“Right. Your money,” Cade said, judgment in his tone.
My eyes met his. “You know, Cade, there’s more to knowing a person than what they’ve done.”
“Yeah? Well, it doesn’t seem like you want to talk about yourself very much.”
“I’m not going to talk about me, but I’ll talk to you.”
“About what then?”
“Anything else.”
CADE
Anything else was colors, food, movies, football. And it filled the sweltering evenings as Jane and Hunter healed up in the barn. Mattey was with us a lot. And he kept Jane company while I had football practice. He would bring his charcoal pencils and sketch pad and draw while they talked, sometimes skylines where he imagined living someday, sometimes the people right in front of him. Mattey’s world.
But most of the time it was just Jane and me together.
“What’s your favorite color?” I asked.
She told me light green, like leaves when they’re new. I said mine was blue. She wanted to know what kind of blue, and I’d never really thought about it before. Maybe like the sky over the corn when it’s growing. Or kinda like a pair of old jeans. The sort of blue that is familiar. She wondered if that meant I liked things predictable. I laughed because even if I did, finding her in the field was the end of that.
We talked and we walked, following the fence lines and scouring the woods between the barn and the freeway. It became a routine to end each day with a search for her money.
At first, she wouldn’t answer any of my questions.
“When do you last remember having the bag?”
“I don’t.”
“How did you get away from Ivan?”
“I just did.”
Then she answered them a little bit.
“When do you last remember having the bag?”
“After Ivan attacked me.”
“How did you get away?”
“I fought back.”
And then, one day, we thought we found it.
We spotted a bag in the brush. Jane flew toward it, snatched it up, but quickly realized it wasn’t hers. Something about the false hope though, the surge and the crash—it broke down her guard a little. After that, her answers started to have real information, information that threw me no matter how many times I heard her say it.
“When do you last remember having the bag?” I asked, like I asked every time, thinking that eventually something had to click for her.
“The woods. . . . I tried to make a break for it. When Ivan slowed down, I jumped out of the car. But he caught up to me in the woods.”
“How did you get away?”
“I had a fork. From the McDonalds at the bus station right before he found me. Plastic . . .”
I glanced over at her. I remembered Ivan’s swollen eye. She didn’t meet my gaze. I couldn’t picture Jane hurting anyone, but I guess when it comes down to it . . .
“Are you sure you grabbed the bag?” I continued my list of questions.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t drop it near his car?”
“No.”
“Did you have it in the woods?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have it in the cornfield?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So you lost the bag somewhere between the interstate and my farm?” I asked.
“Right.”
We had reached the storm drain where she’d hidden.
I scrambled down into it for her. Again. The dirty cement cylinder had some trash in it, a few plants growing in the cracks, and a dead fish that must’ve washed in from the river nearby. Mattey and I used to race paper boats in the spillover streams after it rained, running alongside them till they got sucked through the drain and disappeared under the road. I always wanted to see where they went, but Mattey was scared to cross the interstate. His parents told him he’d get run over if he tried.
No bag of money.
“When do we give up?” I asked after I crawled up the muddy embankment, brushing myself off.
“You don’t strike me as someone who gives up,” Jane said.
“I’m not.”
“Me neither.”
“I know.”
“So tomorrow . . .”
“We’ll look again.”
We walked in comfortable silence back to the barn. I scooped up my football from where I’d tossed it by an old fence post and arced it back at Jane.
“Go long!”
She missed.
“You suck,” I teased.
She scooped up the ball and chucked it hard at me. “Football sucks.”
“I love it.” I easily jumped out of the way.
“What do you love so much?”
“Everything. You get to wake up and do the thing you want to do. And I’m out there with my best friends, like Gunner and Fajardo and the twins.”
“That’s it? It’s just fun?”
“We all need to have fun somewhere, right? It’s also the only thing I feel in charge of. I can actually see the results of the work I put in. I like that.”
“How old were you when you started?”
“Six, seven, maybe? I played Pop Warner football. I was a scrawny little squirt.”
“Really?” Jane squinted at me. “What are you on now, steroids?”
“Why would you say that?” I felt slightly embarrassed.
“Shut up. You know you’re built. You work out, like, twenty-four seven.”
“Whatever. I was tiny when I started out. I remember once the biggest kid on one of the teams we played knocked me down and my shoe ripped. The sole flapped right off. And I was so mad because I knew we couldn’t afford new ones.”
“What did you do?”
“Same thing I do now: duct tape.”
“Whatever it takes,” Jane said.
“Whatever it takes,” I echoed.
With so much resting on the luck of being scouted, my chances for success seemed barely better than Jane’s odds of finding that bag of money. Paper boats swallowed up.
Back at the barn, we sat down with our backs against the wall and watched the orange square of sunlight from the door disappear.
“What day is it?” Jane asked.
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve been living in a barn, are you surprised?”
That made me laugh, which made Jane crack up too, and suddenly we were laughing so hard we were leaning against each other. It was crazy. All of this was nuts.
