by Anne Key
“Oh, that’s totally cool. Seriously. For reals. Thanks.” Even if they sucked, that was so sweet.
“So.” Daddy wasn’t looking at her as he pulled a couple of plates down from a cabinet and set them on the counter. “Did I hear you say you tried to give a boy your phone number on the first day?”
“Yeah. I mean, not in a ‘let’s hook up’ way, but in an ‘it would be nice to know someone here’ way. He totally freaked.”
“Guess he thought it was in the ‘let’s hook up’ way.” He paused. “Wait a minute. You’ve given out your number in a ‘let’s hook up’ way?”
“Well, I—”
Her daddy raised his hand, cutting her off. “Nope. Nope, you know what? I don’t want to know.”
“Daddy—”
“Nope. Just promise me you’ll be safe.”
“I’m not a baby. I promise.” Momma had let her start dating last year. She’d gone with Dillon for five months, but… well, Momma had said he was a stupid butthead.
“Is that who you walked home with?” He started opening up containers and Styrofoam boxes. “Help yourself. I just guessed and grabbed a bunch of stuff. If you like it, there’s a menu online; you could check it out. It’s right on my way to the train.”
“Yeah? Cool. You know how weird that is? The train thing?”
“A train is weird?” He stuck a taco and some rice on his plate.
“Well, yeah. I mean, trains aren’t weird, but…. You know, they have busses in Austin, but the train is something you take at Christmas. It’s just weird.” And everyone was so casual about it, too, like it wasn’t scary to just get on something and hope you knew where you were going.
“Little girl, sometimes I do not understand the Texas in you, but I love you anyway.” That was something Daddy had been saying to her as long as she could remember. He kissed her temple and headed out into the dining room. “Tell me about this kid you met. Did you meet him at lunch? Is he in one of your classes?”
“Drama class. His name is Eli. He helped me walk home and bought me a mocha. He was nice to me. We’re going to…. Oh! Can I borrow your bike lock?”
“Uh, yeah. Where are you going?”
“To school.” Silly Daddy. Where else would she go?
He smiled. “Yeah? Cool. Should we have rules about boys? Do you need rules about boys? I mean. Not in the house when I’m not home—stuff like that?”
“I’m fifteen, remember? I know the rules—no means no, if I’m going to have sex, let you know so I can get on birth control, and no boy is worth screwing up your college chances.”
Daddy started coughing. She was pretty sure that color red wasn’t good.
“You choking, Daddy?”
“Nope.” He sounded like he’d swallowed a toad, though. “All good, just down the wrong pipe.” He coughed a few more times and then started to look better. He cleared his throat. “You’re a pretty smart girl, I guess. I don’t need to tell you anything, do I?”
“Except for everything, huh? I feel like this is a whole other world and I’m never going to fit in. At this point, we’re not going to have to have the ‘fixin’ to have sex’ talk because no one’s ever going to want to with me.”
“First of all, never ‘fixin’ to have sex’ with anyone in high school is not a failure. Second, sweetheart, you’ve been in school exactly one whole day. I’d give it at least a week before you start saying never. And third, well. Third, it is a whole other world mostly. But it’s not a bad one. Give it a chance. And make sure you tell me how I can help, okay?”
“You’re such a boy, Daddy.” She tried the tacos and, while they weren’t like the ones from Dos Salsas exactly, they totally didn’t suck, and Daddy’d thought to get her favorite. “Thanks for supper. It’s good.”
“Cool. And I’m going to take that as a compliment, since I am, in fact, male.” He grinned at her. “Got homework?”
“Nothing really. I did it most when I…. Oh. Oh, we have like eighty gazillion things you have to sign. Like tons of papers.”
“Wait, I have homework? That’s no fair!” He laughed and got up to take his plate into the kitchen.
“Momma would tell you that life’s not fair, but I won’t, because that always made me mad.”
“I miss your mom. Have I told you that? I mean, I know we weren’t… but she was a friend.”
