She didn’t say anything for a moment. Her foot tapped against the floor. “You must have said something else, because just sending off two freshman girls isn’t enough to trigger that lightbulb above his head to flicker on. I’ve been flirting with him since you moved in, and he hasn’t figured out that I like him.”
I resisted the urge to take my eyes off the road and stare at her. “Charity, when have you ever flirted with Dante?”
She let out a grunt of protest. “I talk to him all of the time. I help him with his calculus homework.” She waved one hand at the darkness to emphasize her point. “I’m constantly telling him to be careful on his motorcycle and to stop hanging out with people who skip school.”
“That’s not really flirting. That’s more like trying to reform him.”
“Well, I’m doing it in a flirting way.”
I turned on a street that led to Bickham’s most exclusive neighborhood. I hadn’t realized Shane lived in such an upscale place, and I hoped he didn’t live on one of those estates that was surrounded by vicious guard dogs. “Look, Charity, I didn’t say anything to him. But since we’re twins, we may have a bond that allows him to read my mind. I’m not sure about that yet.”
Charity folded her arms, her expression turning to resignation. “He’ll probably ask Raine to prom now that he thinks she likes him. After all, she’s pretty and tall.”
Shane leaned over the back of the seat. I could smell him before he spoke. “It’s that house right over there.”
Mansion was more like it. I pulled farther down the road but didn’t see a place to park. Vehicles lined the streets, and the driveway already had cars in it.
“Why are there so many cars here?” Charity asked.
Which only made the guys laugh all over again. Did I already mention how strange drunk people are? If so, it’s worth repeating.
Brett rolled down his window and yelled out, “We’re home!”
And then I saw them. The people standing on the porch. The potted palms lining the walk. I gripped the steering wheel. “This is Wilson’s house.”
Rich leaned over the seat. “Hey, a party is a party. You wanna be our dates? I bet they’d let you all in.”
Charity turned around and glared at him. “You think this is funny? We ought to leave you here.”
The idea was tempting. We could kick them out of the car and let them walk home. Only then they might call the police and report that I’d stolen their car. That would be bad.
See, you know your life is messed up when you don’t think in terms of whether something is right or wrong, but by how many years in jail it would get you.
“Look in the glove box for a registration slip,” I told Charity. “That should have Shane’s address on it.”
Charity opened the glove box, and I slowly eased past Wilson’s house, hoping none of the people out on his porch could recognize me.
Brett stuck his head out of the open window, flung an empty bottle toward the house, and yelled, “How do you like Jack now?”
I heard the crash. I wasn’t sure if it was a window or just the bottle breaking against Wilson’s driveway. The sound made my stomach twist inside of me.
“Why did you do that?” I yelled, and stepped on the gas. I wasn’t sure where the street led to, but I couldn’t back up, because Raine was right behind me. I hurried down the street, driving down the middle so I didn’t sideswipe any of the parked cars. Brett still hung out the window, hollering some sort of war cry at the top of his lungs.
“Sit down and shut up!” I shouted.
He ignored me, and his war cry turned into some sort of werewolf-howling-at-the-moon thing. I checked over my shoulder, trying to see Wilson’s house. “That was at least littering, and maybe vandalism! Those are probably misdemeanors, you know.”
Charity riffled through the contents of the glove box. “There’s all sorts of junk in here. What does a registration look like?”
“It’s a little piece of paper.”
Charity’s phone rang. She pushed the speaker button, laid it on her lap, and kept riffling through the glove box. “Hello?”
Raine’s voice came over the phone. “Are you all insane? I can’t believe I just followed you to Wilson’s house and watched you hurl a bottle at his guests. A little competition is one thing, but this is taking it too far.”
I picked up the phone, took it off speaker, and held it to my face. “I didn’t throw the bottle—that was Brett. Couldn’t you tell the difference? His arms are way hairier than mine.”
“Oh, sorry. My mistake. You can explain that to the people who ran outside after the bottle crashed on the driveway, because I think some of them got in their cars.”
I looked in my rearview mirror, but I could only see Raine’s Taurus. “Are you serious? Is anyone following us?”
“I don’t see anyone yet,” she said. “Oh wait, there’s a truck behind me.”
I turned on the first street I came to, and then the next, trying to find an outlet back to downtown. Nothing looked familiar. Suddenly I wasn’t even sure that I knew what direction I was headed.
Raine’s voice came over the phone. “Giovanna, do you have any idea where you’re going?”
“Not really.”
“I’m following you and you’re lost?”
“I’m not lost. I just don’t know where I’m supposed to go next.” I handed the phone back to Charity. She set it down on her lap and turned on the overhead light. Then she picked up a handful of papers from the glove compartment and went through it like confetti. “Tire warranty . . . Oil-change receipt . . . I told Dante he should drive, but no . . .”
In the back seat all the guys gave each other high fives. If I hadn’t been gripping the steering wheel, I would have turned around and slapped them. I finally found a street that led back to downtown. I let out a ragged breath of relief and sped up as I headed there.
“Here it is,” Charity said. “He lives at twelve-seventeen Sycamore Street.”
