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  Yeah, I realized I’d wasted far too much time running surveillance detail on Stacy this summer, and because she wasn’t at the pool, I was just wasting more now. But I also realized that if someone like Doug Le Fleur could talk to her, then I shouldn’t have any problems doing the same, and the only reason I still hadn’t was that I’d been flooding my engines and stalling out over nothing like I always did. Big fucking surprise. I knew my time would come, though, and to make the most of it, I’d taken steps to prepare myself. I’d been practicing my rap on Kathy at the home for the past few months, trying to come up with a smooth line or two, and the more I talked to her, the easier it got, so I figured I was almost ready.

  My only worry now was that I’d have to get in the game sooner than I’d wanted to. Lots of older guys had taken an interest in Stacy over the past few months, crawling out of the woodwork and pushing up on her with all the subtlety and good intentions of sharks in a feeding frenzy. Guys like Razor and his pal Tommy Sharpe, center for the junior-high team last year and the grim, doughy Hardy to the other’s screeching Laurel. Both had cool names but were total dicks. Then there was Lou Patterson, a freshman who’d had vocational school stamped across his oversized forehead since the fourth grade; Hubert Donovan, a sophomore metalhead with a soft chin, a lint mustache, and a one-man garage band with no fans; Michael Corey, this ghostly nonentity of a freshman who was dark-haired and shifty-eyed and just way too fucking creepy to stand a real chance with anyone; and a few others who weren’t worth mentioning. Yeah, real winners. It was getting to the point where if I wanted to talk to Stacy, I’d have to take a number and stand in line like the deli counter in the supermarket.

  But I wasn’t sweating it too much. Everybody knew that chicks totally lost it over bad boys—real ones, not slaphappy jocks, dirtbags, or fakers—and as far as bad boys went, I was the worst one around. And sooner or later that had to start working in my favor.

  My trip to the pool had been a dead end and clocks were ticking all over the damn place. The trail of the crime was growing cold while I still had practically nothing to go on, and any day now Stacy could be swept off her feet by an older guy who wasn’t a total sleazebag. All of a sudden it felt like I had too many things on my plate, each one leading in a different direction, and I knew if I thought too long or too hard about which to do first, I’d just get flustered and hamstrung and wind up doing nothing. Same shit, different day.

  So I jammed the Cruiser’s stick shift into third, eased back on the banana seat, and stepped on it, but I’d only gone a short distance from the pool’s entrance when I saw a browning shrub rustling next to one of the apartment buildings about thirty feet away. I looked more closely in that direction and spotted a small, thin girl with long black bangs, a pink bikini top, and a towel under her arm poorly hidden behind the bushes. She was looking at me, watching. My heart pounded, our eyes locked, and I couldn’t look away, my head turning on a swivel as the Cruiser coasted forward. The shock of it hit home: Stacy Sanders was looking at me. And then the unthinkable happened: she lifted her free hand and waved!

  I felt excited and panicked, but I tried to be cool and wave back anyway. I loosened the grip of my right hand from the handlebars and shot a quick glance in front of me to make sure the way was clear. It wasn’t. The Cruiser was drifting over to the left, toward a car parked at the curb, and it was coming on fast. Suddenly all I could think about was how badly the Cruiser would be scratched, dented, and maybe even busted if I hit that car. I slapped my right hand back down on the handgrip, veered hard left, bunny-hopped the curb, and found myself headed straight for a tree at the edge of a grassy area just beyond the sidewalk.

  There was no time to go around it and nothing else to do. I had to lay the Cruiser down or plow headfirst into the tree trunk. I leaned back, threw all my weight hard to the left, and yanked the handlebars into my chest as I did so. I hit the ground with my shoulder, hip, and knee and bounced and slid through the wet grass while the Cruiser’s back tire whipped forward in a semicircle, the bottom of the rubber tire whacking hard, but safely, against the tree roots. I didn’t take any time to collect myself. I knew I’d saved the Cruiser from serious damage, but I’d also made a total drooling jackass out of myself in front of Stacy Sanders.

  I got up, jumped back on, and got the hell out of there.

  EIGHT

  I was mad at myself. But I was kind of mad at Stacy, too. Why the hell did she have to pick such a goddamn awkward moment to acknowledge my existence? Sure, she’d caught me staring at her like, well, pretty much all the time in class, but it never seemed to have any effect on her before, and she never did or said anything about it. Then again, Stacy didn’t seem to mind much to begin with, and that’s partly what drew me to her. Okay, she also had an ass so tight that you couldn’t pull a strand of dental floss down the middle, and the way she’d started dressing this spring made Playboy centerfolds look bashful and withdrawn. But still, didn’t she know you weren’t supposed to distract people while they were driving? That was one of the most basic principles of road safety, and a good way to get someone killed. And what the hell was she doing behind the bushes anyway, lurking like that? The thought made me nervous, mostly because it led to others. How long had she been watching me? Had she seen me outside the pool before? Had she figured out why I’d been going there?

