Summer on the Moon (10 page)

Delia stood in the middle of the dirt lawn, gripping the handle of a rake so new the white bar code label glowed in the dim light. “You didn’t wake up you-know-who, did you?”

“Nope.” Socko sat on the front step to put on the shoes he’d carried down the stairs so he wouldn’t wake up you-know-who. A wasted effort. “If his own snoring didn’t wake him up, nothing can.”

Delia waved a hand. “I’m thinking flower beds along the driveway.”

It was so dark out, Socko could barely see the driveway.

“And my hedge right about here.” She scratched a line in the dirt with the rake handle. “Everything else is going to be lawn.”

“Do you know how to plant a lawn?” he asked.

“The bag’s got instructions.”

Socko read the print on the back of the bag by the light over the front door. “We don’t have a spreader or a roller, and it’s summer. It says right here, ‘plant in late spring.’”

“It is what it is.” Delia handed him the rake. “Here. Fluff up the dirt.”

“Fluff up the dirt,” he mumbled. But he figured helping her might convince her to do something more than “try” to check on Damien, so he scrabbled the tines of the rake across the ground. The dust rose. He sneezed.

Delia followed him, flinging seeds into the air. “See? Who needs a spreader?”

When all the seeds had been flung, Socko consulted the bag again.
“To ‘ensure good contact between seed and soil,’ we need a roller filled with water to make it heavy.”

“We’re heavy,” said Delia. “We’ll
stomp
the seed in.” They took baby steps back and forth across the yard, stomping the seed in.

“Are you gonna find out about Damien today?” Socko asked, mincing toward the road.

“Yeah, yeah. Keep stomping.”

Delia and Socko were heading in opposite directions on their stomping mission, so at first only Socko saw the truck.

“Why are you not stomping?” she called over her shoulder.

“Mom?”

Delia turned and was caught in the truck’s headlights. “Take a look at that!” She came and stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders. “That moving van is huge. No one owns that much stuff!”

The behemoth moving van stopped right in front of their house. Socko remembered the General’s comment about Santa Claus. But with a series of high-pitched beeps, the truck backed into the driveway of the house across the street.

The man in the passenger seat got out, unfolded a piece of paper, and smoothed it against the side of the van.

“They’ve got so much stuff they need a map to show where to put it,” Delia whispered.

The first thing the men pushed down the ramp was huge and wrapped in padded blankets. It had three thin black legs. Although the men moved it carefully, when it hit the hard surface of the driveway, it boomed a hollow note. “You think it’s a grand piano?” Delia breathed.

A china cabinet followed the piano down the ramp, then a cushy leather chair, then a dozen cartons so big a couple of homeless guys could have slept in them with room to spare.

“So they have a lot of stuff.” His mother squeezed his shoulders. “We’ll have a lawn before they do. Keep stomping.”

Socko continued to stomp, but not with the same vigor. The parade of stuff kept him distracted. And stomping seed in front of the moving guys was embarrassing.

“Sweet,” said Socko, watching the men carry a flat screen TV as big as their picture window down the ramp.

“Study,” said Delia, still stomping. Delia’s recommended route to everything he wanted had been reduced to that single word.

He threw up his hands. “What’s wrong with ‘win the lottery’?”

“Hey,” said Delia as the men carried a Ping-Pong table into the house. “Maybe these people got a kid your age.”

Yeah, a kid with tons of stuff. All Socko had was a stop sign with a bullet hole through the
O
. Impressive.

Computers … a hutch … three more armchairs …

A sound from inside his own mostly empty house caught his attention. The General was at the window, slapping the glass with his palm.

“I’ll see what he wants.” Socko let himself into the house.

The General pointed at the thick king-size mattress the moving men were carrying. “I want to live over there.”

“Me too.”

“What are you and Delia Marie doing out there, anyway? An Indian rain dance?”

“Gardening.” Socko nuked a mug of water, added coffee crystals, and stirred. He handed it to his great-grandfather. “You want something to eat?” He was in no hurry to go back to looking stupid in front of the moving van guys.

“No, but if you get me my electric razor I’ll cut off those girl curls of yours, give you a GI haircut.”

“Thought you were a cook, not a barber.”

“In the armed services you do a little bit of everything.”

A GI haircut would drive Delia nuts. A shaved head or a buzz cut so short it was more scalp than hair was popular with Rapp’s gang. “I better let Mom cut my hair.”

“If she doesn’t do it soon, we’ll have to change your name to Betty.”

Socko went back outside.

