“From who? The old men at the gas station? The guys at the hardware store?” I shook my head. “Since when do you listen to small-town gossip?”
He pushed his chair out, too, and stood. He was taller than me, but not by much. “The truth is, I don’t like these friends you’ve been hanging out with, Stephen. Devon has trouble written all over him, and his sister can’t be much better. They’re exactly the kind of stuck Spencer people I didn’t want you around. It has to stop. Now, son. Before you make any more poor choices.” His tone said he was serious. Both serious and incredibly out of touch with reality. Had he seen Cara?
I pointed an accusing finger at him. “I’ll watch my back when it comes to Devon, but you can forget about the idea of me breaking up with Cara. Because that is not going to happen.”
“Be reasonable. There are other girls.” He was speaking nonsense. There were no other girls. Not like Cara. She was smart and sarcastic. She was funny and sweet. She was open and real. And what’s more, she was mine. You’d think he could respect that much of it anyway.
“Sure, there are other girls. There are other kids I could hang out with. But what you’re forgetting is that I like Cara. And at least Devon’s more interesting than the other jerks in this town.” How had the conversation gotten so twisted around? A minute ago, I’d been this close to flat out asking my dad whether he thought I should worry about Devon. But now, it felt like by attacking Devon, he was attacking me.
“Did your new friends tell you they put that Lane kid in the hospital?”
My body froze, but my heart raced. There was no way. He had to be wrong.
But I couldn’t forget Markus’s words the day Lane stole my wallet. “The boys and I will take care of it.” Or Devon’s that night: “Probably better not to ask.”
Had they? Taken care of it?
As I moved for the front door, my dad threw out desperate, meaningless words. “Go to your room, Stephen!”
“Go to hell, Harold!” The door slammed behind me and I stepped outside into the midday sun. Standing there on the sidewalk was Cara, dressed in ragged military boots, red plaid skinny jeans, more bracelets than I could count, and some obscure band T-shirt, looking like a much-needed beacon in the middle of a stormy sea.
chapter 13
“What’s wrong?” Cara fell into step beside me. And man, was I stepping. Fast and forward. The only direction that I had in mind was away.
Clenching my jaw even tighter, I practically growled, “Nothing.”
“Liar.” When I glanced over at her, I could see the smile in her eyes. But it faded when she realized this was more serious than just a bad day.
I softened, but was still fuming. Not at her. Never at her. “Everything.”
“Liar.” She grabbed the sleeve of my T-shirt and gave it a tug, pleading with me to stop walking. We’d only made it a block from my grandmother’s house, and so far my dad hadn’t bothered coming after me. Cara tugged my sleeve again, getting my attention. Her eyes were so big and wondering. I wished that I could just spill my guts and tell her everything at that moment, but I couldn’t risk hurting her like that. Oh, Cara, my dad says you and your brother are trash. No big.
A spark seemed to ignite in her mind and she laced her fingers with mine, pulling me down the street after her. “Come on. I know where we’re going.”
Hand in hand, we kept making our way down Water Street until we came to Second, where Cara veered us right and led me all the way to the end. We passed an older home. As we walked by, Cara pointed to it and said, “That used to be the funeral home years and years ago, but then they built a new one over on First Street. So now it’s just a house. The weird thing is that the crematorium is still in the basement of this one.”
It was hard to imagine the small brick Craftsman bungalow as a funeral parlor, but then again, I hadn’t exactly spent much time in small towns . . . or their funeral homes. On the front porch sat a rusty tricycle that had once been painted red. Its presence made everything that Cara was saying all the more creepy. “Really? Don’t they have to take them out when they’re no longer in use? Isn’t there a law or something? It just doesn’t seem sanitary to have living people residing where corpses have been burned up. Y’know?”
