He laughed.
“So where do we…” I looked around the car, then at him. “You don’t want to, do you.”
He turned his dark eyes on me. It wasn’t the look of love. It wasn’t the hard, angry look, either. Damn it, I couldn’t read the look.
I knew not to get too close, because it was easier to see what was going on from the outside. I knew this, and I’d gotten too close anyway. I shouldn’t have told him what happened four years ago. He thought I was diseased. He knew I was evil. Now I was about to get hurt.
I breathed, “You were alone, on night shift, with a girl, and you were bored.”
“Why would I have taken you seriously?” he protested. “You told me you don’t plan. I thought you were bored. You’d get in trouble if you didn’t show up for work at the diner now, anyway.”
He had a point. The diner hadn’t occurred to me. That was one problem with not planning. You got in trouble a lot.
“Right.” I leaned down and grabbed my notebook from the floor. “Pop the trunk, would you?”
I didn’t even slam my door. I managed to close it properly. When he didn’t open the trunk right away, I knocked on it politely. It opened. I retrieved my motorcycle helmet, closed the trunk gently, and walked over to slip the notebook into the bag on my motorcycle.
John opened his window and called to me. “You know you’re not off the hook until you send the DA your project proposal and tell her what you’ve learned.”
“I e-mailed it to her yesterday from work.” I got on my bike.
He leaned a little farther out the window. “You’re still not going to give me a hint what it’s about?”
“Yeah, John. Here’s what I learned by wasting my spring break with the police. I learned that you’re a fucking asshole.” I started the engine so I wouldn’t hear anything else he said, then put on my helmet. Briefly I considered taking off my helmet, hooking it to my bike, and roaring away. But that would just make him come after me. I didn’t want him to come after me. Repeat: I did not want him to come after me. And anyway, I couldn’t afford another traffic ticket.
I fastened my helmet and then roared away, without looking back.
As if I had the last laugh. The last laugh was definitely his. He had done what he set out to do. He had taught the dead girl a lesson.
IT FELT LIKE THE LONGEST SHIFT of my greasy spoon career.
Some days I almost enjoyed parts of working at Eggstra! Eggstra! Cooking. Making up new recipes. Observing the more colorful customers, like the hunters and fishermen out-boasting one another, or the cheating-heart couples using the diner as the starting point for their rendezvous. If given a choice, they always picked the Princess Diana table, like she gave cheating a good name.
Today I didn’t enjoy it. I botched orders and burned my finger on the grill. I couldn’t concentrate on work with the last five days playing over and over in my mind. Screaming at John outside his car at the bridge. Touching him in his apartment. Kissing him in his car. Watching him walk calmly to his imminent death in the convenience store, while I stayed behind like his worried missus, whipping up a fruit cobbler for him in my mind.
I felt more of a connection with him than I’d ever felt with anyone in my life. Was it possible I had imagined this vibe? Maybe so, I decided as I wiped our table carefully and turned the busts of Elvis toward the wall.
The other days this week, I’d taken a break mid-morning. I’d left Corey in charge of the front and checked my e-mail in the office. Today we were so busy, I didn’t get a break until almost two in the afternoon, quitting time. Good news, though. The DA had accepted my bullshit proposal to discourage other errant teens from following in my footsteps. In fact, the city was instituting my proposal today. Suddenly I was a model citizen. Go figure.
John would love my project. Or hate it. And me. Not that I cared anymore.
I switched off the computer and sauntered back into the diner to wait out the few minutes left in my shift by scrubbing chair legs or something else the paid employees didn’t bother to do, and—oh, yeah—obsessing about John some more. Would you believe it, a customer had the audacity to walk in just then. I couldn’t see his face in the blinding beam of sunlight behind him. But I could tell from the way he walked he was a teenager.
On my way toward him, I grabbed a menu from the stack. I wished I could tell this kid to go to McDonald’s, because teenagers didn’t tip. But he might cause a hullabaloo that would get back to my parents. I knew this from experience.
When I walked in front of him, where his head and shoulders blocked the sun, I stopped dead. It was John. The sun behind his back made the edges of his blond hair glow like a halo.
I had never seen him look so good. I mean, Officer After was manly. Johnafter the runner was hot. But this boy wore loose jeans and a faded T-shirt that clung to his chest. An Incubus T-shirt, the one with a heart inside a grenade. His hair was short, but not abnormally so. It stuck out in strange places like he’d run his hands through it on the drive over here. Despite the halo, he was a mess.
Exactly as a boy should be.
I looked around for Corey. He could wait on John instead of me. But he must have taken a bathroom break. Then I glanced out the front windows into the parking lot, on the chance Bonita had pulled up. Usually she was fifteen minutes early for her shift, which was miraculous considering what my parents paid people. No such luck today.
John walked right past me. He slid into our booth, the Elvis table.
I walked toward him and stopped in front of the table, holding the menu awkwardly. At a complete loss for words. For once.
“I don’t need a menu,” he said.
I was not supposed to be flabbergasted at seeing him. And definitely not ecstatic. I was supposed to be angry with him for blowing me off this morning. I called up some fake anger. “What do you want?”
