Dead Ends (8 page)

“I said no visitors when I'm not home.”

I returned the stare and tried to make mine even fiercer. She had no right to be giving me that look. What had I done to her, besides keep her kid entertained while she worked long hours and kept secrets?
You're welcome
, I thought.

“I'm showing Dane my toys,” Billy said.

It was a decent cover. Half truths are really the most believable lies. But I felt a twitch in my stomach as Mrs. Drum's eyes slipped down to the box. She let out a tired sigh. “Fine. I don't have time to argue. I have to go back to work. I just came to pick up—I mean, we're out of—” She rubbed her eyes. “Oh, it doesn't matter. Just please stay home for the rest of the day. And no visitors after dark,” she said pointedly.

Billy agreed, and we followed his mom into the kitchen, where she grabbed an industrial-size bottle of bleach and a handful of old rags. I took in her clothes, a uniform of papery gray pants and a matching top, like dreary doctor scrubs.

“Where do you work, Mrs. Drum?” I asked, using the voice I used with girls at school.

Apparently it
only
worked on girls at school, because Mrs. Drum snapped her head around and fixed me with a look like I'd just let out a string of curse words.

“Why?” she asked.

I stepped back in surprise. “Just making conversation,” I said.

She watched me for a second longer, then turned to Billy. “No visitors after dark,” she repeated, and disappeared out the door.

Billy and I were back in his room, unearthing the photo album, the instant the door closed. We didn't even have to study the pictures. Billy's mom had made it easy for us with a label right inside the cover:
Our wedding, Cancún, Mexico.

I read it out loud to Billy, and he wrinkled his nose. “That's not in my atlas.” He pulled the book out of his backpack and showed me the front cover. “United States of America.”

I frowned, thinking. “What does the clue say?”

Billy flipped to Pennsylvania and recited the line printed under the map. I noticed he read it much faster this time, almost like he had already memorized it. I wondered how many of the clues he knew by heart.

“Both met and married,” I repeated, mumbling to myself. “Different but the same.”

“What does that mean?”

Different but the same.
“Did they meet in Cancún?” I asked.

Billy huffed and crossed his arms. “I told you I don't know that stuff.”

“Well, where are your parents from?” I pressed. “Where did they grow up? Oregon?”

Billy shook his head. “No. Here.”

“What?” I started in surprise. “Here in Columbia?”

“Here in Missouri.”

I jumped to my feet and started pacing like I expected the movement to shake my brain loose or something. “Where in Missouri?”

Billy waved his arms, frustrated. “I don't know, Dane. But Mom said, ‘Missouri is home. We're going home.'” He pouted. “You're asking a lot of questions.”

“Annoying, isn't it?” I raised my eyebrows.

Billy just scowled.

“Different but the same.” I paced some more. “Mexico and Oregon. Mexico and Missouri.” I stopped in my tracks and flashed a smile at Billy. “Mexico, Missouri!”

“Huh?”

“It's a town! It's a town with a stupid name right here in Missouri.” I dropped to the floor and flipped eagerly to the map of Missouri. “Look, you don't even have to write it in. It's already there.”

I pointed out Mexico to Billy—less than an inch away from Columbia on the map. “I bet that's where they met. And see? There's a clue at the bottom of this page, too.” I was talking fast.
“I think that's why some pages have clues and some don't. There's a pattern, like an order to it, and you have to find the right order until you get to the end. …”

I'd said too much. I could see it in the way Billy's face lit up.

“I'm not sure …” I stumbled. “I didn't mean …”

But I couldn't backpedal as fast as Billy could run full steam ahead.

“Can we go there?” he asked.

“Go where?”

“To Mexico.” He uncapped a pen and drew a careful circle around Mexico, Missouri.

“Dude, I doubt your dad's in—”

“Just to see,” he said, perfectly calm.

I still didn't think the clues led anywhere except to more maps, but it couldn't hurt to check out one little town. Anything that kept Billy happy kept me out of trouble at school. And on top of that, I admitted only to myself, I sort of wanted to help the kid find his dad. A dad like that, who bought you Christmas presents and took you to the zoo and let you spend an hour at the monkey cage, now
that
was a dad worth finding.

