I went through the motions: Showering from the whiskey barrel. Picking an outfit from the few items of clothing hung on nails on the old stall walls. Checking my reflection in the warped mirror the boys got me from somewhere.
I couldn’t show up at Cade’s and risk running into his dad. Instead I headed down the dusty shortcut over to Mattey and Jojo’s . . . to see them one last time.
And then? Canada. Use my brand-new passport to get to Montreal, maybe, where I could begin to forget them . . . Cade and Tanner, Texas.
Snow outside could remind me to be ice inside.
CADE
Five minutes. Damn it. That’s all I needed. Five more minutes and I would have been out of there and back to the barn and Jane with no one seeing, none the wiser. Instead what happened? She and Jojo walked in while I was still sitting at the dining table with Mattey stitching up my head and blotting the blood with a paper towel.
“Oh my God, Cade, what happened?” Jojo exclaimed.
I stared straight ahead. Does it get any more mortifying than this? I was pathetic. I let out a long exhale through a tiny opening in my lips to try and calm down. It came out in a weird hiss. Seriously, who gets beat up by their old man over and over again and takes it?
“I’ve got this,” Mattey said without breaking his concentration.
“What about the game tonight?” Jojo insisted.
What about it? I would be on that field no matter what. Everyone would cheer and depend on me. And I’d put my arms in the air like I was in control, a hero, like I was the king of everything. Like I was proud of who I was. What a joke. I was a joke.
“He’s shouldn’t play,” Mattey answered Jojo. “He’s lucky not to be hurt worse.”
“Lucky?” Jojo stewed. “That’s not how I’d describe it. Cade, what can I do? You want food or soda or something?”
“Something to drink maybe would be good. And I’m definitely playing. Don’t listen to Mattey.”
“You could have a concussion. You get hit again on the field, you’re in big trouble,” Mattey warned.
“You said mild concussion.”
“You want to make it major, go play tonight.” Mattey sounded like his dad.
“It’s not an option. I have to play. College scouts . . .”
“Scouts won’t want a brain-dead vegetable.”
“Oh, come on. I got a whack to the head.”
Jojo scowled. “Cade, I hate him. I hate your dad. I want to tell somebody. It’s getting worse.”
Jane interjected. “What do you think will happen if police or the state get involved? He’d get put into foster care.”
“I don’t wanna go to the police on my own dad,” I shut the discussion down. And it was true. I didn’t.
“What happened this time, Soldado?”
Oh no. Dr. Morales was home. Dr. Morales always said our names the Spanish way. But there was no name equivalent for Cade, so instead he called me Soldado. Old soldier.
“Hood of the truck came down on me while I was working on the engine.”
“For all your moves on the field, you’re one clumsy kid off it.” Dr. Morales stepped in to take over the stitches from Mattey. I quickly turned my arm over so he couldn’t see the finger marks on the inside of my wrist.
Jojo let a burst of air out her nose like an agitated horse and spun around dramatically to go into the kitchen. Jane sat down at the table with me, her eyes going from my messed-up face, to the cut, to Dr. Morales’s hands at work.
“Let’s numb you up. You knocked yourself good this time,” he said.
It felt weird with half my head numbed. It went up the side of my face, even into my nose. No feeling—in my skin, in my mind. My brain had a dull, flat buzz. Turning off emotion. I tried to grin, like everything was normal.
“Am I even smiling?” I turned to Jane.
“Sort of.”
“Do I look like shit?”
“Sort of,” Mattey answered for her.
That made me laugh a little, at least.
“Jauna, you make sure Soldado here rests, okay?”
Jane nodded as Jojo came blowing around the corner with root beer. I reached for it without thinking, and Dr. Morales grabbed my wrist and turned it. He looked from the bruises to the cut on my head.
“Cade.” He used my real name. His eyes were serious. “You know you can always be honest with me, right?”
“Sure.”
“Everything okay at the farm? Your father . . . isn’t drinking too much, is he?”
“He’s fine.”
“Jane?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Our doors are always open.”
Dr. Morales cleaned off my skin around the stitches with a sting of alcohol and started reciting a verse.
“Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.”
Jane’s eyes connected with mine before flickering back to Dr. Morales.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means ground that’s been tilled and farmed before but that now lies waste,” Dr. Morales explained. “It need to be broken up and mellowed before it is ready to receive grain.”
“It means you have to be open to goodness,” Mattey offered.
Break up your fallow ground.
It’s not that simple, I wanted to tell him.
My farm will never be anything but dry and dead. Jane will always want to run. I will always be sitting here, keeping other people’s ugly secrets, because deep down, no matter what, I love them. My father. Jane . . .
I lowered my gaze from hers, face flashing hot.
I mumbled thank you to Dr. Morales and bolted outside. Jane caught up to me. I gave her a little nod but didn’t say anything. We headed back down the path toward the barn, sipping the cold bottles in silence for a while, until Jane asked me a question.
“You really would never turn in your dad?”
I sighed.
“It’s child abuse,” she persisted.
“I’m not a child,” I mumbled
“You’re his child. He’s abusing you.”
