Dark Water - Laura McNeal [16]
I didn’t, but right then Ms. Grant came out of her office and shouted, “I hope from the noise level in this room that you’re all going to be ready to write a rough draft of your script in fifteen minutes, including but not limited to Ms. Coombs and Ms. DeWitt?”
So that was all I knew when I was introduced at lunch to a boy I would frankly have called unworthy of breathy-voiced description. His eyes had a sleepy look I associate with low achievement, like most of the boys who were mesmerized by Greenie’s breasts. The cuffs of his jeans had come unraveled from dragging along under the heels of his sneakers. His hair hit his eyes mid-iris. He looked older than us, too, which I realized halfway through the conversation was because he had an actual and pressing need to shave.
We were wandering over to the pizza stand when I opened my wallet and saw nothing in there except an old raffle ticket.
“Wait,” I said. “I forgot to get money. I’ll have to go find my mom.”
“You bring your mom to school?” Hickey said.
“Her mother teaches here,” Greenie told him. “Sometimes. She’s a substitute. Mrs. DeWitt.”
“Oh, her,” Hickey said. I waited for further observations, but he kept them to himself, which made me feel subtly insulted.
“So I guess I’ll see you later,” I said.
“We could do Pedro’s,” Hickey said. “I’ve got, like, this gift certificate.”
Fallbrook High doesn’t have an open campus, so I said, “But we’re not allowed to do that”—the sort of nerdy remark I’d been making since the age of about four.
“Hickey is,” Greenie said. “He’s eighteen, so he’s got a pass.”
“He does, but we don’t.” This, too, is the sort of thing I’ve been pointing out since the age of four. But Greenie just gave me a pained look, so I followed her to Hickey’s car, and nobody saw us.
The taco stand was maybe five minutes away, right on Main Street, an old white cube of a building that my mom says was a darling little hamburger and ice cream stand back when Fallbrook was more like downtown Disney. It was my favorite place to eat, and I always ordered the shrimp burrito and horchata, a yummy milk and cinnamon drink. “I’ll pay you back,” I told Hickey after we shouted our orders in the general direction of the outdoor menu.
“No need,” he said. His arms were freckled, and he jiggled the gearshift slightly as we idled at the drive-up window, watching a Hispanic woman fold a tortilla like you’d wrap a newborn baby.
“Let’s go eat at the river,” Greenie said as soon as Hickey handed over his gift certificate and took three paper bags.
“There isn’t time,” I said immediately.
“We only have two classes after lunch,” Greenie said back, un-Greenie-like.
There was a truck full of construction workers behind us now, waiting with hostile expressions. “Right or left?” Hickey asked.
Left was back to art class and the return to compliance, provided nobody asked us what we were doing off campus.
Right was the river. Sun glinted on the hood of Hickey’s car.
“Right!” Greenie said gleefully, and without asking for my vote, her Hickeyman turned right, speeding us past the fake Irish pub, the Art and Cultural Center, the Mission Theater, the Mexican market, the stoplight, and the brown stucco apartments with sheets draped over the windows.
“You recall that my mother is a sub, right?” I said. “I’m going to get in gigantic, life-threatening trouble, Greenie. So are you, if you care.”
“We’ll be back before the end of school,” Greenie said. “Relax, you big stress cow. You love the river!”
“But I’ll be marked absent in art. They’ll notice right away what’s happened.”
“I worked as an aide in the attendance office last semester,” Greenie said, poking her straw decisively into her horchata. “They aren’t always totally on the ball, I promise. And you know who happens to be working as an aide this period?” She gave me a look I didn’t find at all comforting. “Paula Menard. Who totally owes me one.”
I adjusted to the situation the way I suppose people adjust to being on a hijacked plane. “So, Hickey,” I said, feeling miserable and a little sick. “What’s up with