“Yeah, we can go there sometime,” I said. “On a weekend when I can borrow my mom's car.”

“You can drive?” Billy asked.

“Of course I can drive. I'm sixteen.”

“But you always walk,” Billy said.

I pulled my eyes down to the floor, suddenly very interested in a dark stain on the worn-out carpet. “That's just because I don't have a car,” I muttered.

“You should get a red car like that boy.”

“What boy?”

“The one you beat up.”

I looked up. “Oh, that douche in the Mustang? I would never drive the same car as that loser. He thinks he's a big shot just because he's got wheels.”

“Is that why you beat him up?” Billy asked. “Because he has a car and you don't?”

“No, that's not why I …”

I hesitated. It wasn't just that the jerk had a car and I didn't. It was that he had the
freedom
that comes with a car—and I didn't.

“Yeah,” I said to Billy, shocking even myself with the confession. “Yeah, maybe that was part of it.”

Billy nodded. “You hit people who have stuff you don't.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just hit people who have it coming.”

“Have what coming?”

“You know—people who are asking for it.”

Billy's eyes bulged. “People
ask
you to hit them?”

“No, it's not—” I half laughed, half sighed. “I just mean people who deserve it.”

Billy nodded again, but he didn't look like he understood so much as he was bored of the line of questioning.

“You want to see something cool?” He jumped up and pressed his nose against the bedroom window. “Look. My room is right next to Mark's room. You can see inside it.”

“Who would want to?” I said. “The only action in Mark's bedroom involves Mark and his own—”

“Well, you can't see anymore,” Billy said. “He talked to me through the window when we moved in. But then you walked me to school, and he closed the curtains, and now we can't see.”

“Who cares? Sure, if it were Nina Sinclair's bedroom …” I leaned back against Billy's mattress, fantasizing.

“She's boring,” Billy said. “Seely is cooler.”

“Who?”

“Seely, with the skateboard.”

“Oh, Wite-Out?” I cocked a sideways grin at Billy. “You got a thing for her, huh?”

Billy's wide cheeks turned pink, and he looked away. “I just like her skateboard.”

I pictured the red lips popping out from under that white hair and imagined the husky voice coming from that tiny body. She was annoying, but I wouldn't mind seeing her bent over under an open hood. There was something kind of hot about a girl who knew her way around an engine—especially since I
didn't
.

“Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes and letting a new fantasy take over. “I kind of like her skateboard, too.”

“And then, in Worms, Nebraska—that's not really a town, just a bunch of houses in the same place—we went to a carnival.”

“Uh-huh.” Mom nodded.

“And my mom let me ride this one ride that spins around really fast all by myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I didn't even get sick.”

“Good for you!” Mom grinned at Billy.

He'd taken her on a stop-by-stop tour of his trip here from Oregon—everywhere from Snowville, Utah, to Frankenstein, Missouri, which apparently had a lot of cemeteries and not much else. I'd lived in Missouri my whole life and never heard of it. And I could have lived the whole rest of my life and happily never heard about it again.

It had been more than an hour of this, and Mom still seemed riveted.

She kept piling cookies and chips in front of Billy, and between those and his big atlas he'd spread across our kitchen table, I'd been pushed over to a corner, where I was trying to catch up on algebra and block out their conversation. But it was kind of hard to ignore when your mom went all Betty Crocker with the new kid. The only reason I'd let him in after school was because he was all excited to show me something he'd checked out of the school library, but ever since we'd walked in the door, it was like he'd forgotten all about it.

“I would love to take a road trip like that,” Mom gushed.

“
My
mom didn't want to go. I had to say ‘pretty please with sugar on top.'”

“Why didn't she want to go?”

Billy dropped his eyes to the table and twisted a cookie in his hands. “She doesn't care about those places.”

“Well, she obviously cares about
you
, if she took you to them. You are a lucky guy, Billy.”

