“Put on your seat belt.”
Damn, I was sick of sounding like my mom.
“No.”
“Come on, sit down. I don’t want to get pulled over.”
Billy was on his knees, his arms hugging the headrest and his eyes trained out the back window. At first, I thought he was watching the bridge to Kentucky disappear, but now I couldn’t imagine what he was looking for behind us.
“Billy D., turn around. I need you to tell me where to go.”
“Go back,” he said, still staring out the rear window.
“No. Seriously, there’s a freeway coming up. Do I need to get on this?”
Billy D. finally let go of the headrest and flopped down in his seat. “I don’t know.”
“You check it.”
“I’m driving.”
Billy stared out the window.
“Fine,” I said. “We can drive all the way to Texas, then. But I’m not going back. You can either tell me how to get home, or we can spend the rest of our lives sleeping in this car.”
That’s not a half-bad idea, actually. Anything would beat facing Mom.
Billy opened the atlas reluctantly.
“I-Fifty-Five,” I said. “Isn’t that the one we took from St. Louis?”
“I guess so.”
“So yes? Get on it?”
We were one exit away.
Billy closed the atlas and looked out the window.
I cursed under my breath and took the 55 north. Fortunately, the first sign listed both Cape Girardeau and St. Louis ahead. Somehow, we’d come full circle, winding up just south of the Missouri state line, where it stretched east and curled under Illinois. Now I knew I could get home even without the atlas—and even if Billy played mute the whole way. In fact, that would have been preferable, because when he did open his mouth, it wasn’t pretty.
It started with begging. When we passed the exit we’d taken to Cape Girardeau, Billy cried and pleaded and called me a liar through his tears. When I veered onto the bypass around St. Louis, he began to scream. The insults he was throwing at me melted into nonsense syllables swallowed up by these terrible sounds from somewhere inside his chest. He thrashed in his seat and kicked the dashboard over and over. He even reached for the wheel at one point, and I had to grab his wrist so hard, I left a mark.
The injury stopped Billy’s tantrum instantly. He sucked in all the horrible noises he’d been making and settled for shrinking down in his seat and whimpering. I had a sick feeling in my stomach that Billy had been silenced this way before.
When we cleared St. Louis and pointed the car toward Columbia, Billy finally exhausted all his tears. In fact, he was just exhausted, period. The sniffles and whimpers faded to faint snores, and for the first time, I could hear my own thoughts.
What kind of sucker was I to have fallen for Billy’s broken-heart story? Hell, I was a sucker from the very beginning, with my rules about who to hit and who to spare. Really, I should have just knocked the little punk down the first time he followed me to school. Then none of this would have happened. Instead, I was stuck with him—stuck in a car with him, in trouble with him, and stuck giving a shit about him.
I shook Billy out of his sleep.
“Are we home?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Close. Listen, we need to get our story straight.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where did we go? What did we do? Why?”
Billy gave me one of his famous blank stares. “You don’t remember?”
“No, that’s not—”
“We went across the river and to the restaurant and back across the river. And we got in a fight because you got mad at me. And we got in another fight because you got mad at those guys. And we got in another fight because you got mad at me again. And—”
“Oh my God, stop talking.”
“But you asked—”
“I don’t mean what really happened. I mean, what do we tell everyone else?”
“You want to lie?” Billy asked.
I shot him a look. “Like you don’t know how to lie.”
Billy frowned. “Why do we have to lie about where we went?”
“You want your mom to know you went looking for your dad?”
“No,” Billy admitted.
“You want my mom to know we had to steal her lottery tickets because you wanted to leave right away?”
Billy twisted his fingers in his lap. “No.”
“And do you want—”
“Don’t tell my mom we slept in the car!” Billy burst out.
I jumped. “Okay. Why?”
“She says only homeless people sleep in cars. She says no matter what happens, we are not homeless. She says it all the time. ‘We’re hungry, but we’re not homeless.’ ‘We’re hurting, but we’re not homeless’—just like that.”
I thought then about how hard I was on Mom about money—always asking for a car or a computer. We were never hungry, never hurting. And we sure as hell weren’t homeless. Okay, our kitchen floor was in bad shape, and my cell phone was a dinosaur, but at least I’d never had to worry about the basics.
“Right,” I said. “So we won’t tell your mom about sleeping in the car. But what do we—”
“It didn’t feel like being homeless,” Billy said, more to himself than to me. “It felt like camping.”
“That’s it!” I reached over to high-five Billy, and he met my palm, both of us forgetting for a second that we might not be friends anymore. “We’ll say we went camping!”
“Awesome!” Billy got caught up in my enthusiasm. “And fishing! ’Cause we were at the river!”
“But we don’t have any poles,” I pointed out.
“That’s why we didn’t catch any fish!” Billy exclaimed.
We both laughed out loud.
“Okay, but Billy D.,” I said, “that doesn’t explain why we went ‘camping’ without permission … in the middle of the week … in a stolen car.”
“Maybe we thought we’d be back in the morning before school,” Billy said.
