Dead Ends (7 page)

“What's wrong with her?” Billy asked.

“Who cares?”

A few steps later, almost to the corner, the woman spotted us. She threw her arms up in a hallelujah gesture.

“Oh, thank goodness! Can you help me?”

“Help you what?” I asked.

She flung an arm backward toward her car. “This piece of sh—this piece of junk broke down. It just
stopped
. I'm driving, and it sputters and chugs and then just
stops
!” She planted her hands on her hips, waiting for us to look as shocked by this news as she was.

“And?” I said.

“And—well, could you look at it maybe? See what's wrong?”

I sighed. This happened to me a lot. Maybe it was the stubble or the fact that I lived in work boots and jeans, but for some reason, people—especially female people—always assumed I knew something about cars.

One of Mom's boyfriends tried to teach me about cranks and gear shafts and whatnot once, but I shut him down same as I did every guy who pretended to be my dad. I wouldn't have minded learning from an uncle or a grandpa or something, but
I didn't have any of those, and Mom assured me if I knew them, I wouldn't want them anyway.

Normally I would have told the cougar with the car I couldn't help her, but Billy was standing right there, watching me like he expected me to fix it—like he expected me to be able to do anything. So I tried to look confident as I stepped over and opened the hood.

I peeked in and immediately backed up, coughing. Something in the mess of engine parts was smoking slightly.

“Oh yeah.” I hacked. “You've got a problem.”

“Oh no! What is it?” The woman leaned away from the car as though it might explode at any second.

“It's—um—” I moved back to the engine and reached for a part, stalling for time. The bit of metal I touched seared my fingers. “Shit!”

I stuffed my hand in my pocket, wincing. I didn't want Billy or the woman to see I'd burned myself.

“Oh, God. It's really bad, isn't it?” The woman moaned.

I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I can't fix this without … y'know, without my tools. You should call a tow truck.”

“What a crock of shit!” a husky voice chimed in.

I whipped around at the sound of wood skidding against concrete. A skinny boy with shocking white hair hopped off a skateboard behind me.
No wait—not a boy—a girl
.

Her flat chest, deep voice, and supershort crop of bleached hair had thrown me off, but as she grabbed her board and joined me at the front of the car, I could see everything about her face screamed
girl
. It was all soft skin, long eyelashes, and bright red lips.

I felt my hand fly up to flatten my cowlick. “Excuse me?”

She leaned over the engine, ignoring the smoke. “Looks like you just overheated,” she said to the woman in the tight skirt. “When's the last time you changed your oil?”

The woman waved a hand. “Oh geez, who knows?”

The white-haired girl rolled her eyes. “Well, the smoke is clearing out. When this cools off, it should start up again, but I'd drive it straight to a mechanic.” She pointed down the road, past the baseball diamonds. “You know where Ray's Auto Repair is? On Oakland? Just down there to the right.”

The woman nodded. She seemed encouraged by the confidence in the girl's voice.

“You might need to flush your coolant system.” The girl lowered the hood and dropped her skateboard to the street. “Ray'll give you a good deal. Tell him Seely said to hook you up.”

The woman thanked the girl over and over while I stood to the side feeling like a jackass.

With one foot on her board, the girl waved good-bye to the woman and turned to us. “A tow truck?” She sneered.

“What makes you think her car will restart?” I snapped back.

The sound of the engine coming alive and the car peeling away answered my question.

The girl laughed. It was a low sexy laugh, and I wanted to hear more of it, but I scowled at her anyway.

“It's okay.” She gave my arm a light punch. “I'm sure you would have fixed that engine right up. Y'know … with your tools.”

“Guess we'll never know,” I mumbled.

“Can I ride your skateboard?” Billy suddenly spoke up.

She eyed him, looking unsure of whether it was rude of him to ask or rude of her to say no to a kid with Down syndrome. “Well … I don't usually let strangers borrow my board.”

“I'm Billy Drum. But everyone calls me Billy D.”

