The way this whole thing got started was completely coincidental and not like I planned it or anything. Jen and I had been at Ridgedale a few days before and we got kicked out of Abercrombie & Fitch because Jen was carrying around this enormous drippy waffle cone, so we went outside and sat on one of the benches in front of Macy’s so she could suck down the rest of it. We were talking and watching people walk to and from their cars when I noticed this salesman-type guy younger than our parents but way older than us score a prize parking slot close to the front entrance. The guy got out looking very pleased with himself and set his car keys on the hood and started digging in his briefcase for something. His keys slid off the hood and landed by his feet. He didn’t notice.
I looked at Jen but she was having some sort of crisis with her cone.
A couple seconds later, the guy found whatever it was he was looking for. He closed his briefcase and took off toward the Macy’s entrance, passing real close to us. I opened my mouth to tell him he’d dropped his keys, but for some reason I didn’t. After he was gone I said to Jen, “That guy dropped his keys.”
“Where?”
I walked over to his car and picked them up. I don’t remember what kind of car it was—something boring, a Toyota or Honda or something. When I got back to the bench, Jen was staring at the last inch of her waffle cone with this tragic expression on her face.
“I didn’t get a malted milk ball in the bottom,” she said.
“I don’t think Flavor Hut does the milk ball thing. You have to go to Cold Stone for that.”
“That sucks.”
It did suck, no malted milk ball, but what could you do? Jen walked the soggy tip of her cone over to the cans on the other side of the entrance and tossed it into the recycling.
“Wrong can,” I said.
She shrugged and wiped her fingers on her butt. “We better go find him,” she said.
“Find who?”
“The key guy.”
“I’m sure he’s got another set,” I said, putting the keys in my purse.
Jen looked at me like I was this psycho, but she was the one who just threw her ice cream cone in the recycling can, so I ignored her.
“Let’s go back to Abercrombie,” I said. “I want to try on that top with the rhinestones.”
“You know you’ll never buy it. It actually might look good on you.” Jen had some very definite opinions on my fashion sense. She thought I dressed like a nun, which was not completely untrue.
“You never know,” I said. “Maybe today I’ll have an aneurysm and buy something pink and sparkly.”
The week before, Jen and I had been at the Minnehaha Club pool and Jen was giving me grief about my swimsuit.
“You should get a two-piece,” she told me. “You’d look hot.”
“Are you saying I don’t look hot now?” I was wearing a black one-piece, skimpier than a nun would wear—if nuns ever went swimming.
“No! I just think you’d look hotter in a bikini. You’re so conservative.”
So of course I immediately felt like the boringest person on earth—but I didn’t say anything, even though it bugged me.
A little while later we were ogling these two guys, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and Jen said, “I’ll take the blond.”
“Fine. I’ll settle for the one with the six-pack abs.”
“Damien.”
“He looks like a Damien. And the other one looks like a Troy.”
“Not Troy. Andre.”
“Okay, Andre. Damien and Andre.”
We were laughing—okay, giggling—and sipping our iced teas and absorbing megawatts of cancer-causing UV rays. We were also bored out of our minds, so I decided I’d walk over to Damien and Andre and say something because it was the last thing Jen would ever expect Boring Conservative Me to do. I figured I’d never see them again, and they were too old for us anyway, so what did I have to lose? I stood up and walked over, imagining Jen’s eyes wide on my back.
Up close they weren’t nearly as good-looking as I’d thought. The blond one had little bumps all over his face like old acne, and the one with the six-pack abs had kind of squished-together features, like the space between his eyes could have used another half inch.
I said, mostly to the one with the squished features and the abs, “So, are you guys members here?”
They looked a little startled. Then their eyes went up and down my body the way guys’ eyes do. My suit might have been the most boring conservative bathing suit at the pool, but the way those guys looked at me, it might as well have been Saran Wrap.
I said, “Because if you’re not members, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you.” Where that came from, I had no idea. I wasn’t even a member myself—Jen’s parents were.
