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We pulled up to the retirement home, I chained the Cruiser to the
NO PARKING
sign out front, and then Staci and I sat down on the curb. I was about to dig in when I felt her looking at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She paused. “It’s just, what are we doing here?”

“My grandma lives here. She’s old and going senile, but she’s still my grandma. There’s something I have to tell her real fast, and then we can book it and do something else.”

Staci’s face drew back a little, and her eyes widened as if she’d just been told to go sit in the corner. Maybe she didn’t like old people or being around them, but just as quickly her face relaxed and she nodded her head. Then she scooted closer to me so that our knees were touching, bit into her McMuffin, and somehow made it clear that she understood. No, it didn’t last all that long, but it was easily the best McDonald’s breakfast I’d ever had, and everybody on solid food knew that Mickey D’s breakfasts were the best you could get.

After we’d finished, I grabbed all our trash, wadded it into a ball, stood up, said come on to Staci, gave her my hand to help her up, and kept hold of her as we walked in. Kathy was at the desk, looking as ridiculously hot as ever in her sandals and short skirt and tight top and jaw-dropping cleavage and big hair, but her pretty face flashed hard and fast with mixed emotions when she saw us come in. She got up quickly, rushed over from behind the desk, started rubbing my
cheeks, neck, and head, looked totally worried, and asked me what happened. Before I could get a word in, Staci said, “He beat up this high-school guy that was mean and bothering me.”

That was only sort of true, but it didn’t seem like the right time to make an issue out of it, because Kathy’s green eyes got all round and big and she pulled her head back some and just kind of looked at me, and then at Staci, and then at me again and smiled. Yeah, I smiled, too. After a few seconds of us all grinning at one another like morons, Kathy said, “If you beat him up, then what happened to your eye?”

“Well, she never said I beat up his friend, too.”

We laughed.

“I guess not,” Kathy said. “So are you going to introduce me to your girlfriend, or what?”

Girlfriend? Whoa.

“Hi, I’m Staci,” Staci cut in, as if I had no say in the matter whatsoever.

“Hi, Staci, I’m Kathy. Nice to meet you.”

The introductions were over, and I’d just been informed that Staci was my girlfriend. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: whoa.

“So what are you guys up to? Going to see Toots?”

“Yeah, for a minute. Where’s Pencil Neck?”

“He’s out of the office today, why?”

I was considering trying to have a man-to-man with him about what was really going on in, or out of, Livia’s room. But he wasn’t around, so it would have to wait. Then again, it wouldn’t be so easy having a man-to-man with Bryan when I knew one of us didn’t qualify.

“No reason,” I answered, thinking that
everything
seemed to be going my way.

“Hey, K-kathy?” Staci stammered quietly at her feet.

“Yeah, hon?”

“The sign out front? Why isn’t it fixed yet?”

“Oh,
tell me
about it, Staci,” Kathy dished.

“Can
we
do it?” Staci asked her, and then looked at me.
“Can
we?”

For some reason the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d planned to repaint the sign by myself sometime later in the day, after we were done hanging out, just like I’d told mom I would last night. I’d never thought about asking Staci to help me, maybe because painting the front sign at an old folks’ home wasn’t exactly the coolest thing to ask a chick to do on a first date and all. But since she suggested it, and I had to do it anyway, I was more than inclined to agree.

“You really
want
to?” Kathy asked.

Staci nodded; I followed suit.

“Okay. I don’t see why not.”

Kathy circled behind the desk, made a call, and in a few minutes two of the home’s janitors came out with a large can of white paint, one of black, four brushes, stencil letters, a level, a T square, a yardstick, four or five sharpened pencils, and two six-foot fold-up ladders. I felt like screaming,
If you already had the goddamn stuff, then why haven’t you fixed the fucking sign yet?
, but Staci was there and Kathy was still smiling in this really pleased and knowing way, so I just swallowed it and got ready to get to work. Grandma would just have to wait.

