The truck hit a massive pothole, and all the kids were thrown into the air.
“Ugh,” Penny said, as she felt the ice cream slosh around in her stomach.
“I hate her!” Oren said vehemently, his black curls flopping on his forehead.
Penny met his eyes, and almost flinched at the emotion simmering there. “Who?”
“My dad’s girlfriend.” He looked at her and said, “I hate her guts.”
And then it appeared.
The sleek red car roared out of the pitch dark, engine roaring throatily, a demon from hell with its headlights glowing eerily like disembodied eyes. Clouds of fumes billowed behind it, and music was blasting from the stereo. A lazy arm hung out the driver’s side window holding a bottle of beer, and the kids didn’t need to see the skull tattoo on the back of the hand to know who it was.
“Teddy!” Penny shouted, scrambling to the rear window of the cab, where Teddy was sitting with Mr. Schuyler. She banged furiously for Teddy’s attention.
The driver of the car gunned its engine and nosed up to touch the back bumper of the truck.
“He’s going to hit us!” Oren yelled.
There was grinding as the two vehicles met.
“What’s going on back there?” Mr. Schuyler hollered.
“Drive faster! Drive faster!” Penny shouted to Teddy through the cab window.
“What?” Teddy asked.
“It’s Caleb!”
Teddy craned around, looking out the window. The arm hanging out the car behind them lifted the beer in a silent toast.
He paled and then hauled himself over to Mr. Schuyler’s side and yelled in his ear, “Hurry, Mr. Schuyler! The car behind us is bad news!”
“You got it, boy,” the old man said. “Hit my truck, will ya?”
Mr. Schuyler hit the gas and accelerated for the curve ahead, spurred on by the kids in the back shouting for him to hurry. The Trans Am was nearly on top of them now. Penny clung to the side of the truck, and all she could do was stare at that muscled arm. The car kept trying to pass them, weaving dangerously back and forth, nearly forcing the truck into a gully.
“Wanna play, do you?” Mr. Schuyler shouted. “No punk kid is going to get the best of Al Schuyler! I’ll show you what’s what!”
“All right!” Mac shouted with a grin. “This is more like it!”
“Hold on!” Mr. Schuyler cried, eyeing the approaching curve.
Penny braced herself.
Mr. Schuyler took the curve, braking slightly, then turned the wheel hard so that the truck went sailing off the main road and onto an old dirt cattle path. The truck skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust as the car sped by, a beer bottle sailing out of it to land with a crash on the road.
“Hooligan!” Mr. Schuyler shouted, waving a fist out the window of the cab.
Teddy was still gripping the dashboard, his knuckles white.
“You okay, boy?”
Teddy nodded, gritting his teeth.
Mr. Schuyler leaned through the cab’s rear window to survey the kids in the back of the truck. He looked at their pale faces.
“You kids okay back there?” Mr. Schuyler shouted.
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Penny said with a gulp. “Just great.”
And watched as Zachary barfed up his chocolate ice cream, along with chunks of cone and rainbow sprinkles.
CHAPTER 12
The Fourth of July dawned hot and humid, the air as sticky and moist as the gym showers at school after ball practice.
Penny was in the garage, helping Teddy put the finishing touches on his astronaut-themed bike. She had gotten up at the crack of dawn and decorated her own bike, twining black and yellow crepe paper around the spokes of the wheels, constructing long antennae out of aluminum foil, and fashioning a stinger from a sharp sliver of wood that she had painted black. It was long and thick and tapered down to a sharp point.
Her mother had seemed a little unsure about the wood. “Isn’t that stinger thing a little sharp?”
“Exactly,” Penny had said. “It’s a bee.”
Her parents had exchanged a worried look.
Now she was nearly done with Teddy’s bike.
“No, put it there,” Teddy ordered from his perch on the stool.
She glue-gunned silver tinsel to the spoke of a wheel.
“Okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I can’t wait to set off the fireworks,” he said.