“The Meg Special.” He pinned me to the spot with his dark, sleepy eyes and looked me up and down.
That did make me angry. “We’re all out.”
“Then why are you still advertising?”
Two could play that game. I slid the menu in front of him and put both hands on the table. Leaning forward so he could see down my shirt, I said low, “I did the crime. I did the time. You got nothing on me, copper.”
I started to stand up straight, but he covered my hand with his hand and gestured with his eyes to the booth seat beside him. “Sit down.”
What he’d told me at Martini’s flashed through my mind: You want to be higher than the suspects, talking down to them. Right now, I was talking down to him. If I sat, he’d be talking down to me.
He raised his eyebrows and smiled. Both dimples showed.
I sat down.
He squeezed my hand and leaned closer. I felt the warmth of his body and caught the scent of his cologne. “I want to show you something,” he said.
“Thanks, but you’ve shown me plenty.” I tried to back out of the booth.
He held me in place with his hand on mine. “No, nothing like that. Something different. Something good.”
So John finally wanted to show me something good, huh? I let my eyes travel from his strong neck down to the T-shirt covering his broad chest. I could think of several sights that would qualify. “Like what?”
“The beach.”
Fighting the sudden urge to cry, I pulled my hand out from under his and sat back. I pointed at him, as he’d pointed at me with his pen in the cop car one night. “Don’t tease me.”
“Miami’s too far, though. I have to work tomorrow night. I was hoping you’d settle for the Redneck Riviera.”
Of course I would settle for the Florida Panhandle. With John. And of course he couldn’t be serious.
And of course I couldn’t go, anyway. “I have to be back before you do, for my shift at six A.M. tomorrow. And don’t tell me you forgot about the diner. You were kind enough to remind me this morning.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. I figure it will take u
s five hours to drive down there—”
“Three, if you let me drive.”
He cleared his throat and gave me a stern look. “It will take me five hours to drive down there and five to drive back. That leaves you six hours of spring break.”
I was beginning to think he was serious. “When will I sleep? I have to sleep before work tomorrow.”
“You can sleep in my truck on the way down, and on the way back.”
“When will you sleep?”
“I’ve been asleep for the last seven hours, and I’ll sleep again when you go to work tomorrow morning.” He leaned back in the booth and tapped his fingers on the menu. “Next argument.”
I hadn’t slept since yesterday, right after my run and my conversation with Tiffany about the possibility of her becoming a slut-whore. And right before I almost slut-whored myself to Eric again. It seemed like a year ago, but nothing in the diner had changed. Same bright afternoon sunlight slanting through the front windows. Same secondhand tables, same kitschy saltshakers.
The only remarkable thing was John, still drop-dead gorgeous and hunky, but in a teenager’s clothes.
Officer After, transformed into a boyfriend.
“Why the sudden change of heart?” I asked.
He took my hand again and whispered, “No sudden change of heart.”
“You mean, this morning, you already intended to invite me to the beach?”
He nodded.
I pulled my hand away and whacked him on the chest. “Then why’d you act like you hated me?”
He grinned. “You’ve said you don’t plan. I didn’t want you to stand me up.”
“You mean you were manipulating me?”
He touched my bottom lip with one finger. “Just say yes.”
I lost myself in his dark eyes. “Yes.”
Bonita had come in by then. I asked her to serve John steak and eggs with steamed vegetables while I ran to the trailer and took the quickest shower of my greasy spoon career. Suddenly my career had sped up, with my pulse.
I pulled on clean jeans and the skimpiest shirt I owned, which was saying a lot because I owned some fine examples. As I saw it, the occasion called for cleave and even belly button. I paused for a split second in front of the mirror and wished for the umpteenth time this week that my hair wasn’t blue, but I was already on my way out the door.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING, AND I want you to plan for once,” John called over the noise of the surf. “It’s going to be a long ride back in wet underwear.”
Uncanny, how he’d known I was thinking of plunging my whole body into the water, clothes and all. The cold night back home had lifted for the warmest day of the year so far. Florida was even warmer. And even though the ocean was still cool, I longed to experience it in every way I could, for the short time it was mine.
But John was right, as usual, damn him. “You keep your mind off my underwear,” I said. Actually, I was delighted to have him think about my underwear.
My face must have given me away, because he took my hand.
We sloshed together through the waves, with our jeans rolled up past our knees. When we’d first gotten here half an hour before, the sun was still up over the dark blue ocean. I had heard the Gulf Coast had the world’s whitest beaches, but I hadn’t expected them to be this white. They weren’t paper-white, but just off—the color of John’s hands.
Now the beach was tinted pink, the clouds and ocean glowed neon pink, and a huge orange sun sank in the violet sky. Every time I glanced at John, I expected to look back at the sunset and discover it had been a figment of my imagination. Of course, every time I glanced at the sunset, I expected to look back at John and find he’d disappeared.
He swung my hand as we splashed along. “It’s so beautiful that I wouldn’t know how to begin to draw it.”
“You’ve drawn the Matterhorn, John. I’m sure you’d manage a Florida sunset.”
“This one is special. It would be hard to convey how jarring and in-your-face it is.” He turned to me. “And still so beautiful.”
