Take Me There (9 page)

“You were following me.”

I took a deep breath. “Sort of.” There was no use denying it.

“Why?”

“I saw you fighting with your boyfriend. I got worried. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“You saw that.” Her face turned three shades of red, and she started pacing back and forth in front of the car. I would have given anything to be able to read her mind, but she just stoped and stood there in silence.

It was almost impossible finishing my work with Jess watching me, but I managed somehow.

“Car’s finished,” I told her, after I checked the brake pads.

“That was quick.” She almost seemed disappointed.

“I could take longer if you wanted.”

Her cheeks turned red again. “No, that’s great. I need to get home, anyway.”

We walked up front and she bought a soda while Gomez filled out her invoice.

“Did you ask her out?” Gomez whispered.

“Nope, and I’m not going to.”

Gomez totaled the bill, and Jess paid him with her father’s credit card. “I think Dylan should follow you home,” he said.

“Really?” She looked up at me.

“Make sure the brakes are working okay,” Gomez told her. “We usually like to test-drive cars before we let ’em go, but we’re about to close.”

“I’ll meet you out front,” she said. I couldn’t read her, and it was making me crazy.

“What are you trying to do?” I asked Gomez after she had gone outside.

“Give you a jump start. You need to get your act in gear, son.”

“She’s out of my league. We don’t even play in the same ballpark.”

“Have you seen the way she looks at you?”

“She looks at everybody that way.”

“You’re a good kid, Dylan.” He patted me on the back. “Not very observant when it comes to girls, but you’ll figure it out.” Gomez walked back to his office, leaving me to wonder what the heck he was talking about.

I went to the bathroom. Peeled off my grease-stained work shirt and washed my armpits in the sink. Combed my hair. Studied my reflection in the mirror.

Girls always told me they went crazy over my eyes. The rest of me may have been dark and hard but at least I had nice eyes.

I went back into the garage to get Baby Face. I worried that I looked like I was trying to show off my arms by wearing the white tank top. Figured my filthy blue work pants and black
boots would counter the effect. Thought about putting my dirty work shirt back on. Sniffed it and decided against it.

I found Jess outside, sitting in the Beemer, top on, air-conditioning running. I realized that by the time we reached Hermosa Beach I’d be sweating like a pig again, since the air conditioner in the Mustang was busted. I was saving money to put in a new system, but by the time I got what I needed it would probably be winter.

Jess rolled down the window.

“My car’s out back.” I said. “I’ll pull it around front and follow you.” Jeez, what was I getting myself into?

I expected her to tell me she’d changed her mind or to forget about it or to take a hike. Instead she looked up at me with her green eyes and said, “Thank you.” It made me feel proud, and I figured, what the heck. I’ll follow her home. Who knew what might happen.

“C
AN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME WHERE IN THE LIVIN’ HELL WE
are?”

I look up to see the morning sun shining on Wade, who is standing outside the Mustang. Baby Face is next to him, on her leash, growling at a cow on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. I get out of the car and look around. Realize that I’ve driven right off the road onto the shoulder. I must have fallen asleep and taken my foot off the gas.

We’re out in the middle of nowhere. The landscape is so flat that I look in all directions and see nothing but brown grass and sky.

It’s creepy, like one of those movies where you’re the only person left on Earth or where the mutated locals hack you to pieces and then barbecue your body parts.

“Ten miles to Plainview,” I say, squinting to make out the name on the road sign.

“And you complained about me takin’ detours,” he says. “Why don’t you let me drive?”

“Maybe I should,” I say, getting back inside the car on the passenger side.

“Looks like we’ve landed on another planet,” he tells me as he puts Baby Face back inside the car and sits behind the wheel.

“We have,” I reply. “This is Texas.”

I PARKED ON
H
ERMOSA
A
VENUE AND MET
J
ESS AT THE PIER
. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but we started walking and talking and pretty soon I was buying her and me and Baby Face chili dogs from a beachside vendor.

“My dad used to be a beach vendor,” she said as we walked along the Strand eating our hot dogs. “He had a T-shirt truck, and he’d park it by the pier down in Newport Beach.”

