I shifted my gaze forward as the road grew windier, trying to stare through the front windshield and keep a hold on the horizon—no easy task, considering I was sitting in the backseat of Rose’s Pathfinder, wedged between Archie DuPraw and Avery Diaz. Not only was it hot and stuffy being stuck in the middle like I was, but I’d begun to feel ill, a situation not helped by Archie, who was sleeping with his mouth open and his head on my shoulder.
That seating arrangement, by the way, was not my doing. Back at school, when we’d been figuring out who would go in what car, I foolishly told Tomás to go ahead and ride shotgun—the Pathfinder was his, too, after all. I assumed Archie and Avery would want to sit together. But after Avery crawled inside, Archie took one look at the middle seat, slapped my back so hard it hurt, and told me to get on in. All six foot two of me. Not to mention, he took up so much space himself that by the time we were all situated, I was practically sitting on top of Avery. But Archie didn’t appear to give a rat’s ass if my balls were in his girlfriend’s lap or if any other part of my anatomy might be touching her. He’d started snoring the minute we got on the road.
Avery poked me in my side. “You okay?” she whispered.
I shot a quick glance up front. Rose had her eyes on the road. Tomás was fiddling with the stereo.
“I don’t feel so good,” I whispered back.
“Here.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a Ziploc bag.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ginger candy.” She placed one in my hand. “They’re good for your stomach on long car rides.”
I took the candy and put it in my mouth. I didn’t tell her it wasn’t the car ride making me feel gross, but a combination of skipping breakfast and being forced to sit next to her boyfriend, who smelled like the Dumpster at work on the days we tossed out expired meats. “Thanks.”
“How much longer?” she asked.
I checked my phone. It was one thirty. We’d only been on the road for an hour and a half. “Maybe three more hours?”
Avery popped a ginger candy in her own mouth. We both sucked in silence. It was a soothing silence, not an anxious-making one, and I couldn’t help letting my mind wander and wonder how it was someone like her had ended up with Archie. Only when I thought about it more, I realized I knew why it was most guys didn’t go for girls like Avery. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty. Or sweet. Or friendly. Or any of those qualities guys valued because they thought they made a girl less likely to say no. Avery’s problem was that she was ordinary. Forgettably so, unless you really got to know her. That meant that even though she and Rose shared the same brown skin, smoldering eyes, and Latin roots—hell, they were lab partners in AP Bio; they probably shared a brain—what mattered more was Rose’s boldness, her family’s money, and the fact that her last name was Augustine and not Diaz. All those things added up to make Rose seem exotic and rare, and if that sounds racist or sexist or anything else terrible, that’s probably because it is.
“Do you remember my seventh birthday party?” Avery asked in a low voice. “When we rode together to the beach?”
I smiled, because I did remember. Her parents had driven a whole group of us out to the ocean to look for whales, which had been Avery’s favorite animal back then. She used to do all her book reports on them. Art projects, too. We’d sat next to each other on that car ride, small thighs pressed close together as soft guitar music spilled from the back speakers—Jobim sang to us in Portuguese. The old Buick’s windows had been rolled down the whole way, I remembered that, too, letting in the salt air to fill our heads and pepper our skin.
Once at the beach, while the other kids clambered around and stood on boulders with binoculars, hoping to spy humpbacks on their migration toward the warm waters of Mexico, I did my own thing, preferring to stay on the rocky shore, closer to the waves, walking in circles with my head down to scour the ground for pieces of cobalt sea glass and driftwood in a rare daze of contentment.
Sitting beside Avery now, I realized I recalled that day with such vividness for two reasons: One, our house was scattered with pieces of blue glass and driftwood—long-ago remnants of my father, who’d clearly been enamored by the roiling surf and the gifts of its fathoms—but Avery’s birthday was the first time I’d ever actually seen the ocean, despite living no more than fifteen miles from the coast; and two, the peace of that day had been shattered the next when my mother woke me with tears in her eyes and pain in her voice to tell me there’d been a terrible accident at the city pool.
I don’t know. Some accidents are more unfair than others. That’s what I believe, even though the word itself implies no one meant for it to happen. But on that long-ago morning, Avery’s mother, who swam laps every day as the sun rose over the eastern hills, was the first person to arrive at the pool the way she always was. And unlike my father’s wild ocean, I like to imagine the water’s surface was calm for her the moment she dove in. There was no way she could’ve known a short circuit from an ungrounded pool light had charged the deep end with hundreds of volts of electricity. No one could’ve known. And maybe that’s the point of tragedy—to remind the living that fate is always waiting, just right around the corner. But if you ask me, dying for that kind of reason seems like the most unfair thing of all.
I glanced over at Avery, still sucking on the ginger candy, and I wondered if she was thinking of the same thing I was. Of her mother’s heart stopping from shock and all the misery that followed. Or was she able to isolate that one pure, good moment—riding with me in a car on the day she turned seven, when we were both small and happy and headed toward the beach? I didn’t ask, though. Given what I knew of loss and pain, the answer seemed obvious.
My gaze drifted southward. I wasn’t looking at Avery’s cleavage, which was covered by her T-shirt, but at the gold pendant hanging around her neck. It was an animal of some sort, and it had a sparkling crystal for an eye that glinted in the sunlight. I kept staring and I guess I just assumed the animal must’ve been a whale, a memory of a time in her life when her mother was still alive to bring her to the water’s edge.
But it turned out the pendant wasn’t a whale. It took me a minute to figure that out. No, the tiny gold animal resting against Avery’s throat wasn’t a sea creature at all. It was a fox. A vixen, even.
A beast both cunning and sly.
10.
WE STOPPED IN the rural blink-and-you-miss-it town of Cecilville for gas. I guess I should say Rose and Mr. Howe stopped for gas, since they were the ones doing the actual driving. Everyone else just did whatever the hell they wanted. Tomás and Avery went to use the restroom, Shelby made a phone call, Clay stayed in the truck, reading a book, and Dunc and Archie snuck off behind the nearby saloon to get high.