It turned into a major event; then again, almost anything that ever happened at the retirement home was an event of some magnitude to the inmates. Staci and I set up the ladders on the island, next to the sign, and covered the tag with two coats of white paint. While we waited for them to dry, the parade of onlookers began. The old-timers shuffled across the parking lot in groups of two, three, or four, Cuthbert Stansted and Livia and all the rest, in their loud outfits and sweaters and heavy shoes, with their walkers and wheelchairs, to see what we were doing and to ask the question—over and over—what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing? We told them their sign needed repainting and we’d volunteered to do it, and they seemed to buy it because they told us what good kids we were. Yeah, right.

In the meantime, it started getting warm out, so it only took a little while for both base coats to dry, and when they did, Staci and I got started on the hard part—the lettering. We had to use the yardstick and the level to draw pencil guidelines first, so the letters wouldn’t slant up or down or a mixture of both, because that would look like shit. But since there were two of us—one to hold the yardstick with the level on top and the other to run a pencil along the bottom—it was no problem at all. No, I couldn’t have done it all by myself, and I would’ve made a total mess of it if I’d tried. But Staci seemed to have a knack for that kind of work, which she said probably came from making all those patterns for clothes, because she was always tracing the outlines of things. I didn’t know where she’d gotten it from, but she was about six or seven grades better than I was, at the stenciling, too, so I tried to hold my own and not make a klutz of myself in front of all the old men and women circling our knees and ankles.

They were all still coming out and watching in turn, especially the ones who knew every damn thing about every kind of job ever performed in the history of human endeavors and whose sole purpose in life was to share that information with everyone all the time, whether they were asked for it or not. Luckily, old farts like that were outnumbered by sweet grandma and grandpa types who told them to pipe down and quit bothering us because we were doing a wonderful job. Shit, for them we could’ve done the sign in crayon and left-handed and they would’ve said it was the most beautiful craftsmanship they’d ever beheld.

It took a while, but we got through it okay, and we’d finished the measuring, lining, and stenciling by lunchtime. Most of the crowd dispersed to the cafeteria for grub. I asked Staci if she was hungry and she said not yet, so we switched paint and brushes and started on the letters. Grandma still hadn’t come out. I could see her room from where we were, and I saw that the curtains were opened and that she was sitting in her chair watching us from a distance, but she hadn’t
come outside to say hello or to see what we were doing. I took that for what it was, a bad omen. Maybe mom had called her this morning and told her everything that’d happened, and grandma was either sulking about it because she’d gotten blamed or was pissed off at me because I’d fucked it all up. Either way, she wouldn’t be in too great a mood when we went to see her later on, and I was glad as hell I hadn’t gone to see her first. As soon as she got me alone, she was going to lower the whole goddamn boom on me and more, and suddenly I was dreading it.

If I wanted my ass all in one piece, which I did, then I’d have to come up with a plan. I couldn’t think about it too much, though, because staying within the lines of stenciled letters with a paintbrush took more concentration than I’d expected, and I was focusing my attention on that. I must’ve had my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth, like I sometimes did when I was concentrating intently, because Staci asked me if I was okay.

“I’m cool,” I said, “how you doing?”

“I’m okay.”

Yeah, she
was
okay. After a few more minutes of working in silence, Staci laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Oh, I was just thinking.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you can tell me.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“C’mon, Staci,
please?”

“It’s just, I mean …”

“What?”

“I was laughing because I was thinking how much easier it is to do this on a ladder.”

It took me a few seconds to realize what she meant, but when I did, it was like a pair of icy cold hands had torn through my
abdomen and ripped out my spleen. The tips of my ears sizzled, my mind raced, and just like that I could see it all too clearly. If you had a brand-new moped to stand on, you wouldn’t
need
two people to pull the job off, but that didn’t mean
only one
had done it.

Jesus H. Christ, that
so
fucking figured, didn’t it? How in the shit-smeared world did I
not
see that coming? How the hell could I be such a
sucker? Goddamn it!
Why didn’t
anybody
tell me? But did anyone else even
know
, like Neecey or Darren or someone else? No, they
couldn’t
have known. But if they couldn’t have known, then why were Darren’s words from the arcade thundering back to me, telling me all I’d needed to know, right from the very beginning:
wank, hand painted, hand job
. Maybe because my life was
a joke
, that’s why—a dirty fucking joke.

