Текст книги "Such a Rush"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

eighteen

Afterward he lay on top of me. His cheek pressed against my neck, but I didn’t want him to move. With all of him pinning me, I felt oddly comfortable. I only tried to slow my panting, quiet my breathing, to the point that I could hear he was breathing hard too.

He propped himself up on his elbows, blinking at me, his long, blond eyelashes and the edges of his blond hair lit only by the streetlight through the tiny window. “God, I’m sorry, Leah,” he whispered. “I was crushing you.”

“Maybe a little,” I said.

He smiled at me then, not an embarrassed smile, and that put me at ease. He had a look in his eyes I recognized from times when he’d pulled a prank on Mr. Hall, or he’d landed after a series of touch-and-go’s when he was first learning to fly. Unlike a lot of people, he wasn’t drained by a rush of adrenaline. His expression said, I want to go again.

I laughed. After that adrenaline rush of a flight, I’d come back to Earth now. But just like with flying, I was already looking forward to the next time too.

He couldn’t, at least not yet. Boys had to recover first. I knew that much from TV and dirty talk on the school bus. He reached to my bedside table and fumbled with the alarm clock. The radio shut off for the first time since he brought me back from the airport basement two nights before. Normally silence would have descended on the room like a shroud. With Grayson here, the quiet was bearable. Even nice. I didn’t mind the idea of a long, empty space.

He rolled to his side and settled on one elbow with his chin in his hand, watching me. “This is going to be kind of a downer after that, but I want you to know something. When we were at Molly’s café the night of the party, you said something that got me thinking. You said sometimes people have problems, and they get stuck.” He raised his eyebrows, asking if I remembered.

I nodded. I’d been talking about my mom.

“That’s exactly how I’ve felt for the past two months,” he said, “since my dad died. No, for the past three months, since Jake died. There have been moments—actually, a lot of moments—when I’ve thought I’ll never be happy again. But I’m happy right now. You make me happy.”

“Good,” I said, smoothing a hand across his bare chest and trying to act natural. It was Grayson, I kept telling myself, Grayson whom I’d loved from afar for so long. But he was different in the flesh. This man’s body would take a lot of getting used to.

“And whenever you and I are talking—” he went on.

“—or doin’ it,” I broke in, because this was getting so heavy.

He laughed. “Or doin’ it,” he agreed, but then his smile faded. “I’m serious.”

“I know,” I said, feeling like the worst friend, the worst person. I’d thought making a joke would help him out of this, but he wasn’t ready to go yet.

“When I’m with you,” he began again, “it’s like… I still don’t feel normal. But I can see normal at twelve o’clock on the horizon.” He pointed past me, through the windshield of an imaginary airplane. “At least I know normal is still out there. I’ve spent the last three months not sure of that at all.”

On a sigh he brought up his hand and used one long finger to brush a dark curl away from my face. With the saddest look in his eyes, he said, “A girl needs to be held right now, and comforted, and told that everything is going to be okay. I’m sorry I can’t do that for you. I don’t have any of that left.”

“I have a little,” I said, “and I’ll lend it to you.”

He kissed my lips twice more, wrapped his arms around me, and nestled his head under my chin. I worked my fingers through his blond curls. They sprang up and tickled my cheek.

He said low, “One down, one to go.”

I laughed.

“I didn’t want you to bed down for the night and get comfortable and think we were done.”

“Thanks for warning me. That is so sexy.” There really was nothing about the sex we’d just had that was sexy at all, except Grayson himself. The air conditioner was running, but the pit bull was faintly audible over the roar. My mom had bought the comforter on my bed at a thrift store when I was seven. It depicted a cartoon girl who hadn’t been on TV in two decades.

And on the wall opposite from my pink bed, where I could see it first thing every morning, was a poster of US Airways flight 5149. Captain Sullenberger had taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City one January afternoon, his Airbus headed for Charlotte, North Carolina. A flock of geese hanging around the runway flew into his plane and took out both engines. He managed to land perfectly in the Hudson River that ran along Manhattan Island. The poster was an iconic photo of the plane floating in the river, with the skyline of Manhattan behind it. All 155 passengers and crew stood precariously on wings, in business shirts rather than overcoats on the frigid winter afternoon, surrounded by icy water, waiting for boats to take them back to the wharf for hot chocolate. Afterward, Captain Sullenberger was acclaimed as a hero. He wrote a book and did the talk show circuit. And then it all became a joke. Movies made fun of the crash and said people in New York were so protective of this captain’s heroic status, but modern automation meant those planes flew themselves.

