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“I wonder what’s taking Bobby so long,” I say, cutting into the captain’s lecture. “He should’ve been back by now.”

The captain puts the tin sheet down. “I don’t think he’s coming back,” he says, looking at me sympathetically.

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t he come back? You don’t think he had a wreck, do you?”

“No, I just think he needs to be alone for a while. That’s how it is sometimes when the dark thoughts hit.”

“Dark thoughts? What dark thoughts? Did I say something wrong? He seemed like he was in such a good mood. Then all of a sudden, things changed.”

“That’s how it is,” the captain says, and picks up the tin sheet and goes back to work. “He’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. He can’t stay away from Angelica for too long.”

“Well, I can’t wait till tomorrow or the next day. I need a ride home tonight.”

The captain grins. “Is that all? I have the truck right out there.”

“That’s okay. I’ll wait a little while longer.”

Another half hour of listening to the captain ramble about the history of flight, and still no Bobby. Finally, I break down and call Brianna. She doesn’t ask any questions. She just says, “I’ll be right over.”

When she gets there, we drive by Dani’s to see if Bobby’s motorcycle is parked outside. It’s not, so we cruise slowly down the highway looking for signs of a wreck. Luckily, we don’t see any. Then an idea strikes me—the Tip-Top Motel. And sure enough, when we pull up in the parking lot, there’s Bobby’s motorcycle parked right next to Mona’s Escalade.

“Don’t you dare tell anyone about this,” I order Brianna.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t want to see someone get killed any more than you do.”

I never say anything about the Tip-Top Motel situation. Sure, cheating on Dani is creepy, not to mention dangerous, but I can’t help hoping this means Bobby might be ready to move out of the trailer. Of course, he needs a real job if we’re going to get our rent house. He can’t keep spending all his energy working on Angelica, but somehow he can’t seem to stay away from her. Which means I can’t either.

We go in the evenings when it’s cool. Mr. White’s over there most of the time, except when he has to work late at the bowling alley. Actually, I’m glad when he’s there. He gets my jokes and has some good ones of his own. Half the time I end up talking to him more than my own brother.

Gillis doesn’t like the idea of hanging at the captain’s, so he’s hardly ever there. The thing is, though, I’m not sure if he
has a problem with the captain so much as he does with Mr. White. What Gillis really has against him, I couldn’t say. He just seems to have a bug up his ass, says he’s got better things to do. Maybe being around Mr. White makes him feel stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s hard for one guy to admire another guy for being smart.

Brianna comes over every once in a while, but it’s not her favorite thing to do. She just comes because I’m her best friend. Dani’s not so supportive of Bobby. After showing up a couple of times and even bringing little Ian, she decides she’d rather stay home, smoke weed, and watch reality shows on TV. She’d be smart to be more concerned about what Bobby’s up to, but as the days pass, I don’t see any more signs of him sneaking off to be with Mona. Good thing. Dani’s not someone to get crossways with.

So mainly it’s just the captain and Bobby working on Angelica while Mr. White and I listen to them talk. Sometimes I wonder if Bobby would even miss me if I didn’t show up. For so long I ached to have him home, and now it’s like he’s still not all the way here. I don’t want to be mad at him, but every once in a while I can’t help it. I feel like jerking him away from that stupid Angelica and telling him to quit acting like such a—I don’t know what—a ghost? Of course, I don’t do it, though. No, I just sit there like a do-nothing lump, watching him work. Around my friends, I’ve always been the take-charge girl. If something needed doing, I did it. But now I’m stuck, frozen, waiting around for something to happen that will make everything go back to the way it used to be between Bobby and me.

When I can’t take the sitting and watching anymore, Mr. White and I get out of the barn and go around to sit on the front porch, look off at the moonlight washing across the sculptures, and talk about our own stuff. Something about him soothes me
down, makes me feel less frustrated about the way the summer’s going. It’s come to the point where he’s not even Mr. White anymore. I’ve started thinking of him as Padgett instead. Strange as he is, he’s becoming a real friend, and you don’t call your real friends something like Mr. White.

There’s a lot I can talk about with him that I can’t talk about with Brianna or Gillis or even Bobby because they already know all my stories about myself. I bet I could tell him about more than just biographical things too. When you’re the badass chick, no one expects you to go around talking about your emotions, but maybe I could with Padgett. The problem is I don’t. I don’t know why—there’s so much trying to get out of my throat, but something holds it back.

