Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (10 page)

We were saved from declining that sick offer by the boys bursting through the door behind us.

“We have a problem,” Boston said in a low whisper.

“Boyfriends?” All the flirt had gone out of the clerk's voice.

Andi shrugged apologetically and threw an arm around Boston's waist, steering him back out the door. I followed her lead, grabbing York's hand and winding my fingers through his as we retreated. He looked at me like I had grown another head, and I dropped his hand the second we were outside.

“Impressive,” Andi said to me. “We make a good team.”

I reached into my back pocket to pull out whatever Andi had stashed there and saw it was a bag of cashews.

“I'm not really a team player,” I said, tossing them to her. “And I don't even like nuts.”

She caught the bag and tore it open with her teeth. “Good. More for me.”

Boston was pink cheeked, his shirt pressed against the sweaty skin where Andi had wrapped her arm around him. “Guys, I said we have a problem.”

“We have several,” I agreed.

“Well, now we have one more,” York said seriously. He led us to the back of the SUV and opened the hatch. Inside, a long black bag ran the width of the trunk, zippered closed.

“Oh God,” I said. “Is it guns or something?”

Of course we accidentally stole an arsenal when we accidentally stole a cop car. Of course we did. Naturally.

York shook his head. “It's worse.”

Then he leaned in to grab the zipper tab, took a deep breath, and pulled.

He was right.

It was worse.

 

12

THE SUV AND parking lot disappeared around me, replaced by stained yellow walls and an unmade double bed. Foil crinkled in Mama's hands as she balanced it over the hissing flame of a Bic lighter. An aroma like too many Easter eggs being colored at once soaked the tiny motel room. Chasing the dragon, Mama called it, but I thought chasing dragons sounded like a lot more fun than whatever she was doing.

By age five, I was tall enough to turn on the fan in the bathroom. Then I would crawl into the rusted tub and pull the stained plastic curtain closed. It was as far away from Mama and her smell as I could get. It wasn't far enough.

Beside me, Andi leaned deep into the SUV to inspect the contents of the bag. Not that they needed close inspection. Small rectangular packages wrapped in clear plastic were laid out in tight, neat rows. The boys had already torn one open, and its dusty brown contents spilled like sand.

“It's drugs, right?” York said, looking over his shoulder to confirm we were alone in the lot.

“This is bad,” Andi said.

York brushed a finger over the powder he'd set free and held it close to Boston's face. “It's too dark to be coke. Cocaine is white, isn't it?”

“How should I know?” Boston pushed his brother's hand away and then rubbed his own hands on his shirt as if they were contaminated. He began to pace back and forth behind us.

“Very bad,” Andi repeated to herself.

York lifted his tainted finger to his nose, and I shot out my hand instinctively to stop him, my fingers closing around his wrist.

“I wouldn't,” I said.

“I just want to smell it.”

“It's heroin.” I let go of his wrist, but his hand still hung frozen in midair, and three faces turned to stare at me. “And if you want to know what it smells like, go stick your face in a bottle of vinegar.”

I could think of only one scent I hated more—so distinct in my olfactory memory that I couldn't pin down just one thing to compare it to. It was like urine mixed with cleaning supplies and poured over burning plastic. I'd smelled it only once, cooking on our stove in the little apartment Grandma had rented for us to get us out of the motels. When I was six years old, other kids' moms were cooking SpaghettiOs. Mine was making meth.

I closed my eyes, wishing the thought away. It happened like that sometimes: one bad memory bleeding into the next, as if my past were a patchwork quilt of ugly moments and I was chasing the seams, trying to find an exit but only bumping into new patches, new memories.

I forced myself to focus on the drugs in front of me instead of the drugs Mama had left behind.

Drugs
.
We are standing in a gas station parking lot with a wide-open bag of who-knows-how-many pounds of heroin.

