The truck shakes like a blender crushing ice cubes, and sounds like one, too. I cling to the grab handle and look at Dad.
“Diesel runs a bit rougher than regular gas,” he says. “It’ll smooth out once we get going.” As the truck changes from loud rumbling to low grumbling, he looks at me again. “That, uh, that wash out?”
He’s looking at my hair, which is honey brown . . . mostly.
“It’s called dip dying, and no, it doesn’t wash out. That’s why my friends and I only do the ends. It gets cut off when you trim it, but you can have it dyed again. Mandy and Beth do theirs a different color every time. Pink . . . blue . . . green—sometimes more than one.”
“Mandy and Beth?”
“My best friends.”
“You meet them at that private school your mom insisted on?”
Right before Christmas this year, Mom moved us to a neighborhood on the other side of town. She said it was safer and the new school had better teachers and a college-prep curriculum. Gang violence was becoming a problem where we used to live, and gang members had started harassing kids at the public school I attended. You could always spot them, especially the ones who wore jackets with their gang name on it and had their gang’s symbols tattooed on their necks or arms. In Texas, you have to be eighteen to get tattoos, but these kids obviously knew how to get around the law. Nobody had given me any trouble yet, but Mom seemed to think it was only a matter of time.
I really missed my friends after we moved. We talked a lot right at first, but not so much anymore. They got busy with clubs and cheer squad, and I had a lot of catching up to do at my new school.
“Cassie?” Dad was still waiting for me to answer his question.
“Yeah, I met them at school. They’re real cool. We do everything together.”
That isn’t exactly true. It was only a few weeks ago that Mandy and Beth let me be their friend, and that was because we were assigned a group paper. I did most of the work, but I didn’t care. After we turned in our paper, they asked me to go to the mall with them. Me, the bookworm at the back of the room. Right off, they decided I had to do my hair like theirs. I said no at first, but when they called me a wimp, I caved.
“And your mom is okay with it?”
“Well, sure . . .” I look out the window, watching a flat world rush past. “Totally.”
That’s not exactly true, either. Mom pitched a fit when she saw my hair. But when I told her all the kids were doing it, she eased off. “A fad,” she mumbled. “A passing fad.” Her way of saying I was to get my hair back to normal as soon as possible.
But I really wish she’d liked it. . . .
I look at Dad. “Mandy and Beth love it—me, too. Do, uh, do you like it?”
“Didn’t see anything wrong with the way it was,” he says.
My chest caves in. “Well, I picked my favorite color. It’s called—”
“Peach,” he says, finishing for me.
“Oh, yeah.”
When I was six, I asked Dad to paint my bedroom a peach color. He mixed and mixed until he got the shade exactly right.
“Becoming a construction worker isn’t the dream I was talking about,” he says, changing the subject.
“Then what is?”
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” he says.
That’s the big difference between my dad and my mom. She’s a motormouth and he’d rather read words than speak them. Before he left Austin, he went to the library every weekend. I don’t know why. He owned enough books to open a bookstore.
Sighing, I stare at lines in a highway that goes on for miles and miles.
“Guess it’ll grow on me,” he says a few minutes later.
“Thanks, Dad.”