She took a step outside the door, not daring to go far from the house. Even in her more modest clothes, the driver looked at her every few seconds or so, smiling. She couldn’t tell if it was apologetic or if he’d gone back to fantasizing about her. After he’d leveled the flatbed and rolled it forward to lock, he trotted over with the clipboard held out.
He kept his gaze locked on her eyes. “Need you to inspect the car and sign off that there’s no damage.”
Oh, no friggin’ way am I going out there with you. “Dad?” she yelled. “He says you gotta check the car for damage and sign. I can’t ‘cause I’m only fourteen.”
Riley felt somewhat vindicated at the look he made when he learned her age. She didn’t want to imagine what thoughts had been bouncing through his head. Fortunately, he didn’t seem disappointed. A wave of panic flashed over his face. Dad jogged up and offered a handshake. She edged into the house, feeling guilty.
“Hon, keep an ear on the headset please?”
“Sure… how do I work it?”
“No need to ‘work’ anything, just put it on and yell like crazy if anyone calls for me.”
“Okay.”
With Dad going outside, she wandered to his bedroom. She hesitated at the door, as if she were about to invade some kind of inner sanctum. Dark blue carpeting and the blackout curtains left the room cave-like and cool. She sat on the edge of the still-warm wheeled office chair and put the uncomfortable military-style headphones on. A faint hiss filled her ears, like a stereo on a dead frequency with the volume all the way up. With each passing minute, her guilt grew.
Soon after the rumble of a departing truck rattled the walls, Dad walked in. Riley relinquished the seat and headphones without an inkling of protest.
“Nothing. No one said a word.”
“Good news.” He smiled, sat, and clamped the headset over his ears.
“Dad?” She stared at her toes.
“Hmm?” He pulled one earphone off.
She murmured through a story of what happened. He got angry for a moment, but it wasn’t clear if it was directed at her, at the driver, or in general. Dad leaned forward and held her hand.
“I trust you’ll not wear those again.”
“It’s not all my fault.” She gave him a wounded look.
“No, I’m not saying that. Thank you for being honest. He didn’t touch you?”
She shook her head. “Just tried to peek down my shirt.”
“You’re probably right. I would’ve at least hit him.”
Dad let the headphone snap back in place, squeezed her hand with a smile, and swung the mic boom in front of his mouth. “Baker-four-four, SITREP, copy?”
Riley wandered the house for a while, thinking about Mom’s system of awarding her tokens for doing chores. Tokens she could redeem for things like shopping trips or ‘get out of grounding’ free cards, though that one was expensive: 50. She’d probably had 32 in the jar when Mom…
She sighed.
For a moment, she stood at the sliding glass door in the dining room, gazing at a small spread of uneven red patio tiles and desert beyond. A patch of sun warmed her toes, and lofted the scent of wood in the air. I wanna go home. I miss trees. She went to the couch, sat, laid sideways, draped herself over the arm, rolled to face the back, rolled flat, and eventually slithered onto the floor. After lying there for about a half hour bored out of her mind, she got up and trudged to her room.
She flopped on the floor, back against her bed with her legs crossed, elbows on knees and chin in her palms. This sucks. She frowned at the shelf of books by the closet. Somehow, the school’s summer reading list’s titles had wound up right where her eyes landed on The Good Earth. She smirked. If school wants me to read it, I bet it’s boring. She looked up and over to the top shelf at Lord of the Rings. Despite finishing it twice, it was more tempting than something she was required to read.
Riley blinked. “Duh. I’m not going to that school anymore… and technically, the one in this hellhole hasn’t given me any summer work.”
She laced her fingers behind her head and leaned back, proud to have won an argument with no one. Her good mood faded as she remembered the day Mom had taken her shopping. A stop to buy books she wasn’t really interested in reading had been softened by Starbucks hot cocoa. Two thousand and change miles away, the bookstore at Menlo Park Mall went on as though she’d never existed. Someone may be walking through her house at that very moment, thinking of buying it.
