Wanted (5 page)

My lip trembles.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s okay.”

When I manage to blink back the tears, I hand him a Kleenex. “Your nose. It’s bleeding.”

He shoves the Kleenex against his nose. “Have you ever considered the line of work you’re in is, for lack of a better term,
terminal
?”

“Yeah. Nim’s an anomaly. Sort of like an evolutionary glitch . . . on steroids. Most of my clients place bets, pay debts, win a little cash, whatever. You did well, by the way.”

“Told you I don’t lose. I waited for you at Bully’s.”

I can feel blood rush to my cheeks.

Josh stands up and helps me to my feet. “This is getting to be a habit.” He rubs his shoulder and readjusts the Kleenex on his nose. “You gotta admit. That was pretty valiant. Me going after him like that.”

“Are you trying to flex?”

He clears his throat. “A little. Okay. A lot. I’m just scrappy, you know, lots of lean muscle—not a lot of bulk.”

“Still flexing?”

“You can’t tell?”

I squint and clear my throat. “No?”

“They used to call me Noodle at my other school.” He drops his hands to his sides. We laugh together, and I feel a release of tension, laughing harder. When I snort, he pauses for a second, then doubles over.

I try to stop, control myself, but can’t, and snort again.

“So,” he says, “I’m your big hero?” He attempts flexing again, then just shakes out his arms. “Forget it.”

“Didn’t even faze him, did it?”

“Didn’t budge. Unbelievable. Valiant or not?”

“Valiantly stupid.”

Josh winces. “Why stupid?”

“You’re pretty new.”

Josh nods. “I’ve been here for almost a month already.”

“That long?”
Of course
I know it’s been that long. Who wouldn’t?

“Nice to know I slipped under your radar, there.”

“Don’t be snarky. I’m serious.”

“Serious. As a heart attack?”

“As a colonoscopy.”

“Ouch.
Not
pleasant.”

I stop to tie my shoe. “Go on ahead of me.”

“I’ll wait.”

I shake my head. “These are the last few months of high school—months you don’t want to spend—”

Josh laughs, interrupting my monologue on being a school untouchable—she with only one photo in the yearbook. “Spend with the only chick who laughs for real, not doing some lame
tee-hee-hee
thing. Spend with a bookie. A bookie? A high school bookie.
That
blows my mind. No way. You’re a keeper.”

“I’m not a novelty.” I hate that my voice is quavering, so I inhale and fumble with the zipper on my backpack. “What do you want?” I ask.

“I could use a friend.”

I shrug. “You have friends—an entire entourage now.”

“I thought you hadn’t noticed me before.”

That stings. We’re silent.

“Wow.” Josh kicks at an empty Coke can. It skips across the gravel lot and bangs into the curb. He pulls the Kleenex away. “So that’s it?”

I rub my throat, trying to push back the ache. “Thanks again,” I say. “You go ahead. I’ll be right in. I’ll text you with Sanctuary to let you know when to meet up for the winnings.”

Josh faces me, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He bends over to scrape blood spatters off his jeans, his lanky frame looking a lot like a question mark. “Know the last time I gave a shit about what anybody said or thought about me?” His jaw is tense. His eyes look like they’re ready to shoot sparks.

I shake my head.

“Neither do I.” He cocks his head and turns toward the building, crushing the Coke can under his shoes. He pauses and turns. “See you around.”

I swallow. “See you.”

Chapter 5

AFTER I FINISH LUNCH, I PACK

up my antiecological, plastified cheese-and-crackers packs. I’m not sure what’s more plasticky: the cheese or the container. Nim and his friends walk by; he’s talking about how he can get away with anything in this school, this town. He holds up a ticket, flashing it. “Number twenty-seven. I can park wherever I goddamn please in this shithole town.” He crumples the ticket and tosses it my way, smirking, then sneering at me like I’m a cockroach.

I pick crumbs off my sweatshirt, stacking the empty cheese-and-crackers containers one on top of the other, shoving the crumpled paper in my romance novel, trying to keep the cover out of sight. Cory at Grassroots Books says that I need to learn to “own the cheese.”

Personally, I don’t need Nim to know I crush on scantily clad, muscular figments of Nora Roberts’s imagination.

