Down With the Shine (21 page)

A
s I make the turn onto Michaela’s street, I have almost no idea how I even got here. I mean, turn brake steer. Those were the mechanics. My hands and feet were doing those things and I guess a bit of my brain must have been involved, but most of it was in the back of the ambulance with Larry, telling him to please just hold on a little bit longer.

I have no actual plan for what I’ll do once we reach Michaela’s house, other than drive up onto her lawn. And when, upon turning the corner, I see that half of her street is blocked off by cars and a huge group of people are clumped around the driveway entrance . . . well, I’m stumped.

I screech to a halt at the edge of the action. It’s an insane scene. People everywhere. I see my uncles at the edge of the action talking to a confused-looking cop. Dazed, I open my door and step outside. My only choice
is to somehow carry Larry through this, against the tide of what I realize now are aggravated and angry parents forcibly dragging their kids home.

A scream rings out as a father steps across the edge of the property line with his daughter slung over his shoulder. “Help!” he yells in my direction, and I realize that he thinks this ambulance is here for him.

“No! Take her back!” I holler, while making big shooing gestures with my hands.

Confused, the man stops. Then the cop and my uncles are at the man’s side, reversing his steps.

I cling to the side of the ambulance, not sure if my legs will support me. Leaning against it for support, I press on until I’m at the back doors. I open one of them, climb in, and then quickly close it again behind me.

“Smith, we gotta—” One look at Smith’s face and my words stop. There is no gotta. No need for the plan that I don’t have anyway. No nothing.

“He stopped breathing almost ten minutes ago,” he says softly.

“No,” I counter, still unable to look at Larry, to confirm what I already know is true. Tears roll down my cheeks unchecked. “No.” I say it once more, not a denial, but a protest. This is not the way this was supposed to go. But then again, that’s been true for over twenty-four hours now.

I slide to the floor. Smith is seated only a foot away from me, but he makes no move to come closer.

I hold a hand out to him. Inviting him to take it.
Needing
him to take it.

He shakes his head. Scoots a little farther away. And then says the most devastating thing he could after announcing Larry’s death. “I’m sorry, Lennie. For everything. I just want you to know . . . I’m really sorry.”

Not one, but two apologies. Sincere ones too. He says it the way you would to a dying friend, trying to get it out while you still have a chance.

“No,” I say again. I have turned into a petulant toddler. I turn away from Smith and crawl forward until I am at the foot of Larry’s stretcher. His face looks tired. Stretched out with pain and . . .

I turn away, unable to see anymore. Why couldn’t he at least have looked peaceful? Like he’d gone on to a better place? Why did he have to look exactly like he must have felt—alone and wishing his mom was there? I took him away from her. Trying to do the right thing and once again getting it all wrong.

“Lennie,” Smith says, his voice reaching toward me, a mixture of caress and condolence, but his body distinctly distant.

“Smith.” I hold my hand out again. “Please hold my
hand. I really need someone to hold my hand. I need you to hold my hand. I need—”

His arms wrap around me, pressing my own arms to my sides, keeping our palms apart. I would protest, but his lips are on mine and even though it is in bad taste to kiss next to the body of your recently deceased friend, I don’t care. Or I don’t care enough to stop.

It’s not a sexy kiss.

It is the kind of kiss I’d never imagined or only imagined as something that forty-year-olds in the dark corner of a seedy bar might exchange. It’s a little salty from tears and snot. To be honest, it’s sorta desperate and sad.

In an odd way that’s what makes it nice. Or what I need right now, anyway. And what Smith needs too, I think, as some of that snot and desperation and sadness is his as well.

But then it changes
—
or I change. I no longer think of the kiss as something that belongs with awful worn-out old people. Instead, it belongs to two people who have been through something together and have come out on the other end transformed in ways they don’t understand yet. It’s a kiss that works much like pricking fingertips and declaring a blood bond. It’s a kiss and an oath all in one.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe that’s what I need to believe right now. Maybe my brain is simply spewing crazy shit as a distraction from everything else.

I never get a chance to find out, because the doors fly open and a cop pulls us apart. Before I can even blink Smith’s arms are cuffed behind his back and the cop tosses him across the ambulance with brutal force. Smith’s head snaps back and connects with the edge of Larry’s stretcher. I watch in horror as his eyes roll back into his head and he slumps to the floor.

“Smith!” I scream his name as the cop drags me away.

Outside, my uncles are still fighting to keep the parents from unintentionally killing their kids, but I barely register them, too preoccupied with keeping my eyes on Smith until finally the cop shoves me into the backseat of his car.

The door slams and I slide away from it only to bump into another person. I glance over and am too worn out to be shocked or even surprised, really. Truth be told, I recognized that terrible smell of decay first. A dull feeling of unease would be the best description of my state of mind as I find myself going from one dead friend to another.

