Both hands pressed to my mouth, I tried very hard not to panic. I knew the airport up, down, and sideways, and there were no other jobs.
On the bright side, I was all set to graduate from high school in a month and a half. I was one step ahead of my mom. And I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Two steps ahead of my mom. And I had a commercial pilot’s license.
With no paid experience as a commercial pilot. And my only solid reference was dead.
I longed for Molly. Even if I’d had a phone, I wouldn’t have called her. I refused to be that needy friend. I mean, I was that needy friend, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to whine on the phone to her and make it worse. Sometimes she dropped by, though, and took me for a drive. I listened to her talk about her problems, and maybe after a while, when there was no way I could be accused of taking and taking and taking without giving, I might mention one of my problems. That wasn’t happening tonight. She and her rich friends were at a beginning-of-spring-break concert. Even if I’d been able to afford it, I wouldn’t have gone. Her friends didn’t like me.
Molly or no Molly, moping would do me no good. The thing that bothered me most about my mom was that every time something went wrong, she went through the same motions, expecting different results. I needed to think out of the box.
But my mind was empty of ideas, my stomach empty to the point of nausea. For breakfast I’d eaten a pastry from the machine in the airport break room. For lunch I’d had a pack of crackers. In the back of my mind I’d been thinking Mark would have returned from the beach when I got here. But if he did show up soon, I wouldn’t ask him to drive me to the grocery store now. Not after what Grayson had told me. And the closest convenience store was a two-mile walk, which hadn’t seemed so bad on other days but loomed tonight like the distance to China.
I opened every kitchen cabinet and found salt, cayenne pepper, and one beef jerky stick that had expired two years ago. It must have come with us the last time we moved. That was pretty bad, when your beef jerky expired, because it was manufactured to last through the apocalypse. The refrigerator held ketchup, mayo, and one unopened case of beer, which Mark had deposited when he’d come in late last night.
I opted for a beer. I sat with it on the couch, in the dip hollowed out in the cushion by one of my mom’s weightier boyfriends, and stared at the wall where the latest huge high-def miracle of a TV had been until earlier this week. My first-, second-, and third-grade photos stared back at me.
The beer smelled like vinegar and tasted like dirt. I felt a lot better after I drank it, so I had another.
I was on my third beer and feeling completely rejuvenated when Mark’s truck turned from the highway onto the gravel road through the trailer park. I didn’t have superhuman hearing. The trailer walls were thin and let in everything. I knew it was him by his favorite country band blaring from the open windows. My gaze shifted from my school photos on the wall to Mark’s pile of shit on the floor.
Suddenly I was seeing it through Grayson’s eyes, or Molly’s. There was a reason I never let Molly in the trailer.
I didn’t want Mark in here with me either. But he lived here. The den/kitchen walls collapsed around me like the shrink wrap Mr. Hall had used to package gadgets and tools for storage.
I jumped up and jerked open the door. The sun was low behind the trees, but the sky was still bright compared with the murky trailer. I took my shades from the neck of my T-shirt and put them on, then started down the stairs.
I’d never drunk much. I didn’t want to flow into the same crowded pool as all the people around me and drown. Two and a half beers was quite a bit for me—obviously, or I wouldn’t have forgotten I was still holding one—and I worried about my balance as I descended the wobbly cement blocks. I felt my face color at how Grayson would stare in revulsion at a cement-block staircase outside a mobile home.
Then I felt a new wave of embarrassment that I was obsessing about Grayson. Mark would see my flushed face, think I was even drunker than I was, maybe try to take advantage of me. I was very thankful I was wearing sunglasses and he wouldn’t be able to see my eyes.
The music came closer and closer, inciting the pit bull to riot, until Mark’s enormous pickup truck with roll bars and fog lights weaved across the gravel road and stopped right in front of me. A couple of bare-chested guys from school waved to me from the payload. I waved back halfheartedly.
Mark slid out of the driver’s seat. His friend Patrick was in the passenger side. Patrick didn’t fit in with these guys. He was wearing a shirt, for one thing, and the shirt still had both its sleeves. Sometimes I wondered what he was hanging around Mark for. Pot was a good guess.
