Jeremiah Morgan. Kylie and I had looked him up too, along with almost every other member of the Junior Woodsmen. “Why the hell should I care about any of them?” I asked Rami. “We show up to this prairie dog colony field, we freeze our asses off, we go home. What difference does it make who the center is? When I call for the ball, he gives it to me. I don’t have to know his name to do it.”
Rami shook his head again, this time slowly, like he couldn’t believe it. “You have to start trying. You have to make some kind of effort, an effort to know the other guys and how we do things around here, and when we start the season next week, you’ll have to make an effort to win. If you don’t, I’m going to have to talk to the coaches about this, man.”
“Did you seriously just threaten to tell on me?” I started to laugh, because anyone had to see how funny it was. “Are you a six-year-old girl, or are you a football player? I’m the quarterback because I’m better. It’s too bad that it sucks for you, but you’ll just have to be happy on the bench.”
Yeah, he was back to wanting to hit me. “You won’t be the starter if you can’t lead the team. I don’t see that in you, not at all.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t understand. Why the hell did you even come here to play, just to screw with us? You’re as bad as everyone says you are.”
“I’m worse,” I informed him, and I went to my Bentley, and I took myself home.
The next day I was still thinking about Rami and what he’d said. Kylie and I had a load to drop off at the recycling center before we went to the Helping Hands building, because my car had become a dump truck for the house. With me pushing hard, she was getting through her aunt’s crap at double-time. I’d ripped up the carpeting in most of the rooms and gotten rid of that, too, which had helped a lot with the smell. And the fungi.
But what was I going to do about the Junior Woodsmen? “You won’t be the starter if you can’t lead the team,” that was what Rami had told me. How was I going to do that, when they hated me as much as I hated them? If we could get some wins, then they’d follow me. My dad had always told me that, how everyone likes a winner. Everyone wants to be with a winner.
“What?” Kylie asked me. She reached across the gear shift to pull on my sleeve. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I answered quickly. “Look, do you see the stop sign up there? And I’m starting to brake, already pressing some, all the way back where we are. That way we don’t jerk against the seat belts,” I said, and she nodded. She’d come along with me this morning because we were going to have another driving lesson later, bringing Jamison along for the ride. With me spending my life with the shitty Junior Woodsmen and with her working nights, we didn’t get a lot of time to practice together during the week.
Actually, it seemed like I didn’t get to see her much at all, even with me living like a parasite in her house. Sometimes, when I drove home after practice, I found myself wishing that she would be there so we could talk about how things had gone. Or, like, I wanted to hear what the weird regulars at Roy’s had pulled the night before. She was a maniac on her phone, calling and sending me pictures and messages, but it wasn’t the same as talking to her face to face and watching her brown eyes get big, watching her gesture with her hands to fit the words. Maybe she’d have an idea of what I could do with the Junior Woodsmen.
“Kayden, what?” she demanded. “Why do you keep sighing like that?”
“Just thinking some about practice. Now watch how I pull into the parking spot slowly, straight in between the lines. Very slowly.” I was paying a lot of attention to how I was driving now that I was trying to teach her. “Let’s drop off this stuff fast so we aren’t late for Jamison.” We got out to carry in another load of molding magazines and a bunch of notebooks with clippings pasted into them, and I removed a big bag from her hands. “Why’d you try to carry so much?”
“I forget how strong you are. I’m used to doing things myself,” she told me, but she let me take the sixty pounds of knitting magazines into the building. “You’re still frowning and you sighed about ten times in less than a mile as we drove here,” she said on our way out. “Was practice really that bad?”
“No, it was all right.” It didn’t matter, since this was the job I had, and there wasn’t anything to do about it. I was who I was, and so was Rami: he was a leader, but I could throw. Maybe that would be enough to get us winning and get the guys on my side. I didn’t care if they liked me, but I needed them to play to keep my new paycheck coming in. “Tell me what Roy’s up to,” I said to take both our minds away from my issues. “Is he still pissed about Dexter leaving and going home?”