The blond one—Damien or Andre, I’d already forgotten which was which—said, “You’re already talking to us.”
“Then you must be members.”
“I guess so,” said Damien. Or Andre.
I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I just smiled and shrugged.
“So…what’s happening?” said the blond.
“Nothing—just another boring day at the country club.” I pointed at Jen, who was watching openmouthed from forty feet away. “My friend says you guys are named Damien and Andre. But I forget which of you is which.”
They looked at each other and laughed.
“Why don’t you invite your friend over here?” said the blond.
I waved Jen over. She looked behind her, like I was waving at someone else. I waved harder. She got up and came toward us, slowly, giving them plenty of time to check her out.
What Jen looks like: same height as me, straight hair that gets streaky blond in the summer but goes to honey brown in the winter, blue eyes, a nose and chin that are both a little longer and pointier than she’d like, and the body of a gymnast, which makes sense, because she was a gymnast before she blew out her left knee. She doesn’t limp or anything but her doctor told her no more floor exercises or dismounts, so she kind of gave up on the whole Olympics thing. But she still has the hot body, which, as far as most guys are concerned, makes up for any excess facial pointiness. She makes the most of it by wearing the skimpiest swimsuits permitted at the Minnehaha Club. Thongs are forbidden—this is Minnesota, after all—but it would still take five or six of her suits to add up to as much fabric as mine.
By the time Jen arrived, Damien and Andre had done that wordless guy thing where they put dibs on who gets who. The blond was all over Jen, which was fine with me. It took him about ten seconds to tell her how hot she was and that he was a student at the U and that they were going to this great party later and would we like to come. My guy, whose actual name turned out to be Tyler, tried to impress me by telling me he drove a BMW. I told him my name was Cordelia—which it isn’t. From there the conversation just kept getting stupider. I mean, any college guy who wants to date a fifteen-year-old is a total loser as far as I’m concerned, but they were kind of fun to talk to, so we hung out with them for an hour or so, then told them we had to go home and get dressed for the “great party” they were taking us to. We said we’d meet them at eight o’clock at the Starbucks on Winnetka.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Jen said after we left the pool.
“Neither can I,” I said. I loved the way she was looking at me, all amazed. So much for boring and conservative.
That night at eight, Jen and I were at the Starbucks on Winnetka. Not like we would actually go to a party with those guys. But we were curious to see if they’d show up.
They never did.
Back to the car keys thing. I figured I’d hang on to them for a souvenir. I liked the idea of having a set of car keys in my purse, and that’s probably all that would have happened except that a week later I found out where the key guy lived.
I was with my mom in her Toyota Camry, driving her to Book Club, which was an unutterably boring way to spend two hours, but it was a chance to get in some driving practice and I had homework to do. I’d gotten my permit, and I’d passed the written test, so it was legal for me to drive as long as I had an over-twenty-one adult in the passenger seat. The problem was, my parents hardly ever let me drive at all because my dad did not “passenger well” and my mom always had some excuse, like she was in a huge hurry and didn’t want me to get a speeding ticket before I even had a license. Book Club was an opportunity because this was the sort of book club where half the women don’t even bother to read the book and they each toss back like six glasses of chardonnay apiece and spend more time dishing than book-talking. My mom would have a serious DUI-worthy buzz going by the time things broke up, and I was the designated driver because the law doesn’t say anything about the over-twenty-one person being sober. So I drove her to Betsy Charlesworth’s. Betsy has a huge house and no kids, perfect for Book Club. I grabbed a brownie and some little cookies from the sideboard and planted myself on the periphery of the group to read my summer novel, the incredibly thick Moby-Dick, while tuning in now and then on the juicier bits of gossip. I think I ended up reading about ten pages. It was actually quite funny in places. The book, I mean.
