The Other Fish in the Sea (29 page)

Anyhow, I think we were all expecting a longer drive than what we got. It was maybe six minutes before the beeping stopped and Jillian pointed across the bridge to The Charcoal House. It’s a restaurant right next to where we go to school. And it’s infamous for the bar being a known place for cougars to hunt.
 

“Oh my God! My mom’s a fucking
cougar
!”

Tristan was doing his best to not laugh his ass off at me or my mom or both of us, but his voice was cracking when he said, “Well, just hold on now…we don’t know for sure if she is or not. She might just be having a really poorly prepared meal and not actually singing karaoke in the Wrinkle Room…”
 

The Wrinkle Room is the affectionate name for the damned bar attached to the restaurant that serves notoriously mediocre food. Tristan and I know all this because although he owns his
own
bar over by San Diego State, Jeff’s dad is good friends with the owner of this place and has told us all kinds of stories about when he comes here. He’s still really attractive for being in his early forties and looks like he’s in his late twenties—early thirties,
maybe
—and he’s constantly getting hit on by women who are his age or older who
think
he’s a decade or three younger than them. He thinks it’s hysterical, as does his son.

“Do you think Grey might be here tonight?” I asked Tristan who now has tears streaming down his cheeks. I don’t see his car, but then again from where we’re parked, I can’t see the majority of the parking lot or my mom’s car either.

“Mm, I doubt it…Friday
is
karaoke night and if what he’s said is true, it tends to be a college crowd. But call Jeff…he’d probably know.”

Duh…

Ring, ring, ring, ring…
and
voicemail. Figures.
 

I left him a message and sent him a text, but when ten minutes went by and I didn’t get a response, I knew I wouldn’t get one. His phone is either dead, in his Jeep, in the kitchen or he’s asleep, which means he’s dead to the world.

“Great. So now what do we do? I have to know what she’s doing in there…”

“Why don’t you just go in and look around?” Camie asked me rationally.

“I can’t! My mom will see me and if Grey is here, he’ll see me too!”

“Yeah, they’ll recognize all of us,” Melissa agreed. She and Brandon joined us in the bus when we all parked and now the two of them are scrolling through Tristan’s playlist.

“Jillian’s ether—well, she moves like a wraith, she could go.”
 

Even with my messed up mental acuity, I
swear
Pete was about to say that Jillian is ethereal, which you could probably say she is, but still…it would’ve been a weird choice of words in
my
mind for him to use so maybe that’s why he went with wraith instead. I glanced at him and it sort of looked like he regretted what he’d essentially just blurted out as he was staring blankly at some point above his head and was minutely shaking his head back and forth. Then I transferred my attention to Jillian. For the
barest
flash of a moment, she didn’t look the least bit happy with him or his suggestion, but then her features transformed back into their usual state of boredom and she shrugged.

“Sure. I’ll go, but I’m taking Brandon…no one will recognize him either and if we look like we’re on a date, it’ll be more convincing,” she said with a little smirk and what I honestly think was a sinister light in her eyes, neither of which did the rest of the gang catch as both were mostly hidden by her motion of taking her hair out of the high braided ponytail she was wearing before fluffing it up a little.

Then she completely shocked us all when she put actual makeup on. Honestly, it wasn’t a lot, but after applying some colored lip gloss and being done with her mini makeover, she looked like a damned supermodel. That’s odd though…I’ve never seen her make an effort with how she looks before. I know for a fact she’s not interested in Brandon and vice versa…even though with the way they both look right now I could totally picture them together on the cover of some star tabloid. Huh. I really think she’s up to something, though.
Ack…
I don’t have time or the mental fortitude to ponder Camie’s sister’s balefulness tonight.
 

“Okay, good! You two go and scout the place out…Brandon, here’s what my mom looks like,” I said, showing him my mom’s picture on my phone.

I held my breath as I watched them go inside hand-in-hand, then I blew it out and waited. I don’t know how much time elapsed before they came back to the bus, but it was enough for me to chew most of my nails down to nothing and have Camie yank my hand away from my mouth at least four times.
 