The kids were going to take the fireworks they had been stashing in the hollow tree along with them to the municipal park later that day, where the town was staging its own fireworks display. Mac figured a few more fireworks wouldn’t be noticed in the noise and confusion, and they could always disappear into the crowd if anyone gave them trouble.
Teddy, Penny knew, was excited to be out and about, even if he was on crutches. He had been keeping a low profile since his accident, but nothing was going to ruin the Fourth for him. Or her, she thought, feeling light for the first time in days, excitement rushing through her veins. She would not think of Caleb today, she promised herself.
“Now go ride around the driveway,” Teddy ordered. “I want to see how it looks.”
Penny hopped onto the bike, pedaled out of the garage, and whirled around the driveway. The aluminum foil glinted in the bright sun.
Teddy grinned happily.
It was going to be a great day.
Maybe it was the presence of so many adults, the implied safety of the crowd, but whatever it was, Penny didn’t give Caleb a second thought. It was as if she were having a day of amnesia. She had better things to think about, like sparklers and birch beer and water-balloon fights. It was, after all, a holiday.
There was tons of food: steamer clams, foot-long hot dogs, Polish kielbasa, hamburgers, macaroni salad, potato salad, deviled eggs, potato chips, and a whole cooler devoted to Popsicles for the kids. There was a keg of beer for the hardworking fathers and mothers and a keg of birch beer for the thirsty kids. Ice was scarce, and the parents collectively agreed that they needed a cold one more than the kids did, so the kids had to make do with warm birch beer.
The day moved along at a fast clip. To his delight, Teddy’s astronaut bike won the contest. The potato-sack race proved amusing when Mrs. Bukvic fell flat on her ample rear. The water-balloon toss ended with half the block’s mothers being soaked by their husbands. After that a no-holds-barred volleyball game all but ripped every blade of grass from the Schuylers’ newly sodded side yard.
To no one’s surprise, Zachary was stung by a bee and promptly dragged home by his mother. Oren did his best to avoid his father, who had showed up after all and brought his new girlfriend, a receptionist from the clinic who looked about eighteen. And Mr. Albright drank too much beer and fell asleep in a lawn chair on his own driveway.
Amy Bukvic made a brief appearance, and as Penny’s mother had predicted, she was wearing a dress—a strapless hot-pink number that made more than one of the fathers in attendance stop and stare.
Penny, who was getting birch beer when Amy showed up, watched from the sidelines as Amy sauntered through the crowd with a distracted look on her face, as if she couldn’t wait to get out of there. She caught sight of Penny at the kegs, walked over, and casually pumped herself a cup of real beer.
“So, isn’t this party great?” Penny said awkwardly, looking around to see if Amy was going to get in trouble.
“New dress?” Amy said, shooting a critical look at Penny’s sundress.
“Um,” Penny stammered self-consciously.
“You have to stop letting your mom pick out your clothes,” Amy sniffed, obviously unimpressed.
“Uh, okay,” Penny managed to reply, her cheeks burning.
“This party’s pathetic. I am so out of here,” Amy said.
“Where are you going?”
“To a real party, that’s where. Somewhere where there aren’t any parents.”
“What kind of party? I mean, whose?”
“No o
ne you know,” Amy said, with a withering look.
Penny said in a tentative voice, “Could I—”
“No, you are not invited,” Amy said, with a nasty grin. “No little girls allowed.”
Penny blanched.
Amy tipped her head back, draining her cup. Then she dropped it on the ground and walked away. “Have a great time playing with all the kiddies,” she called over her shoulder sarcastically.
Amy Bukvic aside, it was still the best block party ever. They all ate too much, and got sunburned, and played so hard they panted like dogs. Mrs. Bukvic, the organizer, was queen for the day, and even Officer Cox stopped by for a laugh and a hot dog. “Just keep the peace,” he joked.
But the Devlins’ front door, just off the cul-de-sac, stayed shut, the blinds drawn, no hint of life in the house.
Then several things happened very quickly.
