He nods, super excited to have handed over this invaluable piece of evidence.
“So where’s Jiffy Print?” I ask, but Hudson cuts in with, “We saw Captain Evil at the motorcycle shop on Main Street.”
“He was trying on chaps,” Mikey giggles.
I look at Hudson. “Chaps?”
Hudson holds open the screen door, and as we file in, he says, “Leather overpants. They protect against asphalt scrapes better than jeans.”
“They had fringe!” Mikey says. “He tried on a jacket, too. With fringe!”
“Lots of fringe,” Hudson says, giving me a secret roll of the eyes. “Michael and I spent our walk home discussing fringe.”
“It looks like hairy armpits!” Mikey says. Then he blurts, “Captain Evil has hairy armpits!” and totally busts up.
I laugh and tell him, “It’s a good thing you’re getting yourself into superhero shape, ’cause I don’t know if your sister and I can handle Captain Evil by ourselves. Not if he’s gonna start running around with hairy armpits.”
“Yes!” he cries, and he actually jumps a few inches off the ground as he pumps his fist in the air.
“Looks like we’ve got a sidekick,” Marissa whispers as I go to use Hudson’s phone to call Grams. And as I’m dialing, it hits me that six months ago Marissa would have been desperate to get rid of Mikey, but now she seems happy.
Happy and grateful.
So I’m feeling pretty good … and then I talk to Grams.
“Where have you been? You don’t have softball practice already, do you?”
“Uh …”
“Why doesn’t anyone call me to let me know what’s going on? Did Gil find Lana? Are you still in trouble at school? Why did they think you were making crank calls? Were you making crank calls?”
“No! And everything’s fine. I’m at Hudson’s now, and—”
“Why didn’t he call me?”
“We just got here!”
“So they held you after school this whole time? Was your mother there?”
I take a deep breath and say, “You know what? I’ll be right home. Just stop worrying, okay? I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not going to jail.”
She lets out a big breath and says, “Well, that’s a relief.”
“Grams!”
“Well, it is! You have no idea where my mind has traveled these past few hours.”
“Okay, well, you can dock it in Reality Station now. I’m on my way home.”
And I’m just about to hang up when she says, “Oh! Holly called. Apparently, she has news about Casey.”
I put the phone back to my ear. “About Casey? Like what?”
“Do you think she’d tell me? But she did sound quite keyed up, so when you get home, remember to give her a call.”
I hung up and grabbed my stuff, wondering what in the world Holly knew about Casey.
EIGHTEEN
I didn’t wait to get home to call Holly.
Actually, I didn’t call her at all. I went straight to her house.
Well, it’s not a house like you’re used to thinking of. She lives in an apartment over the Pup Parlor, which is a dog-grooming business that her adoptive mom and grandma own. And it turns out I didn’t even have to go up to the apartment. Holly was downstairs, sweeping up dog hair.
“Hey!” she said when I walked in.
It was after five and she was alone, so I jumped right in with, “Grams told me you had some news about Casey.”
She stops sweeping. “He was hanging out by the school. Like, right after school.”
“So … ?”
“So I think he was looking for you.”
I heaved a sigh. “Aw, c’mon.”
“I’m serious! He just had that … that look about him.”
“Holly, please.” All of a sudden I’m so tired that I just want to collapse. This wasn’t “news.” This was my stupid little hopes getting dashed, and I felt like a total idiot for letting any hope creep in in the first place. I plopped on a grooming table and sighed again. “I’m sure he was looking for his sister.”
“But he wouldn’t cut school to—”
“Who says he cut school?”
“They let out forty minutes after we do!”
“So maybe they were on half day or something.”
She eyes me. “Yeah, well, I thought the same thing, so after I couldn’t find you anywhere, I went by the high school, and guess what? Parking lots all full. PE classes out on the fields.…” She starts sweeping again. “He cut school.”
I slap aside the hope that’s trying to worm its way back inside me. “Yeah, well, if he did, it had nothing to do with me. You saw that text.”
“I know. Which is why I didn’t go over and talk to him. But now I wish I had.” She scowls at me. “Because if he wasn’t looking for you, I could have reamed him for being such a jerk to you.” Then she asks, “So you didn’t see him?”
I shake my head. “Long story short, the Vincenator annihilated Marissa’s skateboard in the teachers’ parking lot—”
“What?”
“He ran over it.” I shrug. “Marissa’s fault, but he was a total spitwad about it.”
Holly laughs as she dumps a pile of dog hair into the trash. Then she grins at me and says, “It’s not like she could ride that thing, anyway.”
I laugh, too. “Yeah, I know. But afterward she dragged me some long, stupid back way home because she’s been stalking Danny’s house.”
“She’s been what?”
So I tell her all about that, and when I’m done, she just shakes her head and says, “She needs to get over him already.”
I slide off the grooming table and tell her, “Yeah, and I need to get over Casey, so no more Casey sightings, okay?”
She shrugs and says, “Okaaaay.”
