I cleared 44 and made it to the trail. I was kicking through the high weeds and figured that was as good a time as any to fire up the first one. And the damn thing was stale as hell. The pack’d probably been open a month. Lord knows where Max found it, probably under a chair somewhere. I’d just assumed he’d gotten the pack new somewhere and smoked the first half. Right then I realized that he’d found the things and must’ve known they were stale. Now that I was paying attention, I could feel how brittle the paper was, not that fresh almost moist feel of the first cigarette out of a new pack.
So he’d found this old pack and decided that instead of smoking crap cigarettes, he’d turn a quick profit. And even then, it’s like, OK, so sell them to some dumb freshman. You’re gonna sell them to me? To Bones? Man, that was a good way to get beat the hell down. But by the time I was in sight of the house and lit the second one off the stub of the first, I was willing to let him off the hook, because stale cigarettes were still cigarettes.
Anyway, I was heading up to the house, getting ready to boost myself in the window. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and pushed up the sleeves of my hoodie, and I heard something. It was a low grunting sound, like voices without words, and there was movement, weight being shifted around on the old floorboards. There were people in there and, to show you what a moron I can be, I thought maybe they were fighting.
I took the cigarette out of my mouth and sort of crept up to the side of the window. I slid my head over to take a quick look in, and all I saw was hair, the back of a shirt, and a flash of pale skin. There were two of them, a guy all over a girl, and it wasn’t until I ducked my head back out of the window that my brain processed their profiles and told me who they were. I could not frickin’ believe it. I took a quick drag and went back in for another look, just to confirm it.
She was kind of leaning up against the far wall, or maybe he was holding her there. There was an empty bottle of Boone’s Wine Product on its side next to them, some fruit flavor, which was gay as hell, except for the fact that Bones was on top of Natalie in the house in the woods.
Her shirt and bra were on the floor, and her breasts were just right there, bam. I mean, I got my hands on Jenny #1’s once, but she was wearing a bathing suit under a T-shirt, so that even when I got my hand under the shirt, it was still on top of the suit. I’d never just flat-out seen them like that. The only thing in my way was Bones’s shirt, which was flannel and hanging open, so that when he leaned in, it sort of draped over her side. That pissed me off for some reason. I guess it seemed selfish. Like, step aside, dude, I can’t see.
His left hand was moving over her chest, and his right hand was pushing down at her jeans. She was trying to hold it there, but he was a strong dude, considering how skinny he was, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure I should be seeing this. I kind of got a bad feeling, you know? He was looking down at her, but her head was turned a little toward the far wall. He was doing all the grunting. I ducked my head out again before either of them looked my way.
It was shocking as hell. Like the most shocking thing I’d seen up to that point in my life. I mean, where to start? First of all, I thought Bones was all talk. I didn’t think he was actually getting any. Second, I mean, it was Natalie. She was a completely hot property, 100 percent in demand. Tommy had called dibs like the first day we met him, and it was like, sure, whatever, because it didn’t seem like any of us had a shot with her anyway.
And Bones was probably the one with the longest odds against him; at least that’s what we thought. Bones is a cool enough guy, but he’s just a dirtbag. When I call him that, I sort of mean it as a good thing, but that’s not how most of the girls in our school would take it.
And that was especially true of Natalie. She was tall and pretty and just sort of seemed better than the rest of us. She looked like she should be somewhere other than our little dump of a high school, and she’d definitely had a lot of practice shooting guys down. Like a lot of the hottest girls, she was just this side of being kind of weird-looking. Like how you see models on those shows and they are all stretched out in one way or another. Exaggerated is the word. Like one will be six four and another will have a head that’s too big for her body. With Natalie, it was her legs.
She was almost as tall as me, and even so, she was still mostly legs. I guess it was possible she’d grow into them, but that would make her like seven feet tall. Her eyes were a really pale, washed-out blue, almost gray, like vampire eyes. It seemed like if you turned out the lights, they might actually glow. She had dark hair and kept it short, which not many of the girls were doing, so it seemed sort of unusual and cool. Not that any of us spent much time looking at her hair. If she was walking toward you, all you saw were those long legs and laser-beam eyes. I’d seen guys walk into lockers looking at her.