  As I turned onto the street that led home, my stomach felt unsettled. I was supposed to be the one watching her, and somehow the idea that it could go the other way, too, didn’t sit so well with me. I didn’t like the idea of being dirty all day from wiping out in the grass either, so I wheeled the Cruiser to the back porch and used the hose out there to clean myself off. There was a clump of soil clinging to the edge of the left pedal, so I rinsed that off, too, then I locked the Cruiser up and went in.

  I dropped my backpack on a chair in the kitchen, dried my arms and legs off with a wad of paper towels, and heard the TV well before I went into the living room. I found Neecey curled up on the couch watching MTV in a red top and jean shorts.

  “Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in,” I said.

  “What?” Neecey asked, using the remote to kick up the volume on the TV with one hand while taking a sip from a can of beer with the other.

  I’d seen Neecey drink a beer before when her friends were around, but never alone and never so early. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  It looked like she was taking the first steps down a slippery slope to tragedy, just like we’d learned in health class, because after beer and cigarettes came rotgut alcohol and pot, then whippits, glue sniffing, and acid, and then the really hard stuff like cocaine, heroin, turpentine, Sterno, and bottles of vanilla extract stolen from the houses she’d have to break into to support her habit and survive her miserable life on the streets.

  Yeah, it made me a little bit worried, but I wanted some information from her, so I couldn’t let myself get distracted with giving her a lecture on the perils of peer pressure and teenaged drinking. She’d taken one of Craig’s beers, so I limited myself to telling her that.

  “It’s like no big deal, Genie. It’s just one beer, and it’s summer vacation and all. Besides, there’s way more in the cooler on the porch.”

  She didn’t take the hint, so I had to let it go. I sat down next to her on the sofa and pretended to watch videos for a few minutes, while she pretended I wasn’t there. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that a metal-mouthed pantywaist like Razor had been alone in our house with my sister, while Page and Plant had set the mood, and I still didn’t know what the hell they’d been doing, or why he’d even been here. I wanted some answers, but I realized that I needed to stay a bit calmer than I had last night in the bathroom and use some tact.

  “Neecey”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “For sure, monkey nuts.”

  Great. Now I was gonna have
to hear about that for the rest of my life, too.

  “So, what’s the deal with Razor?”

  “What do you mean, ‘deal’?” She slid a few inches to the left.

  “Well, he was over here, wasn’t he?” I couldn’t have been sweeter if I was coated in honey, and it was making me feel sticky and sick.

  “So? Lots of people come over.”

  “But he’s a guy.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  I ran my palms up and down my thighs to steady myself. Neecey wasn’t one to withhold information. She usually gave straight answers that included all the rank and sweaty details she could think of—even about her time of the month—until I fled the room screaming. I tried again. “Well, the only other guys who’ve been here alone with you are Gary and Darren.”

  “And you and Craig,” she said, piling her hair like spaghetti on the top of her head.

  “C’mon, Neecey, you know what I mean.”

  Neecey stopped what she was doing and glared at me. “So you want to know if I balled him, right?”

  The image of Razor’s bony hips pumping in midair made my skin retch. “No, it’s just—”

  “It’s just what? Jesus Christ, Genie. Like, what do you think I am anyway?”

  A year ago, a question like that never would’ve come up between us. But things had changed a lot since then, or maybe only she had, and I guess that’s partly what I was trying to figure out. I made my voice level and soothing. “I just want to know—”

  “Whatever you want to know, it’s not what you think. So like don’t even worry about it, okay?”

  “How the hell do you know what I think? You’re not letting me finish.”

  She wriggled into the corner of the sofa and squared her shoulders to me. “Well, I already told you last night that I’m not a slut and that there’s like no deal with Razor, so what else is there to know? C’mon, Genie, you’re the genius around here, you tell me.”

  If she was trying to wind me up, it was a stupid move on her part, but it was working. “What else? Okay, well, for starters, how about what the fuck was an assmunch like that doing here in the first place?” So much for tact.

  “Why? Are you jealous?”

  She knew I hated that question more than Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the Ice Capades all rolled into one, so she made sure to ask it each time she started seeing someone new. It was not the answer I was looking for.

  “No, I’m not fucking jealous,” I said. “But Gary and Darren might be when I tell them.”

  “As if,” she scoffed. “Besides, Gary’s way too busy delivering pizzas and saving money to go off to college to care about anything else, and you can like go ahead and tell Darren whatever the hell you want. He’ll just get high and forget all about it. So like sit back down and mellow yourself out or I’ll have to call mom.”

  Empty threat, just like mine. She’d never made that call or told on me in her entire life, but I sat back down anyway. I was getting nowhere. I took a breath, regrouped, then plunged in. “So you didn’t ball him?” I asked.

  “God, Genie, why can’t you ever trust me when I tell you something?”

  “Not a hummer, either?”

  “Ee-ew!”

  “Didn’t even shake hands with the president, then?”

  “Could you like do me a favor and obsess more?”

  I could, but I’d already exhausted my list of dirty deeds, and she’d danced around all of them. The only thing I’d gathered so far was that the moment I’d been fearing had finally arrived. Grilling my sister about her sex life only made it official. Yeah, I was a pervert. But I was already a Peeping Tom and a chicken-choker, so it wasn’t like this great leap or anything.