“He’s being awful about it, even though he won’t admit that it’s bothering him,” she confirmed. “His mood! Lordy, it’s noxiating. But the bar is running more smoothly without Dexter there, so things are easier. No one’s complaining about their beers being one hundred percent foam, and we’ve gone back to being dirty, which is gross but also a relief. All that constant cleaning was tiring me out. I’ve been pretty tired.” She looked out the window. “Have you noticed that?”
“You’re tired? You did fall asleep at eleven on Christmas,” I pointed out. “But so did I. It was quite the party.”
“Yeah.”
I looked over and she was rubbing her knuckles, massaging over her mitten with her other hand. “Is that bothering you again?” I asked.
“No. What are you doing with Jamison today?”
“You mean, what are we doing. We’re taking him on our driving lesson.”
“No. Kayden, no! The last time, you nearly threw up in the car,” she protested.
“You got a lot better after that. You stayed a lot straighter, remember? You hardly swerved at all.”
“Thanks. But I don’t think we should subjam a kid to that.”
“I think it’s ‘subject.’ And Jamison won’t mind. He’s game for stuff,” I said. He was a pretty good kid, when it came down to it. We’d been working on his science project, which was him trying to see if using water tinted with different shades of food coloring made a difference in how plants grew. My job so far had been repotting seedlings with him and using my laptop to help make charts of the measurements he took at home. We’d also been practicing baseball, and he was absolutely terrible. Worse than Kylie was at driving…no. No one was that bad at anything, except maybe me and how I was doing with the Junior Woodsmen. But why the hell did I care so much about that? All I needed to do was throw well. I’d make the team look good, so that the scouts would come more often, and they’d want to keep me around. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t a leader. It didn’t matter if they all wished I was back in Portland or in jail or dead of an overdose—
“You’re sighing again!” Kylie exclaimed. “What’s going on? Really, Kayden, you better get it off your chest now or you’re going to upset Emma when we get home. She’ll pick right up on how you’re feeling and if it gives her more tummy problems…”
Then we’d have to give her the house and live outside in a tent. “We’re here,” I announced, and pulled to a stop in front of the Helping Hands building. We waved to Miss Margulies and Kylie stopped to introduce herself and to ask how the director’s old dog, Hank, was doing. I’d already told her the news passed on from Jamison, how the week before Hank had been back at the vet.
“Oh, hi, Kayden,” the girl at the front desk said as I walked into the building, blowing on my hands to warm them up. Jackie. No, Jessie, that was her name. She’d introduced herself to me more than a few times now. “How are you? It’s pretty cold this morning, isn’t it?”
You’d never know that it was around five degrees from what she was wearing, a shirt that dipped down to expose most of her chest. I realized that I was wondering if she had a sweater she could put on, instead of staring at the expanse of skin she was showing off. What had happened to me? “Yeah, it’s freezing,” I agreed, and looked back to see if Kylie was coming. Her own coat sucked.
“You know, I wanted to
tell you, there’s going to be a really fun party tonight. At the college.”
“I’m a little old for college parties.” And I couldn’t go to a party, not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Oh, sure,” Jenny said. No, Jessie, that was it. “Well, um, if you’re free, we could do something else instead. We could—”
“Lordy, that poor dog!” Kylie burst out when she burst in through the door. “He had bloat. Can you believe it, Kayden? On top of everything else he’s gone through. Once, I was afraid that Emma had bloat because she was…well, her tummy was very off, and she was in such a mood. I took her to the emergency vet in Kingston, Arizona, where we were living after leaving Vegas, and they were so nice there.” She peeled off her mittens and hat, letting her chocolatey hair shimmer around her shoulders. “Hi,” she said to the receptionist. “I’m Kylie.”
