ain’t enough to live on long. We still gotta find my dad if we wanna stay gone till we’re eighteen. We’re gonna need money for all kinds of shit. Like … gas and rent if we wanna find a place to stay … Mama didn’t have that much saved.”
I’m sure it sounds flimsy coming out of my mouth, but it’s good enough for Agnes.
“Right,” she says. “That makes sense.”
My hands relax, and my foot eases up on the gas. I hate that I’m relieved. Part of me wishes she’d called me on my bullshit. That she’d demanded I take her back home.
I just can’t stop thinking of her parents and how much they gotta hate me now. There are about a million other things that oughta be on my mind, but that’s what I keep coming back to. I can hear the names they’re probably calling me. Can hear their voices cursing my name up to the high heavens.
Maybe if they’d never let me into their house, this wouldn’t be happening. Maybe if I’d never gone over there to work on my algebra, Agnes would still be at home, instead of in a shitty car with a bad haircut and fifty dollars of stolen drug money.
I hadn’t even cared about the algebra anyway. I’d just … wanted to hang out with her.
I wish I could regret all of it, but the truth is, if none of that had happened—if I didn’t have Agnes now—I ain’t sure I’d have had the nerve to run. Despite everything I’d always said, all the promises I’d made myself, I probably would’ve just sat there in the trailer, waiting for the cops to come. Because I couldn’t do this alone.
I couldn’t do this without her.
Even if I feel awful about dragging her into my mess.
“Okay,” she says. “So we don’t know where your dad is, right? How do we find him?”
I shake my head and clear my throat. “I know someone who can tell us where Daddy is. We’re about there now.”
I turn off at the next exit. A couple stoplights and five minutes later, we’re pulling into the parking lot of an apartment complex. It ain’t fancy, but it ain’t a hellhole, either. Half the lawn out front is brown and dead. A few of the cars are old and dinted, but others seem all right. And the parking lot ain’t too dirty. Just a few crushed beer cans on the concrete by the Dumpster.
It’s no paradise, but it seems safer than the motel we stayed at last night. That’s for sure.
“Get your stuff,” I say as I climb out of the Reliant K.
“We’re staying?”
“Hope so.” I put Utah’s leash on and grab my bag. Agnes’s cane clicks on the concrete behind me as I lead the way to one of the ground-level apartments. I knock on the door, the branches of a cheap wreath scratching my knuckles. 1B is the only door with any kind of decoration on the outside.