“You, um, want to come in?” He motioned with his thumb inside the shed.
“Oh . . . okay.” I nodded.
“You’ve probably been wondering what I do in here, anyway . . .”
“No, I . . . well, yes.” I gave a nervous laugh. “People are always driving up and buying something from you, so . . .”
“It’s not drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, I . . .”
Lennie smirked, reached back, and pushed open the shed door. “Welcome to my den of iniquity.”
I stepped gently into the small space, which was lined with shelves, each one about six inches deep. Covering the shelves were gears and chains and mechanical-looking pieces I couldn’t begin to identify. In the corner, on a plywood workbench, sat a computer—a brand-new desktop Mac. And in the middle of it all, a table with a postage meter, and some packing tape, scissors, and boxes. Everything was super neat and organized.
I strolled around the table, browsing the bits and pieces on the shelves. “What is all this?”
“Small engine parts, out-of-stock stuff mostly,” he said. “I take them off junkers, put them up on my website, people order them for old cars they’re fixing up, stuff like that.”
“You have a website?”
He walked over to the computer and hit the space bar. The screen lit up. Across the top it read, LAZO’S ENGINE PARTS. The artwork was similar to Lennie’s tattoo.
“Lazo?”
He shrugged. “Better than Lazarski. I didn’t want my business to get confused with my dad’s. He used to have a body shop.”
I took the computer mouse in my hand and scrolled around the site. There was a section for automotive parts, and another one for other types of engines—lawn mowers, chain saws, washer/dryers. You could order an item to be shipped or pick it up. Voilà.
Not a drug dealer, then, but a budding entrepreneur? “Did your dad teach you all this?”
“Some.” He picked up a part that was lying on the desk and placed it next to a similar one on a nearby shelf.
“You said he had a body shop. . . .”
“Yep.” Lennie ducked down to search for something in one of the boxes beneath the counter. “Messed up his back when a car fell on him a few years ago. So now he mostly sits around smoking weed.” Lennie found the part he was looking for and stood up to face me. “Medicinal purposes.”
I stepped back. “So your dad’s the pot smoker?”
“Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”
I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Not your fault.”
“I mean, I’m sorry about what I said, before. About you smelling like a bong. I thought you were a total pothead.”
He snorted. “Guess you were mistaken.”
It’d been happening to me a lot lately.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I figured you’d decided who I was, and nothing I said was going to change it.”
“Not being totally freaking scary might’ve changed it,” I said.
He laughed. “I’m not that scary.”
“Seriously? That first day when we moved in? You and that guy with the scar?”
“That’s my cousin Frankie. He’s such a bonehead.”
“Well, he’s a scary bonehead. He called me a Westside bitch. He didn’t even know me.”
Lennie leaned back against the workbench, arms folded across his chest. “And what do your friends call me? They don’t know me, either, but I’m pretty sure they don’t think very highly of me.”
All the words we’d ever used to describe Lennie’s crew ran through my head. Druggie. Stoner. Lowlife. Loser. But I didn’t say them out loud.
“That’s because you hang out in a pack, like you’re part of a gang—”
“And you don’t?” he interrupted, coughing like he’d just swallowed something the wrong way. “Your friends are a way scarier pack than mine are. I mean, that day I brought you the potato? I was just trying to be funny, and Willow Goodwin nearly sliced me open with her eyes. That bitch is scary.”
“Yeah, okay. I see your point. But your friends have tattoos, and they, I don’t know . . . they snarl.”
Lennie bent and unbent his elbow in my direction so show off his tattoo of gears and chains. “Oooh. Scaaary,” he said, then gave me his best snarl. “Like this?”
“Yeah, like that.” I smiled, then stepped closer and pointed to his tattoo. “Can I see it?” I had been curious, but didn’t want him to think I was staring before.
“Sure,” he said, pulling his sleeve up over his shoulder. His arm was more muscular than I would’ve thought, since he was so tall and lean, but I pretended not to notice. I focused instead on the intricate gears on his elbow and shoulder, and the chain that wound around them. I wanted to trace it with my fingers, the way it bulged across his biceps.
“Stop flexing,” I said.
He laughed. “I’m not. I’m just naturally buff.”
“Right.” I gave his shoulder a gentle shove.
I suddenly heard Mom calling for me from the side yard, looking up toward our kitchen. I stuck my head out the shed door. “Over here, Mom.”
“Oh!” She spun around, surprised to see me with Lennie. Or maybe it was the way he was pulling his sleeve back down over his tattoo. “We’re home from therapy,” she said. “Can you watch Brady for a bit?” She pointed to where he was gathering his stones out front.
“Sure,” I said, then turned to Lennie. “I have to go throw gravel now. Thanks for giving Brady a new hobby, by the way.”
He laughed. “No problem.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Does this answering machine work?” I held up the ancient device and shook it against my ear, to see if anything rattled. Mom had resurrected it from a cardboard box in our Westside basement so we could cancel the answering service through the phone company and save money on our phone bill. “Has anyone actually received any messages?”
