The A-Word

by Joy Preble

  Casey dragged me toward the Merc.

  “What is it with those two?” I grumped. “He knows stuff about her that we don’t, doesn’t he? About lots of things, I bet. The way he looks sometimes, like he’s seen it all and done it all, too. Gives me the willies.”

  Casey gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “Don’t have anything to tell.”

  And here was the problem: I had a feeling he really didn’t.

  HALFWAY HOME, ONE question was still poking at me.

  “Casey,” I said, as the Merc zipped along on the mostly empty freeway. “Why did Bo call you?”

  He made a tsking sound like I was an idiot. “ ’Cause Amber was out of control.”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “Did you not see her on that bar?”

  “Y’all can turn your drunk on and off at will, Casey. Least that’s what it seems to me. She was blowing off steam. You blow off steam all the time and I don’t have to call her. And I’m not one of you. Even that thing with Donny was … well … Bo’s powerful, right? He’s been in charge of her for five years. Why is it that he couldn’t haul her off the bar and away from some cowboy wannabe?”

  Casey didn’t answer right away, just gripped the steering wheel, his eyes on the road. The Merc thumped along in the darkness.

  “I needed to know what was going on,” he said eventually, not looking over at me. “Amber’s my boss.”

  More driving in the dark. More quiet. We rarely played the crappy radio when we were in this car. It was fuzzy sounding and we generally had some sort of crisis to deal with. I didn’t even miss it much, except now when it was just both of us breathing. My brain whirred. You don’t have faith in anything, Amber had told Bo. Least of all love.

  “I think she’s hurting,” I said. “I think it’s that Terry guy. Maybe she misses him. I think if we figured out what happened to her then—”

  “Enough, Jenna.” Casey’s voice was sharp.

  Well, fine then. I decided to let it go. I was not in the mood to argue matters of romance with my permanently single brother. So I closed my eyes and thought about Ryan instead.

  WE MADE IT home. We checked on Mom, asleep in her bed. I showered. I changed into shorts and a T-shirt. I checked my phone for texts. None. Got into bed. Set my alarm so I could shower in the morning. I was new to this boyfriend thing, but I figured clean hair was a plus. Tomorrow I’d put on some of that purple shadow again. Maybe try my hand at the eyeliner thing, too, if I woke up early enough to deal with it. And one of the glosses—maybe dewberry, which I thought would go well with the shadow.

  I didn’t feel myself fall asleep.

  I mention this because I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming when I heard Bo Shivers laugh again. Not a chuckle this time, but something skin-prickling, deep and dark and dismissive. The kind of laugh you never want to hear from someone. I sat up but I couldn’t find my nightstand lamp and I couldn’t see because the curtains were pulled tight. There was no light from outside, not even hallway light seeping under my door.

  “Bo?” I called, my voice shaky, but trying to be brave. The laugh echoed around me again, the sound feeling tight and close—seeping into my eardrums and traveling down to my chest where it wrapped around my heart.

  What the hell? Was that really him I heard? What was he laughing at?

  My heart seized: Was he laughing at me?

  Jenna Samuels, I told myself. Don’t be a baby. You are having a nightmare. You need to wake up. Your life has not been a bed of roses lately. Some old angel with a death wish cackling in your head is no big deal.

  Which was when I heard the scream. Loud. Shrill. Female.

  Amber Velasco.

  I fumbled for the light again. Couldn’t find it. Tried to leap out of bed but my feet tangled in the covers.

  “No!” the Amber voice screamed. And then I could see her. I had to be dreaming. I had to be. She was standing with Bo just beyond the foot of my bed, a reddish glow surrounding them, all of which I knew was impossible but there they were in the darkness. “Jenna!” Amber hollered, but she wasn’t looking at me, just peering into the pitch black. “No! Bo! No!”

  I opened my mouth, but fear was lodged too sharp in my throat.

  And then light was shining in my eyes. I blinked.

  I was lying in my bed. My heart was galloping. I shivered, even though I was hot. The sheets were damp. Casey was standing over me, his hand on my shoulder.

