Dead Ends (11 page)

“Me, neither.” Billy frowned.

They both looked at me.

“Yeah, right,” I laughed, producing my own cheapo cell. “This thing barely makes phone calls.”

“Well, we'll just use a computer,” Seely said. “That's faster, anyway.”

“I don't have a computer,” Billy said. “I have to use the ones in the library at school.”

I pictured the folding table and chairs that substituted for a dining room set at Billy's house and felt a tug in my gut. I knew Mom and I weren't the poorest people in Columbia, but now I realized we weren't even the poorest people on our street.

“I don't have a computer, either,” I said.

“I do.” Seely looked back and forth at us and grew shy all of a sudden. “I mean, if you don't mind my help. I don't want to butt in—”

“That's great,” Billy said.

“Yeah, cool!” I said. I swallowed hard and glanced away from Seely. “I mean fine, whatever.”

“And you live right across the street.” Billy got to his feet. “Let's go right now.”

I stood, too, and pointed out the dark clouds that had finally come together above us. They were swirling, and the electricity in the air was making our arm hairs stand up on end.

“If we don't get home now, we're going to be walking back in a tornado.”

Billy stamped a foot. “But it's not even dark yet!”

“Well, I'm not your mom, dude. Do whatever you want. But I'm going to try to catch the bus, so I don't get soaked.”

Seely put a hand on Billy's arm. “Yeah, it's gonna get nasty. You better go. We'll do it tomorrow.”

Billy scowled up at the sky. “Tomorrow is Saturday?” he asked.

“All day,” Seely said.

“Fine.” Billy pouted. He shouldered his pack and started to pound his way across the park.

The first drops of rain fell as Seely and I joined him. At the edge of the park, she pointed out her house and made us promise not to show up too early.

“Okay,” Billy said. “But if it rains again, we're still coming over.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “
I'm
not afraid of storms.”

Seely's house was like one giant garage. The kitchen counters were covered in tools, drill bits, and metal parts I didn't recognize. There was a diagram of some kind of engine taped up to the mirror in the bathroom and a table with a big, round saw set up in the living room, right in front of the TV.

The homiest room in the whole place was the actual garage, where at least there were some dusty couches and a stereo. The computer was in the garage, too, so that's where we were hanging out, drinking sodas, and finishing off Seely's Easter candy.

“This is awesome,” I said for the fifth time, gawking at the garage.

“It's okay,” Seely said.

“Okay?” I swept an arm to indicate the vast space, big enough for two motorcycles, a truck, a living room setup, and an
industrial-sized workbench. “It's bigger than my whole house—than
your
whole house.”

“Yeah, we expanded it when we moved in. I helped build it, but only because I thought that meant we'd keep the house, y'know, a
house
.”

“But this is perfect,” I argued. “Any guy would want to live here.”

“Exactly. Any
guy
. But I'm not a guy, in case you didn't notice.” She glared at me.

I had noticed, but it was easy to forget. I'd never met a girl who could rip a belch like Seely or who knew so much about cars. Talking to her was like talking to a dude, but
looking
at her was definitely like looking at a girl, even with her short hair.

“I like it 'cause it's warm,” Billy said.

We'd both forgotten bus fare and had to walk the whole way to Seely's in a downpour. Seely had fired up a pair of heaters and aimed them at the sofas in the garage, but we were still pretty soaked.

I tilted my head toward the computer on the workbench.

“Does that dinosaur even work?”

It was old-fashioned and boxy, like the TV in Mom's bedroom.

“Of course it works. My dad built it.” Seely propped herself up on a stool in front of the computer and turned it on.

“I thought your dad fixed motorcycles,” I said.

“He does. One builds bikes. One builds computers.”

Billy and I looked at Seely, then at each other, then back at Seely.

Seely spun her stool toward us while the computer fired up.

“It's funny. You guys have no dads, and I have two. I guess we all have our own issues.”

“Two dads?” I asked.