“Hey, Lennie. Funny meeting you here,” Dyl says with a little smile.

I am too numb to say with any certainty what expression I give her in return, but I am fairly certain it is not a smile.

T
he cop slides into the driver’s seat, flings off his hat, and turns to face me. At first I think something is wrong with the plastic divider between us when his facial features start to change. The eyes change colors, his nose grows shorter, and finally his lips thin and curl up into a smile. He goes from being someone I’ve never seen before to my very own father. This is his wish in action. The ability to hide in plain sight.

“You again,” I say.

He smiles. “Didn’t think I was done with you already, didja?”

I shake my head. “Only hoped.”

“Hmmm,” Cash says in response, which seems pretty mellow until he adds, “You need to reconsider your attitude or I’m gonna go back and gut the guy you were playing kissy face with the same way I did Rabbit.”

And that wakes me up. I slap my hands against the Plexiglas divider. “Don’t you touch him! Don’t you even go near him!” Cash merely watches me with cold eyes. I get the feeling he’s a little miffed with the way I got the upper hand during our last showdown over Rabbit. And I’m pretty sure that threatening him again will only backfire.

I appeal to Dyl instead. “He’s talking about Smith. You know that, right?”

She swallows in response, but doesn’t look surprised. “You just have to grant his wish, Lennie.” Her voice is low and her gaze doesn’t hold mine for longer than two seconds before she looks down at her hands.

“I already granted his wish a long time ago.” Sickened, I turn back to Cash. “Remember that?”

“You’re granting her wish,” he says, jerking his head in Dyl’s direction. “She’s got herself a jar of shine all ready to go and everything.”

I see the jar then, tucked against her far side. My instinct is to grab it and smash it. Except I can’t do that. I can’t risk Smith like that. Then I remember Uncle Rod’s plastic sports bottle full of shine tucked into the pocket of my hoodie. And it feels like an opportunity.

A chance.

An incredibly slim one, but a chance just the same.

“What’s the wish, then?” I ask, keeping my voice
neutral, not wanting to give anything away.

Dyl says nothing. She almost seems to be shrinking before my eyes.

“Dylan,” Cash nudges with steel in his voice.

“I wish Lennie was bound to Cash forever and could grant him an endless number of wishes.” She mumbles it so quick and low that I have to lean in to catch it all. And when I do, it almost takes my breath away. Suddenly I am so mad at Dylan for putting us both here, and that goes all the way back to her dying. Truth be told, I’ve never really forgiven her for that.

I grab hold of her chin and jerk her face toward mine. “You should wish to have your spine back,” I sneer.

At that a bit of the old Dyl flashes in her eyes. “What I want is my old life back, but that’s not gonna happen, is it?”

“And what about my life? That wish turns me into his prisoner, his slave. What kind of life is that?”

Tears well up in Dyl’s eyes, but they don’t move me a bit. I shove her away so hard that she bounces against the door.

“I wished you back to life, Dyl.” I don’t add that it was the worst wish I granted. My biggest and worst mistake out of an endless list of them. The words are there, and it would be so easy to twist the knife in deeper. The thing is,
it’s not true. I would bring Dyl back again. And again and again. I can’t imagine not making the same choice. The same terrible wish. That’s what Uncle Dune was talking about, I guess. If I went back in time, I would redo it all the same bad way and end up right back here. It would be better to wish myself unborn or—

Dyl interrupts my train of thought. “You shoulda wished that I’d never died in the first place. Did you ever think of that, Lennie? Maybe you coulda made a wish that didn’t end with me being a freaking zombie!” She is screaming the words at me by the end, but I barely hear them.

“Or maybe I could have wished that it was me instead of you that died,” I say, the words coming out of my mouth slowly. “Maybe that’s what you should wish for now. Wish that I hadn’t been so stupidly scared of everything all the time and that I’d gone to meet that guy like you wanted me to.”

“I can’t wish for that.”

“But you want to.”

Dyl doesn’t reply, but our eyes meet and the answer is there. She would happily sacrifice me in her place. Because she blames me for her death. For everything. She thinks it should have been me instead of her. In that way, it’s not her condemning me, but righting things back to the way
they should have been. That guy wanted me. Me to get to Cash. Dyl just got caught in the middle.

“Yeah,” she says at last, admitting it.

“Sun’s coming up any minute now,” Cash says, finally breaking into the showdown between me and Dyl. “You don’t make that wish, your friend won’t see it.”

“Okay,” I say in a hoarse voice, holding my hands up to show that I’m giving in. “Let me get a drink of water first.” A sense of inevitability fills me as I reach into my hoodie and pull out the water bottle. I take a small swig. I try to hold back the coughing fit of the liquor hitting the back of my throat, but I hack a few times anyway. “Wrong pipe,” I explain. Then I hold the bottle out to Dyl. “A little water to wet your mouth before the shine?”