  “Jenna? You were screaming.” His hand whipped to my forehead like he was checking for fever. “What’s wrong?” He bent over me, face close to mine.

  He smelled clean and crisp, like air and eucalyptus and fresh sheets, hand cool on my head. I didn’t push it away, just let the soothing feeling seep in. But it was working at halfforce or something, and the calm wasn’t coming fast enough.

  “I think I was dreaming,” I said, not positive at all, heart still thumping way too hard, my throat dry as sand.

  “About what?”

  I swallowed. “About Amber. I don’t know what else. Bo maybe? I heard him laugh. She was hollering my name, Casey. She sounded so scared. She was yelling at Bo. Telling him no.”

  Casey sat next me then and stroked the top of my head. The light from my lamp drifted across his face, illuminating his eyes and that forever-perfect skin of his—no zits, no scratches, just smooth and tan and nice.

  “Why does Bo have scars on his wrists?” I asked, the question coming out of nowhere and everywhere. Bo’s laugh kept ringing in my ears. Why had I dreamt that? Why had it felt so real?

  My brother looked startled. He removed his hand from my head. “What do you mean?”

  “Bo’s wrist scars. Why does he have them if you and Amber are so perfect?”

  He grinned. “You think I’m perfect, huh? Can I quote you on that later?”

  I socked him on the arm, which settled my heart and stomach some even though I knew he barely felt it.

  “It was only a dream, Jenna. You’re okay.”

  I collapsed back against the headboard, yanking my comforter with me. The dream wasn’t about me, even though she’d called my name.

  “It was real,” I said. “More than a dream.”

  “No such thing.”

  “And there’s no such thing as your brother coming back as your guardian angel. With wings. We have to find out what happened to Amber. Whatever it is, Bo’s not telling her on purpose. That’s what I think. He knows and he won’t say and she doesn’t want to know.”

  “Does it matter?” But I could tell from his voice that he thought maybe it did.

  “Take me tomorrow,” I said. “To Austin. Where she lived … then.” I couldn’t bring myself to say when she died. I just couldn’t.

  Casey was quiet for a few seconds. My heart was beating normally now. I wasn’t freezing anymore. “Thought you were going to meet the pissant during break,” he said.

  “You are seriously an ass wipe.” But I heaved a sigh, feeling torn. “This is important,” I said, even though my brain filled up again with lips and hands and cupcakes and other wonderful things.

  This time Casey was silent for much longer.

  “We’ll leave early,” I said, taking this as a yes. “Be home in time to take me to the DMV for my permit.” No way was I letting him off the hook for this part. Even if we had a mystery to solve.

  “We’re not gonna find anything.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Another silence, not as long. After which he allowed that maybe I was right. “Bo’s a guardian angel, Jenna,” he said, as if I didn’t know this. “No matter what else you—what else we—don’t know, that’s the truth of it.” Then he added: “If you didn’t know me like you do, you wouldn’t trust me, would you? Especially the way I was before … Even if I was always trustworthy. You wouldn’t have thought I was someone you could count on, would you?”

  “You’re not Bo.”

&nb
sp; “Answer the question.”

  I snorted, attempting to sound snotty. It didn’t work.

  “I’ll take you to Austin,” Casey said. “But we’ll stop at school first so you can tell the pissant face-to-face that you’ve got family business to take care of. Guys like stuff like that, when you tell them face-to-face.”

  Was Casey a secret romantic? I would not normally have taken love advice from my brother, but nothing felt normal right now. Nothing had been normal for a long time. Besides, it was a good idea, not that I would tell him I thought so. He knew the truth, anyway. I would trust him no matter what. Weed or no weed. Behaving like a nitwit or not. Always and always.

  “So you think he’s a good guy, then? Ryan?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  I was in high spirits by the time we chugged up to Spring Creek High. In spite of my nightmare (if that’s what it was). In spite of not sleeping. In spite of ditching my boyfriend. (My boyfriend! I could say that!) We were finally DOING SOMETHING. It might not be the right thing, but it was SOMETHING. I knew deep down that Casey wouldn’t have agreed to this Austin road trip unless he felt it was important or possible. Or that it might make Management see the error of their ways.