“Yeah. I wish y’all would have… I guess not stayed together, but… stayed together.” Although, she couldn’t see her momma with him. Momma’s life had never changed. Never. Work. Laundry. Groceries. Friday nights were for either football games or movies, and they ate out. Saturdays, they went shopping or got their nails done. Sunday, they went to church, and it started again Monday. Sammy would lay bet that Momma was still doing all the same things, because dying hadn’t been written in the planner.
“Yeah, um.” Daddy looked pretty uncomfortable, and he started cleaning up the kitchen like maybe he just needed his hands to be busy. “Sweetheart, you know your mom and I were never together. That just… couldn’t have worked.”
“I know. She told me.” Daddy had one life and she had another. Momma had wanted a baby, and Daddy had been there willing to help a girl out. “I’m sorry that you have to have me here. I know you didn’t want to live with me. I mean… you haven’t been mean. I just know.”
Daddy stopped moving around the kitchen. He just went still. “Sammy.” He sighed, turning to look at her. “You know what I wanted? I wanted you to finish high school and I wanted your mom to see it. I wanted her to send you off to college. Was I ready to be a full-time dad overnight? Hell no. Any more than you were ready… for all of this. But guess what? Here we are.” He stepped closer and put his hands on Sammy’s shoulders. “Give me a little credit, okay? All I want now is for you to be happy.”
She shrugged, tried to smile. “I was trying to be nice. I just—I really was.”
God, her head hurt. Seriously. She’d been polite to people all day. Maybe she was running out of nice. Maybe she needed to get a TV for her bedroom so she could hide up there forever and not bother anybody. The one she had in Texas wasn’t cool enough to worry about moving so far.
“Just don’t want you feeling like you’re not wanted, sweetheart. Your mom would kick my ass six ways from Sunday. Why don’t you go grab me that paperwork?”
“Sure. There’s tons. Do you think I should get a job, since I’m not cheering?” Okay, sometimes words fell out of her mouth without her brain being involved.
“Sure, you want one? There’s the coffee shop right there, and the independent record store. There’s a bunch of stuff right up the road.”
Like she had enough tattoos for either of those jobs.
“I don’t know. I’ll go look.” Part of her had hoped Daddy would just say, “No, here are a ton of neat things you could do instead,” and part of her had been ready to snarl if he said no. Go her with her quiet insanity.
She headed upstairs to get all the papers and left them on the table before she went back to her room.
Maybe she should cut off all her hair or something.
She looked at her nails, which were gross and ugly now.
No. She wasn’t ready for that. Maybe tomorrow.
What do you say, Momma? No big decisions when I’m upset?
Shit, at the rate she was going, she’d have hair to her ankles before she’d be ready to decide anything.
She texted Lacey, hoping Lace would answer. She needed that.
Chapter 6
ELI WOKE up at 7:00 a.m. still wearing the clothes he’d fallen asleep in. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, or the last time he’d been in such a rush to get out the door. As he snagged his lunch from his mom, he mentally went over his checklist and was mostly sure he’d remembered everything. He glanced at his phone and then ran out the door, pretty impressed with himself. He was going to be on time.
The sidewalks here were in good shape, so that was a bonus. It sure beat his old n
eighborhood, where he was always bailing to avoid tree roots and buckles. He didn’t miss the old neighborhood or his old school one bit. That was the truth.
A minute or so later, he was rolling up in front of Sammy’s house.
Sammy was standing there with her hair pulled up, wearing a bright blue tank top with glitter hearts on it, a sequined belt, and jeans. The bike looked great—not fancy enough to get stolen, not trashed. Just a decent bike.
“Hey.” Eli gave her his practiced hint of a smile. “Look at you, all twinkly. Love the hearts.” Eli had actually made a point of not wearing black today. He had on his favorite stonewashed jeans and a white T-shirt with a short-sleeved green-and-blue plaid button-down hanging open over it.
“It’s sort of my thing, I guess. I have another shirt to put over the top when I get there. You ready?”
