As we pull up in front of my car, she grabs my shoulder. “Wait, you didn’t tell me. Is he a good kisser?”
“Seriously good,” I groan. “Thank God for El Maldito. It saved me.”
“What?” she cocks an eyebrow.
“We sort of ran into a mountain lion. It was just standing between the trees near my driveway.”
Racine’s eyes pop. “Seriously? How weird. You must have freaked out.”
“Strange timing, right? I almost gave Angel a reason to blow me off. Pee-pants aren’t so sexy.” My exaggerated pout and big doe eyes make her laugh, and that makes me giggle.
Before I open the car door, she reaches across her seat and hugs me. “See you on Monday?”
“Absolutely. Have fun at work.” She lets me go, and I give her hand an extra squeeze before hopping out. “You’re the best, Racine.”
Racine waves as she drives away, leaving me standing in front of Liddy’s Volkswagen. After a quick visual inspection—Liddy would never forgive me if something happened to her car—I head into Margarita’s.
From the looks of it, La Luna is a town full of early risers. The only booth left in the diner is a four-top near the back, and lucky me, right behind Ezra’s. Ezra sits slumped against his seatback with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. When he notices me walking toward the booth behind him, he pulls his straw cowboy hat down over his face and slinks into the seat even further, hiding behind his paper.
I scan the diner, hoping to will someone out of a different booth. When that doesn’t work, I finish my trek, walking as stealthily as I can, pretending I don’t notice him.
Daisy brings me a coffee cup immediately. She nods sympathetically, filling the cup to the brim. “You look like you need this.”
“I could kiss you.” I smile up at her.
“Yeah? Do me a favor and don’t. Next thing you know, we’ll be the talk of the town. Trust me.” She winks and waves her free hand around the room, clicking her tongue disdainfully.
“I don’t mind.” I grin. “Besides, who on Earth would blame me?”
“No one.” She smiles crookedly and tugs on a braid. “But you try explaining it to the old-timers.”
Daisy takes my order, lingering at the table while I briefly recap my first week at Pecos High. When she comes back to drop off my breakfast, she asks, “You went out with Racine last night, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. We had a great time.”
“From the looks of it, I believe you.” She raises an eyebrow, reminding me of Racine. “You see Angel?”
I squint at her before answering. “Yes.”
Leaning over, Daisy whispers conspiratorially, “You know, regulars been taking bets on whether you’d be back after your run-in with Ezra.” She pulls her pad out of her maroon apron and turns it over, scanning the backside. “Looks like Angel won the kitty.”
“The kitty?” I whisper back.
“Angel wouldn’t comment on Ezra, but he bet five bucks you’d be back this weekend, which means he was hoping to see you again. I’ll wager you all my tips he’ll be in soon just to check.”
Daisy laughs and straightens up. She refills my coffee cup, then leaves me perplexed and alone with an enormous bowl of oatmeal. While I eat, I stare out the window, trying to ignore that Ezra’s behind me. Instead, I think about the people walking by. I give each of them a secret identity. Computer hacker. Cheeto addict. Internet porn star. It’s what Mom and I did when I was a kid and we had to wait in line. Back then I thought that if those everyday humdrum people could be spies, and diplomats, and members of secret witches’ covens that met on the sly at the Magic Castle, then I could be anything I wanted. When I see Angel’s Bronco pull into his assigned space in front of the Sheriff’s Department across the street, I give him his own secret identity: professional sweet-talker. Last night he proved he could charm the pants off just about anyone.
Out on the sidewalk, Angel is harmless. But as soon as he turns and heads for Margarita’s front door, my throat constricts. After our driveway kiss and Daisy’s counsel, I’m not ready to face him. Panicking, I grab my cereal and coffee, hop up, and slip into Ezra’s booth uninvited. “Mind if I join you?” I ask nervously.
Ezra drops his paper only slightly. “Will you go away if I say I do?” he asks from under his hat.
“No,” I answer politely.