  I don’t know why I was so convinced about this. But I was.

  Wishful thinking, maybe. Still, every angel player in my weird little world was either hiding something or worried about something or sad about something or all three. Getting to the source of this whole thing felt IMPORTANT—the chain of events that led from Amber’s murder to Bo showing her the ropes to Amber pulling me and Casey from our wreck and everything that had happened since.

  What I tried not to think about: Why me?

  If I hadn’t had a seizure that day last year, Casey wouldn’t have had to drive me and we wouldn’t have had the accident. Except then we wouldn’t have gotten to the bottom—sort of—of why the bad guys had destroyed our family. Of course Dad might have left us anyway, I realize now. Honestly, it all made my head hurt.

  “Don’t take your sweet time about it,” my brother said. It was 6:53 in the morning, sun barely rising in the sky. The plan was for me to talk to Ryan, then race out before the first bell rang so no one caught me cutting class.

  Casey would stay in the Merc. He’d be missing school, too, but that was how it was these days. He was passing everything now, but just barely except for the repeat of Teen Leadership and his science class, which was Forensics. I’d nosed around those college websites he’d bookmarked, just to see what he was up to. But I hadn’t been sure until I overheard him a few months ago with his friend Dave, talking about how forensic scientists solve crimes. How it’s pathology and DNA and trace evidence and even odontology, which he told Dave meant forensic dentistry. And how maybe that’s what he might want to do, be a cop or a detective.

  Of course Dave had jerked around about it, saying how Casey ought to be taking more chemistry so he could make a good drug dealer, which in Dave’s opinion he would not because he was too soft. Casey stopped hanging around Dave after that. As Casey put it, it was a choice of either avoiding him or punching him in the face. Good riddance, as far as I was concerned. Soon after, Dave vanished in a cloud of weed smoke and went to live with his parents again. The last time we’d heard about him was when his grandma, Mamaw Nell, called to say we could keep the Merc. She no longer needed it, now that she had bought some fancy sports car with her slot machine winnings.

  The point was: even as an A-word my brother wanted something real. Something legitimate. Something other than what he was. Of course that was impossible, right?

  I shoved those thoughts from my brain as I rushed in to find Ryan.

  He was standing by his locker. He looked beautiful and perfect. His buzzed-but-growing hair stuck up in a maybe random and maybe on-purpose-but-nice way.

  I wondered how I looked after not sleeping. I was wearing my #76 mustang necklace and my regular jeans and double T-shirts—dark and light blue, the light one underneath, hanging a little longer than the dark. I’d swiped on purple shadow again and the berry lip gloss and almost poked my eye out between the pointy liner brush and the mascara wand, but it was all on there and not too gloppy, either. My hair was in a medium-length French braid. My cowgirl boots added the finishing flair.

  It must have looked decent because Ryan’s eyes lit up when he saw me.

  He smelled like Axe again, a little too much this morning. I figured there was no polite way to tell him this so I pretended not to notice. What I did notice: he kissed me on the lips—just a quick peck—before I could even tell him what I had to say. I stopped noticing the Axe. Funny how that worked. Funny how dumb conversations can be, too.

  Me: “Hi.”

  Ryan: “Hi.”

  Me: “I’m not going to be here today.”

  Ryan: “You’re not?” (Here he looked confused, not that I blamed him since I was standing there.)

  Me: “My, um, dad couldn’t come home from Austin so Casey is taking me to have lunch with him.”

  Ryan: “Oh. We have a bio quiz, right?”

  We were in the same class. My stomach got knotty. We’d been going out for like a day and here I was, lying to him.

  Me: “Yeah. But …”

  We looked at each other. I scuffed my boots on the floor.

  Ryan: “Family’s tricky sometimes.” He twitched his lips like he was pondering. “You do what you have to do. I’ve got practice till late but after that. You call. I’ll answer.”

  This made me happy and nervous all at once, but I said, “Okay.” Then added, “That would be great.” Which sounded lame, but I guess it was enough because he tapped a finger on the mustang necklace with his number on it—which had been inside my shirt and now was somehow not—and then grinned the cutest grin.