Instead of crying, she sank into a sullen pout and wrapped her arms around her knees. Maybe I’m coping. Her throat ached from the pain of stalled sobs, but it didn’t feel like it would do much good. She glanced to her right at the green glow where her Xbox controllers charged, all but useless without Internet. She looked at the game console, debating bot-matching and shooting AIs. She hadn’t touched Call of Duty in three weeks. It used to be a nightly ritual. As much as they horsed around, she and Amber had been pretty good in retrospect. They probably could’ve ranked in a tournament, though in no way did she expect to win.
She got up and moped to the kitchen, stopping with her hand on the wall phone. What the crap is Amber’s number? Riley had always tapped her face in the contact list. The only time she had ever typed the number out was the day Mom got her the iPhone two years ago. The iPhone! I might not have cell reception, but I can look up the number. Riley ran to her room, digging through the nightstand drawer. She hugged the white iPhone 4 to her chest as if it were a beloved kitten and clicked the power button.
Dead.
“Shit.”
Riley tore her room apart, hunting for the charging cable. When she didn’t find it a half-hour later, she darted across the hall to the junk room and attacked the unopened boxes of ‘stuff from the house.’ The sight of Mom’s things broke her resolve not to cry more, but she kept on searching. The precious white cable turned up perched atop mom’s recipe book in the ninth box she checked.
Still sniffling, but wearing a broad grin, she rushed back to her room and plugged the phone in. The screen remained black. She bounced up and down on the bed, chanting, “Comeon comeon comeon.”
Ten agonizing minutes later, a white Apple logo appeared. She shook the slab of technology, as if that would convey the message it needed to boot faster. As soon as it came up, she pushed the contact icon, and Amber’s entry. The number hid behind a pop up warning her she had 10% battery power.
“Argh! Go away!” She mashed the dismiss button.
She read Amber’s phone number four times, speaking it aloud. After repeating it twice more without looking at the screen, she put the phone down and marched back to the kitchen chanting it. When she picked up the handset and reached for the buttons, dead silence in the earpiece knocked the number right out of her short-term memory. Riley slouched, and let the receiver fall against the wall, bouncing on its cord.
“Dad?” she whispered, trudging to his room. “Dad?”
“Yes, hon?” He looked up from his radio. He seemed simultaneously happy to see her as well as scared.
“Your phones don’t work.”
“I know. You see any wires outside?”
“Actually, yeah. There’s one off the pole.”
“That’s main power. The phones came with the house. Telco wanted to charge me twelve hundred bucks to run cable out this far.”
Why do you live in the ass end of nowhere! Her mental voice shrieked. Outside, she remained despondent and silent. “Oh.”
Head down, she plodded back to her room and collapsed on her knees, leaning against the bed with her head atop her crossed arms. Sobbing lasted a shade less than fifteen minutes, after which she slid like a murder victim to the rug. She didn’t like these people. She wanted her friend back. All Lyle and Camila wanted to do was have sex with each other. Jesse was just a little kid, even if he was supposedly thirteen, and Luis… Luis smoked himself retarded.
Riley cringed at the imagined voice of her mother chiding her for using that w
ord. ‘Sorry it just slipped out’ didn’t make Amber any less pissed when Stacy dropped an ‘N-bomb’ in casual conversation. She felt guilty, not to mention hypocritical―she’d felt as angry as Amber. Overwhelming boredom seeped in. She lost track of time for a while, but eventually sat up and turned on the Xbox and her TV, leery of breaking Mom’s decree by hooking it up to the big screen. She went into the game, growing more and more forlorn at the separation from her best friend as the familiar screens popped up. The game nagged at her about not being able to connect, but she managed to get it to start a single-player match against an army of computer-controlled opponents.
It had long ago become boring as it offered zero challenge compared to thinking enemies… not to mention she couldn’t squeaker-troll the computer. At first, she played lazily, not caring how well she did. Playing at all felt like some kind of betrayal of Amber. Had she sworn off the game since they could no longer play it together? Had she been lurking in the lobby every night wondering why Riley hadn’t shown up? Guilt grew to anger, and the digital automatons paid a heavy price in pixilated blood.
Riley went on a rampage.