“Take over.” Delia pumped the front of her blouse in and out with one hand. “I’m running late and I’m sweaty as a fry cook.”

Great. Now he got to look stupid all by himself.

The last thing to come out of the truck was a basketball hoop. It took both guys twisting it back and forth on its heavy base to walk it up the driveway. They looked over the papers on a clipboard, then locked the house. “Keep up the good work,” the driver called to Socko as he swung himself up into the cab.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” added the second mover as he hopped in on the passenger side.

The van pulled into the street and turned right.

Socko listened until the engine’s growl became silence, then sprinted across the street to get a better look at the new people’s stuff. The sun was fully up now. He shaded his eyes with one hand and peered up at the basketball hoop. It had a glass backboard and a shot clock welded to the pole. It was easy to see that a street-bunged basketball had never swished through its white net.

Socko was a city kid, and he knew he should be slick at shooting hoops. But he wasn’t. The court at the park was Tarantula territory, so he didn’t go anywhere near it if he could help it.

He pictured the scene in his near future when the kid who owned the hoop challenged him to a game of H-O-R-S-E and he embarrassed himself completely.

Man, he hated this place.

Socko knew he was going dangerously fast. He didn’t care. He rode the skateboard up the short wall at the shallow end of the pool, catching some air before doing a 180.

He was ticked. His mom got him out of bed way before O-dark thirty to stomp grass seed, and he rolled right out, didn’t even complain. But when he begged for a ride back to the old neighborhood to check on Damien, her answer was to gun the car engine and point at the basketball hoop as she drove away. “Looks like you’ll make a new friend soon!” Steaming mad, Socko had marched inside and asked the old man where he kept his electric razor, and the “girl curls” had hit the floor.

Delia would have a fit when she saw him—he did look a little like Meat now—but too bad. The air felt good on his freshly exposed scalp as he carved his way across the pool.

He slalomed back and forth, going higher and higher up the pool walls. He’d wiped out a couple of times already, but no one was watching and he hadn’t gotten hurt much. This was solo skating—no fault, no glory. His wheels touched down with a clatter.

He charged to the top of one of the side walls near the deep end and cleared it. “And the Mighty Ant totally airs the pool!” The board hovered above the wall. In that breath-held millisecond, he 180ed and jammed the wheels back down with both feet.

After executing a sweeping turn at the shallow end, he was plunging toward the deep end when a voice yelled, “Hey! Mighty Ant! This is a pool, not a skate park.”

He whipped his head around. Standing on the edge at the shallow end was a lanky long-haired girl with one hand on her hip, a cell phone in the other.

“Who the h—” The rest of the sentence was smacked out of him. He slid down the wall. Sprawled on his back, he listened to the
tick, tick
of the wheels on the flipped skateboard. He was trying to get the double-image of the girl to focus into a single person when she leapt off the wall.

Maybe he was hallucinating—a side effect of the crash—because she didn’t jump like a normal person. Even for a girl. This girl hovered, her ghost-blonde hair floating around her head, her iridescent phone catching the light like a laser sword. He closed his eyes.

He didn’t hear her land. He didn’t hear anything. He had definitely made her up.

“Ohmygosh!” someone whispered.

He opened his eyes and gasped. His breath riffled her long hair. It brushed his cheek. He’d never seen hair that color. Dazed, he almost reached up and touched it.

She pulled her hair back with one hand and watched him intently. “Are you okay?” When he didn’t answer, she punched a button on her cell phone.

“What’re you doing?” he moaned.

“Calling 911.”

“No, don’t!” He flailed an arm and the cell phone skated across the pool floor. “My mom’ll kill me.”

“Okay … so … you get hurt … I call 911 … and your mom kills you?” She crawled after the phone. “That makes sense!”

“Trust me, it does.” He pushed himself up and leaned against the wall of the pool.

She sat down cross-legged at a safe distance and studied him.

He wasn’t used to being looked at by a girl, and this one was really looking him over. “Do you have to be so … yellow?” he asked. In the bright sunlight her yellow shirt and shorts were almost blinding.

She fingered the hem of her T-shirt. “The outfit? Not my choice. Mother bought it. Everything’s in boxes and I can’t find any of my
real clothes.” She leveled her gaze on him again. “Where are your helmet and kneepads?”

“Don’t have any.” Suddenly the yellow of her outfit and the colors of everything around her looked runny, like an ice pop melting on a hot sidewalk. He rested his forehead on his bent knees.

Hearing a quiet
tap-tap
, he looked up. The girl was typing something on the phone’s keypad—but there were way too many numbers for it to be 911. “Who are you calling?”

