The A-Word (20 page)

“What would you like me to say?” Bo asked.

“I think it makes you feel like the man.” Anger welled up, with images of the horrible things from that first slide. “Holding power over everybody. Over Amber.” I spun to face her. “You need to stand up to him. You need to.”

But Amber turned away. I felt like once I ran out of steam, we’d be where we always were. In the dark.

I turned, too, and my gaze settled briefly on one of the paintings. Then another. They were mostly his own, I realized, not just the one in the bedroom of that lady. Deep, beautiful colors. Different scenes, each of them, but in the ones I could see from here, there was always a female figure far in the background, tiny and distant, like she couldn’t be easily reached. If there was time—but there wasn’t—I could ponder this. Wonder about a dead man who would paint that over and over.

“Casey,” Bo said. His tone was soft.

I turned, eyes flashing between Bo and my brother.

“Here’s what she hasn’t told you, son. This is your war. Yours. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and figure out why.
You said it yourself. I told you to follow the riches. So why aren’t you doing that? Someone has tried to kill your sister. Twice. Isn’t that telling you something?”

Casey made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “It’s telling me that I need to take her and go. It’s telling me she’s right. You get your jollies off by manipulating us.”

“Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said?” Bo’s voice was thunderous. The loft shook. I saw—and heard—a rustling movement under the back of his shirt. Any second now, his wings would unfurl. Something inside me said that if they did, they would fill the room. My stomach knotted into a ball of concrete. “Do you know what free will is?”

“Forget free will, Bo. Fuck you.” Casey turned to me, holding out a hand. “Come on, Jenna. We’re going.”

I didn’t want to take his hand. I wanted to stay at Bo’s. But what else was I going to do? Like Bo said, this was Casey’s war.

A
mber caught up with us on the street while we were calling for a taxi. “I’ll drive you,” she said.

Bo wasn’t with her, but I sensed he wasn’t up there in his little sky palace twiddling his thumbs.

“Is he telling the truth?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Amber said.

“He’s been your boss for five damn years. How did he get those wrist scars?”

“Jenna. I really
don’t know
.” She sucked in a breath like she was about to say more, only she didn’t. But there was something in her eyes that told me she, too, was lying. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe … My head hurt from the overload.

“Whatever.” My brother was looking up at the sky. “Jenna’s late.”

“I don’t care,” Amber said. “You think he’s a pissant, anyway.”

“Yes, you do care. And not about what I think of Jenna’s boyfriend.”

More frosty glares all around. (But my heart did sing a little at the word “boyfriend.”) And then we did what I had wanted to do when we’d left the practice field. We drove back to school in time for the Bonfire.

LATER I WOULD believe that I was right, after all: We should have stayed at Bo’s. We should have talked and hollered and cut the truth free like they do diamonds. Hack them loose from their caves and squeeze the pretty out of the ugly coal. But Bo would have probably said that that’s the thing about free will. You don’t always do what you need to.

I SLIPPED MY phone out to call Maggie and tell her I was already at school. I knew she thought I was with Casey at the DMV taking my permit test.

“I won’t even text you,” she’d said earlier when I saw her in the hall before Spanish II. “Don’t want you to freak out and fail it or something.”

That only made me want to talk to her in the worst way. And that feeling grew. Now it was overpowering. I had to come clean. Tell her everything while we ate a gallon of chocolate ice cream and then let her give me one of those henna tattoos on my ankle. Or maybe somewhere more showy than that. If I could tell her, Maggie would have advice. Good advice. Best friend advice. If she believed me.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

But there was a text from Ryan.
Are you okay? Hope you make it for Bonfire. Talk later. ~R.

There he was again, spelling everything out fully, taking his time about it. I pictured him tapping his thumbs on the screen, making sure the message was just right for me. Was he home, maybe? Getting ready for the Bonfire, Morris
nipping at his heels? He had not run screaming (metaphorically speaking) from my brother’s antics on the football field. I memorized every word after reading it four straight times. That way if it got deleted, I’d still be able to see it in my head.

“You going to stay?” I asked Casey. Amber had driven off, not saying much. What was there to say, really? Like Bo, I suspected she’d be around somewhere. But that was her business. I’d done my best. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t want my help.

He shrugged. “I’ll be around. You just meet me at the Merc after, okay?”

We stood there looking at each other.

Then he took me by surprise and wrapped me in a hug, tight and then tighter. I wriggled my arms free and hugged him back, burying my face in his shoulder. I breathed against him, holding on until eventually it felt awkward and we let go.

“You really gave up weed?”

Casey laughed, almost a belly laugh but not quite. “Yeah. I really did.” His laugh dried up. “It was easier to let you think I didn’t.”

I pushed him away, feeling cranky. “You think I’m a little girl still, don’t you?”

“What I think is that sometimes I want things to just go back the way they were. Way back. Like to when we were little.”

“So you could pick on me?”

His lips arched into a grin. “Hell, yes.”

“Bo was quite the stoner back in the day,” I observed. “Maybe we should introduce him to loser Dave.”

Casey’s smile flickered. He shrugged. “Don’t think about Bo now, Jenna.”

We were quiet for a while. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You let Sloboda come to you, remember? He will.”

I rolled my eyes.

“He’s right, you know,” Casey said then, looking at his feet then finally lifting his head to look at me.

“Ryan?”