“That’s a lot different than the movies you used to like.” Dad leaned on her doorjamb. “Looks like you’re pretty good at it, Squirrel.”
“Do you have to call me that?” She mowed down a dozen unthinking soldiers with a heavy machine gun.
“You used to laugh at that name.” He sighed with a wistful stare into space. “Sometimes when I’d use it, you’d go grab a cookie and nibble on it.”
“I’m not a little kid anymore.” Out of ammo. Pistol time.
“No… I suppose you’re not.” Dad crossed the room behind her to sit on the bed.
Despite her mood, she leaned back until she rested against his knee. Soldier after fake soldier came at her in the same way, always a few seconds too slow to get a shot off before she killed them. Head shot, groin shot, head shot, head shot, body shot. When they started spawning with heavy armor and riot shields, she whipped out the claymore mines and chokepoint tactics.
“You’re rather good at that.”
“Mmm.” She wasn’t having fun, this was venting… and even that wasn’t helping much. She couldn’t make the AI rage-quit a match.
“Guess you played this a lot back home?”
“Can we get Internet? I’ll probably need it for school… you know, to do research.”
“I already called. I was going to surprise you when they showed up.”
She paused the game. “Really?”
He smiled. “Yep. I hope the wireless net has enough bandwidth for your game.”
“I…” She jumped up and hugged him. “I wanted it more to talk to Amber.”
He squeezed her.
“Thanks, Dad.” She sat on the bed next to him, shooting a guilty stare at the rug for sniping at him over a childhood nickname.
The resigned expression that spread over his face at her declaration of non-kid-dom remained. He glanced at the TV screen frozen in the image of an over-the-pistol view of muzzle flare and a man taking a slug in the cheek.
“You played that game a lot?”
Riley crossed her legs on the mattress, grabbed the controller, and un-paused it. “Yeah. Every night… usually with Amber. After we got good at it, we’d get in matches just to piss people off. A lot of old people play too, and they get all kinds of foamy at the mouth when they think little kids beat them. Some of the stuff they say is hilarious.”
She took out another ten opponents, and ducked into an alley for a breather between waves.
“Do you think you could kill a man to protect yourself?”
Pause.
“What?” She whirled around.
Dad, his expression still blasé, got up and walked out. She stared at the doorway for a moment. Freaky. After two breaths, she resumed playing and planted a couple of claymore mines on her way up a staircase. Sniper rifles sucked for botmatching, but this was getting boring. She wanted a challenge.
Plop.
Something heavy enough to feel landed on the mattress behind her. Riley paused the game again and twisted around to find a black handgun lying there. The sight of it filled her with the fear that the police would batter through her door any second and arrest her for laying eyes on a weapon.
“Dad… is that a―?”
“Beretta 92FS, Military Police model with a 15-round magazine.”
“I-is it loaded?”
“Always treat an unknown weapon like it’s loaded.”
She gawked at it, afraid to move, as if the Grim Reaper himself was a foot away from her ass.
“If someone was going to hurt you… could you protect yourself?”
“That’s real, isn’t it?” Riley lifted her gaze from the weapon to her father’s unfazed, calm, blank face. “Dad… you’re like, seriously freaking me the hell out.”
“S’pose we’ll have to fix that.” He slurped coffee.
iley leaned on the counter listening to the soft, rhythmic thrush-thrush of the dishwasher operating, trying to decide how she felt. Too much happening at once had left her numb. Mom… Yeah… Mom. Dad had gotten a little spooky last night, and she was still a bit ticked off that he’d left the gun on her bed. She didn’t want to touch it, afraid of hurting herself. After staring at it for heck knows how long, she risked a two-fingered pinch of the handle and set it on the floor so she could sleep.
Then, there was Kieran—and the embarrassed, eager, lonely, happy, skeptical morass that churned in her gut. The last time a boy had shown her any interest, he’d been bait in a cruel prank. The ‘dark room’ they’d gone to make out in turned out to be the middle of the football field, and the entire crowd saw her standing there, blindfolded, kissing empty air.
