Dead Ends (28 page)

“Awesome!” Billy got caught up in my enthusiasm. “And fishing! 'Cause we were at the river!”

“But we don't have any poles,” I pointed out.

“That's why we didn't catch any fish!” Billy exclaimed.

We both laughed out loud.

“Okay, but Billy D.,” I said, “that doesn't explain why we went ‘camping' without permission … in the middle of the week … in a stolen car.”

“Maybe we thought we'd be back in the morning before school,” Billy said.

My laugh caught in my throat at the word “school,” and I swallowed hard, remembering why I was supposed to be pissed at Billy. He'd flat-out conned me into this trip with his heart lies and his threats of taking off alone in the middle of the night. But no one would see it that way when we got back. Even my own mom would take one look at Billy's innocent mug and point the finger at me. Not that I blamed them. If even a guy
like me could get suckered by a kid like Billy, then moms didn't have a prayer.

And it wouldn't matter if the warden believed me or not. He'd already suspended me for sticking up for Billy. He would be signing my expulsion letters before I could even
tell
him that I'd missed school to look after the kid. Hell, the expulsion notice was probably already waiting for me at home.

“What about the lottery tickets?” Billy asked.

I sighed. “I'll figure out something to tell my mom.”

In fact, I planned to tell Mom the truth—partly because I owed it to her for stealing those tickets, but mostly because she wouldn't buy this bs camping story we were cooking up for one second anyway.

“Is she going to be really mad?” Billy asked. “About the tickets?”

“I think she's going to be really mad about the whole thing.”

“So you're in big trouble like me.”

“Bigger.”

Billy propped his feet up on the dash and inspected his shoelaces for a long time. Finally he looked up and took a deep breath.

“I'm mad at you because you lied.”

I gaped at him. “
You're
mad at
me
? You … you're …,” I spluttered. “
You're
the liar.”

“You lied about helping me find my dad,” Billy went on, as if he hadn't heard me. “And I'm mad at you because you promised to take me to Monkey's Eyebrow, and you didn't.”

“And
I'm
mad at
you
for being a con artist.”

“What's a con art—”

“You lied about having holes in your heart. You lied about your dad being awesome.”

“He is awes—”

“You lied about why you wanted to learn to fight.” I was raging now, shouting the lies at Billy as fast as I realized them. “It was never about those punks from the bus stop, was it?”

“You didn't take me to Monkey's Eyebrow,” Billy repeated. “And you're not going to help me find my dad, are you?”

“Hell no.”

“Then you broke your promise.”

“And you broke yours,” I said. “I'm going to get kicked out of school because of you—because of your lies.”

Billy didn't have an answer for that, so for a few minutes we both sat and stewed.

Finally, Billy broke the silence, and his voice was much softer than before.

“I'm still mad at you.”

I snorted.
That makes two of us.

“I'm so mad, I might be mad forever,” Billy said. “But … but … I don't hate you.”

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and felt something unclench in my stomach. I wanted to tell him I didn't care if he hated me or not. I wanted to tell him I hated
him
. But I couldn't even think it, let alone say it, because the only thought that forced its way into my mind—as much as I tried to shove it down—was,
I don't hate you, either.

“Okay, Dane?” Billy said. “I don't hate you.” He searched my face for understanding.

I set my jaw, to make sure my expression didn't give away too much, and I gave Billy the smallest nod.

“Okay, then,” I said.

“Okay, then.” Billy sat back, satisfied.

“And hey, Dane?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we supposed to see a big sign that says ‘Columbia' with, like, an arrow?”

“Probably like that, yeah. Why?”

Billy pointed behind us. “We just drove past it.”

• • • X • • •

It was a long time before Mom stopped screaming. Sometimes she would pause to cry a little bit or attack me in a bear hug and tell me how much she loved me, but then she'd go right back to screaming. I half hoped she'd cry herself to sleep the way Billy had in the car, but no such luck.

I only caught snatches of Mom's rant—words like “dangerous” and “underage” and “disappointed.” That last one hurt.

Finally, she calmed down enough to let me tell her the story—and not the story Billy and I had concocted about camping. I told her the truth, every bit of it—including what I'd learned about Billy's dad. She didn't seem surprised. Apparently, while Billy and I were missing, Mom and Mrs. Drum had had a few pretty intense conversations of their own.

She stopped me at one point to call that lawyer she and
Mrs. Drum had hired. When he told her that getting into another fight meant I might have to sit in jail until my court date with Billy, Mom burst into tears. The lawyer told her not to panic until he made some calls to the sheriff's department down in southern Illinois, and he promised to get back to us.

Mom hung up the phone, dried her wet cheeks, and sank into a kitchen chair with her head in her hands.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “My kid is not a criminal.”

I am scum.

“But close enough to criminal that he needs a lawyer.” She looked up, talking to me now. “You're sixteen years old, and you have a lawyer.”

Mold on top of scum.

Mom's eyes drifted to the wall where her remaining lottery tickets hung.

“Mom,” I began.

She held up a hand to silence me.

“But I just want to say I'm sor—”

“No,” she said.

“What?”

“I don't want to hear ‘I'm sorry' from your mouth until I know you've taken some time to really think about it—to
really
regret your poor decisions. Then you come back and say you're sorry.”

“Okay.” I moved to stand up, then turned back. “Um, Mom? How much time should I take? You want me back out here later or …”

Her death glare silenced me, and I shrank away to my room, wondering how long I should sit in there and pretend I was thinking about what I'd done.

It turned out I would have plenty of time to sit in my room because the warden called an hour later. As of today, there was one less student enrolled at Twain High.

