“Sure,” I said, putting my hairbrush back.
“I mean, so she’s from New York?” Kelly was really warming to her subject. “Big deal. I mean, I’ve been to New York. It wasn’t so great. It was really dirty, and there were these disgusting pigeons and bums everywhere.”
“Yeah,” Debbie said. “And you know what I heard? In New York, they don’t even have fish tacos.”
I almost felt sorry for Debbie then.
“Well,” I said, shouldering my backpack. “It’s been a pleasure. But now I gotta go, ladies.”
I left them there, dipping their pinkies into little pots of lip gloss and then leaning into the mirror to apply it.
Michael was waiting for me exactly where he’d said he would be. You could tell the eyeliner was doing its job, since he got very flustered and went, “Hi, uh, do you, uh, want me to take your backpack?”
I cooed, “Oh, that would be lovely,” and let him take it. With two backpacks slung over his shoulders, mine and his own, Michael looked a bit odd, but then, he always did—at least with his clothes on—so this was no big surprise. We started down the cool, shady breezeway—empty now that most everybody had left for the day—and then stepped out into the warm yellow sunlight of the parking lot. The sea, just beyond it, winked at us. The sky overhead was cloudless.
“My car’s over there,” Michael said, pointing at an emerald green sedan. “Well, not my car, really. But the one the rental agency loaned me. It’s not a bad little number, actually. Has some punch to it.”
I smiled at him, and he tripped over a loose piece of concrete. He would have fallen flat on his face if he hadn’t saved himself at the last minute. My lipstick, I could see, was performing as well as the eyeliner.
“Let me just, uh, find the keys,” Michael said as he fumbled around in his pockets.
I told him to take his time. Then I pulled out my DKs and turned my face toward the sun, leaning against the hood of his rental car. How, I wondered, to best bring it up? Maybe I should suggest we stop by the hospital to see his little sister? No, I wanted to get to his house as soon as possible so I could start reading his e-mail. Would I even know how to access his e-mail? Probably not. But I could call CeeCee. She’d know. Could you talk on the phone and access someone’s e-mail at the same time? Oh, God, why wouldn’t my mom let me get a cell phone? I was practically the only sophomore without one—Dopey excepted, of course.
It was while I was wondering about this that a shadow fell over my face, and suddenly I could no longer feel the warmth of the sun. I opened my eyes, and found myself staring up at Sleepy.
“What,” he demanded in the same somnambulistic manner in which he did everything, “do you think you’re doing?”
I could feel my cheeks getting red. And it wasn’t because of the sun, either.
“Getting a ride home with Michael,” I said meekly. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Michael, over on the driver’s side of the car, had finally found the keys, and had frozen with them in his hand, the driver’s side door open.
“No, you’re not,” Sleepy said.
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe he was doing this to me. I was so embarrassed, I thought I was going to die.
“Slee—” I started to say, then stopped myself just in time. “Jake,” I said, under my breath. “Cut it out.”
“No,” Jake said. “You cut it out. You remember what Mom said.”
Mom. He’d called my mother Mom. What was going on here?
I lowered my sunglasses and looked past Jake. Gina, along with Dopey and Doc, stood on the far side of the parking lot, leaning against the side of the Rambler and staring in my direction.
Gina. She’d told on me. She’d told on me to Sleepy. I couldn’t believe it.
“Sleep—I mean, Jake,” I said. “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I can take care of myself—”
“No.” And to my surprise, he wrapped a hand around my arm, and started to pull. He was surprisingly strong, for someone who gave the impression of being so tired all the time. “You’re coming home with us. Sorry, man.” This last he said to Michael. “She’s supposed to ride home with me today.”
Michael, however, did not appear to find this apology a satisfactory one. He put down both our backpacks, and, slipping his car keys back into his trouser pocket, took a step toward Sleepy.
“I don’t think,” Michael said in a hard voice I’d never heard him use before, “the lady wants to go with you.”
The lady? What lady? Then I realized with a start that Michael meant me. I was the lady!