It was on our way home, with my mom chatting boozily about Ginny Ahlstrand’s sudden suspicious weight loss and the declining quality of Betsy Charlesworth’s deviled eggs, that I saw the key guy. I probably wouldn’t have recognized him except that he happened to be getting out of his familiar-looking car with the same familiar-looking briefcase and he had the same hurried look I remembered from before. He was only like five blocks away from our house, which I guess makes him a neighbor.
You see what I mean about coincidental.
“Turn here,” my mom said.
“I’ve only lived in this neighborhood my whole entire life,” I said.
“You’re fifteen years old.”
I gave her a look. “I can count.”
“Are you going to tell me how many glasses of wine I had?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t mention it to your father, either.”
That night—I don’t know why, but I remember it was a Thursday—I called Jen and made her promise to meet me at Burger King at midnight. It took some convincing, because the BK was almost a mile from her house, but I told her I had this secret and if she ever wanted to know what it was she had to show up. In the end she said okay, and after we hung up I started working on homework, never mind that tenth grade didn’t even start until September. The American educational system gone berserk. Not only did I have to read a “classic novel” from a list they gave us and report on it (I’d never have picked Moby-Dick if I’d known how long it was), I also had to write a five-hundred-word essay of “acceptable quality” on how to do something. How to Tie a Shoe. How to Apply Lip Gloss. How to Become a Vampire. How to Build a Spaceship. How to Write a Five-Hundred-Word Essay. All for an extra half point added to my language arts grade. Woo-hoo.
I worked for like half an hour and only got thirty-five words written. Four hundred sixty-five to go. Good thing I still had a couple months to work on it.
I got to the BK first and bought some fries. Jen took forever to get there. I was sitting at one of the outside tables, fishing little crumbles of french fry from the bottom of the bag and thinking about all the times Jen had disappointed me, like the time we were supposed to go to camp together and she backed out at the last second, leaving me friendless and bored for two weeks at Camp Wannamakemepuke or whatever.
Finally she showed up.
“You’re late,” I said.
“Look at you,” she said, looking at me.
“What?”
She sat down. “All ninja.”
I was wearing my black Pilates tights and a black cotton hoodie.
“Not too ‘conservative’ for you?” I stood up and pulled the hood over my head.
“So what’s the big secret?”
“C’mon.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her up.
“I don’t get to eat?”
“Later.”
She complained practically the whole way, all whiny because I wouldn’t tell her what we were doing. I shhhed her as we approached the house, staying close to a row of lilac bushes. We were in luck. I’d been afraid the guy would put his car in the garage, but there it was, parked in his driveway.
“Wait here,” I said.
How I usually dress: like an off-duty nun, just like Jen says. No one on earth owns more black and gray. If you saw me on TV you might think I was out of some old black-and-white movie. My idea of festive is black pants with a gray blouse. Even my mother thinks I lack fashion sense. “You should wear something fun,” she has said on many occasions, often upon presenting me with something “fun,” like a multicolored polka-dot shirt, or a pair of “designer” jeans with carefully applied rips, or striped socks, or red shoes. Yes, she actually bought me a pair of red shoes.
I do not wear red shoes or striped socks. I do not wear blue jeans or any other color of denim. I don’t want to look like every other girl. I don’t want people to judge me by my clothes. I have other reasons too. My dad actually gets me on this. He dresses kind of the same way, only he wears white shirts, which I never do. I like to shop, though, and when Jen and I get into it at the mall, I’ll try on anything, the more colorful and bizarre the better. But not in the real world. It drives Jen crazy. And my mom.
How to Steal a Car
by
Kelleigh Monahan
When nobody is looking you sneak up to the car and get in and start it. Then drive away. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
I unlocked the driver’s door, slipped behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition, and turned it. The car started right away. I waved at Jen to get in. She shook her head and pressed her body back into the lilac bushes. I put the car in gear and backed out of the driveway. I drove around the block. When I got back to the driveway, Jen had left the shelter of the bushes and was walking quickly down the sidewalk toward home. I pulled up alongside her and rolled down the passenger window.
“Need a lift?” My voice sounded weird and my heart was banging around like a munchkin in a mosh pit.
