Текст книги "Slow Twitch"
Автор книги: Лиз Реинхардт
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
“Cheers!”
We clanked our glasses against each other’s and took deep, long draughts, then slammed them onto the table when we were choked with alcohol. It was Evan who just kept drinking, her throat tightening and relaxing, two rivulets of beer dribbling out the sides of her mouth. Watching her made me feel like I was drowning, like I needed to take a breath for her, but she finally hammered the glass down in triumph and wiped a victorious wrist across her lips.
“Holy shit, loves. Y’all are gonna need to carry me back to the dorm. Whew!” She shuddered and hiccupped. “So, wait, I wanna win the game we started before.” She put an unsteady finger out and bopped me gently on the tip of my nose. “Jake. Jake, Jake, Jake. He is…artsy? Kind of quiet, but cool. Always wearing his paint-speckled shirt and ripped-up jeans. Ironic and sensitive.” She held her hands, prayer-style in front of her and raised her eyebrows high.
Devon’s laugh sputtered beer across the table. “What? That’s so not Jake. Like, the polar opposite.”
“He’s artsy,” I argued, thinking of his amazing projects and sketches. I took another long sip of bitter beer without even wincing. “But, no, you’re wrong.”
Evan slammed both hands palms down on the shiny wood table. “This is so embarrassing, okay? I’m usually, like, an oracle when it comes to guys. I can just…” She paused and waved her hands in front of her face before she continued, “I can visualize the guy just by looking at the girl. I can’t believe this is, what, my third or fourth guess? It’s the ocean between you two. That’s it, that’s what I’m blaming it on.” She turned her pale eyes on Devon. “Give me a hint.”
“A hint?” Devon frowned. “What kind of hint?”
“About Jake!” Evan drummed on the edge of the table fast and hard. “Here is gorgeous, smart, amazing Brenna. And she dates this mystery guy. Well, a mystery to me, anyways. But he’s not captain of the football team. And he’s not president of the student council. And he’s not sensitive and artsy. I’ve used every last ounce of pixie dust, Devon. Help a sister out.” She popped her shiny bottom lip in a pout. “C’mon, don’t leave me all embarrassed.”
“A hint?” Devon tapped his fingers on the condensation-fogged side of his glass. “About Jake? Okay. Um, I guess ‘truck’?”
“Truck?” Evan repeated and leaned across the table until she was only a few inches away from me. “Truck. Big backseat? Oooh, I know I’m right because you have the prettiest blush, Miss Brenna. Okay truck?” She took a deep breath. “Alright, where I come from, a big ol’ pickup means ‘hick.’ But isn’t New Jersey a whole lotta city? So there can’t be hicks, right?” She gave us a half-smile that let us know she was fully aware of how far she’d pushed her luck.
“Now you’re just taking potshots at our lovely state,” Devon murmured wryly. “And, can I remind you, it’s the Garden State? Okay? So stop being a terrible stereotyper.”
Evan laughed maniacally. “So many apologies. And, before we get into a battle of wits about states, I swear on baby Jesus if either one of you talk about peaches or sing that ‘Georgia on my mind’ song, I will shank you both. Not very Southern lady-like of me, but I will.” She stretched her neck to one side, then the other, bringing out a little series of pops that made her sigh. “Truck, truck, truck. Jake, Jake, Jake. Hmmm.” She pressed her lips together, squinted and burst out, “Hot older guy who owns a landscaping business?”
I felt so much relief when the waitress came back at that second, I considered kissing our frazzled server. Evan ordered a second round for herself, but Devon and I were still nursing our beers, and I was wishing I’d ordered a water or soda. Evan picked up her sandwich, took a huge bite and moaned with unbridled happiness.
“This sandwich is making me mouth-gasm.” She moaned a second time, a piece of sandwich in each hand. The deliciousness of her meal kept her busy for about three minutes before she zeroed in on Devon. “Spill. Right now. Tell me all about the mysterious Jake and his brother. My sixth sense is obviously broken in Europe.”
Devon took a huge bite of his burger and caught my eye. I shrugged and poked at my food with my fork, suddenly nervous to have Jake dissected in front of Evan.
Devon chewed, swallowed, and said, “Jake is a really great guy. He’s smart, but not a big-time academic. He works hard. Seriously, this guy could put grown men to shame with the hours he pulls. He goes to the technical school, and he’s definitely brilliant in the trade he’s doing. He’s got one of those bad boy pasts everyone talks about, but he put it all behind him now. And he loves Brenna. I’m not gonna lie…it’s slightly nauseating. But, since I’m being all honest and wearing a paisley vest, I guess I’ll admit that it’s also incredibly, vomitously sweet.”
