Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book

by Nancy N. Rue

I finally figured out that he must be interrupting me not because he was panicking but because I was. Even I could tell my voice was climbing up the wall.

  “I only have to go with my–this relative because there’s no place for me to stay here and I can’t stay with Chelsea because her mom’s a control freak, so if you could maybe find me a place to be for, I don’t know, a week, that would be great.”

  There was a long-time silence.

  “Marcus?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  All of a sudden I wanted to cry–not meltdown scream, just curl up in a ball and bawl. Maybe I would have if it didn’t sound like what I’d seen my mother do.

  “I owe you,” I said. “And I will pay you back for this, I swear. Maybe we can even talk about seriously–well, whatever you want.”

  “You don’t have to,” Marcus said.

  “I want to. So think of something.”

  I left him thinking and hung up and went on to the only other thing I could think of to do. Marcus was going to find me a place to come back to. All I had to do was make Lou’s life so miserable he would be happy to let me go. The thing was, I knew it wouldn’t be that hard. Most adults were ready to get rid of me within the hour of meeting me. Maybe even half an hour.

  Granted, Lou hadn’t gotten that “Oh, I know what’s the matter with you” look in his eye. He probably hadn’t been around that many kids. He probably thought we all acted like we had hamster wheels in our heads. Or he just hadn’t seen me at my worst. The scene at the hospital didn’t count. Anybody would have lost it under those circumstances. No, I needed for him to see me do my “normal” thing when the world wasn’t going ballistic around me. The only challenge was going to be keeping him from knowing why. I had to keep the label ADHD out of it. It had done nothing but mess me up ever since it got stuck on me.

  I peeled myself off the bed and went into my bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. I’d convinced myself I was the only kid I knew whose toothpaste and zit cream had to share a shelf with a controlled substance. This wasn’t going to be so bad. I hated taking it anyway, hated having to pop pills just so I could concentrate on what my friends were saying to me (much less my teachers) and stay in my desk for forty-five minutes at a time and not fall asleep in sixth period because I was so wiped out from pretending I was okay all day. Not only was I going to drive Lou crazy without even trying, but I was going to get a break from feeling like a freak at the same time.

  The pills were only part of the freakiness–and not the worst part. Without them I’d be just wacko enough to make Lou want to send me home–but not enough to set me up for ridicule and humiliation and all those other multisyllable words I always got right on vocabulary tests because I knew them so well. If I could keep him away from the label, I could keep him away from doing what my mother had done to me. Her and everybody else who knew.

  I popped open the container and lifted the lid on the toilet seat.

  “Good-bye, little green pills,” I said as I poured them in.

  I pulled down the handle and watched them swirl away, and wished it was that easy to get rid of the rest of my problems. Maybe this was the beginning.

  I had no idea.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘You can sit down,” Lou said. “The flight’s been delayed again.” No, I could not sit down. Climb the post I was leaning on. Run down the up escalator. Those things I could do. Sitting down was out of the question.

  I guess I didn’t know how much those little green pills were helping me until I stopped taking them.

  Besides, I already knew from the fifty-two minute flight from Birmingham to Atlanta that I wasn’t going to be able to handle having a “father” for two weeks. I felt like I was being questioned on The Closer.

  “So tell me about Chelsea and Marcus. What do you do after school? Do you play sports? Do you have any hobbies?”

  Was he serious? Teenage girls do not have “hobbies”–at least none of the teenage girls I knew. As for “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?”–I didn’t even have to think about that one. I would get out of this airport and hitchhike back to Mountain Brook and pray that Marcus had found me a hideout.

  And that was another thing. The praying. I was always catching Lou with his hands folded and his eyes closed– before the plane took off, when the plane landed, and basically whenever he thought I wasn’t watching him.

  Yeah, I definitely had to get out of here, in case praying did work for him and he was asking God to make me want to stay with him in Senior Land. I’d learned that much from Chelsea before I left: that any place in Florida that wasn’t Disney World was full of old people.

  I looked down to find Lou watching me. Which wasn’t all that surprising since I was twirling one of my flip-flops on my finger.

  “The good news is I got us on an exit row,” he said.

  “Why is that good news?” I said, returning my shoe to my foot.

  “We’ll have more leg room.” His lips twitched. “I think you’re going to need it.”

  “Why’s it called an exit row?” I said.

  “That’s where the door is that we’d all go through in case of an emergency.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So we’d get out first.”

  “No. We’d open it and help get everybody else out.”

  “I don’t know how to do that!” I said. “I’ve never really flown before!”

  The bald guy next to Lou glanced up from his laptop.

  “See?” I said, pointing to him. “He’s not gonna feel safe with me trying to get the door open. Are you?”

  Baldy shook his shiny head. “Leave me out of this,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” I said to Lou.

  “They’ll give us instructions–”

  “Then I’m definitely disqualified,” I said. “I don’t follow instructions that well.”

  That was true, and for once it was a good thing. I didn’t even regret the Blurt.

