In a way I was going back on my promise to Jen that we would both break up with Will, but in another way I wasn’t, because all I wanted to do was go for a ride with him. I knew it was a show-offy thing. I didn’t care. I felt like I could do anything I wanted to do and whatever happened didn’t matter because I’d done this thing, this car thing, like jumping off a cliff, and I’d survived. So from then on it was all free. I’d almost drowned in the Hummer, and I’d almost gotten pulled over by the police when I’d taken the Cadillac, and I’d taken my mom’s car for a ride and nothing had happened, and I’d survived an all-out attack by a crazy briefcase man, so why not take my possibly-gay possibly-ex boyfriend for a spin in my new stolen Mercedes? I know it doesn’t make sense now, but it did at the time.
Will was standing out in front of his house, all slouchy in knee-length shorts and a tank top. I think he’d grown an inch or two since the last time I’d seen him, even though it had only been two weeks.
I pulled over and rolled down the window.
“Hey,” I said.
Will peered into the car and looked around like he was expecting somebody else.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hop in.”
Will ran his tongue over his lips. He made no move to open the door.
“Come on.” I leaned over and pushed open the passenger door. Will stepped back. I said, “Are you getting in or what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Whose car is this?”
“It belongs to a guy named Johnson. Or Anderson. I don’t know. Get in.”
“Did you steal it?”
“Yes. Get in.”
He shook his head and backed away a few more steps.
I put the gearshift in park, got out, and walked around the car. Will looked nervous. No, more like scared.
“Kelleigh…,” he said, holding up his hands, palms facing me.
I stopped a few feet away from him.
“Alton Wright is right,” I said. “You are gay. Totally, totally gay.”
Will lowered his hands slowly and the nervousness was replaced by an injured, angry look.
“I’m not gay,” he said.
“Yeah, right.” I put enough sarcasm into that last word to melt flesh. He just shrugged it off.
“If I was gay, I’d tell you,” he said. “My uncle is gay, you know. It’s no big deal. But I’m not.”
The way he said it made me feel like an utter and complete bitch, which just made me madder. “I don’t mean gay gay,” I said. “I mean gay like chickenshit.”
“That’s not what you meant,” he said. “You think I’m gay. Jen told me.”
“Jen is full of shit too.”
“Anyway, I’m not.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Suddenly our fight seemed like the most ridiculous conversation two people had ever had—ever.
“This is stupid,” I said. “Come on, let’s go for a ride.”
“I don’t get you,” Will said.
“Obviously.” I looked back at the Mercedes, its engine running quiet as a sigh. “I don’t get you either.”
“Look, I talked to Jen. She said—”
“If you want to talk, get in the car,” I said.
Will looked up and down the street. I walked back around the car and got behind the wheel. I sat there for almost an entire minute, then the passenger door opened and Will got in. He looked around at all the leather and gauges and buttons and knobs.
“What does a car like this cost?”
“Ninety thousand.”
He whistled. That’s a guy thing. They whistle when something costs a lot. I don’t think they know they’re doing it.
“What about Jen?” I asked.
Will had found the radio concealed behind a panel on the dash. He cycled through at least ten different kinds of music in about ten seconds. I hadn’t even known it was there. “Wow. Satellite,” he said. He looked up and frowned. “What happened to the windshield wiper?”
“The guy I stole it from bent it.” I put the car in gear and rolled away from the curb. Will was acting all nervous again, looking back at his house like I was kidnapping him. The car was beeping.
“Put your seat belt on,” I said.
Will put his seat belt on. The beeping stopped.
“What about Jen?” I asked again.
“She…she said you thought I was gay because I didn’t want to make out with you.” He was pressing buttons on his door, making his seat go back and forth. “And she had this thing about, you know, that you guys were going to both marry me at the same time, except if I was gay, then we’d all have to move to a state that had gay marriage or something. It was really stupid but…I don’t know. I’m not gay. I’m just not into you guys that way.”
I was driving without thinking about where I was going, just making turns at the corners and stopping at all the stop signs.