My heart overheated like a little old lady who needed someone to wave a fan in her face to revive her.
Evan chomped on a pickle and assessed me with steady, icy-hot eyes. “A hard-working, blue-collar, truck-driving boy from the wrong side of the tracks?” The waitress came back with her drink. Evan thanked her, then caught the whiskey by the edge of the tiny shot glass and let it dive into her beer. “He sounds like perfection worthy of a toast.” She lifted her glass gingerly and announced, “To Jake, Brenna’s dream guy.”
Devon and I took our nearly-full glasses and were about to clink, when she pulled back.
“Wait. Wait a minute!” Evan’s black eyebrows pressed so low over her eyes, her eyelashes mingled with them. “All facts point to Jake being amazing. So what’s so tempting about the brother?”
“Saxon?” Devon’s voice dripped with sarcasm, grudging respect, and the fascination that that particular name always seemed to dredge up in everyone.
“Saxon?” Evan tasted the name on her lips and her smile stretched until I could see past the sharp points of her eyeteeth and back to her molars. “Saxon is the brother.” She half-closed her eyes so they fluttered slightly. “Mmm. My psychic powers are absolutely constipated. Devon, my love, hit me with another hint.”
Devon put his palms on the edge of the table and pushed back, shaking his head and blowing out a long breath. He sat back and brought his glass to his lips to drink before he answered. “No words. Just, sorry. Nothing comes to mind.”
My throat felt tight and dry, and I couldn’t make eye-contact with Evan.
“Brenna, can you give a hint?” Her fantastic kitten heel bumped my calf under the table. “Or the whole story? Or just stare into your beer like some sad old drunk. Brenna? Hellooo?”
My eyes were inexplicably pricked with tears. I stood up and looked for the bathroom. “I…uh, I have to go pee.” My hip bumped the table and everyone’s drink spilled a little. I rushed away, leaving an open-mouthed Evan and Devon staring at my back.
In the cold tiled bathroom, I put my back against the door of one of the stalls and shoved the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Why are you crying?” I whispered to myself. “Stop it. Stop!”
Maybe it was the weight of all that jetlag I hadn’t slept off. Or the strong beer I wasn’t remotely used to drinking. Or the excitement of meeting Evan coupled with the shock of seeing Devon. Or the memory of Jake’s lips on mine, urgent and a tiny bit desperate at the airport.
“You have a great time, okay?” His hands had bit into my arms and he couldn’t let go.
“It will be fine,” I promised. I didn’t say what we were both thinking. Not like last time.
“No doubt. Bring me back a shamrock or a pot of gold.” His attempt to smile at his own sad joke made his mouth quake in a way that drew-and-quartered my heart.
“Maybe just a fairy or a rainbow?” I traced my fingers over his face when he closed his gray eyes and, I knew, told himself not to worry.
“Okay on the rainbow, but stay away from those damn fairies. They steal beautiful girls away, you know.” This time his smile was slightly fuller, but it looked twice as painful.
“How do you know all about fairies and their girl-stealing ways?” I cuddled close to him and smelled the autumn-fresh, minty-clean scent that could make me salivate with one sniff.
He nuzzled my neck and whispered, “A long and embarrassing boyish fascination with Magic game cards. Do. Not. Repeat. This.”
I tightened my arms around him and whispered back, “So, were you some kind of wizard or warrior or something?”
“You have no idea how much power I have. In the imaginary realm of Magic, capital ‘M’ of course.” We laughed, and then he buried his face in my hair and his voice was all choked when he said, “I love you so damn much.”
“I love you, too.” I held on twice as tight.
The memory dropped away when I heard the bathroom door creak open too slowly for it to be a regular patron. I grabbed some toilet paper and blotted my eyes and nose.
“Brenna?” Evan’s voice called out, smoky and quiet.
“I’m…I’m, uh, sorry. I have no idea what’s up with me. I just…you know, I think I’m just tired, I guess.” I peeked through the crack in the stall door, not ready to face anyone just yet.
She slid up on a sink and fished in her rosebud purse until she found a silver case. She flicked it open and took out a short, dark cigarette that she pursed between her lips and lit up with a tiny vintage gold lighter. The smell it gave off wasn’t the acrid burn of a regular cigarette. It was a smoky/sweet mix that made me think of Halloween and pumpkin spice coffee that my mother always got in October.