And, I mean, there were some other truly hot girls in the school but, you know, not many. She was another one who the teachers were always badgering for not “living up to her potential.” But I think a lot of them just wanted to help her out after school, if you read me.
All that said, and here she was basically getting mauled by Gerard freakin’ “Bones” Bonouil. I mean, Bones was my friend, but he was also pimply, skinny, not especially funny, and not all that nice. And Bones was Tommy’s friend, but he was kind of screwing him over. I sort of had to wonder, and not for the first time this year, what was up with him. I mean, yeah, he was an angry dude. We’ve covered that territory, but he’d always been a decent friend, and he’d always had some kind of reason for the things he did. These days, it was getting harder to figure out where he was coming from. I sort of figured it was because he was older—sixteen to our fifteen—but it was hard to say exactly. I mean, we’d all changed a lot.
It’s not like he couldn’t get with Natalie. If he had a shot and Tommy didn’t, Tommy would have to step aside, but he should’ve cleared it with him beforehand. He was crossing a line. It was like in October, when he beat the living hell out of that kid, that Adam what’s-his-name. And I mean, Adam was a freshman and a weird one. Everyone picked on him some, but we came across him alone by the pizza place, and Bones just went to work. If Adam did anything to provoke him, I didn’t see it, and he definitely didn’t do anything to deserve what he got. He was a mess afterward. He had a bloody nose that left a thick red snail trail clear down the front of his shirt.
When it was all over, I was like, “Dude, WTF?”
But Bones just shrugged and said, “I hate that kid.”
That’s not really a reason for a beating like that, so I said, “Yeah, well, I hate Monday mornings. It doesn’t mean I’m going to beat the crap out of them.”
“You would if you could,” he said, and I ended up laughing because he had me there. It was still like that with Bones; one minute you think you should be getting as far away from him as possible, the next, he was the same old jackass you’d known for years. It just felt like the ratio was shifting, like he was getting a little worse, is all. Maybe that’s just what sixteen was like, but I sort of hoped not. One way or the other, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t end up laughing about this one.
I felt a sharp, stinging pain in the first two fingers of my right hand. The cigarette had burned down to the filter. I swore under my breath and shook it loose.
I put the two fingers in my mouth to soothe the burning and stood stock-still, like I was hunting and a buck had just stepped into the clearing. Did they hear me? It was under my breath, but only sort of. I had an urge to make a break for it, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong this time, either.
I mean, yeah, I’d gotten a free show, but this was like a public place, not their house and not mine. It didn’t even have glass in the windows. I could just stick my head in the window and say, “Hey, Bones, when you’re done, you should know those cigarettes I gave you are stale.” But for whatever reason, it felt like skulking around was the way to play this, so I was standing real still and listening, but Bones just kept on grunting away, and Natal
ie was just sort of mumbling something.
I thought I’d better take another look anyway, or maybe, you know, I just wanted another look. I sort of hated myself for having a boner. It just seemed kind of pathetic, standing outside with a burned hand and an erection, but there I was, sticking my head back in for another peek.
Natalie was on her back looking up at the ceiling now, not at Bones but just past him. The look on her face wasn’t at all what I was expecting. She wasn’t into it, and she wasn’t angry, which I’d figured were the two possibilities. She looked as bored as she did in class. Her giraffe legs looked useless and a little sad, lying open on either side of Bones. There was sweat on the side of his face, and I looked down and I could see that her jeans were undone now and he had his hand most of the way inside. His wrist was bent back in a way that looked uncomfortable but, all things considered, not too bad. I bent my wrist and sort of imagined my hand there. I looked back up, and she was looking right at me. She didn’t scream, didn’t do anything, just looked me in the eye.
