We spaced out our attacks every few blocks, trying to avoid attracting too much attention, but eventually the inevitable happened. Jake hit the side of a tour bus with one of the balloons, and when it passed, there was a police car pulling up from the side street. The lights came on immediately.
“Run!” Jake cried.
I had no thought of giving up this time. We were the Water Balloon Boys, after all, a pair of nefarious criminals wanted all over the world, and to be caught by the law would mean certain hanging. It was run or die. So we ran, the pedestrians giving us a wide berth, the police siren screaming behind us. We ducked into an alley so narrow I could touch both brick walls with my elbows. I heard a screech of tires and, glancing over my shoulder, saw the police car stopped at the curb, two officers clambering out.
“Ho boy!” Jake cried.
The policemen yelled for us to stop. Jake dropped the bag of balloons and ran faster, me struggling to keep up. When we reached the street, he weaved around a guy on a bicycle and headed left. I followed, dodging a few pedestrians. There seemed nowhere to go but just on down the sidewalk. The policemen emerged from the alley, yelling at us. Jake may have been able to outrun them, but they were definitely gaining on me. Jake glanced over his shoulder at me, saw that he’d begun to stretch out a lead ahead of me, and slowed his pace to match mine.
“Go on!” I said.
“No way!” he replied.
He nodded toward a hotel. I didn’t know what he meant until he ran that way, leaping over a cart of luggage and right through the revolving door. My legs feeling like they were going to collapse at any moment, I followed him into a plush lobby. There was a white stone fountain, green marble flooring, and a matching reception counter. A man behind the counter yelled at us, but we didn’t stop, sprinting down a hall of doors and ducking into a stairwell. Jake went up one flight of stairs, me right behind him, and then down the red-carpeted hall, numbered doors on either side. One of the doors was open, a mop-and-broom cart parked right outside. A heavyset woman in a red uniform was backing her way out of the room.
“Oh thank you, ma’am,” Jake said. “Dad sent us up here to get his wallet. Are you done?”
“Oh yes, yes,” the woman said meekly, and stepped out of the way.
Jake smiled at her and we stepped inside, closing the door. It was just in time, because I heard the stairwell door down the hall open. A shout, running footsteps, the clank of elevator doors closing. Another heavy door opening at that end and more footsteps.
We waited for a good twenty minutes—each us taking turns mimicking the way people looked when they’d been hit by one of our balloons, stifling our snickers—then crept out into the hall like a pair of cat burglars. We took the stairs down to the main floor, then used an exit that led to a parking lot in the back, finally making our way through the busy streets to the depot. I was exhausted, but it was probably the best day I’d had in a long time. I couldn’t even think of a close second, which said something about how lame my life had been.
It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, and the depot was bustling with activity, people carrying crying kids, businessmen pulling suitcases on wheels. There was a bus leaving for Denver in thirty minutes, but Jake insisted on going by train, and the next train wasn’t for two hours.
“Enough time to get something to eat and maybe take a little nap,” he said.
I’d forgotten we hadn’t had lunch. After we bought our tickets and stuck them in the backpack, we had burgers at a greasy little cafeteria right there in the depot, then found an empty bench in the main lobby area. Jake rolled up his jean jacket and used it as a pillow, dozing off right away. I tried to do the same, using my backpack as a pillow, but my mind wouldn’t relax. The high I’d been on from the water ballooning had finally started to fade, and now I was starting to think about Dad again.
We were getting closer.
We were definitely getting closer.
I was having a hard time remembering why I had ever thought seeing him was a good idea. I’d often said to myself that I should go see him, but I’d often said I should do lots of things and had never gotten around to them. What did I think was really going to happen? Did I really think giving him the portrait would change anything?
It was making me crazy thinking about it, so I decided to do some drawing, sketching the lobby area. It wasn’t long before I felt some serious pressure down below, so I hopped up to go to the bathroom, slipping the pad underneath the backpack on the bench. Jake was snoring away. I thought about waking him to tell him where I was going, then decided he would be pretty angry at being woken up just because I was going to take a leak, so I let him sleep. It was a little decision, one I didn’t think much about at the time, but it was going to change everything.
I was away for less than five minutes. When I was heading back to the bench, now feeling much more relaxed and maybe finally sleepy enough to take a nap, I saw the problem right away. And I was suddenly wide awake again.
My drawing pad was sitting there on the bench corner, but my backpack was gone.
chapter fourteen
“Stolen? What do you mean, stolen?”
Jake sat up, blinking away his sleep. Without his jacket to give him bulk, he looked thin and small in his rumpled T-shirt. I swallowed hard. All around us, people continued to walk purposefully to their destinations, hardly even giving us a glance, all of them oblivious to the crisis we now faced. The commotion in the lobby echoed off the tiled floor and the high ceilings. Outside the doors, a train screeched to a halt. I wondered if it was our train, then realized we still had at least an hour to go.
“I mean, it’s gone,” I said.
