The Last Chance Texaco

by Brent Hartinger

  I took the bus home. As I stepped into the front yard of Kindle Home, I saw Emil leave the house and climb into his car, parked in the circular driveway out front. He drove a gigantic SUV that put his head about five feet above the top of almost any other car. Somehow, this just figured. I hoped he couldn't afford to make the payments on it. As he pulled out and started driving away, I noticed that his left taillight was burned out. With any luck, the greedy gas hog would get a ticket.

  I still felt crappy and was in no mood to see other people, but I was supposed to check in with one of the counselors by four o'clock, the time I was scheduled to be home. So I went inside and checked in with Leon. Then I went back outside, grabbed a basketball from the garage, and walked around to the backyard. Someone had turned the old tennis court into a basketball court, but the concrete was now cracked and uneven.

  I shot hoops by myself for a few minutes before I heard Leon's voice say, "Can I play?"

  "Sure," I said. Truth was, I'd kind of been hoping he'd join me.

  We played one-on-one for a while. At any second, I expected him to stop dribbling and ask me why I was out back playing basketball by myself. But he never did.

  Finally, I was the one to stop.

  "Something on your mind?" he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the bottom half of his T-shirt. Unlike Ben's, his chest was smooth.

  "Kinda," I said.

  "Yeah?"

  "I don't know." I fiddled with the ball. "It's just that there's this guy." Without the ring of the bouncing basketball, everything seemed so quiet. It sounded like I was shouting.

  "Yeah?" he said, perking up.

  "It's not like that," I said, quieter. "He's just a friend. At least, he was. Oh, hell, it's Nate Brandon."

  "The kid you hit?"

  I nodded.

  Leon's face got serious. "What'd he do now?"

  "It's not like that either."

  "Well, why don't you tell me what it is like?"

  So I did. I told him everything, start to finish. How I'd given Nate the Happy Meal box, how he'd shown me the garbage under the bleachers. How we'd watched that crow die by the tennis courts, and how I'd dogged him in the hallway.

  Leon just listened. When I was done, he didn't say a word.

  "Well?" I said.

  "Well, what?"

  "Don't you have any advice?"

  "Yeah. Get a handle on the ball, would you? You were double-dribbling like crazy."

  "I mean about Nate!"

  He grabbed the ball from me and took a shot at the basket. He missed. "Damn," he said under his breath. Then he said to me, "You like this guy, huh?"

  "No!" I said. "I already told you that!" But at the exact instant I said this, I suddenly remembered the smell of Nate's aftershave.

  "So you're just friends?" he said.

  "Yeah!"

  Leon went to retrieve the ball. "So why'd you ignore him in the hallway?"

  I thought for a second. I'd been trying to answer that question to myself all afternoon. I hadn't really come up with much.

  Because of all the things he said to me," I said at last. "Because he threatened me."

  "But I thought you said he'd been nice to you lately. And that he'd only said those things before because his brother had been stabbed by someone from a group home."

  Suddenly, Leon was pissing me off. "Because of Alicia, then! Because I know how she'll react if she sees us together again!"

  He tossed me the ball, then nodded toward the basket. I took a shot, but I missed too.

  I looked at him. "What? You don't think that's a good enough reason?"

  "I didn't say that," he said, going after the ball again.

  "Then what do you think?"

  He stopped and stared at me. "I think if you want to go through your whole life alone, it might be easier to just wear a sign around your neck that says 'Don't talk to me.'"

  "What?" I was confused. What was he saying? That I'd dogged Nate in the hallway because I'd wanted him to leave me alone? Then I remembered what I'd overheard Leon telling the other counselors that day when I'd been listening from the Magic Step--that because I'd been rejected so much in my life, I pushed people away before they had a chance to get close to me.

  "That's not it!" I said. "It's not like I want to be left alone!" I didn't want that. And I didn't always push people away either. I was friends with Yolanda, wasn't I?

  "Okay," Leon said, lining up for another shot. "Forget I said anything." He took a shot at the basket, and of course this time he made it. The ball didn't even hit the rim. "But now I should go cook dinner."

  "Wait!" I said.

  "Sorry," he said. "Really gotta get moving."

  Then he was gone, and I was even more confused than before. Was Leon right? Was I afraid of getting close to Nate Brandon?

  It was only then that I sensed someone nearby-- someone who had been listening in on Leon's and my whole conversation from inside a clump of overgrown shrubs on the other side of the fence.

  "Damon!" I said to the bushes.

  Sure enough, he stepped into view, headphones and all.

  "Don't you ever do anything but listen in on other people's conversations?" I said.

  He thought about it, then shrugged. "Not really."

  "Well? Hear anything interesting?"

  "Not really." He blew on his hands, and I took some satisfaction in knowing that while Leon and I had been running around the basketball court, he'd been freezing his butt off in the bushes.