“Then whatever.” Ezra pulls the paper up tautly, so it covers his face again. I reach over the top and peel it down. “Is this why everyone hates you?”
“Hates me? Are you serious?”
I bite my lip. “Kind of?”
Ezra starts laughing. Not condescendingly like I expect but for real. “What do you think, Ruby?”
“I think you’re kind of a jerk. But I already told you that.” I nod earnestly, as though the answer to my inquiry is in doubt and I’m somehow enlightening him.
“Then I guess you answered your own question.”
“You do know that people don’t like you? That people talk, that is.”
He snorts. “I’ve lived here all my life. I may be ugly, but I’m not deaf. People talk. I don’t pay attention.”
I eye him, curious to know if he means it. “You can’t be as bad as people say.”
When his pupils narrow and he meets my stare, I cover my mouth. Dumb, Ruby.
“I may not listen, but that doesn’t mean the talk isn’t true.”
“You say it like you’re proud.”
“No,” he snaps. “I just don’t care.”
“You know, your face isn’t a very good excuse to be a jerk to everyone.”
Ezra looks both angry and surprised. For a moment, I think he might throw his coffee cup at me. But then he of good timing steps up to the booth and interrupts whatever it is Ezra is contemplating.
“Ruby.” Standing over the table in his crisp beige uniform, Angel winks at me. “How are you this morning?”
“Good.” I swallow, still dodging Ezra’s glare. “Great. You?”
“Fantastic. I had a fine time last night.”
“Oh … yeah … me too,” I stutter, feeling like a taxidermied deer.
Angel nods at a now-empty table near the entrance. “Do you want to join me?”
Maybe Angel likes my company. But I also get the distinct impression he thinks he’s rescuing a damsel in distress. “No. I’m good here. Thanks.”
“Really?” He pulls his head back into his neck, knotting his eyebrows together. “You sure?”
“Positive. Right, Ezra?” I give Ezra a little kick under the table.
“Right,” Ezra says casually, with just the slightest hint of amusement. “Ruby and I were having a delightful conversation.”
“Oh, well.” Angel sounds surprised. “I’m glad you’re okay. I know we had a great time last night at La Cuesta. But after the whole driveway incident, I thought you might want a little company this morning.”
As Angel speaks, I realize he’s choosing his words carefully for Ezra’s ears, not mine. “Well, I do have company. But maybe we can talk later?” I ask nicely, emphasizing the word ‘later’ so he’ll go away and let me die of embarrassment.
“Have dinner with me this week?”
“Um, can I check my calendar first?”
“Sure. Call me.” Angel tips his hat at us and walks off toward Daisy.
Across from me, Ezra is doing a lousy job of hiding his delight. “Your calendar? Didn’t you just move here?”
“Whatever.”
“La Cuesta. I guess that explains it.”
“What’s that?”
“Why you look like shit.”
I squint at him, admonishing his bad attitude with a curt nod of my own. “Thanks. You don’t look so hot yourself.”
Ezra chuckles. “You’re a gem. You know that? I bet that’s why you’re named Ruby.”
“Actually.” I sigh. “It’s not. My mother named me after Jack Ruby.”
Ezra raises his eyebrows quizzically.
“Becaus
e he was a Jew with balls.” I smile broadly, then cover my mouth. “At least that’s what she told me.”
Ezra reminds me of a caged beast, gloriously feral behind a controlled exterior. It isn’t exactly that I want him to like me, and I don’t exactly like him, but trying to get inside that cage without being torn apart is a compelling challenge.
Ezra smirks, opening the paper’s sports section. He holds it up in front of his face. “You can go now.”
I pull it down again. “Why?”
“You came over here to avoid Angel.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I said yes,” I snap.
“He’s gone now.”
“Well, now I don’t want to leave.”
“You really do look like crap.” He frowns at me.
“Fine. I look like crap. Surprise.” I throw my hands up. “The bar was dusty. And I didn’t drink enough water. It all kind of had its way with me.”
“You were there with Angel?”
“Yes. I think I gave him the wrong impression.”
