He opened the passenger door and slid in next to her. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Angie Juarez never talked, so in a way it made sense that when she did, it all came gushing out. Had to come out sometime. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and told him her secret, about liking girls. She’d been damming it up so long, it was a wonder she hadn’t cracked at the center like the lake.
“It’s okay. You can like whoever you want. I won’t tell anyone,” he said, before she could ask. “Who am I going to tell?”
She smiled and hiccuped a couple of times. “Thanks. Thanks for listening.”
He nodded. He lifted the collar of the suit coat and sniffed. He thought he could smell peppermint. “I miss my brother,” he said. It was the first time he’d said it aloud.
“I’m so sorry, Beto,” she said. “I really am.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He was still holding the screwdriver. He set it on the dash.
“Want to come to the shop with me? Come. Meet my papa. You know, he’s planning to hire a mechanic. I think he wants full-time, but I don’t know. Maybe you could work after school?”
“I have a job,” he said.
“Weekends, then,” she said. “Come on. Put your bike in the trunk.”
He did, tying the trunk down with a bungee cord. He slid in next to her.
“Let’s ride awhile,” she said. “Do you want to drive? You fixed her.”
“No,” he said. “You. I don’t have my license yet, anyway.”
“When are you sixteen?”
“I am. I just don’t have my license.” He hung his head. “I’m not a very good driver.”
“Well, that’s okay. Maybe you just need to practice.”
“Maybe,” he said.
The car roared to life. He heard Tomás in his ear: Be yourself. Over on the passenger side, Beto did feel like himself. He felt fine. Better than fine. His new friend Angie drove, and she talked. A lot. It was as if she’d flung open a cellar door and they’d stumbled out into the open. All the shadows went away and left him with sun. He even forgot his gnawing stomach. He hung his arm out the window, dove his hand through the wind, thinking he was touching the dust particles of the universe. In that moment he felt, as Ms. Genoways always said, like a million bucks.
Beto started working at the auto shop after school and on weekends, doing oil and tire changes and shadowing Mr. Juarez. Angie would invite him for dinner. Mr. Juarez made simple meals of enchiladas or hamburguesas and sides from boxes and cans—rice and beans, macaroni and cheese, au gratin potatoes, butter noodles. Beto ate and ate and ate, and Mr. Juarez laughed. Growing boy, he said, patting him on the back, a good strong slap, but Beto saw Mr. Juarez had teared up, which he knew had to do with Tomás.
After dinner, in the last strains of the day’s light, with the bats winging and dodging overhead, Angie and Mr. Juarez would take him out in the Impala to practice driving. He hadn’t been behind the wheel since Tomás had taught him to drive a stick; then, they had lurched around the neighborhood, the truck smoking by the time Beto pulled into the driveway, Tomás doubled over laughing on the passenger side. Mr. Juarez was patient, even when Beto almost sideswiped a parked motor home and backed up onto his neighbor’s lawn. “Esta bien,” Mr. Juarez said, patting Beto’s arm. “Relax. Take your time.” But Beto couldn’t relax. His joints felt rusted, and he hunched like an old man at the wheel, clenching his jaw until it ached.
When Beto got them home safely to Angie’s house, he came in for dessert and ate a half a pan of brownies and a whole sleeve of mint cookies before walking the four blocks home. He checked the winter sky for Orion and the Big Dipper—he arced to Arcturus, sped on to Spica—and then searched for the Pleiades and Aldebaran and Sirius, the brightest and nearest in the whole galaxy. He wished he could tell someone these facts. When he got home, he pulled the meat loaf Luz had made from the fridge, unwrapped it, and ate it cold while standing on the back steps, looking up at the winking sky. Where was the Hubble now? What was it capturing and sending home? Sitting out in the winter dark, looking up, the line came to him: The ship sailed across the sky. That was the night he wrote the story, hunched over the kitchen table with a pan of meat loaf at his elbow. For a few hours, he left behind that hunger year, flying away into his imagination, into an imagined future.
Funny how quickly friendships and relationships shifted and realigned then, as if their teenage lives were playing cards shuffled and redealt every few months. Jess started hanging out with Dani Newell and Paul Overton, a holy trinity of cool smartness, about the same time Rose Prentiss rocketed into Angie and Beto’s sphere, all corkscrew hair and doll-blue eyes and attitude. When Rose wasn’t working at the Patty Melt, she was in detention. To be fair, every time she got in trouble she was defending Stevie. Rose was tiny, but she threw her body into revenge against shit talkers; recently, she’d rammed a CPR dummy into a boy’s chest in health class. With Rose in their orbit, Angie laughed her canyon laugh, her eyes a galaxy.
On weekends, the three of them started going to Rose’s parents’ motel, the Woodchute. Rose had a key to the Woodchute’s office, and once she knew Stevie had gone to her room and put up the after-hours sign, she would sneak in and get a room key. Unlike other teenagers who went to parties at Peck’s or the Drag, who locked faces near the fire, rubbed up against each other, or ducked away into the scrub, the three of them sat around and sipped on crème de menthe Rose had stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet and watched cable TV. But Angie and Rose watched each other, too. Beto understood those looks without anyone saying a word. Hungry. They were hungry, too.
Beto wrote more, filling up his loose-leaf with silly stories about talking spaceships and doppelg?nger planets and human-robot love. Once he went to see Ms. G after the last bell, to show her some of these wonders. He’d knocked and then turned the unlocked knob, stepping inside before realizing she wasn’t there. Her desk was strewn with student papers, stained coffee mugs, and pencils sharpened down to nubs. He hurried forward and set his stapled pages on top of a stack of papers, tiptoeing away as if he’d just done something wrong. He heard keys jingle outside the door, and he panicked, as if he was doing something wrong. Near the door, he ducked behind a coat rack bursting with abandoned jackets, umbrellas, and book bags.