“I don’t care what she wants,” Sleepy said. His voice wasn’t hard at all. It was simply very matter-of-fact. “She’s not getting into a car with you, and that’s the end of it.”
“I don’t think so.” Michael took another step toward Sleepy, and that’s when I saw that both of his hands were curled into fists.
Fists! Michael was going to fight Sleepy! Over me!
This was very exciting. I’d never had two boys get into a fight over me before. The fact that one of the boys was my stepbrother, however, and held about as much romantic appeal for me as Max, the family dog, somewhat dampened my enthusiasm.
And Michael wasn’t much of a catch, either, when you actually thought about it, being a potential murderer, and all.
Oh, why did I have to have such a couple of losers fighting over me? Why couldn’t Matt Damon and Ben Affleck fight over me? Now that would be truly excellent.
“Look, buddy,” Sleepy said, noticing Michael’s fists. “You don’t want to mess with me, okay? I’m just going to take my sister here”—he dragged me off the hood of the car—“and go. Got that?”
Sister? Stepsister! Stepsister! God, why can’t anyone keep it straight?
“Suze,” Michael said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Sleepy. “Just get in the car, okay?”
Well, this, I decided, had gone on long enough. Not only was I completely embarrassed, but I was getting hot, too. That afternoon sun was no joke. Suddenly, I just didn’t have any ghostbusting energy left in me.
Plus I guess I didn’t want to see anybody get hurt over something so completely lame.
“Look,” I said to Michael. “I better go with him. Some other time, okay?”
Michael finally looked away from Sleepy. His gaze, when it landed on me, was odd. It was like he wasn’t even really seeing me.
“Fine,” he said.
Then he got into his car without another word, and started the engine.
God, I thought. Be a baby about it, why don’t you?
“I’ll call you when I get home,” I shouted to Michael, though I doubt he heard me through the rolled-up windows. It would be difficult, I realized, to wring a confession out of him over the phone, but not, I thought, impossible.
Michael’s tires squealed on the hot asphalt as he drove away.
“What a freakin’ jerk,” Sleepy muttered as he dragged me across the parking lot. Only he didn’t say freakin’. Or jerk. “And you want to go out with this guy?”
I said sullenly, “We’re just friends.”
“Yeah,” Sleepy said. “Right.”
“You,” Dopey said to me as Sleepy and I approached the Rambler, “are so busted.”
This was one of his favorite things to say to me. He said it, as a matter of fact, whenever he had the slightest chance.
“Not technically, Brad,” Doc said thoughtfully. “You see, she didn’t actually get into the car with him. And that was what she was forbidden to do. Get into a car with Michael Meducci.”
“Shut up, all of you,” Sleepy said, heading for the driver’s seat. “And get in.”
Gina, I noticed, slipped automatically into the front passenger seat. Apparently, she didn’t believe that when Sleepy had told us all to shut up, he meant her, too, since she went, “How about we stop somewhere for ice cream on the way home?”
She was trying, I knew, to get me to not be mad at her. As if a chocolate-d
ipped twist would help. Actually, it sort of would, now that I thought about it.
“Sounds good to me,” Sleepy said.
Dopey, on my right—as usual, I’d ended up sitting on the hump in the middle of the backseat—muttered, “I don’t know what you see in that headcase Meducci anyway.”
Doc said, “Oh, that’s easy. Females of any species tend to select the male partner who is best able to provide for her and any offspring which might result from their coupling. Michael Meducci, being a good deal more intelligent than most of his classmates, amply fulfills that role, in addition to which he has what is considered, by Western standards of beauty, an outstanding physique—if what I’ve overheard Gina and Suze saying counts for anything. Since he is likely to pass on these favorable genetic components to his children, he is irresistible to breeding females everywhere—at least, discerning ones like Suze.”
There was silence in the car…the kind of silence that usually followed one of Doc’s speeches.
Then Gina said reverently, “They really should move you up a grade, David.”