“Not calling. Texting.” Her thumbs never slowed as they punched the tiny keys. Then the tapping stopped. “How’d you get the black eye?”

“Black eye? Oh.” The shiner Rapp had given him had ripened. The dull purple was surrounded by a sick greenish yellow. “A fight.”

She leaned toward him. “A fight? You mean, like, a real fight? Did you win?”

“Close enough.” He wasn’t about to say, “The other guy pulverized me.”

She turned the phone toward him and clicked.

“Wait … did you just take my picture?”

“Yup”—he heard another small click—“and sent it.”

He had to get out of here, but he felt too woozy.

With a jingle of little bells, a message came back. The girl read it and her cheeks turned pink.

“What?”

She slumped forward so her face was hidden by her hair. “My friend Izzy thinks you’re cute. BFN,” she said, typing the letters. She slid the cell into the pocket of her shorts and stretched her legs out in front of her. Her thighs were skinny; her shorts ballooned around them. But she had muscles, like she ran or something.

“Did you sneak over here from Lorelei or Colonial Park?” she asked.

Socko was just putting it together—she thought he came from one of the other subdivisions—when she answered her own question.

“No. You’re not from around here.”

“I
live
here,” he said. He could hear the attitude in his voice, like
he was imitating Rapp, but he guessed he needed a little attitude to talk to a girl. “What are
you
doing here? You’re in my territory.”

“Your
territory
?” Her eyes flitted from his cropped hair to the shiner to his T-shirt. “Are you in a gang or something?”

He could tell that through the strands of hair that hung over her face she was reading the message on his T-shirt. He popped himself on the chest with an open palm. “You looking at this?”

She flinched, then flipped her hair out of her face with a quick turn of her head and came right back at him with some attitude of her own. “As a matter of fact, yeah. Don’t look at me like that!
You’re
the one wearing a shirt that says, ‘Not a Suspect, I Just Fit the Description.’” He laughed, but stopped fast. After his recent series of lost fights and crash landings, laughing hurt.

She raised one invisible eyebrow. “And that was funny because …?”

“Long story.” He had chosen the shirt out of the Help Yourself closet at St. Ignatius—the nuns had been okay with the message. “I like my shirt better than yours.”

“Me too,” she admitted. “Do you really live here?”

“Yeah, really. Whoa!” He put both palms down on the cement. The world was spinning left. “Excuse me while I pass out.” He dropped his forehead to his knees again.

Feeling her breath on the back of his neck, he turned his head slightly. She was right up in his face again.

“Show me your pupils,” she demanded.

He closed his eyes down to a slit. “Why?”

“Open them! I’ve had first-aid training.”

Whoop-dee-doo
, he thought. But he opened his eyes.

Her eyes scanned back and forth. He had never looked at a girl’s eyes this close-up before. Hers were a freaky pale blue with long white eyelashes, which were freaky too—but pretty. And she smelled nice. He hoped she wasn’t breathing in, because his own smell was a whole different story.

“Your pupils are the same size,” she decided. “No concussion.”

Then why did he feel so dizzy? He propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands.

“Ohmygosh!” She pointed at his arm. “You’re bleeding.”

He looked down and thought he’d pass out for real. The back of his right arm was ground burger. He hadn’t even felt it—maybe he
was
in shock. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

“No. Seriously. You’re majorly bleeding!”

“You think this is bad? This is a nada. I saw a guy get shot once.”

The girl’s eyes opened wide. “Where?”

“Next to the Dumpster behind my building.”

Her eyes crossed. “I mean, in what part of his anatomy?”

“Heart. He was shot through the heart. Point-blank.”

She slapped her hands over her own heart. “Did he die?”

“What part of ‘through the heart’ did you not get?”

Her pupils large, she stared into his eyes for a long moment. “What did it look like?” she breathed.

“Blood everywhere.” It still made him sick to his stomach. “The shooter must’ve run through it. A trail of bloody footprints disappeared around the corner.”

“I thought you said you
saw
the shooting.”

“Sorry, guess I just missed it!” Why was she getting all technical? “The dead guy’s name was Frankie. He lived in 3F.”

“How terrible!”

“Being dead, or living in 3F?”

“Being dead, of course.” She acted all sad about poor dead Frankie, but for her it was like one of Mr. Marvin’s newspaper headlines. For him Frankie lying there in his own blood was real—he still had nightmares about it.

Why were they still talking? His arm was bleeding, his head was throbbing, she was weird. It was time to split.