I figured I was caught, flat busted. My first thought was to duck down, but she’d already seen me, and Bones wasn’t looking at anything except her. Her left arm was sort of propped against his chest, half pushing at him and half useless, and that arm told me pretty much everything I needed to know about who was driving that train. I looked at the arm, looked at her, turned around, and left.
I’ll be honest, that was the first time I’d seen something like that. It was pretty heavy. It wasn’t with me, of course, but it was still the first time I’d seen anything remotely resembling sex anywhere other than on TV. In a way, her looking at me like that was kind of hot. I mean, it sort of involved me, if that makes any sense. But it was messed up, too. Her expression, really her lack of an expression—it was like she barely noticed me. It was like she barely noticed him, for that matter. There was that bottle of Boone’s, but Boone’s didn’t fog your eyes over like that. What was going on in there, it wasn’t the sort of thing you necessarily wanted to be around.
I turned around when I reached the top of the little slope that led down to the house. I bent down, fingered through the grass, and picked up a rock about the size of my palm. I winged it at the old beat-up roof. For a second it looked like it was going to make it into one of the holes, but it hit right on the edge and bounced away. I watched as a shingle tipped and fell into the dark gap of the attic. I kind of hoped they heard.
It wasn’t much of an effort on my part, I guess, but whatever was going on in there was their deal. I don’t know what she was thinking, meeting him there like that. But again: Not my deal. I’m no hero. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Wolverine—kind of a tough-guy hero—but by now I knew I wasn’t even that.
You know before, when I said that Bones had to be pulled off people in fights, like he was a dog and you had to grab his collar and maybe a fistful of neck, too, and pull him clear before he could do some real damage? Well, that’s a weird thing to realize about someone you’ve known since they were a little kid, but it’s even weirder to realize that you might not be the guy to do it. I mean, we were growing at about the same pace—he was taller and I was wider—but I couldn’t match his intensity anymore, couldn’t even understand it sometimes. What was so important about anything around here that you had to fight for it? We were still living at home in this crappy little town. I guess I was just sort of headed the other way from him. I was biding my time until I got my license, finished school, got something of my own, and he was still defending his turf like a schoolkid. He was defending it like it was shrinking, fighting over scraps.
You think I was going to go in there and pull him off that girl? Yeah, he might listen to me. He might also tear off my arm and beat me with it. That was a two-man job, and Mixer wasn’t around. Yeah, I felt bad for Natalie, for what I was pretty sure was happening in there, but I hardly knew her. I’d never once talked to her one-on-one—like she’d even stay put for that—and Bones and me, we had that history. Add it all up and it amounts to the same thing: not my deal.
Once I reached the thinning grass at the mouth of the path, I took out the matchbook and lit up another crumbling Camel. Only a few left.
12
So obviously I had a lot to think about on Thursday night. I talked to Mixer, but I didn’t tell him about Bones and Natalie. That was too big a bomb to drop over the phone, so I just told him there was something I had to tell him before homeroom and left it at that. I couldn’t even bring myself to call Bones about Throckmorton and all that other stuff, and there was no way I could concentrate on reading more of the book. Instead, I watched Without a Trace again and The Mummy for like the twenty-fourth time.
I was drifting off to sleep and I was thinking about, well, you know what I was thinking about. The Kleenex were still crumpled up in little balls on the floor next to my bed, but I was still thinking about Natalie and Bones. Like, if that was a one-off thing or if he’d been hitting that for a while. I mean, she pretty much seemed like a passenger on that ride, but she was there with him, and that had to mean something. Then I was thinking, because it’s like sometimes I don’t sleep that well, and I was thinking about how Bones and Tommy hadn’t been getting along lately, and so it was like the lightbulb went on.
All of a sudden I had a whole new idea about what might’ve happened to Tommy. I mean, hell, I might take off, too, if I’d been sniffing after the same girl for years and Bones beat me to it. I mean, Bones was nobody’s idea of Brad Pitt. He wasn’t even like some actor’s normal-looking brother who ends up on made-for-TV movies just because of who his brother is. No one would watch Bones, not even on TV. The point is, I could see where that’d burn Tommy up.
