West of Nowhere (26 page)

From her stealth position behind a tree, Amber watched as Madison approached the fire hydrant on the corner, craning her neck to look for Joy. She could all but see the wheels spinning inside the girl’s head when she spotted her, as if considering a quick backtrack before she was seen.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Where’s Joy?” Not exactly a friendly greeting, but at least she hadn’t run in the opposite direction.

“Union meeting. She’ll be home in about an hour.” She relieved Madison of her backpack as they started toward the house.

“Why didn’t you bring Skippy?”

“He was asleep with your grandpa.”

A dark-haired boy zipped along the sidewalk on his bicycle, causing both of them to jump into someone’s yard to escape being run down. “Hey, y’all,” he yelled, his voice an exaggerated drawl, obviously meant to mock Madison’s southern accent.

“Butthole!” she yelled.

“Whoa, watch the name-calling.” Amber would have said something far worse. “Who was that?”

“Jason Perini. He thinks he’s hot snot, but he’s just a cold booger.”

She didn’t dare point out that boys that age usually teased the girls they liked. “Let’s play a game, Madison. You ever play Truth or Dare? You pick whichever you want, and then you either have to do what I dare you to do, or you have to answer my question with the truth.”

“You do it.”

“Okay, I’ll go first. I pick Dare. You dare me to do something and I will.”

Madison stopped on the sidewalk and scratched her chin thoughtfully. Suddenly her eyes lit up and she pointed to Amber’s pocket. “I know! I dare you to eat a cigarette.”

“Ew! That’s disgusting.”

“I dare you!”

This would probably make her sick, but it was worth it if she could get Madison to play the game.

“Fine.” It wasn’t as if she’d never lit the wrong end of a cigarette and gotten specks of tobacco on her tongue. She readied her mouth with lots of saliva to make swallowing easier and pinched off an inch of tobacco. “Just a bite, though. Keeling over dead would take all the fun out of the game, and you’d have to drag my body home like a sack of potatoes.”

Madison giggled. “This is going to be so gross.”

“Okay, here goes.” The bitter taste of tobacco leaves filled her mouth as she soaked the blob with spit and swallowed it whole. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Yuck! That’s worse than vegetables.”

Amber smacked her lips to rid her mouth of the foul taste. “That was sickening, but now it’s your turn. Truth or Dare?”

“Truth!” Obviously wary of subjecting herself to a vengeful dare, Madison walked right into Amber’s trap.

“Okay, so I get to ask a question and you have to tell me the truth. No fibbing.”

“As long as I don’t have to eat a snail or something.”

“So…where did you really go the last time I came to meet you at the corner? I was waiting for you right where I was supposed to be and saw you coming down the street, but then you turned around and went the other way.” Amber wasn’t absolutely sure about all that, but figured she could force Madison into coming clean if she was forceful enough about her version of events.

“I was there too but you didn’t see me.”

“No, you weren’t. And I just ate a nasty old cigarette”—she coughed for effect and made a sour face—“so you have to tell me the truth.”

Madison walked ahead a few steps and then stopped and turned around. “I walked with Melanie. She lives on that other street and she said I could get home that way. But then I got lost and went the wrong way around the circle.”

“How did you find your way home?”

“A crossing guard…she told me how to get to Garfield.”

That explained why it had taken her an extra fifteen minutes to get home, but not why she’d gone that way in the first place. “How come you didn’t want to walk with me and Skippy?”

The girl shrugged, likely realizing that an honest answer in this case would show her as not being very nice.

“Are you going to tell Joy? She’ll be mad at me.”

“No, but I bet she’d be disappointed because you told her a fib about me not being there to meet you.” To say nothing of the fact that she’d gotten Amber in trouble, which had probably been her sole intent.

“That’s even worse. I’d rather she be mad at me than disappointed. But you promised not to tell her.”

Amber had hoped to clear her name, but couldn’t do that without telling Joy. She could, however, leverage it to make Madison behave in the future. “I won’t, but you have to make a promise too—that you won’t ever do anything like that again. Friends don’t get each other in trouble, and we’re pretty good friends now. Right?”

