The A-Word (17 page)

Just like Bo had talked about in the history class I’d missed.

Mom struggled to sit up. She blinked at me with glassy, bloodshot eyes. “Is everything all right, Jenna? You look pale.”

“Want some chicken, Mom?” I heard myself ask.

“Sure, sweetie,” she said. She slumped back down. “I should probably eat something, shouldn’t I?”

W
hen I went back upstairs, Bo was long gone and my brother was who knows where again. I called Maggie. I wanted to talk more about Bo’s history class lecture, but she wanted to know if she should bite the bullet and ask Billy Compton to Homecoming. He played alto sax in the Spring Creek marching band. Like Ryan, he was somewhat socially awkward. That last part didn’t surprise me: anyone who willingly wore a furry hat in one hundred degree Texas weather so he could march sideways while playing the theme from
Star Wars
had to have issues.

“He makes my pulse do this
thing
,” Maggie said, sounding breathy. “So f-ing cute.” She’d kept an eye on him at the football game—mostly his lips on that sax.

I told her I agreed, although in truth he was skinny as a beanpole, but you never knew with guys. One growth spurt and he could fill out nicely.

We hung up and I finished my homework. But all I could think was that I still didn’t have my learner’s permit and that
if something was going to break with all these mysteries that were piling up in A-word land, then I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. Which was when I realized that there was only one person who might know the truth. One living person, that is. Terry McClain. Amber’s Terry.

I could even call him. Would I call him?

Yes. No. Maybe.

He’d be traumatized by the night of the break-in, though. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair to dredge up all those painful memories. On the other hand, he was smart and analytical. A lab guy. Head of stuff at Texicon now. So it stood to reason he’d want to find the attacker as much as I did, right? Geeks like him didn’t like unanswered questions. Maybe that’s even why he’d let Amber go, because she’d had no interest in pursuing the case. (Had he known she was dead, he might think differently, of course.) But I had to be subtle.

I picked up my phone, trying to remember his number from when he’d called Amber.

I pressed what I thought it should be. Some guy answered. Not Terry.

Tried another combination. A lady this time.

Why was I even doing this? Third attempt. No answer, not even a voice mail.

I’d give it one more chance. I pressed in the numbers. The call connected.

“Terry McClain.”

My pulse did a wild hurdle.

“Terry!” Only then did I realize that I had no earthly idea what I was going to say. “Hi! This is Amber’s friend Jenna Samuels. You know—the girl who was with her when we stopped at your house and drank coffee from your new K-cup machine?”

“Um, yeah?”

It didn’t go much better from there.

“Well, you know how Casey’s training to be an EMT, right?” I began, my armpits sweating up a storm because that particular cover story began and ended with that sentence.

“Yeah? Is Amber with you?” He sounded hopeful and also something I couldn’t quite identify—nervous, maybe? It was hard to tell and that made me sweat some more.

Panicked, I launched into the same story we’d used in Austin with that guy Carl Whatley—the building manager—I was writing a story for the school paper for history on the growing crime problem and home safety.

“Amber says you might remember more than she does,” I fibbed. I waited for him to start rattling on. Instead, he was silent. Probably wondering what the hell this had to do with Casey becoming an EMT. Me, too.

“You were out that night, right?” I asked, hoping to encourage him so I could stop yammering.

“What of it?” he said, and the sharp tone of his voice stopped me in my tracks. “I was studying in the library. Where I always study. I came home. We’d been robbed. But you know that already or you wouldn’t have called.”

Which was true.

Click
.

“Hello?”

He’d hung up. I sat there with my phone in my hand. As has been well established, I was not an expert on guys. But I knew guilty when I heard it. A thought dawned on me. Maybe he hadn’t been at the library. Maybe he’d been cheating on her. And maybe, five years later, he’d realized the error of his ways and wanted Amber back. He’d gone so far as to get her that necklace. And here I was, a stupid teenager from
out of nowhere, about to blow everything. Either way, this was another dead end.

When my phone buzzed and vibrated again, I hoped I could apologize. Maybe Terry wasn’t a brilliant douchebag with bad phone manners. Maybe he’d remembered something. But when I glanced at the caller ID, I forgot all about Terry.

“Hey, Ryan,” I said, trying to sound casual and cheery. I thought ‘hey’ accomplished this more than ‘hi.’

“Hey Jenna,” he said back. “How was Austin?”

“Not bad.”

“How’s your dad?”

Where was this going? “Fine. Well, yeah, fine. How was practice?”

This seemed to please him, and he talked about the D-line and the coaches and how he knew Spring Creek would beat the pants off of North Ridge and that if he was lucky and kept at it, maybe Coach Collins would put him in again.

He talked and talked—about how Morris had eaten his sister’s shoe this morning and boy was she steamed and how he was so excited that the Football Booster Club folks had bought a bunch of these Hulk Smash Hands that made a loud smacking sound and everyone was going to smack their Hulk Hands after touchdowns at the next game. Which of course Ryan LOVED since he was the big Avengers fan, and he liked Bruce Banner even if Iron Man, aka Tony Stark was his favorite. Good talking. The kind I wanted from a boyfriend, just shooting the shit and telling me about his day and being casual and comfortable about it.

We laughed and he told me how the varsity guys were all going to gorge on big-as-a-dinner-plate chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and gravy this week to get carbed up, and how they might have an eating contest.

“I can eat at least three full-size platters,” he bragged, making a fake Hulk Hand smashing sound—
Crack crack!—
as a joke, which was honestly cute, and made my heart so happy I thought it would burst.