  "He's wrong about me," I said. "Leon, I mean. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about."

  "He knows a lot more than the other counselors," Damon said.

  "What? Why?"

  He put his hands in his pockets. "You mean you don't know?"

  "Know what?"

  "Leon grew up here."

  "Where?"

  "Kindle Home. His parents were druggies. The rest of his tribe is extinct or whatever. So he lived here from age thirteen though sixteen."

  "What?" Normally I liked to know personal things about the counselors, but this felt different. This felt cheap. Gossipy. But I couldn't deny it made Leon make more sense. Why he always stuck up for me. How he seemed to understand the things I did.

  "You said he lived here till he was sixteen," I said to Damon. "What happened after that? Where'd he go?"

  He rolled his eyes. "You really don't know anything, do you?"

  "Just tell me," I said, though suddenly I had a feeling I already knew.

  "What'll you give me?"

  "Forget it. It's none of my business anyway."

  "Come on," Damon said. "I think you already know."

  "I don't! And I don't want to know!" I really didn't want to know. Not anymore. Not at all.

  Leaving the basketball behind, I turned for the house. But there was only one exit from the court, and getting there meant having to walk right past Damon.

  "I'll give you a hint!" he said before I could even take a single step. "There are rabbits there!"

  Damon was telling me what I'd already suspected. Leon had spent two whole years at Eat-Their-Young Island.

  • • •

  Eddy stopped me at the top of the stairs. "What's the password?" he said with a cocky grin.

  "The password is get the hell out of my way,'" I said. After learning that news about Leon, not to mention the whole thing with Nate, I was in no mood for games.

  But he didn't budge. He crouched down, spreading his arms, daring me to take him on. Group homes may be like chicken coops, but they're also like wolf packs, with exactly one dominant male and one dominant female. With Roberto gone, Eddy was determined to take his place as Kindle Home's alpha male.

  Fortunately, Eddy was still only fourteen years old. I'd had to hold my own against much bigger guys than him, so I didn't have any problem pushing him aside.

  At least he took it well. Behind me, I heard him laughing.

  I turned the knob on Yolanda's and my bedroom, but th
e door didn't open. It was stuck. Most of the doors in Kindle Home stuck, but I'd never known my bedroom door to stick before.

  I forced it, and eventually it gave way.

  The light was on, and at first I expected Yolanda to be in there. But it wasn't Yolanda. There was an old woman in sensible shoes--Mrs. Morgan-- crouched down next to my bed. I wasn't that surprised to see her there--counselors had done unannounced bedroom searches in every group home I'd ever lived in. I wasn't worried either. I didn't have anything to hide.

  Mrs. Morgan stood up, then around to face me. Her expression looked extreme, exaggerated, like she was wearing a rubber mask.

  First that mask looked angry. Then it looked disappointed.

  Disappointed?

  I saw what she was holding in her hand. It was a little plastic bag full of white pills.

  Mrs. Morgan didn't say a word, but I immediately recognized those pills. Not because they were mine--I'd never seen them before in my life. But I'd seen pills just like them before, many times.

  They were Oxies, the pills I'd been hooked on the year before. Someone had planted them in my room, and now Mrs. Morgan thought they were mine.

  Chapter Nine

  "Well?" Mrs. Morgan said, still facing me in my bedroom, with that little plastic bag of pills in her hand.

  "They're not mine!" I said.

  "Oh? Then how'd they get inside your mattress?"

  It was Joy. It had to be. She'd planted those pills in my bedroom to make it look like I was using again. Taking or having drugs was one of the Mortal Sins that Mrs. Morgan had warned me about on my first morning at Kindle Home, when we'd made soft pretzels and she'd gone over the house rules. It was one of the things that got you shipped off to Rabbit Island. Joy clearly wanted me gone. And unless I figured a way out of this mess--and fast!--she was going to get her wish. But Joy had picked the one drug that was particularly hard for me to explain. After all, I used to take the damn things. But none of the kids at Kindle Home knew the details of my sordid past. How had she?

  Damon. Somehow he'd read my file. And he'd sold the information to Joy. Or maybe she'd tormented or blackmailed it out of him. Either way, she'd learned exactly what she needed to know to make me look especially bad.

  But even though I knew all this, I couldn't say any of it to Mrs. Morgan. The Group Home Code applied even here. No matter how much of a bitch Joy was being to me, I couldn't squeal on her--not without permanently destroying my reputation among the other kids.

  "Lucy Pitt!" Mrs. Morgan said. "Answer me!"

  I kept thinking, wracking my brain for something to say. But nothing came. So finally, I had no choice but to say, "I don't know. I don't know how they got there. But they're not mine! Mrs. Morgan, you've got to believe me!"

