I’ve seen pictures on Heather’s phone before, and let me tell you, they’re not the kind you’d want to share with your mother.
But this picture was different.
It was sweet. Innocent.
It was Heather at about ten, hugging her dad—both her arms thrown around him while he had one wrapped around her. They both looked so happy. And what’s funny is, even if I hadn’t known either of them, I’d have known that this was a picture of a dad and his daughter. Not a dad and his niece, or a coach and a player, or a couple of actors.
This was a dad who adored his daughter, just like the daughter adored her dad.
In that moment I felt almost sorry for Heather. Somewhere along the line she’d lost the joy that was obviously there in that picture, and now she was just … sour. But I also felt sorry for me. Seeing the joy of Heather being with her dad made me realize that I would never, ever have a picture like that of me and my dad.
And then Heather pulls her phone away and says, “What are you staring at, loser?” which brings me back to the realities of dealing with an evil psychopath instead of finding excuses for why she’d become one.
Candi hadn’t even looked at the picture. Instead, she’d been fixated on me. “Are we agreed, then?” she asks.
“Sure,” I tell her, like I could go either way.
She hands me her cell phone. “Then call your contact and set it up.”
So I dig up Pete’s number, punch it into Candi’s phone, and when he answers, I say, “It’s Sammy. The number I’m calling you from is the number to reach me at. But it’s not my phone, and we need to come up with a password, okay?”
“A password?”
“Yeah.” I eye Heather. “I’ve made a dangerous alliance, and it’s possible someone might pretend to be me.”
Heather flips me off, which doesn’t seem to faze Candi at all.
“So what’s the password?” Pete says in my ear.
“If you call me or if I call you, the first thing you need to do is list some Elvis songs. I’ll say no to anything but the right one. And only you and I know the right one.”
“So what’s the right one?”
“You tell me.”
“How about ‘Love Me Tender’?”
“Perfect.”
“So I go in random order?”
“Right. Mix it up every time we talk.”
“Got it. Oh, and hey—I’ve got help out there. The Elvis Army’s rallyin’.”
“You’re serious? Cool!”
“Later, gator.”
“No, really?”
He laughs and hangs up.
“Very clever,” Candi says as I hand the phone back to her.
I give her a little smile. “I do want to survive the night.”
So they go back to bed, and I curl up on the couch, and the truth is, I’m hugely relieved. I have a place to stay, I have two people helping me—one with the most determined mind I’ve ever gone up against—and there’s an Elvis Army out on the streets of Las Vegas rallying.
Whatever that means.
I put my head down on my backpack pillow, too exhausted to care.
ELEVEN
I had a really frightening dream that night.
Heather Acosta was being nice to me.
It was one of those total anxiety dreams. You know—like when you’re searching for something and can’t find it?
I was searching for her angle.
What was she up to?
Why was she being so nice to me?
I knew it was a trap. I mean, it had to be a trap. But where was the trapdoor? Why couldn’t I see it? Any second I was going to step into it and—aaaaahhhh!—I’d fall into a deep, dark abyss, and she’d be laughing at me from above, going, “Looooooooooser!” as I tumbled down, down, down to my death.
So I kept trying to figure it out, and she kept being nice to me.
And then, like a nightmare within a nightmare, I hear, “Looooooooooser! Hey, looooooooooser.”
I couldn’t see her; all I could hear was her voice. “Hey, loser!”
I flailed around, looking, looking, looking.
And then she was shoving me.
Hard.
I flailed around some more.
Why couldn’t I see her?
And then I realized—oh yeah, my eyes are closed.
They popped open, but everything was still dark.
Only not as dark.
And then all of a sudden it was super bright and there was Heather, holding back the curtain, blinding me with white-hot Las Vegas sunshine.
She was still wearing her silky pink pajama shorts and her sneer, and she was holding out a cell phone.
I guess I was having a little trouble transitioning from dream to reality because she finally says, “Take it!”