“You think?” He cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Can you please stop repeating me?” I look down at the table at the uneaten bowl of oatmeal I brought over. The more I think about going to the Pecos Monument alone, about being alone all afternoon, the more I don’t want to be.
“I have a weird question for you,” I tell him.
“Lovely.”
“Will you come to the Pecos Monument with me when you’re done eating?”
Ezra drops his paper on the table and looks at me curiously. “Why would I go to Pecos with you?”
“Because I asked.”
He shakes his head, grabs his coffee cup, and stares at its bottom for a second. When he looks up again, I can tell he’s waiting for something.
“I really don’t want to be alone,” I admit.
“What’s wrong with being alone?”
“It’s lonely.”
“Imagine that,” he sighs.
My jaw flexes. It’s probably better he declined anyway; calling him a grump is an understatement of epic proportions. “Just forget it.”
Ezra fixes a hard stare somewhere past my face. His eyes never roam, and he never blinks, but eventually, he nods. “All right,” he answers quietly. Ezra dumps the paper on his seat, throws a few bills on the table, and stands up. He towers over the table, tapping his boot on the flecked linoleum floor while he waits. “Are you coming?”
When I stand up and follow Ezra, quickly waving goodbye as I rush past Angel out of Margarita’s, everyone, and I mean everyone, stops what they’re doing. I can almost hear the chattering inside their heads.
Outside, Ezra stops on the sidewalk, looming over me. “You know you just gave everyone a mouthful to talk about, right?”
Nodding, I hook my arm in his and semi drag him toward my car. The gesture probably gives at least a few of Margarita’s patrons angina. Although, if they’re that set on making a meal of it, they probably have it coming.
Ezra stops my march forward and points down the street. “I’ll drive.”
I shrug indifferently and follow him to his truck.
Compared to the outside of the dusty black pickup, the cab is surprisingly clean. As I buckle up, Ezra takes his cowboy hat off, throws it on the seat between us, and drives away from La Luna with both windows down. He takes main roads to the Pecos monument instead of the highway, driving slowly, but the warm wind whips his shoulder-length hair around his face as if he was speeding.
Ezra’s hair, which lacks a part but still seems to fall equally on either side of his face, masks a lot of his scarring. He has beautiful hair, dark and glossy like wet ink. It definitely adds to his magnetism—a trait that surprises me, considering his messed-up attitude.
As he parks near Pecos’s Welcome Center, I pull my own hair out of its ponytail and run my fingers through it, combing out the knots that formed while the tail snapped out the window. While I smooth it, Ezra stares at me. For someone who claims I should learn some manners, he sure stares a lot at people.
“What?” I ask, squinting at him.
“You should wear it down more.”
Ezra hops out of his truck and walks toward the ranger station. Without checking to see if I’ve joined him, he stops and stands near the entrance with his hands stuck in his pockets, staring up at the mountains. From a distance, it’s hard to miss he has a nice build. His worn jeans and checkered shirt fit his tall frame and broad shoulders perfectly. With his hat pulled down so far over his face, it’s easy to imagine Ezra before his accident. From afar, I completely see the guy he was. And for maybe the first time since we met, I feel more than a little sorry for him.
“You waiting for an invitation?” he shouts across the parking lot.
I scramble out of the cab. At the entrance, Ezra turns and walks into the building without me, making a beeline for a rack of postcards, where he tries to blend with the fixtures. A ranger hands me a map of the Pecos Monument, staring past me at Ezra while he briefly explains the things we’ll see.
In the middle of the ranger’s speech, Ezra slips outside, waiting near the beginning of the trail. When I catch up with him, I hold out a pamphlet. “Here. You read.”
“I don’t need a guide.” He hands it back to me.
“I haven’t been here before. I want to know what happened, about its history.”
