Dead Ends (25 page)

“Yeah, my dad is cool.”

Billy rolled over in his seat to look at me through the dark. “Maybe he'll take us both camping after we find him.”

I rolled, too, so Billy and I were face-to-face across the car. “You think so?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

We didn't need to whisper in this empty stretch of forest out of sight of the main road, but something about the stillness of the car, the thickness of the dark, kept our voices low.

My eyelids had just slipped down again when Billy said, softer than ever, “Hey, Dane?”

“Yeah?”

“You don't remember your dad at all?”

“Not at all,” I said sleepily, keeping my eyes closed.

“Then who hit you?”

“What are you talking about?” I grumbled. I was ready for more dreams, less chatter. “Nobody hits me.”

“Maybe you just don't remember getting hit,” Billy said.

I opened my eyes and saw Billy staring at me.

“Hit by who? What the hell?”

Billy's voice was quiet and matter-of-fact. “Mom says people hit because they got hit first.”

I fought the sleep that kept threatening to pull me under and tried to focus on what Billy was saying. “You think I hit because I got—why is your mom even—” I gave my head a little jerk, to shake the bedtime fog out of my brain. It cleared, revealing a terrible thought. “Wait, what?” I opened my eyes wider. “Billy D., does your mom
hit
you?”

“Not my mom,” he whispered.

The last of the sleep went up in flames—flames sparked by a ball of fire growing in my chest. I sat straight up in my seat.

No. No no no no no. He is not saying what I think he's saying.
I tried to keep my voice steady, but it was shaking.

“Your dad?”

Billy nodded, still curled up on his side. “Mom says Dad hit because his dad hit him, and
his
dad hit
him
.”

“Stop.” I held out a hand to Billy, then ran it through my hair. This wasn't happening.

“Fuck,” I said. It was barely a whisper—more like a breath.

“You didn't get hit?” Billy asked.

“No.”

“Then why do you—”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING?” I exploded.

Billy jumped back, pressing his body against the car door. “Why are you yelling?”

I shifted around in the seat, wishing I had room to pace. I curled my hands over the steering wheel and realized my palms were itching—no, not just itching—they were
on fire
. I was burning up with rage from the inside out.

I tried to point my fury in one direction, but it kept bouncing back and forth between Billy's dad and Billy himself. Five
seconds ago we were talking about Billy's dad taking us camping. Now we were talking about him using Billy as a punching bag.

Questions spun around my brain.
How often? How hard? Why?
I tried to picture someone who could hit a face like Billy D.'s—especially if he was your own kid, but all I kept seeing were monsters. The fire was moving past my palms, spreading into my fingers, and up my arms. I was looking around for something to punch when a disturbing thought hit me:
I wonder if Billy's dad got the itch before he hit.

All the questions in my head were eclipsed by just one, so I asked it again, softer this time.

“Billy D., what are we doing?”

“We're going to find my dad.”

“But he hit you.”

Billy sank down in his seat and curled back into a ball. “Not all the time.”

“But more than once?”

“Just when he couldn't help it—like when I acted wrong or when he tried to show me how to do something, and I messed it up.”

“But that's not fair. You're … you're different, so—”

“Dad says I'm not different. He says I'm like everybody else. I should be able to do stuff and know stuff like everybody else. He doesn't treat me different.”

“No, he treats you worse.”

“It's not his fault.”

“I swear to God, Billy D., if you say it's
your
fault, I will drive us back to Columbia right fucking now.”

Billy stayed quiet. He knew I meant it. He could already see my brain working—calculating how long it would take us to get home in the morning, whether I was awake enough now to just leave that very minute.

“You promised,” Billy whispered.

I looked down at him rolled up in the seat and thought how much he looked like a little kid—not a teenager and nearly a man, like me.

“I promised to take you to your dad, not take you to get a beating.”