I couldn't wrap my brain around what it meant to be part of a hit-and-run involving a police officer and a stolen cop car, but I knew exactly what could happen to us if we were caught with drugs. I reached up to pull down the hatch, barely giving Andi and York time to duck out of the way.

“Watch it,” York said, but he glanced nervously around the lot, understanding my urgency. “Get in the car.”

Andi was talking before I'd even settled in my seat.

“We can't turn ourselves in like this, with a car full of heroin.”

“But it's not ours,” I said, clinging to my initial plan. “We'll just explain that we found it like this.”

“We found it,” Andi repeated, staring at me. “In the back of a cop car. Would
you
believe that?”

“But it's true,” Boston said.

“It doesn't matter if it's true,” York countered, sounding defeated. “It matters if it
sounds
true.”

“And it sounds like bullshit,” Andi added.

The truth of Andi's words hit me hard, and I felt my plan unraveling.

“What it sounds like,” I said, hating to admit it, “is a really good reason to run over a cop.”

“Motive,” Boston whispered.

I nodded, and a quiet fell over the car.

“Well, we can't just sit here,” Andi finally said.

Her words seemed to snap Boston out of his trance, and he turned the ignition. He checked all his mirrors twice—left, center, right—and then he reversed the order and checked them again. He'd gone through the same ritual back before we'd left River City. I didn't know what it was, but I was losing patience with it.

“Can we go already?”

He shot me a dirty look in the last mirror he adjusted and finally put the car in gear.

No one protested when he got back on the interstate heading north. Something felt wrong, and I was fine with driving away from that wrong until we figured out how to right it.

“What the hell are police doing with a bag of drugs?” York asked, turning to me. “And how do you know it's heroin?”

“How do you know it's not?” I pivoted.

“This is bad,” Andi muttered. She kept repeating this same phrase, and it was starting to freak me out.

“Maybe it was a bust,” Boston said. “Maybe it's from a drug deal they were breaking up.”

“Doubt it,” I said. “If there was a bust that big going on, the police wouldn't have been wasting time at a stupid high school party.”

York pulled the walkie-talkie out of the glove compartment; it was so still now, as though it had never been turned on. He held it up, a question on his face. “They didn't tell us. They didn't say a word.”

“And they didn't exactly demand we turn ourselves in, either,” I said, my mind clicking and whirring now. “All they wanted to know was where we were.”

York nodded. “And you said that cop standing by the car ran
away
when he heard the cop with the megaphone?”

“Yep.” Something wrenched inside my gut. Andi was right. This was bad.

“And then they tried to shoot us,” York finished.

“Maybe we didn't see what we think we saw,” Boston offered.

“Yeah,” York scoffed. “We all simultaneously hallucinated flying bullets.”

“No, I mean, maybe it just wasn't what it looked like. Like this car—undercover.”

“That's another thing,” York said, getting loud. “What kind of undercover cops wear uniforms? This whole thing reeks.”

I wished they would both shut up so I could think.

“We just don't have all the pieces of the equation—” Boston started.

“No.” York shook his head. “This is not some algebra problem you can just solve—”

“Uh, I take calculus, not algebra. At least I will, if Mrs. Doyle—”

“Boston, they
shot at us
! They tried to kill us!”

Andi pounded the back of York's seat with a fist. “Settle down up there!”

“I'm sure they didn't know they were shooting at kids,” I said. “There are a lot worse things going on in those woods than high school parties, trust me.”

“How would you know?” Andi asked.

I slumped back in my seat, suddenly tired. “I just know.”

Boston latched onto my suggestion. “Maybe they were aiming for the tires.”

“And you're supposed to be the smart one,” York huffed.

“You got any better ideas?”

York thought a moment. “One.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“They weren't busting up a drug deal. They were the ones
making
the deal.”

York let his words settle over the car.

Arresting druggies by day, feeding them by night.
The idea sickened yet somehow didn't surprise me.

“Oh, come on.” Boston rolled his eyes at his brother.