“I was being a monster, sweetie.” She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the mirror. “Devon gave me a few hints about Saxon, so I understand a little bit, I think. You’re not gonna mess it up with Jake here.”
“I know.” The words flopped out too fast. “I mean, I don’t think that’s going to happen or anything.”
“Of course you do.” She flicked the dull gray ash into the pristine white sink. I wondered if it was okay to smoke here. I doubted it, but it was clear that Evan operated above the rules. “I know you think I was joking back there about being psychic, but I have this teeny-tiny sixth sense. My daddy used to take me to the track because I could always pick the winning horse. Every single time, I’m telling you. He stopped after this one time when I was twelve and he forced me to go with him instead of letting me hang out with my new boyfriend at the mall. I picked all the wrong ones just to piss him off.” When she chuckled, rings of bluish smoke coiled out of her mouth. “I knew you were a winner the minute I saw you. I really do have a harder time with guys. It’s girls and horses with me, I swear to God. Guys? I just don’t see them clearly. Hence…well, Rabin most recently.”
“What did you see when you saw me?” I had my fingers on the deadbolt, almost ready to slide it open and sit next to her on the sink, maybe take a drag of her sweet cigarette.
She took a long, slow drag and opened her eyes, but just stared at the ceiling for a few seconds before she answered, “I saw what I wanted.” She gestured with her cigarette like a kid writing a flash of a message with a sparkler. “I wanted to know you. To be your friend. And I wanted to have what you have. Not your stuff, though I do love those fucking gorgeous shoes. I saw this, I can’t really explain…like this love in you. And I saw the guilt, too, so I knew you weren’t just this bambino in the woods. I knew it was real.”
I knocked my forehead against the bathroom door. “Oh, it’s real. It’s so real, it’s scary. I feel so much about them both, but it’s so incredibly different, and I just have to shut up about it, you know?”
“You don’t.”
I’d never heard a person say things and make them sound like a question and a non-negotiable fact at the same time, but Evan managed that.
I slid the bolt with shaky fingers and flew to the sink. Evan was already holding the cigarette out to me. I took a quick drag and was disappointed to find that it was still acrid and burning, just like a regular cigarette.
“What do you mean?”
She petted my hair back from my face and tucked it with smooth, quick fingers behind my ears. “I just mean that you shouldn’t shut up about anything that’s important to you. If it matters, say it. And if you really love Jake and are worried, don’t hide things from him. Try to explain, and maybe some of this nervousness will go away, you know?”
I watched the cigarette smolder. “If I say it, I’ll just hurt people. It never comes out right. No matter how hard I try, it’s just all wrong, and I sound like a jerk. That sounds lame, but I don’t know how else to explain it.”
She plucked the cigarette from my fingers and stubbed it out in the sink. “People always want girls to be nice. Fuck nice, Brenna. Be honest. Say what you need to say, and don’t shut up. You’re a good person, and you love him, so it will work out.” She slid the pins out of her hair and it swooped, piece by piece, down around her shoulders.
“It’s not that easy.” I ran the tap so the black, smeared ashes funneled down the drain and tossed the butt into the garbage.
“Nothing that’s really important ever is, sweetie.” Evan kissed my cheek and took my hand. “It’s never easy, and it’s never neat. Ever. You don’t have to listen to me, but I’m saying it because I like you so much, and I know what happens when you try to lock secrets away and cover them with lies, no matter how good your intentions might be.” Her eyes went dark, like lake water, crystal clear until its murky bottom gets agitated.
All the hair on my arms stood on end at her words, and a cold chill twisted up, then back down my spine.
I thought about what she said as we headed back to Devon. Evan gulped down one more drink, and Devon did wind up carrying her more than half-way back to the dorms, just like she predicted. We managed to get her tucked in, and I took a minute to pull the covers up to her chin, the way I liked them.
“She’s a little crazy,” Devon whispered, rubbing the kinks out of the shoulder he carried her over during the long walk home.
I looked down at her long hair spilled over the pillow, her mascara-coated lashes flecking bits of black under her eyes, and her puffy red lips, half-parted in sleep. “Crazy beautiful.”
Devon shook his head as he left the room. “Geez, you fall in love fast, Bren.”
“Yup,” I said as I pulled the door shut. “I’m full of it.”
