Pretty Crooked (23 page)

I looked out the window to hide my face. “I don’t know. I’m just curious.”

“You sound like you’ve got a thing for him.”

“Me?” My voice rose to an incredulous pitch. “No.”

He nudged me with his elbow and grinned. “Naw, of course not. Do you want me to ask my dad to ask his dad?”

Major blushing. “No. No. Forget it.”

He rolled down his window and we looked at the little metal keypad that gave entry to the gate. Tre got into lesson mode.

“Now, see, if I were trying to get through a gate like this one, I wouldn’t bother guessing the code. You’d be here all day. And that’s no good.”

“So what would you do?” I asked.

He smiled, revealing long laugh lines. “Easy. I’d
program my own code in. For this one, you hit star and then the default, which is two-three-seven-five. Then it lets you put in a new one. But the defaults are gonna be different, depending on the system. You have to do your research and learn the defaults.”

Tre punched in the code. The gate swung open. We drove through, arcing around the curving street to turn onto Happy Valley Road. Tre’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, behind a few orange trees.

From the outside it was hard to see how big it was—it had been built in the Southwestern style I’d seen so often around these parts: boxy, with white stucco walls studded here and there with wooden beams. Like everyone else in Paradise Valley, he had a pool in the back, surrounded by a cactus garden.

I wondered if he swam in it, or if he just used the concrete deck for skateboarding. It was fascinating to see where he lived, as he’d never talked too much about home. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that was just it. He was so private I’d never imagined much of anything. And the more time I spent with Tre, the more mysterious he became to me. In a way, that was one of the things I liked most about him. While everyone at VP was busy plastering their intimate secrets all over the internet, he kept to himself.

He parked his Audi in the driveway and we got out.

“Not enough room in there?” I ribbed, waving toward the four-car garage. “Any Bugattis?”

“Nope,” he said, giving me a look, like
Don’t start
.

“No one’s around?” I asked.

“Nah. My dad’s at work. Okay, let’s take a closer look at what we’ve got here.”

We circled his house on foot.

He showed me the different sensitive points around the building: the motion sensors by the doors and windows; the mounted security cameras by the back entrance; the access control panels. From where we stood I noticed a scooter, leaned up against the back of the house. Tre must have had a sibling living here. It was cute to think of him as someone’s older brother. I could picture him being teasing but protective.

“See here, if this was night, that light would go on if I twitched.” He pointed. “I was trying to convince my parents to go with the laser system they have at banks but it was a little too expensive.”

“Do you worry about break-ins?”

“Nah, not really. My dad’s famous, but he’s not like Kobe Bryant or anything. He has a bodyguard when he travels anywhere, though. I think it’s stupid. No one’s coming after him. He’s all paranoid.”

“Why the lasers, then?”

He grinned. “Ever see
Ocean’s Twelve
? That was dope.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “Boys and their gadgets.”

We went around to the front of the house and crouched in the pebbled plantings, peering up to the
roof at the cameras there. Tre pointed out more motion sensors by the entrance.

“Once you know what to look for, it helps you figure out how to get in and out. You can cover a camera up with Vaseline; you can avoid a light sensor. But when an alarm goes off, you can’t silence it unless you know the code. So that’s when you have to run like hell.”

I nodded. “Alarm equals run like hell.”

“You usually don’t want to bother with the front. It’s too visible—unless you have a key. The main thing to remember is to always go out the same way you come in.”

“Out the same way you come in,” I repeated.

He turned to me, face serious. “Look, Willa, I’m just showing you this stuff because you asked me. I don’t recommend you actually doing this. House break-ins are really dangerous. People have dogs, guns, Tasers. You can get seriously hurt. And I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know if you’re on that level.”

I drew up my arms in front of me defensively. “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?”

“I’m just saying, for your own good. This isn’t for amateurs. And it’s only a matter of time, with all the news reports—”

He looked up to see if I was still listening—probably waiting for me to protest—but I was too busy looking behind him at the cop car that was driving around the cul-de-sac—slowly. He followed my gaze and turned around.