“He doesn't beat me up,” Billy said. “He just hits sometimes. He doesn't mean to. He always says sorry, and it makes him really sad.” Billy paused, stifling a yawn. When he spoke again his eyes were closed and his voice low. “It makes me sad, too.”

“Then why do you want to find him so bad?” I asked.

“Because,” Billy mumbled, his words full of sleep. “He's my dad.”

A second later he was snoring.

My own chest rose and fell in time with Billy's. I was gasping in deep, ragged breaths, on the verge of some kind of attack. I had risked getting expelled for this? Not a dream dad but a nightmare.

I guessed it was around 1:00 a.m. If I raced all the way home without stopping, I could get back in four hours. If I wanted to get to my first class on time and avoid expulsion, that meant I'd have to be back on the road by 4:00 a.m. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket to set an alarm, then remembered we'd shut our phones off. I couldn't risk turning it on and
giving Mom a way to reach me. As ready as I was to head home, I wasn't ready to deal with the wrath of Mom yet. I had to pray the cramped sleeping quarters would be enough to wake me up in three hours.

I knew that was wishful thinking, but there was no other choice. Sleep was pulling me back down into the seat. I watched Billy breathing in and out until my eyes wouldn't stay open any longer. When they closed, I could still see his face there painted behind my eyelids—innocent and trusting and forgiving—just like he'd been with me. Billy saw a friend where others just saw a thug. And he saw a father where others would have seen a monster. I fell asleep with the uneasy feeling that, to Billy, I looked a lot like the man who showed him how to build a campfire with one hand and knocked him around with the other—that Billy had gone searching for his dad and found the next closest thing.

I woke up to sunlight and sweat. I turned on the car long enough to read the clock on the dashboard. I already knew it was too late to get back in time for school, but a glance at the digital display confirmed—school had already
started
. I sat up with effort, groaning at pains in strange places from the awkward way I'd slept. If this was anything like camping, I was glad I'd missed it.

Billy was already outside the car, kicking a rock around the grassy clearing. I opened the car door and felt a cool rush of air. I stood and stretched, relieved to be out of the sauna. The muddy river smell on the breeze told me we were still close to the water—but on the wrong side of it, as far as I was concerned. We should have been home by now.

Billy saw me get out of the car, but he didn't say anything.
I moved into the clearing, staring across at him. We locked eyes. A silent duel of wills.

Billy spoke first, but it didn't make me the winner.

“I know you want to go home.”

I squinted across the grass, not sure how to answer. It wasn't that I wanted to go home so much as I wished I'd never come in the first place. At this point, the way I saw it, there was nothing but trouble at
both
ends of this road, and I just didn't know which way was worse.

“Did he really take you camping?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I nodded. I figured. Billy wouldn't have lied about that. His dad probably did all the things the good dads did—even the extraspecial things, like show Billy all the funny town names and write him secret letters and press them in the back of books. But he did the bad things, too—the things only some dads did—the things you don't think about when you imagine what it would be like to have a dad at all.

I threw my arms out, helpless. “I don't know what to do, Billy D. You're going to hate me forever if we go back, but I can't drive you to find this guy who … I mean, that's crazy! Right?”

“You don't understand.” Billy kicked his rock.

“No, I don't. I don't know why you'd want to see this guy for any reason other than to kick his ass.”
Hey, wait a minute.
I looked up, hopeful. “Do you want to kick his ass?”

Billy scowled at me. “No.”

My shoulders slumped.
Damn. That I could have helped with.

Billy kicked his rock across the grass toward me. “Don't call him ‘this guy.' He's my dad.”

“He doesn't act like it.”

“Yes, he does.” There was no anger or pout in Billy's voice—only truth.

His last kick rolled the rock into the toe of my boot, and when I looked up he was right in front of me, honesty all over his face. He must have known it was wrong for his dad to hit him—enough to make excuses for him, anyway—but I could see he still believed he had a good dad. Or maybe he just loved the guy despite the hitting—took the bad with the good because the good was worth it. And I couldn't talk him out of it, because I didn't know what it was like to have a father—good or bad or otherwise. All I could guess, seeing Billy's earnest expression, was that
any
dad was better than
no
dad.