“Well?”

“She’s in the bar, sitting alone but smiling,” Jillian informed me while taking her place in the passenger seat again, but instead of swiveling the seat to face us, she kept her back to us.

“I still wanna know how you got into the fuckin’ bar! I mean you look way older and fuckin’ hot, but they check ID,” Brandon said, sounding completely stymied.

“Trade secret,” Jillian’s voice floated back to us from the front of the bus.

“Dude, I thought you were fuckin’ kidding about that wraith shit, but you totally weren’t! You guys, check this…we go in there holding hands, right? She tells me to ask for a table and the second our hands unclasp, she’s fuckin’ gone! I mean she completely fuckin’ vanished! So I get a table and then when I’m walkin’ through the restaurant kinda lookin’ around for her or Kate’s mom, she’s all of a sudden right behind me again tellin’ me we can go! She scared the shit outta me comin’ up behind me like that…”

“Yeah, she can do that sometimes,” Camie said with a head nod of sympathetic understanding.

“Well shit. Now we have to wait until she decides to leave…I gotta know if she’s shacking up with random men or random
college
guys or what. Hey Camie, you told your mom you and Jillian are staying at my house tonight, right? I don’t know how long she’ll be here, but this place doesn’t close until one-thirty and last Friday she didn’t get home until like four in the morning.”

“Yeah, Melissa and I did the round robin, so we’re all good on the no curfew.”

“AMEN!”
Tristan shouted like he was in a Southern Baptist church service. Then while the rest of us snickered at his enthusiasm, he planted a big ol’ kiss on Camie who he has in his lap in the driver’s seat.

“We should play a game or something while we wait! Any suggestions?” Melissa asked, bubbly as usual.
 

I can see where Camie would be confused about the Melissa and Brandon thing. Melissa looks and usually behaves so strait-laced and Brandon is like the polar opposite, practically exuding danger. It’s weird. And it’s not just his physical appearance…there’s just something about his mannerisms that a smart person will read as a warning to not engage with him unless they’re absolutely sure of victory. Keith was right not to start something with him the other day. My intuition tells me that Keith would’ve had his ass handed to him even though he’s bigger than Brandon.

All of us aside from Camie and Pete, but only because he’s staring out the window, looked at Jillian in small surprise when she threw a deck of cards into Melissa’s lap.

Jillian just looked at us and in her usual way she responded with, “What? This isn’t my first rodeo you know. I always come prepared. I carry a towel everywhere I go too.”

“Nice! ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ reference…I like it,” Tristan said, nodding his approval. Then he looked at Camie and sort of waggled his eyebrows at her and said, “Hey Baby, still forty-two…”
 

Camie giggled and rolled her eyes. I don’t think I even wanna know what he meant by that, though.

Then Jillian pulled out an actual towel and recited what I’m pretty sure is an actual line from the book. “About the most massively useful thing you can have.”
 

We chose Crazy Eights and by a non-verbal declaration, we all decided to gang up on Tristan. I don’t know why we did it but it
was
pretty funny. However, Tristan didn’t seem to agree and after a little while, he took his ball and went home.

“Fuck this…I’m done playin’ your reindeer games.” Tossing his cards in the pile, Tristan took Camie’s from her hand and added them to his, got up, raised the overhead and then while gathering her as she giggled at him he said, “Come on, Vixen, up you go…”
 

We continued with the game and we were all doing pretty well holding our tongues about what we all pretty much knew was going on above, but when Tristan’s shirt landed on my head, there was universal laughter and a few comments.

“Tristan, your shirt I believe…please be wearing it!” I yelled and threw his damned shirt back up to their little love nest about the same time Brandon and Pete made their comments. It’s not that I begrudge them a little kissing time, but I miss Jeff. I wish he didn’t feel so strongly about getting me sick. I really doubt a twinge of a sore throat will cause an epidemic, you know?

“
Ugh
, get a room!”

“Dude! Are you
trying
to make me jealous? I mean for Christ’s sake, I’m sitting right here!”