“Not as lucky as you!” Billy exclaimed. He threw an arm up toward the wall of unclaimed tickets. “I wish I could do that. It's like magic!”

Leave it to Billy to not only not judge our crazy house, but also embrace it like it was the coolest place he'd seen since Ket-chum, Idaho.

Billy turned his chair to marvel up at the lottery tickets, and Mom caught my eye behind his back.

I love him
, she mouthed.

I ducked my head into my algebra textbook, pretending to ignore them both.

“Really, Billy, you don't think my tickets are weird?” Mom pushed.

“No way.” Billy knelt to face my mom over the back of the chair. “I saw a show on TV about people who won the lottery and spent all the money. They couldn't help it; the lottery made them loony tunes. And they ended up
poorer than before they won
.” Billy punctuated the sentence by throwing his arms up in the air. “Isn't that
nuts
?”

“That
is
nuts,” Mom emphatically agreed. “Greed is dangerous.”

“This way,” Billy said, gesturing at the wall, “you're a winner forever.”

Mom leaned over the table, reaching a hand out to Billy. She was practically slobbering on him.

“Oh, Billy, you simply
have
to come over more often.”

“I'm done!” I snapped my book shut a little too loudly. “Um … with my homework, I mean. Billy D., you want to show me that thing, or … ?”

Billy looked surprised that I was still in the room. “Oh, yeah.” He slid a sidelong glance at my mom, which I took to mean the “thing” wasn't for her eyes.

“Let's go to my room,” I said.

“Okay, but …” Billy looked down at the cookies.

Mom took the cue and pressed a pile of imitation Oreos into his hands. “Take them with you. Come back if you want more.”

“We'll be fine, Mom,” I said, pushing Billy and his backpack out of the kitchen and down the hall.

I locked my bedroom door behind me. “Okay, this better be good.”

“It's awesome,” Billy said. He sat on the dirty carpet and pulled a tall, flat book from his backpack.

“What is it?” I dropped down to the floor next to Billy and leaned in.

“It's a
yearbook
,” he breathed.

His breath was the sound effect to match my own deflating anticipation.

“A yearbook? Seriously? I've been waiting an hour to see some lame yearbook?” I grabbed it from Billy's hands. “It's not even a new yearbook. It's some old moldy year.” I checked the date on the front. The year I was born. “I don't get—”

Oh.

There was only one person I knew who went to Mark Twain High sixteen years ago.

“Is this my mom's yearbook?”

I opened the pages without waiting for a response. Billy knelt beside me, peeking around my shoulder.

“You said she was fifteen when you were born,” Billy explained. “And I'm really good at math”—I happened to know Billy was, in fact, in remedial math, but I didn't interrupt—“so I figured out which yearbook she was in.”

“Okay. So?”

“I bet your dad's in there, too.”

I snapped the yearbook shut and held it away from me like it was contaminated. “Whoa. Who asked you to look up my dad?”

“Nobody asked me. I did it because I'm nice.” He looked very pleased with himself, which only pissed me off more.

“I told you,” I said, seething. “I don't want to find my dad. I don't want to talk about my dad. I don't give a
shit
about my dad.”

Billy leaned away from me, but he didn't look scared. “You didn't tell me all that.”

“I told you enough,” I said, flinging the yearbook back into his bag. “What did you expect to find in there, anyway? I don't even know my dad's name.”

“Duh. Somebody who looks like you.”

I froze for a second, almost tempted by the idea, but then shook my head.

“No way. Sorry, but he could look like anybody.
I
could look like anybody. What are we going to do, look up every guy with dark skin and dark hair, track them down, and ask them if they slept with my mom? Not cool, Billy D.”

Billy's shoulders slumped, and I could see he hadn't thought that far ahead. Just like with his atlas, he'd decided the answers were in a book—like books were magical yellow-brick roads with dads at the end of every one. My palms began to itch. Billy had made me think—even for a second—like him, like there was a secret inside one of those books. He'd made me feel dumb and childish, and I wondered why the hell I was hanging out with someone so retar—
damn
, I couldn't even
think
the word anymore.
Someone so … not like me
.