So we say our see-ya-tomorrows, and I head home, jaywalking Broadway, then crossing over to the Highrise, being careful to look like I’m going somewhere else before cutting through the shadows and up the fire escape. And really, I’m kinda dreading getting home and having to explain everything to Grams. It’s not like I have anything to hide from her, but I feel like I’ve spent so much time explaining stuff to other people that I just don’t want to talk about it anymore. Besides, Grams likes to go over the details of things. I can’t just tell her, Mom showed up and sorta bailed me out, and everything looks like it’s gonna be fine.
No way.
I’m going to have to get into every little breath that was taken and every little word that was spoken and every little glance that was given … and I’m just not up to the Granny Inquisition.
But I told her I’d be right home, so home I go.
“Samantha!” Grams says when I slip inside, and she’s sounding really … cheerful. “I just got off the phone with your mother!”
I dump my backpack and skateboard. “And … ?”
“She told me what she did for you at school!”
“Yup,” I say, forcing half a smile, “Lady Lana to the rescue.” I plop into a kitchen chair and ask, “So where is she?”
Grams blinks at me. “Where is she?”
“Yeah. Like, where’s she staying? Is she still in Santa Martina?”
“I … I didn’t think to ask.”
I scowl. “Yeah, and she didn’t volunteer.” I eye her. “So how did Officer Borsch find her? You gave him Casey’s dad’s name?”
She nods.
I shrug. “Well, there you go.”
Grams sits across the table from me and very gently says, “Samantha, look at the good. Your mother went to your school and got you out of a very tight spot.”
“How hard was that? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She frowns at me. “There are people on death row who didn’t do anything wrong. But there they sit, on death row.”
I shake my head and mutter, “Whatever. Yeah, she showed up. Yeah, she was great. Whatever.”
Grams studies me a minute. “Well,” she say
s, standing up, “I think you could be a little more grateful. Give credit where credit is due, that’s what I always say.”
I knew she was right, but I still felt really … disgruntled. I mean, my mother showing up one time doesn’t erase all the times she hasn’t shown up. I’m not just talking about for the times I’ve been in trouble, either. I’m talking about Back to School Night and Open House and parent conferences and … you know, stuff that parents go to because they’re parents.
This was the first time she’d been to William Rose.
Ever.
And knowing her, it would be the last.
Still. As much as I tried to tell myself that one great performance as a mother did not make her a great mother, all through dinner and all through dishes and all through homework, Grams’ words kept spooking around in my head.
Not just the ones about giving my mom credit or about being a little more grateful.
The ones about my not being supportive of her.
About how I refused to watch her stupid soap.
Which, according to Grams, wasn’t so stupid.
As hard as that was to believe.
Anyway, Grams “retired” at seven-thirty, shutting herself in her room with a book and a glass of water. And since I really was wiped out from what seemed like the longest day ever, it was barely nine o’clock when I hit the couch.
Trouble is, as I’m taking off my high-tops, I see the charm that I wear laced to my shoe. It’s a little horseshoe that I got from Casey about six months ago, and it’s always there making me smile, reminding me of how lucky I am to have him in my life.
But seeing it now and facing the cold, hard fact that he’s really out of my life is suddenly too much for me to take. I rip the laces out of my shoe, pull off the charm, and throw it across the apartment. And after I’ve cried my eyes out, I just lie on the couch feeling miserable, thinking about Casey.
I really thought I knew him.
I’d trusted him.
Believed in him.
How could he have given up so easily?
I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. All I could think about was Casey. So I finally got up and went to the kitchen, got myself some graham crackers and milk, and went back to the couch.
And then I just sat there, eating and staring straight ahead at the little black screen of our TV, thinking about Casey.
Eventually, my eyes wandered down to the stack of videotapes in the TV stand. They were all labeled: Lords 1, Lords 2, Lords 3 …
There was a Lords 24.
And I don’t know—I guess anything was better than thinking about Casey, so I put in Lords 1. I figured if that didn’t put me to sleep, nothing would.
And it should have. It was totally lame. The cheesy music between scenes, the overdramatic acting, the phony English accents, the swooshing of dresses, the awkward cliff-hangers … it was all so over-the-top and stupid. The Lords of Willow Heights is like a retro-vampire soap without the vampires, only there’s a normal world in the valley below where one of the “lords” works as an emergency room doctor. I don’t know what it’s trying to be.
I started fast-forwarding through all the scenes my mom wasn’t in, only that made it so I didn’t understand the story line. So I let the tape run, and eventually it did the trick. When my alarm went off in the morning, the remote was still in my hand, Dorito was sleeping on my head, and the tape had popped out, leaving the TV buzzing static.
“Ohhhh,” I groaned, feeling totally wiped out.
It crossed my mind that I should just stay home from school, but then Grams started clanging around in the kitchen, and Holly called to see if I wanted to ride to school together—something we hadn’t done all year.
So I took a quick shower, gobbled some oatmeal, and snuck out of the building and across the street to the Pup Parlor, where I met up with Holly.
It would have been a whole lot safer to just stay home.
NINETEEN
Holly does know how to ride a skateboard, even though she hasn’t had hers all that long. In some ways, she’s a lot more like me than Marissa. She’s tough. She’s had to scrape through life even more than I have and, as Hudson says, she’s not afraid to “jump into the fray.”