  Mrs. Morgan stared at me. Now the mask on her face was one of both anger and disappointment.

  She didn't believe me.

  She turned to go.

  "What's going to happen now?" I said. What I was really asking was, Will I be sent to Rabbit Island?

  "You'll just have to wait and see," she said, and with that, she was gone.

  • • •

  I didn't see Mrs. Morgan again until dinner that night. "Please pass the sour cream," she said to me, and I did, as if nothing had happened at all. Had I imagined the whole thing? Had it happened, but she'd decided not to tell the other counselors?

  Something told me I wasn't that lucky.

  After dinner, the kids and the counselors gathered in the living room to put up and decorate our Christmas tree. I was in the middle of untangling a wad of Christmas lights when I noticed that Mrs. Morgan and Leon were missing. When I glanced out into the entry hall, I saw that the door to the office was closed. Somehow I just knew that they were both inside, and that Mrs. Morgan was telling Leon what she had found in my room.

  I had to know what she was saying. So while Gina and the other kids decorated the Christmas tree in the living room, I worked my way up to the Magic Step. Then I stared at the dusty chandelier while I listened to them talk.

  "I will say this for her," Mrs. Morgan was saying. "She's had almost no points since the day she arrived, and she's even earned some tokens too. But she attacked that boy at school. And now we find out she's using again."

  "We don't know that," Leon said.

  "But I found the pills in her mattress."

  "That's just it. If Lucy really was using, you think she'd hide the pills in her own bedroom? She's way too smart for that. She knows we do inspections." So Leon was still on my side, I thought to myself. That was something anyway.

  "Then how do you explain the pills?" Mrs. Morgan asked.

  "Maybe someone set her up," Leon said. "Joy, probably. You said she said they weren't hers."

  "That's what these kids always say. And Joy has no way of knowing the kind of drug Lucy was addicted to."

  "Maybe she read Lucy's file. Or Damon did."

  "That's impossible. It's kept locked up."

  "Maybe. Maybe not."

  Mrs. Morgan sighed. "Leon, I think it's great that you identify so strongly with these kids. But we have to be realistic. You know their recidivism rate for drug use."

  To my surprise, now Leon sighed too. "Yeah. I do. I just hate the thought that she hasn't been straight with me."

  I wanted to run down the stairs and pound on the door, shouting, "I have been straight with you! They weren't my pills!" But I knew I couldn't, not without making things a whole lot worse.

  "So what do we do?" Leon said.

  "We wait to hear what Emil thinks," Mrs. Morgan said.

  "Emil." Even through the door and more than halfway up the stairs, I could hear the disgust in Leon's voice.

  "Ultimately, it's his decision," Mrs. Morgan said, and I immediately thought one thing.

  I was doomed.

  • • •

  Two days later, at my next session with Emil, he kept me waiting again while he jotted notes in Juan's file, then read them over again. Then he did that whole big production number where he put Juan's file away, then took the notes out of my file and lined them up absolutely perfectly in the center of his clipboard. Before, it had seemed like he'd done these things to show me who was boss. Now it seemed like he was doing them to punish me.

  "Well?" he said, looking up at me at last. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

  I'd thought a lot about how I was going to play this. If I told Emil they weren't my pills, I knew he'd never believe me. And even if by some miracle I did get him to believe me, he'd just want me to squeal on the person I thought had set me up. Neither of those options did me any good, so I figured why bother? All I could do was throw myself on the mercy of the court.

  "I screwed up," I said to Emil, my eyes appropriately downcast.

  "So!" he said, sounding like the villain in some cheesy James Bond movie. "You admit you were using!"

  "No," I said. "But I'd thought about it. And I admit they were my pills." I figured it would sound more believable if I didn't give him everything he wanted.

  "You had the pills in your bedroom, and you expect me to believe you hadn't taken any?"

  "Okay," I said. "I'd had a few. But I wasn't hooked or anything." The point here was to make myself sound defensive, maybe a little bit in denial--exactly like a genuinely guilty person would sound. "But I'm sorry," I went on. "Really. And I promise it won't happen again."

  Emil scowled at me. By accepting responsibility for my actions, I'd made it just a little bit harder for him to condemn me. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for me yet.

  "You're lying," he said. "You're very, very good at it, but I can still tell you're lying."

  So Emil had seen through my act. I was a good bullshitter, but he was even better. Oh, well, I said to myself. It had been a long shot anyway.

  "What's the truth?" he said. "Are you dealing? Is that it?"

  I looked up at him. He had that look in his eyes again, the one that made me think he thought of me as a wildfir
e, violent and out of control, and that it was up to him to put me out.

  "I'm telling you the truth," I said, but we both knew it was a lie, and we both knew that we both knew it was a lie.

  He said, "You do know that I could have you kicked out of this house, don't you?"