Skully scooted next to me. “Having fun?”
“Not really.”
“Morgan can be so boring at parties,” Skully told me. “She’s too busy building up her clientele.”
“What do you mean?”
She smirked. “You’re joking, right?”
I watched Morgan weave her way through the chairs. She was talking to one of the skaters I bumped into earlier.
He dangled a baggie. “So where’s the rest of it?”
“Don’t try to act like I gave you a slack bag.”
Their voices grew louder, but I couldn’t hear them clearly anymore. “Let’s talk,” was the last thing I heard her say, as she and her customer slunk behind the house. I took a step, but Skully held me back.
“Chill,” she said. “Morgan can handle herself.”
“So she’s a dealer,” I said. Not Skully. The girl in the vintage dress with the butterfly buttons was my alpha dog?
“Bingo, detective.” Skully giggled. “But I wouldn’t use the word dealer. Morgan is more of an entrepreneur, though she hasn’t quite mastered the art of finance. For instance, she blows all the good shit on her friends and doesn’t charge them a dime.”
“I thought you didn’t smoke.”
Skully shrugged. “What can I say? In junior high, I used to hang out in the parking lot with all the stoners because I liked talking to them. They didn’t diss me for not joining in.”
“Where is she getting it from?”
“What is this? Twenty questions?” She looked over her shoulder. “Check out Spiderman over there.”
On the boat docks, I caught a glimpse of Brent grabbing onto those heavy chains that lower yachts into the bay. I watched him swing over the water like a caped crusader. His spiky hair rippled like feathers. A few people clapped.
“If he falls, I’m not fishing him out,” said Skully.
I was so over this party. My head was pounding. How could Morgan be the one I was after? She was this cute girl in my history class, an ex-ballerina who drew her own comics. Where the hell was she now? And with who? I had to call her and get this figured out. I reached into my pocket.
My phone wasn’t there.
Shit.
This was bad. Really bad. If anyone found my cell and the numbers in it, I could lose everything. I tried to keep calm. I wasn’t supposed to call my contact unless it was an emergency. The number wasn’t identified on the phone, only the name Carlos. Still, I’d messed up. Big time.
“Has anyone seen my phone?” I called out, receiving only blank stares in response.
A crackle erupted from the backyard. Then a hiss. Then a musical series of pops.
Skully pointed at the roof. “They’re setting off bottle rockets. What a bunch of idiots. Come on. Time to jet before the policia arrive,” she said, tugging my arm.
“Where’s Morgan?” I asked. A dozen scenarios flashed through my brain: Morgan on the ground, the deal gone wrong, blood in the grass.
Everyone scattered. As we tore around the front of Skully’s house, a rectangle of light sliced the gravel. Across the street, a woman stood in her doorway, hunched in a bathrobe.
“It’s four in the bloody morning,” she said, like an actress on Dr. Who.
“Only you can prevent forest fires,” Skully yelled.
The woman waved a flashlight at us. “I’m calling the police.”
Skully ran through the backyard. I stumbled in the grass and tried to catch my breath. The Roman candles kept sizzling, beads of colored flame swooping across the pines as if someone had lit them all at once. I remembered buying fireworks with Collin, how we laughed at the warning on the box: Light Fuse and Get Away!!!!
When I reached the car, there was no sign of Morgan.
“Stay here,” Skully said, as if talking to a dog. Then she bolted toward the trees.
I leaned against the bumper, watching everyone flood past: the party girls half-jogging with their shoes flung over their shoulders, the boys tossing bottles into the street. Okay. This sucked beyond all recognition. There was the sound of glass tinkling, then a jolt of pain surging up my arm. I looked down at the ribbons of blood slashed into my skin. The more I stared, the harder it stung.
“Looks like you got in a ninja fight with a cactus,” said Morgan, sneaking up beside me, “and the cactus won.”
“Skully was trying to find you,” I explained. “These idiots were throwing bottles all over the place. And I lost my cell phone.”
“I know,” she said, handing it over.
A wave of sickness washed over me. Whether I liked it or not, Morgan was my suspect now. She was the last person I’d want to find messing with my phone. I flipped it open. All the numbers were there, blinking back at me.
Morgan said, “I wouldn’t go dropping it in people’s driveways.”
“Is that where you found it?” I asked.
“Buried in the gravel.”
“It must’ve fallen out of my pocket.” Still, that didn’t make any sense.
She peeled off her cardigan and dabbed my arm. “Can’t have you bleeding on my fake leather upholstery. Good thing I paid attention in Girl Scouts.”
Did Morgan pick my pocket? I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was playing me.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
Cars squealed down the road, their headlights so bright they seemed solid. The lights merged into spinning discs, blue and red, and I knew that the neighbor wasn’t kidding about calling the cops.
“Get in the car,” Morgan said, her smile gone. “You’re driving.”
“I am?”
I slid into the driver’s seat. “What about Skully?”
No answer.
I revved the engine. We rolled backward into the neighbor’s driveway. I jerked the wheel and we spun around as Morgan directed me to.