“You’re joking,” Jake said.
He was finally wide awake now, and the full impact of the situation seemed to finally hit him. If my backpack was stolen, that meant all our money was gone, as well as our tickets. He looked under the bench, then hopped up and began wandering around the terminal, searching next to vending machines and video games, as if the backpack was a pet that had just wandered off on its own. I watched him, waiting for him to understand what I had understood right away. The backpack was gone, and there was no getting it back.
Finally, he returned, looking pissed and miserable.
“How could this happen?” he said.
“I had to go to the bathroom.”
“You should have woken me.”
“I thought you’d be mad.”
He gaped at me. “Mad? Don’t you understand, Charlie? We have nothing now!”
I swallowed, remembering where the money had come from. “What are we going to do about the drug dealer? He’s going to want his money.”
“Oh, shut up!” he said. “I made up that stuff. The money was my foster dad’s from when he sold his van.”
“You made it up?”
“Yeah, so you’d go with me! God! What difference does it make now? We have nothing! Nothing!”
“They didn’t get my drawing pad at least.”
“Oh great!” he said with mock enthusiasm. “Because I’m sure they would have wanted that! They might have sold the drawings for a million dollars each!” He shook his head. “I mean, Jesus! You could have taken the backpack with you. That would have been the smart thing to do. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Well—”
He held up a hand. “Don’t. Forget it. It doesn’t matter. It’s gone.” It obviously mattered, a lot, but he kept repeating “it doesn’t matter” as if he would eventually convince himself. Finally, he sighed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of twenties. He counted them. “Well . . . I didn’t think I had enough on me, but I do. I have enough money for one ticket. You can still go to Denver. It’s not a total loss.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m not going.”
“Oh yes you are!”
I shook my head. “We should probably see this as a sign. I wasn’t meant t
o go. It was a dumb idea to begin with.”
“Charlie, come on. You’re just getting scared ’cause you’re going to see your dad soon. You don’t want to chicken out now, when you’re almost there.”
“I’m not chickening out,” I said. “I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Charlie—”
“I mean it, Jake. Why does it matter, anyway? I thought it did. I thought it would matter. But I don’t have to see him. It’s not like he’s been there in my life, you know? It was just dumb, the whole thing. It’s better if I don’t go. At least I can pretend that maybe the picture might mean something to him. If I give it to him and he doesn’t like it . . . it’s just not worth it.”
Jake started to say something, stopped, tried again, then turned away and muttered something.
“What was that?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I said you’re full of crap.”
“Okay, whatever,” I said. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”
“You may buy all that stuff, maybe you’ve convinced yourself, but the truth is that you’re just a wuss.”
I felt the tomato face coming on, a warmth that spread all the way to my ears. “Maybe it seems that way, but it really isn’t. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I really don’t see the point of going there.”
“Nope,” Jake said, “you’re just a wuss.”
I walked away. He followed me. I had known he was going to see it that way, that no amount of explaining would make him understand it was more than me just being a chicken.
“Wuss, wuss, wuss,” he said.
“Oh, real mature,” I said. I walked out of the terminal and onto the sidewalk, people streaming around me, the sun bright overhead. I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from him.
“I should have figured this would happen,” he said.
I chose a random direction and started walking. “That’s right, Jake, you should have.”
“You’re just a wuss right to the core.”
I walked fast, but he stayed right next to me. I wouldn’t look at him.
“That’s right,” I said. “You know everything, Jake. I’m just a chicken. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Just like with Tessa,” he said.
It stopped me cold. I turned and stared at him. We stood next to a covered bus bench, where a grubby-looking wino in a gray trench coat was sleeping. I smelled the alcohol clinging to the guy even from where we stood.
“What?” I said.
He smirked a little and looked away, and just for a second, I thought he was going to say something else, maybe pretend he hadn’t said it, but then he looked back at me and his face was set, his eyes hard.
“You wrote her that note, and then you chickened out.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I put it in her locker, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t. You wrote it, but you didn’t give it to her. Somebody else did.”
“What are you . . .” I began, and then realized where he was going. The thought that someone else had given Tessa the note had never occurred to me, but now I realized that’s exactly what had happened. “You did it?” I said, incredulous.
“That’s right.”
I felt like I’d been shot in the back. “Why?”
“Why? Because I knew you were too much of a wuss to give it to her.”
“You took it from my notebook? You actually took it from my notebook?”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I found it in the hall. You’re just lucky it was me that found it and not someone else.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Leo had almost killed me and he thought I was lucky? What would have been worse, broadcasting it on the news? Lying to me about the money was one thing, but this was the worst betrayal I could imagine. “I can’t believe you did that to me,” I said.
“Yeah, well, believe it. I was trying to help you.”
“Help! Leo was going to rip off my face and feed it to his gerbils! How was that helping me?”
“Keep your voice down,” Jake said.
I knew some of the people walking by were ogling us like we were animals in a zoo, but I didn’t care. “I could have died!”