Seely licked a smudge of chocolate off her thumb. “Well, three, if you count bio-dad, but I don't.”

“What's a bio-dad?” Billy asked.

“Biological, like, I have his DNA, but I don't know him or anything.”

“What about your mom?” I asked.

“
Bio
-mom,” Seely corrected. “Don't think much about her, either. They're not my parents, really—more like participants in a science experiment.”

My face must have looked as flat and clueless as Billy's, because Seely just laughed at both of us.

“My dads wanted a kid, but gay couples aren't exactly at the front of the adoption line, y'know? So they got some sperm and a good friend with a vagina to—”

“Whoa, whoa!” I held up my hands. “Too much information.”

Seely laughed again and reached for another piece of candy. “The point is, some kids get the birds and the bees talk. I got the one about test tubes and surrogates.” She ducked her head next to Billy's, crossed her eyes, and let her tongue loll out the side of her mouth. In a voice even lower and more gravelly than her normal husk, she growled, “I was created in ze laboratory like ze monster of Dr. Frankenstein.”

Billy rolled to one side on the couch, giggling.

I raised an eyebrow. “But your dad—or,
one
of your dads—is a mechanic.”

“So?”

“So that's like a … a
dude
job.”

Seely rolled her eyes and dropped her empty candy wrapper onto the workbench next to the computer. “You're an idiot.”

Maybe I
was
an idiot, but if I needed schooling, surely Billy D. did, too. I looked at him and adopted that voice Mom used when she was trying to talk about so-called grown-up things.

“See, Billy, the reason Seely has two dads is because—”

“Because you're so lucky,” Billy breathed. He was looking at Seely, but his expression was far away, staring at something no one else could see.

“Yeah, I am,” Seely said. She gave me a pointed look and turned back to the computer. I wished I hadn't insulted her dads.

I pulled a second stool up next to Seely's.

“Hey, I'm, uh—” I stammered quietly. “I'm, uh … um …”

“Sorry?” Seely offered.

“Yeah.”

“You're not very good at it.”

“What?”

“Apologizing.” She didn't meet my eye. “It's fine, whatever. I'm used to it. So, Billy D.” She looked past me to Billy, who had the atlas out already. “What's first?”

Billy consulted his maps. “I don't know which one's first.”

“We don't even know if one clue leads to another,” I said. “That was just an idea I had.”

“Makes sense,” Seely said. “But we don't have to go in order. Just pick a town you figured out already.”

“Burnt Corn, Alabama.” Billy was all business now. “B-U-R-N-T.”

Seely had pulled up three different websites, each with little boxes to search people by name and city. She typed “Paul Drum” and “Burnt Corn” in all the appropriate boxes and set the search engines spinning.

“No results,” she said after a few seconds. “Next.”

There were no Paul Drums in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, or Spunky Puddle, Ohio, either.

Billy's list of towns was short, and we were burning through them fast. With every “next” and “nope” from Seely, the room grew more quiet. We were letting Billy down.

After Santa Claus, Indiana, turned up another dead end, Seely suggested we take a break, but Billy insisted we keep going. It wasn't until Mexico, Missouri, came up empty that Billy finally slammed the atlas shut and crossed his arms. I think he was just a little too hopeful about that one. He'd been wanting to go to Mexico, and I could see now how much he really hoped his dad was that close.

I wanted to tell him it's not that easy to find dads—even when they probably live in the same
town
as you.

Instead, I opened the atlas again to Missouri and nudged Billy. “So we solve this clue, then.” I pointed to the riddle written under the map. “We solve all of them—get a longer list.”

Seely sat on Billy's other side and read from the bottom of the page. “
This is what happens when you don't give up.
” She chewed a fingernail. “Try, try again?”

“No,” I said. “The clue would have to be, ‘If at first you don't succeed.'” The last word caught in my throat, and I sat up
straight on the couch. “Hey, what about that? If you don't give up, you succeed, right?”