The steamer clams Benji’s dad had bought from a buddy in South Philly turned out to be bad. In short order Mrs. McHale, Dr. Loew, Oren, Becky, and Dr. Loew’s new girlfriend were struck down with food poisoning and had to be rushed to the emergency room. Oren, Penny noticed, wore a secretly pleased expression when he observed his father’s new girlfriend puking her guts up on the lawn, even though he was doing the very same thing a moment later.
Then Penny’s dad’s beeper went off. Two kids who lived in the trailer park out on the Farm Road had been playing with fireworks and almost succeeded in melting the skin off their arms.
Soon after her dad left, Mac, lit from the beer he’d been sneaking from the keg all day, stood in the middle of the cul-de-sac and whistled, waving at the swooping bats with a big butterfly net. He managed to catch one as it flew low, confused by his whistle; but when he reached to take it out of the net, the bat bit him hard on the cheek and then flew off into the trees.
Penny’s mom was prevailed upon to render first aid—everyone assumed that she knew what to do because she was a pediatrician’s wife. She knew enough to know that Mac would have go to the hospital, so she parked the baby with Mrs. Loew and drove Mac to the emergency room, where his mom was still throwing up her guts.
Benji, Teddy, and Penny watched with dismay as Mac was bundled into the Carsons’ minivan.
“I told him not to mess with that bat,” Teddy said, leaning on his crutches.
First Oren and now Mac. Things came in threes, Penny knew. Who would be hurt next? she wondered, and then reconsidered. Zachary had gotten stung by the bee. He sort of counted. That would make three, wouldn’t it?
“Wait,” Benji said, suddenly remembering something. “The fireworks are still at the creek.”
It was supposed to be Mac’s job to retrieve the fireworks before they went to the park, but that wasn’t going to happen now.
“The sun’s gonna go down soon,” Penny said. “We better get them now while we can still see back there.”
“Yeah,” Benji agreed.
They were walking away when Mr. Schuyler called out. “Hey, you kids, come here,” he hollered across the cul-de-sac.They turned around, startled. Did he mean them?
He jabbed a finger at them. “Yes, you.” He was holding a box of heavy black trash bags. “Come on and help clean up this mess.”
“But, Mr. Schuyler,” Benji whined.
Mr. Schuyler shook his head decisively. “Don’t ‘Mr. Schuyler’ me. This here’s a block party, and you live on the block, so you gotta help clean up.”
“I gotta—” Benji was tongue-tied. “It’s really important,” Benji finally blurted.
Mr. Schuyler snorted. “I’m sure it is,” he said, thrusting the box of trash bags at him. “Make yourself useful.”
Penny waited until Mr. Schuyler was out of earshot and then said, “Look, you guys start cleaning up, and I’ll run down to the woods, get the fireworks, and meet you back here and help.”
“You don’t have enough time,” Teddy said, visibly panicking. “We’re supposed to go soon.”
“And I’m not getting stuck doing this all by myself,” Benji said irritably, giving Teddy and his crutches a disparaging toss of his head.
“Hey, I can hold the bags!” Teddy said.
“I’ll be really fast,” Penny promised. “Mac will kill us if we forget the fireworks. We’ve been planning this all summer! Just tell Mr. Schuyler I went to the bathroom.”
“C’mon, kids. Get a move on it,” Mr. Schuyler yelled from across the cul-de-sac. “We’re leaving in half an hour.”
Benji sighed. “Hurry.”
“Don’t let them leave without me,” Penny yelled, already off at a run.
Penny trotted quickly through the woods, the sounds of the block party fading in the distance, her dress swaying gently against her legs.
The woods were full of dark pockets, where the lacy canopy of leaves and branches grew thickest. Here and there among the trees the evening’s first fireflies were starting to wink on and off. By the time she returned it would be dark, and that meant it would be time to go to the municipal park. One thing was certain: she was changing out of this stupid dress.
She followed the creek along its winding path until she reached the old hollow tree by the steep cliff. She reached inside for the metal box and sighed with relief. The fireworks were right where Mac had left them, neatly packed in the plastic bag, nestled next to the BB guns. She grabbed up the bag, then closed the metal box and stowed it back in the tree.