But I’ve known Marissa since the third grade, and I’ve only known Holly about a year, and there’s something about having history with a person that sort of glues you together.
And it’s not just that I’ve known Marissa a long time, it’s that we’ve been sharing secrets and getting in and out of trouble together for as long as I can remember. I mean, there are people that I’ve known for just as long, but there’s no glue between us because we’ve barely even talked for that whole time. Oh, maybe there’s a drop of glue here and a drop of glue there—like we can say to each other, Hey, do you remember that time back in fourth grade when Benny Salizar barfed on the teacher’s desk? Or, Hey, do you remember gator taters? ’Cause that was everyone’s favorite thing in our elementary school cafeteria. But after that, there’s no glue. Your conversation just sort of splits apart, and you go back to being separate people in parallel universes traveling through the same slice of history.
So Marissa and I have some serious glue—long, wide ribbons of it that make us stick together. But what Holly and I have is like little squirts of superglue. We’ve been through some really heavy stuff—stuff that we never talk about anymore but is still always there, holding us close.
And we might have a better bond of, you know, regular glue if we rode to school together every day. It would make total sense to do—we live across the street from each other, and we both ride skateboards. But I’m always running late, and it drives Holly crazy. She’s, like, punctual and organized and disciplined, where I tend to scramble around, or forget things, or get sidetracked. And we usually don’t ride together after school ’cause Holly volunteers at the Humane Society, and that’s in a different direction.
Anyway, as usual, I got to Holly’s late, only this time her solution to that was to say, “Race ya!”
Well, she knew I couldn’t turn that down. I laughed and said, “You’re on!”
She kept up with me along Broadway where the sidewalk segments were long and straight. But when we turned down a side street, there were more alleyways and intersections, and since she doesn’t hop curbs yet, I started to get a pretty good lead on her.
Still, every time I checked over my shoulder, there she was, pumping like mad to close the gap.
About a block and a half from school, I let up a little, just to make it fair. And since there was no one in front of me, I was cruising along, watching her over my shoulder, when all of a sudden, THWACK, something rams hard against my shoulder, and I go sprawling across cement.
You know those stars that circle over the heads of cartoon characters when they get clobbered? Well, I saw them. And I swear I heard little birds chirping, and the whole world spun for a few seconds.
And then, through the spinning and the stars and the tweeting birds, I hear a voice.
“You should watch where you’re going, loser!”
And suddenly a devil is floating in the little spinning stars above me.
A devil named Heather.
And on either side of her, little devilettes, Tenille and Monet.
“I didn’t touch your phone!” I spit out, fighting back the tweeting birds and the swirling stars.
“This isn’t about my phone!” she screeches at me. “This is about your mother stealing my father!”
Her leg cocks back to kick me, only all of a sudden she goes staggering to the side. “You weasel!” Holly shouts as she shoves her clear of me. “You think you can just hide behind a fence and tackle people?”
“Don’t touch me, Trash Digger!” Heather shouts at her.
It wasn’t the first time Heather had called Holly Trash Digger.
She’d also called her Ugly Orphan.
And Homeless Hag.
And even though Holly had always just walked a
way before, suddenly she’s had enough. She grabs Heather by her shirt, and then wham, she buries her fist in Heather’s stomach so deep it looks like it might come out the other side.
Then she just lets go.
Heather doubles up and falls to her knees. “Help me!” she gasps at Tenille and Monet.
Now, all of us know that this Help me does not mean Help me get to my feet or Help, I need air or Please, I think I’m going to die. It means GET THEM.
And since by now I’m back on my feet, there’s no way Tenille and Monet are going to take us on.
“Hey,” Tenille says to us, her hands in the air like someone said, Stick ’em up. “I was just walking to school.”
“Me too!” Monet eeks out, and they both scurry away.
Holly and I pick up our skateboards, but instead of just walking away, I squat down in front of Heather and say, “You think I want my mom with your dad? You think it’s my fault they got together? Think again, sister.” I stand up. “Or should I say stepsister.”
And then we walk away.
In a strange way I felt sorry for Heather. I mean, talk about being the last one to know. Obviously, she had just found out. And when I’d said “stepsister” to her, I could see the horror in her eyes. Like she hadn’t even known long enough to think through what my mom and her dad getting together might mean. And the more I thought about it, the more I had to shake my head over the whole new dimension of this.
For the first time ever, Heather and I agreed on something—neither of us wanted her dad with my mom. And I hate to admit it, but it did cross my mind that Heather and I could maybe team up and find some way to break up our parents.
We would be unstoppable.
But I immediately got the creeps and was totally revolted at myself for going there, even if it was only in my mind.
My hands and shoulder were scraped up and bleeding, so in the time we had before the bell rang, Holly helped me clean up in the bathroom. There was blood blotched around on my clothes, and there was a hole in my T-shirt sleeve from where I’d skidded across the sidewalk.
“That witch,” Holly muttered as she soaked off the blood on my shoulder with a paper towel.
I pulled a face ’cause it felt like she was scraping rocks out of my arm. “It would have been worse if you hadn’t stopped her.”