A couple of girls I don’t know—maybe new—are in the hallway, and Nim stares past me at them.

He turns to his friends. “Did these little border bunnies lose their way? Maybe we should make a few calls, huh? Help them find their way back under the barbed-wire fence where they belong.” He holds out his hands out, saying, “Green card? Green card?”

Everybody giggles like in some sit-com laugh track. I can just see the Tweets and texts now . . . 
LOL, LMAO, ROFLMAO, LOL LOL LOL
.

God.

He looks behind him, though, knowing that if he ever said that in front of Moch or la Cordillera, he’d probably be jumped before the day was through. Both girls stare down at the ground. I can practically feel the heat coming from their bodies and wish I had some of Lillian in me at the moment. She’d come unhinged and probably sue him for something.

Lillian’s big on lawsuits. She’s good at indignation.

And I place bets. Sometimes I feel so shallow.

Nim and his friends walk away. I turn to the girls and say, “I’m sorry—sorry he says that stuff.” More sorry, though, that I don’t say anything back.

One of the girls looks up and shrugs. “What can you do?” she asks.

“Maybe some kind of
pendejo
intervention. Do you think it’s possible that people are born with a DNA glitch that makes them incurable
pendejos
? Like the thirteenth chromosome is the terminal butthead one, so with a little genetic modification . . . Who knows?”

The girls smile.

“Do you want a Coke or something? My treat.” Coke could do a whole new ad campaign:
Wash hate away with a swig. Carbonated love in a can. Cheers!

Six words.

The girls are staring at me, big-eyed. Sometimes I wonder if I’m talking out loud or if looking at me the way they do is just the way I’ll always be looked at. Nim and his crowd are walking down the hall. He turns back and winks at me, making my stomach feel all queasy.

“Is okay,” one girl says, squeezing my arm. “What you can do ’bout him?”

I stare at the crumpled parking ticket. I have the title to his truck, which he’ll need if he ever gets pulled over or some police officer asks him about those tickets.

The queasiness turns to anger. “A lot,” I say. “A lot.” I buy them Cokes. We sit down in the courtyard. I’m surprised they join me.

“You from here?” one asks.

I nod. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m Mike. You?”

“Sofia. This is Laura. We in nine grade. New.”

I whistle. “Tough place to be new.”

I feel bad for them. New here, for lack of a better word, sucks. I remember after living with the One Body, One Mind religious group for eight years, the real world was a pretty cruel awakening. “Kumbaya” was replaced by “I see Paris, I see France.” Meditation was replaced by masochistic games like dodgeball or red rover, where it’s perfectly okay to hurl rubber balls at or clothesline your classmates.

And under no circumstances should I have brought my Bible Battles Trading Card collection for show-and-tell.

I spent eight years in a New Testament world—love everyone, turn the other cheek. The real world tends to work according to the eye-for-an-eye teachings. Just make sure you gouge first.

“So what you gonna do?” Sofia asks.

I smile. “A little smiting.”

She looks at me weird. Her friend, Laura, who hasn’t said a word, mutters something to her in Spanish.

“It has to do with the paper?” Sofia asks.

“A piece of paper can mean everything to somebody,” I explain.

Sofia nods. “You don’ have to tell me.”

Chapter 6

I WIPE OFF A SMUDGE FROM

my one good lens. My head hurts having spent an entire day bleary-eyed. I’ll get my glasses replaced this afternoon—another hundred bucks down the drain.

I look up to see Nimrod and his friends head from the field to the locker room. Medusa and her gang follow close behind. “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Here goes. Wish me luck.”

I look around.
Who am I talking to?

I make the call from the school’s only pay phone, hoping to sound desperate and worried and pissed about some dumb teenager recklessly driving in the high school parking lot—taillight busted, skid marks and all. I keep the call under a minute, then hang up.

I run to Nimrod’s truck: a shiny, green, double-cabbed machine of masculinity. It’s impeccable.

Now or never.
Never is starting to feel like a better option, but I’m tired of the safe way out. Sure, I have U-Dub, University of Washington tomorrow. But why does today and every day until then have to totally suck? And if it sucks for me, it’ll suck for all the kids like Laura and Sofia.

Plus, I have to send a message out to my clients.