We pilots knew Captain Sullenberger was a bad-ass. He could have crash-landed that plane and taken out half of Manhattan. But he kept calm, and the outcome was perfect.

Grayson’s eyes had fallen on the poster too. “Hey, where’d you get that?” He nodded toward the poster. “My dad—”

“—had a poster like that,” I interrupted him. “I know. It’s his. After he died, I used the key the airport office had for your hangar and I took it, but that’s all I took, ever. I’d gotten used to seeing it every day and I just wanted that one thing to remember him.”

I must have sounded really strange, because he propped himself up on both elbows to look at me. “Leah, it’s okay.” He sank down with his chin on his crossed arms, watching me. “He’s a good hero to have.”

I wondered whether he meant Captain Sullenberger or his dad. As my heart raced, dragging my mind with it, I decided it was best to come clean before I got caught again. “The poster is the only thing I took, but I already had this.”

I rolled away from him and felt around on my bedside table for The Right Stuff. The paperback had been well worn, with a cracked white spine and missing corners, when Mr. Hall loaned it to me years ago. I’d read it a million times. When the cover had come off, I’d secured it to the book with a rubber band from the airport office. I handed the frayed bundle over to Grayson.

“Oh!” he said through a laugh, recognizing the book. He removed the rubber band and opened the front cover, setting it next to the book.

At the top of the inside cover, Mr. Hall had written Brian Hall. His name was crossed out, and underneath it, in a different handwriting, was Jake Hall. This too was crossed out. A third handwriting proclaimed, Alec Hall. A fourth, by far the messiest, claimed the book for Grayson Hall. Then Alec Hall again. The last Grayson Hall was the only name in the column that didn’t have a line through it.

Grayson touched the cover in the space between Brian Hall and Jake Hall, then swept his fingertip down the page. “Dad tried so hard to get us to read it. When Jake finally did and told Alec and me how good it was, we fought over it. I guess buying your own copy of a book doesn’t occur to you when you’re twelve.” He bit his lip.

And then, without moving his head, he brought his eyes up to meet mine. His look was hard to read. I’d known him for years, yet I’d had so little face time with him that his expressions were practically a stranger’s. The basic look of chagrin I recognized. The subtleties were lost on me. I couldn’t tell whether he was embarrassed that he’d accidentally accused me of freeloading, or he was accusing me on purpose.

And asking for his book back.

“You should have it,” I said quickly.

Now his lips parted in surprise. “No! Of course not. You should have it. You were the last one to…”

He took a breath, and so did I. Neither of us wanted to delve into Mr. Hall’s death right now. That much I understood about Grayson. We’d shared something that had to do with him and me, not Mr. Hall, not Alec, not Jake, just the two of us. We wanted to enjoy the afterglow and we were trying our best to bond, but it was difficult with so many people between us, even though most of them were ghosts.

He exhaled, and I did too.

“We’re very tense,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He chuckled and touched my lips. “We weren’t tense a few minutes ago.”

I smiled. His finger followed the curve of my mouth. I watched him watching me. We’d shared tender moments like this in the past few days, but I had difficulty shaking the image of the distant Grayson I was used to. His fingertip on my cheek was warm and welcome but strange, because I knew his mood wouldn’t last.

But if I hadn’t understood his background, I would have thought he was a carefree eighteen-year-old with tender feelings for his girlfriend, experienced enough with sex to know what he was doing, inexperienced enough to act thrilled. His hand moved into my hair. Stroking my curls, he smiled as he said, “It’s cool that I’ve scored a pilot.”

I laughed, relieved at the joke. “I think so too.”

He wound a curl around his finger, then unwound it, watching my hair rather than looking into my eyes. And sure enough, his chuckle faded into a frown. His blond brows knitted. He seemed to be concentrating on the puzzle of my hair. I knew he was sliding away from me already. Now the unexpected sweetness that made him Grayson was fading, and he seemed like any other guy out there. Like Mark.

“If we hadn’t done it tonight, would you want another girl on the side?” I asked.

I had his attention again. He untangled his finger from my hair and looked me in the eyes. “Like, if you and I were dating but weren’t having sex, would I want a second girlfriend to have sex with?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved that he got it.

“No,” he said angrily. “Would you do that to me?”