“Oh, they’ve offered,” Doc replied, cheerfully, “but while my intellect might be evolved for a boy my age, my growth is somewhat retarded. I felt it was inadvisable to thrust myself into a population of males much larger than I, who might be threatened by my superior intelligence.”
“In other words,” Sleepy translated for Gina’s benefit, “we didn’t want him getting his butt kicked by the bigger kids.”
Then he started the car, and we roared out of the parking lot at the usual high rate of speed that Sleepy, in spite of my private nickname for him, chooses to employ.
I was trying to figure out how I could make it clear that it wasn’t so much that I wanted to breed with Michael Meducci, as get him to confess to having killed the RLS Angels, when Gina went, “God, Jake, drive much?”
Which was sort of amusing since Gina, whose parents very wisely won’t let her near their car, has never driven before in her life. But then I looked up and saw what she meant. We were approaching the front gates to the school, which were set at the base of a sloping hill that opened out into a busy intersection, at a higher rate of speed than was usual, even for Sleepy.
“Yeah, Jake,” Dopey said from beside me on the backseat. “Slow down, you maniac.”
I knew Dopey was only trying to make himself look good in front of Gina, but he did have a point: Sleepy was going way too fast.
“It’s not a race,” I said, and Doc started to say something about how Jake’s endorphins had probably kicked in, due to his fight with me and his near-fight with Michael, and that that would account for his sudden case of lead foot…
At least until Jake said, in tones that weren’t in the least drowsy, “I can’t slow down. The brakes…the brakes aren’t working.”
This sounded interesting. I leaned forward. I guess I thought Jake was trying to scare us.
Then I saw the speed with which we were approaching the intersection in front of the school. This was no joke. We were about to plunge into four lanes of heavy traffic.
“Get out!” Jake yelled at us.
At first I didn’t know what he meant. Then I saw Gina struggling to undo her seatbelt, and I knew.
But it was too late. We had already started down the dip that led past the gates, and onto the highway. If we jumped now, we’d be as dead as we were going to be the minute we plunged into those four lanes of oncoming traffic. At least if we stayed in the car, we’d have the questionable protection of the Rambler’s steel walls around us.
Jake leaned on the horn, swearing loudly. Gina covered her eyes. Doc flung his arms around me, burying his face in my lap, and Dopey, to my great surprise, began to scream like a girl, very close to my ear….
Then we were sailing down the hill, speeding past a very surprised woman in a Volvo station wagon and then a stunned-looking Japanese couple in a Mercedes, both of whom managed to slam on their brakes just in time to keep from barreling into us.
We weren’t so lucky with the traffic in the far two lanes, however. As we went flying across the highway, a tractor trailer with the words Tom Cat emblazoned on the front grid came bearing down on us, its horn blaring. The words Tom Cat loomed closer and closer, until suddenly I couldn’t see them anymore because they were above the roof of the car….
It was at that point that I closed my eyes, so I wasn’t sure if the impact I felt was in my head because I’d been expecting it so strongly, or if we’d really been struck. But the jolt was enough to send my neck snapping back the way it did on roller coasters when the train car suddenly took a violent ninety-degree turn.
When I opened my eyes again, however, I started to suspect the jolt hadn’t been in my head since everything was spinning around, the way it does when you go on one of those teacup rides. Only we weren’t on a ride. We were still in the Rambler, which was spinning across the highway like a top.
Until suddenly, with another sickening crunch, a loud crash of glass, and another very big jolt, it stopped.
And when the smoke and dust settled, we saw that we were sitting halfway in and halfway out of the Carmel-by-the-Sea Tourist Information Bureau, with a sign that said WELCOME TO CARMEL! pressed up against the windshield.
Chapter
Sixteen
“They killed my car.”
That was all Sleepy seemed capable of saying. He had been saying it ever since we’d crawled from the wreckage of what had once been the Rambler.
“My car. They killed my car.”
Never mind that it hadn’t actually been Sleepy’s car. It had been the family car, or at any rate, the kids’ car.