“I mean, I really like you and Jen for, like, friends. But I guess you’re just not my type.”
“What’s your type?” I heard myself ask.
Will shrugged. “I don’t know. Like Phoebe Line.”
I almost drove up onto the curb. “Phoebe Line?”
“Yeah.”
Phoebe Line was an elf. She was about four foot nine with a pointy nose and a squeaky little voice and this long almost white hair that hung all the way down to her miniature ass. In high heels she would maybe come up to Will’s armpit. All of which would have been okay except that her physical stature was matched by her mental stature. In my opinion.
“Have you ever talked to Phoebe Line?”
“Sure,” Will said.
Phoebe Line?
“She’s nice,” he said.
I turned right, then turned right again.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
I told him I was taking him home.
“Whatever,” he said.
The funny thing about Deke was that even though he was a car thief/ex-con/pothead with no future, he was at least a guy who had an agenda I could count on and understand. He knew what he wanted. Money. He would be pissed at me for making him wait at Byerly’s. That was okay with me. At least he wasn’t all squishy and “whatever” and “Phoebe Line is so cool” like Will.
I parked in the middle of the Byerly’s parking lot, between a panel truck and a minivan, put the key on top of the left front wheel, and went into the store. I was suddenly starving, and Byerly’s is a great place to be if you’re hungry—they have a huge deli section with everything from fried wontons to sushi to chocolate croissants. I bought an egg roll and a bottle of pomegranate juice, then went back outside to sit on one of the benches and wait for Deke. Assuming he hadn’t already given up on me—otherwise I’d have a long walk home. I was finishing my last sip of juice when Deke pulled up to the curb. I motioned to him to wait, walked over to the other side of the entrance, and put the egg roll tray in the trash and the empty bottle in the recycling—doing my bit to save the planet.
As I got into the pickup, Deke said, “What happened to you?”
“Nothing.”
“I been driving in circles for almost an hour.” He slammed the truck into gear and popped the clutch; my head snapped back against the headrest.
“I had to run some errands,” I said.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get cracked!” He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “How d’you know that Benz doesn’t have a locator in it?”
“Because if it did, the guy would have just called the cops. He wouldn’t have jumped on the hood and tried to smash through his own windshield with his briefcase.”
“Bullshit!” Deke banged on the wheel again, then forced himself to calm down and said, his voice level, “He might have if he was mad enough. That was messed up, what you did. And stupid. If he got my license number, I’m screwed. I am so screwed!”
“He wasn’t looking at you. He was looking at me. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“Now he can ID you!”
I looked at his eyes. His pupils were huge, like big black holes. It hit me then what was going on.
“You’re high,” I said. I didn’t know if it was weed or meth or what, but it was something. I expected him to deny it but he didn’t.
“What’re you, my parole officer?”
“Pull over,” I said.
“What for?”
“Let me out. Now!”
For about three seconds he just kept on driving, jaw pulsing, hands squeezing the wheel so hard I thought he’d crack it. He jerked the wheel to the right and hit the brake and bumped up onto the curb and stopped.
“Get out!” he said. Like it was his idea.
After I watched Deke lurch off in his pickup, I walked back to Byerly’s, grabbed the key from on top of the front wheel, got in, and drove the Mercedes home. I parked on the street a few houses away and listened to the radio for a while. It was only about eleven o’clock. I wanted to make sure my parents were asleep before I let myself in, because I didn’t think I could stand all the pretending. I was listening to some headbanger rock—not what I usually listen to, but it felt right—when a bright light hit the side of my face. I shaded my eyes and squinted into it. A police car had pulled up alongside me.
I had thought my heartbeat had maxed out before when that guy had jumped on the hood, but that was nothing compared to the banging that was going on in my chest right then.
I rolled down the window. The cop lowered the light slightly so I could see her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked in a way that could have meant absolutely anything from I want to help to You are going to jail.
“Fine,” I said, smiling even though my voice sounded to me like a squeaky robot voice. “I’m just waiting for my brother.” I don’t know where that came from.
“Do you live around here?”