“Of course not,” I said self-righteously. I’d never really thought about it before, but I was way more loyal than was good for me.

“Then why did you think it was okay for Mark to do that to you?”

I gaped at him for a moment, speechless with astonishment. When I found my voice, I asked, “How’d you know I was talking about Mark?”

“I understand Mark pretty well,” he grumbled. “I was headed down that path, only thinking about myself, when I wrecked the Piper. Something like that makes you rethink what you value and what you want. I wish it had happened to me a few years sooner, when I had more than a few weeks left with my brother and my dad.”

He tapped my lips with his fingertip. “I know Mark. I know what he would do just to get a rise out of you. I want you to promise me that if you and I ever break up, you won’t go back to him.”

I sucked in a long breath around his finger, trying not to show how surprised and overwhelmed I was at the idea that Grayson and I were a couple now. If we decided not to be anymore, we would have to go through the formality of breaking up.

Like any normal girlfriend and boyfriend.

My arms and face tingled with the rush.

Then I had to say on a sigh, “I can’t make you that promise, Grayson. It’s not that I’m planning to run back to Mark. But I determine what’s best for me. I’m not making promises to other people about that. I’ve done that only once.”

His eyes searched mine. “Even if it’s for your own good?”

“Your dad earned the right to tell me that.”

Grayson nodded, understanding. “You’re right. I haven’t. I just… worry about you.” His fingertip moved down my cheek to trace the line of my jaw. He seemed so serious, heavy with responsibility, utterly unlike the crazy boy I’d crushed on years ago. I knew the old Grayson was in there—I’d seen him when he kissed me, when we made love—and I hoped he didn’t count me as one more weighty responsibility that killed his spirit.

“Are you sorry that we were together?” I whispered.

His whole face changed like an idea was slowly dawning on him. He cradled my cheek in his palm. “Leah, of course not.”

“You seem sorry,” I said, feeling small again. I’d thought I didn’t need his comfort. I’d thought I could comfort him. But out of nowhere, here was that waiflike girl he’d said would want to be held, a girl who’d taken what we’d done too seriously and needed him to pretend it had meant something.

“Hey. I told you. Lately my brain isn’t working right. I feel one thing, but I act a different way and it surprises me. I don’t know where my words are coming from half the time. But you…” He kissed my cheek. “Gosh…” He kissed my lips, then backed away to look at me again. “You know what? Let me show you how I feel.”

I gasped as he trailed kisses down my cheek, down my neck, across my breast and farther down, and then he showed me.

He crawled across the bed until he hung off the side. Dragging his shorts from the floor, he found his phone in the pocket. “I’m starving. Pizza?”

“Great. My treat.”

He looked around at me and opened his mouth. And I took a breath to explain my situation. My refrigerator was empty and I always ate like it was my last meal because I had no phone and no car to get food, not because I had no money.

He closed his mouth and swallowed his protest, already flipping through search screens on his phone.

I rolled closer and watched over his shoulder. “Not that one. They don’t deliver to this trailer park because they’ve had so many problems out here.”

He gaped at me again. “What do you mean, they—”

I chopped my hand across my throat.

He closed his mouth and showed me the screen for a different pizza place.

“Perfect,” I said.

An hour later, we were full of pizza, and I loved him a little more. I’d figured things would get awkward when we sat down on the pitted couch to eat with no TV in front of us. What were we supposed to do for entertainment, stare at my second-grade photo?

But we talked airplanes. He told me about his dad taking him and Alec and Jake to Sun and Fun in central Florida, to which everybody flew their planes instead of driving, and the biggest fly-in in all of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he’d seen his first Harrier. He said the noise of a Harrier put the Chinook to shame. I’d never heard a Harrier.

We put away the pizza, he stepped into the bathroom, and I snuggled back into bed. I felt comfortable with him here. The only person who’d ever been in my bedroom, besides me and my mom, was Mark—and only that first night, when I thought we were going to do it and he fell asleep instead.

My mom had issued the invitation for him to live here, and when he passed out drunk, it was like she’d invited her life to become my life and lie useless beside me in my bed, the most private of spaces, and I wasn’t allowed to get rid of it. Most nights after that when he’d stayed here, he’d gone out with his friends to get plastered, and I’d locked myself in my room. I knew from experience with the trailer that he could easily have kicked the door in if he’d wanted to badly enough, but he’d been too drunk to care that deeply. He’d only knocked on the door, then yelled threats at me, then passed out on the couch in the den. I’d stretched to take up both sides of my bed, relieved.