So I take the phone and put it up to my ear. “Hello?”
“ ‘Suspicious Minds’?”
“Huh?”
There was silence for a second and then, “Sammy?”
“Yeah.”
“ ‘Suspicious Minds’ is an Elvis song.”
“Oh!” I finally sit up and snap to. “Right! I mean, no, wrong!”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“I can tell that’s you—can we cut to the chase?”
“No. Make sure. Always make sure.”
“All right, all right,” he says like Elvis. “ ‘Love Me Tender.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Miss Sammy.”
“So what have you got?”
“They do not have an appointment at any of the bigger chapels and—more important—they haven’t applied for a license in the state of Nevada.”
“They—how do you know that?”
“I told you I was on it,” he says with a laugh. But then he adds, “That doesn’t mean they can’t be walkin’ up to the counter right now, though.”
“Is it open already?” I look around for a clock but don’t see one anywhere. “What time is it?”
“Bedtime for me, ten-thirty for you.”
“Ten-thirty?”
“Guess you had the dark shades drawn?”
“Yeah.”
He laughs. “Welcome to Las Vegas, little mama.”
It sounds like he’s about to hang up, so I blurt out, “Wait! Where’s this counter?”
“The marriage counter? At the Marriage Bureau. It’s downtown.”
“You think I should stake it out?”
He hesitates. “I knew you were smart. Yes. If they’re coming to Vegas to get hitched, they have to get a license first. That’d be the place to stake out.”
“Thank you!” I tell him. And then, because he always said it to me when I bought stuff from him at Maynard’s Market, I do my best Elvis impersonation and add, “Thank you very much.”
He laughs and hangs up, and since I’m feeling pretty psyched, I’m laughing, too, when I click off.
And then I see Heather.
She’s standing there with her angry arms crossed and her signature sneer. “So? What did he tell you? Huh, loser?”
I study her a minute. “Can you mix it up a little with the insults? You know, throw in an ‘idiot’ or a ‘dimwit’ or a ‘lame-brained bozo’? The ‘loser’ thing is really getting old.”
She snatches the phone from me. “You can’t tell me what to call you, loser!”
I scratch my head. “Just a suggestion, sis.”
“Shut up!” she screeches.
Candi comes over and snatches the phone from Heather and says, “You’re making this way harder than it needs to be.” Now, at first I think she’s talking to both of us, but she keeps her eyes on Heather. “Just drop the name-calling altogether. We have work to do!” Then she turns to me and says, “Please tell us what you found out.”
A “please”?
Wow.
I sit up taller on the couch and tell her, “They’re not registered at any of the bigger ch
apels—”
“But what if they’re going to a small one? And they could walk up at any time!”
“Right. But they haven’t applied for a marriage license yet. Not in the state of Nevada, anyway.”
“But … they can do that at any time, too! There’s no waiting period or blood tests or any of that in Nevada. That’s why people come here!”
“Right, but they haven’t done it yet, which means that if we stake out the Marriage Bureau, we can confront them before they even get their license!”
Now, I’m actually really excited about this breakthrough, and for a second there I’ve lost track of the fact that I’m talking to my archenemy’s nasty-tempered mother. So I’m, like, bouncing a little and, you know, wide-eyed and happy.
Like I’d be if I were talking to a friend.
But then it registers that her face is all pinchy and her eyes are like little laser beams, staring at me, so I stop bouncing and start thinking about diving for cover. And then out of her pinchy, laser-beamy face comes a loud, hard hiss.
A hiss that it takes me a minute to realize is her saying, “Yes!”
Now, even though I think this means that she’s excited, too, it’s creepy enough that I’m not actually sure. So I say, “Good, huh?”
“Exxxcellent!” she says, hissing again.
Which, let me tell you, is more than a little scary.
“You’re doing it again, Mom,” Heather says under her breath.
Candi snaps out of it. “I am?”
