Junk Miles (44 page)

Did I do drugs because my life was such a steaming pile of shit, or was my life such a steaming pile of shit because I did drugs? My theory is that it’s a nice bundle of both theories. I think I just chose the wrong drug. Coke made me see things more clearly, have more energy. For what? I had no one to do anything with, considering I’d screwed the love interest of every guy friend I’d ever had, and I don’t hang out with girls unless they have the only thing I’m interested in on their minds. I already have a genius IQ, like it or not. And despite smoking a pack a day, I was a star athlete without the drugs. So the coke just made everything more clearly, draggingly miserable. That’s why I wasn’t good at hiding it. That’s why my mom found it. A lot of it.

Trust me, the amount matters. Lylee didn’t wig out because she feared for my life and health. She would have been cool with a little line here and there. It was the fear of being caught with so much of the shit in her house that made her squawk to my father, the shithead who left when I was young enough to still feel like a dad might be a good idea. Lylee wasn’t about to give up her bourgeois whoring and partying and her cushy professor job because I was being fruitful and selling enough of the shit to get attention from the bigger city dealers (another bad thing that was about to get a whole lot worse). So dear old Daddy came down and slapped me around a little and threatened to take away the only thing that can still make my granite heart skip a beat; my inheritance.

Hey, it’s blood money, but it’s fair and square blood money. Jake will get his, I’ll get mine and so will the two dozen or so other Maclean cousins and grandkids and whoever else is a direct descendent. It’s old money, and I’ll take it happily.

But Daddy told me no money unless I cleaned up my act, and he wasn’t about to take my word for it. I was put in the back of Jackie’s hideous purple Mazda with a duffel bag of necessities and sent somewhere that was pretty much going to be tailor-made hell for me; I was being sent to work in a diner.

I had been to rehab. Twice, actually. It’s all kind, dumb therapists who always act like there might be secret VH1 reality show cameras documenting every deep, heart-string-pulling conversation. There’s usually a lot of nature (ocean, mountain, trees, whatever) and a lot of meetings with other losers. It was like a very lame vacation.

And I had been out of the country. Lylee spirited me to Paris, which was only made bearable by the company of Brenna Blixen, Jake’s hot girlfriend. We spent a lot of time kissing and twice as much time pissing each other off. It was clear to me from the beginning that I was a reluctant experiment at best. She’s been in love with Jake since the first second she met him. He is a good-looking guy, and I can admit that honestly because our spectacular genetics can’t be denied.

Jail would have sucked. That was probably next, or maybe juvenile hall. But eighteen is coming up quick, and any sane judge would have wanted to teach me a real lesson about the harsh reality of drug use and dealing.

But I escaped the slammer. I got indentured service, family style.

Daddy’s family owns all kinds of random shitty businesses, and one of them is this queer diner that plays oldies and has girls skate out to your car with food like some shitty
Happy Days
’ episode. I get to be a dishwasher, lowest of the low men on the totem pole. And I will shack up with some geezer great aunt of mine in her piss-stinking, shag-carpeted, doily-decorated house.

As if this shit storm wasn’t bad enough, Aunt Jackie was blaring Celine Dion. Who the hell listens to Celine Dion willingly?

“
Can you turn this crap down?” I asked as nicely as I could manage.

Aunt Jackie glared at me and turned the knob on the stereo up a little. Celine’s ferociously annoying voice filled the inside of the car and battered against my eardrums. “You are not here on vacation, Saxon,” she lectured. “This is not about you enjoying yourself. You have been stripped of all privilege and comfort for a reason. I am certainly not playing one of the greatest singers and divas of all time to punish you, but knowing that it irritates you is a bonus.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You are supposed to be thinking about why you are where you are instead of enjoying your summer with the family in New York like your brother Jake.”

I groaned at his name. “If I hear about your damn golden boy one more time, I’m going to hurl,” I said and reached instinctively for my cigarettes. Damn! Those were gone, too.

“
Jake is someone you should look up to,” Aunt Jackie droned. “He’s making a real effort to fit in and he knows the value of hard work. That’s a Maclean gene he seems to have in abundance, even if it did manage to skip right over you.”