The girl, Jody—no, Jessie—stared at Kylie. “Oh. Hi.” She looked back at me, very obviously pissed off. She turned her back and started messing with her printer.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kylie told her, and then whispered to me, “Is that the woman who’s always trying to pick you up? She’s so pretty!”
I nodded but steered her down the hallway, my hand on her back. “This coat is terrible,” I said. “I can feel all your body heat escaping.”
“I can always throw on a garbage bag at your game,” she told me, and laughed as she looked at my expression. “I can see how you feel about that idea! Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you in front of your new team.”
It wasn’t that I was afraid she would embarrass me at our opening game, although the trash bag was a no. I was going to embarrass myself with this shitty team. We’d lose, I’d lose, and—
“Ok, if you sigh one more time and tell me nothing’s wrong, I’m going to take you to the doctor to get your lungs checked,” Kylie announced. “Will you please talk to me about what’s happening with you?”
“Nothing,” I said, and she opened her mouth to argue, but then I steered her into the meeting room and over to Jamison, who stood up to shake her hand. She was impressed by his manners and told him so.
“And I’ve heard so many good things about you already,” she went on. “Kayden says you’re really improving at baseball!”
That wasn’t what I’d told her—it had been something more like, “He can throw the ball now without hurting himself by mistake.”
“Yeah, he’s doing great,” I lied, and Jamison briefly smiled. But he was different, off, as we started to put in his latest data points for his science project. He certainly wasn’t talking a thousand words per minute like he usually did, not even with Kylie, who could always keep up a conversation. It was obvious enough that something was wrong with him that she started kicking me under the table, widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows at the kid and then also pointing in his direction, in case I’d missed the earlier signals.
I hadn’t. “Hey, what’s up with you today? Why aren’t you excited that the red water plant finally grew?” I asked him.
He kept playing with his pencil, but he mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“Your mom?” Kylie prompted. “Is that what you said? What about her?”
“She went to work today even though she doesn’t feel good. She’s been going all week and she’s sick,” he said.
“She’s an adult,” I told him. “She knows if she can do things or not.”
Kylie shot me a look and kicked me again under the table, but very, very hard this time. “That’s too bad,” she told him. “Is she afraid she’ll get fired if she doesn’t go into work?” And he nodded, and I thought about what it would mean for him if his mom was out of a job.
“I don’t think it’s fair!” Jamison burst out. “It’s not fair that she has to work all the time and it’s really hard and she gets so tired.” And then more of the story came out, about how he needed stuff to try out for baseball, like cleats that fit him, and how everything was so expensive. How Kieffer, his friend at school, had new cleats that his dad had gotten, how Kieffer’s dad practiced with him almost every day after work, not just on Saturdays like we did. How Kieffer’s dad had a good job that wasn’t very hard and so did his mom so they could buy whatever, even that chocolate spread made out of nuts that was way too expensive except for on your birthday. How both of Kieffer’s parents were home on weekends and how his dad drove him all over the place for domino building competitions, which apparently Jamison had always wanted to do, also. Kieffer’s dad was a great guy who was always around.
“Kieffer is so lucky. I don’t think it’s fair that some people have all that luck,” Jamison finished up.
“I don’t know if it’s luck—” I started to say, but Kylie broke in to interrupt me. She was nodding like she knew exactly what the kid was talking about.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” she told him. “I used to feel the same way. Like, why do those people have a whole house, and my mom and I live in a terrible apartment over a garage so that the car exhaust makes her sicker? And kids at my school would go to Tahoe to ski or sled or something, and they knew how to ride bikes, and they would bring such cool things for lunch.”
“Sushi,” Jamison agreed. “The kind with cucumber and rice and seaweed, not the raw fish. And the chocolate spread stuff.”
“Exactly. But the hardest part for me, always, was that I didn’t have a dad either,” Kylie said. “He left when I was just a baby and I always wanted one, so much. A guy like Melanie’s dad in Startripping to Love,” she mentioned to me. “He’s so cool, how he accepts Baristron and doesn’t judge that he has those horns and only wears a loincloth.”