“Yeah,” Heather tells her. “It’s really creepy.”
Candi turns to me. “Was I … hissing?”
I look at her, then sort of glance at Heather, thinking it might be really wise of me to just not say. But Heather gives a little smirk with a one-shoulder shrug, which is pretty much universal for, Go ahead—tell her.
So I tell her. “Yeah. You were hissing.”
She blinks like she has no memory at all of going snaky on me. “And it was creepy?”
I glance at Heather again, and again I get the little smirk-shrug thing.
“Yeah,” I tell Candi. “Kinda.”
“Not kinda,” Heather snaps. “Tell her!”
So I pull a little face and tell Candi, “Let’s just say you’re a lot prettier when you don’t hiss.”
Now, the truth is, Candi puts a lot of effort into trying to make herself look pretty. She’s a flashy dresser and isn’t afraid of makeup, but underneath all that makeup is a slightly droopy eye, and a sort of knotty chin. Not knotty like a big ol’ sailor rope or anything. More just knotty like a walnut.
Not a huge walnut.
More just a, you know, junior walnut.
Not that I’d ever noticed her knotty chin before—I’d actually never been this close to her before. The other times I’d seen her, I’d either ducked or run … or been sitting across the conference table from her in the school office having bigger things to worry about than droopy eyes and knotty chins.
Anyway, Candi’s head bobbles a little, and that’s the end of the hissing debate. She hurries back to the bedroom area saying, “Get ready, girls. We’ve got a destination!”
Well, since I’d only crammed the bare necessities into my backpack before I’d bolted out of the apartment, after a little water splashing, teeth scrubbing, and raking through the hair, I’m ready to go. And Heather actually doesn’t take too long, either. But Candi? She’s in that bathroom for what feels like an hour.
It feels that way partly because Heather and I are holed up in our separate corners, avoiding each other, and partly because I’m really hungry and I can hear Heather in the bedroom munching on stuff. I know she’s not going to offer me any, but I don’t feel like I can go to the food court to get myself something to eat, because knowing Candi and Heather, they’d ditch me now that they had a plan.
Plus, I didn’t know what time Marissa and her mom would be leaving, and I sure didn’t want to run into them.
So finally I break down and ask, “Could I maybe have a little of that?”
“Could you maybe not talk to me?”
So I just sit there with my stomach grumbling, listening to Heather munch and crunch. Then things go quiet, and pretty soon I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke. So I spy around the divider, and sure enough, she’s smoking, keeping the end of the cigarette out a small slit in the window as she puffs from it, then blows smoke outside through the opening.
When she’s done, she flicks the butt out, then closes the window and sprays cologne around all over the place.
When Candi finally emerges from the bathroom, her face is all done up and she has high heels on. “Are you girls ready?”
“For like an hour,” Heather grumbles.
So we head out to the elevators and down to the first floor. I am starving, so real quick I duck into the little store by the water fountain and buy a box of Double Stuff Oreos and a carton of milk. Then I race to catch up to Heather and her mother because they’d just kept on walking.
I spot them about halfway across the lobby, and since there was no way I was going to leave my stuff locked inside Heather’s hotel room when I don’t have a key, it’s really tempting to put down my skateboard and ride across the huge lobby, but catching up to them on foot is a piece of cake, so I don’t.
After we’ve crossed the lobby, Candi leads us down the escalator and through the little tunnel mall. But it isn’t until we’re outside and Candi pulls over to light up a cigarette that Heather notices I’m eating Oreos and swigging milk. “Why’d you want my food when you had your own?”
“Uh … I just now got these?”
“Yeah, right. Where?”
I feel like saying, I’d tell you but you told me not to talk to you, remember? But I figure why make things worse? So I say, “At that little store by the waterfall.”
“While we were walking?” She sneers at me. “Liar.”
“Heather!” Candi snaps. “Quit with the names.”