“What the heck are we doing anyway?” I asked her.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I should have left already.”
“You’re not going to start school with us? Don’t break Mattey’s heart.”
“Mattey’s heart?”
“He’s the one who wants you to stay.”
“Not you?” she teased.
“Girl, you gotta do what you need to do. I’m not going to tell you what that is.”
“Trust me, the offer’s tempting,” Jane said softly. “But I still feel like your dad will catch on. And then what?”
“Like I told you, A, he never comes out here. I hide in this barn whenever he goes on a bender—hasn’t found me yet. And B, he hasn’t left the farm in a couple of years.”
“He’s, like, a total recluse then?” Jane asked.
“Honestly, the most human contact he’s had in forever was when the police came here after he shot Ivan.”
Jane nodded, absorbing the information. “I need to be certain there are no more Ivans coming after me. You can’t be in the middle of this.”
“Aren’t I already?” I pointed out.
Jane’s gaze went distant. “We have time to figure it out, I guess.”
B
ut time was flying.
Summer was winding down. August was sitting, sweaty, on top of Tanner, and the start of school was only a couple of weeks away.
As each day passed I found myself hurrying home a little faster after football practice to bring Jane some of our dinner and shoot the shit with her. I mean, whatever, it wasn’t like that. But it was nice having someone to talk to. Real nice. I hadn’t liked anything about coming home at the end of a day since my mom left. But now, it was like we were our own little family or something.
“How are you always here?” Jane asked me one day when we were all hanging out. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“He’s got girls, not girlfriends,” Mattey told her.
“Player?” Jane raised an eyebrow.
“Nah.” I tried to shrug them off.
A girlfriend would want to come over. A girlfriend would ask too many questions about black eyes and bruises. It sucked, but I could never let someone get close like that. I had to be Cade the quarterback, too obsessed with winning games to deal.
“I’m too busy with football,” I lied.
“Plaay-yer,” Mattey mouthed next to me.
“Shut up.” I put him in a headlock.
Sometimes when Mattey would visit, he’d bring Jane things he swiped from his sisters: new razors, deodorant, girl stuff. Then one Saturday when I was cleaning pools, Mama Travis told me she was clearing out their garage and I could have anything I wanted from the pile by the door. And jackpot! There it was, one of those little camping toilets. You woulda thought I brought Jane a car, she was so excited to be able to stop squatting in the bushes.
That day I also scored a card table, two folding chairs, and flowered curtains, which we hung on the stall with the mattress. I tied them back with rope from some old cattle harnesses.
“Wow. Look at you, the interior decorator. It kind of makes it like a canopy bed.” Jane surveyed my work.
“Zee barn is the most sought-after hotel of Tann-air,” I said with a fake French accent. “Actually, it might be nicer out here than in the house, if I’m being honest.”
“Really? That’s kind of sad,” Jane said. “Also never do that accent again. Because that is truly tragic.”
“Well, we do at least have real furniture in the farmhouse, so there’s that,” I laughed. “It’s just so run-down, and my dad never cleans. But I’m out of here soon. I hope.”
“I’m sure colleges will be fighting over you.”
“You’ve never even seen me play. How do you know?”
Just a feeling, she told me, but she guessed she’d have to come to a game to be sure.
“Wee wee,” I said in the bad accent again to bug her, and she smacked me on the shoulder.
“I’ve never done anything normal like that, you know,” she said. “A football game.”
“You and your boyfriend never did things together?”
She shot me a look like don’t go there.
“What’s your favorite kid movie?” she asked, changing the subject.
Hers was The Little Mermaid. Because the mermaid is willing to give up everything she ever wanted to save the life of the one she loved. Mine was Robin Hood. Steal from the rich to give to the poor.
“You seem older than you are,” I said. It was her eyes. A hard edge to the bright blue.
“I feel older than I am,” she answered.
“So I really can’t ask about your boyfriend?” I asked.
“Can I ask about your mom?”
“No.”
“Well, same,” she said. “No.”
I did anyway. All she would tell me is that even though he got mixed up in dealing drugs he wasn’t a bad guy.
“Do you miss him?”
“I found him dead.”
Shit. I shut up.
“Anything else?” she asked coldly.
“No.”
Anything else was anything else. And then there was everything. Which was nothing we could talk about.
JANE
Dead and pretty.
Hair is dead, but we think it’s nice. There’s always more pushing its way out of our heads, and we make sure it’s clean and shiny. That’s what I was thinking about as Mateo’s sister cut mine. Hair hanging in a dead sheet down my neck. Attached to a body, with no nerve endings, the only way to know it’s being cut is the dry sound of the scissors. I watched the inches fall onto the well-worn lime-and-yellow braided rug. Sunlight streamed in the window of the crowded bedroom. Their colorful house smelled like so many things at once: laundry soap and banana bread, sizzling garlic and onions, lemon cleaner, vanilla candles. Their life in layers, coming, going, cooking, sleeping, laughing. I was just one more moving part, no big deal, securely lost in the mayhem of their morning.