Mom pulled it out of my hands. “Yes, it works.” She pressed the PLAY button. Molly’s voice blasted our kitchen, “So, about the Halloween party. I can only fit three people in my house and you can probably fit about seven. Can we have it in your yard? Do you think Carla will mind? Call me!”
“Party?” My mom looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
I grinned sheepishly. “Oh, right.” That’s how my parents learned that we were hosting a Halloween party. Once Molly and I assured them our costs would be minimal—we’d make lemonade and serve chips—they agreed to it. Honestly, I think they were just happy I’d made a friend here and was no longer begging to leave.
But it had been more than a week since James had left and still no call. I’d sent him a paper invitation and countless letters. I phoned Ida to see if she’d heard anything, but her answer was always the same: “Nothing, dear. I’m sorry.”
Molly had made the invitation to our party, cutting words out of magazines and taping them together like a ransom note. Then she snuck into the office at school and made photocopies on that hideous orange-yellow copy paper they use for notices they don’t want parents to ignore.
“Goldenrod,” Molly clarified. “It was the Halloweeniest color I could find.”
“Weeniest,” Rigby said, snickering.
Molly handed us each our allotment. Rigby was an honorary cohost of the party. “Don’t invite any douche bags,” she said to him.
I took one and wrote in the margin above the COME AS YOU ARE heading:
I don’t care who you are.
I just want to see you.
—Yours, Ivy
I addressed it to James in New York and dropped it in the big blue mailbox at the entrance to our neighborhood. I mailed one invite every day, in different kinds of envelopes. I always included my email address so he could reply more quickly. But I was careful not to print a return mailing address on the outer envelope. Maybe one of them would get through.
/> On my way back from the mailbox one day, I saw a woman with salt-and-pepper hair come out of Lennie’s front door with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She fast-walked toward an old Honda Civic that was parked in the grass on the other side of their house, ducked into the backseat, and shut herself in. Her head dipped to the side and she disappeared from sight. I slowed my pace to see who would follow, if Lennie or his dad would come out and drive her away.
But nobody came.
Then I noticed that the car had a flat tire and one of the taillights was out. I walked along the hedges between our houses and knocked on the door to Lennie’s shed. He opened it a crack and peeked out.
“Hey.” He smiled and nudged the door wider when he saw it was me. “Come on in.”
I stayed outside and gestured toward the Honda. “No thanks. I just . . . There’s a woman hiding in that car. Do you know her?”
He sighed and his shoulders dropped a bit. “That’s my mom.”
“Oh.” I looked toward the Honda again. “Is she okay?”
He wiped some grease from his hands with a rag. “Probably just hiding.”
“Oh,” I said again.
Lennie held up a finger. “Wait here.”
He strode over to the car and tapped on the back window. The woman sat up and rolled it down. I couldn’t hear what they said, but she reached a hand out and stroked his cheek. He nodded and turned back to me.
“Is everything okay?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Can we talk later? I—”
“Yeah, sure. No problem.” I backed away toward my house, lifting my hand in a little wave. “See you later.”
“Thanks.” He locked up the shed and went in the back door to his house.
I found my mom in our kitchen, chopping onions. “Have you met Mrs. Lazarski?” I asked.
“Couple times,” she said. “She’s very quiet.”
I hadn’t even thought about Lennie having a mother, to be honest. I’d never seen her before. “What does she do?”
Mom shrugged. “Takes care of her husband, I guess. Why don’t you ask Lennie?”
“I will,” I said.
The tenderness between Lennie and his mom made me wonder about James and his mother. Rebecca had been all “Daddy this” and “Daddy that,” barely mentioning their mom. But James had looked like he’d been punched in the gut when he’d heard she’d been crying.
I opened the obituary of his grandfather on my computer again and stared at his mother’s name. Sheila Wickerton. She’d grown up here, in a family that went fishing and bowling. Had she turned her back on that long ago, immersed in her high-society life? All I had to go on was a hunch that she had a soft spot for this place, and for James. I took out a sheet of paper and wrote her a letter.
I told her how James and I met, how we’d gone to the cemetery and left daisies on her parents’ grave. I told her how much I liked her son, that there’d been a misunderstanding and if she could give him a message for me . . . I very much wished he would call.
When I carried the letter to the mailbox fifteen minutes later, Lennie’s house was still quiet. I hoped everything was okay in there.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I knocked on Lennie’s shed door after school the next day. I’d been half expecting to see an ambulance or a hearse drive up, as quiet as it had been around his house. There hadn’t even been any customers.
Lennie opened the shed door and pulled out his earbuds. “Hey, come in. Sorry about yesterday—my mom and all,” he said as I shut the door. He moved back to the far counter and fiddled with a pile of bolts.
“What happened?” I’d been worrying about it more than I cared to admit.
“Ah, nothing, really. My dad was having a bad day. Mom needed a little break is all.”
“Oh.” We stood in awkward silence for a few seconds. I noticed a little section of his shelves that had books instead of engine parts, so I went to peruse. They were mostly automotive manuals, but also some paperbacks. A thesaurus and a Spanish-English dictionary, a copy of The Great Gatsby. I pointed to it and said, “Summer reading?”