  “I’m serious,” I said again. “You’ve gotta get us a different seat.”

  Lou gave me a look so long I almost thought he wasn’t going to buy it. But he finally got up and said, “I’ll see what I can do. Stay here with the stuff.”

  I had no intention of doing that. As soon as he got up to the counter, I was going to take off–just beat it out of there and find a way to get back home. I even hoisted my backpack over my shoulder and was about to lose myself in a herd of high school kids going past our gate when Baldy said, “Is this yours?”

  I looked back with a no already formed with my tongue. He was holding out a leather book that looked like it had been run over by a luggage cart.

  “It was on your seat,” he said. “I didn’t want you to forget it.”

  He was a lying sack of cow manure. There was no book on my seat when I got up from it. Did I look like somebody who would be carrying around something from the Dark Ages?

  Evidently so, because he was still holding it out to me, and he was starting to look impatient. That was the adult reaction I was used to.

  I took it from him, only because I was losing my chance to blend in with the field trip or whatever it was. What I was going to do with it I had no idea. Maybe drop it back on the seat when Baldy went back to his magazine. Which he didn’t do. He just kept watching me and glancing up at the counter and looking at Lou’s bag parked on the floor and then back to me. What–he overhears one conversation between my “father” and me and he thinks he has to babysit me now?

  I stuffed the leather book in the outside pocket of my backpack and looked to make sure Lou was still at the counter arguing for a seat change. He wasn’t. He was already on his way back to me.

  Great. Now I had lifted somebody else’s book. Any minute, airport security was going to come and shake me down–

  I felt a smile taking shape on my lips. Perfect. The Father of the Year wasn’t going to want a criminal in his house, even if she was his daughter. A night or two in juvie and my mom woul
d have me back home so fast.

  “Thanks,” I said to Baldy, and sat down to wait for our plane.

  “How long ‘til we land in Jacksonville?” I said.

  Lou’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Not as long as it was five minutes ago when you asked me. Don’t you wear a watch?”

  I didn’t. The art of telling time had always escaped me, unless it was in digital, and even then I was always late anyway so I never saw the point in a wristwatch. I’d lost the one Mom bought me in one of her No-Bed Phases when she was on a campaign to straighten me out.

  “You okay?” Lou said.

  I swallowed back the lump that formed in my throat every time I thought about my mother and pulled down the tray table and put it back up again.

  “Seriously,” I said. “How long?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Lou said.

  “Oh. Then I have time to read.”

  I pulled my backpack out from under the seat in front of me and took the leather book from the pocket. Now that I had time to look at it, I decided it hadn’t been run over by a luggage cart. It had taken at least an eighteen-wheeler to do that kind of damage. The cover was cracked like somebody–a lot of somebodies–had curled it back to read, and more than one person had carved stuff into the leather. The only thing that looked like it was supposed to be etched into it were two letters in the middle, RL. Whose initials were those? If it was some famous dead person, forget about it. Last semester was the first time I’d ever learned anything in a history class, and that was only because of Mrs. Morse. She brought in costumes and had us acting stuff out and making 3-D maps and building models. Chelsea and Donovan and Adam and everyone else said it was lame at first, but I secretly dug it, and I was glad when they finally got into it so I could too. Mrs. Morse herself was all right too. At least she never said I was “operating far below my potential,” like my English teacher Ms. Honeycutt. We had to keep a notebook in her class, and half the time I couldn’t find mine. I got like a fifty on it. I’m not that organized and she was so boring. She talked the entire period, and we were supposed to be taking notes and I would always end up drawing spiderwebs. I felt like I was caught in one, and she was the black widow.

  “What are you reading?” Lou said.

  I had to look at the book for a second to remember what I was doing with it. Maybe I should have kept one or two pills.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You brought a book but you don’t know what it is?” Lou said.

  “I didn’t bring it.” I took a breath. Here goes. “I stole it.”

  His eyebrows shot up. Finally. I’d started to think he was a robot.

  “You stole it,” he said. “From where?”

  “From the airport. It was lying on the seat and I just took it. I do stuff like that.”

  Actually, I’d never done anything like that before, but from the look on his face, it was worth a little white–okay, a big fat lie. Any minute now he was going to call for the flight attendant and tell her to have social services waiting when we arrived in Jacksonville.

  “Let me see it,” Lou said, mouth in a straight line. Gotcha.

  I handed it to him and tried not to look too smug while he opened it and looked at the first page. The straight line turned up at the ends, and he made a husky sound in his throat. Was he laughing? He was holding a stolen article, and he was laughing?

  “Did you read this?” he said.

  “No, I didn’t read it,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance. I just stole it.”

  He pulled a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. They made him look smart.

  “‘If you’ve found me,’” he read, “‘you need me. I was left for you for a reason. Read and discover what that is.’”

  He tilted his chin down to look at me over the top of the glasses. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what you had in mind, Jessie, and I don’t think this was it.”

  I snatched the book from him and stuffed it back in my backpack. The skin on my face was about to burn off.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” he said. I could hear the chuckle still lurking in his throat.