She eyes me suspiciously, but takes the bottle and takes a long swallow. She gasps and chokes worse than I did and in the front seat, Cash has figured out what’s going on because he curses and pounds the barrier between us before flinging open his door.

I am already grabbing the bottle of shine back from Dyl while the words pour from my mouth. I can’t wish to die, though. Or I can’t wish to only die. If I’m gonna reboot everything, I at least want to give myself time to live before I die. So I wildly build on Dyl’s wish, figuring that I’m at least keeping the spirit of it intact.

“To me being a person who wants more and takes chances. Good and bad chances and everything in between, like going with that terrible guy instead of Dyl and—” My door swings open. Cash reaches in. I finish in a rush, “May all your wishes come true, or at least just this one.”

The bottle touches my lips. Cash grabs hold of my arm. He jerks me out of the car. Too late, though. The shine is on my tongue and then burning all the way down once more.

His hands hold me in a bruising grip and he’s shaking me the same way he did such a long time ago, when I was little and gave him his wish.

But not this time. I smile. Barely feeling the pain.

“Not made of Swiss cheese.” I push the words out between my rattling teeth while behind Cash, the sky lightens.

My eyes remain fixed on that distant ribbon of color where the sky meets the earth, watching. Waiting. It doesn’t take long.

The noise and lights and Cash all recede as the sun finally creeps over the horizon and swallows everything—including me.

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

“I
gave you my name for a reason, Lennie. It might not be worth much now, but someday, someday real soon, I’m gonna make it so Cash is a name nobody ever forgets. I’m serious, Lennie. People are gonna remember us.”

When I was a little kid, I didn’t get tucked into bed with a story or a song. Instead, I listened to the ravings of my father. The nightly routine ended on my sixth birthday. That was the day he made the nightly news for the first time and they rechristened Leonard Cash the Bad Daddy Bandit.

Over the next two months, Daddy and I crisscrossed the country on a hold-’em-up, shoot-’em-down crime spree. With me in tow, he took down six banks and three toy stores, killing two people who got in the way. He was finally pinned down at a Chuck E. Cheese’s, but managed
to escape by taking the guy dressed in the mouse costume as a hostage. They found me hours later, burrowed deep in the ball pit, still waiting for Daddy’s all-clear whistle.

The only place I’ve seen him since then is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted webpage.

That all happened eleven years ago, but it’s not the sort of story people forget. Maybe if I’d become a super-smart honor-student nerd or a chipper rah-rah leadership council type, they’d dwell on it a little less often. But I’m not either of those things, and most people think it’s just a matter of time before my daddy comes back for me and the two of us pick up where we left off at Chuck E. Cheese’s oh so many years ago.

To a stranger, I might look like a typical sullen, angry teenager, but everyone in town knows I’m the furthest thing from typical.

I’m Lennie Cash.

And my famous name is a big part of why, at this exact moment, instead of dividing my time in English class between clock-watching and trying to figure out exactly how those two crazy kids, Romeo and Juliet, managed to mess things up so badly, I’m hanging out with a total nutcase who just forcibly removed two of my fingers.

I can’t help but ask myself, how the hell did I get
here? And then I remember.

Dyl.

My best friend, Dylan, really wanted me to meet up with this weirdo guy named Rollo she’d met online, and even though I knew it was the worst idea ever, I did it anyway. That’s what friends are for. Right?

Ha.

Despite what my uncles might say (during one of their many lectures on “exercising caution,” Uncle Jed told me that if I can’t tell if I’m being brave or just stupid, I should go ahead and assume it’s the latter), it was a calculated risk. Also. I met Rollo in a brightly lit Denny’s and we hung out for about an hour, during which time I never gave him a chance to slip anything into my drink. Then, having fulfilled my friend obligation, I left thinking I’d never see him again.

And that’s pretty much how it played out.

Except.

He followed me home and grabbed me the next morning while I was walking to school.

Who saw that one coming, huh?

Turns out, though, that Rollo isn’t superinterested in me—I’m simply a way to get to my notorious father.

Despite being kidnapped and hidden away in a dark
room that smells like cat pee, I was still sorta thinking he was a mostly harmless lunatic . . . until he chopped off two of my fingers.

At least Rollo was kind enough to give me a few fortifying swigs of my uncles’ moonshine afterward.

Good of him, right? I took the opportunity to propose a little toast, wishing him to hell. “To Rollo in hell. May all my wishes come true, or at least just this one.”

He didn’t like that. Not one little bit. He’d like it even less if he knew the wishes I grant have a way of coming true.

It’s sort of a family secret. My uncles broke the news to me a few years ago. After the first wave of disbelief passed, it made a whole lot of sense. Then I was all, “Holy shit, this is gonna be awesome! Oh, the wishes I will make.” My uncles let me dance around for maybe ten minutes before bursting that bubble and giving me the “With great power comes many possibilities for royally fucking up” speech. I guess I didn’t look crushed enough, though, ’cause then they were like, “BOOM. History.”