He nodded.
He had all the same books that used to sit on my shelf, from English class. The books that made you look like you were serious about literature. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Howl by Allen Ginsberg. There were copies of Jane Eyre and The Outsiders. I stroked its spine. Couldn’t seem to get away from reminders of James.
I hadn’t been to our secret room for a few weeks now. What was the point? James was gone, my secret of living in Lakeside was out. But looking at these books made me miss it a little. I shook my head and turned, nodding toward Lennie’s iPod. “What were you listening to?”
He stepped closer and held the earbuds out. I put one of them in and handed the other back to him.
“So you don’t totally blast me out,” I said.
We had to stand really close to share the earbuds, shoulder to shoulder. He glanced sideways at me. “You might not like this.”
“You’d be surprised.”
He smiled and tapped PLAY. The song started out in Latin, with eerie church choir voices, and I quickly realized the lyrics were all words for Satan. “. . . Behemoth, Beelzebub . . . Satanas, Lucifer . . .”
My eyes widened. “Oh, my God. What is that?”
Lennie just bobbed his head to the beat as drums and electric guitars came in. Then he grinned. “Swedish metal band, Ghost. Cool, huh?”
“I guess . . .” I gave him a wary look. The music was cool, actually, though I didn’t usually get into metal. Or Satan.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not a Satan worshipper . . .”
“You just play one on TV?”
“Gotta keep up appearances.” He flexed his tattooed arm and gave me the badass scowl I recognized from the old days, before we ever met. Just as quickly, he shrugged it off and turned back into the kinder, gentler Lennie I was getting to know. “They’re not really Satanists. The band. It’s just their shtick. The lead singer dresses like a cardinal, with skeleton makeup. They all wear hoods and capes and their concerts are like a horror show.”
“You’ve seen them in concert?”
He nodded. “In Philly once.”
“Nice.”
We started talking about bands we’d seen live, or wanted to. He played a song from another favorite group. I recognized it immediately, because I’d been totally obsessed with them for a few months last year. I loved the way they mixed piano and symphony and choral music into a hard rock sound.
“I’m teaching Brady how to play the ukulele,” I said.
Lennie scanned his music and pulled up a ukulele recording. “Jake Shimabukuro. You know him?”
I shook my head and listened for a moment. “Is that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?”
“Yep,” said Lennie. “Dude is amazing.”
“I always thought of the ukulele as a wimp of an instrument, something to use in a pinch if you didn’t have anything more substantial. But I love it now. And this guy really is amazing.”
Lennie smiled and let me scroll through his music selection while he went back to work sorting through a box of odd parts. I played a few more Shimabukuru tunes. (“Ave Maria” on ukulele? Bach’s Invention No. 4 in D minor? Crazy.) I found lots of heavy metal, too, but also stuff like the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Then I saw something that really surprised me.
“No way.” I bit my lip so I wouldn’t laugh.
“What?” He tried to grab the iPod from me but I held it out of his reach.
“The sound track to Titanic?” I said through giggles. “Céline Dion?”
Lennie groaned. “She only sings one song. The rest is instrumental. You know in the movie when the musicians are performing right up to last moment before the ship sinks? That stuff is on there, and . . .”
I held up my hand. “It’s okay, Lennie. I won’t tell anyone about you and Céline.”
He shook his head, smiling. “I hate you.”
“Trust me.
You’re not alone,” I mumbled.
He narrowed his eyes at me for a second, then went back to his gadgets. He was photographing each of them on a white background. I offered to help, and soon we had a rhythm going where I stood behind the camera and took the pictures while he positioned one item after another.
It was nice, comfortable. I didn’t think about Reesa or James. We just played music and worked in silence. After a few minutes he said, “I don’t really hate you.”
I looked up and smiled. “I know.”
We continued to work for another hour, logging the parts I had just photographed into his online inventory. He read off model numbers and descriptions and I keyed them in.
“I should pay you something,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I could use the money, but didn’t feel right taking it from Lennie.
“Why not? You’re cutting my workload in half. At least.”
I shrugged. “I like doing it. It takes my mind off . . . other things.”
He finished labeling a gear and slid it onto the shelf. “Like that guy James?”
I stayed quiet. I never did find out what James had said to convince Lennie to give him my address.
“He, uh . . . seemed to like you a lot,” said Lennie. “Whatever happened to him?”
That achy feeling that came to my chest whenever I thought about James started to flare up again. It got worse with each day he didn’t call or email. I was starting to lose hope.
But I didn’t want Lennie to know how thoroughly I’d been dumped. “He’s visiting his father,” I said. “In New York.”
“Oh.” Lennie looked down at the label he was marking and put the item on a shelf.
“He should be back soon,” I said. “Any day now.” I’d given up lying, but was it really a lie if I sincerely hoped it to be true?
Lennie held my gaze for an awkwardly long time. “That’s great,” he finally said.
He read the model number of a tractor gasket, and I keyed it in. When I looked up for the next item, his face was dead serious. “Ivy,” he said, “I have a confession to make.”
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