“Whatcha got there?”
Penny went still at the sound of the voice, closing her eyes.
“Huh, kid?”
She turned around slowly, her hands shaking so hard that she dropped the bag on the ground, fireworks spilling out like candy.
Caleb Devlin stood on the edge of the cliff, the last rays of sunshine fighting their way through the thinning trees to wash over him like a golden brush. He was wearing worn jeans and an old T-shirt, a black one that hung on him, a little too big, like he’d gotten it from someone else, and it had been washed so many times it looked thin in places. The only new-looking thing he had on were black motorcycle boots, and they looked shiny, as if he took special care of them. Penny imagined him polishing those boots every night, to keep them gleaming, like new.
He nudged the fireworks with the shiny tip of a boot. “Fireworks, huh? Planning to celebrate something?”
Penny jerked her head up, taking a step back. “The Fourth,” she choked out.
“Of course, the Fourth,” he said, as if suddenly understanding. He pulled out the silver cigarette case and shook a cigarette out, then flicked on the lighter and drew on the cigarette. The light from the flame illuminated his face, the stubble on his cheek, the thin white scar by his eye.
He squinted at her and casually held out the pack.
“I don’t smoke,” Penny said, her voice sounding strained to her own ears.
“I’m not surprised.” Caleb said, inhaling deeply, leaning against a tree as if he had all the time in the world. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Penny Carson,” she whispered.
He nodded like he knew.
“You’re that girl that’s always playing with the boys, aren’t you?”
She nodded her head uneasily.
“So how come you’re wearing a dress?” His eyes ran up and down her slender form in frank appraisal. Here was a boy used to real girls—girls with actual breasts and hips, girls like Amy.
She sucked in her breath. “Because my mom made me.”
“Trying to turn you into a little lady?” he asked with a not-very-nice sort of laugh.
“I guess.” Penny’s mind was whirling. She was all alone in the woods, too far back for anyone to hear her scream, even.
“You guess, huh?”
Penny took a step forward, trying to sidestep around him.
He grinned at her, shaking his head as if she had somehow disappointed him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I have to get back. Everyone’s waiting for me,” she said in a shaky voice.
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He grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her roughly back to where he stood.
“Is that so?” he said, his voice like gravel. He pulled deeply on the cigarette and stared at her hard, his eyelashes so lush they should have been on a girl.
She nodded, fear bright on her face.
“Well, they’re just gonna have to wait.” Caleb flicked the cigarette onto the dirt, grinding it with his boot. “See, I have a few questions I want to ask you, Penny Carson.”
Penny paled.
“Like what do you do with those boys all the time?” he asked in a deceptively casual voice.
“Play,” she whispered.
“Play? Games? Like spin the bottle?” he laughed.
“No.”
“You like boys, Penny?”
He came and stood next to her, so close she felt the heat coming off his body. He ran his hand lightly up her arm so that the fine hairs stood up, a rush of sensation tingling up her spine. She couldn’t move.
“Huh?” he said, right into her ear, his breath hot and moist, like steam. He nipped lightly at her earlobe. “You like boys?” he asked in a husky voice.
“I don’t know,” she gasped, overwhelmed by the feel of him, so close. He smelled of tobacco and something musky, like sweat.
Caleb laughed throatily. “Don’t know, huh?”
Penny stared into his eyes. They were a soft gray-green color with gold flecks. So beautiful, she almost said aloud. He smiled at her, revealing a chipped tooth, but even that tooth seemed right, somehow, on him.
Caleb’s hand smoothed the soft skin of her neck, rubbing it as if he was a sculptor and she was a statue just waiting for him to breathe life into her. He nuzzled the edge of her collarbone, teeth scraping.
“I like this dress,” he whispered.
His hand was heavy on her shoulder, and she could feel him playing with the zipper at the back of her dress, tugging it up and down an inch, and that tinny little sound shook her like nothing else could. She started to struggle, wanting to pull away, but his other arm snaked around her waist, forcing her tight against his hard body.
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