Jen stuck her head in the window and said in a loud whisper, “What are you doing?”
“Going for a ride,” I said.
“Maybe. Get in.”
I didn’t think she was going to do it, but then she opened the passenger door and hopped inside. Her cheeks were flushed. I knew her heart had to be banging like crazy too.
“Go!” she said. “Go! Go!”
We went.
I did not have this screwed-up home life that you would think would drive me to crime. My parents were nearly perfect. I don’t mean perfect perfect, but compared to a lot of parents, like the ones who beat their kids and lock them in closets and smoke crack and stuff, my parents were practically ideal. For one thing, they were still married after twenty years, and they were completely nonviolent, and neither of them had ever been arrested as far as I know. My dad was a lawyer who ran three miles every morning except Sunday, when he worked as a deacon at our church. He’d been doing that ever since I could remember. My mom worked part-time selling real estate and belonged to like a dozen different do-good organizations—PTA, MADD, ASPCA, AAA—I don’t know what all else. And no, she was not a drunk. Only at Book Club. And sometimes wedding receptions. Other than that, she was almost perfect, and even when she wasn’t, she tried really hard.
I remember one time when she came rushing home at like ten minutes to six with a bag from Byerly’s. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some lame American history assignment. She pulled a slab of deli lasagna out of the Byerly’s bag, fitted it into a pan, and stuck it in the oven. She had also bought some corn salad and roasted peppers. She said nothing to me as she transferred the salad and peppers from their plastic cartons into a matching set of serving bowls.
I said, “Wow.”
My mother stopped what she was doing and looked directly at me for the first time. She winked at me, which she never does, then went back into action, stashing the Byerly’s cartons in the trash and opening a bottle of wine and making up a bread basket with some organic dinner rolls, also from Byerly’s.
Twenty minutes later my dad got home and we sat down to eat. We always ate dinner together, because my nearly perfect mother had once read an article that said children thrived in families that ate home-cooked meals together every night.
“Great lasagna,” my dad said.
“Thank you,” said my mother.
“New recipe?”
“I just tweaked it a little,” she said, then winked at me—again.
I remember now. It was a Nissan Altima. I don’t know what color.
I drove fast out of Golden Valley and got on the freeway heading north. Jen and I were both talking at the same time, neither of us really saying anything, just blowing off this wild energy. There was a lot of “Omigod, omigod, I can’t believe we’re doing this” and Jen talking about all the people who were going to totally freak when they heard about it. Finally I sort of calmed down and said, “We can’t tell anybody.”
Jen looked stricken.
“I’m serious,” I said. “If we tell anybody at all, it might get back to our parents. Or the police.”
Jen nodded, then said, “Not even Will?”
Will was our boyfriend, sort of.
“We can tell Will,” I said. “He doesn’t talk.” That wasn’t true, exactly. Will Ford spoke perfectly well—he just didn’t do it often, which was probably why we were friends. He was the perfect listener. If you told him something and said it was a secret, you couldn’t even get him to tell it back to you.
Jen nodded and smiled. As long as she could tell at least one person, she was fine.
“Where should we go?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jen said. “It’s after midnight. It’s a weekday.”
We were almost out of the suburbs, about twenty miles north of Minneapolis, with new housing developments and the remnants of farms on either side of us. I saw some lights up ahead on the right. A low building surrounded by SUVs and pickup trucks came into sight. The neon sign on the roof read B.J.’s BUNKHOUSE, LIVE NUDE DANCERS 24 HOURS.
“Want to stop off for a beer?” I said.
Jen laughed—but she stopped when I turned onto the exit ramp.
“Hey…,” she said, sitting forward.
“I’m just turning around,” I told her.
She slumped back in her seat saying nothing as I turned away from B.J. and his Live Nude Dancers, crossed under the freeway, and turned onto the southbound entrance ramp.
“We could hit the twenty-four-hour Taco Bell,” I said.