And never mind that Sleepy did not seem capable of telling us who this mysterious “they” was, the “they” he suspected of murdering his automobile.
He just kept saying it over and over again. And the thing was, the more he said it, the more the horror of it all sank in.
Because, of course, it wasn’t the car someone had tried to kill. Oh, no. It was the people in the car that had been the intended victims.
Or, to be more accurate, one person. Me.
I really don’t think I’m being at all vain. I honestly do think that it was because of me that the Rambler’s brake line was clipped. Yes, it had been clipped, so all the brake fluid had eventually leaked out. The car, being older, even, than my mother—though not quite as old as Father D.—did have only the single brake line, making it vulnerable to just that sort of attack.
Let me see now, who do I know who might like to see me perish in a fiery blaze?…Oh, hang on, I know. How about Josh Saunders, Carrie Whitman, Mark Pulsford, and Felicia Bruce?
Give that girl a prize.
I couldn’t, of course, tell anyone what I suspected. Not the police who showed up and took the accident report. Not the EMS guys who couldn’t believe that, beyond a few bruises, none of us were seriously hurt. Not the guys from Triple A who came to tow what was left of the Rambler away. Not Michael who, having left the parking lot just moments before us, had heard the commotion and turned back, and had been one of the first to try to help us out of the car.
And certainly not my mother and stepfather, who showed up at the hospital looking tight-lipped and pale-faced, and kept saying things like, “It’s a wonder none of you were hurt,” and, “From now on, you’re only driving the Land Rover.”
Which caused Dopey, anyway, to brighten up. The Land Rover was way roomier than the Rambler had ever been. I suppose he figured he wouldn’t have as much trouble getting horizontal with Debbie Mancuso in the Land Rover.
“I just can’t understand it,” my mother said, much later, after the X rays and eye tests and poking and prodding were over, and the hospital personnel had finally let us go home. We sat in the dining room of Peninsula Pizza, the place Sleepy worked, which also happened to be one of the only places in Carmel you could get a table for six—seven, if you counted Gina—without a reservation. We must have looked, to an outsider, like one big, ha
ppy family (well, except for Gina, who sort of stuck out, though not as much as you might think) celebrating something, like a soccer game victory.
Only we knew that what we were celebrating was the fact that we were all still alive.
“I mean, it must be a miracle,” my mother went on. “The doctors certainly think so. That none of you were more seriously hurt, I mean.”
Doc showed her his elbow, which he’d scraped on a piece of glass while slithering out of the car after it had come to a standstill. “This could prove to be a very dangerous wound,” he said, in a wounded little boy voice, “if it happens to become infected.”
“Oh, sweetie.” My mother reached out and stroked his hair. “I know. You were so brave when they put in those stitches.”
The rest of us rolled our eyes. Doc had been playing up the injury thing all night. But it was making both him and my mother happy. She’d tried that hair-stroking thing with me, and I’d nearly broken my arm trying to get away.
“It wasn’t a miracle,” Andy said, shaking his head, “but simple dumb luck that you weren’t all killed.”
“Dumb luck nothing,” Sleepy said. “My superlative driving skills are what saved us.”
I hated to admit it, but Sleepy was right. (And where did he learn a word like superlative? From all the SAT review he surely had to do last year?) Except for the part where we’d crashed through the plate glass window, he’d driven that tank of a car—brakeless—like an Indy 500 pro. I guess I could sort of see why Gina wouldn’t let go of his arm, and kept looking up at him in this worshipful way.
Out of my newfound respect for Sleepy, I didn’t even look to see what he and Gina were doing in the back of the Land Rover on the way home.
But Dopey sure did. And whatever he saw back there put him in as foul a mood as I’d ever seen him.
His stomping around and turning up of Marilyn Manson in his room only served to annoy his father, however, who went from grateful humbleness over how close he’d come to losing his “boys—and you, Suze. Oh, and Gina, too,” to apoplectic rage upon hearing what he termed “that noxious mind-poison.”