That’d explain why he flipped the desk, too. Natalie and Bones were both in that class, and he wasn’t going to be able to say three right—and you just knew Dantley’d make him repeat it—and maybe they’d both be back there laughing at him behind his back. A guy’d do some crazy stuff to avoid that. And once he’d done it, maybe he just needed to cool off for a while. Or maybe he was off hunting for a .38. Anyway, sleep was coming on and that seemed to make as much sense as anything else. I figured I had to talk to Bones, to corner him and get it out of him, so I made like a mental note and hoped I’d remember it when I woke up.
It came back to me about the second time I hit the snooze bar and that was enough to get me out of bed. Plus, it was Friday. TGI-frickin’-F, people. I got dressed, scarfed down some cereal, and went out and waited for the bus. It was a warm morning, still sort of gray, and I could see fog up on the mountain, hanging there like shampoo in the trees. The yellow dog pulled up and I climbed on, and Mixer was sitting on the seat over the wheel hump.
He didn’t always take the bus, because sometimes his dad dropped him off on the way to work, if his dad was working down that way. All things considered, this was a good day for him to be there. Bones’s house was at the tail end of the Cambria bus route, and that was fine, too, because Mixer and I had stuff to talk about without him. It’s bumpier when you ride over the wheel hump. That’s why people like it. But it’s noisier, too, so we could talk normal, without worrying about anyone else hearing.
I told Mixer what I’d seen, and when I told him about that, plenty of people heard him. I think the bus driver even heard, but there’s only so much you can read into “No freak in’ way!” so that was fine. He got quieter when I told him my new idea about why Tommy might’ve taken off. Mixer smelled like cigarettes, so I knew he’d smoked at least one of his Humpies out at the end of his dirt driveway waiting for the bus. It’s not something I’d do, because if the bus arrived early, you’d have to crush it out on the ground and that was a waste.
Anyway, Mixer agreed that it might’ve lit a fire under Tommy’s ass, and he was sort of mad, too. It hadn’t occurred to me to be all that mad about it, but Mixer was like, A) It’s kind of a crappy thing to do to Tommy, bad as he had it for Natalie. And I was like, Yeah, like you wouldn’t’ve done the same thing
if you had the same chance, but Mixer was having none of it.
He just went on and was like, “B) If that’s what happened, then Bones should’ve clued us in. We’re all sitting there talking about Haberman, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, what if ?’ Meanwhile, he knows full well where Tommy’s gotten off to.”
But Mixer wasn’t really thinking this through, so I had to call him on it. “Yeah,” I said, “but he might not’ve known. Maybe he didn’t even know Tommy knew.”
I wasn’t completely sure that sentence made sense, but I was sure about the next one. “And anyway,” I said, “he wouldn’t’ve known where Tommy got off to, just why.”
“Yeah, well, he should’ve told us that,” said Mixer. “And it was still a dickhead thing to do.”
“No argument there.”
“All right,” said Mixer, and you could hear he was making an effort to calm down, “we’ll catch up with him after homeroom. Might as well get his side of the story.”
“He better not dick us around,” I said.
“Once he knows you saw, he won’t try to feed us any bull,” said Mixer. “Man, Bones. I still like him and all, but I’m definitely beginning to wonder about that guy.”
“Yeah, I wonder how he got Natalie to look at his scrawny pale ass without running in the other direction.”
Mixer just shrugged. “Maybe she was wasted.”
“Could be,” I said.
We caught up with Bones at his locker. At first, he was like, “You saw me? You frickin’ saw me?”
I was like, “What? I go out there all the time, and you forgot to put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out. Looked like you had your hands full, so whatever.”
“How long were you there?” he said. “How much did you see?”
“Enough,” I said.
“Forget about what he was doing there or how long he stayed, he lives across the damn street,” said Mixer. “What the hell were you doing there?”
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