“Okay.” I could tell the thrill was wearing off for her. I could feel it in myself too. The fun part of stealing a car is pretty short-lived if you have no place to go.
The Taco Bell was close to home and I thought maybe we’d run into somebody we knew, but we didn’t—we just ate some really disgusting thing with way too much cheese in it. Then I dropped Jen off at her house, parked the car a block from the key guy’s house, and walked home.
I kept the keys.
When I got home, a text from Jen was waiting.
OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE WE DID THAT! she wrote.
I couldn’t believe it either.
My father is enormous. As far as I know he has never hit anybody, but he looks like a guy who would. He’s about six-five with these huge shoulders and when he wears a shirt with an open collar you can see the mat of gorilla hair covering his chest. And he has big thick eyebrows and dark eyes, and hands so big he can pick up a basketball the way a normal person grabs a softball.
Of course he knows how he looks. He laughs about it. He says it comes in handy in court. My dad practices criminal law, which means he defends all sorts of scumbags, and he says being so big helps him intimidate witnesses. I guess he sort of leans over them and exudes waves of testosterone until they crack.
I just thank God I didn’t inherit his enormousness or his hairiness.
It was around the time Jen and I stole the Nissan that my dad got involved with Elwin Carl Dandridge, the serial rapist. Elwin Carl Dandridge was a skinny little guy, half white, half black, and half something else—gray, maybe—who specialized in terrorizing college students over at the U. He raped eight girls in two months before they caught him. As far as the police were concerned, it was a no-brainer. They had DNA and everything, but because it was what my dad calls an “above-the-fold-headline case,” he offered to represent Dandridge pro bono (that means for free), even though he had to know that Dandridge was guilty, which was pretty embarrassing for me, because nobody wants their dad to be a rapist-defender.
“Look, it’s not like he’s going to get off,” I told Jen. “My dad will probably just have him plead guilty or something.”
We were at Cedar Lake. It was a few days after the Nissan thing, one of those hot, muggy, windless, semi-cloudy days, and the lake was pretty disgusting in that scummy midsummer way. It had to get way hotter than it was to make it worth getting in the water with all the algae and stuff, so we were just hanging out on the beach and waiting for Will to show up.
Jen said, “I don’t see why a guy like that even deserves a lawyer.”
“Well, if we’d got caught stealing that car, I bet my dad would have defended us. Even if we were totally guilty.”
“I still can’t believe we did that.”
“I wish you’d quit saying that,” I said, but really I didn’t mind—I thought it was cool. I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my chin on my fist and stared at the weave of my towel, imagining myself getting arrested and thrown in a jail cell with a bunch of skanky prostitutes and drug addicts and baby-killers, even though all we did was drive around a little and eat at a Taco Bell. I thought about my parents looking at me through the bars of my cell. My dad saying, Why on earth would you do such a stupid thing?
I would tell him it had nothing to do with lack of intelligence.
You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!
Yeah, Dad, but it was one of those living-in-the-moment things.
The thing he would never understand was that it only had to make sense for about one decision-making nanosecond. Later it might seem moronic, but at the time it all made perfect sense. Anyway, we got away with it. Because for every time some kid like me pays the price for doing something incredibly stupid, there are a thousand times she gets away with it.
“I told Will,” Jen said.
“What did he say?”
“‘Cool.’ He said, ‘Cool.’”
“That’s all he ever says.”
“He’s supposed to be here.” She sat up and looked around. “There he is.”
Will Ford was shuffling shirtless toward us with his sizethirteen flip-flops leaving troughs in the sand. A half-empty twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew dangled by its neck from his long fingers.
“Hey,” he said. That was Will’s other favorite word. Hey. Hey, cool. Cool. Hey. He could express just about any thought with those two words.
“Hey,” said Jen.
“Hey,” I said.
Will folded his half-naked body onto the sand between our towels.
“Steal any more cars?” Will said.
Okay, I was exaggerating about him only having two words.
“Not today,” I said.
“Cool.” He gave me a sideways look, like he was seeing someone he didn’t know.