Eli leaned a little closer. “It’s a good thing. I like it.” He gave his skateboard a little shove into the street with his foot and then hopped on. Maple was quieter than Elm, and there were no meters on the street, so he could get away with riding on the smoother pavement.
He had to say that Sammy rode her bike like she knew what she was doing, and he never felt like she was going to crash. He’d seen some girls—wow.
“Is it hard to do?”
“What, skate?” He shrugged. “At first, maybe? I mean, the tricks are always hard to learn, but just this? Nah. You could do it, for sure.”
“Huh. I never knew anyone that did. It’s cool.”
Eli shrugged again. He glanced back over his shoulder and then pushed off with one foot. He rolled ahead of her before turning backward on the board. “You’re solid on your bike, though.” He turned front again as she rode by and grabbed hold of her cargo rack with one hand, letting her pull him.
“Lazy!” She laughed, though, the sound ringing out.
“You know it!” Eli crouched low and hung on, loving the wind in his hair and the sound of Sammy’s laughter. Never in a gazillion years did he think he’d make a friend on the very first day at his new school. His only hope for the school year, honestly, was just to pass, for other people to believe he was the boy he had always known he was. That was it. He didn’t expect to be happy, he didn’t expect to make friends; he just hoped to stay under the radar and be accepted. If anyone had told him he’d be smiling this big on his second day of school, he’d have told them they were crazy.
But then he seriously never expected Sammy. She was pretty, she was brave, and she was obviously crazy-smart. Sammy wasn’t like other girls he’d known. She was interesting. She was pretty strong, too, pulling him along on her bike like he wasn’t even there.
As Sammy turned the corner and headed up the drive into school, Eli used the length of his arm and her momentum to slingshot himself ahead of her again. “You’re amazing!” he shouted back to her, only realizing what he’d said after it came out of his mouth. Oh well. She was.
Sammy stopped as they got to the bike racks and locked up, then grabbed a blue shirt from her backpack and tugged it on, carefully rolled up the sleeves to the exact same width and checked the collar. “Am I too wrinkly?”
Eli shook his head. He’d pulled his shirt out of the laundry hamper this morning, so wrinkly was kind of a relative concept. “You’re good.”
“Good deal. Thanks.” She sighed, scrunched her face up. “There’s a special place in Hell for whoever decided that precalc could happen in the morning, huh?”
Good deal? Must be a Texas thing. “Right? You’d think they’d at least let us eat lunch first.” Eli pulled out his schedule. “Have you got Grissom? In 1F?” He dropped his backpack and strapped his skateboard to it with a bungee cord, then hauled the whole thing back onto his shoulder.
“Uh-huh. And I’d ask if he was cool, but you don’t know.” She spun one of the wheels. “They look like they’d be soft somehow.”
“Not these, they’re street wheels, so they’re a little soft, but I can still get speed. They make some with a lower durometer—softer I mean—so you have more contact with the road when you ride. Those are slower and more for a rough road, or like, a longboard. I have a sweet set of hard wheels too. You know, for tricks? They’re rad; they glow in the dark. But I don’t use them often. I’m not that good, yet.”
“Wow. I had no idea. So… you take the wheels off? I’d be scared that they’d fall off and I’d break my butt.”
Another girl—this one with a mohawk and an eyebrow piercing—came up. “Dude, you tried the new Freebord yet? It’s smoking…. Whoa. You are not Erik.”
Eli blinked at her. She wasn’t tall, but her hair sure was. “I am definitely not Erik. But wow, your hair is sick. You have a Freebord?”
“Thanks.” She beamed at him. “Are you kidding me, my friend? Do you know what they cost? I tried one at an event in San Diego over the summer.”
“Sweet.”
She looked at Sammy, eyes dragging up and down her body. “Where are you from?”
“Austin.”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one whose mom died over the summer? That sucks.”
Wait. What?
“What?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Don’t freak. My mother works in the office. She knows everything about everybody. I’m Mari.”