“Look, I’m really not in the mood for some sort of heart-to-heart here. We’ve talked about this. We all know he’s not winning father of the year. But it’s the booze. It’s not who he really is.”
“When does a person become what they do though? When do their actions take over what you think you know about them? How can you trust that someone doesn’t mean to hurt you?”
“Maybe you can answer those questions better than me,” I shot back. She looked down at the ground. I tried to soften it. “Sorry. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So, this is why you never came last night?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah. Got knocked out. It was a bad one. Did you really think I wouldn’t show? Come on, now.”
“I don’t know. You were pretty mad about the passport.”
Jane’s hair was messy. The back was sticking up a little bit. Her big blue eyes looked tired. She must have been up all night deciding what to do.
“Are you really leaving today?” I asked.
“It’s too dangerous to stay.” Jane bit her bottom lip lightly as she thought about her answer. “You need to go back to your lives, like nothing ever happened.”
It’s not nothing, I wanted to say. It’s everything. You’re the only thing that is going to get me through senior year. Let’s keep hiding you. Don’t leave Tanner until I can leave Tanner. Stay, stay, stay.
Instead I said, “You’re part of the group now. Me, Jojo, Mattey, Gunner, Savannah.”
“Yeah . . . Savannah,” Jane said.
“Look, about her party—” I started.
“What about it?”
I stopped walking and leaned up a
gainst a fence post. “Come on, Jane.”
“What?” She leaned next to me and crossed her arms.
“Don’t act like it wasn’t awkward.”
Jane turned to face the other way, staring out at the endless flat fields. She climbed up onto the bottom rung of the fence. We stood shoulder to shoulder, but looking in opposite directions. Old barbed wire sat rolled in the grass—metal tumbleweeds.
“You should be with someone like Savannah. She’s like sunshine,” Jane said softly. “I want to feel like sunshine.”
I found myself reaching out and pulling her in front of me, so our legs and hips were up against each other, her feet staggered with mine. She arched her back away from me and placed her hands against my chest, keeping distance between us.
“I’m scared that even if I leave, someone will come looking for me here and find you. I’m so terrified of what they could do.”
“Well then, that defeats the purpose of running off, doesn’t it?” I wrapped my hands around her wrists and pulled them up against my shoulders, so her elbows fell against my chest and she was that much closer.
A flash of lightning zipped across the sky behind her. Jane jerked around to see what was going on and finally gave into the lean, letting her body fit against mine. I rested my chin on top of her head. The pounding in my skull where I got slammed into the truck got that much quieter. My father’s sweaty face faded. When I wrapped my arms around Jane, it felt like how coming home is supposed to. And as we watched the dry lightning come down in skeleton fingers, then break into smaller and smaller veins dying into the horizon, I knew I would do anything to protect that home.
“Stay until after the game,” I said. “It’s important. I promise.”
THE WOLF CUB
“Party’s over.”
I didn’t shout it. I simply turned off the music. Waited. So then when I banged my fist on the pool table, it made everybody jump. “Take off your shoes . . . and pants. Watches, all of it.”
“Lobenzo, man, what are you trying to prove?” Alamo asked. My compadres looked at me, confused.
“Shut up and go outside.”
Alamo, Asesino, and Pozolero stood, in their underwear, on my balcony.
“Now toss it all over the edge.”
Their clothes and shoes, sunglasses and jewelry landed in the gutter below.
“Who puts the clothes on your back?” I asked. “Buys your cars? Diamonds?”
“You do,” they mumbled.
“You have nothing without me. So when I say I need something, I don’t expect you to be partying. We’re not little kids playing games anymore.”
“Can you just tell us what we did wrong?” Pozolero pleaded.
“Ivan is dead.”
The hiss of their collective inhale told me they were as surprised as me.
“I’m told he broke into somebody’s house and the man who lived there killed him,” I said. “In Tanner.”
Alamo rubbed his temples. “Ivan was our best tracker.”
“Exactly. So if Tanner, Texas, is where Ivan died, the girl he was tracking for us is somewhere close,” I said. “Clearly loyalties still lie with Grande there if we are only hearing of this now. We must make the birds sing. It’s time to send another message.”
“Plata o plomo?” asked Asesino.
Silver or lead. Those who cannot be bought with money get eliminated with bullets.
“Whatever it takes.”
JANE
The tiny apartment outside Manchester, New Hampshire, with my mom, snow collecting on the windowsill, flakes falling so softly it was like the world had slowed down.
My aunt’s house in the Third Ward in Houston, police sirens warping the early morning hours.
Tanner High . . . It was just my latest foster home. Another temporary resting place on my way to . . . what?
Somewhere in Mexico, Lobenzo was whispering to his wolves to find me.
But instead of racing north, I was standing in a silver-and-blue dress on a football field. Because Cade asked me to.
My world is full of worlds, ceilinged with stars that don’t align, constellations jagged as this afternoon’s lightning. It made the sky look cracked enough to fall down around us, but then rain never came. How long can a person live like a terrible storm is about to hit? That isn’t really even living. It’s waiting.
