“Just get out of here,” Audrey barked. “We don’t have anything else to say to any of you. And that includes you, Dylan.”
I’m like, “Wait. Just listen,” but she and Trix turned and walked away.
Nash patted me on the back. “Well, you tried.”
On the drive home, he and Brett laughed about Trix’s reaction and how her face had turned nearly as red as her hair. I guessed they were just trying to cheer me up, but I couldn’t laugh. Sure, Audrey and I had had our spats over the years, but nothing like this.
When we pulled up in my driveway, Nash goes, “Hey, don’t forget, next Saturday you’re coming to Gangland.”
“And this time you’re staying till closing time,” Brett added.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If Audrey’s still mad at me, I may not have a ride.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Nash said. “We’ll give you a ride. And believe me, you’ll be riding in style.”
“Okay,” I said. “But no more karaoke or car chases or anything, right?”
Nash laughed. “I don’t know if I can promise you that.”
CHAPTER 32
I thought having a best friend was a good thing. You always had someone to hang out with, to talk to, and to just, in general, back you up on things. But what if you happen to lose that best friend? Then what do you have? Nothing.
That’s how I felt when Audrey wouldn’t return my calls or even talk to me at school. I couldn’t believe she was that mad at me, but I figured when a person thinks they’re in love, they can get pretty unreasonable.
Journalism class was the worst. She wouldn’t even look at me, much less give me a chance to explain that I was just trying to look out for her own good. When the bell rang, I tried chasing her into the hall, but I accidentally bumped into Jared Hess, who as a senior, a giant, and an idiot felt it was his duty to pin me against a locker and fling a spit-soaked lecture in my face about how, if I wanted to keep up my health, I should stay out of the way of my betters. At least he didn’t call me Body Bag.
And there wasn’t anyone to confide in about my Audrey problem either because she was the one I always confided in about everything. I didn’t want to talk to my parents—they were likely to go all Oprah on me—and I was never the type to cultivate some kind of huge network of friends. I never needed that. I had Audrey. I figured I always would.
So that left Randy. He was still a little pissed at me for not taking him along with Brett, but he had even fewer friends than I did, so it wasn’t like he could hold a grudge against me for very long. Still, I didn’t mention that Nash and Brett had invited me back to Gangland. Obviously, Randy would want to go, and I didn’t see any reason to get into that argument again.
Without a ride, we were stuck meeting for lunch in the lowly school cafeteria. At least they were serving cheeseburgers—if you want to call those things cheeseburgers. I swear they painted stripes on the patties to make them look like they were actually grilled.
As I should have predicted, Randy had no interest in counseling me about best-friend issues. Instead, he totally wanted to focus on Mr. Westwood’s sex scam. How many girls had he run it on? Who were they? What did they look like? What kind of things did he do with them? These were questions I didn’t have the answers to, which was probably for the best. Randy’s interest seemed a little unhealthy.
“Well, let me ask you this,” he said. “What if Trix isn’t covering up for him? What if he’s covering up for her?”
I’m like, “You mean maybe Trix is the one luring in the girls like for a lesbian thing, and her dad knows about it?”
“Why not?” he said around a mouthful of French fries. “Trix probably killed that girl in California to keep her quiet, and now she’s doing the same thing here.”
For the first time ever in my life, I didn’t feel like finishing off my second cheeseburger. “I didn’t think about that,” I said. “But maybe the whole story is false. After all, there hasn’t been anything on the news about it. Not that I think Nash would lie to me, but what about Mr. Browning? Maybe he made it up.”
“I doubt that,” Randy said. “He seemed pretty determined to get to the truth.”
“Yeah. Damn, we have to do something.”
Randy nonchalantly poked another fry into his mouth. “What for? The cops are already on to the deal, right?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Apparently, the cops only suspect Mr. Westwood. For all they know, Trix is just his innocent little girl.”
“But I thought you’d quit this investigating crap after the switchblade thing.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said. “I’m not dropping anything if Audrey’s involved.”
After school, I cracked the laptop and did some more snooping, checking over all of Trix’s social sites and Googling her dad. There was quite a bit on him, mostly about legal cases he’d worked on for one corporation or another. It was all very boring and, aside from proving that he was pretty great at his job, didn’t give me anything to go on.
As for Trix, of course I’d looked her up before, but now I went over every photo and post as if I was an archeologist trying to decipher the meaning of a foreign culture. She had a bunch of photos of herself with girls I’d never seen, probably California girls from the looks of them, so I checked the captions for names and then Googled them to see if there was any news about them getting kidnapped or murdered. Nothing—until I took a closer look at one of the photos of Trix and a friend.