Trouble From the Start

  I propped my hip against the bike, needing some sort of support for my weakening knees. How was it that he could make me feel at once steady and unsteady?

  I ran my fingers up into his hair, relishing the fact that right now it was only us, the night, his lips moving over mine.

  Drawing back, he stroked my lower lip. “I’ve got no resistance where you’re concerned.”

  “That’s a good thing. I know you like me, Fletcher.”

  “I’m not good for you, and I’m not going to bring you down to my level.”

  Is that what last night had been about? Some misguided sense of protecting me? “Shouldn’t what’s good for me be my decision? And there’s nothing wrong with your level. It’s not beneath me.”

  “You’re smart, Avery. Scary smart. You’re going to college. You’re going to meet smart guys—”

  “You’re smart.”

  “Not the way you are.” He skimmed his fingers along my cheek. “You’ve got a future. You can do anything—”

  “So can you,” I interrupted. “You can be anything you want to be. You can have anything you want to have. You just have to be willing to work for it, to do what it takes to make it happen.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy, but someone once told me ‘easier isn’t always the right choice.’ If it was easy, it wouldn’t have value.” I threaded my fingers through his hair. “I believe in you.”

  With a low groan, he jerked me forward and buried his face in the curve of my neck. “No one ever has before,” he said in a low rasp.

  Tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to never have anyone in your corner.

  “My parents do or they wouldn’t have taken you in. Smiley does or he wouldn’t have given you a job.”

  Fletcher leaned back, studied me. “And if you’re all wrong?”

  “My dad will kick your butt. After I’ve finished kicking it.”

  He released a soft chuckle. “You’re something else.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “More than I should.”

  I couldn’t stop the joy spiraling through me. “I like you, too.”

  He jerked his head toward my car. “We need to go. Make sure it works.”

  Leaning in, I gave him a quick kiss. “We’ll talk some more when we get home.”

  I went to my car, unlocked it, and climbed in. I put the key in the ignition, turned it—

  And Trooper purred like it had fallen in love. The car hadn’t been this quiet when we bought it. Fletcher had done way more than rotate a few tires. I gave him a thumbs-up before pulling out onto the street. I couldn’t believe how smooth it drove. I looked in the rearview mirror. Fletcher was following me.

  When I pulled into our driveway, I hopped out of the car. I couldn’t wait to thank Fletcher for whatever it was he’d done to Trooper. I wanted to hug him and kiss him.

  Instead I just stood there and stared as he whizzed by. No wave, no acknowledgment at all. He just carried on and disappeared into the darkness.

  Chapter 26

  FLETCHER

  I didn’t know where I was going. I had no destination in mind. I just knew that I needed to keep riding until Avery was far away and couldn’t pull me in. She made me want to believe in dreams and a future and plans worth having. She made me smile. She made me laugh, deep down, where I hadn’t even known laughter existed.

  Dangerous, so dangerous to forget who I was, to forget where I came from. I wasn’t totally stupid. I’d taken biology. I understood genes and how they worked. That our parents contributed to our makeup. I didn’t remember much about my mother. I remembered too much about my father.

  Sometimes when I looked in the mirror I saw him in my black hair and my dark brown eyes.

  I pulled onto a narrow lane and stopped just shy of the entrance to the trailer park. I turned off the engine and started walking. It was late at night and I knew a lot of the trailers weren’t soundproofed very well. I’d wake up half the people here if I drove through. Then they’d look out the window to see who it was and what was going on. I didn’t want anyone to know I was here.

  So I strolled along. I heard the occasional bark of a dog, a TV turned up too loud, a couple arguing. I hated arguing. I hated loud talking. I hated anger.

  Me, who everyone at school was wary of, who everyone thought was so tough—I’d never hit anyone. Shoved on my dad to try to keep him off me, but I’d never hit him. He was my old man, and it just seemed wrong to even think about hitting him.

  I stopped and stared at a dilapidated trailer. It was dark, no lights on. I doubted my old man was asleep. He was either out drinking or still in jail. I’d come here to remind myself of what I was. Someone who didn’t dream, who didn’t believe life got better.

  Avery made me want to dream. She made me want to believe everything she said.

  When I was with her, I felt different. I felt clean. I felt like she understood me, even though there was no way that she could. How could she understand this when I didn’t even understand it?

  What if I had inherited whatever it was that made my dad the kind of man who’d beat on his kid?

  I believe in you, she’d said.

  Four little words.

  They scared the hell out of me.

  Chapter 27

  AVERY

  I took a deep breath, slid beneath the surface of the water, and did several breaststrokes before coming up for air. Beneath the pool, the lights were on, but other than that I was encased in darkness. In the house, everyone was asleep. I told myself that I’d come out here because I wasn’t tired, but the truth was that I wanted to be out here when Fletcher returned. He would return. He had to. But even as I thought that, I knew he could keep riding forever.