He’s holding back too. Sure, he’ll go on and on about one theory after another and analyze what makes everyone else tick, but he doesn’t say much about his own feelings. When I ask him if he has a girlfriend waiting for him back in the city, he changes the topic and goes into how his aunt basically got jilted at the altar when she was seventeen and never got over it. He makes the story interesting, but I was hoping to hear something a little more personal.

One night, after the motor for Angelica finally comes in, the captain and Bobby are having a hard time trying to get it to fit Angelica’s frame. It’s kind of freaking the captain out—and Bobby’s not so pleasant to be around either—so Padgett and I leave them to it and hang out in the Casa Crazy living room, listening to some old vinyl records and talking about something besides mechanized angels.

Now, I’m sure when people drive out to look at the sculptures in the front yard, they think it’s pretty bizarre, but let me tell you—they don’t know bizarre unless they’ve seen the inside of the house. For one thing, there’s all these splintery crates of
records stacked everywhere, next to the overstuffed couch, the tattered chairs, the bookcase. He must have a couple thousand albums from the fifties through the seventies. Not a single CD anywhere. He wouldn’t even know what an MP3 was. On the walls, he has paintings and wood carvings and huge sheaths of butcher paper covered in cartoon drawings—all his own work. Nothing is normal.

The wood carvings are all heads, bald heads with dark, polished faces that either grin in complete glee or frown in despair. The cartoons are probably supposed to tell some kind of story, but even Padgett doesn’t know what it is—bug-eyed, bearded men carrying huge apples or loaves of bread, women with big boobs and short skirts, pelicans, reindeer, and penguins cut into sections. Padgett says he knows the penguins stand for innocence, but the rest of it’s a mystery, even to him. He’ll figure it out one day, though, he tells me.

Mostly, we talk about one of my favorite subjects—life in the city. He tells me about movies and music that no one around here has even heard of. He’s been to plays and art museums and concerts. I want to know about all that stuff. You may not expect me to be a big art-museum type of girl, but actually I can draw pretty well. Tigers, eagles, bulldogs. That kind of thing. Lions too, a lot of lions. I filled a notebook full of animal heads during social studies class.

So I can see myself walking around in a museum or going to the amphitheater to watch cool bands that would never even pass through a town like Knowles on their way to play someplace else. I picture going to stores and water parks, restaurants, coffee shops, and outdoor cafes. The idea of the rent house on the south side of town fades. Instead, I picture me and Bobby walking up the stairs to a cool apartment with a balcony that looks out on the city. It would be good for him there, far
away from the crap around here. I’d get a job and go to night school, and Padgett would be there, so I’d already have someone else I know to hang around with too.

Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s not like I’m imagining some kind of future romance between me and Padgett. I mean, no girl wants a boyfriend she can beat up. It’s just that, in the city, I could be a different Ceejay McDermott, one nobody else but Padgett even suspects could exist.

That doesn’t mean he might not have a little bit of a crush on
me
, though. He’s always talking about how he wants to show me these cool places, how he wants us to see everything together. He puts on this old sixties rock record of the captain’s—the words are something about “hold on baby, baby, I won’t let you go”—and starts talking about how he’s pretty sure he’s going to get to move back to the city come fall.

He’s like, “I don’t want to do all this stuff by myself, you know. A guy needs a partner in crime, a partner in the misfit revolution.”

I’m thinking, Oh my God, is he going to ask me to be his girlfriend?

“I know we both have another year of high school to go,” he says. “But the way I see it—”

A knock at the screen door cuts him off. It’s Richard, the captain’s older brother. I feel like he just snapped some kind of spell. Up to this moment, we’ve been lost in our own universe, far away from adults and everything that goes with them. But the thing is, I don’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed that Padgett didn’t get to finish what he was starting to say. I mean, how could I respond without ruining everything?

Richard opens the screen door and pokes his head in. “Excuse me, Padgett. I’m here to see my brother.”

Obviously, Padgett’s been out here so often, Richard knows him pretty well and doesn’t think it’s weird he’s sitting around in the captain’s living room.