  “You see,” Neecey went on, “this is why I told you not to worry about it. You never listen to anyone; you just believe like whatever you want to believe and then throw a total conniption. And that’s like completely beat, Genie, because there are all these things I could tell you and want to tell you, but don’t, because I know there isn’t a snowball’s chance you could handle them.”

  Blah, blah, blah; she sounded exactly like mom. “I know.” I yawned. “Everything’s always my fault. But if you and mom stopped treating me like a soft-ass sissy fucking baby all the time and didn’t keep me in the dark about every goddamn thing, then maybe you’d both find out I can handle a hell of a lot more than you think.”

  Neecey frowned at me for a few seconds, as if I’d just insisted, in all seriousness, that I could fly. “Ohmigod, you’re like so right on cue,” she said. “You probably don’t even listen to yourself, do you?” She sat up straight and folded her arms across her chest. “Let’s just drop it, okay? Sure, Razor was over here, you saw him yourself, big fucking whoop, but that’s between him and me. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  Funny, I never said it did. She was clamming up, though, and if I wanted to get anything out of her, I’d have to change tactics—soften her up, hit her from a different direction—the kind of crap my counselors always tried to pull with me. “Know what, Neecey? You’re right. It’s none of my business. I’ll drop it.” Oh yeah, they also taught me how to lie.

  “Cool, thanks, Genie,” she said, flicking through the channels with the remote.

  It was working. I tilted my head to the side, made my eyes all puppy dog, and said, “It’s just, I guess I got upset because I had a few words with Razor at the arcade yesterday, not too long after I’d been at grandma’s and saw what’d happened to the sign, so I wasn’t in the greatest mood when I bumped into him. Then I had a pretty rough time at tryouts and they sent me home early and, bam, he was here when I got back.” Saying it out loud made me realize that Thrash had been right on the money—the timing of it was perfect. “It’s not like I don’t trust you, Neecey,” I went on, “I do. But you see how that could piss me off, right?”

  “What do you mean, ‘a few words’?”

  “Nothing, the same punk bullshit he tries to lay down on everyone under fourteen. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “But he was alone, right? I mean, Tommy wasn’t with him or anything?”

  “Not that I saw,” I said. “But it wasn’t like I was gonna wait around to ask them for their autographs either.”

  Neecey snickered. It was funny all right, but not ha-ha funny. She’d completely skipped my mention of the sign, as if she hadn’t heard me, or as if it wasn’t her grandmother, too. Something seemed off, and I was suddenly glad I hadn’t told her more.

  “There’s no need to get your panties in a bunch, though,” I said. “I’m not afraid of those chumps.”

  “Well, they’re gonna be freshmen in September, and they’re definitely not afraid of you. So just stay away from them.”

  “No worries … as long as they stay away from me.” “No joke, Genie, don’t even talk to them, you know how they are.” Neecey took another mouthful of beer, flipped her hair back, and folded her legs beneath her. “Okay,” she sighed. “I mean, since you told me what was bothering you, and because it’s like no big deal anyway, I might as well tell you. Can you keep a secret?” Bingo. We were back on track. I nodded. “You know Razor’s thinking about quitting football?” “Bullshit.” I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and I wasn’t sure I believed it. The kid was too stupid to qualify for wood shop, sure. But why the hell would he quit the only thing he was good at? “Seriously,” she insisted, “because of Chuck and Easy.” Chuck Freel was the high-school team’s starting quarterback; he was first-team All-County last year as a junior and looked primed to be All-Universe this year as a senior. Ezekiel “Easy” Hightower was Chuck’s go-to receiver and second-team All-County last year as a sophomore, but everybody knew Easy was the best athlete in town by a mile, which accounted for his nickname—it was how he made everything look on the field, easy—and the fact that he was the second-string quarterback. With Chuck and Easy ahead of him, Razor was looking at holding the clipboard at least this year and maybe next. “So he’s thinking about qui
tting instead of riding the pine?” Neecey nodded. “He said he doesn’t want to be a jock anymore now that he’s gonna be in high school, but all his friends are jocks and it isn’t gonna be easy on him if he quits.”

  What a fucking baby. I didn’t give a shit if Razor led a happy and well-adjusted life, but if I wanted her to keep talking, I had to play along. “Is that why he came over, then?”

  “Kind of, yeah. I mean, I don’t know. It’s complicated, Genie. It’s like all fucked up.”

  That’s exactly what Darren had said yesterday, not about Razor, though, but about the sign. “C’mon, Neecey. How complicated can it be? Why doesn’t he just get some new friends?”

  “It’s not that simple, Genie,” Neecey replied. “You of all people should know that.”

  “It’s different with me,” I said. “People don’t like me because I scare them, and I don’t like them back because of it. Don’t ask me why, but people seem to like Razor, so it’s different.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said, “but not everybody in high school likes Razor. He’s kind of a dick and he’s picked on way too many of their little brothers and sisters. Besides, at least a couple people like you. You just need to make more of an effort.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The same old crap to boost my self-esteem. “Who likes me?”