“I live in Wayzata,” I said, naming a random outer suburb. “My brother was supposed to stay over with his friend Adam.” I gestured at the Garbers’ house, just across the street. The Garbers had no children; I hoped the cop didn’t know that. “But then he got sick so my dad asked me to come pick him up.” The lie formed itself effortlessly. “I think he’s just homesick. He’s only seven.”
For the next several seconds, the only sound was my heart whooshing blood through my arteries. I could see the cop making her decision: Was it worth asking for my license? Was it worth running the license plate? Didn’t she have better things to do?
I said, “He had one little backpack and I’ve been sitting here ten minutes waiting for him to find all his junk.” I laughed. “You know how little kids are.” The cop nodded and gave me a short smile as the blood roared in my ears like, goosha, goosha, goosha. I had this really weird thought then—two thoughts, actually. One was that the veins in my eyeballs were about to explode. The second was that if she would arrest me, maybe my heart would slow down.
“You take care,” she said, and drove off. The back of her trunk had NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICES printed across it. She hadn’t even been a real cop, just one of those community cops who do things like put up barricades for block parties and check on old people to make sure they’re not dead. My heartbeat slowed, to be replaced by a creeping nausea that crawled up the inside of my spine and spread like tendrils through my belly. I sat there for a few minutes, waiting for the nausea to subside, then put the car in gear and drove back to Byerly’s.
It took me almost an hour to walk home. I passed a lot of parked cars and checked to see if maybe one of them had the keys in the ignition, but none of them did. The good thing was that when I finally got home the house was dark and my parents were asleep, so I didn’t have to deal with them. I was a little surprised though that at least one of them hadn’t stayed up to wait for me.
The next morning I told my mom I was having major cramps and couldn’t do Pilates. I stayed in my room the whole day, going back and forth between Moby-Dick and watching car theft videos online. Some of the videos were guys filming themselves stealing a car and then posting it on YouTube, which has got to be the stupidest thing imaginable next to chasing a giant albino whale that wants to kill you. I must have watched fifty videos of car thieves in action, mostly hot-wirers and carjackers. The funny thing was, I felt nothing in common with any of them. I actually had more in common with the whale.
I had gotten almost all the way through Moby-Dick, chapter one hundred thirty, and Ahab was still chasing the white whale. I might have finished it right then, but I heard my mom making cooking noises and I was getting hungry, so I went downstairs. The kitchen smelled like garlic and cigarettes. She was seeding and peeling tomatoes. Most people would just open a jar of Ragú, but Mom didn’t do anything the easy way—not even spaghetti.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better. Did you know that a car gets stolen in this country every twenty-eight seconds?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I just read it online. I thought it was interesting.”
“It’s frightening,” she said.
“So Dad’s not coming home for dinner?”
She paused before replying. “That’s right,” she said. “How did you know?”
“It smells like cigarettes in here.”
She dropped a few more tomatoes into the pot of water and stirred them around for a few seconds, then lifted them out one at a time with a slotted spoon and put them into a colander.
I said, “Usually you smoke out on the porch and throw your butts behind the rosebushes. Unless Dad’s out of town or something.”
“He had to fly back to Colorado.”
“To talk to the car thief again?”
“Yes!” She slammed the spoon onto the counter, then pretended like she’d accidentally dropped it.
“Are you and Dad going to get divorced?”
That set her back. But instead of saying no, she said, “Whatever gave you that idea?” Then she said, “I don’t want to hear it.” She slipped the skins off three more tomatoes, chopped them, and added them to the ones already simmering on the stove.
“I don’t care if you smoke,” I said.
I didn’t hear from Deke that day. No surprise there. I didn’t even care about the money, but it bothered me that he didn’t at least call to tell me if Neal had gotten the car okay. Just for, you know, a sense of closure.
Speaking of closure, I finished Moby-Dick that night. The last five chapters were pretty good, or at least a relief, because finally the whale showed up and did his thing and almost everybody got killed.