“You should have covered for me—told them I was out sick!”

“Out sick? I thought you were out
dead
! Disappearing in the middle of the night—your cell phone turned off … I thought … I thought—”

“I left you a note!”

“Which said nothing!”

Mom and I had been having this same fight for two days.

When the school called to report my absence, Mom had already been up half the night with Mrs. Drum looking for me and Billy, and it must have made her delirious because she said she didn't know where I was and let them mark me truant. By the middle of the week, calls to the principal and requests to appeal to the school board had been exhausted and denied, and now we were filling out papers to enroll me in the alternative high school.

Mom shoved the forms across the kitchen table and stared hard at her wall of lottery tickets. She'd made a point of hanging the plundered frames back up empty. I guess it was supposed to make me feel guilty, but the only betrayal I saw when I looked at that wall was in the frames still full of unclaimed winners.

“We always have the option of fighting this in court.” Mom took a deep breath and ran a hand over her face. “But by the time we get a hearing, the school year will be over. Maybe private school?” She seemed to be talking to herself now.

“Like we can afford private school,” I said.

Mom's eyes flickered back to the wall of tickets, but she didn't say anything for a minute. When she did speak, her voice was thin. “We'll figure something out.”

And I believed she would. The only times I'd ever seen Mom fight harder than when she fought with me were when she fought
for
me. And I suddenly felt bad for making her have to put up a fight at all.

I couldn't quite bring myself to apologize, but I dragged the papers scattered across the kitchen table into a neat pile in front of me and started filling out my application to the alternative school.

• • • X • • •

Billy got into a little bit of shit himself. Skipping school rubbed the shine off his perfect image, and the warden actually gave him a detention. He seemed pretty proud of it, too, judging by the way he waved the truancy slip around a few nights later.
He'd already apologized for getting me kicked out of school, but he seemed to think his detention was truly the final penitence.

He got grounded, too. First for running away and then for lying about it. He'd actually tried to use the camping story, but Mrs. Drum had gone straight to my mom for the truth. After all that, I was surprised our moms were letting us hang out, but they made an exception for my birthday.

Once upon a time I would have celebrated my seventeenth with a very different crowd and probably pushed Mom for a car. But under the circumstances, I was just glad to have a little company.

Even if that company's idea of a birthday gift was a detention slip.

When Billy finished showing it off, he tucked it back into his bag, which he had dumped on my bed. I caught a glimpse of the atlas there, still in its place of honor up front and always by Billy's side. A book behind the atlas caught my eye, too—just as familiar and nearly as dangerous.

“It's not the same yearbook,” Billy said, following my gaze. “It's a different year.”

As if that made it okay.

But if I couldn't hold a grudge against Billy for getting me grounded and expelled and arrested, there was no point getting pissed about a stupid yearbook.

When he sensed I wasn't going to explode, he pulled the yearbook out cautiously. “You should look at it,” he said. “Only if you want to. It's …
better
than the other one.”

I let him leave the book on my bed, but I made a mental note to hide it under a pile of laundry later.

Seely came over after dinner, and we filled her in on everything I hadn't already told her over the phone. We stuffed ourselves with birthday cake, then we all crowded on the couch in the living room and
finally
watched
The Karate Kid
. Billy smiled through the whole movie, and Seely let me cop a feel under the blanket. I could almost pretend I was on vacation and not expelled from school.

The cherry on top of the whole night was a phone call Mom got from my lawyer. I watched her nod and “uh-huh” her way through the call, and every few seconds her smile got bigger. Then she thanked him over and over and hung up.

“What was that?” I asked.

Billy and Seely had gone home, and Mom and I were side by side at the sink, doing dishes.

She dropped the phone and went back to drying a plate. “Well, you'll be happy to know your ‘friends' from the restaurant are going to be okay.”

“I will?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Well, you
should
be. And better yet—they're not pressing charges.”

“We should press charges against
them
,” I grumbled, “for being dicks.”

I wasn't surprised they'd wanted to drop the whole thing. After all, they'd been armed, and we were just a couple of teenagers. But I hadn't told Mom about the gun—one detail too many might have put her over the edge.

“You dodged a bullet there,” she said.

You have no idea.

“Anyway, your lawyer talked to the sheriff or someone down there, who says one of the guys—the owner of the restaurant—is on probation for some other crime and doesn't want any trouble. So as far as he and his buddy are concerned, they never saw you or Billy D., and nothing ever happened.”

Mom was practically dancing in celebration, but all I could think was something
did
happen. Somewhere between Mom's lottery tickets and Billy's lies, I'd discovered a part of myself I wasn't proud of. The way Billy's tantrum had ended under my too-firm grip, the way those guys looked all sprawled out on the diner floor—the images were all pointing to a single question.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I could end up like … maybe, like Billy's dad?”

Mom stopped drying the dishes and leaned on the counter, facing me. “What kind of a question is that?”

I shut off the water and took her towel to dry my hands.

He's a hitter; I'm a hitter. And Billy likes us both, even though most people don't.

“You know what I mean” was all I said to Mom.

She pulled a chair from the kitchen table and flopped down in it. “You are nothing like that man.”

I took the chair next to hers. “How do you know? You don't know him.”

“I know you.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Mom cut me off.

“You've had it harder than most kids. You're angry a lot of the time, and that anger occasionally gets misplaced.”

I thought of Jimmy Miller and the anger I'd misplaced on his face when I'd caused him to nosedive off his bike and onto the pavement.

Mom took a deep breath. “Would you want to talk to someone about it?”