“No,” she said quickly. “No, I did it on purpose. I just dumped it on his head. It felt great.” Her giggles grew into full-scale laughter, the kind that steals control of your limbs and your better judgment. There was no joy in the spasms rocketing through her body, just an explosion of all the tension she’d been storing since morning-once it started coming out, she couldn’t figure out how to shove it back in again. She flopped around on the chair, heaving with hysteria, gasping for breath, until finally Roy’s frozen scowl brought her back to reality.
“Look, I don’t know what the joke is,” he said, standing up, “but I really don’t have time for this kind of thing.”
“No!” she cried, leaping up. “No joke. This isn’t me- I’m a great employee, really, just give me another chance, I really need this job, I’ve tried everywhere else in town-”
His expression warmed, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I am. But I can’t hire you just because I feel bad for you-I need someone reliable, and it’s pretty clear that you’re-”
“Not,” she finished for him. It would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been so sad. Reliable was all she’d ever been. Good ol’ reliable Beth. And now she didn’t even have that. She slumped down over the table, her head resting on her arms and her arms resting on something wet and sticky, but she didn’t cry. She’d been holding it all in for hours now, and it seemed the tears had all dried up.
When she felt the hand on her shoulder, she knew who it was, and she knew she should stand up and rush out of the restaurant without even looking at him, but she was too weak and too selfish, and so she lifted her head up and smiled. “Hey. Again.”
“You’re having a bad week,” Reed said, without a question in his voice. “Come on.” He grabbed her arm gently and pulled her out of the chair, walking her toward the door. She let herself go limp, happy for a moment to be a marionette and let someone else pull the strings.
Once outside, he sat her down on the bumper of his truck, then perched up on the hood.
“I should go,” she mumbled, avoiding eye contact. “I should get out of here.”
“Slow down.” He pulled something out of his pocket- a small, squished paper tube, and offered it to her. “This always helps,” he explained.
“What is it?” he asked, his soft, concerned voice so incongruous against his punk rock wardrobe and apathetic pose. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I just screwed up my interview,” she admitted. “And everything.”
Reed laughed, a slow, honeyed chuckle. “Don’t worry about ‘Guido.’ He’s a pushover. I’ll talk to him, vouch for you-he listens to me.”
“Why bother?” she asked. “You don’t even know me.”
“So tell me.”
“What?”
“About you.”
So she told him about how she made up stories for her little brothers when they had trouble falling asleep, and about the stacks of blank journals that were piled up on her bookshelf, each with two or three entries she’d written before getting distracted and giving up. He told her that he’d taught himself to play the guitar when he was twelve, when the school had started using the music room for detention overflow. She admitted that she liked Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Dar Williams-the sappier, the better. He admitted that he hated the whole girl-power, singer-songwriter, release-your-inner-woman genre, but recommended Fiona Apple and Liz Phair to bulk up her collection.
They didn’t talk about Kaia.
Reed was lying back on the hood of the truck, staring up at the darkening sky. Beth couldn’t stop watching him, the way he moved his body with such fluid carelessness, as if he didn’t care where it ended up. The cuffs of his jeans were fraying, and his sockless ankles peeked out above his scuffed black sneakers. Beth resisted the crazy urge to touch them.
“I should take off,” she said, realizing that the sky was fully dark-her brother’s babysitter would be eager to leave, and her parents would be expecting to find dinner on the table when they got home from work.
“Wait-” He grabbed her wrist, and she gasped as the touch sent a chill racing up her arm. Their eyes locked, and neither of them spoke for a long moment. She had time to notice that his skin was softer than she’d expected, and then, abruptly, he pulled away. “If you need me…” He dug a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil out of his back pocket. She now knew he always kept one on hand, for times when a strain of melody popped into his head and he needed to record it before it disappeared. He scrawled down a number and handed it to her.
Beth knew she shouldn’t take it; she should never have allowed herself to lean on Reed, even for an afternoon. But she let him hand it to her, and she let herself smile when their fingers touched.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“What?”
“Being so…
“Because you-” He stopped in the middle of a word, closed his mouth, and looked beyond her for a moment, out to the dark horizon beyond Guido s pizza shack. She wondered if he was thinking about that day on the side of the highway-and she wondered if letting him believe in it, and believe in her, counted as a lie. “Because you look like you could use it.”
She couldn’t stand it anymore. “Reed, I should tell you-”
“I gotta go.” He gave her an awkward wave before sliding into the driver’s seat.
“Wait-”
But before she could say anything more, he shut the door and drove away.
“A little to the left, farther, no, now to the right, faster, faster, okay… not there-now! That’s it! Yes!”
“Awesome!” Miranda cried, tossing down the controller and shooting her fists in the air. “I rock!”
“You really do,” Adam marveled. He threw himself back on the couch, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. “Who knew?”
“High score!” Miranda cheered, pointing at the screen. “See that? I got the high score.”
“Mmph,” Adam grunted.
“Oh, don’t get cranky just because you got beat by a girl.” Miranda tapped her thumb against the buttons until her initials were correctly entered in as a testament to her glory. “Where has this game been all my life?” She glanced over at Adam, giving him a playful grin. “Think I could convince the phys ed department to give me some sort of credit for playing Wild Taxi?”
“
Miranda shook her head. “My cousin gave me his old PlayStation, but that was, like, when I was a kid. And it broke after a couple days. This is much cooler.”
“Okay, so what’s next? Resident Evil or Tony Hawk?”
Miranda checked her watch and her eyes bugged out. “Adam, we’ve been playing for two hours.” She hadn’t even noticed the time passing, which was pretty much a miracle since the first ten minutes in Adam’s living room had dragged on forever. Without Harper around, the two had nothing to say to each other; all the more reason to consider Sega Dreamcast a gift from the gods.
“Yeah? So?” Adam hopped off the couch. “Hungry? I could order a pizza, and I think we’ve got some chips or something-”
“Adam, we haven’t even started looking at math,” she pointed out. “What about your test?”
“What about your high score?” he countered. “You really gonna leave it undefended and let me kick your ass?” He plopped down on the floor beside her, lifting a controller and restarting the game.
“But…” Miranda stopped. If he didn’t want to work, it was his funeral, right, she told herself. And after all, just one more game wouldn’t hurt…
They spent another hour glued to the screen, switching from Crazy Taxi to Tony Hawk to NBA 2K1 before they were interrupted again.
“No fair!” she yelled as he sank yet another three-pointer. “You’re captain of the basketball team and I’m barely five feet tall-how am I supposed to block your shots?”
