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“Holy fuck,” Neecey whispered, and then asked Darren what time it was.

It was about midnight, but only just, he said, which meant mom shouldn’t have been home for at least another hour on a Wednesday.

Neecey turned to look at me from the passenger seat. “We are so totally and utterly and forever fucked, Genie, I’m
not
even kidding.”

I had to agree, but I thought there was a chance that
we
didn’t have to be, so I said, “Just let me out and you guys beat it, and I won’t tell her I was with you.”

“See, the little dude is chilly to the bone,” Sticky said. “My younger bro wouldn’t do that for me.”

“Dude,” Darren chimed in, “you saw how he ransacked Razor’s jewels; little dude fears no fear.”

They were wrong, dead wrong, both of them. I just thought Neecey deserved a pass if she could get it, and I’d give her one if I could.

But she said, “Genie, get a clue, okay? She’s waiting for you and she’s already seen the Jeep, trust me.”

I said I’d tell mom that I got a ride from someone, and Neecey laughed in my face before I’d even finished.

“Who?” she asked.
“Who
would you get a ride from, Genie, or
where
would you be at this hour, because you don’t have
any
friends.”

Sticky, Darren, Cynthia, and Chakha all protested—
Hey, whoa, back off, way harsh, we’re his friends
—but Neecey was right. If I had a friend, she was either sitting on top of Darren in the passenger seat telling me the truth, or she was home in her apartment right now, and I’d just made that friend tonight and didn’t know if she even owned a bicycle, let alone a car.

“We’re going in together,” Neecey ordered, “and if you say like even
one word
before she gets it all out of her system, then I won’t have to kill you tomorrow because she’ll murder you tonight, got that?”

I nodded.

“This is serious, Genie, so like don’t fuck it up, I’m totally begging you.”

I nodded again.

Neecey said good-bye to everyone and that she’d see them around the end of October or early November when she wasn’t grounded anymore. I said good-bye, too, and thanks for the ride and everything else and that I’d had fun, because I did. They all said good-bye and waved back, and somebody, most likely Darren, said, “Go on, little dude, show your
madre
what you’re made of,” and I appreciated the encouragement, but that was
exactly
what I feared.

From the outside
of the house, things looked bad. Inside the house, they looked even worse. As soon as we opened the door we smelled smoke, cigarette smoke, and mom only ever smoked when she was at what she called her “wit’s end,” and the air was so thick and stale that she must’ve been witless for a while now. Neecey and I looked at each other before we went into the kitchen to face the music, and it was somehow reassuring to see that I wasn’t the only one terrified out of my skin.

Not reassuring enough, though. When we got into the kitchen, mom was still wearing the black T-shirt and jeans she wore to work
at the bar, her hair was down and badly mussed, she was drinking back an entire cigarette, and her mascara had run from her eyes, which were glaring rather nastily at us. Instantly, I felt panicked, and had this overwhelming urge to say something to her—to apologize, confess, beg, plead, whatever—anything to calm her down and bring her back to earth. But just as I was about to open my mouth, Neecey reached out and grabbed my hand, steadying me and reminding me to shut the hell up, which I did. Mom stood up from the chair at the kitchen table, mashed out her cigarette, and proceeded to make us feel as if we’d both made a big mistake by being born.

Having a bad temper kind of ran in the family, and Neecey and I had been expecting things to get hot. But mom was madder than I’d ever seen her before—scalding, cursing, scary mad—so mad that I honestly thought she was going to lose control and start swinging, although she’d never hit either of us before. Not that I could’ve blamed her if she’d made an exception just this once. She had every right to rip my arms off and beat me over the head with them if she wanted to, because I’d not only lied to her and disobeyed her and generally screwed the pooch every which way from Sunday, but I’d worried her to the point where she’d actually feared for my life. Yeah, I did, and even guys on death row knew that worrying a mom on top of making her angry was just about as capital a crime as you could ever commit.