Sure, everybody knew, why not? They fucking
had
to. Shit, they
all
knew what’d really happened,
everybody except me
, and they’d
all
been laughing their asses off about it behind my back. But why didn’t somebody
say something
last night? Why was I the
only one
left in the dark? What the hell was so goddamn
wrong
with me that everybody
always
had to treat me like a fucking
chump?

I felt empty and all alone, and I was gripping the wooden rails of the ladder so hard that it seemed as if they’d splinter through my palms.

“Hey, your face is like all red. You okay?”

I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. I didn’t know what I was, or what the hell I was supposed to be. Worse still, I didn’t know a goddamn thing about anyone else. I didn’t know if Neecey, Darren, and the others hadn’t told me last night because they didn’t know, or thought I knew already, or for some other reason. Maybe that’s why I’d wondered about them acting all friendly and nice to me, because something about it just didn’t seem right. Maybe it
wasn’t
all in my head, maybe they’d just been
pretending
to like me to serve their ulterior motives. But
why?
What had I
ever
done to
them?
Why would they play me like that? Did they think I was some kind of wild, piece-of-shit,
vicious asshole of a menace who needed to be lied to and dicked around and handled with kid gloves like …
like Razor?
Was that
why?

Jesus, the idea of being lumped together with that scumbag just totally and completely sucked, and there was
no way
I could tell if that’s what people around here really thought of me. I sure as hell hoped not, because I didn’t think I deserved it. But I honestly didn’t know, and that made everything seem even worse. Yeah, I’d had my doubts about Darren and the crew and I thought I’d gotten over them, but I still couldn’t tell if everything they’d said to me was
true
, or if the way they’d treated me was
real
.

And I couldn’t tell about Staci either. She must’ve thought I already knew, she
must have
, because she’d asked me why I’d brought her here in the first place, she’d been casual about admitting what she’d done, and she didn’t seem to be hiding anything. But she
was
hiding something, wasn’t she? She’d been hiding things all along. She’d been hiding what she’d done with Razor, and that she’d been
here, with him, at the sign
. She’d
done it, she
was to blame;
that’s
what she’d been hiding, and
that’s
why she’d been so goddamn eager to repaint the sign,
to hide it all over again
.

Okay, sure, maybe Razor had forced her to do that, too, but even if she’d been forced to do some of it, she hadn’t been forced to do
all of
it, and none of that would ever change the fact that she’d just copped to being the
perpetrator
, and that’s something she would
always
be. That counted for something; there were consequences for that.

It was happening all over again. I was back by the reservoir in the dark, standing on the edge of a cliff, and the ground was giving way. All the heartache and madness were back, fresh and painful as ever. It was like I’d never left, like I’d never escaped, like wherever I went or whatever I did, they’d be right on my tail and I’d never get away. I closed my eyes and tried to steady myself, but all I could see was Staci painting the sign while standing on Razor’s moped, one of her black rubber bracelets falling to the ground without her noticing, the two
of them alone together, kissing, touching. It made me feel hateful and sick. And it made me realize I wasn’t the blond Satan I’d thought I was, because at the end of the book Sam Spade refused to play the sap. But that’s exactly what I was doing: I
was
playing the fucking sap,
covering up a crime for the sake of a guilty chick
.

Goddamn it
. Knowing, really
knowing
where I stood and what I was doing was a hell of a lot worse than any punishment I could’ve ever dreamed up for myself. I felt foolish, shamed, humiliated, used, and I knew if I didn’t make a stand and part ways with Staci right now, then I’d not only play the sap, but I’d be guilty, too. I’d be an
accessory after the fact
, and that would rope me in with the rest of them, with all their lies and petty crimes, all their cliques and false friendships, and I’d be just like everyone else. It seemed too high a price to pay for what I’d done, too harsh a sentence, a sentence I’d be reminded of each time I looked at Staci’s face. And that would ruin
everything
, like a stain, or a wound that wouldn’t heal. Unless I cut her loose, there’d be no escaping it, and not much hope that it would
ever
go away.