She shrugged as we moved past the house and toward the end of the street. Beyond the crumbling pavement, there were trees, but nothing else. I had no idea where she was taking me. “I don’t know if there’s a law or whatever. I just know it’s there because I’ve seen it. A girl I used to hang out with in elementary school lives there. We used to dare each other to go down into the basement at night and touch the oven door.”
My mind whispered, Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man, but I wasn’t certain why.
When I tried to imagine little elementary-aged Cara, with long hair in pigtails tied with ribbons, the muscles in my shoulders relaxed a little. I pictured her running back up the creaky basement stairs, squealing in fear and laughter. It was an image of pure joy, a thing of beauty, and I wondered if she ever laughed so freely now as when she’d been a little girl. Money said she didn’t laugh a lot anymore at all. Not since she lost her dad in such a terrible way. Maybe before that even. A cloud hung around Cara at all times, even when she was smiling.
“Did you do it?”
“I only managed to touch it once. The rest of the times I was too scared. I used to have these nightmares about a half-burned man reaching out and grabbing me. But at least I was braver than Brandy. She never even made it down the basement steps.” Cara straightened her shoulders in pride and I made a considerable effort not to chuckle. It was such a funny thing to take pride in—that she’d once touched a cremation oven and run away from the boogeyman inside as fast as she could when her friend had not—but who was I to judge whether something was prideworthy? She’d been brave. Braver than her friend. Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.
We reached the end of the pavement and I stopped at the beat-up road sign that read Dead End. From the time I was four until I turned eight years old, I was terrified of dead ends. I’d somehow convinced myself that whenever you saw those signs they were warnings. Of the horrors that awaited you at the end of those roads, those streets. Of monsters. But there were no monsters here. Just me and Cara.
“You and Brandy don’t hang out anymore?”
“Nope. That was a long time ago. Back before this town had made up its mind about me, and before the half-burned man in my dreams became my dad.” She grabbed a low-hanging branch and pulled it out of the way. As I moved past her, she raised an eyebrow at me. “What do you think? Has Spencer made up its mind about you yet?”
When I stepped through the brush, I saw that we were standing in a clearing. Sunlight filtered through the surrounding trees, and a hush fell all around us. There was no way you could tell that we were standing mere feet outside of a town. It was quiet. It was exactly what I needed.
I shrugged in response to her question, thinking about my grandmother, about the old man from the corner shop, about Lane and his friends. “I think so.”
She led me across the clearing and through another grouping of trees, until we came to an open field. We stopped and she met my eyes. “What are you gonna do about it?”
I shrugged again. “Well, if my dad doesn’t get a job soon, the plan is to get through high school and get out of here, I guess.”
“You’d leave?” She sat crisscross applesauce and looked up at me, her eyes filled with utter surprise. I felt guilty, but what else was I supposed to say? I couldn’t lie to her. I wouldn’t.
Shrugging, I tried to keep my tone casual, even though I felt in some small way like I was betraying her with every word I spoke. “Well, yeah. I want to go back to Denver. Maybe get into the University of Colorado, I don’t know. I don’t want to get stuck in Spencer forever. Don’t you want to get out, go somewhere else?”
“Of course I do.” She pulled her Tarot cards from her back pocket and shuffled them.
As she
laid three cards faceup in front of her, I asked, “What are you doing?”
“Baking cookies. What does it look like? I’m reading my fortune.” Her tone was snippy, which, okay, I guess was partly my fault. The way her forehead wrinkled as she looked over the cards suggested she wasn’t pleased with whatever it was that she saw.
“Something wrong?” I knelt in front of her in the grass. The sun warmed my shoulders.
“I was hoping that would be the Chariot.” She tapped the card on the right, the one in her future position. The corners of her pretty mouth were pulled down in a frown. “The Chariot’s a card of movement. It signifies a journey.”
I was interested, but probably not as interested as she needed me to be. “To where?”
“Anywhere but Spencer.”
I don’t know why I was surprised. Of course she wanted to leave Spencer someday. But for whatever reason, she felt like she couldn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to abandon her mom, the way my dad had once abandoned his mom, then later abandoned mine. I could respect that.