The next morning, I wrote a review and posted it on the school library website. There were a bunch of other reviews up, including a review of Speak that Jen had written. (I happened to know she had already read it last year, but, as Will would say, whatever.) Alton Wright had posted a long review of Of Mice and Men that I would bet anything was written by his girlfriend, Tracie. Nobody else had read Moby-Dick or any other book as old and long and complicated, so I figured I’d get extra points or something for that, even though my review was kind of critical of whaling in general. It was funny that about ten seconds after I posted my review, Deke called. I saw it was him from the caller ID, so I let it go to voicemail. Then I waited a few minutes before listening to the message.
“Hey, crazy girl,” he said. “You in jail, jailbait? I guess not or you wouldn’t be getting this. Listen, I got some cheese for ya. Pizza with extra cheese. Yum. You know where to find me. Lunch break’s at two. See ya.”
My mom had Book Club again, so I offered to drive her, and of course, being ever-eager for mother-daughter bonding opportunities, she said that would be nice. “We’re meeting at Francine’s this month,” she said. “She always puts out a nice spread. I bet she’ll have those little fruit cups.”
I ran upstairs to change. I put on a clean pair of pants and a long-sleeved cotton blouse that I’d picked up on sale at The Gap.
“You look nice,” my mom said, giving her head a critical tilt.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.” She laughed. “My black-and-gray daughter. I guess I should be thankful you’re not running around in nothing but a tube top and a thong.”
It was only a ten-minute drive to Francine Abrams’s house, but on the way there, Mom managed to tell me that Dad had called and he was coming home and everything was okay in Colorado. From which I inferred that they’d had some other sort of conversation entirely, and they weren’t going to get divorced after all.
She also told me she was quitting smoking for real on her fortieth birthday which was in September, and that I should never start smoking, and that she was planning to make individual chicken potpies for dinner.
“I already made the crust and the filling,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I just have to put them together and throw them in the oven.”
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s easy,” she said.
“I mean, wow, you’re actually smoking in front of me.”
She cracked her window and expelled a lungful of smoke. “You’re old enough to see that your parents are not perfect.”
I laughed. I was going for a friendly chuckle, but it came out sarcastic.
She looked at me sharply. “Wait till you have a daughter of your own, then you can judge me.”
“I’m not having children.” I meant it.
My mother laughed a laugh just as dry and sarcastic as my laugh had been.
“Sweetie,” she said, “you have no idea.”
“Neither do you.”
She shook her head and blew more smoke out the window.
When we got to Francine Abrams’s house, I told my mother I wanted to sit in the car and listen to music, and that’s what I did for a while. I saw her look out the window at me twice. I waited until a full five minutes went by without her peering out at me, then I started the car and drove to the mall.
Deke Moffet was sitting in the food court, sucking on a giant soda, tapping his right foot, and glancing around with little jerks of his head. He looked straight at me twice before he recognized me. He started to stand, but froze halfway up and sat back down. I walked over and stood across the table from him. He stared at me, hollow-eyed, jaw pulsing, and sucked down a few more ounces of soda. He shrugged, looked away, scratched himself behind his ear, looked back at me and said, “Every time I look at you, I freak out. Little Miss Perfect Kelleigh Monahan, car thief.”
“I’m a retired car thief.”
He muttered something, but because he had the straw back in his mouth I couldn’t make it out.
“I stole a couple cars,” I said. “But it’s not who I am. There’s a difference.”
“Not if you get caught, which you will, if you keep doing shit like you did yesterday.”
“It was the day before yesterday.”
He looked away. “Whatever.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Here.”
I took the money and put it in my purse without counting it.
He said, “Neal knocked off a couple hundred for the wiper blade and the dents on the hood. He’s a prick.”
“Whatever.”
Deke looked over his shoulder toward Wing’s Wild Wok. “I hate this job,” he said.
“So quit.”
“I can’t. Parole violation.”
I turned away.
“Wait a second!”
“Neal needs an Escalade.”
“Call Marshall.”