Funny how my feelings about Mark and Grayson were night and day. I’d thought I liked Mark at first. I’d tried hard to like him, but I just couldn’t. I’d never wanted to like Grayson. I just did. And whereas I would have cringed at seeing the silhouette of Mark reentering my bedroom in the moonlight, my heart sped up when I saw Grayson coming back. To say good night, maybe. That was better than nothing. Or just to slip on his clothes. The promise of making love again seemed too good to be true.

He slid through the sheets next to me and nuzzled my neck until I giggled. He reached out. With one gentle hand, he turned my face to his so he could kiss me long on the lips. No urgency this time, just a lazy exploration of my mouth with his tongue.

After a few minutes, he said, “The floor in the bathroom is spongy.”

He paused, allowing me to explain.

When I didn’t say anything, he went on, “Like the pipes have had a slow leak for decades, and the water has disintegrated the floorboards. That thin layer of linoleum on top is all that’s preventing you from falling through.”

He paused again.

When I just glared at him, he instructed me, “You should call the landlord. He’s required to fix stuff like that, even if you’ll only be here a few more weeks.”

This time when he stopped running his trap, he realized from the look on my face that he’d said something wrong. He bit his lip. “What.”

“My mom did call the landlord,” I said self-righteously. “Years ago, right after we moved in. He said the floor had been like that for twenty years, it had been like that when my mother signed the lease, and if she hadn’t been too good for the trailer when she signed the lease, she wasn’t too good for it now.”

“Leah. Okay,” he said soothingly, a soft contrast with my voice, which had risen to a shout. He touched my lip with two long fingers, shushing me. “I’ve hit a nerve and I don’t know what it is. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I am trying to tell you to shut? Up!” I was so angry that my brain was flooded with it and I couldn’t even see him anymore. Everything was ruined now. I had known better than to let him into the trailer.

“Why didn’t you do like that?” He chopped his hand back and forth across his throat. “I thought that was the signal.”

I chopped my hand back and forth across my throat in turn. “Because I would be doing this all night!”

“Great,” he muttered. “Now I have to start all over.” He rolled out of bed, dragged me after him, and threw me over his shoulder.

“Hey!” I yelled. He was laughing, a sound I’d longed for so deeply that, despite myself, I laughed too.

He set me down on the counter in the kitchen and kissed me again.

I knew he was making a point of working his body over my body in exactly the way he’d done it when he first arrived. I knew he was being sweet and accommodating my hang-up. I tried to get into what he was doing. But my mind was still on the bathroom floor with the leaking pipes, the slow rot, the landlord who thought that’s exactly what my mother and I deserved.

In my mind I put Grayson back where he belonged, at his shack by the beach, furnished with nothing but a futon and a surfboard. Instead of the counter, he kissed me on the sand, and I rose to meet him again.

The radio startled me awake. Grayson must have set the alarm accidentally when he turned the radio off. I hit the button and nuzzled against him, glad to have another hour in bed with him, another hour of sleep. But he slipped from the bed. The streetlight through the window lit the edges of his hard muscles as he felt around on the dark floor for his clothes.

“Leaving?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.

“I have to get back to the other side of town before Alec wakes up so he doesn’t guess where I’ve been.” Grayson sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand over my hand. “I know this sucks, but I need you to keep dating Alec for me. Now that you know why, you’ll do that for me, right?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I slid my hand out from under his hand. But I managed to keep my voice ironically pleasant as I asked, “What if he tells me tomorrow that he feels like we’ve gotten really close, and he wants to take it to the next level? What if he wants to come back here with me alone? What if he wants to go all the way? Should I let him? Can you stop by the store and buy me a new pack of condoms just in case?”

He closed his eyes like I’d slapped him. His face was three horizontal lines: two eyes, grim mouth. “That’s not going to happen. Either he doesn’t like you very much and none of this has worked, or he’ll see this week as just the beginning, and he’ll ask you to our prom next weekend.”

“Your prom!” High school stuff seemed a million miles away, especially for Grayson and Alec’s foreign town that really was eighty miles from here. “I hope you don’t expect me to go to Alec’s prom with him.”

“If he asks you, yes.”

“Then what if he wants to make prom night super-special?”

