Shine - Lauren Myracle [86]
“That’s messed up,” I said softly.
“You’re telling me,” he said.
Eventually, our conversation circled back around to Beef’s mysterious trips and Patrick’s mysterious boyfriend.
“When Patrick mentioned his boyfriend, did he say anything about drugs?” I asked Jason.
Jason drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Yeah. I don’t know if it was meth, but they fought about it.”
“What exactly did Patrick tell you about him?”
“Not much,” Jason said. “That he had a hard family life.” He shot me a glance to say Don’t we all?
“Do you think he’s the one who hurt Patrick?” I said. How could Patrick care for a person, maybe even love him, if he had the potential for such violence?
Jason shook his head. Neither one of us could get our heads around it. That’s when we stopped talking. But I didn’t stay in that ugly place, and as I said, our silence wasn’t the bad kind. We were here, together in Jason’s crappy Malibu, because we chose to be. We weren’t high. We weren’t hitting each other. The forest surrounded us, but sometimes sunlight snuck through the overlapping branches and bathed us in liquid gold. We were doing our best to help a friend.
“We’re getting close,” Jason said, after we’d left the shelter of the woods. He glanced at the map and turned left onto New Plateau Drive. It didn’t look new to me. It looked like we were heading into the seedy part of town.
Jason made a right and then another left, pulling into a cramped parking lot. He killed the engine. He turned and gazed at me for a long moment.
He said, “We’re here.”
BILLY THE KID’S WAS NOTHING FANCY, JUST A DOOR opening out onto an alley. When I saw it, I thought, No way anyone’s going to be here, not in the middle of the day. But I knocked anyway. When I gave up, Jason took over, his knuckles pounding the wood.
From inside, a man growled, “Go ’way. Not open.”
Jason and I looked at each other.
“Please?” I called. “I have a friend, and he’s in trouble, and I just want to ask a few questions?”
Nothing.
Jason tried. “We don’t mean in trouble with the law. We’re not cops or anything.”
“Yeah, we’re just kids,” I said.
“Go. A. Way,” the man said, but with a weariness that suggested he’d give in if we pushed a little harder.
“Just five minutes,” I said. “It’ll take five minutes, I swear, and then we’ll leave you alone.”
Silence. But when I pressed my ear to the door, I heard a heavy sigh.
“Um, otherwise we’ll just stay here,” I said. I held Jason’s gaze so it was as if I was talking to him instead of the guy inside. “We’ll just stay here, talking to you, and it’ll probably be hard to get any work done, because I know we’re being kind of annoying.”
“Who’s being annoying?” Jason said, lifting his eyebrows.
“Good point,” I told him. I raised my voice. “Well, I’m not annoying, but the guy I’m with kind of is. And sometimes he just starts singing, just randomly, and he’s not very good.”
Jason’s expression didn’t change, but amusement flickered in his eyes, and I knew him well enough to recognize it. Already I knew him that well, even though we’d only just come into each other’s lives, and it made me so happy I wanted to sing. I hadn’t wanted to sing in forever.
I picked a song Mama Sweetie used to sing to me and Patrick when we were littlies. I’d spend the night at his house, and the crickets would chirp outside the open windows, and Mama Sweetie would rock back and forth in her rocking chair, singing softly till we fell asleep.
I, however, did not use my soft voice. “Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,” I belted out. “Keep on the sunny side of life!”
Jason regarded me incredulously.
“Sing with me,” I whispered
“Not happening,” he whispered back.
I didn’t know what to do but plunge on, so plunge on I did, and when my voice cracked on the high note, I ignored it. “It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way, if we keep on the sunny side of life!”
The door opened. A huge black man stared down at me.
“Well, if it ain’t a li’l white gal