“Uh, yeah,” Padgett says. “He’s around here somewhere.”

“Down at the barn, I suspect,” says Richard, starting to turn away.

“Uh, hold on, I’ll go with you,” Padgett tells him. “Come on, Ceejay.”

From the way he’s acting, I get the idea he doesn’t especially want Richard to go to the barn, but I don’t know why. Since Richard’s always bailing the captain out of trouble,
I thought the two of them must get along pretty well, but as we walk to the barn I gather that’s not exactly the case.

Richard’s a tall, thin old dude with wispy gray hair, and a stiff, careful way of walking as if everything around him is covered with radioactive germs that might jump onto his skin if he doesn’t watch out. His comments and the expression that spreads across his face as he looks around at what the captain’s made of the farm remind me of our high school principal, Mr. Thornton. If it wasn’t for his job, Mr. Thornton would probably stay as far away from teenagers as he possibly could, and it looks like that’s the way it is with Richard too. If he didn’t feel responsible for his brother, he’d never set foot on this place.

Before we get to the barn, Padgett shouts for the captain and Bobby to come out to talk to Richard, so here they come, the captain with this sheepish look on his face, like a little boy who’s been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to.

Richard seems to like Padgett all right, but he’s a little wary of the likes of me and Bobby hanging around. As we stand there, about thirty yards from the barn, he quizzes us about what we’re doing out here, as if he thinks maybe we’re out to scam the captain. What he thinks we would be after, I don’t know. It’s not like the captain is rolling in money or anything.

Just trying to clear things up, Bobby mentions that we’re helping the captain with the aero-velocipede. Big mistake. Padgett and the captain both grit their teeth when he says it, and Richard’s like, “You mean you’re still working on that contraption? I told you I didn’t want you fooling around with that anymore. You need to get rid of that thing, and I don’t mean maybe.”

“Wait a minute,” Bobby says. “There’s nothing wrong with
Angelica, man. We’ve put our sweat into her. The whole thing’s one hundred percent by the book. All we need to do is get the engine harnessed in there, and she’ll be good to go.”

The captain nods hopefully, but Richard isn’t going for it. “You aren’t harnessing any engine,” he tells his brother. “In fact, you need to tear that mess down to scrap. Make it into one of your sculptures if you want, but if I come back out here and you’re still building it, I’m going to get a truck and haul it off to the dump myself.”

The captain looks at the ground, his shoulders slumping.

“Aren’t you even going to come look at it?” Bobby asks. “You can’t make a judgment without seeing what we’ve done. This thing is spruce. You’d be amazed.”

Richard looks at Bobby. His expression isn’t totally unsympathetic. “I know who you are, and I know your dad. I’m sure you mean well. But you don’t understand the whole situation here. It’s just too dangerous.”

Bobby starts to argue some more, but Padgett cuts in. “It was just supposed to be a sculpture in the first place. We don’t even care if it flies. We’ll just set it out by the fat boy. It’ll look good there. I’ll make sure everything’s all right, Mr. Monroe.”

Richard studies Padgett for a moment. “Okay. I don’t care if you put it in the yard, but I don’t want to see any engine hooked up to it. You understand me?”

Padgett nods. “I understand.”

After Richard leaves, Bobby turns to Padgett. “Goddamn, man, why did you say we weren’t going to try to fly? Because I can guarantee I don’t care what anyone says—I’m going to take that thing up as soon as we get it finished.”

Padgett tosses him a sly expression. “I never said we wouldn’t try to fly it. I just said it was supposed to be a sculpture. Which it is. This way we buy ourselves a little time.”

Bobby smiles. “You’re a good man. I’m glad you’re on my team.”

The captain isn’t too happy, though. “This is bad,” he mutters nervously. “Bad, bad, bad.”

Richard’s visit has definitely short-circuited something in him, but he’s been fidgety for the last couple of days, ever since the engine came in from whatever Web site they ordered it off of. They can’t get it mounted right. It seems too big for the frame, and when we go into the barn to work on it tonight, he gets more and more upset as they wrestle with it. He’s like, “If there’s something wrong with one part, then there’s something wrong with the whole. The process is coming undone, man.” His hands shake. He paces around the barn, bumping his head on the mechanic’s lamp, causing weird shadows to bounce around the walls.