He looked out the window, his high cheekbones and long nose lit by the moon, and seemed to be considering it.

“That’s it,” I snapped. “You have officially lost your mind. I put up with this shit when I thought it was only going to last a week, and I didn’t know I was going to get tangled up with you. Now I’m through. Get out.”

He balled his fist and held it in front of his mouth. “Leah. We’re both mad, and it’s late, and we’re tired, and we just… we just—”

“What? You don’t even have a word for it, when you’re still trying to get me to screw your brother.”

He jerked up to standing then. He’d pulled his shirt over his head and was halfway across the dark room when he turned and said, “You don’t have to fake anything with him anymore. Just don’t tell him that I asked you to in the first place.”

“Oh! Thanks, Grayson, for clarifying that. You know, I’m beginning to wonder whether you only slept with me to get me to do what you wanted.”

He gaped at me. In the still dark, we could hear another man and woman outside a trailer up the road, screaming at each other.

Grayson’s hands were shaking as he touched one of his pointer fingers to the other. “I would not do that, Leah. To anybody.” He touched his middle finger. “And I especially wouldn’t do that to you. My God!” He extended his hand. “What was tonight, anyway?”

I could see tonight had meant as much to him as it had to me. And he was willing to throw every bit of it away in order to manipulate Alec, just like he’d always planned. I’d played this game when I thought I was the only one getting hurt. But I wouldn’t continue to play Alec. Why couldn’t Grayson see this was wrong?

“So you won’t do some immoral things to keep Alec out of the military,” I pointed out. “Other immoral things to keep Alec out of the military are perfectly fine.”

Grayson spread both arms wide, exasperated. “Yes!”

If Grayson didn’t see my point, I would make him see. “I’m going to tell Alec.”

“You are not,” Grayson growled.

“I’ll be at work at seven,” I warned him. “I’ll give you until then to tell him. If you don’t, I will.”

He balled both fists.

Put one to his mouth and one on his hip.

Seemed to be holding his breath.

Finally he stomped out of the room, down the hall, and out of the trailer. The pit bull became hysterical, but the aluminum door did not bang shut.

Staring at the poster of the beautiful Airbus floating in the Hudson, I knew I was right. I knew I would go through with my threat. Yet I wanted to call Grayson back. He was under so much pressure, but he hadn’t slammed my door.

I walked up the path and emerged from the trees onto the bright airstrip as usual. Nothing else was as usual this morning. Mark must have had an early night, because he was in Mr. Simon’s hangar, checking the fuel level in his Air Tractor. He whistled at me as I passed. I ignored him.

Molly was already out in the grass, unrolling a banner for Alec. But all the Hall Aviation planes were still there. First I swung around the doorjamb of the office and faced Grayson, grim behind the desk, his blond hair wet from a shower. I fought down the urge to go to him and embrace him and smell him. What I asked was, “Did you tell Alec?”

He glared up at me with pure hatred in his eyes. “No,” he said curtly.

“It was kind of late when we talked last night,” I said loud enough to make him cringe and look through the doorway to see whether Alec was listening. “Maybe you’re kind of fuzzy on this. I said I would give you until I got to work this morning to tell him, and then I would tell him.”

He squeezed all the blood out of his fist. His jaw went white too. He said very slowly, “I’m going to give you every opportunity not to do that.”

I flounced out of his office. Alec stood in the open doorway of his airplane, peering into the gas tank on top of the wing, just as Mark had been.

I called, “Alec, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure thing.” He hopped down from the doorway and leaned against the strut. “What’s up?”

He was so handsome, grinning, round-faced and blond and blue-eyed and innocent, that I found myself faltering. What if he really had fallen for me, and my revelation crushed him?

“Wow,” I said. “I wanted to tell you something because I think you deserve to know, but this is a lot harder than I thought.”

He never stopped grinning. He didn’t even sound particularly sarcastic as he said, “You’ve only been pretending to like me? Grayson blackmailed you to do that, hoping I would cling to you instead of joining the military?”

“Yes,” I said on a huge sigh of relief. “He did tell you.”

“Molly told me,” Alec said, and now I could hear the bitterness in his voice.

“Molly told you!” I exclaimed, glancing past his airplane to the field, where Molly stretched tall to hang a banner on the upright poles. “When?”

“Sunday night.”

Sunday had been the day Grayson first came to my trailer. Sunday night, Molly had taken me for a drive. “Alec, you hadn’t even met Molly on Sunday night.”

