She felt a sudden surge of enthusiasm. “Oh my God, I loved that show. Is this your first time watching?”
He splayed his arms. “Yup. I’m a virgin.”
“What season are you on?” With more enthusiasm than she had felt in hours—or maybe longer—she walked over and sat on the bed next to him to see the screen. It didn’t even strike her as a weird thing for her to do until she felt the heat from his body pulsing toward her through her thin Bon Jovi T-shirt (at fifty cents, a major score from the Goodwill by her house).
If he thought anything of her proximity, he didn’t show it. “Four. It’s probably the greatest show I’ve ever seen.”
“Dude, just wait.” She regretted the accidental use of Vince’s word. “Dude” hadn’t used to tumble naturally from her tongue at all. She used to sound like a mom trying to fit in with the kids when she said it. She’d hated feeling like such an outsider back then, but now it kinda bugged her that she sounded like any ol’ no-real-vocab teenager. “Um. Yeah, it just gets better and better. I love it.”
She looked back at him. He was obviously completely sober, save for maybe a beer or two. All at once, she wished that she could have the kind of conversation she had been imagining between Vince and the Redhead.
One that went: “I hate these parties.” “Ugh, me too.” “I’m not even drunk, or anything.” And then they could leave and go to IHOP or something.
She knew it was stupid to imagine all this with Conor, someone who saw her as a jailbird at best and a dumb little kid at worst. He was a senior, and she and most everyone else at the party were sophomores. Two years, but it was a big difference. Particularly when in addition to those two years, there was the consumption of a half bottle of vodka and a joint between them.
And also the fact that he had a bunch of internship hours under his belt, when all she had was court-ordered community service.
“You don’t usually wear glasses, do you?” she asked, gesturing at his thick-rimmed black glasses.
“Wha—? Oh, no, usually wear contacts. But when I’m just sitting around, I wear my glasses.” He made a face and pushed the frames up into his hair. Was he embarrassed to be looking dorky around her?
No. That was in her head.
“Cool,” she said.
“Not really.” He laughed.
“I guess not.” She smiled, and the expression felt unfamiliar on her face. She had the strange realization that this was the first time she’d smiled all night. The thought made her self-conscious, and all at once she felt like she was imitating the Joker or something. She pressed her lips together. Stopped the smile. “I’ll uh … I’ll let you get back to the show.”
He nodded. “Yeah, you enjoy your party out there.”
“Hey, at least it’s good music. Not always the case.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, and then said, “You’re welcome for that.”
“You put it on?”
“Yeah, it’s my iPod. I figured if I had to listen to music through the wall all night, I wanted it to be mine.”
“Makes sense … Um. Hey, so none of my friends even like Breaking Bad. So I never got to talk about it when I watched it. Do you want maybe to…? Like, I could give you my number and you could text me after you get through a few episodes. I mean, if you feel like it. It’s the kind of show you wanna talk about after things happen, I feel like.”
No, she thought, that was super weird. She was just the weird little stoner girl who had somehow ended up at the party, and then in his room. Why was she being so weird? He probably had plenty of friends to talk about it with, ones who had watched it already. Probably a girlfriend. Probably a really cool girlfriend who had told him to watch it, and he was taking her advice. Some girl who was too classy and girlish to use the word “dude.”
“Sure. Here, give me your number.”
He pulled out his phone, and she gave him her number, certain he was merely being polite and that she had just totally embarrassed herself. God, she just couldn’t help but look like an idiot. Her boyfriend was out there flirting with some stoplight, and here she was, giving her number out to the guy who clearly didn’t want any part of anything out there. Which surely included her.
And it’s not like she had even been invited. It suddenly seemed insane that she was hanging out at Jenna King’s house, trying to fit in like it was her right to be happy there.
She said bye and hurried out of Conor’s bedroom. Once she was back in the living room, Vince ran into her.
“Where you been? I’ve been looking for you.”
