by Carolee Dean
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,
real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,
characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Simon Pulse paperback edition July 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Carolee Dean
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949
or [email protected].
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors
to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact
the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049
or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Tyfa ITC.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Control Number 2009033514
ISBN 978-1-4169-8950-9
ISBN 978-1-4391-5743-5 (eBook)
Excerpts from The Mermaid, A Man Young and Old, and
Two Songs from a Play by W.B. Yeats.
Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W.B. YEATS, VOLUME I: THE POEMS, REVISED edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1928 by The Macmillan Company; copyright
renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved.
For Sal and Calle Treppiedi—
thanks for everything you do to promote poetry for teens;
and for the educators, lawmakers, and poets who try to make
the world a better place for the youth of today who will
become the leaders of tomorrow.
MY FATHER
I know two things about him.
He’s locked away
down there in Texas,
I’ve heard my mother say.
She only talks about him
when she’s full of wine.
His name is Dylan Dawson,
same as mine.
1
DARKEST PLACE I’VE EVER BEEN.
Middle of the California desert. No lights for miles. Another hour to Needles.
Wade watches the road behind us in the side mirror. Baby Face thumps her tail. Looks out the back window, growling at every shadow. The three of us need sleep, but we won’t rest until we make it to Arizona.
I want to kill Wade. He is my best friend, but I want to rip off his head and leave his body on the highway for the vultures and wild dogs. I understand why he did what he did, but I had three months at a good job. I was turning myself around. I had a girl. I had a future.
Not anymore.
I remind myself how Wade saved my life in juvie. It’s the only thing that stops me from leaving him on the side of the road.
We ride with the windows open because the air conditioner is busted. Still feels like we’re traveling in an oven. Watch the temperature gauge. Radiator has a leak. Gallon jug of water in the backseat in case the engine overheats.
I strain my eyes to keep them focused on the white reflective lines so the Mustang won’t fly off the blacktop. At least there’s a full moon, but it makes my eyes play tricks on me. Every time I pass a cactus I think it’s a man with a gun standing outside in the sand. A shining reflection becomes the glint of a badge … or a barrel.
I remember the rage in Eight Ball’s eyes. He’ll come looking for us. Of that I’m sure. My only comfort is that he doesn’t know where we’re heading. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Jess or Mom. Better that way.
If they are lucky, they will forget about me.
I still have Jess’s note in my back pocket. I don’t know why she ever fell for a guy like me. What must she be thinking now? Will she hear about me on the news?
And my mother. How will she react when the police come looking for me? It almost killed her when I went to juvie last time.
I realize I’m pushing the gas and have to force my foot to relax.
Keep it slow. Don’t draw attention. Remember to breathe.
I’ve got to put some highway behind us, but we can’t afford to get pulled over. If a cop checks my license or registration, he’ll notice the plates I lifted from the Volkswagen in San Bernardino.
Wade and I don’t speak. There isn’t much to say after what has happened.
I try to stick my head out the window, hoping for a blast of cool wind to revive me, keep me awake, but it doesn’t help. All the air has gone out of the world. I cannot breathe. The night is an endless sea of desert and blackness. I clutch the steering wheel—my life preserver—though I’m not sure anything can save me now.
“You’re goin’ kinda fast.” Wade mumbles the first words he’s uttered in four hours.
I look at the speedometer and see I’ve edged past eighty. Ease my foot off the gas. Take a deep breath. Can’t let my thoughts go wandering. Have to make it to Arizona. Then we can pull into a rest stop and grab a couple hours’ sleep.
“I didn’t think it would go down like it did.” Wade looks at me.
I want to scream and tell him what an idiot he is, that as usual, he didn’t think at all. But he already looks like a puppy expecting to get beat—slouching in his seat, head hanging, greasy blond bangs covering his eyes, trying to make himself small.
Wade has made an art out of trying not to be seen or heard. Something he learned from living with an alcoholic stepfather. Wade came to stay with me and Mom when he was fourteen, after his stepdad pushed him down a flight of stairs and broke three of his ribs. He is part of my family. The only brother I’ve ever known.
“Don’t worry,” I finally tell him. “It’s all gonna work out.” I know this is a blatant lie. We are both screwed, and only time will tell just how totally screwed we are, but Wade seems to take comfort in my words. Sits up a little taller. Smiles. “Want some corn nuts?” he asks, tilting the half-empty bag that is his dinner toward me.
“No thanks,” I say, but Baby Face sticks her head into the front seat between us and licks his chin, eager for a snack. Wade gives her some food and scratches her ears.
“How long till we cross the border?” I ask him.