“It was a one-time deal,” I said.
Will shrugged. “Cool.”
I should explain about Will being both my and Jen’s boyfriend. Really, he’d been Jen’s boyfriend since second grade, but not like her boyfriend boyfriend, even though they had made out a couple of times. And then last year I sort of hooked up with him in a closet at this party I wasn’t supposed to be at, and Jen found out, and we had this teary three-hour fight. In the end we decided to share him. Neither of us had made out with him since. I should explain about that too. Will was like one of those sex dolls. Not that I’ve ever seen a sex doll, but he was like, hey, cool, whatever. I almost had to grab his hands and put them on me. I don’t know why I even did that except maybe I was jealous of Jen for having him. But it wasn’t any fun because it was like he was kissing me and stuff just to be polite or something and not like he was into it. So we worked it out, me and Jen, and we came to the conclusion that Will just wasn’t interested in sex, and that was how it got to be okay that he was both of our boyfriends.
“This guy dropped his keys,” I told Will. “I just happened to pick them up, and then later we took his car for a ride. I brought it back, so it wasn’t really stealing.”
Will nodded. “Know what I’d like to steal? Alton Wright’s Hummer.”
Jen laughed, and Will’s lips turned up in this half smirk that he doesn’t do very often.
“That would be fun,” I said.
Alton Wright’s Hummer was yellow. There is something about yellow cars that is just naturally irritating. And it was a Hummer. Also irritating. And it was Alton’s. Alton Wright was one of those people you wanted to do damage to, but you couldn’t because he had too many friends. The reason he had friends was because he had a yellow Hummer, and he was smart and funny in a cruel sort of way, and he looked like he should be in a movie. But anyone with any taste whatsoever hated him because he was so full of himself. Especially while driving his yellow Hummer.
So I knew where Will was coming from, but still it surprised me, with Will being so laid-back and all, that he would even think about it.
“He comes into Ducky’s,” Will said. “I have to vacuum it out like every week.” Ducky’s Auto Laundry was the car wash and detailing shop where Will worked weekends. “One of these days I’m gonna get a dead rat and hide it in his glove compartment and hope he doesn’t find it till it explodes.”
That was the longest sentence I’d ever heard from Will.
“Where are you going to get a rat?” I asked.
Will shrugged.
Jen said, “So did you hear that Kell’s dad is defending a serial rapist?”
That night I watched Gone in 60 Seconds with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. The idea is that Nicolas Cage is this retired car thief who, for reasons too ridiculous to say, is forced by a bad guy to steal fifty cars in one night, which he does, but of course he has to kill the bad guy in the end, and he saves a cop’s life at the same time, so the cop lets him go. I don’t know what Angelina Jolie is doing in the movie, but her hair is really weird, and now that you know what happens, you don’t have to waste your money renting it unless you really like Nicolas Cage, in which case consider yourself warned.
Kelleigh Monahan: five foot seven, a hundred ten curvaceous pounds, thick silky black hair, full lips, perky nose, and sparkling hazel eyes. It’s true. Or it would be true if I was wearing stack-heeled boots and hazel contact lenses and a push-up bra, and got collagen injections in my lips. And lost seven pounds.
The perky nose I really have—I got that from my mom—and I do have black hair, which I got from my dad, but it’s not all that silky.
Actually, I do not hate the way I look. Sometimes I see actresses on TV who remind me of myself, give or take a few major details like complexion and bust size and so forth. But there is always room for improvement, so for purposes of reading my story you should go with the tall, sleek, puffy-lipped, perky-nosed, hazel-eyed, silky-raven-haired beauty. It’s close enough.
When I was nine years old I used to watch this old show called Flipper on TV Land. It was about this really smart dolphin who saved the day in every episode. I got all excited about dolphins—or porpoises, as they are also called. So for my tenth birthday my dad gave me a dolphin necklace. It was just a chain with this dolphin carved out of soapstone, but it was nice of him to remember that I liked Flipper.