God, she didn’t even want to talk to him. Didn’t want to hear his voice. Just wanted this night over. “Can we go back to your house?”
“Right now?”
“I really…” She scrambled to think of a way to leave. She used her frequent fallback. “I wanna hook up. I’m bored of this and I wanna go back and do that.” A little piece of her died.
“What we were talking about earlier?” He looked intrigued, and she knew she had gotten him.
“Blow job.” No matter how desperate she was to leave, she wasn’t going to agree to become a viral video. Jailbird Gives Great Beak. “Yeah. Whatever. Fine. Let’s go.” Some small, stupid part of her hoped he’d hear the hesitation in her voice and that some sort of decency would prevail.
No such luck. They were in his car and on the road in a flash.
Once home, and having snuck in the back door, they went to the couch, where he kissed her for maybe fifteen seconds before she felt the familiar push on the top of her shoulders. Not wanting to be yelled at or embarrassed more, she went with it.
She obeyed.
At first she didn’t notice, being drunk and high and embarrassed, that he was holding his phone above her. By then it was too late to stop him.
“Hey—?” she started, giving the camera full view of her face before she realized what was going on.
“Babe. It’s okay. It’s just for me. I’m not going to show anyone. Now, finish.”
So she did.
It wasn’t like she had that much to lose.
Not two minutes after she finished him off, her phone lit up. A text from an unknown number.
Hey jailbird. It’s Conor, just givin you my number.
It was like being trapped in hell and getting a postcard from someone in a happier world, living a happier life, with no clue what scene his innocent text had just been a chaser to.
She wanted to be part of that world so badly, she could almost taste it.
Almost.
CHAPTER FOUR
Colleen
It had been Colleen’s vision that she would rise with the sun the morning she was leaving, then stop at McDonald’s—her favorite breakfast, truth be told—and hit the open road, blasting “Drive South” by John Hiatt. She had a whole playlist set up on her phone, actually. “On the Road Again,” “Drive South,” “King of the Road,” “500 Miles”—technically a train song, but miles trumped method—and more. Forty-two drive songs in all. She’d felt completely inspired, dragging them onto her Road Trip playlist.
But instead of the sparkling clear June morning she’d envisioned, it was a drizzly cold leftover from what felt like October. The sky looked like a pile of wet towels at the gym, gray on gray on wet gray, swirling around the dank, still air.
A bad omen?
She shuddered.
Honestly, she was filled with trepidation about the whole thing, and every third thought was that maybe she should cancel the trip altogether and just stay home and babysit Tamara. At least that way, she could have some alone time and just check on Tamara now and then to make sure she wasn’t lying on the bathroom floor like Nancy Spungen, with a needle in her arm.
“Trailer’s all hooked up,” Kevin announced, coming up behind her and looking brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed than she thought he should, given that he was about to lose his wife for almost two weeks.
He was probably just glad he wasn’t going to be stuck with Tam
ara.
That wasn’t fair. She was talking about a child, after all. A troubled one, to be sure, but Tamara had been through a lot in her young life, so it was ugly of Colleen to begrudge her this time together. Particularly since Tamara was probably looking forward to it even less than Colleen was. What a drag this was going to be for her!
“Are you sure the car can pull it?” Colleen asked Kevin. “It’s not exactly a workhorse.” In fact, it was exactly her toy—not her midlife crisis car, as Kevin called it. A red Toyota Solara convertible that she’d actually gotten because she always wanted one; since she was frugal enough to buy used, she hadn’t had a choice of colors. She pointed out that he’d better hope she lived to be older than sixty-eight, but that hadn’t stopped his taunts throughout the entire first year she drove it.
Then his Ford F-250 died and he’d had to borrow the Toyota, and all of a sudden he appreciated one more of the finer things in life.
“Piece of cake,” he said. “You’re perfectly safe. Just don’t stop suddenly.”
“What if a deer runs out in front of me?”
“Hit it.”
“Kevin!”