“I don’t know why you want to change your hair.” Jojo pursed her lips. “I mean, I get wanting a new look, but you look good now.”
She thought I looked good? It had been a month and a half since Cade found me, and this was the first time we dared introduce me to Jojo as his cousin. I glanced nervously up at Cade, where he was lounging on the top bunkof the bed in the corner, absently swinging his leg off the edge. I still couldn’t believe we were going through with this. How many late nights of second-guessing and here we were, moving forward with Mateo’s crazy idea.
I still had a rawness across my stomach, especially if I tried to sit without rolling onto my side and pushing myself up on an elbow. I ran my fingers along my bare arms. Cade had rigged up a shower for me using an old barrel, hose, and sprinkler head. My skin felt like someone else’s—smooth and soft, clean in a way it hadn’t been in so long. All the hand-me-down furniture Cade was collecting was making the barn look more like a house than a cowshed. As one day ran into the next, we kind of started assuming I really was going to stay.
Jojo continued to chatter as she worked on my hair.
“Oh, and P.S., if moving in with Cade is better off than where you were in California, I feel sorry for you. I mean, it’s not like we’re rolling in it over here. But have you seen the farm lately?”
“Jojo!” Mateo barked at her from the corner, where he was doodling on a notebook cover, elbow resting on a pile of half-dressed Barbie dolls and laundry that got folded but never put away.
“What? Am I not allowed to say it? His dad sucks. Cade . . . your dad sucks.”
Cade let out a little snort of agreement over in the corner of the room. He was thumbing through one of Jojo’s magazines. “You’re allowed. He does.”
“See, Mattey? What I said.” Jojo surveyed the box of dye Mattey had scooped up for me. “Ugh. Jane, welcome to boring.”
“Tanner’s not that bad,” Mateo chimed in.
“Oh, I meant this. What’s with this blah brown?” Jojo made a face before tossing her own sheet of long hair around like a shampoo commercial. “If you’re gonna go there, go there. Let’s do sleek black, like mine!”
“Is this one really that ugly?” I asked, taking the box from her. The girl in the picture didn’t look so bad.
Mateo defended his choice. “Don’t listen to Jojo. It’s not a blah brown. It’s burnt umber with streaks of sienna in it.”
“Are those paint colors?” I asked him.
“Yes—” Mateo started to say.
“If you wanted to paint the color of dirt,” Jojo butted in. She made the sign of the cross. “R.I.P., beautiful hair.”
“Burnt umber and sienna are only the color of dirt if the sun is shining on it in the morning,” Mateo said.
Jojo and Cade looked at each other, paused, and burst out laughing.
“Listen to Michelangelo,” Jojo teased.
Mateo shook a finger at her. “Someday when I have a big art show and you want to come . . .”
“What? I won’t be invited?” Jojo laughed. “Please. No party
is fun without me. Go steal Sophia’s dye. She has a better color. Swap it out.”
“She’ll be mad.”
“She’s always mad.” Jojo laughed. “Blame it on me.”
Mateo scooted down the hall and brought back a different dye.
“That’s what I’m talking about! That other one will wash you out. This one will bring out your eyes. Back to work,” Jojo said, squirting the cool dye into my hair. “Hey, Cade, whatcha reading?”
Cade held up the magazine. “I’m learning about what girls think guys want in bed.”
“Ew!” Jojo said.
“It’s your magazine!” Cade protested.
“Yeah, but it’s you reading it. So, is it true?” Jojo asked.
“Is what true?”
“The stuff it says guys like. Is it true?”
Cade squinted. “Uh, sure. Some of it.”
“Like what?” Jojo asked.
“Yeah, Cade, like what?” Mateo teased.
“I don’t wanna talk about that kinda stuff in front of my cousin.”
Cade tried on the word for size and shot a look over at me that was almost a little smug, like he was telling me, Yes, we could pull this off. Mateo’s eyes were still a little nervous, waiting for Jojo to somehow catch on, but she was buying it 100 percent, and why shouldn’t she?
Maybe this was going to be easier than I imagined.
Ivan was dead. How would anyone know that he had found me here before Cade’s dad shot him? No one from Playa Lavilla should think to look in this dingy little town. Still . . . there was a gnawing. It was the same sort of doubt that wormed in back when I realized Raff was smuggling drugs.
People know when they are doing something that holds too many consequences. But I had to eke out some sort of existence now, right?
“So, what else do I need to know about you, Jane?” Jojo asked. “You lived in Cali your whole life?”
“Uh, yes.”
“San Diego is supposed to have the best weather in the universe!”
“Yeah, it’s nice.”
“And your parents got divorced, so you’re like, See ya, I’m gonna move in with my cousin?”
“It was more complicated than that. I got myself kicked out of school. I needed a fresh start.” I recited the story Cade and I concocted.
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