I flipped off the overhead light. “Sycamore . . . Sycamore. Do you know where that is?”
Charity shrugged. “No.”
Rich leaned over the seat and said, “I’ll tell ya how to get there. Take a U-turn at the next light.” Or at least he tried to say it. He broke out laughing halfway through the sentence. Charity pushed him back into his own seat again.
I picked up the phone and asked Raine.
“It’s somewhere in the tree streets,” she said. “North of here.”
I pulled onto Main Street, which is two lanes each direction. I knew whoever was following us would try to overtake us here. Luckily, since it was now ten thirty and downtown Bickham doesn’t have much of a night life, the streets were mostly empty. I gunned the engine, zipping down the street, and made a sharp turn onto State Street.
Through the phone I heard Raine’s voice edged with panic. “This isn’t the way to the tree streets. Where are you going?”
“I’m trying to lose whoever is following us. That way Wilson will think Rich, Brett, and Shane went by his house and were being jerks again. He won’t know we had anything to do with this, because we’re in Shane’s car, and it was Brett who yelled things out the window.”
The panic rose in Raine’s voice. “But I’m in my own car. Do you think Wilson recognized me? I mean, he hinted he might ask me to prom.”
“Raine, Wilson hinted that he might ask everyone to prom. If he asks everyone he flirted with, he’ll show up to the dance with a harem.” At the last minute, and mostly because the green turn arrow flashed on, I turned and doubled back onto Main Street. Then I sped up to make it past a minivan.
“I’m hanging up now,” Raine said. “I need to use two hands to drive if I’m going to keep up with you.”
From the back seat the guys all chanted, “Drag race! Drag race!”
Charity checked the rearview mirror on her side of the car. “The truck is gaining on us.”
Brett leaned his head out the window again.
At first I thought he was going to throw up, but no, he just screamed again. “We can take you! Bring it on, buddy!”
Charity glanced at the speedometer. “It’s dangerous to speed like this.”
“I’m not going to crash.” After pulling around the minivan, I cut past an SUV, then sped through a light that was so yellow it was orange. I made a quick right turn onto Grand Street. I searched in the mirror but couldn’t distinguish one pair of headlights from another. “Did we lose them?”
“You lost Raine, but the truck is still following us.”
Not good. I switched lanes and took a sharp left. “She knows Shane’s address. She’ll probably go there.”
Charity tilted her head, examining the rearview mirror again. “Um, Giovanna, what kind of truck does Jesse drive?”
“A white Ford.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
There was a moment of silence—well, at least silence between Charity and me. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.
“Please tell me that isn’t Jesse following us,” I said.
“I won’t tell you if you don’t want me to.”
I looked into the rearview mirror and let out an involuntary scream. Yep. It was Jesse. Luke Talbot sat beside him.
The light in front of me turned red. The cross traffic started across the street. I couldn’t do anything but stop at the intersection and wait. Jesse changed lanes and pulled up beside me. Yeah, this just kept getting better. I put my hand across the side of my face so I didn’t have to look at him. I could hear him, though. He’d rolled down his window and yelled my name.
I slumped down in my seat and still didn’t look over. “Jesse knows now. You might as well talk to him,” Charity said. She turned and waved at him.
“I want to die,” I said.
Charity’s cell phone rang. Without looking, I knew it was Jesse. He probably had called to congratulate me on the new breed of guys I was hanging out with now that I’d broken up with him. Charity answered it. “Hey, we can explain all of this—we’re just taking these guys home because they’re too drunk to drive.”
A pause. Why did red lights last so long?
“Because they tricked us into going to Wilson’s house,” Charity said. “We had no idea they were going to throw that bottle.”
Pause.
Charity cast a glance at me. “Well, we found Shane’s address off his registration, so we’re taking them home now.”
Another pause. Surely the light should have changed by now. The cross traffic was long gone.
Charity turned around to check on the back seat, then put her hand over her eyes and spun back forward. “Okay, I’ll let her know.”
“What?” I asked.
“Jesse says to tell you that the guys are mooning all the cars you just passed, including a police car that’s pulling up behind you.”
I’d like to say here that Jesse has a terrific sense of humor, and it was all a joke that we laughed about, you know, once I’d recovered from my heart attack. But no. I spun around and sure enough, Rich, Brett, and Shane had various parts of their body pressed up against the windows. And although I imagine it wasn’t a pretty sight for the people outside, trust me, it was worse looking at them from the inside of the car.
The light turned green, but it only barely registered in my mind. I let out a scream, picked up junk from the glove box, and pelted them with it. “PUT YOUR CLOTHES ON! ALL OF YOU!”
Instead of doing anything constructive, like, say, hiking their jeans back up, the three of them laughed so hard that, if anything, their pants slid closer to their ankles.
Someone honked, probably to remind me that the light had turned green, and I sat forward again and drove through the intersection. That was about as far as I got before the police car turned on its lights.
Chapter 12
The sobriety tests they give you in real life are not at all like the ones they show on TV. I was totally prepared to walk a straight line, and even a little nervous about it because I’m not really coordinated and was afraid I would trip or something and then the policeman would never believe I was sober—especially if I started spontaneously weeping, which I was very close to doing without walking the line.