Wade wipes his hands on his jeans, turns on the overhead light, unfolds the map, and traces a long red line. “Little over an hour. From there Flagstaff’s another two hundred miles and Albuquerque’s three hundred more. Hey, look! The Grand Canyon is just north of Flagstaff. Wanna go?”
He’s grinning like a little kid. It takes so little to make Wade happy. Sometimes I envy him. “We’ll see,” I say. I am not taking a detour to the Grand Canyon, but there’s no reason to disappoint him just yet.
Wade turns back to the map. “We’ll take I-40 all the way to Amarillo, then catch Highway 27 south through Lubbock. After that it’s 87 to Fredericksburg, 290 to Brenham, then ten miles north to Quincy. You sure your grandma won’t mind us staying with her?”
“I’m sure.” I haven’t seen my grandmother in over a decade. Can’t expect her to shelter two guys on the run, but I don’t want to worry Wade. I just hope Levida will tell me how to f
ind my father.
Dylan Sr. has been a guest of the Texas Department of Corrections for eleven years, since I was six. I don’t know where exactly. Don’t even know what he did. Mom cries if I ask her too many questions, so I quit asking.
I wanted so badly to make her proud and not disappoint her the way my father had done, but some things aren’t meant to be.
I will find my father. Then I will understand why I am the way I am. Why it is that no matter how hard I try to stay away from trouble, it always finds me.
2
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE A STORY BEGINS? I COULD START with the night I killed Two Tone, but even if I described how Eight Ball’s gang came after us, ten against two, you still might shake your head like a tired judge who has heard too many pleas of innocence.
When it is so clear I’m anything but innocent.
I could start with what happened in juvie that made Wade the way he is and put me in debt to him for the rest of my life, or tell you how we never thought we’d do time for chopping cars, until we jacked a CD player out of a Honda one of Eight Ball’s gang had used in a hit-and-run.
I could go back to the day I dropped out of school and my uncle Mitch said he could get me a job with his old friend Jake, who owned a car lot in East L.A., and how Jake taught Wade and me a way to make some quick, easy money.
I could explain how I first met Eight Ball and how before we knew it, Wade and I had become associates of the Baker Street Butchers (BSB).
I could go back even further to when I was six years old and my father went to prison and how after that I couldn’t stay on the right side of anything.
I could even start with my father and tell you what led him to a life of crime, except for the fact that I don’t know.
And back there somewhere there’s probably another story about his father and his grandfather, what kind of men they were and what made them that way.
I could keep going back and back and back until I got all the way to Cain and Abel and Adam, but I won’t bore you with the history of the world.
Instead I’ll start with a girl named Jess.
I was twelve years old the first time I met Jessica Jameson. I’d gotten busted for lifting a pair of sunglasses from a grocery store when my mother decided to give up singing in nightclubs to become the assistant choir director at a church in Long Beach in an effort to give me a stable home life. Of course, she had to lie about her references, which wasn’t a good start.
When I first heard Jess sing, I thought she was an angel. I actually believed I could become a good person if I was allowed to just sit and listen to her voice.
Jess got the lead role in a musical at Holy Faith called The Starz of Bethlehem . One Sunday afternoon, about an hour after rehearsal had ended, Mom and I were starting to leave when we spotted Jess sitting alone in the foyer. She jumped up when she saw us heading for the door. “Wait!” she called out to us. “Don’t lock me inside.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize anybody was still here,” Mom said.
“My mom just sent me a text. She had to show a house in Paramount. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I can wait outside.” She started for the door.
Jess was always the last kid to get picked up. Usually long after the others had gone. My mother and I shared a look.
“I completely forgot,” Mom said. “I can’t leave. I haven’t catalogued the new sheet music. Dylan, stay here with Jess while I run back to the office for a few minutes.”
The relief in Jess’s eyes was plain to see, and I silently thanked God for my mother.
While we waited, I entertained Jess by beat boxing and rapping my own lyrics for the Christmas musical.
Away in a manger, no crib to call home.
The boy is in danger and Mom’s on the roam.
She has a hard time explaining the truth about Dad.
So don’t ask no questions. Too much truth can be bad.
My singing was so awful Jess laughed her head off, and it sure felt good to make her smile. It was another hour before her mother finally pulled up in front of the church in her Volvo.
Mom never said a word about Jess or her parents, but she made it a point to have lots of cataloging to do when practice was over. Jess and I started hanging out every Wednesday and Sunday night, making up our own version of the Christmas story. Unfortunately, Mom’s job didn’t last long. She soon discovered how nosy church people can be.