  My pulse zinged. “Maggie gave it to me,” I said. “She … well, she’s Maggie. You know.”

  Did that even make sense to him? My face felt warm. I hadn’t meant for him to see the necklace. Like Mags said, I didn’t want him to think I was being a stalker or whatever.

  “Cool,” Ryan said. He nodded, like a chin exclamation point. People were coming and going and the hall was packed, but I barely felt or saw them.

  My heart was beating up a storm and then it beat even faster because he said, “You can wear that to the Bonfire. At least I’ll have one fan who’s not my dad.” He looked modest when he said it. But we both knew that he was a freshman on varsity and that he could have a swelled head about that if he wanted to. I liked that he didn’t seem to want to. I liked almost everything that he’d done or said in the last minute. More than liked.

  Still, I said, “So you’re asking me to go? ’Cause I might have other plans, you know.” I glanced into the air, like I couldn’t care less. When I glanced back, he was frowning.

  “Do you?” His eyes were wide and he was fidgeting.

  I said, “I’ll be there.”

  Maybe I’d said it a little too quickly. But there was no question. For a second I thought we might kiss again, but we didn’t. Which was a shame for obvious reasons, but also if I’d been kissing him then maybe I’d have closed my eyes and not seen stupid Lanie Phelps chatting up Donny Sneed over by the library.

  He was wearing his letter jacket with all his football playoff patches from last year, leaning against the glass wall and looking pleased with himself. Lanie was smiling and gesturing, her hands fluttering around like pale little birds. She must have sensed me looking because she glanced over and, after a few awkward seconds, she waved. I waved back, mostly out of obligation. Here was another problem with Lanie Phelps: She seemed to believe that I could somehow help get her and my brother back together again. And that maybe I wanted to. Which I did not. Even if I had once overheard her tell Casey that he was what people called a diamond in the rough. That no matter what people thought she knew he would be someone special someday. Was special, in fact.

  Well, if only she knew, right?

  I didn’t have t
ime to stew over it because I needed to hustle before I ran into Maggie. At least I could lie to her in a text and not face-to-face.

  I told Ryan goodbye and ran back to the entrance, pounding past Principal Baker’s office, where I heard a lot of giggling. Girlish giggling. So I paused.

  And then I about fell to the floor with apoplexy—which for the vocabulary challenged means a stroke—because there, in Principal Baker’s office, was Bo Shivers.

  BO WAS WEARING khakis and a button-down and expensive-looking shoes. He was talking to Principal Baker and a gaggle of junior and senior girls who couldn’t take their eyes off him. (Bo, that is. Not Principal Baker, who used to coach football and still wore Sansabelt slacks even with his sport coat, which was doing nobody a favor in the fashion department.) Goosebumps prickled my arms so hard it hurt. I sucked in a steadying breath and burst into the office.

  Here is the short version of what happened next:

  Principal Baker looked annoyed, like adults do when ninth graders interrupt them. (My personal opinion was that anyone who didn’t like teenagers probably shouldn’t be working in the public school system, but that horse had left the barn a long time ago.) Then he recovered and introduced me. “This is Mr. Shivers. He’s going to be the new ninth grade pre-AP world history teacher.”

  Then I asked what had become of that nice Mrs. Parnell, who had a fondness for map lessons and an unfortunate upper arm jiggle when she wrote on the board. I was informed that she had taken a sudden leave of absence due to family matters, and also informed that I shouldn’t ask personal questions, but Principal Baker would make an exception since he was glad I cared. Then Baker told me and the cheerleaders to go to class, but of course I kept standing there, glaring at Bo, who said, “Nice to meet you. Jenna, is it?”

  I forced myself to keep my boots on the ground and not smacked against his shins. Bo patted Mr. Baker on the shoulder and said some nonsense about how I looked like a good student and if Baker didn’t mind, he’d like to chat me up about how class had been going. Get a student’s perspective. My brain was whirling on what to do next. Then who should appear in the front foyer but my brother, looking from me to Bo and back again like a wild man, his mouth opening and closing like he couldn’t find the right words. For which I didn’t blame him.