Thing was, she’d called to check up on me this evening and found the line busy because I’d left it off the hook. No, I could not have made a more dumb-fuck amateur move if I’d tried. Because once mom called and got a busy signal, which of course she would, she’d call back a few minutes later, which of course she did, and she’d get a busy signal again, and then she’d keep at it until she realized that the phone had been busy for nearly an hour. This would confuse and disturb mom for basically the same reason Neecey had just brought up in the Jeep: who the
hell
could I
possibly
be talking to, when I didn’t have
any
friends? Okay, I might’ve overlooked that line of thought
earlier, when I’d taken the phone off the hook before leaving the house. It was possible.

So mom called the operator to make an emergency breakthrough, and found that the line was out of service. Yup, now she was worried. She called the retirement home to see if I was there by some chance, they told her I wasn’t, and then she started to panic. She called Cynthia’s mom and asked for Neecey, but Neecey and Cynthia were already out, so she asked Mrs. Murdock where they’d gone and she said she didn’t know—they were out with friends and they’d be back later. So mom called our house again, got another busy signal, and said,
That’s it
, and left work, right in the middle of her shift, leaving only one person to cover the whole bar. Bad news, very bad news. And when she got here, she found nobody home, the phone off the hook, the Cruiser locked to the back porch, and, worse still, Thrash facedown on the bed in my room. Mom said seeing him like that actually damaged something in her brain. I’d
never
left him that way before, but there he was, my tiny plush sidekick and best friend, all alone with his face in the pillow and his backside up in the air, while I was
nowhere
to be found, and she said the sight of that was just so creepy and chilling that she knew, she just
knew
, that I’d been abducted, sexually abused, dismembered, and dumped on the roadside hours ago, and she sort of lost it.

I had to give it to mom, though, because as soon as we’d walked into the kitchen, she seemed to find whatever it was she’d lost, gathered it up, gave
all
of it to me, and still had enough left over to rope Neecey into the fire so she wouldn’t feel left out in the cold. And if you’ve ever had your mother mad at you like that—inside out, beside herself, head melting, skin splitting open, serpents and fire shooting out of her mouth—then you already knew it was the absolute worst experience you could
ever
possibly have, and the only thing you wanted to do was pretend it wasn’t happening, or disappear, but you couldn’t do either, so you just wound up feeling like a worthless piece
of shit and bawling like a helpless two-year-old that hadn’t been fed, changed, or held for weeks.

It was a solid thirty minutes of screaming and angry tears before mom had burned off all her excess fuel and had to sit back down to recharge with three more cigarettes. Thanks to Neecey we’d both managed to stay quiet and not make it any worse for ourselves than it already was. Mom sat smoking at the kitchen table, and we stood exactly where we were—rigid, cowering, chins on our chests—for a few more minutes of tense and painful silence.

Then mom stood up, came over to me, and said, “Come here, let me take a look at that eye.” She held my head with both hands, inspected me, and sucked her teeth. “Where’s your shirt? Or should I be afraid to ask?”

Come to think of it, I had no idea where it was. As mom turned her back and went to the refrigerator, I took a quick look at Neecey; she shook her head no, so I didn’t answer the question.

“We’re all out of steak,” mom went on, “so you’ll have to settle for hamburger.”

This time it was Neecey who stole a peek at me, quickly shooting out her tongue, as if to say,
I told you so
, and for some reason she and I couldn’t help snickering. Nah, that was not a smart move on our part when we were still in grave and immediate danger, and mom turned around to ask what was so goddamn funny. I didn’t want to break the silence first, so I waited for Neecey to speak.

“It’s just, Genie doesn’t think hamburger will work on a black eye. He thinks you need like a steak.”

Maybe that caught mom off guard a little, because she shrugged and said, “It doesn’t really matter what kind of meat you use; it’s more important to have a dense mold for the eye socket, so the cold and pressure are even enough to reduce the swelling.”

“So a chopped sirloin patty,” I worked up the nerve to say, “if it was like frozen solid, wouldn’t be as good as, say, a really cold rump?”