“Well, what would you call her? There’s no way she went into a store and bought cookies and milk without us knowing!”
Candi drags on her cigarette and eyes me like, Well?
So I tell her, “I was starving. I hustled.” And because she’s still eyeing me, I add, “You’re in heels. I’m in high-tops. It wasn’t hard.” Then I hold out the box of cookies to Heather. “Want one?”
“No!” Heather snaps. “Don’t even act like my friend, ’cause you’re not!”
I laugh. “It’s a cookie, Heather.”
But she’s right. It’s more than a cookie. I mean, how can you feud when you’re twisting apart Oreos?
It’d be like breaking bread with the enemy.
So I take back the offer, and when Candi grinds the stub of her cigarette into the cement and tells me, “No food in my car,” I start double-stuffing myself, ’cause who knows when I’ll get the next chance to eat. Plus, all of a sudden I’m nervous. I mean, getting into Candi Acosta’s little red sports car is like hitching a ride on a flaming bullet.
What was I getting myself into?
It raced through my mind that I really ought to find some other way to get to the Marriage Bureau, but I didn’t know my way around at all, and from my little two-block walk last night, I had the hunch it would take me all day to get downtown.
I didn’t even know which direction downtown was.
So when we get to Candi’s car and Heather tilts the front seat forward, I crawl in back.
Then Candi fires up the motor and peels out, laying rubber and centrifuging us around turns as she tears out of the parking structure and onto the street.
TWELVE
I just kept quiet in the backseat while Heather tapped the screen of her mother’s phone and gave her mom directions. “No, stay on Tropicana! We have to get on Fifteen North.”
Not having a cell phone at all, I was having a really hard time not looking over the headrest at what she was doing with hers. And the truth is, I was jealous.
Really j
ealous.
And it didn’t take long for me being jealous over a cell phone to turn into reinforced anger at my mother. Pete was right—her life compared to mine was just wrong.
“Get back, loser. I don’t like you breathing down my neck.”
I guess at that moment I was mad enough at my mother that it didn’t register that I’d just been called a loser or, really, who I was sitting behind. Because out of my mouth comes a pathetic little “Sorry.”
“Heather!” Candi snaps. “The names are unnecessary.”
Heather snorts. “You’re right. I was stating the obvious.”
“Heather!”
For some reason this seems to put Heather in a righteously bad mood. She snarls and snaps directions at her mother, and when we get back off the freeway and Candi misses a turn, Heather cries, “That was Clark! Right there!” Then she grumbles, “Great. Now we have to go clear around the block.” And that’s when what’s really bothering her comes out. “I don’t know why we had to take her with us. Why is she even here? We know what to do. We don’t need her!”
Candi downshifts and roars through a yellow light. “Strength in numbers.”
“What?”
“Heather, you throwing another one of your tantrums is not going to convince your father of anything. Both of you being here might.”
“Tantrums? I can’t believe you just said that!” Heather shrieks. “And in front of her.”
“She’s not the one giving me a headache right now,” Candi mutters as she guns it down the street.
“What?”
Now, normally I would have been hanging on every word of this spat, but right then I notice CLARK COUNTY DETENTION CENTER on the huge gray building that we’ve been circling, and out of my little window I see Marissa and her mom and dad getting into their rental car.
At first I can’t believe it’s them, and then I feel like I’m watching them in slo-mo, even though we’re zooming by. Marissa’s dad looks awful. His clothes are a mess, and he seems pretty green around the gills. Like any minute he’s going to bend over and barf. And while Mrs. McKenze’s acting really uptight—a no-nonsense get-in-the-car-I-want-out-of-here kind of uptight—Marissa seems dazed, very pale and sort of stunned.
I want to call out to her. I want to bail out for her. But I’m a prisoner in the back of this blazing bullet and before you know it we’re half a block past them and Candi’s crying, “There it is!” and cutting across traffic and into a big, open, mostly empty parking lot.