A girl sat in the middle. Her hair was bleached blond and her roots were black. Not every girl looked good as a blonde. I had learned this lesson from observing my mother. The girl wore one of Mark’s plaid shirts, tied beneath her big boobs in a tiny bikini. Judging from what I’d seen at school before Mark graduated, she fit his usual taste in girlfriends. Which was not a compliment. And which did not say a lot for me, either.
“Leah!” he exclaimed, rounding the hood of the truck, staggering a little. I shouldn’t have worried he would notice how soused I was. He was drunker than me. He slurred, “What are you doing home?”
His use of the word home made me cringe. His question made me mad too. “This is when I always get off work,” I said. He would have known this if he didn’t stay out so late partying every night.
But I looked past him at the girl in the front seat. She’d scooted away from Patrick now that she had more room. Which meant she wasn’t with Patrick. And Mark hadn’t wanted me to see her. He’d thought I would be gone.
Shocker: I didn’t care. Things had not been great between Mark and me, but I was shocked at how relieved I felt to see this girl wearing his shirt. A few girls at school had found out he was staying with me. They’d told me how lucky I was that my mom let my boyfriend stay with us. They had no idea.
Mark staying with me was not fun. It felt crowded. I’d dreaded walking home from the airport at night. I’d wanted him to drive me to get dinner tonight, because I was hungry, but also because that was an excuse not to get too friendly again in the long expanse of time before bed. He went out partying but he always came back. He never went away completely.
Strangest of all, although Grayson had not come through the chain-link fence to the trailer park and likely never would, his gaze had followed me. I was seeing everything through his eyes now. I had no chance with a boy like Grayson, but he had ruined Mark for me.
Mark was staring at the can in my hand. “You didn’t get into my beer, did you? I just bought it last night. That’s what we stopped by for.”
This rubbed me the wrong way, probably because there was nothing else in the fridge. “You told my mom when you moved in that you would help with rent. You haven’t helped with shit, so I took three beers and we’ll call it even.” My angry words made me even angrier and gave me the courage to add, “I want you to move out.”
“What?” Mark glanced over my shoulder at the girl in the truck, then turned back to me. “Why?” He was very drunk. There was no more denial. He started backpedaling immediately. “Aw, Leah, c’mere.” He pulled me into a hug.
I lingered in his arms for a moment, relaxing with my cheek on his hot, sunburned shoulder. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed a hug.
The girl’s cackle rose above the country music and the noise of the idling truck.
I pulled away. “I want you to move out,” I repeated.
“Your mom said I could move in!”
“My mom isn’t here.”
He rolled his eyes. “Is this about flying? You think I was lying because we haven’t talked about it again. I’m going to take you up.”
Would I let him continue to stay with me if he promised I could still have the crop-dusting job? I wasn’t sure. “When?” I pressed him.
He frowned at me. “When, what?”
“When are you
taking me up? Last week you said tomorrow.”
He shook his head, then blinked a few times as if shaking his head had disoriented him. “Tomorrow’s not good.”
“Tuesday, then,” I insisted.
“Tuesday’s not good either. Later in the week, though.” He put his hand on my arm. “I can tell you’re mad, and you’ve had a few.” He glanced at the beer can in my hand again. “I’ll spend the night with Patrick”—by which he meant his new girlfriend—“and you and I can talk about this tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “We will not talk about this tomorrow. You can’t go with that skank ho and expect to stay here. Period.”
He gaped at me, outraged. “I’ve been staying here a whole week, Leah, and you haven’t given it up. Most girls understand that if they don’t want to give it up, that’s fine, but their man is going to get it somewhere else.”
I put my chin in my hand and tapped my finger like he was a wildcat and I was a biologist truly perplexed by his behavior. “No,” I murmured, “I did not understand that. Sorry.”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the truck. “I’m telling you, she doesn’t mean anything. She was just for today.”