  During my eighth lap, when I came up for air, I heard the roar of a motorcycle, then silence. Relief washed through me because he’d come back. Now I just had to figure out how to act the next time our paths crossed. How to act. I hated pretending. I hated having to watch my actions or words. I’d been brought up to believe in honesty, truth, the American way.

  I sliced through the water to the edge of the pool. I could see the door to the apartment over the garage. I thought about going to Fletcher, talking to him, but he obviously needed time alone.

  I heard his feet echoing on the steps. Then he appeared at the door, stopped, turned. I thought he was looking over the fence into the backyard. He’d see the pool lights on. I didn’t know if he’d see me. I thought about waving, I thought about moving to the center of the pool so he’d see my silhouette in the water. But I stayed where I was.

  He started back down the steps. Silence. The back gate creaking open.

  I watched Fletcher stride across the lawn. He hunkered down at the edge of the pool. The lights cast a blue glow over him.

  “You’re wearing a bathing suit,” he said. “Disappointing.”

  I welcomed his teasing. Maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought. Laughing, I flung water at him. “Of course I am.”

  He glanced back at the house. “Looks like everyone’s asleep. Who would know?”

  “I would.”

  “Which room is yours?”

  I realized we’d never given him a tour of the entire house. He was just the guy who lived over the garage. “The one on the second floor with the corner window.”

  “That looks out on the garage?”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned to me. “So you can see when I come and go.”

  “If I’m in the window, but it’s not my job to keep tabs on you.” I felt the need to confess. “But that first night, I saw you sitting on the steps. You looked lonely.”

  “That’s why you came and talked to me.”

  I pushed myself away from the side, floating back. “Just like you saw me tonight and came to talk. Where’d you go?”

  “To my past.”

  “You didn’t stay very long.”

  “Decided
it was best not to.”

  “I’m glad. The present is better.” I glided back and forth. “Why don’t you come in the water?”

  “No swim trunks, remember?”

  “Shorts work, remember?”

  “No shorts either.” He skimmed his fingers along the surface of the water. Other than that, he was completely still. It was so quiet I could hear the crickets chirping.

  I didn’t know what to say to get us back to where we had been before last night. Everything suddenly seemed complicated and convoluted. Maybe we could never go back. Maybe we could only go forward.

  “Trooper runs really great now,” I said. “You did a lot of work on it.”

  He shrugged. “I like working on cars. I like taking something that’s broken and fixing it. Or taking something that’s almost broken and making sure it doesn’t break. Is that what you’re doing with me?”

  “What? No.” I glided to the edge of the pool and looked up into his face. “I don’t think you’re broken. I’m not trying to fix you. I like you, Fletcher.”

  “Enough to tutor me?”

  I blinked, stared. Not what I was expecting. I smiled brightly. “Sure.”

  “Summer school starts Monday.”

  “What about work?”

  “Class starts at eight, so I’ll go before work, then stay late to make up for the lost hours. I want this to be the last time I ever see an equation.”

  “We can make that happen.”

  He released a strangled laugh. “Where do you get your confidence?”

  It was funny. I’d seen him swagger around school and assumed he had way more confidence than me, that he was self-assured and in control. Maybe we all struggled with something. “I don’t know all the answers in life, but the beauty in math is that the answer is always there.”

  He scoffed. “Yet I never seem to be able to find it.”

  “Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

  Chapter 28

  FLETCHER

  Monday night I sat at the table in the dining room, my algebra book opened, and a pad of paper in front of me. Avery sat in a chair beside me, studying the algebra problem I’d solved like it contained the answers to the world. I guess for her it did.

  She was so impassioned, so focused. I didn’t know if I could ever feel that way about anything.

  “Almost,” she said. “See here.” She used the pencil as a pointer. “You have a negative variable so you want to multiply both sides by negative one. Two negatives make a positive. Most of the teachers I’ve had don’t care about the negative. Turner does.”

  And he was the one teaching the summer school algebra class. Just my luck. But Avery looked at me with such encouragement. Turner always made me feel stupid, made me not care if I didn’t get the variable right. Avery made me see it as a challenge. If I got it right, she’d smile at me. I wanted her to smile.

  “I think I’ve got it,” I said. “Let me try the next one.”

  “Okay, but I want you to write out every step, no matter how small it is. Don’t do some of it in your head. No one is impressed with how much ‘mental math’ you can do, only that the answer is right. My tests are covered with calculations by the time I’m finished. I could do some of it in my head, but what’s the point? There’s just a better chance I’ll mess up.”

  “But if I can do it in my head, it’s a waste of time to write it down.”

  “This isn’t a race. The object is to get the correct answer. I want you to explain your thought process out loud as you work on the problem.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I know you’re not really one for talking, but when you have to vocalize what you’re thinking, you’ll often catch your mistake. It also helps me identify where you’re having issues because I’ll know what you’re thinking.”

  “What I’m thinking is that it’s stupid.”

  She gave me an indulgent smile. “Humor me.”

  I felt like an idiot but I did it, explaining each step as I wrote it down. When I got to the end and announced the answer, I looked at her.