Madison’s head bobbed up and down in an eager nod. Whether it was a pact of genuine friendship or merely an effort to avoid being ratted out to Joy, Amber didn’t care. All she really wanted was an end to the shenanigans.

Jason Perini appeared again at the corner on his bike and Amber tugged Madison off the sidewalk, though she’d been tempted to stand her ground, knowing he would have dodged them at the last second rather than risk crashing.

“You’re a smelly brat!” Madison yelled. “I can’t stand him. I want to make him stop.”

“Does he bother you at school too?”

“He bothers everybody. He’s a bully.”

“Bullies only act tough to make everyone afraid. Sometimes you just have to stand up to kids like Jason and let them know it’s not working. If he realizes you aren’t scared, maybe he’ll leave you alone.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“If it gets to be a big problem, you should tell Joy. She could talk to your teacher about it, and maybe your teacher would talk to Jason’s parents.”

“But that’s tattling.”

“Tattling isn’t always a bad thing.” Amber didn’t dare share the fact that she’d kicked the crap out of a bully in sixth grade as her classmates cheered, but she hoped for Madison’s sake that one of Jason’s other victims was brave enough to take him on. “Just try to stand up to him and see if that works. If it doesn’t, we’ll talk it over again and try to think up something else.”

As they neared the house, Madison asked, “I’m supposed to call Syd today. Can I use Joy’s laptop in the camper?”

Joy was generous with her computer, so Amber readily agreed. “You can bring it into the dining room if you want.”

“Grandpa’s TV makes too much noise.”

She couldn’t argue with that. “Okay. Joy should be home in an hour or so, and your grandpa wants to make spaghetti for supper.”

“Yum!” Madison tore through the front door and greeted her grandpa and Skippy before disappearing into the camper with her backpack.

“She’s in a good mood,” Shep said. “Wonder what kind of mood you’re going to be in when you open this?”

Excitement and dread filled her as she saw the envelope from the testing service. Either she was now a high school graduate or a flunky doomed to suffer through another round of classes before she could retake the test. If it was the latter, she could cross off most of the jobs she’d seen advertised.

Nervously, she tore open the envelope. Language arts, mathematics, science…only one score mattered.
Overall Status: Pass
.

“Woo!” Amber tossed the papers into the air as Skippy ran for cover. “I’m officially a high school graduate.”

“Atta girl! Let me see.”

They looked over the results again. As expected, most of her scores were quite high, but she’d barely squeaked by on math. Close didn’t matter.

“I need to text Joy.” Her hands still shaking, she pounded out the news on her phone. Within seconds, it rang.

“That’s fantastic! We should go out to dinner to celebrate, just you and me. I’m on my way home now.”

“Wow, a date with my girlfriend.” Amber would have been just as happy to celebrate her feat with Shep’s spaghetti, but a real date with Joy made it extra special. “Hey, Shep. I’m going to hop into the shower for a few minutes. Will you keep an eye on Madison? She’s out in the camper talking to Syd.”

“Hope she’s telling her to jump in the lake.”

Amber headed out to the camper for her toiletries and clothes, eager to share her news but expecting Madison to pout about not being allowed to come along on their date. “I passed my test, and Joy’s taking me out to dinner to celebrate. That means you and your Grandpa Shep get all the spaghetti to yourselves.”

Clearly startled by her sudden presence, Madison hurriedly covered something in her backpack. There was no laptop on the dinette table to suggest she had been video chatting with Syd.

Amber’s eyes were drawn immediately to the bed, which was wrinkled from someone having crawled on it. She certainly hadn’t left it that way, and when she moved to straighten it, she saw that Joy’s gun safe had been moved from its usual place on the shelf by her pillow. “Madison, how come you were crawling on the bed?”

“I wasn’t.”

A lie. Obviously she’d been fooling around with the gun safe, and Amber wasn’t going to let that go. Kids had no business handling guns, even if they were locked up. “Were you playing with Joy’s lockbox?”

Madison didn’t answer, which was just as good as a confession as far as Amber was concerned.

“You shouldn’t go messing in other people’s things.” When Amber slid the case back to where it belonged, she was startled to realize it was unmistakably lighter than usual. She picked it up and shook it—nothing rattling inside. “Oh, my God…did you open this box?”