“I’ve known her for a long time,” Alec said self-righteously. “Sort of known her, but it seemed pointless to try to start something with her when I wasn’t in town that often. I knew I would be here this week, so Sunday morning I asked her out. That night she called me to say my brother was forcing her best friend to pretend to like me.”

My stomach twisted. No wonder Molly had acted so strangely all week. And when I felt like she’d betrayed me by dragging me to Francie’s party, that hadn’t scratched the surface of what she’d done to me.

“So you knew all along?” I murmured. “And you played along with it? Why, Alec?”

“Molly asked me to, for one thing,” he said. “She told me I could never let you know she’d spilled the beans. But it was all typical Grayson anyway. Underhanded. Breaking the rules. He convinced our mom that he’d changed. I realized Sunday night he hasn’t changed at all. I was curious to see how far he’d take it. And he’s been in love with you since the day you first walked onto this airstrip three and a half years ago. I thought it would be fun to make out with you and see how he liked getting double-crossed by his own brother.”

His voice rose as he said this. The louder he got, the faster my heart raced. I thought it couldn’t pump any faster, and then he told me Grayson had been in love with me for years.

But that didn’t fix any of this, or take away from the fact that Grayson had been manipulating us all.

“Alec,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. And Grayson only—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant, Leah,” Alec shouted. “I found Molly two years ago. I finally asked her out. But because of all this bullshit, it’s ruined now. She and I spent last night alone together, and she’s so convinced something happened between you and me that she’s not even talking to me now. Thanks for that.” He opened the door of his cockpit and climbed back up to look at the wing.

I didn’t want to leave things like this between Alec and me, but I wasn’t going to stand there and look at his feet.

I headed back down the tarmac. When I drew even with the upright poles, I waded through the long grass to Molly.

“Hey, chick,” she sang. She dropped the heavy end of a banner she’d been struggling with. A cloud of bugs lifted into the air. “What’s up?”

“Why did you tell Alec?”

As I watched, her face transformed from innocent teenager playing bad girl to a look of malice. I’d seen it on Francie’s face a few nights before. The only time I’d seen it on Molly was when she first confronted me about stealing Ryan from her two years ago.

“What you were doing was wrong,” she said, “and I was trying to warn him.”

“You knew why I was doing it,” I reminded her, “and when you told him, you were jeopardizing my whole flying career.”

“Well, maybe you don’t deserve a flying career,” she snapped. “Did you ever think about that? Maybe you don’t have good moral character. You forged your mother’s name. You shacked up with Mark. One day later, you tried to fool Alec into thinking you had feelings for him. You knew Ryan was dating me and you tried to steal him from me.”

“Is that what this is all about?” I demanded. “Ryan?”

“You’re supposed to be my best friend, but you scope out the ones I really like and steal them! Can’t I have anything?”

“I did not steal Ryan from you,” I said firmly. “He came on to me. I turned him down, and he spread it around school that he’d been with me anyway.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” she exclaimed.

“Because you like the upside down,” I said. “The opposite. You think it’s cool to tell your friends that you go slumming with a poor girl. It makes you feel different and proud to lift me up from the ghetto.” I should have added the truth. When she thought I’d stolen Ryan, that had given me power and daring in her eyes. All I’d ever wanted from Molly was not to lose her. But I couldn’t tell her this. Not after everything she’d thrown at me.

“That’s what you really think?” she asked. “And you lied to stay friends with a bitch like me? It just proves I was right. I couldn’t trust you with Alec. You don’t have good moral character. You’re a liar.”

She was about to bend down and work on the sign again, like the conversation was over and I wasn’t standing there, but something over my shoulder caught her attention. I turned around.

Grayson waded through the grass after me. As he reached me, he held out a wad of bills and coins and dumped them into my cupped hand.

“I don’t want your money,” I told him. “I quit.”

“That’s for yesterday,” he said. “You’re fired.”

I turned and walked through the grass along a new trajectory, a diagonal that would spit me out on the tarmac closer to my trailer. Along the way I dropped a quarter in the grass and did not stoop to pick it up. Grayson and Molly had already lost interest in me and were screaming at each other, but I didn’t want to risk having them glance over at me and see me groveling in the dirt for a coin. Then it occurred to me that there was no reason for me to go home. There was nothing there to eat, nothing to read, no way to get out, and in two weeks I would be homeless.