We relocated to West Covina, and after a few more moves I found myself at Downey High School, where I met Wade the spring of my sophomore year. I was taking a nap in the theater one day while I ditched English, when I looked up and saw Jess on the stage. I had to pinch myself, because I figured either I was dreaming or else I’d died and gone to heaven—which given my history was probably not where I’d end up.
She was even prettier than I’d remembered her, with hair that glistened like fire when the stage lights hit it just right, and bright green eyes. She’d gotten the role of Maria in West Side Story . That April I went to every single rehearsal. Wade gave me shit when I bought the soundtrack and started singing along to all the songs, but I didn’t care.
“Dude, there should be a law against people singing that bad.”
“Bite me.”
Day after day, I watched Jess in the theater and sitting at lunch with her rich friends. It was enough just to see her smile at them and pretend she was smiling at me. I don’t ask girls out. I can’t take the rejection and there’s usually no need. The sorts of girls I date are happy to make the first move. And the second … and the third.
That was never going to happen with Jess. Girls like her don’t go for troublemakers like me.
The final night of West Side Story, Jess finished singing “There’s a Place for Us,” and the entire audience gave her a standing ovation even though it was in the middle of the show. We were all thinking the same thing: how we were all going to be able to tell our friends, I knew her when …
Afterward I finally worked up the nerve to talk to her. She was standing outside waiting for a ride, holding a bouquet of roses, the stage makeup still coloring her cheeks. Kids all around her, pressing in like she was some kind of rock star.
“Jess,” I said, but not too loud, so she could pretend to ignore me if she wanted. I wasn’t sure if she’d even remember me. I’d changed a lot in three years and not for the better.
She turned around. Looked at me funny for a minute. “Dylan?”
“Yeah,” I said, and then I looked away so that she could go back to talking to her friends if she didn’t want to talk to me.
But she pushed past them and grabbed my hand. “Dylan! I haven’t seen you in forever. Where have you been?”
I didn’t think where I’d been was a topic for civil conversation, since I already had a file down at juvenile court, so I just said, “I go to Downey High now.”
“Really? Do you have A lunch or B lunch?”
“B.”
“Me too. I sit by the pizza window. Come find me. We’ll catch up.”
“Okay,” I said, even though I knew I’d never fit in with her crowd.
“Wow, it’s really good to see you.” She looked excited, but I figured that was because of the play and all the attention she was getting.
“Jessica!” a voice yelled, and I looked up to see Jess’s mother pulling up to the curb in a convertible Mercedes.
“I’ve got to go, but find me at lunch,” Jess said. Then she got into the car.
“Who’s that ?” Jess’s mother asked, looking at my long hair and baggy jeans.
“Mother, that’s Dylan!” Jess said, looking back at me to see if I had heard the disapproval in her mother’s voice, and I looked away—pretending that I hadn’t.
The following Monday I stayed as far away from the pizza window as possible. I even avoided the theater and went to English for the first time in two months. Mrs. Bates, who was none too happy about me ditching her class, called on me to read out loud from Great Expectations.
I was fifteen years old and until that moment had been able through lying, sulking, avoiding, complaining, acting like a badass, and convincing my girlfriends to do my homework, to hide the fact that I couldn’t read, at least not well enough to keep up with school. We’d never stayed in one place long enough for me to learn.
So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of. I threw the book on the floor and said, “This class is bullshit.” Then I walked out of the room.
There was a wrought iron fence surrounding the school. The back gates were locked and the front was guarded by security, so I had to lay low until school was out. It was during that hour of watching the front gate and trying to avoid the campus police that I came to realize that a school is just another type of prison.
I decided getting a job would be a better use of my time. We were always short on money. Uncle Mitch got me the position with Jake. My uncle owns a used car lot in La Puerta, Texas, and he brings shipments of cars to Jake, who can sell them in California for higher prices.
Wade, who was already living with me and Mom, finished out the spring at Downey High and then started working with me at Jake’s. He never went back to school, though, because by the time August came around, we were in juvie.
Wade got his GED while we were in jail. I have to give him credit for that. We got out in March, and I was sure I’d never see Jess again, but then she came into my life for the third time, and that’s when I began to believe that maybe destiny didn’t always have to be something bad.
3
IT WAS LATE JUNE AND ALREADY SO HOT THE NEWSCASTERS were talking about rolling blackouts and power shortages. Wade and I were working at Gomez & Sons, jobs our probation officer, Mr. Grey, had gotten for us, hoping we might put our knowledge of cars to some lawful use. I have a natural talent for tearing things apart and putting them back together, and Gomez was training me to be a mechanic. Wade, who only has a talent for tearing things apart, was still sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, changing tires, and doing a piss-poor job of it.