“I always wanted a dad too,” Jamison agreed, and now they nodded at each other.
“Maybe that’s lucky, not the other way around,” I heard myself say, and when they turned to look at me, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
“What do you mean?” Kylie asked.
“Uh, I mean, maybe it’s not always better to have someone there. Like having a dad around, it isn’t so great.” They both stared, waiting. “I had a mom and a dad, we had enough money, we could ride bikes and have sushi for lunch. And I hated almost every minute that I was in that house, except when my brother was with me.”
“What was wrong with your parents? Were they mean to you? Did they hit you or something?” Jamison asked, way too loud.
“I…” I swallowed. “I don’t know why I said that. Nobody hit me, everything was fine. Let’s do the science project and get it over with.”
Jamison opened his mouth but Kylie said, “Ok, yes! Let’s do science. Jamison, what’s the deal with the red water? Why didn’t that one grow very much? Do plants really hate the color red or something?” That led him to tell her about his stated hypothesis, that the plants watered with green or blue would grow faster because those colors looked more like real rain. He also explained his other, secret hypothesis that since red was the color of blood, the roots wouldn’t want to soak it up. I had told him not to put this idea into the report.
We worked on his data charts and wrote part of his introduction paragraph while Kylie asked a lot of questions, and not just about the science project. She wanted to know all about his mom, and his house, and his school, his friends and his teachers. Despite the many, many things that Jamison had already told me about himself in the many, many times he’d talked to me, I learned new stuff about him. Like I’d never known that his best friend was a girl he’d grown up with and who lived in the trailer next to his, which he called a mobile home. I’d heard her name lots of times, but now he admitted to Kylie that he thought they’d get married someday.
I’d also known that he came from a single-parent situation, but I hadn’t understood how angry and sad he felt about his dad, how that douche had left them totally high and dry. And I hadn’t picked up at all on how he resented having to come to hang with me on Saturdays, that he wished he could have been with his mom instead, that he wished he had someone to take
him to domino building competitions, if that was a real thing. Sure, I’d been pissed that I’d been forced to be there with him, but I wasn’t aware that he felt the same way about me. Maybe I’d noticed him talking a lot about his mom, as if he missed her. Maybe sometimes he was quiet, or what my dad would have called sulky, but mostly…
Mostly I hadn’t been thinking about him.
“You have fun when we play baseball, right?” I broke into their conversation.
Kylie and Jamison stared at me. “I like it, yeah,” he said slowly. “We’re doing my project right now, though.”
“Yeah, right.” I drummed my fingers on the nasty table. Generations of Helping Hands kids had carved their names and various curse words on it, which people like Miss Margulies had tried to scratch out. So “Fuck you” was now “Ewok you,” but the original intent was clear. “I know this bullshi…stuff that we do isn’t like having a good dad. What about a brother? Like, I could try to be more of an older brother.”
“You’re old enough to be my dad,” Jamison pointed out, but Kylie answered first.
“I think that would be perfect,” she said. “You’d be more like Ben, right, Kayden? But from what you said, Ben was a brother and a dad for you. So that would be perfect for Jamison. I would have loved a brother like that.”
I swallowed. Yeah, maybe I hadn’t been lucky in my parents, but I had been very lucky to have a brother like Ben. “Are you guys done?” I stood and shoved back my chair when they nodded. “Then let’s get out of here.” I had gotten my first paycheck from the Junior Woodsmen and right now I needed to spend some more of it. Kylie had said that I should save so I had enough for gas money for my guzzler, as she liked to call it, but I had given her money for rent and bought some decent groceries for both of us. About two-thirds of her salary went to expensive food and vet bills for Emma, but we needed to eat as well, and maybe go to the doctor ourselves. I saw her rubbing her hand again like it hurt.
Jamison jumped up too. “Where are we going?” he asked. “Baseball?”
The Bust Page 18