Chapter Two
Saxon
I was always fairly hard to shock. In fact, I was good at being the shocking one, and I liked that. It kept everyone guessing, and that was always the best way with me. Once in a while, I’d get soft and let my heart leak out on my sleeve, but I’ve always regretted it. Every single time, it’s bit me in the ass. Once in a while, once in a really rare while, I managed to shock myself.
That’s where I was just after the end of my unimpressive junior year at Frankford High. I had missed almost as much school as I had attended. I’d hit on my brother’s foxy girlfriend and practically convinced her not to completely hate me, then fucked it all up and lost my one chance to be with a girl whose brain interested me more than her tits. I boozed a little more than I should have and blacked out one too many Saturday nights. And Wednesday afternoons. And Monday mid-mornings.
Then I needed some money, so I started dealing. I’m not remotely interested in sad-sack stories about innocent fucking school kids buying bags of crack and hurling themselves off of tall buildings. I was a dealer; I knew exactly who bought. It was other assholes like me. Losers who needed to forget just how shitty life was.
‘Cause mine was. I lived in a big piece-of-shit house that had been featured in twelve different architectural magazines but still managed to creep my ass out and made me feel like I lived in a really shitty modern art museum. I’d slept with every delicious piece of ass in a hundred-mile radius, but the only chick I really dug was with my brother, Jake, and they were so in love it even made my icy heart thaw a little. I had a hot car, a bitching Charger, but it was pretty hard to drive it when it was locked in my piece-of-shit father’s garage. I was captain of the soccer team, an honors student, a badass, and a little bit of a rebel. So how the fuck did I end up in the back of my Aunt Jackie’s shitty Mazda, zipping down the highway towards a tiny piece of urban Jersey hell? Why was my life so shitty?
Did I do drugs because my life was such a steaming pile of shit, or was my life such a steaming pile of shit because I did drugs?
My theory was that it was a nice bundle of both theories. I just chose the wrong drug. Coke made me see things more clearly, have more energy. For what? I had no one to do anything with, considering I’d screwed the love interest of every guy friend I’d ever had, and I never hang out with girls unless they have the only thing I’m interested in on their minds. I already had a genius IQ, like it or not. And, despite smoking a pack a day, I was a star athlete without the drugs. So the coke just made everything more clearly, draggingly miserable. That’s why I wasn’t good at hiding it. That’s why my mom found it.
A lot of it.
Trust me, the amount matters. Lylee didn’t wig out because she feared for my life and health. She would have been cool with a little line here and there. It was the fear of being caught with so much of the shit in her house that made her squawk to my father, the shithead who left when I was young enough to still feel like a dad might be a good idea. Lylee wasn’t about to give up her bourgeois whoring and partying and her cushy professor job because I was being fruitful and selling enough of the shit to get attention from the bigger city dealers (another bad thing that was about to get a whole lot worse). So dear old Daddy came down and slapped me around a little and threatened to take away the only thing that can still make my granite heart skip a beat; my inheritance.
Hey, it was blood money, but it was fair and square blood money. Jake would get his, I’d get mine, and so would the two dozen or so other Maclean cousins and grandkids and whoever else is a direct descendent. It was old money, it was my due, and I’d take it happily.
But Daddy told me no money unless I cleaned up my act, and he wasn’t about to take my word for it. I was put in the back of Jackie’s hideous purple Mazda with a duffel bag of necessities and sent somewhere that was pretty much going to be tailor-made hell for me.
I was being sent to work in a diner.
I had been to rehab. Twice, actually. It was all idiotically kind, dumb therapists who always acted like there might be secret VH1 reality show cameras documenting every deep, heart-string-pulling conversation. There was usually a lot of nature (ocean, mountain, trees, whatever) and a lot of meetings with other losers. It was like a very lame vacation.
And I had been out of the country. Lylee spirited me to Paris, which was only made bearable by the company of Brenna Blixen, Jake’s hot girlfriend. We spent a lot of time kissing and twice as much time pissing each other off. It was clear to me from the beginning that I was a reluctant experiment at best. She’d been in love with Jake since the first second she met him. He was always a good-looking guy, and I could admit that honestly because our spectacular genetics couldn’t be denied.
Jail would have sucked. That was probably next, or maybe juvenile hall. But eighteen was coming up quick, and any sane judge would have wanted to teach me a real lesson about the harsh realities of drug use and dealing.
But I escaped the slammer.
I got indentured service, family style.
