“It annoys me. They don’t even know me, so how could they possibly care how my day was?”
“I’m with you there. We’ll ask if we want something, right?”
I nodded.
“Problem is, people don’t always say what they want,” she said. “Maybe they’re too afraid to ask. Or sometimes they simply don’t know. If you had to guess, what would you say your friend wants?”
“Love. She wants someone to care about her.” I sucked in my breath. Stupid me. She’d be able to figure out who I was talking about.
“Don’t worry, Drea. Everything you tell me is confidential unless you tell me this person poses a danger to herself or others.”
Well, she had an ex who’d harmed her, but I’d learned early on that being a tattletale wasn’t cool. Dustin Jenkins threw rocks at me for a week after I’d told the teacher he’d peed his pants. Not to mention numerous other incidents that resulted when I opened my mouth. “Okay,” I said.
“I think the best thing you can do is watch out for her. If you get that ache in your stomach, ask her how she’s feeling. Tell her that you’re there for her. And really, that’s all you can do. It’s up to her to ask you if she needs help.” She went on to tell me that I could always talk to her or a trusted adult if the situation got out of hand. But I’d already tuned her out because “out of hand” was subjective, and I had no idea where to draw the line.
We piled into Roger’s car after school. Naomi immediately ejected his CD and put in the mixed one I’d made her. Snow Patrol’s “Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking” filled the stuffy car with a soft guitar melody.
“Aw, come on. Do we have to listen to this foofee stuff?” Roger asked, glancing longingly at the death metal CD Naomi had stuck in his binder.
“Deal with it.” Naomi plopped her feet on the dash.
“Do you know where Lake Padden is?” I asked them.
“No, I’ve only lived here my entire life.” Roger rolled his eyes.
“Can you take me there?”
Naomi turned around, frowning. “Why?”
“Justin told me he likes to go there a lot.”
Roger merged onto I-5 south. “Scott is looking to pound that guy.”
“You better keep your mouth shut, then,” Naomi said.
“Hey, he hit you. I’d kick his ass myself if I wasn’t sure I’d lose. That guy benches at least three fifty.”
“Uh, yeah. Slight exaggeration there, Roger.” Naomi chuckled. “Besides, little Miss Kung Fu back there kicked him in the balls. Twice.”
I stared out the window. That was a moment I wanted to forget.
“Whatever. I told you he was an ass,” he said.
“Yeah, but I’m still not going out with you.”
“I never asked.”
“Uh-huh.” She glanced at me and wrinkled her nose.
My stomach tensed when I saw the sign for Lake Padden. The odds of Justin being here were slim, but I had to know he wasn’t some dream in my head. That the nice guy I knew actually existed.
“What do ya know, Drea’s a psychic,” Naomi said. “Isn’t that his car?” She pointed out her window.
I followed the scattered cars until I spotted a black one in the far corner. Roger drove past it, and my heart sped up when I saw the silver M3 on the back.
“Doesn’t look like he’s in there. Maybe he went for a jog,” Naomi said.
“You guys can drop me off. I can have my mom pick me up.”
“Uh, you sure?” Roger asked. “What if the guy is a psycho killer?”
“You sound like my grandma,” I said.
“I can go with you,” Naomi offered.
“I need to do this alone.”
She opened the door and let me out of the back seat. “Good luck. And call me if you need us to come back.”
I took a deep breath as the squeak of Roger’s fan belt faded into the distance. The screams and giggles of children rang out from the small park, and the jingle of leashes could be heard from dogs walking the trail. The sun had graced Bellingham with its presence today, lighting snippets of water and making me squint. My eyes paused on the baseball dugout. A figure with dark hair was hunched over, reading something.
I headed across the damp grass, my shoes growing heavier with each step. Just as I reached the dugout, my foot slipped, and icy mud bled through my sock.
Justin’s head jerked up. The skin under one eye was the color of a plum. He closed his book and set it on the bench. “You really should try wearing jeans. They’re more dirt friendly.”
Brown sludge covered the hem of my white underskirt. “They’re too scratchy and confining,” I said, clutching the metal fence and stepping inside the dugout.
He glanced at my feet and smirked. “I hope you don’t expect me to give you a ride home.”
“I don’t expect anything other than an explanation. You can’t just be there for someone and then disappear.” I sat down but kept my distance from him.
“I missed one day of school. Why are you talking like I left town?”
“Because that’s what guys do—they disappear. And most of the time, I don’t care. But when they’re really nice…” This wasn’t where I wanted to go.
“Don’t hold me up too high, Drea. There’s a lot I haven’t told you.” He rested his head against the wall, keeping his eyes downcast.
I stared at my muddy shoes. “Why?”
His face turned in my direction. “Because I like you.”
I forced myself to look at him. “I like you too.”
We stared at each other with parted lips and nothing to say. Did his like mean the same as mine? I wondered if his stomach fluttered when I was around. Or if he thought about me before he went to sleep. Either way, we needed to stop hiding from each other.
“You know what I love about music?” I asked. “It doesn’t lie, even if the lyrics do.”
“Are you a Hendrix fan?” he asked.
“Yeah. His solos just say, This is who I am. You can take me or leave me.”
“Me too. My mom had a record player in our living room. I’d go in there and play air guitar to ‘All Along the Watch Tower’ over and over.” He looked down, smiling.
A laugh escaped my throat. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Don’t be. I have two left feet, and my sister said I looked constipated. Guitar playing just wasn’t in the cards for me.” He glanced at me and smoothed his ruffled hair back. The sleeve of his T-shirt rode up, revealing a hint of black ink on his arm. A tattoo—not something I expected.
I looked at his jagged fingernails and the bruised knuckles of his right hand. “I want to know you, Justin. Even the parts you don’t think I’ll understand.”
He exhaled sharply and drummed his feet against the ground. “Bellingham is my clean slate—my second chance. I can’t screw it up.”
I waited to see if he’d offer more. He didn’t. “Is that all you’re going to tell me?”
He followed my gaze to his knuckles and covered them with his other hand. “I didn’t use to be much different than Scott, okay?”
“You sold drugs and hit girls?”
“No, but I got wasted a lot. And I used to race. Only we were a bunch of rich private-school guys—we didn’t even care about the cash.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I needed the rush and the distraction. After my mom died, I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted to hit the fast-forward button and skip to the part where my stomach stopped hurting. When the dreams stopped. When everything I looked at didn’t remind me of her. I wanted to pretend she never existed.”
“Did it work?”
“No.”
Justin told me about his freshman year. He wore a lot of black and smoked pot behind the library with his friends Kermit and Jake. They’d write lyrics about robots and global warming for their industrial band. But Kermit got kicked out later that year for selling his mom’s painkillers. And the band went to hell.
He joined a metal band sophomore year. They met a chick from the all-girls’ school down the street who could roar like the guy from Mayhem. He fell in love with her and with speed that year, but she used him to make the lead guitarist jealous. The rest of the year was a blur—moving walls and trails in his eyes. Sometimes he couldn’t even tell what was real anymore. He got suspended for coming to class high and then expelled for breaking some guy’s nose. But he couldn’t even remember the guy’s name, much less why they fought.