But instead he marched us out of the car, took down our names, phone numbers, addresses, and then smelled our breath.
The guys flunked this test in a big way, and he sent them to sit in the back of his police car. After that, he took Charity a few feet away to discuss the matter with her.
She used a lot of hand-waving while talking to him. He wrote things down on a pad of paper and nodded grimly. Then he talked to her. She mostly kept her gaze on the ground and looked like she was about to cry. This went on for quite some time.
I watched the two of them and felt ill. It was all my fault. She had just been an innocent passenger who came along to make sure I didn’t end up in a shallow grave, and now she was being interrogated by a police officer. And if he was this stern with her, what was he going to say to me, the driver, who by the way was already on probation? My insides felt like they’d tangled themselves up and gotten lodged somewhere around the vicinity of my throat.
Finally the officer walked over to me. He slipped his pen back onto his clipboard and folded his arms. “First off, miss, I want to tell you that you did the right thing not to let those boys get behind the wheel tonight. You may have saved their lives and the life of whoever they would have hit when they tried to drive home. Because of that, I’m overlooking the speeding violation I would have otherwise given you.”
With that one sentence most of my insides fell back into place. I would not be explaining all of this to Judge Rossmar. I wanted to cry with relief. I gulped out, “Thank you, officer.”
“However, next time something like this happens, I want you to call a cab for your friends, okay?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
“And I don’t ever want to see you trying to outrun another vehicle, even if your ex-boyfriend is driving it, okay?”
“Okay.” I glanced over at Charity, surprised she’d told him that part of the story.
After that the police called the guys’ parents, and using words like, “underage alcohol consumption” and “disorderly conduct,” told them they had to come down and pick up their sons.
Raine picked us up, and we headed to Charity’s house to drop her off. No one spoke for a long time.
Finally I said, “It could have been worse.”
Charity looked straight out the window with her arms folded. “The policeman who stopped you goes to my church. I’m going to have to face him every Sunday from now until I leave for college.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“And of course I’ll see him when I come home for Christmas.”
“It’s not like you really did anything wrong.”
She leaned her head against the car door. “And for the summer break between college semesters.”
“He probably sees a lot of this stuff and won’t remember it past tomorrow.”
Charity sent me an incredulous look. “He knows my father, Giovanna. They talk. I doubt either one of them will forget the night he pulled over the minister’s daughter in a car full of drunk, half naked teenage boys.”
Well, she did have a point. Still, it didn’t seem fair that anyone should hold it against her. I held up one hand, offering her an argument she could use. “You were trying to do a good deed. Your father will understand.” At least I hoped he would. I hoped he wouldn’t label me as some juvenile delinquent troublemaker who shouldn’t hang around his daughter anymore.
After Raine let Charity out, she drove me home. When I trudged into my house, Dante was cleaning up from the party. As I dragged myself into the kitchen, he eyed me over and said, “That sure took you long enough.”
Which was the last straw. So I let him have it. I told him everything that had happened, including that it was his fault for inviting those drunk-mooning-idiots in the first place, and if Charity
could never come over to our house again, that would be his fault too, and then I quit as his campaign manager. Again. Considering the school counselor thinks I have a hard time expressing anger, I did an exceptional job of telling Dante how I felt.
He held up both hands as though to ward off my words. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.” Then he shook his head. “But what’s with you that you can’t walk out of the house without getting in trouble with the law?”
I didn’t answer him. I just walked up the stairs repeating, “I quit. I quit. I quit.”
On Monday Dante and I went to school early to put up his posters. Technically I shouldn’t have had to do this, since I had quit as his campaign manager. I reminded him of this fact about ten times the night before while we made more posters. Dante doesn’t always take what I say seriously, though, and apparently ten times didn’t convince him that I shouldn’t have to trace his name onto posterboard.
So there I was up on a ladder taping up all of our nice, but obviously homemade, signs next to Wilson’s mass-produced-by-someone-with-a-degree-in-graphic-design signs. They all showed these huge glossy pictures of Wilson smiling under the caption, “Leadership. Trust. Responsibility.” At the bottom of the poster was a box with the words, “My promise to you,” and a paragraph about how Wilson was all about service and so on and so on. This part was in his own handwriting, which I thought looked out of place. The whole thing had perfectly formatted lettering, and Wilson’s up-and-down scrawl stuck out like a sore thumb.
And I’m not just saying this because I’m bitter that I had to trace the letters off of stencils to write, “Dante Is Our Man. Vote For El Pres-i-Dante,” like, twenty times. And yes, we did steal the term “pres-i-Dante” from our drunk party guests. It was catchier than anything we could come up with on our own.
So anyway, I was on the top of a ladder taping up posters when Bridget strolled by. She shot me one of her rodeo queen smiles. “I heard you had quite a party on Saturday.”
I ripped off a piece of masking tape and marveled at the fact that Bridget had been able to find anyone who actually went to our party in order to talk to them about it. “Yeah,” I said.