My laugh caught in my throat at the word “school,” and I swallowed hard, remembering why I was supposed to be pissed at Billy. He’d flat-out conned me into this trip with his heart lies and his threats of taking off alone in the middle of the night. But no one would see it that way when we got back. Even my own mom would take one look at Billy’s innocent mug and point the finger at me. Not that I blamed them. If even a guy like me could get suckered by a kid like Billy, then moms didn’t have a prayer.
And it wouldn’t matter if the warden believed me or not. He’d already suspended me for sticking up for Billy. He would be signing my expulsion letters before I could even tell him that I’d missed school to look after the kid. Hell, the expulsion notice was probably already waiting for me at home.
“What about the lottery tickets?” Billy asked.
I sighed. “I’ll figure out something to tell my mom.”
In fact, I planned to tell Mom the truth—partly because I owed it to her for stealing those tickets, but mostly because she wouldn’t buy this bs camping story we were cooking up for one second anyway.
“Is she going to be really mad?” Billy asked. “About the tickets?”
“I think she’s going to be really mad about the whole thing.”
“So you’re in big trouble like me.”
“Bigger.”
Billy propped his feet up on the dash and inspected his shoelaces for a long time. Finally he looked up and took a deep breath.
“I’m mad at you because you lied.”
I gaped at him. “You’re mad at me? You … you’re …,” I spluttered. “You’re the liar.”
“You lied about helping me find my dad,” Billy went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “And I’m mad at you because you promised to take me to Monkey’s Eyebrow, and you didn’t.”
“And I’m mad at you for being a con artist.”
“You lied about having holes in your heart. You lied about your dad being awesome.”
“He is awes—”
“You lied about why you wanted to learn to fight.” I was raging now, shouting the lies at Billy as fast as I realized them. “It was never about those punks from the bus stop, was it?”
“You didn’t take me to Monkey’s Eyebrow,” Billy repeated. “And you’re not going to help me find my dad, are you?”
“Hell no.”
“Then you broke your promise.”
“And you broke yours,” I said. “I’m going to get kicked out of school because of you—because of your lies.”
Billy didn’t have an answer for that, so for a few minutes we both sat and stewed.
Finally, Billy broke the silence, and his voice was much softer than before.
“I’m still mad at you.”
I snorted. That makes two of us.
“I’m so mad, I might be mad forever,” Billy said. “But … but … I don’t hate you.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and felt something unclench in my stomach. I wanted to tell him I didn’t care if he hated me or not. I wanted to tell him I hated him. But I couldn’t even think it, let alone say it, because the only thought that forced its way into my mind—as much as I tried to shove it down—was, I don’t hate you, either.
“Okay, Dane?” Billy said. “I don’t hate you.” He searched my face for understanding.
I set my jaw, to make sure my expression didn’t give away too much, and I gave Billy the smallest nod.
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Okay, then.” Billy sat back, satisfied.
“And hey, Dane?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we supposed to see a big sign that says ‘Columbia’ with, like, an arrow?”
“Probably like that, yeah. Why?”
Billy pointed behind us. “We just drove past it.”
• • • X • • •
It was a long time before Mom stopped screaming. Sometimes she would pause to cry a little bit or attack me in a bear hug and tell me how much she loved me, but then she’d go right back to screaming. I half hoped she’d cry herself to sleep the way Billy had in the car, but no such luck.
I only caught snatches of Mom’s rant—words like “dangerous” and “underage” and “disappointed.” That last one hurt.
Finally, she calmed down enough to let me tell her the story—and not the story Billy and I had concocted about camping. I told her the truth, every bit of it—including what I’d learned about Billy’s dad. She didn’t seem surprised. Apparently, while Billy and I were missing, Mom and Mrs. Drum had had a few pretty intense conversations of their own.
She stopped me at one point to call that lawyer she and Mrs. Drum had hired. When he told her that getting into another fight meant I might have to sit in jail until my court date with Billy, Mom burst into tears. The lawyer told her not to panic until he made some calls to the sheriff’s department down in southern Illinois, and he promised to get back to us.
Mom hung up the phone, dried her wet cheeks, and sank into a kitchen chair with her head in her hands.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “My kid is not a criminal.”
I am scum.
“But close enough to criminal that he needs a lawyer.” She looked up, talking to me now. “You’re sixteen years old, and you have a lawyer.”
Mold on top of scum.
Mom’s eyes drifted to the wall where her remaining lottery tickets hung.
“Mom,” I began.
She held up a hand to silence me.
“But I just want to say I’m sor—”
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t want to hear ‘I’m sorry’ from your mouth until I know you’ve taken some time to really think about it—to really regret your poor decisions. Then you come back and say you’re sorry.”
“Okay.” I moved to stand up, then turned back. “Um, Mom? How much time should I take? You want me back out here later or …”
Her death glare silenced me, and I shrank away to my room, wondering how long I should sit in there and pretend I was thinking about what I’d done.
It turned out I would have plenty of time to sit in my room because the warden called an hour later. As of today, there was one less student enrolled at Twain High.