"I don't know where they were going," I said, hoping I wasn't supposed to know. I'd been trying to get Lila and Keke to tell me what happened since they'd picked me up. It was harder than I'd thought. I'd admitted to them only what I'd told Doug: that I didn't remember the wreck itself. More than this and I was afraid they would report it to their mother, she would try to report it to my mother but get my dad instead, and he might actually make good on his threat to have me committed.
The twins didn't automatically offer a recap of events. Very frustrating. And as I prompted them, I had to choose my words carefully so I didn't give away how little I knew. I couldn't say I had such a great time at the football team's party or I had such an awful time at the football team's party because the opposite might have happened. After a few seconds of a boy band wailing on the CD player, I settled for, "Wow, what a party. I'll remember it for the rest of my life."
"Why?" they asked at the same time.
I threw up my hands like they were so dense. "Because of what happened. Y know."ou
"No," Keke said, "we don't know. Y told us you couldn't find Brandon, and then you disappeared. Then it started raining, so Lila and I came home.
ou What happened?"
"Oh, just the usual," I said.
"What was so great about it that you'll remember it for the rest of your life?" Lila persisted. "Maybe I was drunker than I thought, but it sounds like we weren't at the same party."
"My head hurts," I said out the open window. We'd reached the straight stretch of the road into town, where my dad had said I'd wrecked. Sure enough, black tire tracks careened across the road, and broken glass twinkled in the grass on the shoulder. A deer stood in the trees, chewing, watching traffic. I shook my fist at it.
"Y ou're nuts," Keke said.
We reached downtown. The high school and the football stadium. City hall. The police station. The county courthouse where my mom worked. A historic town square with striped awnings on storefronts, including the police station and my mom's office. The dried skeletons of petunias in pots outside her office door, because no one was there to water them. It was a quaint little downtown like any small town's, built in an era before tourists cared about the beach. The only difference was that ours was built on sand.
Keke turned the Datsun off the square, down the road with new housing developments: the one where Gabriel lived, then the one where Keke and Lila lived. After a couple of miles, the impressive entrance to Brandon's neighborhood appeared, an enormous facade of an antebellum mansion with faux marble columns painted to look like they were smothered in wisteria. The neighborhood itself was a grid of brand-new identical brown brick houses, one story, on such narrow lots that they'd put the front door on the diagonal, set back from the wide two-car garage door dominating the front.
"And I thought all the houses on our street looked alike," Lila said. "How do you find him in here?"
"Count three streets over and then six houses down," I said. Not that I came over much. We'd been together only a week, and he'd been busy. I had cruised by a few times on my way home from swim practice in case he was outside. His family didn't seem to be outdoorsy types. His house was always shut tight.
Today we didn't need to count. Clouds parted. Angels trumpeted. In the grassy strip that passed for his lawn, powerful spotlight beams crisscrossed, advertising his house. An airplane flew overhead like the ones that dragged advertisements for tourists at the beach, proclaiming BRANDON LIVES HERE. He stood in his driveway, soaping slow circles along the Buick, with his shirt off.
"Y can say that again." Lila breathed at the sight of the muscles moving in Brandon's back. I wondered what strangled noise I'd made that she was
ou agreeing with.
"Stephanie Wetzel can say it again," Keke declared, nodding toward the house across the street from Brandon's. A curtain in the diagonal front door fluttered shut.
"Do you think she needs us to give her a ride to the high school?" I suggested.
"She's the one who's been giving Brandon rides," Keke said.
Lila hit her.
"Hit her again for me," I grumbled.
"I don't mean that kind of ride," Keke said. "I mean, she's been giving Brandon rides to school since Brandon's Buick broke. Y didn't know that?"
I had not known this. I had not known the Buick was broken. It explained why Brandon hadn't popped over to my house for a visit during the week. It didn't explain why he hadn't asked me for a ride.
"If the Buick is so broken, how'd he back it out of the garage?" Lila asked.
I whirled in my seat to face her. "What happened to Brandon and me being perfect and dreamy?"
"Only if you keep up the maintenance," Keke said. She parked the Datsun in the street because Brandon's driveway was too small for two cars. "Flirt hard."
I turned to Lila for verification. She shrugged. "We're just saying."
This was not exactly the pep talk I needed. But Brandon had already stopped scrubbing and turned his muscled trunk toward us, wondering who might emerge from the somewhat crusty Datsun 280z. I gave myself one last glance in the side mirror. It seemed my makeup was still caked nicely over the bruise. But I got only a glimpse. I didn't want Brandon to catch me looking at myself, like I cared too much. From my angle stepping out of the car, most of my face was hidden by the words OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEYAPPEAR .
"Hey, baby!" I called.
"Hey!" he called back, and he did not glance ever so briefly at Stephanie Wetzel's house. I did not see that. Keke had put that idea in my head, and how could I tell anyway, with the bright sunlight glinting off his pecs?
I walked toward him. He threw his soapy sponge onto the hood and met me halfway, just like he was supposed to. He wrapped me in his muscular arms, squeezed me, and let me go, running his damp hand down my arm.
I said, "We were just on our way to the swim meet" (and took a detour several miles out of our way) "and I stopped by to tell you I had a wreck last night!"
His eyebrows shot up. "With Doug?"
Someone had told him about Doug and me in the emergency room! Only . . . if that were true, Brandon wouldn't have been rubbing his thumb back and forth across my forearm. Maybe he'd heard a less incriminating version of the story, and I could still pass the whole incident off as what it was: lust induced by brain damage. I punched him playfully in the shoulder. "Y heard already and you didn't call me!"
He stared at me for a moment with his mouth open. "I didn't hear you were in a wreck. I heard Doug was in a wreck." Now he looked over the top of my head, toward Stephanie Wetzel's house. This was not my imagination.