He laughed. “Deer season isn’t until the fall. Keep your eyes open and you’ll be fine. You’re more likely to have a clown dash out in front of you.”
She had to laugh. “That I’d hit.”
“That may be the only time I’ve ever seen a clown make you laugh.”
“True.”
“So.” He stretched. “What time were they supposed to be here?”
“Nine.” Colleen looked at her watch and tried to avoid making a snarky, impatient comment. Nine thirty. She’d hoped to have hit the road by now, grabbed McDonald’s breakfast before they stopped serving (nothing worse than craving an Egg McMuffin and being offered chicken nuggets), then kept going until someone needed to pee desperately.
“I know,” Kevin said, even though she hadn’t commented.
“You don’t suppose he changed his mind and forgot to tell us, do you?”
As if in answer, Chris’s big blue boat of a Chevy turned onto the street and barreled down toward the house and into the driveway.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said when he got out of the car. “We had a little trouble getting going this morning.” He flashed a look at the passenger seat and said, “Come on, Tamara.”
It wasn’t that he snapped at her, precisely; there was just a subtle edge to his tone that caught Colleen’s attention. The girl had already been collecting herself to get out of the car, but as Colleen herself had explained to Kevin time and again, any trip longer than ten minutes usually involved the removal of things from a purse that had to be hastily put back upon arrival at whatever the destination.
The less fun the destination, the more crap there was to put away.
It was like a law of nature.
Chris looked at his daughter for a minute, then sighed and turned his attention to Colleen. “I really appreciate your doing this. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It wasn’t like I could take her to Vegas with me.”
“Sorry—Vegas?” “Out West” had sounded a lot more businesslike than Vegas. Suddenly his trip didn’t sound so urgent.
He nodded. “Conference. The hotels there are cheaper than in other major cities, and there are plenty of flights. But can you imagine me trusting Tamara in the room while I wasn’t there?”
The girl’s posture shrank almost imperceptibly.
“I don’t know,” Colleen said, even though she might have said the exact same words to Kevin about leaving Tamara in a B and B room while she went to an auction without her. Something about Chris’s dismissal of his own daughter got under Colleen’s skin, though. Quickly and a little illogically. “I’m sure she’d be fine, if a bit bored sitting around in a hotel room.”
“She hasn’t been reliably fine in three years,” Chris said, seemingly heedless of the fact that Tamara was getting out of the car then and could hear him.
Colleen noticed the girl’s eyes dart toward her father, then away.
“Tamara, you remember your aunt Colleen,” Chris said, stiff. Awkward. Like he was unsure of the name.
“Not really.”
Colleen barely remembered her either, and definitely wouldn’t have recognized the tall, thin girl standing before her with pale clear skin, no makeup, and dull black hair processed to frizzy, damaged ends.
“Be polite,” Chris cautioned.
For a moment, Colleen thought he was talking to her, but then Tamara said, “Thanks for having me join you, Aunt Colleen.”
God, this was uncomfortable. “You’re welcome. Of course.”
They all stood there in awkward silence for a moment, and Colleen wondered if it was twenty minutes to ten, based on the old Irish lore that awkward silences happened twenty minutes before or after the hour. For every time she’d been right in pointing it out to Kevin, there were at least five others when it had been nowhere near the mark, so she resisted saying anything this time, though she and Kevin locked eyes for just an instant.
“Well, we’d better get going,” Colleen said. “I’m starving and I want to hit McDonald’s before they start serving lunch. Are you hungry, Tamara?”
She shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“This is to cover her expenses,” Chris said, handing Colleen an envelope.
“Chris, that’s not necessary.”
“Of course it is. Take it.”
No wonder Colleen had thought he was ordering her to be polite. He took on the same commanding tone with her that he did with Tamara. She took the envelope without comment and gave him a stern look he clearly didn’t notice or care to notice.
He went to the backseat and took out a faded green backpack. “Tamara, where’s your suitcase?”
