Nothing to Lose (7 page)

This time she does smile. “Oh, no. Lawyers—good lawyers—never lie. We tell the truth better than anyone. But whether we choose to tell
all
the truth—well, that’s a different story. What I know is, you left. What I need to know is, why are you back? And why here, talking to me?”

Good question. I don’t answer a second, considering the possibility of standing and heading back out the door I came in. Finally I say, “I’m not sure. I thought maybe you could help me.”

“With what?”

With deciding what to do. With telling me whether being here will help my mother, or if I should stay a missing person forever.

I say, “I came back to Miami. I’ve been gone a year, and no one knows where I was.” I wait for her to ask me where I’ve been, but she doesn’t. “So I wanted to know if anyone’s looking for me.”

“Why would they be?”

“I don’t know. To give information. To interview me on CNN. Because I ran away, maybe, to put me in a home for messed-up kids.”

She smiles. “Well, forget that last one. If the police spent their time looking for runaways, they’d never do anything else. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I will. As long as you lay low, you can stay gone forever. And I get the impression you’re good at laying low … if laying low is still what you want. Where have you been all this time?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“I was just concerned about whether you’re someplace safe.”

“Safe enough.” She keeps looking at me until I add, “It’s just, why should I trust you? How do I know that what I say won’t end up on
Inside Edition
or something?”

“I guess you don’t.”

“That’s comforting.”

“How do you ever know you can trust anyone? But everything you say here is protected by attorney-client privilege. You walked in that door, you became my client. You walk out, I can’t tell anyone what you said unless you say it’s okay.”

I test her. “I’m a client even though I’m not paying you?”

She nods. “But I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me, Michael.”

I look down. “Where I am, it’s … complicated.”

“People say I’m pretty smart.”

“So smart you represent clients for no money?”

She doesn’t answer that, and I know she’s waiting.

“I’ve been traveling with the carnival,” I say. “I started working there about a week before … before Walker died. And now the carnival’s back in Miami, and so am I.” I give her a look, like
that’s it.

“Right. Why did you leave home?”

“I had to get out of there,” I say. “Every day I thought he was going to kill her, maybe both of us. It was like playing Hot Potato with a hand grenade. You never knew when he might explode. And she wouldn’t leave. I tried to get her to ditch him, but she wouldn’t go. I felt…”

Weak.
The weight of the word is inside me. Like I have to make her, this stranger, understand or I can’t go on. But I don’t want to admit how weak I felt either. I mean, the problem should be that Mom was getting hurt, not how it made me feel, not how much I hated her for how it made me feel.

I glance at the door again. When I look back, Angela’s looking at it too.

“Do you want to stay here?” she asks.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I guess… I want to know if there’s anything I can do. If not, I should probably leave town before anyone catches me.”

“And go where? Do you plan to stay with the carnival, just keep running away forever?”

“I can’t think of a better alternative.”

“I can think of several, including that group home you’re so afraid of.” She looked me in the eye. “Julian says you were a good student. Don’t you want to finish school?”

“I wasn’t that good a student. And I don’t know what I want.”

She glances out the window at Biscayne Bay. I think about how it’s the first time I’ve seen the bay since I left last year.

When Angela looks back, she says, “It’s all right not to know. It’s okay to be afraid, too. But at some point you need to take a chance, let someone help you.”

“I don’t know if I can do that either.”

She turns to the computer on her desk and pulls up a calendar program. “Is nine o’clock good for you?”

“Huh? Nine o’clock when?”

“Same time, Thursday. Does that work for you?”

“Yeah, but....”

She takes her hand off the mouse and looks at me. “I want to help you, Michael. But I don’t have time to sit here and
not
talk to you. It seems to me you need to do some thinking. Come back Thursday?”

Today is Tuesday. I nod.

“Same time?”

I nod again. She picks up one of her business cards, writes down the appointment, and hands it to me.

“Sometimes you need to have the guts to trust someone, Michael.”

I take the card from her.

“I used to trust a lot of people,” I say.

So the next day, after my attempted assault on Dutton, I was back in the cafeteria. It was St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday that must have been invented by Bennigan’s. The place was awash in every shade in the puke spectrum (worn by guys with Irish names like
Jose
), and the lunch ladies were serving corned beef and cabbage.

Irish eyes: Not smiling.

I should have worn green. Lately my efforts had been concentrated on blending with the crowd. Usually that meant jeans and some kind of T-shirt. But today, in my blue jeans and blue shirt, I stuck out like a buoy in a sea of green.

I was eating pb&j again. I’d brought three sandwiches to have something to do. I remembered this
Peanuts
strip where Charlie Brown says lonely people eat peanut butter, and if you’re really lonely, the peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth.

I swirled it off with my tongue.

“You’ve got the right idea.” Julian put his tray down across from mine. “I should bring my lunch instead of eating the stuff they sell here.” He gestured toward his Styrofoam tray full of corned beef and cabbage. “What is this anyway?”

I ignored him. That was, after all, the reason I sat in the cafeteria instead of outside: No explanations required here. Guys like Tris, they got mad if you didn’t answer their questions. Someone like Karpe was so used to being blown off, he probably didn’t even notice.