But here was the problem: A lot of guys, they wouldn’t even notice if their girlfriend wasn’t telling them about her stuff, too. They wouldn’t catch on that she was encouraging them to be all chatty so she didn’t have to say anything much.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must be bored listening to all that. You shoulda told me to shut up. Tell me about Austin.”

Shit
. “It was fine,” I said again, heart wincing.

It was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh,” Ryan said. The silence was loud. I knew he was waiting for me to go on. When I didn’t, he said, “Okay. Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

He was off the line before I could collect myself.

On the plus side, I guess Terry McClain was off the hook. Seriously. How could I blame him for being weird on the phone if I was being just as bad—to my own brand new boyfriend?

But I had to blame someone.

I tore out of my room and into Casey’s. Didn’t even knock. He was wearing sweats and a T-shirt and his hair was damp but still annoyingly perfect, and he was sitting on his bed, clicking away on his laptop. His room looked more orderly these days. Sparer, maybe, like he’d thrown stuff away—only I didn’t know what. I was used to tripping over dirty plates and bongs and other crap. But not lately.

“You’re making Mom not worry, aren’t you?” I said, without any preliminaries.

He looked up, brows knitting together, eyes curious.

“Just tell me,” I said.

I took his silence as a yes.

“You suck,” I told him. “You really do.”

“Jenna—”

“No. It’s wrong, Casey. It’s just damn wrong. That’s her right. To feel what she feels.”

“It’s safer,” he began.

“No. It’s easier.”

“Jenna.”

“Casey.”

Except I knew he was right. I hated him for it, but he was.

W
hen I got to school, Ryan Sloboda was waiting by my locker.

I was wearing regular jeans and a nondescript T-shirt and my old grey Converse. But I’d tried the khaki green eye shadow this morning and some sparkly bronzer on my cheeks and a peachy gold lip gloss that looked good with my complexion even if it did remind me a little too much of Casey’s skin when he was in full angel glow.

Basically, I hadn’t given up on looking good. I was feeling low, and this was the best I could do. The mustang #76 necklace was tucked into my T-shirt, but I knew if he looked, he could see the chain.

“Hey,” Ryan said.

“Hey,” I told him, heart tapping an SOS in my chest.

He leaned in, awkward about it, and we hugged. His chest felt warm against me. He was warm-feeling in general—not sweaty warm, but alive warm. Or maybe I noticed because I spent so much time with not-exactly-alive people. I thought
of something to say, something not awkward. The seconds ticked past.

He looked at me. “I thought about it last night. I wouldn’t push a guy friend to tell me stuff he didn’t want to tell me. So I shouldn’t push you, either. You’ve been through heavy shit, Jenna, you know? Your dad and your car accident and your mom being sick … I know it’s not the same, but when my Grandpa Dale passed real sudden when I was eleven, I was pissed at the world. But I didn’t want to talk about it. If someone asked how I was, I walked away. Or worse. ’Cause I couldn’t handle thinking that someone might be feeling sorry for me or whatever.”

He made his fake Hulk Smash Hands like we’d joked about last night.

My heart seemed to unfreeze. I grinned back at him, big and wide. On some level, he knew about my life—at least the parts that were public, which were more than I liked to think about. But I was so focused on the angel secret that sometimes I forgot the sum total of everything. A happy voice shouted at me:
Jenna Samuels, Ryan Sloboda is a good guy. He is the guy who hung onto that sheep during Mutton Busting and didn’t let go. Stuff like that, it tells you about a guy. You like the right person. You made the right choice
.

“I get it,” Ryan said then. “I really do. You went with your brother. That’s cool.”

The warning bell rang then, but we stood at my locker for a few more seconds, just looking at each other.

“I found a dress,” I told him, figuring this would be the subtle way to check if we were still on for Homecoming. “It’s a nice one.” Of course somehow I’d have to get to the mall to actually buy it, but he didn’t need to hear that part.

It worked: He told me he would wear his church suit and
did I want one of those mums? Because he would get me one if I did.

“Doesn’t have to be big,” I told him.

He nodded, looking relieved.

We both knew we weren’t talking ordinary corsages. The whole mum thing was an underground-cheerleader-moms-with-hot-glue-gun-skills business here in Texas. (Mum is short for chrysanthemum, for those of you who aren’t local.) Even the grocery stores got in on it. The mums weren’t real: You bought a huge fake white flower, hot-glued it to a cardboard backing with a big old ribbon in the school colors and then added stuff. Candy and little charms and sometimes even stuffed animals and bulbs that lit up and occasionally cowbells, which I felt was sexist, but who would ask me?

Casey’s freshman year, I’d helped him make one for Lanie. We glued on a full size teddy bear with a sweater sporting his football number. The damn thing had been so heavy that Lanie had to carry it around on a hanger. But Casey said she loved it, which flummoxed me. I was not a girl who wanted a fake mum so huge that I had to drape it around my neck like a Homecoming noose.

Ryan agreed about mum size. The second warning bell rang. When we parted ways I was happy, as in really truly happy in a way I hadn’t been for a long time, for about three seconds—until I spotted Lanie Phelps in the Commons area, batting her eyelashes at Donny Sneed. Which even then I might have ignored, except my brother chose that moment to walk by. I still never quite knew when and if he’d show up for school. Often we’d arrive together, park, and then by the end of the day, I’d realize he’d gone off somewhere.