“How does that make it better?” I didn’t know why I was asking. The idea that a man was having a one-night stand rather than an affair made it all better for some women, my mother included.
“Leah, please.” He stepped closer. I shouldn’t have looked into his dark eyes, but I did. They almost melted me. The hot breeze teased a lock of dark hair back and forth across his tanned forehead as he said, “I’ve wanted to get with you for so long. Back when we were kids and we rode the bus together, I used to dream about you. You wouldn’t give me the time of day. I’m so stoked we’re together now. I don’t want to lose you over something like this.” His hand touched mine. “Okay?”
His lashes were long. His eyes were warm. He looked adorable when he coaxed me. It would be so easy to tell him he could stay. He would want to wrap up his day with his friends (and that girl), and then he would come home to me.
Which sounded exactly like my mother’s life in miniature. Her boyfriend didn’t mean it when he screwed that other woman. It wouldn’t happen again. Sure.
“No,” I said. “Get out.” I was shouting now, and that was a page out of my mother’s life too, getting in a screaming fight with a man outside my trailer while a pickup idled in the dirt yard. There was no way out for me, whatever I did. The alcohol was kicking in for real now. The sky between the palms turned a funny color.
“Baby,” Mark growled, sliding his hand across my shoulders.
I shoved him away. “Why can’t people take no for an answer today? Get your stuff and go on. Anything you leave, I’m throwing in the garbage.” I couldn’t do this, of course. It was illegal. My mom and I had been evicted enough times that I knew the law.
Mark might have known the law too, but the wheels turned slowly behind his eyes. Even if I didn’t throw away his stuff, I might go through it now that I was angry, and there was something in it he didn’t want me to find, weed or worse.
“Fine.” He stomped across the yard toward the trailer. A cloud of dirt billowed around his feet. He mounted the cement blocks two at a time. The cloud of dirt reached me, and I turned away to avoid inhaling it.
“Leah,” Patrick called over the music and the engine noise and the pit bull. He crooked his finger at me. I walked over and leaned against the passenger door, peering at the girl, mildly curious. She’d pasted a silhouette above her left breast before she spent her day in the sun. Now she’d peeled it away to reveal a white Playboy bunny in the middle of her tan.
“What’s the holdup?” Patrick asked me.
“I’m kicking Mark out.”
Patrick’s eyebrows shot up. Not one eyebrow, like Grayson’s expression of skepticism. Both eyebrows. “What for?”
I switched into trailer park voice. Polite airport voice was gone now. The Admiral would not recognize me. “Mark brought this whore here and thought I wouldn’t find out he’s doing her. He can’t stay here. The trailer is set to self-destruct when it senses an IQ that low.” This wasn’t true, considering some of my mom’s boyfriends.
The girl leaned toward the window. “What did you call me?”
I was about to clarify it for her when Patrick interrupted us. “Ladies, ladies.” Normally boys like Patrick encouraged a good catfight, but he was sitting between us and was probably scared of getting scratched. To change the subject, he asked me, “Where’s the beer?” His eyes slid to the can in my hand. “Did you drink it all?”
I set my sunglasses on top of my head and looked him straight in the eye. “If you ever mention that beer to me again, I will retrieve it from its supersecret hiding place and shove the entire case, can by can, up your ass.”
Mark kicked the door of the trailer open so hard that it banged against the metal wall. He started down the cement blocks with the case of beer on his shoulder, the garbage bags of his stuff in the other hand, and the rifles underneath his arm.
Patrick leaned nearer, as if he had a secret. I bent my head to hear him, so close now that the breeze blew my curls across his cheek.
“Mark really likes you,” Patrick said conspiratorially.
“He has a funny way of showing it,” I said in the same tone, mocking him.
“I mean,” Patrick whispered, “he may not be that easy to get rid of.”
“Don’t even talk to her.” Mark handed the case of beer to one of the boys in the payload, then swung the trash bags over the side without warning the other guy to move first. “Hey,” the guy protested. He drunkenly slid off his seat on the wheel well.
Mark pointed at me. “You can kiss that job with my uncle good-bye.”