Daddy’s family owned all kinds of random shitty businesses, and one of them was this queer diner that played oldies and had girls skate out to your car with food like some shitty Happy Days’ episode. I got to be a dishwasher, lowest of the low men on the totem pole. And I would have to shack up with some geezer great-aunt of mine who used to babysit me and Jake and was living off her paltry Maclean stipend in her piss-stinking, shag-carpeted, doily-decorated house.
As if this shit storm wasn’t bad enough, Aunt Jackie was blaring Celine Dion. Who the hell listens to Celine Dion willingly?
“Can you turn this crap down?” I asked as nicely as I could manage.
Aunt Jackie glared at me and turned the knob on the stereo up a little. Celine’s ferociously annoying voice filled the inside of the car and battered against my eardrums.
“You are not here on vacation, Saxon,” she lectured. “This is not about you enjoying yourself. You have been stripped of all privilege and comfort for a reason. I am certainly not playing one of the greatest singers and divas of all time to punish you, but knowing that it irritates you is a bonus.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You are supposed to be thinking about why you are where you are instead of enjoying your summer with the family in New York like your brother Jake.”
I groaned at his name. “If I hear about your damn golden boy one more time, I’m going to hurl.” I reached instinctively for my cigarettes. Damn! Those were gone, too.
“Jake is someone you should look up to,” Aunt Jackie droned. “He’s making a real effort to fit in and he knows the value of hard work. That’s a Maclean gene he seems to have in abundance, even if it did manage to skip right over you.”
“I work hard,” I drawled, keeping my voice irritatingly lazy. “Do you know how much effort it took to turn potheads into cokeheads? No easy feat.”
Aunt Jackie blew a long breath through her flared nostrils and cranked Celine even louder. When I closed my eyes and moaned at “My Heart Will Go On,” Aunt Jackie punched the repeat button. I had to smile a little. Sly bitch.
Finally we were at the diner. Aunt Jackie pulled in and turned to me. “I’m not letting you get dumped on poor Aunt Helene so you can sit on your laurels while she gives you coffee and cookies. I’ll drop your bag at her house. You work here, and you can walk to her place. Tony has directions for you, and there are a few other kids who live in that area, so you won’t be walking alone. Go ahead. It’s time to get to work.”
She looked as prim and sour as some old English governess. “Thanks for the ride,” I said and got out of the car.
I hated feeling trapped. I hated not knowing what the hell I was doing. I hated working for anyone, especially someone who knew that I was in a shitload of trouble and couldn’t leave or cause any shit. I stood looking at the double back doors, the ones for employees. I was that. An employee.
Even if the word made me want to choke myself with my own tongue.
It wasn’t that I needed to gather the courage to go in. It was more like I needed to suppress the need to break something or swear up a storm or just generally bring more bad shit down on my head.
Then I heard a weird sound, a clack and roll, clack and roll. I looked behind me and saw a girl. A damn pretty girl.
She was long and curvy in every place that it’s perfect for a girl to be curvy in. Then I realized that she might have just seemed long because she was on skates. Roller skates. Her face was wide-eyed and fine as a Russian model’s. She had green eyes, real green like a Halloween cat’s and jet black hair, pulled back off of her face in a high ponytail. And the outfit. Mmm. A short red skirt, something like a cheerleader would wear and a white shirt, nice and tight against the generous swell of her breasts.
“The entrance is around the front, sir,” she said, her voice sweet and polite.
I smiled, a smile I know for a fact melted girls into puddles. “I’m not here to eat, baby. I work here. I’m Saxon Maclean.”
“The coke head?” Her voice changed instantly, suddenly snappy like the crack of a lion tamer’s whip. I realized that the honeyed-up voice must have been solely for the customers. “Well, what are you doing out here? This isn’t a drug den, dumbass. In through the double doors and to the back. I assume you’re too stupid to do anything but wash dishes? You’ll find the sinks. They’re big and metal and lots of water goes in them.” She made her voice high and unnaturally sweet, thick with sarcasm. “I have my eye on you, asshole.”
“Nice to meet you, too.” Something electric tingled through me. “I didn’t catch your name.”
The girl was already skating away, and I had a nice view of her curvy rear end.
“Cadence,” she called over her shoulder. “Cadence Erikson.”
Erikson. The owners of the diner. Had I just met the owner’s daughter?
I shrugged and went in through the double doors, intrigued by pretty, mouthy Cadence and ready to see her again soon.
I walked into a hot, chaotic clusterfuck unlike anything I had ever seen. People in white aprons were running baskets of sizzling fries and spatulas with hamburgers and hotdogs covered in sauerkraut back and forth, setting them on red trays and beating on a silver bell until it looked like it was going to explode.