“That’s weird,” Tre said, straightening up to take a look. “The county guys usually can’t get in here and just cruise around. We’ve got our own rent-a-cops.”

The car went to the end of the street and circled back before parking in front of Tre’s house. Tre looked at me. My palms went sweaty and I felt a throbbing urge in my legs to run.

They’d found me. They’d finally figured out who I was.

Tre must have sensed that I was getting ready to bolt because he grabbed my elbow roughly. “Stay cool. We’re not doing anything wrong,” he said through gritted teeth. “You run now and you’ll screw us both, Willa.”

The officer approached in his blue uniform with its stripe, shiny like a car. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and I could see our reflection, the two of us looking small and warped, in the lens.

“Hello,” he said. “Mind if I ask what you two are doing back here?”

“This is my house,” Tre said pointedly.

“It is, huh? Well, we got a call from some neighbors about suspicious activity with strangers on the street. Can you show me your ID please?”

Tre reached into his pocket for his wallet. The officer barked, “Slowly, please.”

Tre, looking extremely annoyed, pulled out his driver’s license with exaggerated sloth. I was amazed at his
cool. My own insides were threatening to explode all over the landscaped lawn.

The policeman looked down and up at him, squinting to take in the information. “Tre Walker. You’re not—”

“—the son of Edwin Walker? Yes, that would be me.”

The cop shook his head, looking flustered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. I didn’t mean to bother you guys. I just had to follow up on a call. There’s been a lot of crime in the area recently … you understand.”

Tre didn’t say anything, but the cop was already retreating out of the driveway and getting back into his car.

“Have a nice day, guys.” He waved to us and drove off, engine gunning like he was off to another crime scene—a real one this time, I hoped.

“Jesus,” I said when he left, feeling my held breath flow out of me in tremors. I’d started to picture my own mug shot, and it wasn’t cute like Lindsay Lohan’s.

But Tre wasn’t listening. His back was to me, and he was using a key to open his front door. He let it swing open behind him. I didn’t know if he wanted me to follow or not, but not knowing what else to do, I went inside, too, trailing him through an atrium with a soaring ceiling.

Tre dropped his keys on the hall table and continued on into the living room, where he sat down on the sofa and immediately turned on the television, staring stonily ahead.

“I thought you said your dad wasn’t a celebrity,” I
joked. “You could’ve fooled me. That guy was ready to ask for your autograph.”

I tentatively sat down next to him, but he didn’t look at me, and he didn’t acknowledge what I had said. His body was tensed and coiled on his part of the couch and I could hear him breathing in short puffs through his nose. He was angry. Really angry.

“Tre, I—”

“Forget it,” he snapped.

“No, I want to tell you that I’m really sorry. This was my fault.”

We didn’t say anything for a while. We just sat watching a cartoon about a little kid turning into different aliens with amazing powers. The kid was going around trying to solve crimes, popping up whenever the police needed him on a case to destroy the enemy, or using his disguises to annoy his sister.

During a commercial, Tre started talking, still staring ahead, still without looking at me.

“Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter. I go to this lame private school, I live in this place. I mean, my dad just signed a three-year, twenty-one-million-dollar contract. But it’s still like they expect me to steal their cars and go joyriding, like that’s all I can do, you know? Like I’ll never change.”

On the TV, the little boy morphed himself into a four-armed alien with sharp teeth. I didn’t know what to say, because how could I possibly make Tre feel better
about things that were totally out of our control, things I didn’t know enough about to explain? I wanted to believe it wasn’t true, that people weren’t like that, but I knew, from the pained tone of his voice, that it was, and they were. So we stayed like that for a while longer and I waited for him to continue. When he did, his tone had changed. It was softer, more personal.

“I didn’t want you to know about that joyriding stuff, because it’s stupid. It was a long time ago. But you see, once you get a mark like that on your record, it doesn’t go away.”