“Is that how he made his millions?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“You pulling my leg?”

“Think about how many people buy T-shirts,” she said, giving me a sideways smile. She had a spot of mustard on her chin. I wanted to reach over and wipe it off, just for the excuse to touch her face, but I didn’t. “I mean, he had to move up,” she explained. “But it all started out of the back end of a truck. His dream was to get us out of our little apartment and buy my mother a beach house. Before long he was renting a booth in a mall in L.A. and we were moving to north Downey. Then
my mom started selling real estate. Dad finally saved enough money to get a storefront on Hollywood Boulevard.”

She was talking a mile a minute and I was glad, because I couldn’t think very clearly. Didn’t want to say something stupid. She was walking a little ways ahead of me, backward, like she was leading me somewhere. Her skirt was blowing in the wind coming off the water, so she looked like she was floating. Watching her move was hypnotizing. “But you ended up here, so it was worth it,” I said.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, like she wasn’t sure at all. Then she got real quiet and looked out at the water.

We kept walking until the sun started to set. I figured I should be heading back to my car before I wore out my welcome, but all of a sudden Jess stopped and said, “This is my place.”

“This?” I looked up at a house not eight feet from the short fence separating it from the beach. I couldn’t believe it. She had a place right on the Strand. It didn’t have much of a yard, but then she didn’t really need one. It was narrow and tall. All the houses there were. But I knew it had to cost a fortune for its location alone. I had a sudden feeling of panic like I used to get when the cops came around checking IDs at the bar, like I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. “Don’t you gotta meet your boyfriend or something?”

“He’s gone to Big Bear for the holiday.”

“What about your folks?”

“My parents are out of town until after the Fourth.”

My parents are out of town
. Those words coming from a girl would usually sound like music to my ears, but something about the way Jess said it made me feel nervous.

“Jess, there you are,” a voice said, and Jess’s smile faded as Katie and Alice walked up to us. “Alice and I have been texting you for half an hour. Did you forget about the sale down at Chico’s?”

“I think I’ll pass,” Jess replied.

“Come on, Jess. Don’t be like that. You know we’re fundage impaired.”

“Hey, aren’t you that guy who fixes cars?” Katie asked, looking at my grease-covered work pants as if she couldn’t believe I ever left the garage.

“Yeah, they let me out every now and then,” I said.

“Where’s Jason?” Alice asked.

“Gone for the weekend,” Jess said, lifting her chin in defiance.

“I see,” Katie said, looking me up and down. “Guess you’ve got a thing for bad boys.”

“We’re friends,” said Jess. “Not that you would understand what that means.” Jess turned to me, and the look in her eyes was so deep and warm it seemed to melt away all the years between Long Beach and Hermosa. I was twelve years old again, wanting nothing more than to find a way to make her laugh.

“With a boy who looks like that, there’s no such thing as
just friends
,” said Katie. “But we can take a hint. Come on, Alice. Four’s a crowd.”

When they had left, Jess turned to me. “Do you ever look at the people around you and wonder how you ended up with them?”

I thought of Wade and how I’d met him during in-school suspension at Downey High School. “All the time.”

“Come on,” she said, hopping over the brick fence and leading me into her backyard. She sat on a porch swing and I sat down next to her, facing the beach.

This was a place I could get used to.

“I love to watch the sun set over the water,” Jess said, looking out at the flame red horizon.

“Yeah. It’s different every day.”

She looked surprised.

“I like to unwind on the weekend by driving up the coast,” I told her.

She nodded, then reached out and touched my right hand, tracing the crude tattoo of the cross with her fingertips. The sensation of her skin against mine was like an electric shock.

“Ellee. Is that your girlfriend?” she asked, reading the letters beneath the cross.

“No.”

“But it is a girl.”

“A woman.”

“Really?”

“No. It’s not the way it sounds.”

“You have her name tattooed on your hand. She must be important.”

I wondered how much I should tell Jess about Ellen Carter. I knew if I hung around her much longer I was going to fall hopelessly in love, and that would be terrible because we would never end up together, not in a million years. Maybe if I told her the grisly details of my past, I could scare her away and avoid the heartache.