A balding man with bulgy eyes noticed me.
“Who are you?” he asked brusquely.
“Saxon Maclean.” I offered my hand.
He eyed my outstretched hand uncertainly, then shook a limp, wet-fish shake. “The coke head? Tony doesn’t tolerate drugs.”
“I know.” I felt my back go up a little. Did everyone know why I was here? Jesus Christ.
“Aprons over there. Get one on. Hurry up, I’ve got three minutes to teach you before the next batch of fries come out. I’m Dan. Jesus, Brian, flip those burgers before they’re charred for God’s sake! Please tell me they were supposed to be well done?” He pushed past a spacey-looking guy flipping burgers and led me to a long stainless steel table with a huge box at the end. He grabbed a handle and pulled up, lifting the box, which was, in fact, an industrial dishwasher.
“Put the cups and silverware and plates in the trays, slide them in here, close it all the way and they get washed. It’s magic!” He shook his hands and rolled his eyes. “Anything you can’t wash in there, throw it in the sink and we do it later. When the trays come out of the dishwasher, put them there.” He pointed to another low stainless shelf where girls in outfits like Cadence’s and guys in black pants and white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled were picking up food. “When it’s slow, take the trays out front and fill up the glasses and silverware under the counters. Questions?”
I shook my head. This was going to be fucking great. Magic!
A busboy in a white apron came over and slammed a full bucket down on the stainless tray.
“Hey, I’m Will,” the guy said. He was skinny and blonde. “You must be the crackhead.”
“Saxon,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Well, we’re on shift together, so hey.” He checked out the ass of one of the waitresses who leaned over to get her pen. “I’ll help bring the dishes out when I can, man. Gotta go. Oh, and load quick. One of the dumbass new girls dropped a tray of glasses so we’re low on them.” He grabbed a clean bucket, and I looked dubiously at what was left in the dirty bucket he had dropped.
Maybe I’ve lived a little bit of a privileged life, but I never gave much thought to what happened once I ate my hamburger at some shitty little diner. It never occurred to me that some poor jerkoff in some shitty back corner was going to have to paw through my ketchup-soaked napkins, scrape my half– eaten food into the garbage, and pick through partially-melted sundae remains for lost silverware. I never thought about how a job can be fairly easy, but so freaking boring you could poke your own eyes out with said lost silverware. And I never thought I could work around a good fifty people and feel like I was stranded in the middle of goddamn nowhere without a soul to talk to. At least there was angry death metal playing in the back. It suited my mood to a tee.
But I was mostly just feeling sorry for myself. My life had started a pretty steady downward spiral a few months back, and it didn’t seem like working at this shithole diner was going to make anything look up. In fact I would have thought that I might have hit a kind of rock bottom, except I didn’t want to jinx myself.
By the end of my shift (which was ten hours long; in at two, out at midnight), my arms ached from carrying trays of hot glasses, I was covered up to my elbows in chocolate syrup embedded with tiny pieces of candy that typically gets sprinkled on ice cream, bits of relish and mustard, splatters of soda and milkshake, and a million other unidentifiable things. I kept my section fairly clean, and was feeling dead on my feet when Brian, the space-cadet with the burgers, came over with a crapload of greasy, hot, dripping stainless steel stuff and dumped it in the soapy water in one of the sinks.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Kitchen shit.” He looked over at me with half-glazed eyes. “Dan will bring over the grill guards and baskets in a minute.”
Will appeared next to me. “I told you I’d help. This is the shittiest part of the dishwashing thing.” He grabbed a scrub brush and handed me one. “Tony comes and looks everything over himself, so make sure you get all the shit off of it. He’ll keep you all night if he doesn’t like how you cleaned up.”
Exhaustion ripped through me. I’d been hopped on coke for the last few weeks. I wasn’t used to relying on my own energy sources, and I was dropping. My days were typically a lot less workful, and I liked it just fine that way. For one second I considered throwing my scrub brush down and telling them all to fuck off. Two things stopped me.
The first and most important was that I had enough money waiting at the end of this shitty summer work deal to get my ass anywhere I needed it to be. The second was that once I walked out of those double doors, I didn’t have one person to call and pick me up. Lylee’s house was more than two hours away. Short of taking my chances hitchhiking, I didn’t have a way to get back home. And this wasn’t exactly an area where a good-looking guy could feel comfortable sticking his thumb out on a dark road. So I picked up the scrub brush and went to work with Will until Tony himself came in.