Reaching out, I brushed a stray hair from her eyes. She glanced at me, but refused to hold my gaze. She was mad. Not just at me. Maybe at herself. Maybe at her mom. Maybe at her life. “You could come back to Colorado with me.”
“Yeah. Sure I could.”
I gently lifted her chin with my hand until she was looking into my eyes at last. “You can do anything you want to do, Cara.”
She turned her head away, but I could see the threat of tears in her eyes. “Right. Sure I can.”
A breeze arrived without warning, pressing the long grass all around us down again and again, making it look like ripples in a lake. I sighed, but the breeze picked up and swallowed the sound. To my surprise, the cards remained where they were on the ground, undisturbed. I nodded to the ones she’d laid out. “So what’s it all mean?”
Cara closed her eyes, letting the wind brush back her hair and dry her cheeks. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed a little more at peace. She pointed to the cards and said, “In my past is the Sun. It’s pretty much the happiest card you can get. It stands for relationships, friendship, joy. It might be referring to my childhood. Before everything went to hell. In my present is the Moon. . . .”
She furrowed her brow and stared at the cards, as if something there had disturbed her further. I waited a moment before speaking. “And?”
Cara shook her head. “Why don’t I just read yours now? You can’t possibly be all that interested in my future.”
It was a dig about my plans to leave Spencer, but I shook it off. “I’m kinda hoping to be a part of it. So could you keep reading, please?”
There was a moment when time slowed, when all we did was look at each other, the threat of my leaving hanging between us. Then Cara gathered the cards into a pile and said, “In my future is the World. It stands for triumph.”
I shrugged. “That sounds good.”
“I still wish it had been the Chariot.” She dropped the deck in front of me. “Shuffle the cards and cut them as many times as you want.”
The tension between us was uneasy and strange, and I found myself fighting just to get through it, like walking over marshland. I wanted to apologize, but at the same time, I wanted her to recognize that I had my own problems to deal with. And so what if I didn’t plan to spend my entire life stuck in a nowhere town, filled with no one and nothing to do. It was my life, wasn’t it?
I took the cards from her and shuffled them quickly and cut them before handing them back, biting my tongue. She laid out three cards. Past, present, future. Left to right they looked like a guy running along and not looking where he was going, a dude hanging upside down by his ankle, and a creepy lone man cowering from an unseen force. My life, just looking at the pictures, was pretty grim. I let out a sigh, and Cara pointed to the first card. “In your past, you have the Fool. This card means innocence, naivety, and spontaneity. Maybe you didn’t know something, but you moved forward anyway in ignorant bliss.”
The conversation I’d just had with my dad refused to leave my mind. I shook my head. “Bliss. Yeah. That doesn’t sound like what I’m going through.”
“That card shows more ignorance than bliss. Besides, it’s in your past.” She tapped the card next to it. A ladybug crawled from the grass onto the card before taking a journey across the second guy’s head. “This is in your present. The Hanged Man. It signifies devotion to a worthwhile cause, temporary suspension of progress. It’s all about sacrificing one thing to obtain another.”
Suspension of progress? Now that sounded exactly like my present state. Was the card saying I was stuck? Because I sure as hell felt stuck. Stuck in Spencer. Stuck with my grandmother. Stuck under my dad’s control until I hit eighteen. Devotion to a worthwhile cause could’ve been my relationship with Cara. But what was I sacrificing in order to obtain something else? Was I sacrificing my dad’s approval to be with Cara? Made sense.
I eyed the third card, the dude cowering from something not shown in the picture. I didn’t know why, but seeing the card sent a small shiver up my spine. I wasn’t about to tell Cara that. I nodded toward it as casually as I could manage. “What about that one?”
She ran the fingertips of her right hand over the last card, a small crease forming on her brow. “The Hermit . . .”
She paused, looking troubled. I shuffled a nervous glance between her and the card.
