A few days later, I go to meet Charlotte at her Shady Prairies job. She and Ray and I are going to the Lot in search of Steve. Ray doesn’t know about the searching-for-Steve part.
I wait in the kitchen while Charlotte goes out to serve her last tray. She walks back into the kitchen with a trayful of untouched dishes of tan goop. “Everyone has to have their butterscotch pudding, except for when they all of a sudden decide they don’t like pudding. Then they try to tell you how they’ve never liked butterscotch pudding, which is so ridiculous, because they ate it on Tuesday. But not according to them.”
I shrug. “So what do you do?”
“I stand there and tell them they’re not allowed to go batty on me, I don’t care how old they are.”
“How old are they?” I ask.
“Anywhere from sixty-five to a hundred,” Charlotte says. “I have this one table, my favorite table, of old ladies who are ninety plus. They still dress up for dinner and they have like, drinks first, and then after dessert they go outside and smoke, even though this entire area is supposed to be a No Smoking zone. I love them.”
“They sound fun. But you know what’s weird?” I say. “Why don’t they move to Phoenix or Miami, or somewhere else where everyone retires, somewhere that’s a little more glamorous? You know what I mean?”
“They must like it here,” Charlotte says as she scrapes uneaten butterscotch pudding into the garbage can. Clumps of it cling to the side of the trash bag.
“So is that how long it takes to like Lindville? Sixty-five years?” I joke.
Charlotte and I look at each other and start laughing.
“I don’t think I can wait that long. I mean, I really don’t,” I say.
After Charlotte finishes serving all her tables, we go to find Ray, who’s a dishwasher. He goes to Edison, like me, and is usually hanging out with Steve’s crowd, so Charlotte and I decided the four of us are meant to hang out this summer.
“This is Fleming,” Charlotte introduces me.
“Yeah, I know,” Ray says. “Hey.” He runs a hand through his short black hair, and I check out his arms. They are definitely nice—why hadn’t I ever noticed before? Ray takes off his dirty apron and tosses it into a plastic hamper. “So, we going to the Lot?” Ray puts his arms around Charlotte.
“Where else?” Charlotte says, snuggling up to him.
“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe L.A. New York. Omaha,” I say.
Charlotte laughs. “Yeah, okay, Fleming. Whatever you say.”
An hour later, I’m at the Lot sitting on the tailgate of Ray’s pickup with Charlotte, Ray, and Mike. Steve and Jacqui are a few cars away, leaning against someone’s old convertible, inseparable once again.
This is so not how it was supposed to be.
There are clouds covering the sky, and whenever there are clouds at night, they trap the air here. It might be gorgeous and sunny and breezy all day, and you’d forget you were in the Penned Cattle Capital of the World. Then it gets cloudy, a few drops of rain spit from the sky, and suddenly the air sinks down over the town like a collapsing hot-air balloon.
But the smelly night is the least of my problems.
Mike has been telling Ray about his new car for about ten minutes. I haven’t really been listening, though I did hear it was a yellow Geo Metro with 180,000 miles on it and a purple Princess sticker that he hasn’t been able to pry off the bumper.
Charlotte and I were doing our French homework until we lost daylight. We tried to tell Mike and Ray that we were conjugating verbs and they started making jokes about conjugal visits and we haven’t really wanted to talk to them since.
But now Mike gives up talking to Ray and turns to me. “So what kind of air freshener do you think I should get?” he asks.
“Air freshener?” I ask.
“For the car. The person who had it before was like a serious smoker,” Mike says. “I’ve got to kill that smell.”
I start to smile, glad that Mike and I at least have something in common. We both hate stink. But then, who doesn’t? “Well, what are your options?”
“I’m trying to decide between new car and strawberry,” Mike says.
“Hmm.” I was thinking more along the lines of tropical breeze. “I’d go for new car,” I say. “For the irony factor.”
Mike looks a little confused. “But I really like strawberry,” he says.
“Well.” I shrug. Strawberry seems kind of feminine, but whatever—I really don’t care. “You could always get both,” I tell him. “But then your car might really stink.”
“Yeah,” he says with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll just leave the windows down for a while. It’ll be easy with my new job, because it’s going to be hot and I don’t have A/C.”
“What’s your new job? Delivering pizza or something?” I ask. I’ve been down that road before—and crashed.
Mike’s face falls. “Yeah. How did you guess?”
“Sorry. It was just the one job I really associate with driving. Which place are you working for?”
“Smiley’s,” he says.
I nod. “I worked for Bob’s—last spring,” I say.
“Really? Cool.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t last very long,” I say.
“You hated it?” Mike says.
“Something like that.” I smile, deciding not to tell him about the unglamorous crash I had. I might want to borrow his car someday or something.
What am I saying? The lack of pure oxygen must be affecting my brain. Like I’d ever borrow Mike’s car. Then again, I never thought I’d be sitting on a tailgate next to him, either.
