I had only six more weeks of high school, I told myself. Six more weeks. Six more weeks.
And then what? If high school was supposed to have been the time of my life, what did I have to look forward to?
“God, what have you done now?” Molly hollered, catching me by the arm and dragging me into the kitchen with her. “I can’t take you anywhere.” She crossed the room like she owned it. At the sink she scooped ice into a plastic cup, poured me a soda, and handed it to me. Then she drained the dregs of her own plastic cup that somebody must have brought her. She made herself a soda. Looking around the kitchen, probably for Grayson, she sloshed in a generous helping of bourbon.
“Spill it,” she said. “Grayson told me Francie watched you leave and then followed you. He said it was like an old Western.”
I told her what had happened, expecting her to congratulate me on my twat line.
Instead, she put her hands on her hips and said, “I don’t see why you’re upset. Ten years from now, you’re going to be an airline pilot.”
Without even thinking, I reached one hand to the cabinets to knock on wood.
Molly didn’t stop talking. “In ten years, do you know what Francie’s going to be?”
“A presidential candidate?”
She pointed at me. “An ignorant, frightening one? That’s good! But no. With her holier-than-thou attitude and her level of mean, she’s headed for only one thing. Pastor’s wife.”
I laughed.
“At a really big church,” Molly went on, “so I don’t know what you’re snickering about like you’re all that with your big, bad airline pilot self.”
I nodded as if I believed her, because Molly did not like to hear that I didn’t believe her. “I should leave. It’s Francie’s party, and I’m not welcome here.”
“Why don’t you just go outside?” Molly said this absently while she looked over my head, waved at a friend, and moved in that direction. I couldn’t tell whether she was just trying to get rid of me, her whiny companion at this fun party, or whether she understood who sat outside at these parties. The trash sat outside: the boys invited by popular girls because they might bring weed. Maybe Molly was telling me to go out there with the trash and box my weight.
Molly had already snatched up her drink and gone to hug her friend. I let myself out a side door in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go back through the house and face down Francie again. Carefully I stepped across the lush lawn kept alive artificially by an expensive sprinkler system. The grass lay loosely across a bed of sand, not a good walking surface for stilettos. I should have watched the ground as I made my way along the side of the house, but I held my head high in case anybody was looking out a window. The storms that had been approaching all day and freaking Grayson out were finally close now. The wind tossed the tops of the palm trees. Though a gust might start cold, it ended warm on my bare arms and legs. I hoped we would get rain only, none of the tornadoes that had been creeping up the map all day.
Among the cars parked anyhow on the driveway and in the yard underneath the palm trees, a cluster of pickup trucks and the faint scents of tobacco and pot told me where the trash was. A couple of boys sitting on the trunks of cars whistled to me as I passed. I smiled brilliantly at them. As I neared the pickups, I recognized Patrick perched on a tailgate. I’d never thought I’d feel so relieved to see Patrick. Someone to talk to! I hoped he didn’t bear me any ill will for threatening to shove beer cans up his ass.
Apparently not. “Hey, girl,” he called as I approached. “You look niiiiiiiice.”
“Ha-ha,” I said, hefting myself onto the tailgate beside him.
“Toke?” he asked.
“No thanks.”
“Smoke?”
“Yes,” I said with relief. I took the cigarette he shook out of his pack and let him light it for me.
After one puff I knew I wasn’t going to smoke it. I felt sick, and I could hear Mr. Hall scolding me. I had promised him.
“You’re making the news tonight,” Patrick said. “I heard you’re here with that pretty boy, Alec Hall.”
That sounded about right. “You know him?” I asked.
“Played ball with him a long time ago,” Patrick said. “He’s not your type.”
“Oh, really?” I laughed. “Who’s my type, Patrick?”
“His brother,” Patrick said. “Grayson? We used to be pretty good friends. You and me, we like playing with fire for some reason.”
“Hm.” I’d held my cigarette so long without inhaling that the fire had died out, and the wind had blown the ash away. I tossed the long butt into the cup Patrick was using as an ashtray. On second thought, I wished I’d thrown it down in Francie’s driveway for her parents to find. They probably cared whether she smoked.
“Grayson and Mark are kind of similar,” Patrick said. “It’s like they don’t have an off button, you know? It’s fun to watch that fire, as long as you don’t get burned.”
“I don’t think Grayson and Mark are anything alike,” I said, watching Mark emerge from the cab of his pickup nearby in a cloud of pot smoke.
Following my gaze, Patrick said helpfully, “Oh, there’s Mark now. You know what? He’s still pissed about the whole thing with you, and then when he heard you were here with Alec… wow. Maybe you should g—”
I was already hopping down from the tailgate, my heels sinking into the sand. That slowed my exit. In two steps Mark crossed the space between us. He grabbed my bare upper arm, pulled me back the way he’d come, and pushed me into the cab of his truck.
I never stopped moving. I slid on over to the other side of the cab and reached down to open the door.
He gripped me by the arm again and pulled me back toward him across the seat so I couldn’t reach the door handle. “Leah, come on. I just want to talk to you.”
I stopped squirming, because pulling away from him was what hurt. I sat still and took a deep breath. I was more angry with him for pulling me around than scared of what he might do to me. He had never hurt me—other than grabbing me—or forced me to do something I didn’t want to do. I’d seen men treat my mother a lot worse than this a hundred times, and I tried to remember what she’d done in this situation.
Started dating them again, that’s what.
“Listen.” Mark put his hand on my bare knee and stroked all the way up my thigh to my shorts. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. I see now that you were right about Brenda. I broke it off with her, and I won’t do anything like that again if you’ll let me come back. I’ll talk to my uncle about letting you fly for him too.”