From: JKE
Pls don’t hate me.
Apr 24 00:46
Wes opened the garage door as slowly and quietly as he could, so as not to waken his parents. He put his mom’s Toyota in neutral and positioned himself between the front of the car and the workbench at the back of the garage. He put his back against the bench and his feet on the car bumper and pushed. The car slowly moved toward the open door. He pushed harder. The back tires rolled over the lip of the garage onto the sloped driveway. Wes fell to the floor. He jumped up and ran after the car as it picked up speed, yanked open the driver’s side door, jumped in, and hit the brake, stopping the car just before it rolled onto the street. He put the car in park and walked back into the garage.
Two hours later, Wes heard a sound and looked up to see his father standing in the open garage door wearing powder blue pajamas and his Sorels, holding a baseball bat in both hands.
“Wes, what the hell?” his dad said.
Wes said, “I couldn’t sleep.” He dunked the mop in the bucket of soapy water and wrung it out.
“You’re cleaning the garage at three o’clock in the morning?”
“I’m almost done.” Wes looked around the garage, at the clean floor, the orderly tool bench, the neatly arranged shelves. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“You scared me half to death! I thought we were being robbed!”
“Sorry.”
His mother’s voice came from the house. “Frank? Is everything all right?”
“We’re fine,” Wes’s dad said, raising his voice slightly. “It’s your obsessive-compulsive neat-freak son!”
A few seconds later, Wes’s mom came shuffling out to the garage in her bathrobe and slippers. “What on earth? Wes? What happened here?”
Wes sighed. “I just couldn’t stand it,” he said.
The three A.M. garage incident was not mentioned the next day, although his mom kept giving him worried looks. That afternoon, Wes went downstairs to the laundry room and folded all the clean clothes and linens that had been piling up in the hamper next to the dryer. His mom came down to see what he was doing.
“I’m trying to help out more,” he told her.
“That’s nice,” she said, giving him another worried look.
Wes finished folding, then went to his room and called Alan Hurd.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Can I come over?”
“Bring food,” Alan said.
Alan Hurd shoved a handful of chips into his mouth and chewed, slowly and deliberately. Wes waited, knowing that to rush Alan at that point would only make him say no.
Alan swallowed, never taking his eyes off Wes.
“No,” he said, reaching back into the bag for another handful of chips.
“Why not?”
“Because my parents won’t let me drive it till school’s out.” Spitting potato chip fragments.
“Look, it’s just sitting out behind your garage. It’s not good to let a car sit for that long.”
“My dad would kill me.”
“He won’t even notice it’s gone. You can’t see it from the house.”
“It’s not insured.”
“I’ll be careful.” Wes could see he wasn’t getting anywhere. “And I’ll owe you forever. This is really important to me. Seriously.”
“I didn’t even know you were still talking to her,” Alan said.
“I didn’t want to tell anybody.”
“Not even me?” Alan said, looking peeved.
“Not even anybody. I just — I didn’t want you guys to think I was pathetic.”
“You are pathetic. Secret long-distance girlfriend? That’s as bad as Schwartz and his used Penthouse.”
“It would just be for a couple days.”
Alan sat back in his seat, refilled his mouth with chips, washed them down with a glug of orange soda, belched loudly.
“No,” he said. He was enjoying this. The begging.
“I’ll bring it back with a full tank. I’ll pay you. I’ll, like, rent it.”
Alan considered.
“How much?” he said.
Wes called June that night and they talked, but neither of them brought up June’s midnight phone call from the night before. They talked about music, people, TV shows, whether it would be better to live on a tropical island or on top of a mountain, Nebraska hamburgers versus Minnesota burgers — they never had trouble finding things to talk about. But they didn’t talk about the Drood, or Kel, or how Wes had hung up on her. It was there, a dark scary cloud, but neither of them wanted to bring it up.
Monday after school, Wes washed his mom’s car. After dinner, he called the other Alan, Alan Schwartz, and asked him to host a forty-eight-hour poker game the coming weekend.
“I don’t think so,” said Alan. “My mom barely tolerates the Saturday afternoon game.”
“She won’t have to know,” Wes said.
“Oh, she’d know. My mom’s practically telepathic, especially with six or seven of us in her basement.”
“It’ll be an imaginary game,” Wes said.
Alan said, “Explain.”
Later, just before dinner, Wes mentioned the big game to his mom.
She said, “Forty-eight hours? Good Lord, Wes! Mrs. Schwartz is okay with that?”
“Sure. We never leave the basement. It’s self-contained. She’ll hardly know we’re there.”
“Seven teenage boys in her basement? She’ll know you’re there, all right.”
“She likes it. She says she’d just as soon know where her son is all weekend.”
“What about sleeping? How will you sleep?”
“No sleep,” Wes said. “That’s the idea. It’s like an endurance contest.”
“How much money do you boys play for, anyway?”
“Just nickels and dimes,” Wes said. He was surprised by how easily the lies came out of his mouth. “I’ll be a couple miles away. And you can call me on my cell anytime.”
She frowned, not liking it. “When will you be home?”
“Forty-eight hours, like I said. Four o’clock Friday to four o’clock Sunday.”
Her frown eased somewhat. “Let me talk to your father when he gets home from work.”
The next morning, before leaving for school, Wes washed the breakfast dishes. His mother, sipping her coffee, watched him suspiciously.
“Wes, you are scaring me,” she said.
“Why?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
It was simple. He was building up points. Because there was a good chance that something would go wrong, that his parents would find out what he was doing, that everything would go wrong. So for the next few days, he would be the best, most responsible son anyone could possibly want.
Just in case.