I shrugged. I wholeheartedly agreed with Grayson now. Probably there had never been a job. Even if there had been a position open, Mark wouldn’t have the power to give it and take it away. His mother had kicked him out and his uncle hadn’t taken him in. That’s how close Mark and his family were. Funny that I had ever convinced myself this summer job was waiting for me, just by wanting it so badly.
He rounded the back of the truck. As he slid behind the steering wheel, the girl called across Patrick to me, “Serves you right. You need to learn how to treat a man.”
“If I ever see you again,” I told her, “I will beat you like a dog.” I was no more violent or tough than the next person, but talking big scared most people away as effectively as smacking them. I had learned this through trial and error at school. I thought I’d made my point, because her eyes widened at me before she remembered to scowl.
Patrick just winked at me, though. Then the engine revved. The music rose to a deafening level even for a trailer park. The truck whipped forward, then back, then forward, then back, in a drunken, poorly executed more-than-three-point turn. It had ground up enough dust to coat me before it finally sped down the narrow road through the trees, the pit bull barking at its highest pitch to sound the alarm.
I crossed the bare dirt and settled in a plastic chair near my bedroom window, under the tallest palm. There were two chairs. A stump between them served as a table. On this stylish side table was a small margarine tub filled with cigarette butts and rainwater. I never would have let this mess stay here if I’d known my mother or Mark had made it. I didn’t hang out in the yard, because of the pit bull.
But it didn’t bother me as much as it normally would have. I popped my neck, shook out my shoulders, took a long swig of delicious cheap-ass beer, and relaxed into the plastic chair. I gazed at my home of corrugated metal. It had been parked here so long that palmettos grew out from under it, and it was coated in a thin green film of moss or lichen or something. Whatever it was, it grew a lot better on the trailer than it did in the dirt yard. I listened to the music of the pit bull. I set my beer down on the stump, crossed my legs like I was having a tea party, and pondered the fact that the boys I knew had everything and I had nothing.
; An airplane roared overhead, one of Mr. Hall’s Pipers. I looked up just in time to see the yellow one pass across a patch of blue sky between the trees. Grayson must be flying, or Alec, or some new dope they’d hired instead of me. An advertising banner stretched way behind the plane, but I couldn’t read what it said from underneath.
As the engine noise faded, the pit bull’s barking filled the empty space. The dog had reason this time. Someone knocked on the door of the pit bull’s trailer. And then Grayson was yelling over the barks, asking the owner where Leah Jones lived.
I waited for the fight-or-flight adrenaline spike to pass. Better to sit tight than to attempt an escape into the trailer. If Grayson turned, he might see my movement through the palm fronds and catch me more quickly. Even if I did make it through the door unseen, he would find me eventually. And when I opened the door, he would see inside. Outside was bad enough.
So I eased my sunglasses from my hair back down to cover my eyes, held my breath, and felt thankful Grayson had missed Mark and his crew by several minutes. Grayson hadn’t even located me yet, but I squirmed in his sights.
Maybe he wouldn’t find me after all, I began to think as he gave up on the pit bull owner and knocked on the door of another trailer. Good luck with that. The trailer park wasn’t known for its block parties or ice cream socials. As residents of three and a half years, my mom and I were some of the longer-term neighbors, yet I doubted a single person here knew my name, except the boys I was acquainted with through long years of hoping they would leave me alone on the bus. It was spring break, so they would be at the beach. If I sat here quietly, maybe Grayson would knock on a few more doors, give up, and go away.
But from our talk a few hours before, I knew Grayson wanted me to work for him. He wanted it badly for some reason. He wouldn’t go away until I talked him out of it. In the past year, I’d had a run-in with Ben Reynolds when he got off the bus with me, followed me home, and wouldn’t go away. I hadn’t let him in the door, so he’d found a heavy branch in the woods and walked around the trailer, banging the club against the metal walls as he went, around and around until I thought I would go insane. I’d had no way to call for help. My mom had let the bill go unpaid way too many times for us to have a phone.