“
I work hard,” I drawled, keeping my voice irritatingly lazy. “Do you know how much effort it took to turn potheads into cokeheads? No easy feat.”

Aunt Jackie blew a long breath through her flared nostrils and cranked Celine even louder. When I closed my eyes and moaned at “My Heart Will Go On,” Aunt Jackie punched the repeat button. I had to smile a little. Sly bitch.

Finally we were at the diner. Aunt Jackie pulled in and turned to me. “I’m not letting you get dumped on poor Aunt Helene so you can sit on your laurels while she gives you coffee and cookies. I’ll drop your bag at her house. You work here, and you can walk to her place. Tony has directions for you, and there are a few other kids who live in that area, so you won’t be walking alone. Go ahead. It’s time to get to work.”

She looked as prim and sour as some old English governess. “Thanks for the ride,” I said and got out of the car.

I hate feeling trapped. I hate not knowing what the hell I’m doing. I hate working for anyone, especially someone who knows that I’m in a shitload of trouble and can’t leave or cause any shit. I stood looking at the double back doors, the ones for employees. I was that. An employee. Even if the word made me want to choke myself with my own tongue. It wasn’t that I needed to gather the courage to go in. It was more like I needed to suppress the need to break something or swear up a storm or just generally bring more bad shit down on my head.

Then I heard a weird sound, a clack and roll, clack and roll. I looked behind me and saw a girl. A damn pretty girl.

She was long and curvy in every place that it’s perfect for a girl to be curvy in. Then I realized that she might have just seemed long because she was on skates. Roller skates. Her face was wide-eyed and fine as a Russian model’s. She had green eyes, real green like a Halloween cat’s and jet black hair, pulled back off of her face in a high ponytail. And the outfit. Mmm. A short red skirt, something like a cheerleader would wear and a white shirt, nice and tight against the generous swell of her breasts.

“
The entrance is around the front, sir,” she said, her voice sweet and polite.

I smiled, a smile I know for a fact melts girls into puddles. “I’m not here to eat, baby. I work here. I’m Saxon Maclean.”

“
The coke head?” she said, her voice suddenly snappy and electric. I realized that the honeyed-up voice must have been solely for the customers. “Well, what are you doing out here? This isn’t a drug den, dumbass. In through the double doors and to the back. I assume you’re too stupid to do anything but wash dishes? You’ll find the sinks. They’re big and metal and lots of water goes in them.” She made her voice high and sweet, thick with sarcasm. “I have my eye on you, asshole.”

“
Nice to meet you, too.” Something electric tingled through me. “I didn’t catch your name.”

The girl was already skating away, and I had a nice view of her curvy rear end.

“
Cadence,” she called over her shoulder. “Cadence Erikson.”

Erikson. The owners of the diner. Had I just met the owner’s daughter?

I shrugged and went in through the double doors, intrigued by pretty, mouthy Cadence and ready to see her again soon.

I walked into a hot, chaotic clusterfuck unlike anything I had ever seen. People in white aprons were running baskets of sizzling fries and spatulas with hamburgers and hotdogs covered in sauerkraut back and forth, setting them on red trays and beating on a silver bell until it looked like it was going to explode.

A balding man with bulgy eyes noticed me.

“
Who are you?” he asked brusquely.

“
Saxon Maclean,” I said, offering my hand.

He eyed my outstretched hand uncertainly, then shook a limp, wet fish shake. “The coke head? Tony doesn’t tolerate drugs.”

“
I know.” I felt my back go up a little. Did everyone know why I was here? Jesus Christ.

“
Aprons over there. Get one on. Hurry up, I’ve got three minutes to teach you before the next batch of fries come out. I’m Dan. Jesus Brian, flip those burgers before they’re charred for God’s sake! Please tell me they were supposed to be well done?” He pushed past a spacey-looking guy flipping burgers and led me to a long stainless steel table with a huge box at the end. He grabbed a handle and pulled up, lifting the box, which was, in fact, an industrial dishwasher.