“They obviously had some sort of alternate motive for being at the docks,” York insisted.

“‘Ulterior,' not ‘alternate,'” Boston corrected. “And I don't think police really need a ‘motive' to be anywhere at all.”

“They're crooked,” York whispered, ignoring Boston. He ran his hands through his hair and leaned forward in his seat. “Holy shit. Crooked cops.”

Andi narrowed her eyes at the back of York's head, and Boston opened his mouth but found no words. None of us could disagree.

I didn't know exactly what had happened back there in the woods, but whatever it was, it was definitely crooked.

 

13

WE PASSED A bag of beef jerky around the car and went over our options. Boston still wanted to go to the police, drugs and all, but York convinced him it would be our word against the crooked cops'. I didn't add that my mom's history might make our claim a little less convincing. Andi suggested twice that we dump the SUV and everything in it and just pretend none of this had happened, although she had no solution for how the hell we would get back home.

In the end, the only thing we could agree on was that we needed to get out of sight until we figured out what to do, so Boston kept the SUV's wheels pointed toward the cabin. Mostly we practiced proclaiming our innocence to one another.
Not our drugs! Not our bullet in the bumper!
Of course, there was still the issue of running over an officer. That one was definitely on us.

“But if we ran over a
crooked
cop,” Boston argued, “maybe we won't be in as much trouble.”

“
That
cop wasn't crooked,” York said. “He was one of the police busting up the party.”

“But!” Boston stuck his finger in the air as though inspiration had just struck. “What if the only reason they were breaking up the party was to get everyone away from the drug deal? What if they were in cahoots with the crooked cops at the dock?”

“Um.” York stared sideways at his brother. “Did you just say ‘cahoots'?”

This dissolved into several seconds of mocking, and I curled up in my seat, thinking of the officer we'd left in the woods. Did he have a family? Did the crooked cops help him after we left? The poor guy thought he was just busting up a party. He probably never imagined he'd end up dead. I pulled off my cap and put both hands in my hair, fingers massaging my disfigured scalp as I tried to make sense of the senseless. I didn't understand why the police were in uniform if they were up to no good, but it was the only hole I could drill into York's theory.

I tried again to muster up even a little bit of surprise. Cops who used their uniforms as beards for their real moneymaking job? It didn't sound so different from the pervert downtown who wore a suit to hide his disgusting habits, or the not-so-tough guy who held court outside the liquor store to cover up his insecurities. Walking lies, all of them.

“Look, this could be a good thing,” York was saying as I tuned back in. “We're not the bad guys now. Or we're not the
only
bad guys, anyway. It's almost like we stopped a crime. We're kind of vegemites.”

“You mean vigilantes?” Andi said, disdain in her voice.

“That's what I said.”

“Not even close,” Andi retorted. “And if you think you're going to turn in those drugs and get rewarded instead of handcuffed, you're an even bigger moron than I thought.”

“Call me a moron again, and we'll leave you on the side of the road to—”

“Stop!” The word flew out of my mouth unbidden. “Everyone, just stop talking.”

They fell silent and watched me, waiting. It was a second before I realized they expected me to speak.

“Oh; I didn't—I wasn't—” I stuttered. “I don't have anything to add.”

York rolled back in his seat, and Andi shook her head at me. “God, you're so weird.”

Yeah, and you're so normal, you violin-toting klepto.

Boston caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “You're sure that stuff's heroin?”

“I'm sure.”

I heard the second, silent question he didn't ask, and answered that one, too.

“I don't do drugs.”

He dropped his eyes back to the road and, thankfully, dropped the subject as well.

“York's right,” Boston said. “This is good. We have—we have . . . 
leverage
.”

He and York shared a tight smile and a nod, apparently soothed by the idea that the drugs were somehow our ticket
out of trouble. But until we cashed that ticket, we were still just a bunch of teenagers driving around with an insane amount of heroin.