“You’re exaggerating. You just needed that little nudge, and that’s what I did. Just like I’m trying to do now. Stop you from wussing out. I know you want to give that portrait to your dad. So do it. No matter what happens, at least you can say you did it. That’s something.”
I was still reeling from what he had done to me, but all at once it came to me exactly why he had put that note in Tessa’s locker, and it had nothing to do with me needing a nudge. He had needed a way to get me to go along with his crazy plan to travel halfway across the country, and what better way to do it than make Leo Gonzalez want to pulverize me. I didn’t know exactly why it had been so important that I go with him when we hadn’t spoken in years, but that must have been it. He wanted to go see his uncle, but he didn’t want to do it alone.
“You did all this on purpose,” I said.
“What?”
“To get me to go with you. Admit it. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about you not wanting to take this trip alone. So you’re the chicken. You’re the wuss.”
His eyebrows went up, and he tried to look confused, but there was just a little bit of a smirk, enough to make me think I’d nailed it right on the head and he was smiling because he was guilty.
“You’re nuts,” he said.
“I can’t believe this!”
“Calm down. You’re blowing things out of proportion. I really was trying to help you.”
“Liar!” I said. My eyes felt watery, and I fought to keep the tears from spilling out. I would not cry in front of him. “You’re a big fat liar!”
“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset about this.”
It was hard to speak, and I was sputtering all over the words. “I thought you were my friend, Jake! That’s why! But you turned out to be a jerk, just like everyone else.”
“I am your friend, man. That’s why I’m trying to get you to—”
“Oh yeah, then why didn’t you ever admit you broke my Game Boy?”
I didn’t think about the words first; they just came out. It took a moment for him to realize what I’d said, but I saw something change in his eyes. It was like they froze, like I was looking at a picture of him rather than the real person.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I told you back then, it was broke when I got it.”
“That’s crap.” I probably should have stopped there, just let him have his little fantasy, but I couldn’t. There was no way the Game Boy had been broken when I’d given it to him, because I had played with it just a few minutes before handing it to him. “That’s why we can’t ever be real friends, Jake,” I said. “Friends don’t lie. I thought maybe you’d changed, but you’re still a liar.”
I expected him to punch me. Maybe yell and scream and stomp his feet. Something violent. I knew I was taking my own life into my hands, that he could beat me in a fight without breaking a sweat, but I wanted to get a reaction out of him. I wanted to hurt him like he’d hurt me.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, just stood there staring at me with those frozen eyes. I felt like all of Salt Lake City was watching, when really, nobody probably even noticed, except for the people on the streets who saw us as just obstacles in their paths. Maybe I had hurt him, maybe I hadn’t, it was hard to tell, but he didn’t get angry. He chewed on his bottom lip, nodded as if something had been decided, then took the money in his hand and stuffed it into my pocket. I was too stunned to stop him.
“Buy the ticket, Charlie,” he said. “Give your dad the picture. Do it because then you can say you did.”
Then he walked away. I watched him, thinking maybe he’d turn toward the station, but he walked right on past, rounded a corner, and was gone.
I don’t know how long I
stood there on the sidewalk, but it was a long time. I kept waiting for Jake to come back. No way he was going to just abandon me here in Salt Lake City, was he?
A bus grumbled by, spitting out black diesel clouds, and that snapped me back to reality. So I was on my own now. It was just me and my drawing pad, standing there on the sidewalk outside the depot, over five hundred miles from Oregon, eighty bucks in my pocket. I headed inside, planning on plunking it down on the counter and buying a ticket home. It was time to end this crazy road trip. Get back to getting good grades and making something of my life. Stop living in a fantasy. Stop worrying about a dad who didn’t care whether I lived or died.
After waiting in line for a few minutes and finally making my way to the counter, I was ready to tell the clerk I wanted a ticket to Rexton. The clerk was an old man with white hair and a woolly white beard who made me think of Santa Claus.
“Destination?” he said.
I couldn’t speak.
“Son?” he said.
The winter before Dad left, I had really wanted a new ten-speed bike for Christmas. I’d thought about it all year, but then the whole craziness between Mom and Dad had happened, and I had forgotten all about it. Now here was Santa Claus asking me how he could help me. Asking me what I wanted.
“I want a ticket to Denver,” I said quickly.
Before I could change my mind, he’d taken my money and given me my ticket.
chapter fifteen
I don’t remember much about the ride to Denver—the whole thing was like some kind of hazy dream, a rumble of foggy memories. I remember stepping onto the gray two-story train and handing my ticket to a black woman in a blue uniform. I remember the feel of the cloth coach seat and the garlic smell of the heavy greasy-haired man sitting next to me. I remember how the moon looked rising over the Rockies after the last of the crimson light had drained from the sky. But the memories are just fragments, and what I really remember clearly was waking to the screech of the train’s brakes, and then the conductor telling us over the intercom that the local time in Denver was 6:15 a.m.
The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Page 13