And they told me all this stuff about my dad and mom and, well, I won’t go into details, but the whole thing’s seriously messed up. I was pretty bummed out after that, so they let me grant one wish, just to get a taste for it. Uncle Dune did the wishing—it was sorta repayment for being
the one who drew the short straw and did all the actual explaining. I was excited to grant my first wish, but also a little freaked out. Still, I had to know how this whole thing worked. Would it tingle? Would it hurt? Would I like it?

Dune wished that my father could never hurt anyone again. I could see he got a little choked up too. Him and my mom were the two youngest kids, and I guess had been pretty close before Cash showed up and ruined everything and turned my mom into a chain-smoking half person.

Anyway, that brings me back to good old Rollo. He got over me wishing him to hell and we kept drinking and then got to talking, and the tension between us eased a bit as the moonshine loosened our tongues.

Now Rollo tells me how he’d bought the moonshine from my uncles a few weeks back and we discuss how weird my uncles’ little toast is. After some nudging, he admits how he’d wished for courage to do the things he’d only dreamed of. Turns out his mom had been killed during one of Cash’s robberies years back and it messed him up a bit. Seems that without that motherly influence, he became the sort of person who dreamed of kidnapping girls and chopping their fingers off. And once my uncles granted his wish, well, suddenly he was no longer afraid of making those dreams come true.

Funny the way we all connect, huh?

More time passes after that revelation and we get pretty chummy by this point, and also blind drunk. Rollo’s also feeling pretty bad about cutting my fingers off and I feel sorta bad for wishing him to hell.

So as we come down to the last swig in the jar, I tell him to make a wish.

Okay, I probably shouldn’t have, but at this point I felt like he’d had one too many bad breaks. Also, I’d already wished him to hell and there’s no undoing a wish. My uncles say that trying to make a second wish to fix a bad first one is like trying to undo a knot by tying another one. It’s never gonna work out. And wishing someone to hell, well, that’s pretty serious and I can’t help but think that maybe I went a little too far.

But again, he had just cut two of my fingers off, so extenuating circumstances, you know?

Anyway, Rollo wishes that he could remember his mom better. She’d died when he was pretty young and he can’t remember the sound of her voice or the way she looked when not frozen in a photograph.

It’s a nice wish. We both agree that maybe this is the one he should’ve used when he went to visit my uncles. Certainly seems like lots of things might’ve turned out differently if he’d done that.

He didn’t, though.

Too bad about that.

The night drains away faster than the shine, and knowing the sun will be rising soon, I wonder if I should give poor Rollo some type of warning about what’s coming his way.

Then the door crashes open and my uncles come charging in like the fucking cavalry. Honestly, a part of me had been wondering what the heck was taking them so long. They practically raised me, and I’ve always known they’ve got my back . . . in their own unique way. So while I’m happy and a little bit relieved to see them, I also can’t help but think they have the worst timing ever.

Because moments after they barrel in, I find out that besides the wicked knife Rollo used to chop off my fingers, he also has a loaded gun. He swings it toward my uncles, wildly, and then, probably realizing he’d never hit all three of them before they reached him, he turns the gun on me.

Most times in movies they hold the gun to a person’s head, but Rollo presses his against my heart.

“You pull that trigger and I’ll wish you to hell, boy,” Uncle Jet growls at him in a voice I’ve never heard before. I can actually see the shivers it sends down Rollo’s spine, while at the same time, despite having a gun trained on it, my heart swells.

“She already did that,” Rollo says, jerking his head toward me.

Uncle Jet glances toward the windows covered with newspaper and then back to us. “Well then you don’t got much longer.”

Rollo swallows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

A smile spreads across Uncle Jet’s face. “It means that in our family, wishes really do come true. All three of us can grant them. And she can too.”

“That’s not true,” Rollo whines. “If it were true, you’d never tell me all that.”

“I’m telling you ’cause once that sun rises, there won’t be much left of you. That’s when the wishes get granted, you see? Now if you don’t want to be sent into the devil’s fires, I suggest you let Lennie go right quick, after which I’d be happy to grant you a wish that’ll make the afterlife a little more pleasant for ya.”

Rollo’s gaze shifts from my uncles and then back to me. The gun pressed to my chest begins to tremble.

I’m almost certain he doesn’t mean to pull the trigger. That he’s simply drunk and panicked and in a stressful situation that causes his finger to contract at an incredibly inopportune time.

But it hurts like hell just the same.

I’m lucky in one way, though. The pain, while intense,
is short-lived. Vividly and excruciatingly, I feel the bullet rip straight through my heart like an express train racing toward the end of the line, until finally—mercifully—everything goes dark.