His lashes were long. His eyes were warm. He looked adorable when he coaxed me. It would be so easy to tell him he could stay. He would want to wrap up his day with his friends (and that girl), and then he would come home to me.
Which sounded exactly like my mother’s life in miniature. Her boyfriend didn’t mean it when he screwed that other woman. It wouldn’t happen again. Sure.
“No,” I said. “Get out.” I was shouting now, and that was a page out of my mother’s life too, getting in a screaming fight with a man outside my trailer while a pickup idled in the dirt yard. There was no way out for me, whatever I did. The alcohol was kicking in for real now. The sky between the palms turned a funny color.
“Baby,” Mark growled, sliding his hand across my shoulders.
I shoved him away. “Why can’t people take no for an answer today? Get your stuff and go on. Anything you leave, I’m throwing in the garbage.” I couldn’t do this, of course. It was illegal. My mom and I had been evicted enough times that I knew the law.
Mark might have known the law too, but the wheels turned slowly behind his eyes. Even if I didn’t throw away his stuff, I might go through it now that I was angry, and there was something in it he didn’t want me to find, weed or worse.
“Fine.” He stomped across the yard toward the trailer. A cloud of dirt billowed around his feet. He mounted the cement blocks two at a time. The cloud of dirt reached me, and I turned away to avoid inhaling it.
“Leah,” Patrick called over the music and the engine noise and the pit bull. He crooked his finger at me. I walked over and leaned against the passenger door, peering at the girl, mildly curious. She’d pasted a silhouette above her left breast before she spent her day in the sun. Now she’d peeled it away to reveal a white Playboy bunny in the middle of her tan.
“What’s the holdup?” Patrick asked me.
“I’m kicking Mark out.”
Patrick’s eyebrows shot up. Not one eyebrow, like Grayson’s expression of skepticism. Both eyebrows. “What for?”
I switched into trailer park voice. Polite airport voice was gone now. The Admiral would not recognize me. “Mark brought this whore here and thought I wouldn’t find out he’s doing her. He can’t stay here. The trailer is set to self-destruct when it senses an IQ that low.” This wasn’t true, considering some of my mom’s boyfriends.
The girl leaned toward the window. “What did you call me?”
I was about to clarify it for her when Patrick interrupted us. “Ladies, ladies.” Normally boys like Patrick encouraged a good catfight, but he was sitting between us and was probably scared of getting scratched. To change the subject, he asked me, “Where’s the beer?” His eyes slid to the can in my hand. “Did you drink it all?”
I set my sunglasses on top of my head and looked him straight in the eye. “If you ever mention that beer to me again, I will retrieve it from its supersecret hiding place and shove the entire case, can by can, up your ass.”
Mark kicked the door of the trailer open so hard that it banged against the metal wall. He started down the cement blocks with the case of beer on his shoulder, the garbage bags of his stuff in the other hand, and the rifles underneath his arm.
Patrick leaned nearer, as if he had a secret. I bent my head to hear him, so close now that the breeze blew my curls across his cheek.
“Mark really likes you,” Patrick said conspiratorially.
“He has a funny way of showing it,” I said in the same tone, mocking him.
“I mean,” Patrick whispered, “he may not be that easy to get rid of.”
“Don’t even talk to her.” Mark handed the case of beer to one of the boys in the payload, then swung the trash bags over the side without warning the other guy to move first. “Hey,” the guy protested. He drunkenly slid off his seat on the wheel well.
Mark pointed at me. “You can kiss that job with my uncle good-bye.”
I shrugged. I wholeheartedly agreed with Grayson now. Probably there had never been a job. Even if there had been a position open, Mark wouldn’t have the power to give it and take it away. His mother had kicked him out and his uncle hadn’t taken him in. That’s how close Mark and his family were. Funny that I had ever convinced myself this summer job was waiting for me, just by wanting it so badly.
He rounded the back of the truck. As he slid behind the steering wheel, the girl called across Patrick to me, “Serves you right. You need to learn how to treat a man.”
“If I ever see you again,” I told her, “I will beat you like a dog.” I was no more violent or tough than the next person, but talking big scared most people away as effectively as smacking them. I had learned this through trial and error at school. I thought I’d made my point, because her eyes widened at me before she remembered to scowl.
Patrick just winked at me, though. Then the engine revved. The music rose to a deafening level even for a trailer park. The truck whipped forward, then back, then forward, then back, in a drunken, poorly executed more-than-three-point turn. It had ground up enough dust to coat me before it finally sped down the narrow road through the trees, the pit bull barking at its highest pitch to sound the alarm.
I crossed the bare dirt and settled in a plastic chair near my bedroom window, under the tallest palm. There were two chairs. A stump between them served as a table. On this stylish side table was a small margarine tub filled with cigarette butts and rainwater. I never would have let this mess stay here if I’d known my mother or Mark had made it. I didn’t hang out in the yard, because of the pit bull.
But it didn’t bother me as much as it normally would have. I popped my neck, shook out my shoulders, took a long swig of delicious cheap-ass beer, and relaxed into the plastic chair. I gazed at my home of corrugated metal. It had been parked here so long that palmettos grew out from under it, and it was coated in a thin green film of moss or lichen or something. Whatever it was, it grew a lot better on the trailer than it did in the dirt yard. I listened to the music of the pit bull. I set my beer down on the stump, crossed my legs like I was having a tea party, and pondered the fact that the boys I knew had everything and I had nothing.
An airplane roared overhead, one of Mr. Hall’s Pipers. I looked up just in time to see the yellow one pass across a patch of blue sky between the trees. Grayson must be flying, or Alec, or some new dope they’d hired instead of me. An advertising banner stretched way behind the plane, but I couldn’t read what it said from underneath.