I circle the truck and break the right taillight, picking up the little pieces of plastic and putting them in my pocket, pulling out the key I lifted from him in government class. Growing up in a tough neighborhood had its advantages. I reserve pickpocketing and other skills for emergency situations.

I climb into Nim’s truck, turn on the engine, then take a big breath because if I blow the fenders off this thing, I can kiss solids good-bye until the Second Coming. I pull the break, slip the truck into neutral, and floor the pedal, holding the brake with all my weight and stop just as soon as the acrid smell of burned rubber fills the air. The truck shudders to a stop when I turn it off, and I lean my head against the steering wheel, trying to catch my breath, then slip out of the truck.

I plunk myself on the bench facing the parking lot, feeling like this is a pretty bad idea right about now.

“Whatcha doing?” Josh plops next to me on the bench. I jump about ten feet in the air. “Can I sit here?”

“Sit where you want.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

I nod.

“Why do you make it so hard to be your friend?” Josh asks. “Like it’s some kind of privilege granted after crawling through the nine circles of hell.”

I organize the word search of thoughts in my head and pick the wrong ones. “Why do you care?” I ask. “It’s not like people are rushing to buy BFF necklaces with me.”

“Maybe because you make it so goddamned difficult. You’re about as approachable as the antichrist.”

“Hey. He can strike up some pretty good deals. Haven’t you heard of Charlie Daniels?”

There’s a strained silence, then Josh says, “‘The Devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal . . .’”

I try to muffle my laugh but end up snorting anyway.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sitting where I want to be.”

I look over at him. “Freezing your butt off on a bench outside Carson High School staring at a parking lot—”

“Next to you,” he finishes my sentence. “So whatcha doing?” he asks.

“Waiting,” I say.

“Waiting for what?”

Blue-red lights flash on top of the police car that turns into the school parking lot, cruising up and down the lanes until it stops behind Nimrod’s truck. An officer comes out, walks around the back of the truck, staring at the broken taillight. He crouches down and brushes his hands across the fresh skid marks, smelling like burned rubber. Exhaust lingers in the air. The officer talks into his radio.

Nim and Medusa walk out of the school ahead of the others, her fingers laced in his: blemish-free, wearing school colors, walking hand in hand, their best friends frolicking behind them, tossing a Frisbee back and forth. They’re probably singing the school fight song.

They look like a freaking brochure for high school happiness.

Josh looks from Nim to his truck to the police officer to me. He smiles. “Kinda wish we had popcorn.” His arm brushes mine, and I try to pretend that Josh’s arm rubbing mine doesn’t send my stomach into some kind of delirious butterfly-wing revolt. I hope my face isn’t turning that unattractive, blotchy crimson color.

I clear my throat. “I don’t think they serve snacks at experimental theater.”

“Looks more like reality TV. Want to tell me what we’re watching?” he asks.

“Vengeance,” I say.

“Oooh. Like eternal damnation and that kind of stuff.”

I laugh. “Small-scale vengeance—just making a point today. I’ll save eternal damnation and the heavens raining locusts for another day.”

Principal Holohan joins the scene. His hair looks like the flames of a campfire—tufts of red and white gravity-defying wisps tangle in the wind. He’s followed by Dean Randolph.

We hear the policeman say, “Unpaid parking tickets. Kid, you’re gonna have to make a call, because we’ve got to bring you in.” A tow truck arrives and gets to work booting Nim’s truck.

Nimrod rushes the poor tow-truck worker, whose face loses all color. The police officer grabs Nim and throws him against the truck, clicking cuffs around his wrists. Beast immobilized.

“Well,” I say. “That turned out a lot better than I thought.”

“You want to tell me how you pulled
that
off?” He looks at me like I just parted the Red Sea.

I feel a frisson of fear and excitement. My stomach does flip-flops. “Nim did it all, you know. I just made a call, put the wheels in motion.”

This doesn’t erase the fear. But it gives me the power back. It keeps my business safe. It sends a message. Leonard would be proud. Sofia and Laura won’t know about this, but that’s okay, too. Silent justice.

Maybe that’s what Lillian feels she does—like she makes a difference. If this is it, I get that. It’s nice to step outside myself—do something for somebody.