I glance over at Steve. He’s the one I’m supposed to be sitting next to. This is all wrong.
“So, uh, when do you start?” I ask Mike.
“Tomorrow,” Mike says, sounding a little more proud now.
“So I won’t see you on the bus anymore? You’re leaving me to perish with Kamikaze Driver at the wheel?” I put my hand to my throat. “How could you?”
Mike laughs. “Sorry. Is that what you call him?”
“Among other things.” I take a sip of my root beer. I glance over at Charlotte, who now has one leg thrown over Ray’s. I check to see whether Steve and Jacqui have moved an inch away from each other yet. Nope.
I hate being in this type of situation. Where there are couples all around you hooking up, and you’re so obviously not. When you don’t know someone very well, and you’re trying to make conversation and it’s impossible. When you have to be home by 10:00.
As I’m staring at Steve, I notice Mike is kind of looking at me, observing my obsession. I don’t want him telling Steve that I was staring, so I turn to him and blurt out, “You should have seen him today. Kamikaze. He was so obsessed with making every light. I swear he was counting them down out loud, as he went through each green or yellow light. There might have been some red ones in there—after a while I stopped looking because I didn’t want to know.”
“He’s the kind of person who’s going to be arrested, and then everyone will say, yeah, he seemed really weird,” Mike says. “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” I stare at Steve and Jacqui. They’re entwined, like an exotic plant.
Why did she have to show up here this summer? Why did she have to ruin my plan? It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was in development. Now it’s dead.
“Hey, um, Peg?” Mike gently pushes his fingers against my thigh. I feel these strange shivers travel up my spine when he touches me. “Whoa. You’ve got really strong muscles,” he says.
“It’s, um, from skating,” I say as goose bumps break out on my arms. “In-line.”
“Fleming skates everywhere,” Charlotte says.
Except on the ice, I think.
“She’s amazingly good. Me, I can hardly make it around the block,” Charlotte goes on, but I can’t talk to her right now for some reason. I can’t stop looking at Mike’s hand, which looks strange just perched there on my thigh. What is he doing?
“You know what?” Mike says to me, giving my leg a little squeeze.
“What?” I say, sort of softly, because I feel really close to him all of a sudden.
“I’m starving,” Mike says. “Let’s grab Gropher and hit the Hamburger, okay?” He slides off the truck tailgate.
That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting him to say.
Five minutes later, the four of us are sitting in the Happy Hamburger drive-thru—me and Mike in the front seats, Jacqui and Steve wedged into the backseat of the Geo, on top of each other. This is not the double date I had in mind. In fact, this is worse than the one I was on five minutes ago.
I order small fries and a lemonade. Jacqui and Steve split a concrete shake and a double hamburger and large fries, like they’re incapable of ordering on their own. They have to share the ketchup and the mustard and the bun or they might self-destruct. I am probably jealous only because Steve and I never actually managed to have a meal together—our relationship wasn’t deep enough for that. But we did share spilled ketchup, which is a lot more intense than people might realize.
Mike parks in the Happy Hamburger parking lot, which seems kind of stupid when we could drive anywhere. Steve and Jacqui are eating and slurping their shake. It’s a little more than I can take. I always thought the reason Steve and I didn’t really go out was because he didn’t want to go out with anyone long-term. But he seems okay with seeing Jacqui night after night, so why not me?
I glance over at Mike, who’s staring at me for no reason. “So. Um. I think I need a refill,” I say, shaking the ice in the bottom of my lemonade cup. This is my lame attempt to prolong the night. Why do I want to prolong agony, I wonder?
“No problem,” he says with a nice smile. He reaches over and squeezes my leg again. Then he peels around the parking lot and we approach the speaker with a loud screech.
“I’ll order,” Steve says. “Pull up, Kyle, pull up!”
The car lurches forward as Mike holds on to the clutch a little too long, because he just got the car and isn’t used to it yet. Then he starts doing it on purpose, inching forward, jerking and bucking the car.
“May I take your order?” a voice asks from the black speaker box.
“Can we get . . . can we get . . .” Steve stammers. He and Mike both start laughing so hard that neither of them can order.
“Hello?” the voice says.
“How about a new clutch?” Steve finally asks. “With fries?”
Mike peels away from the speaker and we fly past the drive-thru window, all of us laughing hysterically—except Jacqui.
“What’s so funny?” Jacqui asks. “Steve, what’s so funny?”
She’s the kind of person who’s never cracked up for no reason at a drive-thru before. I don’t know what Steve sees in her.
I glance in the rearview mirror at Steve as I laugh and he suddenly leans forward and says, “I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I just did that, why did I just do that?” He smiles at me and for a second I feel like there’s no one else in the car.
I smile back at him. At first I’m really flattered because he remembers, and because I think about him whispering it in my ear as he kissed me.
Then I’m mad because it was something he used to say to me in private, because it was our thing, and now he’s saying it in front of his new girlfriend. I’m thinking, I can’t believe he just did that.