Again, no answer.

“Please tell me you didn’t…” She tugged the backpack from Madison’s grip and looked inside. Sure enough there was Joy’s pistol. The ghastly image of one child being shot by another while others screamed raced through her head. “Oh, my God…oh, my God, Madison!”

“I was only going to borrow it. I wanted to show it to Jason so he would be scared and leave me alone. That’s what you told me to do. You said I should stand up to him.”

Overwhelmed with horror, Amber shrieked, “You don’t ever threaten anyone with a gun! You’re a child, for gosh sakes. Joy is going to freak out.”

“You can’t tell her! She’ll get mad at me and I’ll get grounded.”

“You deserve to be grounded. I can’t believe you did this! You went into her private things and opened a box that had a lock on it. How did you even…?” With shaking hands, she reached into the backpack, wrapped her palm around the grip and removed the gun.

Bang!

“Fuck!” Amber dropped the gun on the floor and clutched her thumb, sure it was broken from the recoil.

In the same instant, Madison screamed and covered her ears, instinctively drawing her feet up onto the bench.

“Are you okay?”

Madison nodded rapidly, her eyes wide.

Suddenly the door flung open and Joy appeared. “What the hell just happened?”

“I was just—”

“Amber was showing me your gun and it went off!”

“Madison!” Amber barked.

Joy sharply ordered the girl to her room and turned her glare on Amber. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have killed somebody. You had no right to—”

“No right to what? Take your gun out of her backpack?”

“How did she get it in the first place? You’re the only one who knew the combination.”

“Yeah, right,” Amber said, laying on the sarcasm. “No way would such a
brilliant
child be able to figure out that your secret code is her birthday. She was going to take it to school and scare a bully. You’re lucky I noticed she’d been crawling on the bed.”

Joy was breathing so fast, Amber thought she might hyperventilate. “What was she even doing out here by herself? You were supposed to be watching her.”

“You expect me to follow her everywhere she goes? She’s nine years old, for fuck’s sake, not two. Who’s watching her in her room right now?” She didn’t blame Joy for being upset but she wasn’t going to take the fall for Madison, not this time. “I hate to break this to you, but Madison lies, and she sneaks around and goes through people’s stuff. You can’t trust her.”

“I can’t trust anybody,” Joy yelled. “Why didn’t you just send her inside and wait for me to get home? You don’t know how to handle a gun any better than she does.”

Amber counted to ten—getting only as far as three—and as evenly as she possibly could, replied, “All I could think about was taking it away from her.”

“Unbelievable.” She squatted and fingered the hole in the floor. “Of all the irresponsible things you’ve ever done, this one takes the cake.”

Amber whirled around and grabbed her rain jacket and purse. She’d had enough of this. “Nice to know you’re keeping a list.”

“I’m not keeping a list. Don’t be such a—”

“You know what? Just stop telling me what to be. My job was to take care of your father, not your kid. If I’d wanted one of those, I wouldn’t have given mine away.” She pushed past Joy and stormed out the door, unsure of where she was headed. All she wanted was to get away.

“I want the truth, Madison,” Joy said sternly. She was still shaken from hearing the gunshot as she walked toward the camper.

“Amber was showing it to me and it went off.”

“Which one of you took it out of the box?”

“She did. She was telling me about how I needed to stand up to Jason Perini. He calls me a jungle bunny because I’m half African-American.” Madison jutted out her lip in a blatant play for sympathy. “Amber said I should take it to school and scare him with it.”

Not a word of that could possibly be true. Even at her most immature, Amber would never have been so reckless as to play with a gun in front of a nine-year-old.

Joy sighed and moved toward the bedroom door. “This is so disappointing…especially since we had a long talk about lying just a few days ago. I think you need to stay in here and think about it some more. I’ll come back later and maybe you’ll be ready to tell me the truth.”

She closed the door behind her and walked into the living room where her father muted the TV so they could talk.

“Did you get anything else out of her?” he asked. He’d heard the commotion earlier and rolled out to the deck just in time to see Amber stomp off.