And there I was, still jealous of Billy, still wishing I had a dad who wanted me—even if that dad was someone I'd be better off not knowing. It was sick, and I figured it probably made me even more messed up than Billy.

Billy could see I was teetering on the edge, so he played his trump card.

“I have to see him before I die.” He pointed to his heart.

Shit
.

“Don't do that.”

“I have to see him, Dane.”

“For what?”

“To make sure he's okay.”

“To make sure
he's
okay? Like he made sure you were?”

“I didn't say good-bye, when Mom took me away—I didn't say good-bye.”

“Screw ‘good-bye'! Say you want to cuss him out! Say you want to tell him how … how the hitting makes you sad—like you told me last night. Say you want to find him so you can rip his crappy letter up in his face!”

“It's not crappy!”

“It is!” I spun around and pushed off the car in frustration. I didn't have the itch, exactly, but I definitely wanted to punch something. “All that shit in there about dads doing things they don't mean. It makes so much sense now. Give it to me!” I reached for Billy's front pocket, but he clamped his hands over it and backed up.

“No!”

I balled my hands into fists, but it was pointless. I was losing this fight, and there was no punching my way out of it. I sat on the hood of the car, defeated.

“If I promise to rip up the letter in his face, will you take me?” Billy asked.

“Yeah, right.”

“I promise.”

“Please. I know you're not going to rip up your precious letter.”

After a moment, Billy sat next to me, and the car made a deep metallic pop under our weight.

“Dane.”

“Yeah?”

“He won't hit me if you're there, right?”

“So?”

“So, if I just say good-bye, then we go home, then he won't ever hit me again.”

“Dude, you've been yapping about your dad since practically the day I met you. And you expect me to believe you just want to see him this one time, then you'll never look for him again?”

“I can't,” Billy said. “Because of my heart. Because I'm going to die.”

“You are not going to die—”

“How do you know?” Billy asked.

I looked away from Billy. I
didn't
know, and I didn't want to think about it.

“You seem fine to me,” I mumbled.

“I'm not fine. I have holes, and I need a new heart. Mine is brok—”

“Yeah, yeah, your heart is broken!” I jumped off the car and stomped over to the driver's side. “I got it, okay? It's broken and you need a new one and blah blah blah! Just get in the car!”

Billy scampered over to his own door. “Where are we going?”

“We're going to fucking Monkey's Elbow.”

I threw myself in the driver's seat, slammed the door shut, and started the engine.

Billy climbed in carefully next to me and waited until we were in motion to whisper, “Monkey's
Eyebrow
.”

The sun inched higher into the sky as we drove south through Illinois. We peeled off our jackets and commented on how much warmer it was just a few hours below Columbia. We talked about Seely and how her spiky white hair wasn't as pretty as Nina's dark waves but much cooler. We talked about anything and everything except where we were going. I couldn't stomach it, and I think Billy was afraid talking about it at all would talk me
out
of it.

His warning about his heart had tripped some wire in my own. I knew I wasn't on this road trip—this entire journey—with Billy just to repay some favor. Not anymore. If I let Billy down—if I cut this trip short and he actually died—I'd never forgive myself.

A voice inside my head still screamed that making Billy
happy meant driving him toward danger, but I hushed the voice by reminding myself that the odds of Billy's dad actually being at the end of this road were slim to none. If we didn't find his dad, he'd be disappointed, but at least it wouldn't be me who'd disappointed him.

Our trip through Illinois had a lot more turns and slower speeds than the Missouri route. Billy was practically drooling at all the signs telling us how close we were to Kentucky, but our stomachs were growling too loud to be ignored, so he agreed to stop when we spotted a greasy-looking diner alongside the road.