“That’s it.” She gestured at what he was holding. “I don’t even have a suitcase.”
He looked annoyed. Maybe self-conscious of this small indicator of his parenting prowess. “This is all you packed?”
“Well … yeah. I mean … yeah?” She looked at him questioningly. “We’re only going for a week, right?”
“Week and a half-ish,” Colleen told her. “But don’t worry, if we need anything else, we can certainly pick it up on the road.”
Tamara turned her gaze to her father. “See?”
His expression darkened instantly. “Listen—!”
“Let’s go!” Colleen said a little too forcefully. “Time’s a-wastin’.” Good Lord, she was turning into Ma Kettle. But whatever this girl had done—and she knew it had been stressful for Chris—her father was clearly way past the point where he could take anything in stride. It looked like he was one or ten all the time with Tamara, and Colleen didn’t want to sit here and watch him go to ten.
Tamara looked uncertainly at her father, then went to him and gave him a cursory hug. He patted her shoulder with an open hand. Then Tamara came to the car and opened the passenger door to get in. She moved the front seat forward and tossed her backpack in, then started to climb in the back herself.
Colleen stopped her. “For Pete’s sake, Tamara, I’m not your chauffeur—get in the front!”
“Oh.” The girl hesitated, then got into the front seat.
Kevin pulled Colleen into a hug and said, “Bye-bye, baby.” Then whispered in her ear. “This is a good thing you’re doing.”
She wrapped her arms around his lower back and gave him an answering squeeze before climbing in behind the wheel.
The car started with no problem—that was when Colleen realized she’d been semi-hoping for a reprieve right up to the last second—and she put it in gear and backed out of the drive.
As soon as they started toward the main road, she felt a rush of anxiety and glanced at Tamara, who looked away the moment their eyes met.
“I’m starving.” She’d already said so once, and repeated it even though it was pretty meaningless. If she were this lost for words the entire trip, it was going to be a very long couple of weeks.<
br />
Tamara nodded. “Yeah. You said.”
“You look like you could use a little nourishment yourself.” Wait, was that bad? Everyone said it was just as bad to tell a skinny person she needed a cheeseburger as it was to tell a fat person she needed to put the cheeseburger down. Had she just insulted the girl thirty seconds into their trip?
“I guess.”
This was off to a bangin’ start. Colleen was as nervous with a sixteen-year-old girl as she would have been with a sixteen-year-old boy when she was a sixteen-year-old girl. All tied up in knots about saying the right thing, not saying the wrong thing, not offending, not judging. It was all incredibly uncomfortable.
For both of them, no doubt.
She pulled up to the drive-through window and ordered her usual, plus a large coffee—even though she’d probably have to stop and pee a hundred times after drinking it—then looked to Tamara and asked, “Anything?”
“An Egg McMuffin,” Tamara said, then quickly added, “And hash browns. The double one on the dollar menu.”
No sooner had Colleen yelled the order into the microphone than Tamara added, “And a biscuit. And a Wild Berry Smoothie.” Then, as if that were going too far, she tagged on, “Small is fine.”
Colleen placed the order, secretly glad the girl was going to eat, because Tamara really did look like she needed it. Not that Colleen thought Chris didn’t feed his daughter; he probably just didn’t take her tastes into account much. He was used to being on his own, and honestly, no matter who else came into his sphere, he probably wasn’t likely to be very accommodating. That was how Chris was. That was how Chris had always been.
By the time they hit the road, it was a lot later than Colleen had hoped to leave, but at least it was with full stomachs.
Unfortunately, it was also with empty minds. At least conversation-wise. They drove for long, long stretches of silence, tied up in a long ribbon of D.C. traffic. Miles and miles passed, all looking the same—big buildings behind Jersey walls and construction. Brake lights. Horns. Extended middle fingers. This stretch of road felt like it went on forever, where if it had been a straight country road through farmland, it might have passed like a favorite song.
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