Billy's eyes widened a little, and some of the shadows that had clouded his expression began to clear away. His head spun from me to Seely and back again. “Can we … ?”

“I'll look it up,” Seely said, hopping back over to the computer.

I held my breath along with Billy as the keyboard
click-clacked
under Seely's fingers.

“I can't find any place called Succeed,” she finally said.

Billy and I exhaled in matching sounds of disappointment. I wanted to be right about the clue, if only to give Billy something to hold him over for a while—to make him feel like we were getting somewhere.

“But wait,” Seely said.

We crowded behind her, drawn to the excitement in her voice. A website flickered on the computer screen, loading a large map image. When it finished, a name appeared in the center of the map, at the junction of two state highways: Success, Arkansas.

“Success!” Seely said. “What happens when you don't give up.”

She spun on the stool and gave us a big grin. Billy and I grinned, too—at her, at each other. Then, in unison, we both dove for the atlas on the couch. I got there first, but I tossed the book in Billy's lap. “Go for it.”

Seely and I crowded in next to Billy, looking over his shoulders as he quickly passed Alabama, Alaska, and Arizona. I was holding my breath again when he turned the page to Arkansas.
I don't remember letting the air out of my lungs, but I definitely felt my ego deflate. All we saw under the map of Arkansas was a blank space.

Right
. Of course there was no clue in Arkansas. Hadn't I looked at those maps a hundred times? But if I'd looked a hundred, Billy had looked a thousand, and even he had been caught up in the moment enough to forget that Arkansas was not part of the chain.

“Well, that's okay,” Seely said, her voice a measure too cheerful. “We'll figure it out.”

Billy sank into the couch cushions and pulled the atlas close to his face.

“Maybe we should just look for Paul Drum in all the towns you have marked,” Seely continued. “Your dad showed you a lot of these places, right? Not just the few with clues. Maybe the one he's in is already—”

“Or maybe he's not in
any
of those towns,” I said.

Seely shot me a pointed look.

“What?” I said. “I'm not saying give up. I'm just saying maybe we're barking up the wrong tree.”

“It's the right tree,” Billy said, his voice muffled behind the huge book.

I could sense Billy losing confidence in the search—in me. If he didn't think I was holding up my end of the bargain, he wouldn't hold up his, and Billy was the only thing keeping the warden off my back.

“What if we just find more town names on our own?” I said, moving to the stool in front of the computer. “Come on,
Billy D., Burnt Corn is the only one in Alabama? That can't be right.”

“What are you doing?” Billy stood behind me and peered at the computer as I flew through search-engine results. Seely watched over my other shoulder.

“I'm looking for stupid city names in Alabama.”

“They're not stupid,” Billy said.

“Bam!” I punched the screen with my finger. “Check it out.
Intercourse
, Alabama.”

“No way.” Seely leaned in, and I could smell her citrusy shampoo. “Is that for real?”

I clicked on the map that popped up in my search and zoomed out until we could see state borders. “Billy, do you know what ‘interc'—”

“I know what ‘intercourse' means,” Billy snapped. “We learned about it in my life skills class. It's when a man and a woman—”

“That's okay,” I stopped him. “I know what it means, too.”

That discovery triggered a new kind of search that probably wasn't very helpful. We spent the next hour looking up the filthiest names we could find. There was another Intercourse, in Pennsylvania, where we also discovered Virginville. By the time we got to Sugar Tit, South Carolina, and Spread Eagle, Wisconsin, we were all cracking up.

“Oh no. Oh, gross,” Seely said. “That can't be a real place.” She was looking at the screen, where I'd just pulled up a map of Beaverlick, Kentucky.

“I don't get it,” Billy confessed.

I turned to Seely for help, but she backed away laughing with her hands up. “Don't look at me.”

I shut down the computer and slung an arm across Billy's shoulders. “Come on, Billy D., I'll explain it on the way home.”

“Billy, you have to pay attention!”

He was supposed to be spinning away from my punches, but I'd just landed the third one in a row.