“There’s a party tomorrow night with one of your classmates. A realrager, I hear.”
I coughed. “Okay.”
“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if you and Shiloh attended together? You could get to know your classmates and get Shi out of that garage.” She beamed in my direction. “What do you think, darling?”
The woman had to be more blind than I thought if she wantedmeto take her granddaughter anywhere.
“I don’t think so, Ms. Barrera.”
“Please. Call me Bibi.” She smiled into her knitting. “Too bad. I just figured since you go to the same school and all.” She chuckled. “Shiloh worried you were a cold-blooded killer.”
I stiffened, Chouder’s words coming back.The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Bibi sensed a shift in the air and looked up, finding me with her hazy brown eyes. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, dear. Shiloh would screech to hear me meddle in her affairs.” She smiled gently. “There are fresh cookies on the counter. Please help yourself before you go.”
For a second, I thought about Maryann Greer’s twin girls in the apartment below mine. Kids loved cookies. But there was no way in hell I was going to take anything out of this house. I already felt like an invader, barging in their perfect home and sullying it with my presence.
“No, thanks. I should go.”
“Suit yourself, but next time, I’ll insist. See you Monday, darling.”
“Yep.”
I went out, closing the door behind me. Closing it on Ms. Barrera’s mothering smile and her “darlings” and her great-granddaughter who was the most beautiful goddamn thing I’d seen in so many ugly years.
She’s a cathedral while I’m a broken-down strip mall.
As if to prove it, I walked to the Cliffside complex. The cement block of apartments looked even poorer after the Barrera household. My own place was like a bad joke. I’d scrubbed it clean when I first moved in, but the grime of poverty and solitude infiltrated every corner. I tried to imagine Shiloh here.
Not going to happen. Ever. And you know it.
Yeah, I knew that.
Uncle Nelson had hung a box for maintenance requests outside my door. “For when you’re playing school and someone needs you,” he’d said with an eye roll. The tenants all had my cell number too, for emergencies. But the box was empty and my cell phone quiet.
I fired up a frozen dinner and scrolled my phone while I ate, waiting for the night to be over. Around seven o’clock, the door banged shut downstairs. Maryann Greer’s daughters squealed and laughed, tearing around while she started dinner.
They deserved a house like the Barreras’. Warm and safe with chocolate chip cookies from a decent oven, not delivered by the weirdo who lived upstairs.
They’re making the best of it.
I showered, changed into boxer shorts and an undershirt, and lay down on the lumpy futon in the bedroom that smelled like old piss and tried to make the best of it.
***
The next afternoon, I fixed a nasty clog in 2C’s toilet, and then the rest of the day and night unrolled in front of me like an endless stretch ofhours with nothing to fill them. The old hollow hunger had started to hit me when I remembered the shack. Unless Miller was there, I’d still be alone, but it was a better kind of alone. Cleaner.
I hit the convenience store for lighter fluid and beer. The young guy behind the counter didn’t card me. The tattoos helped, but I didn’t look eighteen anyway. I didn’tfeeleighteen. When my dad picked up that baseball bat, he beat my childhood out of me too.
Miller showed up at the shack an hour after I did, carrying a banged-up guitar case. He sat down on a small boulder in front of the firepit and laid the case over his lap.
“I caught Chet fucking with it,” he said, answering my look. “I’ll have to bring it everywhere from now on. Here. To school. Fucking asshole.”
My skin grew hot at the thought of his mom’s lowlife boyfriend messing with that guitar. I remembered what Shiloh had said about Miller needing his hands to play. To make something of himself. There wasn’t much I was good for. No talents or special skills. But Miller was fucking smart, and he thought about what he said before he said it. I nearly asked him to play and handed him a beer instead.
We shot the shit for a few minutes, and then I caught him taking in my tattoos the way Shiloh had. Except when she did it, there’d been more than curiosity there. I felt it wherever her brown eyes landed on my skin, had noticed her lips parting just a little…
Cut it out.