“
Put the cups and silverware and plates in the trays, slide them in here, close it all the way and they get washed. It’s magic!” he said, shaking his hands and rolling his eyes. “Anything you can’t wash in there, throw it in the sink and we do it later. When the trays come out of the dishwasher, put them there.” He pointed to another low stainless shelf where girls in outfits like Cadence’s and guys in black pants and white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled were picking up food. “When it’s slow, take the trays out front and fill up the glasses and silverware. Questions?”

I shook my head. This was going to be fucking great. Magic!

A busboy in a white apron came over and slammed a full bucket down on the stainless tray.

“
Hey, I’m Will,” the guy said. He was skinny and blonde. “You must be the crackhead.”

“
Saxon,” I said through gritted teeth.

“
Well, we’re on shift together, so hey.” He checked out the butt of one of the waitresses leaned over to get her pen. “I’ll help bring the dishes out when I can, man. Gotta go. Oh, and load quick. One of the dumbass new girls dropped a tray of glasses so we’re low on them.” He grabbed a clean bucket, and I looked dubiously at what was left in the dirty bucket he had dropped.

Maybe I’ve lived a little bit of a privileged life, but I never gave much thought to what happened once I ate my hamburger at some shitty little diner. It never occurred to me that some poor jerkoff in some shitty back corner was going to have to paw through my ketchup-soaked napkins, scrape my half- eaten food into the garbage, and pick through partially-melted sundae remains for lost silverware. I never thought about how a job can be fairly easy, but so freaking boring you could poke your own eyes out with said lost silverware. And I never thought I could work around a good fifty people and feel like I was stranded in the middle of god damn nowhere without a soul to talk to. At least there was angry death metal playing in the back. It suited my mood to a tee.

But I was mostly just feeling sorry for myself. My life had started a pretty steady downward spiral a few months back, and it didn’t seem like working at this shithole diner was going to make anything look up. In fact I would have thought that I might have hit a kind of rock bottom, except I didn’t want to jinx myself.

By the end of my shift (which was ten hours long; in at two, out at midnight), my arms ached from carrying trays of hot glasses, I was covered up to my elbows in chocolate syrup and tiny pieces of candy that typically gets sprinkled on ice cream, bits of relish and mustard, splatters of soda and milkshake, and a million other unidentifiable things. I had kept my section fairly clean, and was feeling dead on my feet when Brian, the space-cadet with the burgers, came over with a crapload of greasy, hot, dripping stainless steel stuff and dumped it in the soapy water in one of the sinks.

“
What the hell is that?” I asked.

“
Kitchen shit,” he said. “Dan will bring over the grill guards and baskets in a minute.”

Will was suddenly next to me. “I told you I’d help. This is the shittiest part of the dishwashing thing.” He grabbed a scrub brush and handed me one. “Tony comes and looks everything over himself, so make sure you get all the shit off of it. He’ll keep you all night if he doesn’t like how you cleaned up.”

I was feeling exhausted. Remember, I had been hopped on coke for the last few weeks. I wasn’t used to relying on my own energy sources, and I was dropping. My days were typically a lot less workful, and I liked it just fine that way. For one second I considered throwing my scrub brush down and telling them all to fuck off. Two things stopped me.

The first and most important was that I had enough money to get my ass where it needed to be waiting at the end of this shitty summer work deal. The second was that once I walked out of those double doors, I didn’t have one person to call and pick me up. Lylee’s house was more than two hours away. Short of taking my chances hitchhiking, I didn’t have a way to get back home. And this isn’t exactly an area where a good-looking guy can feel comfortable sticking his thumb out on a dark road. So I picked up the scrub brush and went to work with Will until Tony himself came in.

He was as big as a damn grizzly bear. He had Cadence’s green eyes, but, other than that, he was all bushy red-blonde hair, like a gigantic Viking. He stood with his arms crossed and watched us work for a while. Then he said, “Good job, guys. Will, when this batch is done, you’re free to go. Brian, come and help Will finish. Saxon, you come with me.”