“Marshall’s messed up. Dude hasn’t slept in like two weeks.” I wondered how long it had been since Deke had slept. “Listen, I can get a key,” he said. “I can get a key tomorrow, I think. The vehicle’s a demo just sitting waiting at Prestige over on 394 and I know one of the salesmen there. Same deal. We grab it and drop it at Byerly’s. Piece a cake.” His knee was going up and down so fast his whole body was shaking.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Wait!”
I kept on walking.
I think the main reason I was attracted to Deke was because my expectations were so low to begin with that I figured he couldn’t possibly disappoint me. On a professional-car-thief level, that is. But it didn’t work out that way.
Sooner or later everybody turns out to be a disappointment.
Two weeks later, on my sixteenth birthday, Dad and I went to the DMV in his Lexus so I could take my road test. On the way there he told me that Elwin Carl Dandridge had been released for lack of evidence. The DNA collected from two of the women he had allegedly raped turned out to be contaminated, and there was some question about the chain of custody—the way my dad explained it, it looked as if the investigators had pulled some “funny business.”
“These guys try so hard sometimes to make an airtight case, they just can’t resist cheating a little,” he said.
“You mean they knew the guy was a rapist, so they made up evidence to put him away? Is that bad?”
“Actually, they had some pretty solid evidence in two of the cases, and they figured if two cases were good, three would be better. So they duplicated it. If Dandridge had been forced to rely on a public defender, he’d still be in jail.”
I loaded my mouth with sarcasm and said, “Wow. Good job, Dad.”
He laughed.
He laughed.
I wanted desperately to shake him, but I knew if I went after him for his ethics he’d just want to argue me out of it, and being a professional arguer he was really good at that. So I said, “You know, if you and Mom want to get divorced, it’s okay with me.”
That wiped the smile off his face.
“Why would you think we want to get divorced?”
“Because you’re having an affair and Mom hates you.”
He looked over at me and I saw his face take on that blank, serious, sincere look that he used in court.
“That is simply not true,” he said.
“Which part?”
He pulled into the parking lot and focused all his attention on finding the perfect parking space. Once we were parked he said, “Kelleigh, I don’t know what you think you’ve seen or heard, but you are misinterpreting it.”
“Like that DNA evidence?”
“That’s right.”
He said that with a straight face.
I aced the road test.
I took Will and Jen out for a ride in my mom’s Camry—my first legal road trip. We went to Wagner’s Drive-In for burgers and malts. Will didn’t have any money, of course, and all Jen had was her mom’s credit card, so I paid out of my car theft money.
Looking at the wad of cash I pulled out, Jen said, “Birthday money?”
“I stole a car and sold it,” I said.
They were both sort of quiet.
“Just kidding,” I said. Then, to change the subject, I asked Will how his romance with Phoebe Line was going, which took Jen by surprise.
Will shrugged. “I just said I thought she was nice.”
“She is nice,” said Jen after a moment.
I didn’t say anything. I felt like I was a thousand miles away, alone, driving through mountains and desert, and Will and Jen were nothing but hologram projections out of my past.
Three days before school started, I was at Ridgedale all by myself, looking for a new sweater in black or gray, but mostly thinking about my dad and my mom and Jen and Will and Deke and Jim Vail and Elwin Carl Dandridge, and they were all tumbling through my head like clothes in a dryer. Then I saw the guy whose Nissan Jen and I had taken a couple of months earlier. He was walking through Macy’s with his briefcase. I remembered then that I still had his keys in the bottom of my purse. I wondered if he’d had his car re-keyed. The more I thought about it, the more curious I got, so I went out to the parking lot and walked up and down the rows of cars until I found it.
The key fit.
I got in the car and closed the door. It wasn’t as quiet inside as a Mercedes, but still, it was comforting to be sealed up in there. I could hear the thrumming in my head again, the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I started the car and pulled out of the parking space. The car had a full tank of gas, which was good even though I had no place I had to be, but that was okay, because at least I felt like I was going somewhere.
I think that a lot of car thieves just like to steal cars and drive. Also, they think they will never get caught even though most of them eventually do and they know it but they just don’t care.