Except Drew, who stared at me.
Mr. Rush wiped his eyes. Which seemed kind of pointless, since he was standing in a downpour. “Oh, Sauter,” he said. “You’re not a troubled teen. I know ’em when I see ’em. I was a troubled teen myself not too long ago.” He turned and walked toward the other buses again. Then he tossed over his shoulder at me, “I spent some time in juvy.”
A llison and I were sitting in my car the next morning, watching the first bus park outside the band room for the trip to the contest in Montgomery, when my cell phone rang.
We looked at each other.
“Drew?” she asked.
I handed her my phone and the keys and got out of the car. When Luther came over to her house the night before, she told him that Drew had spilled the beans to the twins. Luther said it didn’t sound like Drew, and he planned to call Drew and ask. That’s probably why Drew was calling me now.
But if Drew wanted to be forgiven, I still didn’t want to hear it. A nd even if I eventually forgave him, I wasn’t sure I could ever take him up on his offer to make out on a hay baler.
I chose a sunny spot on the wall near the band room door and watched the second bus pull up. A fter Luther had left the night before, A llison had come over to my house. We had stayed up late, blotting our soaked boots and band outfits and very carefully blowing them with hairdryers so they wouldn’t shrink. My jacket and skirt and knee-high boots were warm and dry. A nd the stormy front had blown through, taking the cold rain with it, and leaving behind the warm morning sun.
But I couldn’t shake the chill.
The saddest thing was that despite everything, I wanted to sit in this sunny spot and watch Drew drive up in the farm truck and climb onto the senior bus. Just because.
It was actually kind of strange that he wasn’t there yet. He usually was way early because he was so responsible.
Except with other people’s secrets.
A llison got out of my car and walked across the grass toward me with her bag slung over her shoulder, still talking on the phone. “Here she is,” she said. She held the phone out to me.
I shook my head.
“Walter,” she said. “I told him about the rumors.”
I grabbed the phone. “Thank you so much for last night,” I exclaimed. “Football is so hard!”
He laughed. “You did a good job. You would be good no matter what. A nd at half-time the band sounded even better than at homecoming, technically. Did you work on that weird mellophone part in the middle song?”
I knew Walter. I knew there was a but coming. “But?”
“But at homecoming, the show had more … I don’t know.”
“Life.”
“Yes! A nd I think it’s Drew. I think the band sounds best when you and Drew direct together.”
The third bus parked in front of the band room.
“I didn’t make him quit,” I reminded Walter. “A nd I’m not inclined to beg him to come back, after what he did to me. To my family.” I did my best Tony Soprano. “Blood is thicker than water. The family sticks together. Capisce?”
“I’m glad you still have enough of a sense of humor to do horrible imitations.”
“Hey!”
“But listen, Don Corleone. I’m not convinced Drew told the Evil Twins. It doesn’t sound like something he’d do.”
“How can you say that? You hardly know him. A nd you call him Patton.”
“I just called him that because you liked him. I know him pretty well. I was in Boy Scouts with him for years.”
This I couldn’t picture. “You were in Boy Scouts?”
“It’s not that weird. When you’re ten years old and you live in a bus, you do what you can to fit in. A nd then, by the time you’re fifteen, you give up.”
The fourth bus parked in front of the band room.
“It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” I said. “Drew was really mad about losing drum major. But it still doesn’t make sense that he’d be out to get me. He doesn’t work that way. But who else could have told the twins? Drew is the only person I told.”
“Maybe your dad told someone. Does your mom know? Maybe your mom told someone.”
“They didn’t want A llison’s parents to find out. I doubt they told anybody.”
“It takes two to tango.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Who did your dad have the affair with?”
I shivered in the warm sun. “Some nurse named Lurleen at the hospital. It was over by the time he told my mom and me. I never met her.”
The line of boys from the instrument room pitched the last case onto the U-Haul and closed and locked the door.
“A nurse named Lurleen?” Walter asked. “That’s the Evil Twins’ mother.”
On cue, long hair, big boobs, and her sister pulled their car into the parking lot, late. Did this mean we really were the Evil Triplets? “It can’t be the same Lurleen,” I said calmly. But I pressed my hand to my heart thumping hard in my chest.
“How many nurses named Lurleen do you think work at the hospital?”
“Well, I don’t know. A nd how do you know all these people?”
“They rented a trailer in my camp-ground for a few weeks when they were between houses about five years ago, right after their dad left them.”
The twins hauled their bags and cooler and flute cases out of their used car and slammed the doors. I glanced over at my own car, which my parents had bought for me brand new when I turned sixteen. Then I glanced back at the twins. One of them was blatantly pointing at me and was probably making some choice comments about me to the other.
It did make more sense now, why they would come after me like they had. A nd it had never occurred to me that Dad had had an affair with someone I knew or the mother of someone I knew, but that made sense too. It was a small town.
“They must hate me,” I mused. “A nd now I steal their boyfriend? I’d hate me too!”
“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Walter said.
What was I missing? I went over the whole thing in my mind for the billionth time, then gasped.
“Drew didn’t tell them about my dad.
The Evil Twins found out from their mom. Those bitches!”
“There you go.”
“Oh, Walter, and I was mean to him because I thought he told everybody! A nd now he’s not here! I’ve been watching the whole time, and he hasn’t gotten here yet! A nd the buses are starting!”