Casey shook his head. “No. Bo. I think he’s right, Jenna. I think he’s telling the truth. He just—well, I think that’s how it works. I have to get to it on my own.”

My heart bumped against my ribs. “Like looking more into what happened to Amber, you mean?”

He looked up and into my eyes. “It’s bigger, Jenna. That’s what Bo means with his ‘something-is-coming’ crap. It started with Renfroe. With those memory loss drugs he developed.
Memory
, Jenna. That’s big. That’s what Bo’s been talking about. You know what people could do with drugs like that? You could control a lot if you could control what people remembered, right? That’s everything. That’s what we all have. Memories.”

My mouth felt dry as a bone. “But you’re not a memory,” I said. “You’re here for me. Even Bo told you that. Because I was poisoned and a car almost ran me down and Dad is gone and Mom is …” I swallowed over the boulder in my throat, doing my best to hold things inside. I was a tough Texan girl, but even I was not beyond crying sometimes. “You know a lot of stuff for a guy who’s retaking Teen Leadership.”

Casey’s lips twisted into a crooked grin. “Stupid paper sack project.”

“Ass wipe teachers,” I said, going with it.

“Douchebag principal.”

I smiled at him.

“I’m going to solve this, Jenna. I know it’s what I’m meant to do. And then you can be proud. And I can stop—”

I held up a hand. “Shut up,” I said. “I’m always proud of you. Well, okay, maybe not when it comes to those laptop porn shenanigans. But with the big stuff. Always. God, Casey. That’s why they made you a damn angel. You are seriously the stupidest smart person I know.”

He looked away. “Not smart,” he whispered. But he held out his fist.

I turned my hand into a fist and bumped his.

“Go on.” Casey gestured toward the football field. “Band’s starting up. The whole shebang is about to begin. You wouldn’t want to miss old Ryan waving from the football player’s float would you?”

“Shut up,” I said again. “He’s going to be a famous screenwriter someday, did you know that?”

I hopped out of the Merc. The place was crawling with people—students and parents and teachers and people’s little brothers and sisters. The parade would come down the school road and then ride into the stadium and around the cinder track. Later, after the pep rally stuff, we’d end up back on the far end of the parking lot where they piled up a bunch of wood for the Bonfire. Now, the sound system was warming up. I turned to Casey and laughed because “Copperhead Road” was blaring. Same song that Amber had danced to on the bar to back at Wild Horses, dragging that poor, clueless faux-cowboy up there with her.

It’s before my time but I’ve been told …

Casey laughed from behind the closed door and shooed me away.

Across the parking lot, Maggie was waving. She was wearing jeans and a blue Mustang Power T-shirt. I was supposed
to be wearing the same thing—I’d promised her because as has been well established, Mags does not enjoy solo school spirit. I almost turned around again, but headed toward the field.

Halfway to Mags, I realized I hadn’t actually said goodbye.

I
t was a kick ass parade.

Someone had donated hundreds of samples of some new sports drink—
EXTRA ENERGY! Five different flavors!
Fit-looking college-age guys in matching T-shirts handed them to us from buckets as we pressed with the crowd into the stadium. I started to unscrew the cap off the tall plastic bottle.

“Those things are full of chemicals,” Maggie announced, using her “my body is a temple” voice. She set hers—sour green apple—on the ground and some short kid with unfortunate forehead acne picked it up.

The last thing I wanted was another fight. It was just an energy drink! And a free one at that. The really bad world stuff from Bo’s PowerPoint was still roaming free in my head. Maggie needed to get over herself.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the label on my berry surprise. “It’s got vitamins. That’s good, right?”

“You want another one?” one of the bucket guys asked Maggie. I took a closer look at his T-shirt. The logo over
his pocket was stitched with
EXTRA ENERGY!
and then underneath it:
Texicon
. Those Texicon folks must have buckets of money, too. Maybe one of their founders went to Spring Creek High, what with giving us free beverages along with the fancy new Jumbotron they’d donated.

Whatever. It was just a drink. That was not why we were here. Let everyone else gulp the things down. I pressed my bottle back in the guy’s hand.

Maggie grinned with a little nod of approval.

“C’mon,” I said, pulling her toward the stadium. I was too amped up to be thirsty anyway.

Soon we were standing along the cinder track while Ryan Sloboda—looking cute but sweaty in his football jersey—threw candy from the float straight at me. “Jenna!” he called, and my heart whirled like a top. I caught three in a row and dropped the last, then gave Mags a little frown, like:
Can I please eat this, even though it’s full of chemicals?
She burst out giggling. We split the little packages of Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish that I didn’t even realize he knew I liked. But somehow he did.

I almost felt happy again.

Only one moment gave me a pang. The senior football players’ moms’ float drove by—all decked out in red boas and tiaras like prom queens, smiling and tossing Dum Dum pops and beads to the crowd. They were silly-looking, that was for sure—grown women with day jobs wearing tiaras and long white gloves.

Except our mom should be up there, I thought. If Casey was still playing, she would have been. Maybe.

Maggie elbowed me. “I almost forgot! Show me your learner’s permit! Did you brother let you drive back here? Or was he all over-protective about it?”

“I, erm,” I said back. The wind had changed, coming up from the Gulf, stronger and humid-feeling. Thick air. Like a storm coming maybe. I felt sticky all of a sudden, my side-swept bangs plastering to my forehead.