“I thought this was a dead-end street,” I said, as we careened over potholes.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” she said.
The Explorer rattled across a fallen tree limb. I clenched my teeth as the tires bounced over twigs and rocks. In the darkness, it was hard to see. Branches flailed and scraped against the window. I twisted around in my seat, caught the lights flaring in the distance.
We pulled up beside a chain link fence. A section had toppled into the ground, all twisted.
“Where the hell are we going?” I asked, rubbing my sore arm.
“Take a guess,” Morgan said.
The car launched forward with a jolt as I drove over the mangled fence and swerved into a swampy thicket of oak trees. A dirt road curved into some kind of nature preserve, tucked behind Skully’s neighborhood. I half-expected a T-Rex to raise its head above the bushes. After circling for a few minutes and finding only dead ends, I let Morgan have it.
“We can’t just drive around all night. This is stupid.”
She wouldn’t even look at me. Her jaw clenched.
We slammed through a field of tall grass. There was the bay, dark as asphalt.
“Stop here,” she said.
I coasted closer to the shore and cut the ignition. For some reason, Morgan got out and started walking. I followed.
The ground sparkled with broken glass. Poles jutted from the water. There was a dilapidated old fishing dock, the edges frosted with barnacles. It smelled like mud and salt.
Morgan plunked down on a craggy rock. “This is an old chimney,” she explained, as I moved beside her. “A hermit built a house here. Then a hurricane laid waste to the coast. This is all that’s left of his humble abode.”
“Which hurricane?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Back then, they didn’t have names.”
We sat on the slab of coral, our feet dangling above the foamy tide. I was
staring at the ground, at the plastic six-pack rings and rusty soda cans, the bleach caps and Bic pens. Even a naked Barbie doll buried in the sludge, her hair splayed out like seaweed.
Morgan’s fingers slid inside my T-shirt, digging their way across my ribs. “Aaron,” she murmured. “Aaron,” she said again. “Aaron.” She breathed against my neck.
I gently moved her hands away.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing. It’s just that … I’m not into this right now.”
Another lie.
Without a word, Morgan jumped up and walked toward the car. For a second, I thought she was going to take off without me. She was still sulking when I got in. Morgan cranked the engine, and it stalled with a jerk.
“God damn it,” she said, slapping the dash so hard, the glove box door popped open. Inside was a Ziploc stuffed with weed and beside it, a few rubber-banded stacks of cash. We didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Morgan, why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“You know what.”
She still wouldn’t look at me. “Why do you care?”
“It’s not like you’re hurting for money. I want to know why.”
“Why not? It’s fun.”
“Fun? Don’t you realize you could go to jail?”
Now I was starting to talk like a cop. If I wasn’t careful, I could lose everything.
“Nobody’s going to throw me in jail,” she said. “I’m not even eighteen. The worst I could do is juvie. But you’re forgetting one very important thing.”
“What’s that?”
She looked at me now. “I’d have to get caught.”
We cruised down the unpaved street. My teeth clattered with every bump. Soon we were meandering past bright windows and circular driveways. Back to civilization. On the horizon, a power plant gushed mounds of smoke, pale against the night sky, thick as shaving foam.
Morgan drove in silence. I cracked my window, just to fill the space between us.
“Where do you live?” she asked in a monotone, after what seemed like forever.
I was hoping to crash at Skully’s place and find a way home in the morning. Now I was stuck. I couldn’t think of anything else to say except the truth. “Downtown.”
“That’s like, an hour away. I’m not schlepping over there.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Fine. Just sit there and don’t talk to me.”
“There’s nothing you want to talk about?”
“Not really,” she said, fixing her gaze on the road.
We crossed US-1, which hummed with traffic, even at this hour of the night, past the Taco Bell where kids parked and drank from paper bags until the cops kicked them out. I kept thinking about Skully, wondering if she was okay. I closed my eyes and saw her teetering on the seawall, the wings tattooed into her skin.
“We should call Skully. Make sure she’s alive,” I said.
“I texted her already,” Morgan snapped. That was the end of it.
We pulled up to a gate. It jerked aside with a wobble and we drove through it, past one sprawling house after another, with fountains gurgling on the front lawns, and fences spiked like medieval drawbridges.
Morgan grabbed a remote control from her sun visor, punched a button. Another gate slid away. The driveway was packed with fancy cars. There was no room for the Explorer, so we parked on the lawn.
I got out first and stood next to the car. The sign on the gate said Bad Dog, with a picture of a snarling Doberman. A baby swing dangled from a mango tree. Newspapers wrapped in yellow plastic dotted the yard. Morgan reached the front door and turned around.
“You going to stay there all night?” she asked.
Not exactly an invitation.
She unlocked the door. Light flooded the grass and I stood, spotlit, unable to budge.
After a moment, she shook her head and said, “Come on, Aaron. The mosquitoes are nasty. You’ll catch West Nile and it will be my fault.”