I smiled back at him, choosing to tune out the jarring part and listen to the beautiful part. “Besides, where would you put the elephants wearing hats?”
“I think I put those in because I’m not confident in my art. Other people aren’t as likely to judge me if I already have elephants wearing hats in the drawing, judging it themselves.”
“You know what might help that problem?”
The light had faded to the point that I couldn’t make out his hard, dark eyes. I was glad. “A college education in art?” he asked flatly.
“No. Drawing nothing but the bridge over and over. There are no judgmental creatures in your drawing of the railroad bridge.”
We walked on in our silence underneath the roar of the ocean. I waited for him to get revenge.
Here it came. “Something’s been bothering me since I found out you had leukemia. Your parents stuck with you through it. Doesn’t that make you feel like you owe them?”
“They’re my parents. What else could they do? Let me die in the street?”
Strangely, we were still holding hands as we threw sharp darts at each other. But he stopped playfully swinging my hand.
“Of course I owe them,” I said. “Insurance didn’t cover everything. That’s why they make me work at the diner for free. My dad says I’m still paying off the methotrexate and daunomycin.”
I could feel John shaking his head above me, like I was missing the point. “You needed them, and they helped you. Now they need you. Don’t you want to stay and help them? Don’t you feel grateful?”
“I feel grateful. Grateful, like, send them a card. Grateful, like, build myself a career and make them proud of me. Grateful, like, have children someday and bring them back to town for Christmas. Not grateful, like, spend the rest of my life with them, running their shitty little diner in the middle of nowhere.”
I wished he hadn’t brought it up. Or I hadn’t. We had to get off this subject and stay off it for the rest of the night, or we’d never get laid.
He must have had the same idea, because he dropped my hand, pinched my ass, and dashed away as best he could through the knee-deep water.
I slogged after him. We played grab-ass in the fading light. Which morphed into a hundred-yard dash up and down the gray beach. He won every time. So I craftily morphed it into a touch football game with a balled-up towel. What we played didn’t matter so long as his big hands grazed my waist every few minutes, fueling the fire. I felt like I’d never been terminally ill.
At some point we got hungry and walked toward the road to a stand that sold fried seafood. This place made Eggstra! Eggstra! look like fine dining. But when we took the boxes back down to the moonlit beach and set out our picnic on our towels, I made a startling discovery. The shrimp were fresh. Someone had caught them off the coast that very afternoon. The shrimp we served at Eggstra! Eggstra! had been frozen for God knew how many decades. In fact, I probably had never eaten fresh shrimp before in my life. But I recognized them when I tasted them.
I began to have the sneaking suspicion this night was too good to be true.
I knew it was too good to be true when it got even better. John pulled out his cell phone and called Will. “I’m down for just a few hours, and I want to show the lady a good time while we’re here,” he shouted over the roar of the tide. “Where’s the party?”
He had me pegged. I loved parties.
He laughed into the phone. “No, the lady would not happen to have blue hair. Her hair is indigo. Cyan.”
“Violet,” I mouthed.
He reached behind my head and ran his fingers down the purple strands in back. He stroked absently while he finished talking on the phone, as if setting my blood on fire were the most natural thing in the world.
16
We drove the truck a few miles down the beach highway to an enormous nightclub on stilts. The music from inside pulsed so loudly that the sand strewn across
the road vibrated with every beat. We paid cover at the door and walked all the way through the building to get where we were going.
John held my hand like a vise so we didn’t get separated among the writhing bodies. I watched the looks on girls’ faces as we passed. They checked John out for long seconds. Then they saw we were holding hands. Then they checked me out: hair, face, boobs, belly button, boobs, face, ending with a long and pointed look at my hair. Then another glance at John, like, When you get tired of this, call me. All the mascara, cleave, and midriff in the world didn’t make up for the fact that I had blue hair and blue hair was weird. I definitely didn’t want to get in a fight with a girl in my six hours at the beach, but I did try to step on their toes in their high-heeled sandals as I passed.
In back of the club, we had the best of both worlds: our white beach and black ocean and white moon, plus a throbbing party. Hundreds of college kids danced inside a square of tiki torches. We kicked off our shoes and crossed the sand.
Alone at the edge of the crowd, in a bank of plastic chairs that the rising tide threatened to sweep away, Will nursed a beer. We recognized the silhouette of his curly hair against the sky. Now that John wasn’t in uniform, he and Will gave each other a big boy-hug, swatting each other hard on the back. Will turned to me and moved to hug me. Then he saw John’s look and folded his arms around his beer cup.
John leaned in. “I’m going to get her a drink. Don’t steal her while I’m gone.”
“Are you crazy?” Will asked. “I wouldn’t dare steal from the police academy.”
John turned to me. “Frozen daiquiri?”
“Piña colada, please.”
“Virgin?” He wasn’t asking my permission. He was just making sure I knew he wasn’t going to try to swipe me any alcohol.
“That’s optimistic,” I said.
He frowned at me and glared at Will before heading across the beach toward one of the bars in thatched huts. Apparently I was not allowed to make sex jokes in front of Will. Surely John wasn’t still jealous.
“Speaking of virgins,” I said to Will.