I was tired of waiting. But I would, because Cade said he had something to tell me before I took off. After the game, he said, we needed to talk. What was one more night, he asked. It was important, what he had to say. Please wait. And I couldn’t say no.
“Are you so excited?” Jojo bounced up and down next to me. “First big performance!”
Gunner’s mom paced nearby.
“Hi, kids,” she said to us as she passed. “Jane, nice to see you here.”
Jojo dug her elbow into my side and whispered, “Yeah, Jane, nice to see you.”
“What’s that for?” I elbowed her back.
“Gunner so has a thing for you if the sheriff is going out of her way to say hello.”
“Oh, please.”
“Oh, please yourself. I heard y’all made out at Savannah’s party. You have a boyyyfriend.”
“Gunner’s not my boyfriend.”
“But he wants to be.”
“Whatever. It was just a kiss,” I tried to brush her off.
“I’ve never seen Gunner like anyone like he likes you. It’s for real, Jane!”
That made me sadder instead of flattered. Gunner liked the version of me that Cade and Mattey and I had made up. Jojo too. My only friends had no clue who I even was. It was anything but real.
“Ready?” Jojo squeezed my fingers.
The band marched onto the field, and we fell into our routine. Savannah led the moves, front and center. We plastered smiles on our faces. It wasn’t her fault she was who she was. Or rather, it wasn’t her fault I was me. That was more like it. We spun around and then dropped into splits, hopped up, swished hips. We were born into our fates. Mansions and barns. Fathers who protect us, fathers who hit us, fathers who never even meet us. The formation shifted, and I fell in line next to her.
As Savannah and I danced, arms and legs and bodies moving the same, I noticed her eyes looked as determined as mine to see something beyond what was right in front of us. Maybe I was wrong and we weren’t that different. I had nothing. She had everything. But we both danced like it was the only way to pump color back into the world.
The band cleared the field, and the football team came running through the paper mouth of a roaring cloth lion to line up in the foggy green light. We fell back to the sidelines as the crowd cheered and the game launched into action.
“Go, go, go!” Jojo hollered.
Cade had rolled out for a pass, but at the last second he decided to run it. He dodged guys left and right and kept running and running. His legs moved in a blur. His body angled as he darted by everyone and flew across that field for a touchdown. Everyone started cheering. I did too. The smile that crept across my face stuck there and wouldn’t go away. Cade was good. He was so good. Even someone like me, who didn’t know the first thing about football, could see that.
“That’s my boy!” A gravelly voice rang out from behind us. “Did all y’all see that? That’s my boy!”
“Oh jeez, it’s your uncle,” Jojo hissed in my ear.
“Who?” It popped out before I realized what she meant. “You mean Cade’s dad. Really? Here?”
“I know, right? He hasn’t been to a game in forever. Must have felt bad for beating on his own son,” Jojo mumbled, shooting a pointed glare over her shoulder.
Cade’s dad teetered on the bench above us, where Mattey was sitting. “Oh hey, Mattey, how you doin’, boy?”
“Fine, Mr. Evans.” Mattey looked nervously over at me.
; “That was a hell of a run, wasn’t it?” he slurred. I tried to turn away so that he wouldn’t notice me. He was drunk again. Or still drunk. Either way, it wasn’t pretty.
“Hey, Danny.” Gunner’s mom had homed in on him. “How you feelin’, my friend?”
“Feelin’ fine, Connie. I mean Sheriff. And how are you?”
“Oh, I’m just dandy. Why don’t you go ahead and sit down with your niece? Take a break . . .”
“Niece? I ain’t got a niece.”
“Wow, he must be really drunk,” Mateo quickly interjected as Jojo and the sheriff looked on in confusion.
“Boy, who you callin’ drunk?” Cade’s dad lurched his way closer, looming over Mattey.
“All right then, Danny,” Sheriff Healey stepped in. “Let’s take a walk.”
Mr. Evans swayed back and forth. She put an arm lightly on his back and guided him off the bleachers. He and the sheriff headed out to the parking lot, toward her cruiser.
“That’s so weird,” Jojo said with a frown. “He acted like he’d never seen you before in his life.”
Just then, a giant boom ripped through the stadium.
All consuming.
The sound had a sharpness to it that put ice in my veins, the kind of noise that leaves a sick vibration in your heart and throat.
The players froze on the field. Everyone went completely still.
Then we heard screaming from the parking lot. Smoke spiraled up.
People around us were starting to panic, racing to get off the bleachers. The metal clanged with hurried footsteps, and the whole structure rattled like it was about to fall down.
My legs felt fused in place, but Jojo grabbed my arm and Mattey’s and forced us through the crowd to the field.
“What the hell happened?” she yelled.
A paramedic running by answered. “Car bomb.”
CADE
I figured that if a leg got blown off, it was gone, like a clean sweep. Sure, it would be bloody. But I didn’t think about the fact that the skin and muscle would be shredded and a long piece of the bone would still be left sticking out, jagged where the foot flew off.
Hide with Me Page 16