When I stepped inside the house, it felt empty, as if everyone else had disappeared. Morgan ducked into the hallway. She came back with an armful of blankets and dumped them on a couch in the living room. At her heels, a small white dog yipped and sneezed.
“My stepmom’s attack poodle,” Morgan explained. “She has allergies.”
“Your stepmom or the poodle?”
“Both,” she said, reaching down to scratch the poodle’s ears. “She’s like, my ideal dog. But if you ignore her, she’ll pee on your bed. Come on,” she said and I followed her down the hall. At first, I thought I was sleeping on the couch, but she led me into a bedroom.
Morgan clicked on the light. “You can crash here. Sorry about the mess.”
I stepped over an avalanche of clothes heaped on the floor. On the dresser leaned a castle made of Legos and a baseball cap that said “StarStyled” with a dancer leaping over the word. A mobile threw geometric shadows across the room, making me feel as if I’d sunk underwater.
Looking around Morgan’s bedroom didn’t lend any clues to what she was really like. In fact, I didn’t know this girl any more than she knew me.
She yanked back the bedspread, which was decorated with twirling ballerinas.
“You’re really into dance, huh?” I said.
“Isn’t every little girl?”
“You’re not little anymore.”
She frowned. “I was supposed to go to this big deal school for ballet. Obviously, I didn’t get in.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Look at me.”
“I am looking.”
In fact, I was looking all the time.
Morgan shook her head. “You’re not getting it. Even when my stepmom put me on a diet … ”
“A diet? How old were you?”
“Like, twelve.”
“Shit. That’s so wrong.”
“I know. But I still didn’t make the weight requirement. In other words, I’m too fat.”
“That’s totally not true.”
“Yeah, well. Tell that to the dance director.”
A pair of tangled headphones toppled on the floor. She scooped it up. “Helps me fall asleep.”
“Me too,” I said. “You ever dream about music? That’s like, the best.”
“Doesn’t happen to me. At least, I don’t think so. I never remember my dreams.”
“How can you not remember them?”
“Maybe I don’t have any,” she said, glancing away.
“Oh, come on. Even my dog has dreams. You see his little feet going … ” I flapped my fingers in front of her face.
Morgan tossed a pillow at me. She noticed the rubber band around my wrist and tugged it, snapping it against my skin. “You look like shit, by the way,” she said. Then she left me there, clutching the pillow in both arms.
I shut the door. At one time, it might’ve had a lock, but now there was just a splintery hole gaping beneath the doorknob. On the back of the door was a bulletin board rippling with pictures and cards: BFF, best friends forever. 2 Good 2 B 4-Gotten. Stay sweet! Don’t change!
If only it were that easy.
Everybody changed, whether we wanted to or not.
I couldn’t look at this stuff anymore. Just snooping through the cards was enough to drown me in a megadose of guilt. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t want to hurt these girls, but that’s exactly what I was supposed to do. And I was scared shitless about what was going to happen, but I couldn’t decide if I was doing the right thing or not. It was getting harder to tell the difference.
I flipped the light switch and stumbled toward the bed, tripping over things in the dark. I crawled under the covers and ga
wked at the ceiling, where glow-in-the-dark stars looped and swirled and finally faded away.
8 : House of Women
The next morning, I woke up and saw a lady standing in the middle of the bedroom, stuffing clothes into a laundry basket. The lady, with her squat legs and frizzy braid, looked nothing like Morgan.
I hunched down under the covers.
“Hi,” I said. What else was I supposed to do?
It was ten o’clock in the morning and she’d already painted herself up: mascara, blush, the whole works. She wore a tank top decorated with rhinestone flamingoes and a pair of sweatpants draped low on the waist.
“I wondered why Morgan was sleeping on the couch. I’m her stepmother, Sheryl,” she said, shaking my hand. Her grip was flimsy and dry, like chopsticks. “You go to Palm Hammock?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And your name?”
“Aaron Foster.”
I guess she was one of those “cool stepmoms” who put up with coed slumber parties.
“From whereabouts?” she asked.
“Homestead. We’ve traveled around a lot.”
“Military?”
“Yeah. My dad was in the Air Force.”
Her face changed. “Is he … um … in active service now? I mean, is he over there?” she asked. “Over there” was what people called the Middle East.
“He’s dead,” I told her.
This was really awkward. I hated the way she was looking at me, the pity on her face. So I did something dumb. I started blabbering.
“He was in Iran, taking pictures. He said it’s different now. They even have a Starbucks. Except it’s called Star Box.”
“Well,” she said. “That’s progress.”
“Is it?”
The silence swelled around us. Finally, she said, “I am not in favor of this war. But I want you to know that I support our troops.”
“My dad wasn’t a soldier,” I explained, but she was already shuffling down the hall.
I rolled off the mattress and found my shirt wadded under the dresser. My jeans reeked like hell, but I couldn’t go walking around in my boxers. In the back pocket, I found my cell. There was a voicemail from my “friend.” Great.
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