Mom shrugged again. “No, probably not, especially since a frozen patty won’t come in contact with most of the wound.”

I smirked at Neecey, I couldn’t help it, and mom saw that, too. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “Not that you’d ever want a really cold rump pressed against your face.”

We all burst out laughing.

Yeah, it was a stupid joke, and not the kind mom would usually make, but we laughed anyway. It showed me that no matter how angry mom was, she was doing her best to go easy on us. That helped a lot. She was still upset and wanted to know what had happened, but she was much calmer, more composed, and it made Neecey and me feel more relaxed and easy about what was coming. We still had to go through the chore of giving her a flimsy cockamamie bullshit story and waiting for her to mete out justice, but we all knew the routine, so we just got to it.

And the only things mom learned from us that she didn’t know already were that I
had
taken grandma up on the case, lied to her about it, heard Neecey talking to Cynthia on the phone, followed them tonight, and then got into a fight with a kid who’d tried to pick on me. That was it. There was nothing about Darren or the crew, hardly any names, no mention of the church or Razor or Staci or drugs of any kind or Tommy Sharpe or, when you got right to it, really
any
of the important details at all. It was just a story about me doing exactly what mom and Neecey had been trying forever to keep me from doing, without most of the stuff I’d gone through to do it; except, of course, the lying and promise-breaking, sneaking out of the house, and getting into a fight, all of which pretty much had to be admitted and paid for. Mom wasn’t ecstatic about any of it, but she didn’t seem surprised either, and maybe that’s why she didn’t ask for specifics. Besides, the only proof she needed was written all over the left side of my face.

So we cut off the tiniest sliver of what’d happened and chewed it over with mom for a while, and she was pretty cool about it, all
things considered. When we were finished, she said, “You realize, Genie, this is probably the
worst
thing you’ve ever done, even worse than hitting that teacher, because I honestly and sincerely believe in my heart that you didn’t
mean
to do that. God, I
have
to believe that. But you
meant
to do this, you even
lied to my face
so you could, and that, Genie, deserves the
worst
punishment you’ve ever had.”

Thing was, mom wasn’t even mad when she said it, and that’s what really scared me. I realized I was looking at being grounded forever—I was looking at
life
.

“Honestly,” she went on, “I don’t even know
what
I’m going to do with you this time, because
nothing
seems to work.”

Yeah, I’d heard that one before, too, but this time was different. This time
I felt
it, and goddamn it, it
hurt
. My own mother was on the brink of thinking I was hopeless, and everything was starting to look bleak—when Neecey jumped in. She told mom to blame her instead, or that they should blame themselves, because they both had some idea of what I might do and could’ve talked to me about it, but they didn’t. Mom held steady, though, and asked Neecey if she thought I would’ve listened.

“No, he never listens, but we still didn’t try, so that’s like partly our fault.”

But I
was
listening this time; I was standing right there.

“Do you really think we should be having this discussion in front of him now?”

“Probably not, mom,” Neecey replied, “but if we don’t have it in front of him like sooner or later, he’ll never know and he’ll keep doing the same things over and over again.”

I guess that’s when it hit me that mom was responsible for all three of us, but
both
of them were responsible for
me
, and it took
everything
they had working
together
to handle the job. I wanted to jump in and tell them that I got it now and that I’d try to do better, but they were starting to argue about what they should do and what
was best for me, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of it any more than I already was.

Eventually, mom said, “What am I supposed to do, Neecey? He
has
to be punished.”

Neecey paused. “But you
can’t
punish him this time.”

“Oh, no? Why not?” Mom’s smile was more like a dare.

Then Neecey dropped the bombshell. “Because he met a girl tonight and he likes her and she likes him, and if you punish him now, he’ll lose the best shot at having a real friend that he’s had in like three years, so you
can’t.”

Mom was
not
expecting that—shit, neither was I—and it took a second to sink in. “A girl? What
girl?
A
high-school
girl?”

“No, mom, she’s going into seventh grade, like Genie.”