“When I quit school my uncle Mitch got me a job with a friend of his, a guy named Jake Farmer, who owns a used car lot
in East L.A. Last summer he got me and Wade to start chopping cars for him.”

“Chopping cars?”

“Stripping down stolen cars for parts. Taking out the CD players, radios, anything of value.”

“Oh.” Jess raised an eyebrow. “Did your uncle know?”

“No,” I said, though I’d never been sure exactly how much Mitch knew about Jake’s side business. He and I never talked about it, even after I got busted.

“Jake said me and Wade would never get caught ’cause he had us working out of an abandoned warehouse. He said even if we got arrested, we’d never do time because we were juveniles.”

“What does this have to do with Ellee?”

“Ellen.”

“Your tattoo says Ellee.”

“Wade was afraid we’d get caught, and he got a little sloppy with the nail.”

“The nail?”

“That’s how you do ’em in jail. Either that or a piece of wire. You gotta poke the skin and dab in the ink that you make with lead shavings and toothpaste.”

“I see,” she said, taking a deep breath. Good! It was working. I was obviously scaring her. Any minute she was bound to tell me to get lost.

“Ellen was an innocent old lady who got in the way of the gangbangers who stole her car. So they ran her down. She’d left her cell phone in the glove box, so it was easy for the cops to track the GPS to the warehouse with me and Wade the next morning. That’s how I know Ajax and Spider. They’re in the gang.” I didn’t mention that Ajax was the one who’d killed
Ellen. I realized that if I’d ratted him out he’d be behind bars, and the streets would be safer for Jess.

Of course, I’d also be dead.

“I made a bargain with God. If he let Ellen Carter live, I’d clean up my act and go straight.”

“What happened?”

“God didn’t keep his end of the bargain.”

“Wow.” Jess was quiet for a long time. Plotting her escape, I assumed. She pretended to watch the sun sinking into the sea, leaving streaks of red and gold. It was almost dark, and here she was sitting in front of her beach house with an ex-convict.

I watched the people going by, laughing and talking. Not sad, desperate people, but folks with hope and a future. I wondered what it would feel like to be a person with a future. All I’d been thinking about for the past few months was surviving. Keeping my nose clean. Holding down a job. I wished I could erase the tattoo. Wished I could erase myself and start over. But even if I did, what would I do differently? Why couldn’t I have found Gomez
before
I found Jake Farmer?

“What about you?” Jess finally spoke. “Did you keep your end of the bargain?”

“I’m trying.”

Jess looked up at me. “That’s so … unbelievable.”

“It’s all true. Believe me.”

“I believe it happened, I just can’t believe you would tell me. I mean, my friends would never confess anything like that. They can’t even admit they buy Prada knockoffs. It’s like we’re always in this huge competition for who has the perfect life. I’m so sick of it. Sometimes I feel like we’re all in a big popularity parade, all dressed up, marching behind the horses.”

“You want me to leave?” I braced myself for rejection.

She looked surprised. “Why?”

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I’d seen people cross the street to avoid me and my type.

“Should I be?” She didn’t seem afraid at all. She didn’t even seem disappointed.

“No.”

“Then I guess I’m not.”

“So you don’t want me to leave?”

“No. I don’t want you to leave. In fact, what I really want …” She looked down at her sandals.

“What?”

She still wouldn’t look at me. “Dylan, would you stay the night with me?”

I felt my mouth fall open as I suffered a mild heart attack. That was
not
the reaction I was expecting from her.

“No. It’s not like that. I’m not coming on to you. That’s not what I mean. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.” She was trembling like a kitten left out in the rain, and I suddenly realized what she wanted. What she needed.

She was afraid of being alone. If two mongrels like Ajax and Spider had tried to force me into a van, I’d be scared too.

“Sure. I’ll spend the night with you. I’ll spend the whole week if you want.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. It was weird, the idea of a girl wanting to be with me because she thought I was safe. I remembered the way her boyfriend had treated her, and I made a promise to myself that I would never be like that.