“It’s like our middle school is a prison and I might get shanked at any second,” Oliver said, maybe going for humor, but we didn’t laugh.
“I’m going to their houses tonight. I’m going to speak with their fathers,” Alex said.
“Don’t do that. It will only make things worse for me,” Oliver said. Then to me, he said, “So what happened at Booker’s place?”
I told them everything, and I got the sense they weren’t pleased that I’d leaked information.
“He already knew you had the yearbook,” I said in self-defense. “Alex told him.”
“You told Booker about the yearbook?” Oliver asked Alex.
“In a roundabout way. Just testing the waters, so to speak.”
“But we didn’t vote on it,” Oliver said. “We vote on everything!”
“True. My bad,” Alex said.
“My bad?” Oliver said.
I was sensing some tension, so I got to the point. “I voted yes to making contact with Sandra Tackett. Let’s go right now.”
“Really?” Oliver said, which let me know Alex hadn’t told him yet.
“Yes. I’m in. One hundred percent.”
“Well, all right, then,” Alex said. “You heard the lady.”
“But my shirt is full of ketchup stains,” Oliver protested. “I don’t want to meet the real live Stella Thatch like this!”
“We’ll swing by your house first so you can grab the yearbook, the extra photocopy of The Bubblegum Reaper you made, and a clean shirt,” Alex said.
“I also need to shower. You don’t meet a Sandra Tackett every day,” Oliver said, and then we were off.
As we were driving, Alex kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, since I was sitting in the back. Whenever he caught my eye, he would smile brightly, as if we were in on a private joke—or maybe it was like Oliver was our kid and we were planning some sort of surprise birthday party for him, as weird as that sounds. But I got the sense that we weren’t just doing this for ourselves but because Oliver had had a terrible day at school, too. We were trying to right that wrong. It was a relief that Alex didn’t seem mad at me for upsetting Booker, because when I’d left Booker’s house, it felt a lot like when I had tried to kiss Mr. Graves.
While Oliver showered and changed, I slid up into the Jeep’s front passenger seat.
“Booker totally freaked out when I brought up the Tackett twins,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. But you already wrote him about the yearbook, so you can’t be too mad at me.”
“Yeah, I’m not,” he said, and then laughed.
There was a devilish twinkle in his eye.
“You know more than you’re letting on,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“What game are you playing?”
“No game.”
“You know, I asked Booker why he never talks about his mother and he told me about—”
“How she had an affair with a doctor and left him behind. It’s sad.”
“You knew?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it made me realize that you never talk about your mother, either.”
He shrugged. “She left me and my father, too. Only there was no rich doctor or a mansion or any wild affair. She just left us when I was seven. It crushed my father, who sort of became a zombie afterward. He’s a nice guy who bought me this kick-ass Jeep, but he’s not really present most of the time. Not like Booker has been, anyway. Mom sends me a Christmas card every year with a hundred-dollar bill in it. But my dad has enough bucks to make that seem sort of sad and irrelevant. I don’t spend those hundred-dollar bills. I give them to the first person I come across who looks depressed. Always a total stranger. I fold the bill up so that I can palm it, then I reach out and shake a miserable person’s hand, transferring the money—but I never, ever talk to the person. If I let them thank me, it would ruin everything, so I just walk away quickly. That’s been a Christmas tradition for some time now. Other than that, I don’t really hear from my mom at all.”
“Do you not trust women now?”
“What?” he said, and then laughed.
I let it go and then said, “What about Oliver’s dad?”
“Pretty much the same story as ours.”
“Ours?”
“Your dad just left, too.”
It shocked me at first when he said that, but then I realized I was indeed part of this broken-family club now. Even still, I said, “He didn’t exactly leave me. We have dinner a few times a week.”
“Does that make you feel any better?”
I looked away.
Oliver bounded out his front door wearing a pair of backup glasses too small for his face and a new button-down shirt. He had the yearbook and the photocopied Bubblegum Reaper in his arms. “You stole my seat!”
“You forgot to call shotgun. Get in the back, my man,” Alex said, and then we were on our way to Sandra Tackett’s house.
16
Using the Same Basement You Were Currently Locked Away In
At a white ranch home with two apple trees in front of it and a large flower garden to its right, a woman about Booker’s age answered the door and said, “Can I help you?”
She was wearing an orange cotton dress with a white sweater. Her hair was gray but stylish, with a little wave on the right side of her face. She had on pewter eye shadow, which I immediately wanted to wear myself, even though I had never before worn eye shadow. Hers didn’t make her look slutty like most of my classmates—who wore eye shadow heavy as porn stars—but mysterious and maybe even regal, like a queen.