He sighs and sits up. “Right. Everything is my fault. I guess your eating cement in there was my fault, too.”
The strain behind his voice tugs at my heart. “Well, the slam was kind of your fault.” My voice softens, a conscious effort to ease the tension between us. “I would’ve already aced an ollie if you were still teaching the skateboard class.”
Jeb’s lips twitch. “So, the new teacher, Hitch … he’s not doin’ it for ya?”
I punch him, releasing some pent-up frustration. “No, he’s not doing it for me.”
Jeb fakes a wince. “He’d sure like to. But I told him I’d kick his—”
“As if you have a say.” Hitch is nineteen and the go-to king for fake IDs and recreational drugs. He’s a prison sentence waiting to happen. I know better than to get tangled up with him, but that’s my call.
Jeb shoots me a look. I sense a talk coming on about the evils of dating players.
I flick a grasshopper off my leg with a blue fingernail, refusing to let its whispers make the moment any more awkward than it is.
Mercifully, the double doors swing open from behind. Jeb scoots away to let a couple of girls through. A cloud of powdery perfume wafts over us as they pass and wave at Jeb. He nods back. We watch them get into a car and peel out of the parking lot.
“Hey,” Jeb says. “It’s Friday. Aren’t you supposed to visit your mom?”
I jump on the subject change. “Meeting Dad there. And then I promised Jen I’d take the last two hours of her shift.” After looking at my torn clothes, I glance into the sky—the same striking blue as Alison’s eyes. “I hope I have time to drop home and change before work.”
Jeb stands. “Let me clock out,” he says. “I’ll get your board and backpack and drive you to Soul’s.”
That’s the last thing I need.
Neither Jeb nor his sister, Jenara, have ever met Alison; they’ve only seen pictures of her. They don’t even know the truth about my scars or why I wear the gloves. My friends all think I was in a car accident with my mom as a kid and that the windshield messed up my hands and injured her brain. Dad doesn’t like the lie, but the reality is so bizarre, he lets me embellish.
“What about your bike?” I’m grasping at straws, considering Jeb’s souped-up vintage Honda CT70 isn’t anywhere on the lot.
“They predicted rain, so Jen dropped me off,” he answers. “Your dad can take you to work later, and I’ll drive your car home. It’s not like it’s out of my way.”
Jeb’s family shares the other side of our duplex. Dad and I went over to introduce ourselves one summer morning after they first moved in. Jeb, Jenara, and I became tight before sixth grade started the next fall—tight enough that on the first day of school, Jeb beat up a guy in the breezeway for calling me the Mad Hatter’s love slave.
Jeb slides on some shades and repositions the bandana’s knot at the back of his head. Sunlight hits the shiny, round scars peppered along his forearms.
I turn to the cars in the lot. Gizmo—my 1975 Gremlin, named after a character in the eighties movie Dad took Alison to on their first date—is only a couple of yards away. There’s a chance Alison will be waiting in the lounge with Dad. If I can’t count on Jeb to back me up about London, I can’t trust him to meet the biggest nut who’s fallen from my family tree.
“Uh-uh,” Jeb says. “I see that look. No way you can drive a standard with a sprained ankle.” He holds out a palm. “Fork ’em over.”
With a roll of my eyes, I drop my keys into his hand.
He pushes his shades to the bandana at his hairline. “Wait here and I’ll walk you.”
A burst of air-conditioning hits my face as the door to the complex slams shut behind him. There’s a tickle on my leg. This time, I don’t swish the grasshopper away, and I hear its whisper loud and clear: “Doomed.”
“Yeah,” I whisper back, stroking its veined wings and surrendering to my delusions. “It’s all over once Jeb meets Alison.”
Soul’s Asylum is a twenty-five-minute drive outside the city limits.
Afternoon sun beats down, glaring off the car’s hood. Once you get past the buildings, strip malls, and houses, there’s not much landscaping in Pleasance. Just flat, dry plains with sparse growths of shrubbery and spindly trees.
Each time Jeb starts to talk, I mumble a monosyllabic response, then crank up the volume on the newly installed CD player.
Finally, a song comes on—an acoustic, moody number I’ve heard Jeb listen to when he paints—and he drives in silent contemplation. The baggie of ice he brought for my swollen ankle has melted, and I move my foot to let it roll off.