  “Very good,” she said, and beamed at me. “You got it right.”

  I scowled at her. “Don’t get too excited. That was an easy one. Your brother could have probably solved it.”

  “I doubt it. He hasn’t learned his multiplication tables yet.”

  She was so comfortable with it. I couldn’t imagine looking at all this stuff and having it make sense. “Give me a harder one,” I ordered.

  She leaned slightly in front of me, and I inhaled the fragrance of strawberries. So distracting. “Okay, let’s try a system of equations,” she suggested.

  I’d asked for harder, and harder was what she gave me. It was two problems with two different variables, and I had to use one to solve the other. I hated these. They seemed to defy logic, and I’d often start one and then keep going in circles until, after about a page of work, I had simply rewritten the problem.

  I just stared at it. I couldn’t even figure out where to begin.

  “It’s a car,” she said quietly.

  “What?” I looked at her. Her eyes contained such earnestness. She really did want to help me.

  “Think of the problem as a car,” she explained. “It’s broken. Knowing the variables will tell you how to fix it. That’s all this is. You just want to figure out how to make it work.”

  “But I know cars.”

  “You didn’t the first time you looked under the hood. You didn’t know what all the belts and hoses did, where they went. You learned. An equation is the same thing. You analyze it, you learn what the various parts mean, how they work together. You don’t have to look at it and know immediately what the answer is. You solve it. Just like you solved what was wrong with my car. Easy peasy.”

  “You think fixing a car is easy?”

  “Nooo. Not at all. When you pass your algebra class, you can teach me how to repair a car.”

  I pictured her with grease on the tip of her nose, oil on her cheeks, grime on her hands. I thought about how bright her smile would be when she changed the clunk of a car engine to a purr. “Maybe I will.”

  She tapped the book. “Math first, though.”

  “All right.” I studied the problem. “So I just want to make this puppy run.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Take your time. I’ve got all night.”

  I worked it out, writing down every step, even the obvious ones, and revealing my thought processes, even the profanity. She corrected my steps a couple of times, ignored the profanity. I finally announced the answer.

  “You got it!” Her eyes were twinkling, her lips parted in a smile.

  My pride had prevented me from having this all year.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her brow furrowed. “For what?”

  “For all the times I didn’t show up for tutoring, all the times you were waiting on me.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I didn’t have anything else to do.”

  She should have had plenty to do.

  “Ready to try another one?” she asked.

  What I was ready for was a kiss, but I couldn’t keep running hot and cold with her. I needed a distraction. “Yeah, I’m ready to try another one. The harder the better.”

  As usual, she gave me exactly what I needed. I wished I could do the same for her.

  Chapter 29

  AVERY

  Tuesday, I was in the kitchen helping Mom prepare dinner. Dad and Tyler were in the den building some kind of Lego city. Fletcher wasn’t home yet. I was trying not to worry. We’d exchanged cell phone numbers in case one of us couldn’t make a tutoring session. I had this crazy thought that maybe he’d text me some silly nonsense. But of course, he didn’t. Unlike Jeremy, he wasn’t the type to send little “thinking of you” notes over the phone. He wasn’t the type to send notes at all.

  The timer started beeping.

  “Think that’s it,” Mom said, wiping her
hands on a dishtowel. “Why don’t you let your dad and Tyler know it’s time to eat?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Fletcher?”

  “He called. He’s working late tonight.”

  “At Smiley’s?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said distractedly, pulling a dish from the oven. “Some important job that had to be finished up today.”

  I had no idea that Smiley had his crew work late to finish up jobs. I wondered if it was a pain-in-the-butt customer or someone important. It just seemed odd.

  “Maybe you can put together a plate for him and take it over there after dinner,” Mom suggested. “I want to make sure he eats. He’s too thin.”

  Mom thought everyone was too thin. I thought about explaining that he was slender and all muscle, but then she might wonder why I was paying so much attention.

  After dinner, I heaped lasagna, two pieces of garlic toast, and Brussels sprouts onto a plate, covered it in foil, and placed it in a quilted casserole carrier. Dusk was settling in as I drove over to Smiley’s.

  One bay was open. The office windows were all dark. A couple of cars were in the parking lot but they had a numbered card hanging from the rearview mirror, which meant they were in the queue for repair. I pulled in, parked, and grabbed the casserole carrier.

  Cautiously I walked to the bay and peered in. Fletcher was working under the hood of a red car. Glancing around, I didn’t see anyone else. I just stood there watching his efficiency of movement, the way the muscles played across his shoulders as he tightened, adjusted, repaired whatever needed to be fixed.

  Straightening, he turned for the nearby toolbox, stopped, looked at me. “What are you doing here?”

  I held up the offering as I wandered farther into the shop. “Brought you some supper. Mom was worried about you eating.” And I wondered why I didn’t admit that I’d been worried about him, too. “She said there was some job that had to be completed tonight, so why isn’t anyone here to help you?”