Melissa and I giggled when we heard Tristan growl a little and Camie’s giggle, then, from where I can only assume was Camie’s neck or some such part of her, his muffled voice wafted down to us saying, “Take a fuckin’ look around, this
is
my goddamned room. And I’m sorry about this, Pete, it can’t be helped. Oh, the rest of you can fuck off…”
 

His shirt landed on Pete that time.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, Pete, my bad!” Camie’s disembodied voice said with a definite smug quality.

Hours and several rounds of Crazy Eights along with Go Fish later, the beeping started again. We were all talking or making-out as the case may be, having a fun and relatively normal time playing cards (as normal as it gets on a stakeout I guess), that it really took us by surprise, like we’d forgotten why we were there. I was trying to get a look at my mom’s car as she pulled out of the parking lot to see if there was anyone with her, but we were too far away and it was too dark for me to be able to distinguish anything.

“She’s alone,” Jillian said and when I turned to ask how she could possibly know that, I saw she had some kind of small telescope in her hand that looked like it might have night vision.

By the time we got on the road, my mom’s car was out of site but she was
 
definitely driving in the direction of my house. I was about to start venting my frustration for not coming up with any answers when I realized we were passing the street that would lead me home. The beeping stopped as we followed the windy main road, turned onto the very familiar side street and then went down the sloping private drive. Tristan pulled off to the side, hastily threw the bus in park, then he turned to me and with our brows raised high we shared a “
what the fuck
” look.

“What the fuck is she doing here?” I whispered to Tristan, desperate for him to make sense of this for me because I just cannot fathom why
my
mom would be
here
.

Melissa and Brandon quietly climbed in the bus while everyone else was silent and still as they saw my mom’s car parked next to my
boyfriend’s
Jeep in the driveway of my
boyfriend’s
house. That is, everyone aside from Jillian. She’d immediately begun hooking up a watchamacallit, a thingamajig, and a doohickey that, within a matter of minutes, was picking up the voices from inside amid some mild static.

“—tell her?”

It sounded like my mom sighed. “No, I think we should do it together. I think it’ll be easier for all of us that way.”

“You’re right about doing it together but, it’s
not
gonna be easy.”

“I know…and you’re right, we shouldn’t put it off any longer. This will definitely hurt and be extremely complicated, but they need to know the truth and have all the facts.”

“So when do you want to do it?”

“Tomorrow. Before we leave.”

“Alright, if you say so…but you know we may never get out of here if we do that…”

My mom’s voice turned sultry and there were suddenly many pauses in their conversation that could only mean they were speaking in between kissing, which naturally made my stomach violently lurch. “Well…that…would be a…real shame…”

“It certainly…would be…a shame…we can’t let…that happen…now…can we?”
 

Tristan and I were staring openmouthed at each other this whole time not knowing what to say, but when the music started, drowning out their words and lip smacking, he and I both reached for our phones and immediately began dialing and/or texting like our lives depended on it.

“Oh my God,
what
is that awful music?” Melissa asked, straining to hear through the static.

“Barry White,” Tristan, Camie, Jillian, Pete, and Brandon gravely said together.
 

I have no idea who or what the song is, all I know is that I recognize it as sex music from the fucking ‘70s and I have
GOT
to get my boyfriend out the goddamned house before
my
mom and
his
dad have
sex
in the living room with him just down the hall!

Are you listening to me?!
‘70s SEX MUSIC!

“Oh my GOD! Tristan! He won’t answer!”

“I KNOW!”

“Go get him!”

“I’m not fuckin’ goin’ in there! My retinas will be scarred forever just like my goddamned ears are now!”

“Oh shit, someone,
please
go get him!” Panicking, I looked at everyone in the bus, pleading with my eyes and feeling my heart begin to drop when not a one made a move to rescue Jeff from this nightmare he himself has yet to awaken to.

Then Jillian, God bless her, made a disgusted sound and in typical haughtiness said, “Amateurs,” as she opened the passenger door and began to get out.

“Wait! Here’s my key!”

“I won’t be needing that,” she told me, patting her backpack, and then she disappeared into the night, becoming my dark savior yet again.