“I’ll tell you.” Ezra motions for me to follow, and I walk alongside him to the first crumbled structure rapt as he begins explaining the monument and its people. “Once upon a time, Pecos was the largest pueblo in New Mexico. Before Pecos, Natives built rock and mud villages in the valley here. They lived in pit houses along drainages off the Pecos River.” He sweeps an arm across the plain in front of us. “By the 1400s, they’d gathered into a singular group. When Coronado passed through in 1540, the Pecos Pueblo was near 2,000 Pecos strong.”
I close my eyes, trying to picture a great big dwelling rather than the grassy piles of rubble surrounding me. “It’s hard to imagine.”
“The Pecos built their pueblo at a midpoint in the pass through the Southern Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range. Strategically speaking, they ran the trade path between the pueblos of the Rio Grande and the plains tribes. Plains Indians—mostly Comanche and Apache—they traded their goods here. Look.” He points toward a hard patch of barren land outside the rubble. “You can still see tipi ruts in the earth. The Pecos refused Plains Indians entry inside the pueblo, so the Plains tribes set up camp outside the perimeter during long spells of bartering.”
Walking the trail with Ezra is like walking back in time. At the next clearing, he stops and stands behind me, pointing over my shoulder at the remnants of a crumbling rock wall. “Look over there. Pecos had sketchy relationships with other tribes, especially the Comanche. The wall signaled they weren’t allowed beyond that point.”
He walks on ahead, stopping again in front of a crumbling adobe mission. Catching up, I pull him down beside me on a wooden bench and grab a small pad and a piece of charcoal out of my backpack. “Do you mind?” I ask. “I want to sketch it. The sun’s casting crazy shadows over the adobe.”
He looks at me kind of funny. “You want to sketch it?”
“Just for a minute. But don’t stop talking.”
Ezra’s momentary silence adds to the pueblo’s quiet mystery. The air is dead still for a couple of minutes before he starts again. “Governor Oñate came through here in 1598. He called the pueblo ‘Santiago’ and assigned Pecos its first permanent missionaries. They built the mission there around 1617.”
I look up from my smudged paper and scratch my nose. “What happened to everyone? It says in the ranger station that the pueblo was completely abandoned by the 1800s.”
Ezra gazes at the mission, but really past it, as if the answer lies among its ruins. “You want history or lore?”
“History first,” I tell him.
“Pecos played a big part in the Pueblo R
evolt against the Spaniards. A lot of Pecos died fighting for their freedom. The rest were under constant attack by the Querecho Apache. By the mid-1700s, between the two, only about 600 Pecos remained. After that, from what I understand, contaminated well water finished them off. The few Pecos left moved up to the Jemez Pueblo. Only a handful of people still have Pecos blood today.”
Sitting in the completely silent, oddly stirring monument that even abandoned still manages to hold so much magic, I’m struck by the fact that a whole distinct group of people just disappeared. Absently, I wipe my black fingertips on my jeans, feeling morose. “How does an entire culture just vanish like that?”
“That’s history.” He shrugs.
“Yeah, well, chalking something up to history doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. What if historians said that about the Holocaust?” I roll my eyes. “That’s history; let’s just write it off.”
Ezra leans over and smudges my nose with a thumb. “I wasn’t writing it off,” he answers calmly, wiping charcoal on my jeans. “It is sad. But there’s no point crying over spilt milk. We learn our lessons and move on. It’s all part of a process I have no control over. Anyway, it’s a leap to compare what happened here to the Holocaust.”
His levelheaded response is completely logical. Listening to it, I know he’s right. But it still feels wrong. It’s like saying my own life doesn’t matter because it’s fleeting, that no one will remember me unless I somehow manage to make an indelible imprint. Even after Mom, it’s still hard to grasp that once you die, life moves on.
“Were you a history major?” I ask, purposely changing the subject.
“What makes you think I went to college?”
“Word is you went away after high school and came back like …”
“This?” He tilts his head up and meets my eyes, daring me to look away.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Sorry.”
“You’ve been asking around about me?”
“No. I mean, well a little … I guess I’m curious.”
“I went to college for a while.” He nods. “I studied astronomy.”
“Not history?”
“I just said astronomy.”
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