I wore it to school, and of course everybody noticed and said how cool it was. A few days later, this girl Madison who wanted to be my friend gave me a pencil with an eraser shaped like a dolphin. I didn’t really want to be her friend because I already had Jen, but I said thank you and used the pencil at school. And then my mom bought me a new bedspread that had jumping dolphins on it. Pretty soon, for birthdays, Christmas, or no reason at all, people were giving me dolphin things and I didn’t know how to make them stop. I didn’t even like Flipper anymore. So one day—it was about a week before my thirteenth birthday—I had a complete dolphin meltdown. I took every dolphin thing I owned and made a pile in the backyard fire pit and poured half a can of gasoline on it. My mom noticed me out there and came out to see what I was doing with my bedspread and stuffed dolphins and dolphin posters and dolphin T-shirts and everything else piled up in the fire pit, and I lit it.
Gasoline is more flammable than I’d thought. There was a huge whoosh! and I jumped back, but not quick enough. I ended up losing all the hairs on my right arm, my right eyebrow, and some off my bangs too. Fortunately, my clothes didn’t catch on fire. My mom freaked, of course, and so did my dad when he got home. You’d have thought it was the worst thing anybody had ever done in the history of people doing bad things. But I didn’t feel all that bad about it until my dad said, “Did you burn the necklace too?”
Actually, it was the one thing I kept. But I didn’t tell him that.
I was grounded for a week and they made me see a therapist. After a couple hours of taking tests and talking and crying, the therapist told my parents I was a normal kid who sometimes had difficulty expressing her feelings. She also told them not to give me any more dolphin stuff.
I mention this because it sort of relates to what later happened with Alton Wright’s Hummer. Because people just love to know things about you, as in Kelleigh Monahan has a dolphin fetish or Stuey Kvasnick has only one testicle or Kathy Forest will do it with any guy who smiles at her. Anything that makes you predictable and classifiable, like it gives them a mental file drawer to put you in and forever after that’s where they keep you. It only takes one thing for them to create that file.
Even your closest friends.
Will called me up a week after the first car thing and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
“Doing anything Saturday?”
“Why?”
“I need a favor.”
The Hummer dealership was only four blocks from the car wash. The guy at the service counter took the key without looking at me. He asked me my name. I told him it was Cordelia Fink. He set the key on the counter, typed something into his computer, and frowned.
“Did you purchase the vehicle here?”
“It’s my boyfriend’s. Alton Wright?”
The service guy stared at me for a couple seconds. What he saw was a girl wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap (my dad’s) that covered up all her arguably silky black hair. She was also wearing an oversize pair of Gucci sunglasses (my mom’s), a baby blue tunic top (also my mom’s), and lipstick (which I never wear). I was incognito.
The guy typed in Alton’s name. He scrolled around a bit, then said, “I’ve got a Dennis Wright.”
“That’s Alton’s dad. The car’s probably in his name.”
“You know you could have just called this in,” he said. “We could have made a new key from the VIN number. Had it ready for you.”
“Next time I throw my boyfriend’s spare keys in the lake, I’ll be sure to do that.”
The service guy laughed. “Alton Wright. I remember that kid now,” he said. “I don’t blame you.” He picked up the key. “I’ll have Johnny cut you a new one. Take about twenty minutes. He’s a little backed up this morning. Make yourself comfortable.” He pointed me toward the customer lounge.
I texted Will.
getting key. 20 min.
A few seconds later Will texted me back.
hurry!
When I got to Ducky’s, Alton Wright was in the lobby, yelling at the manager. I stopped outside the open door to listen.
“Sir, I’m sure your vehicle will be ready any moment now—”
“Since when does it take an hour for a Speedy Detail?” He pointed at the sign behind the counter. “‘In and out in thirty minutes!’ That’s what the sign says. ‘Speedy Detail—Fastest Auto Detail in the Metro.’ That’s false advertising!”