“What’s your name?” The girl leaned back on her arms, stretching her legs out again. When the toe of one sneaker touched his calf, she pulled back fast and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Unless it really
is
‘the Mighty Ant.’” Holding up both hands, she wiggled her index and middle fingers, making air quotes. “I saw your little attempt at graffiti.”

“You spend a lot of time in drainpipes?” he asked, trying to cover his surprise.

“Apparently not as much as you do.” She scratched an ankle. “Actually that was a lifetime first for me.”

“Why are you checking out drainpipes all of a sudden?”

She looked away. “It’s not the best time to hang around my so-called new
home
. So, what
is
your name?”

“Socko,” he said. “Socko Starr.”

“Are you joking?”

“Sure. I go around making up crazy fake names for myself all the time—of course I’m not joking!”

She blinked her white lashes. “Your parents named you Socko?”

“Parent. My mom named me Socrates.”

Her pale eyebrows pinched together. “You mean like the ancient Greek philosopher?”

“Pretty much.” He didn’t want to act impressed, but she was the first kid he’d ever met who knew about ancient Greek philosophers.

“‘To find yourself, think for yourself!’” she proclaimed.

“Say what?”

“That’s a quote from Socrates.”

“Oh.” He’d never thought of Socrates as someone who had quotes. He’d never thought of him as anything but dead.

She held out a hand like they hadn’t been talking for a good ten minutes. “Livvy Holmes.”

He didn’t want to touch her hand. His was sweaty. “
Your
parents named you Livvy?”

“Olivia. But no one but Mother uses that name. Call me Livvy.” Her hand was still sticking out.

“Livvy?” He swiped his palm on his shorts really quick, then shook. “Where I come from the name Livvy would sound just about as snotty as O-livia,” he said.

“I thought you said you’re from here.”

“I
live
here, but I’m not
from
here.”

“Where
are
you from?”

“The city.”

“Which part?”

“The part where guys get shot through the heart.”

“You mean … it was, like, seriously dangerous?”

“You know, drugs, gangs, drive-by shootings. It’s pretty scenic.”

Did he just imagine it, or did she look excited? “Where are
you
from?” he asked.

“The Heights.” She raised her eyebrows, like “the Heights” should mean something to him. When he didn’t respond, she shrugged. “It’s not, you know,
scenic
like where you’re from, but I thought it was pretty perfect. Actually, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived. We had a tennis court in the yard, and Isabella Kennedy next door.”

“Who’s Isabella Kennedy?”

“Izzy.” She tapped the pocket with the cell phone in it. “My best friend since before we were born. Our mothers did Lamaze together.”

He had no idea how you “did Lamaze,” but he thought it must be nice having your best friend in your pocket.

“Izzy and I talked it over and we agreed that moving is not going to change our relationship.”

“Yeah … and how’s that working out for you?” he asked. “I haven’t talked to my best friend since I moved.”

A blue cell phone appeared in his face. “Call him.”

He almost reached for it, then remembered. “Can’t. His phone’s disconnected.”

She gave him a sympathetic frown. “Did his parents revoke his phone privileges?”

Socko snorted. “Yeah … something like that.” The wall of the pool felt warm against his nearly bare scalp. He stared up at a cloud and wished he hadn’t snorted. “Why’d you move here if your old neighborhood was so perfect?”

Livvy roped her arms around her knees again. “Moon Ridge is my dad’s project. You know, Holmes Homes?”

“Sure.” How could he not know? It was on all the signs.

“My father built lots of the subdivisions around here. But he was always the contractor. This one is all his. I get that he wants to live
and breathe the place 24/7, but they didn’t even warn me! One day a couple of weeks ago my parents were like, ‘Surprise! We’re moving!’” She sighed. “I guess you like it. It’s safe and you have your own personal skate park.”

“I hate it here.” Socko checked his arm. The scrape was doing something less than gush—but definitely more than ooze. Blood speckled the floor of the pool. He pressed his elbow into his damp T-shirt and stood. “Nice talking, but I’m outta here.” Socko tucked his skateboard under his uninjured arm; he figured he’d better walk it. He still felt kind of dizzy.

He made it as far as the corner of the building before she came trotting after him. “I’ll go with you. You don’t look too steady.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. Every now and then Socko shot a glance at her. She was a good head shorter than he was, but still tall for a girl.

“So, do you live with just your mom?” she asked.

“And my great-grandfather. I only met him a few days ago. We took him in trade for the house.”

She stopped. “Excuse me?”