“I'm Seely. Everyone calls me Seely.”

Billy laughed.

Seely looked at me, waiting.

“Oh. I'm Dane.”

“Yeah, I know. I've seen you at school.”

She had? Why hadn't I seen her? It seemed like I would remember that crazy Wite-Out-colored hair, but she was probably one of those posers who changed their hair color every week, trying to prove how “different” they were.

“You go to our school?” Billy asked.

“Yep.”

“What grade are you in?”

“I'm a sophomore.”

“How do you know about cars?”

“My dad owns a bike shop. He works on motorcycles.”

“Is your dad Ray?”

I almost laughed. This girl had no idea how long an interrogation from Billy could go on.

“Who?” she asked. “Oh, from Ray's Auto. No, Ray is a friend of my dad's. Wow, you ask a lot of questions.”

“Get used to it,” I muttered.

“I'm getting to know you, so we won't be strangers, so I can ride your skateboard,” Billy said.

You had to admire the honesty.

“Tell you what,” Seely said. “If we see each other again, we won't be strangers next time, and then maybe I'll let you ride. Deal?” She talked to Billy so easily, like she'd been negotiating with guys like him all her life.

“Deal.” Billy clasped his hands together. “I hope we see each other soon, then.”

Seely smiled. “Me, too.”

And when she said it, her eyes shifted ever so slightly to me. Then she had both feet on her board and was sliding off toward school.

“I like her,” Billy announced as we headed across the ball fields. “Do you like her?”

Let's see. She humiliated me in front of the hot old lady; she made me feel like a jerk for not recognizing her when she recognized me; and she made it painfully obvious that having a dad will give even a girl a bigger man card than I had.

“What's not to like?”

It was almost a week before Billy brought up his dad again. We'd spent so much time sparring in the park next to the playground and so much effort convincing Billy's mom that it was safe to come home after dark as long as I was with him that we hadn't had time for anything else.

And I definitely owed him this favor. I didn't know what he was saying to the warden and Mrs. Pruitt, but in a matter of days they'd gone from keeping a reproachful eye on me to going out of their way to wave and smile when they saw me in the halls. Billy was keeping up his end of the bargain. At least in the eyes of the jail keepers, I was becoming less hoodlum, more hero.

Billy was sprawled on his stomach in the grass after one of our sessions at the park, his face inches from the atlas open in front of him.

“Why are you always staring at that thing?” I asked him. “It's not like you're going to find anything new in there.”

“I find new stuff all the time,” Billy said without looking up.

I dropped into the grass next to him and peeked over his shoulder. It looked like the same boring maps to me. “How's that?” I asked.

“I follow the clues.”

Billy pointed to the bottom of the page, at a single line of neat handwriting—too neat to be Billy's own.

“What is that?”

“My dad wrote it. There are lots of them.” Billy flipped through the pages, and here and there, one of the maps would have its own footnote, inked in that same uniform print. There were at least a dozen of them. “They're clues,” Billy said.

“Clues to what?”

“New towns. See?” He held up the atlas so I could read the line written under the map of California.

It's better than two in the bush.

I stared at it for a second, then shook my head. “I don't get it.”

“Mom always says ‘A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.'”

“Yeah, I've heard that,” I said, still confused.

Billy flipped fast through the pages as he talked. “I looked it up on the Internet. My dad showed me how. There's a place called Bird-in-Hand here.” He let the atlas fall open to a map of Pennsylvania and pressed his finger to a spot where he'd written
Bird-in-Hand.

I raised my eyebrows. “That's really smart, Billy D.”

He beamed at me, but a second later, a shadow passed over his face, and he went back to staring at the book. “But I don't understand all of them.”

I watched Billy for a moment and felt things clicking into place. “So … you think if you can figure out all those clues, one of them will tell you where your dad is?”

Billy sat up, his eyes wide. “You think so, too?”

No, not really.

But I knew my job: keep the kid happy, keep my ass in the warden's good graces.