“Sammy?” Eli watched her for a second; she was looking a little pale. “You okay?” He shook his head at Mari and stepped around her. “Nice.” He didn’t need to be in one of Sammy’s AP classes to put the pieces together. That had to be why she didn’t want to answer his question yesterday. She must have moved up here when she lost her mom. God, Eli couldn’t imagine what that must be like. “Sammy?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s not a secret. No one expected it. Just like out of the blue. I just… It’s still… I’m not ready.”
“My papi died when I was five. Motorcycle accident. It totally sucked. I won’t tell.” Mari actually looked sorry, at least a little.
“It’s not a secret,” Sammy repeated. “I don’t want to be the creepy girl with the dead mom.”
No one on earth could think Sparkly Sammy was creepy. No one. Eli struggled with what to say. He hadn’t lost anybody, ever. Something to make her feel better? Something to change the subject? Something… lighter? “It’s only creepy if her ghost is, like, following you around.” Eli caught her eye and whispered, “She’s not, is she?”
“God, I hope not. That would most genuinely suck.”
Okay, that was good. “We better get inside; we’ll miss the first bell. Already did that yesterday, and I almost ran Sammy over. Where are you headed, Mari?” He hung kind of close to Sammy and bumped shoulders with her, encouraging her to walk with them.
“Precalc. In the morning. The suck is strong with this one.”
“Grissom? Same here. We have seriously shitty schedule-fu.” He just kept subtly herding Sammy toward the school building. She seemed kind of off.
“You’ll meet Erik, then. He pulled this one too.”
“Does he look like me or were you just going by the board?” Eli opened the heavy glass door and held it for both girls. That was one of the first things his mom taught him after he started living as a boy. She told him no son of hers was going to be anything less than a gentleman.
“Thank you, sir,” Sammy said.
“Both. You guys aren’t twins or anything, but it’s an honest mistake.”
Eli glanced at Sammy. “Did you just call me ‘sir’?” He hesitated for a second once they got inside but decided just to follow Mari. She seemed to know where they were going.
“Huh?” Sammy glanced over at him, obviously confused.
“You just… wait. That’s a Texas thing, right? You said, ‘Thank you, sir.’”
Mari went right into the classroom. Eli probably should have thought to put his board in his locker. Hopefully he wouldn’t get in trouble. He could run to his locker later.
“Well, yeah. You held the door for me.” She rolle
d her eyes. “Y’all are something else.”
Eli snorted. “Yeah, okay, Sparkles. I’m something else.” He made a grand gesture toward the door and tipped a hat he wasn’t wearing. “After you, ma’am.”
She scratched the bridge of her nose with her middle finger, shooting him a playful glare.
THAT GESTURE earned Sammy one of Eli’s shy, quirky grins. She stepped past him without thanking him this time and spotted Mari across the room, sitting next to a kid in one of those skullcap hats. Who wore a hat in September?
The kid looked up and looked her over, then sort of nodded to Mari.
“Maybe in those two behind them?” Eli pointed to a couple of empty seats.
“Okay.” Oh God. Momma would stare at her like she’d grown another head if she sat with a girl with a mohawk. “Samantha Danielle Moore, you do understand that girls like that tend toward trouble, yes? Do you want your teachers thinking you’re trouble? That you might use drugs?”
Like everyone on the cheer squad didn’t. It was take diet pills or starve to death, unless you were naturally tiny, like Lacey, and God knew Sammy wasn’t wee bitty. Sometimes, it was like Momma was from Mars.
Eli actually seemed a little more comfortable sitting with these two than he had in the front row in drama class. He dumped his bag and slid into a seat right behind Mari, next to the window. “You’re Erik?”
“Yeah, man. What’s up?” The two boys exchanged some weird handshake Sammy had never seen before.
“That’s Sammy,” Mari told him. “The one from Austin.”
“Oh, hey.” Erik smiled at her, white teeth gleaming in contrast to his dark skin. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.” Every so often Sammy said something and folks stared at her like she was so weird, like she wasn’t talking English or something.
“Lemme see your board.” Erik got out of his seat to get a better angle.
Eli spun his bag around on his desk. “Oh, sure. Check it out.”
“Is that a custom deck?”