Getting stuffed in a locker was better. At least no one could see me.
A snarl escaped her at the memory of Robbie Zimmer’s smug grin. As if one of the football jocks would have really liked me. For an instant, she was back under the floodlights, wanting to burrow a hole into the ground and hide. She shrank in on herself, hair tickled her bare right shoulder. The oversized white shirt hung lower than the hem of her shorts, but had a huge neck opening. This time, she hadn’t made the same mistake and had a tube top on under it.
I hate Robbie Zimmer. She daydreamed about Kieran fighting him. Robbie was thicker, but Kieran probably had an inch or so height advantage.
“Come on, Riley.” Dad’s voice came through the kitchen wall from the back.
She pushed away from the counter and scuffed her flip-flops to the sliding glass door. Dad waited about twenty yards from the ‘patio’ by a folding cafeteria-style table. To her left, a large grey-white box sat on wood blocks thick enough to be railroad ties. It was almost as big as a Prius, and had four one-inch metal pipes running up to the roof. A cap at the right corner bore the label: Diesel Only. Lettering along the side read ‘New Mexico Solar.’ Naturally, the ‘o’ in solar was a smiling cartoon sun.
After pulling the door closed, she walked over to him, waving her foot every so often to get sand out from between her sole and the foam rubber. The table had a few boxes of bullets, three handguns, and that rifle Dad waved at the idiot plus two others and a pump shotgun. Riley froze in place, as if one wrong breath would cause a horrible accident.
“Holy crap, Dad. Where’d you get all these guns?” Riley blinked. “You planning on taking over a small South American country?”
He shrugged. “Picked them up over the years. Most came from this guy who runs a shop in T or C. Army Navy surplus place. I get a lot of stuff from him. ‘Course you also have the occasional gun show.”
“Those are assault rifles…” She shivered. “Aren’t they illegal?”
Dad smiled. “Oh, you poor brainwashed child. Second amendment. That federal assault weapons ban died in 2004, and New Mexico didn’t enact any replacement… not that I’d give two craps if they did. The government’s afraid of a population that can defend themselves.”
<
br /> Riley tucked her hands under her armpits and took a step back. “Mom would drop dead if she saw these. I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Go put on some real shoes,” said Dad, without turning. Evidently, he’d heard them snap on her approach.
“Why? It’s hot. What does it matter what kind of shoes I wear to… uh, shoot. Not like sneakers would stop a bullet.”
The click, click, click she’d been hearing turned out to be him putting rounds into a pistol magazine. “No, and I’m hoping you’re not so uncoordinated that you shoot yourself in the foot. I’m thinking about hot brass.”
“Hot brass?” She blinked.
Dad held up a bullet. “I’m not sure what you see in those games, hon, but only the tip goes flying. The ass end is a casing, and after you shoot one, it’s hot enough to burn. If that falls on your foot, it’ll hurt and likely leave a mark.” He glanced down at her feet. “Go put your sneakers on.”
“Okay, okay… fine.” She took three steps.
“And a top with a more closed neck. Brass loves to get under your shirt. At least you don’t have any cleavage for it to get stuck in yet.”
“Dad!” Crimson. What the hell is wrong with him?
Riley grumbled. Bad enough she had to touch guns, did she have to be uncomfortable while doing it? She ran inside, changed to a snug white tee with dark blue quarter sleeves and a Nike swoosh on it, and traded the flops for her black Keds, skipping socks. She wondered on the way back out if it was some kind of conflict of interest to wear competing products.
When she got back outside, Dad was a distance from the table setting up a couple targets. Two paper cutouts with a silhouette of a man on them as well as about forty empty SpaghettiOs cans.
Okay, those I might be able to shoot.
She didn’t dare touch anything on the table.
Dad walked back over and picked up the gun he’d left in her room. “Okay. This is a Beretta 92. It’s got the least amount of kick of everything I own. It’s stable, reliable, and if you load hollow points, has a decent enough punch.” He pointed at another gun with simpler lines. “I prefer the .45 myself, but I don’t want to rush you in over your head.”
The Summer the World Ended Page 15