“If you’ll just wait here, sir, I’ll go back and find out what’s taking them so long—”
“Damn right you will.” He looked at his watch. “See if I ever come back here!”
The manager disappeared, and so did I. I didn’t think Alton Wright would recognize me—he probably didn’t even know who I was in the first place—but why take chances? I ran around the building to the back entrance of the detailing shop. Will was waiting hard.
“What took you?” he said, not very nicely. He grabbed Alton’s keys from me and ran back into the shop, yelling, “I found them!”
“You’re welcome,” I said to the air.
Later that same day I called Jen to vent.
“Your boyfriend was rude to me,” I said.
“Your boyfriend’s rude all the time. Maybe we should order a new one.”
“From Boyfriends ‘R’ Us?”
“Or eBay. What did he do?”
I told her about the key thing.
“Why did he want a copy of Alton’s key?”
“Don’t you remember? He wants to put a dead rat in Alton’s Hummer.”
“Oh.” Even over the phone I could tell she was making a face. “That doesn’t sound like something Will would really do.”
“Remember last May? Will was walking by the curb and there was this puddle and Alton came driving by and, like, soaked him on purpose. Will was pissed for days.”
“Sounds like he’s still pissed. You think he’ll really do it?”
“No. But just knowing he can if he wants to is probably enough. Anyway, I still have the copy of the key.”
Which is why I wasn’t completely surprised when Will texted me a couple of hours later.
I walked over to Charlie Bean’s and found Will at the back table, sipping on an iced coffee. I tossed the duplicate Hummer key on the table in front of him.
“Cool,” he said.
“You owe me twenty bucks and a Phrap-o-chino.” That was Charlie Bean’s quadruple-shot blended espresso drink, the best legal alternative to mainlining crystal meth.
“Cool. Only I’ll have to owe you. I’m tapped.”
Tapped is normal for Will Ford. He spends all his money on music and games. I bought myself a Phrap-o-chino. When I got back to the table Will was still staring down at the key.
“Did you find a dead rat yet?” I asked.
“Why would I want a dead rat?”
“I thought you were going to put a dead rat in his car.”
“Where would I get a dead rat?”
I shrugged. I was not about to advise him on dead rat procurement.
Will took the straw out of his iced coffee and twisted it into some weird shape—a rattrap, maybe. It took him about a minute of intense twisting and folding, and when he was done, he straightened it, blew through it to puff it out, and put it back in his drink.
“No rat. I need you to help me steal his Hummer.”
See what I mean? You steal one car and all of a sudden all your friends decide that’s what you are.
“Look,” I said, “just because I stole one car—and I didn’t really steal it; it’s more like I borrowed it—that doesn’t mean I’m your designated car thief. I got the key for you. Steal it yourself.”
“I don’t know how to drive,” he said.
“I don’t see how that’s my fault. You’re the one who didn’t take the test.”
“My parents think you have to be twenty-five to drive,” said Will, all pitiful and hangdog, a look he does particularly well.
“I don’t get why you’re so pissed at Alton,” I said. “I mean, I know he’s a stuck-up jerk, and it was shitty of him to tsunami you, but isn’t stealing his Hummer kind of extreme?”
“Why did you think I wanted the key?”
“For the dead rat!”
“He’s been telling everybody I’m gay.”
“Really?” I wanted to ask, Are you? But I didn’t.
“He told all the guys at Ducky’s I’m gay.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were,” I said.
“The guys, they don’t really think I’m gay, but they’re having fun giving me shit about it. It’s a pain, y’know?”
I could see where that would be a pain.
“That’s not all,” he said. “You remember when Alton asked Jen out last May?”
“Sure. She said no.”
“Well, he’s also telling everybody that you and Jen are lesbos. And that I’m like your beard.”
“I think a beard is a girl who dates a gay guy.”
“Whatever. I just thought it would be fun to borrow his Hummer.”
I sucked down the last of my drink. I had to admit, the idea of boosting Alton’s Hummer was sounding a little less crazy.
Just for the record, Jen and I are not lesbians.