  “Later,” I said.

  I folded my arms and jiggled my foot and turned the knob on the tray table so it would drop and bounce.

  “Why don’t we just see what God does with the next two weeks?” he said.

  I jerked my face to the window. I didn’t know what kind of thing God did if God did anything. But I wasn’t giving up on doing what I had to do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The first words out of me when the light went on were, “No! Turn it off!”

  “It’s a little hard to turn off the sun,” Lou said.

  I pried open my eyes and glared into the light that glared back at me from the window where Lou had just yanked open the lime-green-and-hot-pink-striped curtains.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you waking me up?” I rolled over and peered at the clock, which, thankfully, was digital. “At eight o’clock! That’s the middle of the night!”

  “It’s an hour later than you’re going to get up tomorrow,” Lou said in a voice so cheerful I wanted to pluck his nose hairs out. “I let you sleep in.”

  I didn’t inform him that this was not sleeping in. Not when I’d been up until three wandering around a house so tiny you practically needed a microscope to see it.

  I’d spent half the heebie-jeebies night discovering everything there was to know about it, including the fact that there was no air-conditioning. I was sweating so badly I had to change out of my pajama top, which really wasn’t pj’s but the shirt I’d worn on the plane because I couldn’t find anything in my suitcase. I’d put on a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out that was hanging on the back of a chair in the bedroom and explored in that. I found out there was also no TV–only a monitor for watching movies– no video games, and no food that didn’t look like somebody had grown it.

  And that there was an alarm system, which made stealing away into the night impossible. Lou didn’t have bars on his windows, but I still felt like I was in a cage. A very small cage with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a room that was evidently used for everything else, including praying. There was this thing to kneel on in there. I’d seen one when I went to Lutheran Vacation Bible School. Or was it the Church of Christ one? Anyway, I had everything figured out except why a man living alone had painted his spare bedroom pink and hung foo-foo curtains on the window to match the comforters.

  “We’re leaving in half an hour,” Lou said from the doorway. “You need to wear long pants and long sleeves and bring cooler clothes in your backpack. I’ve got breakfast ready.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “To work,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  He was taking me to the place where he worked. It was official, then. He was going to treat me like the eight-year-old my mother said I was, and I was going to die of boredom. I started to pull the covers over my head, but I stopped–partly because that reminded me too much of Mom, and partly because it couldn’t be any more boring there than it was here.

  I threw back the comforter and sat up on one of the two twin beds. Okay. I could make his life chaos at work. Get his boss to threaten to fire him if he didn’t get me out of there. That should take a day, max. Because during the night, when I was tossing and turning and getting myself tangled up in the flowered sheets and the big T-shirt, it came to me that I really hadn’t shown Lou what I was capable of when I didn’t have something to do. He hadn’t seen anything yet.

  “I told you long sleeves,” Lou said when I walked, backpack over my shoulder, from the kitchen into the garage–which, I’d discovered the night before when we arrived in the dark, was as big as the whole rest of the house.

  “I forgot,” I said. I’d gotten the jeans right, although I didn’t get the point. It was already so hot out my hair was going to fr
izz like a poodle. Who wore long pants in Florida in July?

  “Never mind,” Lou said.

  He reached up and took something denim from a hook and tossed it to me.

  “A jacket?” I said as I caught it. “I’ll fry!”

  “I don’t think so.” He had that chuckle-thing going in his throat again. “Put this on too.”

  I stopped, one arm in a sleeve, and looked at what he was holding: a white helmet with a pink rose painted on the side.

  “Why do I need that?” I said. “You don’t drive that bad.”

  “It’s the law. Come on–we’re burnin’ daylight.”

  He looked like he was about to give me a surprise party or something. I wasn’t in a party mood. I stuck the helmet on my head and followed him under the garage door, which was halfway down. When I stood up straight, he was grinning and holding out one arm.

  “Meet Levi,” he said.

  He was pointing to the biggest, reddest, shiniest motorcycle I’d ever seen. Not that I’d ever actually seen one up close–

  “You ever been on a Harley?” he said.

  All I could do was shake my head.

  “Good–and don’t ever get on one unless it’s with an experienced rider. An adult experienced rider.” He erased that with his hand in the air. “No, don’t ever get on one unless it’s with me. How does that helmet fit?”

  “I’m riding on that?” I said.

  “That was the plan.” He picked up a black helmet from the seat of the bike and studied my face. “Are you afraid? Because if you are, we can wait.”

  I found myself shaking my head. No, I wasn’t afraid. In fact, the thought of climbing onto that monster thing was thrilling right up my backbone. Before I could stop myself I said, “Are you serious? This rocks!”

  “I thought you’d see it that way.”

  Even though he looked pretty satisfied with his sweet self, I didn’t try to hide the fact that I was jazzed as he adjusted the strap on my helmet and showed me where the pegs were that I was going to put my feet on and told me I had to sit still and just look where we were going so I would lean naturally.