“. . . is a card of caution. It points to a need to reach into one’s inner resources, and a time to stand back and reflect upon circumstances.”
So basically, the creepy guy thought I needed to look inside myself for the answers to my problems . . . or some such crock. Who did he think he was, cardboard Yoda? I snorted in derision and rolled my eyes at Cara. “Very helpful. Do you really, actually believe in this stuff?”
As lighthearted as I’d meant it, my question clearly hurt her feelings. “If I didn’t believe in Tarot, would I bother doing it?”
Groaning, I stood, brushing grass from my legs. “Lots of people do things on a regular basis that they don’t believe in, Cara.”
“Such as?” She started picking up the cards quickly, angrily, and stacking them together in her hand.
“Nothing. Never mind. I’m sorry. I just can’t do this today. Tomorrow, okay?” I bent down and took her chin in my hand, tilting her face up to mine. I was sorry I was being such a dick to her. It wasn’t her fault I was feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t her fault that my family was so screwed up. But I was taking it out on her just the same. “Tomorrow. When I can be good to you.”
She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, they were sad. She said, “What’s the point in being together if we can’t be together through good and bad?”
She’d made a very wise point. But I had to leave, had to get away from her. I was hurting and in the mood to make someone else hurt, too. But not Cara. Anybody but Cara.
Shaking my head, I moved back toward the trees. “I just . . . can’t.”
“Stephen . . .”
I didn’t look back at her as I disappeared the way we’d come. I only held up a hand in a reluctant wave and made us both a weak promise that neither of us could trust. “Tomorrow.”
She didn’t follow me—something that I was both grateful for and disappointed in. I’d known girls who chased guys, promising them anything just to get the guys to do whatever it was that the girls wanted them to do. I couldn’t respect girls like that, which was one of the reasons I found Cara so irresistible. She was her own person. Smart, strong, independent, but loyal at the same time. I loved that she didn’t call out after me. But I hated it at the same time. Because the truth was, I wanted her to stop me. I was so torn, it was making my head ache.
No sooner had I pushed through the second line of trees and stepped onto the pavement than I noticed Devon and Markus heading north on a cross street. Jogging, I caught up with them relatively quickly. “Hey. What’s going on?”
They excha
nged glances before Markus shrugged. “Not much. Just getting a few things in order before we head to the Playground tonight.”
Devon shot him a look that screamed shut up. It brought an immediate question to my lips. “Anything I can help with?”
Devon nodded for Markus to keep going on without him. Markus continued up the street, joining Nick and Thorne, who were standing outside a liquor store that looked like it doubled as a Laundromat. When Devon turned back to me, his eyes took on a steely gaze, as if I were causing a problem. “You’re not invited tonight, Stephen.”
I had no idea where this was coming from. Was he embarrassed after telling me they believed in stories about giant, winged monsters? Because all sorts of people believed in all sorts of things, as Cara had reminded me. I didn’t care.
I said, “Come on. Seriously? I need to get outta the house. My dad—”
“Stephen.” Devon’s eyes went cold. “Not tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I said.” He looked over his shoulder and I followed his line of sight. A man who I’d guess was homeless by the looks of him had stepped out of the liquor store and was engaging in conversation with Markus and the others. Even from this distance, I could see the ugly hat on the man’s head. It looked like something a fisherman would wear, only instead of various hooks and bobbers, it featured ugly patches of several different colors.
After a moment, Markus waved to Devon. Devon nodded and turned back to me. “Look, tonight’s about me and the boys. Go home, sleep off what’s left of that hangover, and tomorrow everything will be right as rain.”
“Tomorrow?” My stomach clenched. He was making me the same promise I’d made to his sister not ten minutes before. Whether or not either promise was an empty one remained to be seen.
“Yeah. You have my word on that.” He slapped me on the back and continued his trek toward the liquor store and the rest of the boys.
I called after him, “Who’s the guy?”