“Does your mom make your sandwiches?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

Karpe didn’t react to my annoyance. That would have destroyed his credibility as a wannabe. “I think she did, lucky guy. At my house, it’s just me and my dad. We eat manly meals in manly ways—we’re lucky if we take the lids all the way off the cans of baked beans before we ingest them.”

He laughed at his own joke. I’d never met Karpe’s dad. When we were friends, he’d lived with his mom, a working mother like mine. I wondered now why he’d moved, but I didn’t ask. Probably it was because of that “male influence” people always worry about.

In Karpe’s case, it hadn’t worked.

I considered enlightening Karpe that bringing a sandwich wasn’t exactly my choice. Walker kept a tight leash on Mom, letting her buy groceries once a week with his ATM card, but policing her other spending so even a buck-twenty-five cafeteria lunch would be noticed. That’s why I brought my lunch.

The weird thing was, I actually considered telling Karpe that—even if it was just for a second. Tris, or any of my other, more recent, friends, I wouldn’t have told in a quadrillion years. I told myself it was because I didn’t care what Karpe thought. But was it that?

I said, “Why are you sitting with me?” Karpe wasn’t wearing green either.

“Hey, this was my table. I always sit here.”

“Oh.” I felt oddly disappointed, then wondered why. Was I so pathetic I actually worried whether Julian Karpe liked me? “Sorry. I could sit with my friends or something.”

What friends?

“You can sit here. You’re sort of … less of a jerk than your friends.”

I laughed. “Oh, thanks. What makes you say that?”

“You make eye contact, for one thing. Guys like Ted Dutton act like they’d turn to stone if they looked at the wrong person.”

“Okay, I’m superior to Tedder Dutton. Check.”

“And, I don’t know,” he said. “You always picked me for your team in P.E., even after we stopped hanging together. If you weren’t captain, I got picked last, except maybe a couple of really
slow
girls. But you’d pick me fourth or fifth.”

More like sixth or seventh, but, yeah. I’d felt guilty about not being friends with Karpe anymore, so I’d picked him sometimes. And he always,
always
rewarded me for my generosity by striking out or fumbling or kicking the ball toward the wrong goal.

“That’s so lame,” I said. “Can’t believe you told me that. It’s humiliating, really.”

“Yeah, I know.” He played with his cabbage. “Doesn’t matter, though.”

“Don’t you care what people think of you?”

Karpe shook his head. “People mostly think the same, whether you care or not.” He took a bite of cabbage.

“So that’s also why you don’t care if that crap makes you…”

“Flatulate?” Karpe grinned. “It doesn’t. I have excellent self-control—probably from eating all those canned beans with my dad.” He took another bite of the gray slime and finished it before saying, “Why
don’t
you sit with your friends anymore?”

“I just don’t feel like it, okay? God, do you always ask questions like that?”

“You were the one who asked first.”

I changed the subject. “Want a sandwich? That looks like toxic waste.” I realized too late I sounded like Dutton. “I mean, I have an extra one.”

Karpe nodded. I fished the third sandwich from my bag and handed it to him. Of course, that had to be the precise moment Tristan walked into the cafeteria. That sound you heard was planets colliding. Tristan hesitated, then came over. He looked first at me, then at Karpe. Then at the empty seat beside me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

Karpe opened the pb&j and rearranged the pieces of bread so one half was all peanut butter, the other half all jelly, oblivious or pretending to be. Tristan sat down, trying to ignore Karpe but not completely succeeding. He wore a mostly green University of Miami National Champions T-shirt.

“Missed you outside,” he said, uncertain, like a dog on his fifth day at the pound.

I said, “Right. Like I could go back there again.”

“You could. Dutton’s used to people busting on him. He’d get over it.”

“If he’s such an asshole, why do you want to hang with him?”

“Well, it’s… I mean, we have football together.”

“Right. Football.”

“You used to like football. You used to be okay with sitting with us too.”

“It’s not that. It’s…”

I stopped. Why was I arguing with him? He was inviting me back. All I had to do was nothing, and I’d have a place to sit at lunch, people to talk to, parties on weekends. I wouldn’t have to sit around worrying about whether Julian Karpe—Julian Karpe, for crying out loud, who couldn’t even eat a
sandwich
correctly—liked me. It would be so easy. I might even be able to beg Coach to let me play football again. Maybe not first string. Maybe not even varsity. But play. Get my life back.

Easy.

Except it wasn’t. Nothing was or ever would be easy again.

“It’s what?” Tris said. “What is your problem?”

“Could you just…?”

Go. Leave.
But I couldn’t get the words I wanted, and I was just so tired of saying what I didn’t want. I was just so tired of all of it.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I can see from your face.”

“What can you see? That you’ve turned into this loser who hangs with guys like Tedder Dutton like it makes you someone? Are you really this pathetic?” I knew I was being cruel. Still, I kept going. It was that same exploded Coke bottle feeling. Soon they’d hang a sign around my neck that said
contents under pressure.
“You should carry his books, Tris. Or do his laundry.” I was gesturing wildly with my sandwich. “That’s it. You’ve already got your nose up his ass. Why not sniff his jock, too?”