“Can't hurt to figure out the clues, right?” I pulled the atlas into my lap. “Do you know this one?”

The page was still open to Pennsylvania, and at the bottom, the handwritten line read:
Here, Mom and I both met and married. Different, but the same.

Billy read the clue out loud, using his finger to follow the words and sound them out. He stumbled in the middle over “married” and “different,” and I finished for him.

“That's easy enough,” I said. “Where'd your parents meet and get married?”

Billy shrugged, his face blank.

“You don't know? Just ask your mom.”

“Mom gets mad when I ask questions like that.”

I nodded, wondering what had happened between Billy's parents to make them split up. It obviously hadn't been pretty, but it also wasn't fair of Billy's mom to not even let him talk about his dad. I felt a surge of empathy for Billy. Whatever beef my own mom had with my dad, she got even by never telling
his son who he was. What was it with these moms and their misdirected punishments?

“Well, it's still easy,” I said, getting to my feet. I held out a hand to drag Billy up, too. “You and me—we're going on a scavenger hunt.”

• • • X • • •

There wasn't much to scavenge. Billy's house was pretty bare—just a couch and a coffee table with a small TV in the living room, a foldout table and chairs in the kitchen, and mattresses flat on the floor in the bedrooms. Everywhere else was a sea of boxes still waiting to be unpacked.

“What are we looking for?” Billy asked, dragging one of the boxes into his room on my orders.

“Photo albums,” I said. “Pictures from your mom and dad's wedding.”

Billy scrunched up his face. “Mom would be mad.”

“Good thing she's not here, then,” I said, cracking open the box.

It was a Saturday, and Billy had promised that his mom was gone all day working on weekends. He didn't know what she did, which I thought was weird, but I didn't press. I wasn't all that interested, and I could tell by the sparse furnishings it wasn't anything too impressive anyway.

Billy helped me dig through the first few boxes, but he quickly lost focus. Every box contained some new distraction.

This is the Megatron Transformer Dad got me for Christmas.

This is the picture I drew in kindergarten that Dad put up on the fridge.

This is the ticket from when Dad took me to the zoo, and we spent a whole hour at the monkey cage watching them pick bugs off each other—Dane, did you know the monkeys pick bugs off each other? And then they
eat
them. They eat the bugs!

Billy's stories made me want to smile and scream in equal parts. It was nice hearing about having a dad from someone who wasn't throwing it in my face to hurt me.

But I would never have stories like that.

And with every memory from Billy, I felt a little more pissed at his mom for taking him away—for keeping him from making more memories. I hoped my mom hadn't done the same. I even hoped for one small second that she
didn't
know who my dad was, because at least that would be a pretty damn good reason for not telling me.

I was about to give up on the boxes when my hand closed over the edge of something thick and flat.

“Billy D., I think I found one.”

“A photo album?” He dropped his Megatron toy and crawled over to me.

“Yeah.”

I pulled the album from the box and blew the dust off its cover. A picture on the front showed two hands with fingers interlaced, wedding rings in sharp focus.

Jackpot
.

“You found it!” Billy clapped and bounced around on the floor.

I cracked open the cover, almost as eager as Billy to see if I was on the right track. The binding creaked as I opened it—too loudly. I stopped moving, but the creak continued. It wasn't the
photo album making the noise, I realized. It was the front door. Billy and I locked eyes, and I saw my own panic reflected in his when we heard his mom's voice call, “Billy? You home?”

We jerked forward simultaneously, both aiming to leap to our feet and smacking foreheads instead.

“Ow.”

“Shit.”

“Billy?” Mrs. Drum's voice was closer, moving down the hall.

I dropped the album back into the box, and Billy tossed the biggest pieces from his toy collection on top of it. The split-second teamwork covered the evidence just as Mrs. Drum's face appeared in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” she asked. The question started with a smile, but her eyes slid from Billy to me as she spoke, and by the time she reached the question mark, she was scowling.