I reached out for his forearm and squeezed it gently. “Knowing that doesn’t make me think differently of you.”

He gave me a slight smile. “That’s good. But I’m talking about
you
now. I didn’t want to know what your little project was, either—I was trying to stay out of it. It’s really none of my business what you do.”

That stung a little. I realized then that maybe I wanted him to
want
it to be his business. I wanted him to care, at least. All these days practicing—it had felt like we were in this together, that he wasn’t just helping me out because he owed me a favor.

“But I think you need to stop now, Willa. It’s all over the news. If you’re not careful they’re gonna find you.”

So he knew. I didn’t want to say anything out loud. I had never confessed it to anyone before. I let him finish without saying anything.

“It’s only making things worse. I talked to Mary today and she said she’s been getting harassing phone calls every night. The other girls, too. People think it’s them.”

My mouth dropped open in horror. “That’s disgusting. These people are so ignorant.”

He looked at me intently, his brown eyes vast and serious. “Yeah, but I don’t think you can change that.”

“But what if I can?” I asked.

“You know, this kind of stuff will always come back to bite you in the ass. Believe me when I say that it’s just not worth it. You’d get kicked out of Prep. I’m sure your parents would never forgive you.”

The word
parents
pierced me like a dart. As far as I knew, I still just had the one, but that could change at any moment.

Tre was waiting for a response. I just stared at him, zombielike. I knew what he wanted me to say, but I couldn’t make any promises at this point. I still had one more job on my list. The fact that they were on my case almost made me want to do it more—I had to get it in while there was still time.

He sighed, shaking his head at me like I was a little kid. “Well, I’m not going back to boot camp. I don’t care what happens, Willa. I just can’t. So you’re going to have to do your thing without me from now on, okay?”

The message was clear: I’d taken advantage of his generosity.

“I understand,” I said quietly. I looked into his eyes
with the sudden certainty that this was a good-bye of sorts. I was really going to miss this time with Tre. “You’ve been superhelpful, and I don’t want you to get into trouble. I should probably just get going.”

I stood up and got my bag. My bike was back in the school parking lot, but I could walk from here.

On my way out, I turned back to Tre. I figured I had nothing left to lose by asking. “So, joyriding, huh? What was it like?”

His eyes lit up. “Amazing. Total rush, man. It’s addictive, too.”

“Yeah?”

“But see, if I were you, that’s what I’d ask myself. Am I still doing this to help other people? Or am I doing this because it makes
me
feel good? There’s a big difference, you know.”

I let his question roll around in my head all the way home. As I stared down at the glinting pavement beneath me, the truth of Tre’s words hit hard. He was right, of course: I was nobody’s saint, and I was certainly not a medieval archer with a heart of gold.

I just wasn’t sure I could stop now. This thing had gone too far.

It had been a while since I’d been in my mom’s studio. When I got home, she was out, so I took the opportunity to look around. I didn’t know what I was looking for—some kind of clue, I guess. Anything, really, that could
explain what was happening.

The door was open a crack and I pushed it wider. Her easel was set up by the window, a half-finished desert landscape propped on it, the white of the canvas peeking through in big swatches. It was the same painting she’d started on my first day of school. Now that I thought of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her working on it.

The bags of shredded documents had long been removed, though I could still see a shred or two under the file cabinet. I pulled on the handle but it was locked. I briefly considered picking the lock, but my attention was pulled toward the closet on the back wall of the room. It was another long walk-in, and my mom had used it to store all of her paintings. I started looking through them, paging through as if skimming a book. Were there any of people in here? Were there any landscapes I didn’t recognize? It was possible that the paintings would hold some secrets.

I’d gone through about twenty of them—all of them familiar—when I started to wonder. How come there were so many of them in here? I thought she’d sold dozens of them by now, to her sales agent in New York. There were all those auctions … and if she hadn’t sold these, what paintings had she sold, then? I held up a small canvas, about five by five, to the light. It had never been signed, and like the painting on the easel, it looked only halfway finished.