Everything Breaks

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

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Copyright © 2013 by Vicki Grove.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grove, Vicki. Everything breaks / Vicki Grove. pages cm

Summary: After his three best friends die in a car crash when he should have been driving, seventeen-year-old Tucker meets Charon, the Ferryman of Hades, and must decide whether to succumb to his grief or go on living.

[1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Best friends—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Charon (Greek mythology)—Fiction. 5. Quapaw Indians—Fiction. 6. Indians of North America—Oklahoma—Fiction. 7. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.G9275Eve 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2013014190

Published simultaneously in Canada.

ISBN 978-0-698-13540-6

 The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

In loving memory of my dad,
Jim Baum (1920–2010).
He could fix anything, and he never let us leave home without good tread on our tires and all the right tools in the trunk.

I

IT WASN'T EVEN
supposed to happen. The bonfire, that is. It was supposed to be rained out. I mean it
could
have been. There was a tropical storm off the coast of Texas that the TV weathercasters kept saying was supposed to come north and hit Oklahoma.

But late Saturday afternoon, the storm veered east instead. Bud and I were watching a game on TV when the all-clear bulletin crawled across the bottom of the screen. I was waiting for Trey to pick me up for the bonfire or wherever else we'd decide to go if it was called off, and Bud was just sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner, like always.

My stepmother, Janet, was at her waitressing job, and I was hanging with Bud because he'd been kind of low lately and Janet had asked me to give him some company while she was gone. Otherwise I would probably have been texting about if anyone knew if the bonfire was still happening. Then after that maybe I'd have been out in the hoop house, cutting back the ankle-breaking recent explosion of pumpkin vines.

Bud was Janet's father. He came with the package when my dad married Janet back when I was eight. When my dad left us three years later, the package shrank to just Bud, Janet, and me. I quit thinking about the man some time ago. My dad, I mean. I don't remember too much about my mother either. She died when I was little, but Janet has a photo of her hanging on the living room wall, where you can see it.

In that picture, she's definitely Quapaw. My father, wherever he might be, is half Quapaw as well. To describe myself, I'd say I'm pretty much Quapaw, straight black hair, black eyes. I run track, so I've got a runner's build. Not a lot of meat on my bones. I like to feel in control like you do on a five-mile run when everything's in rhythm and your thoughts aren't chewing on themselves like something trapped and desperate.

Several girls I've dated have complained that they never know what I'm thinking. Trey threw back his head and howled when I mentioned that to him. “Dude! Don't you even know that about yourself?” Then he got serious and said quietly, “Tucker, you keep yourself tight, but so would I if what happened to you had happened to me.”

The thing is, Trey always knew what I was thinking
without
my telling him. When my mother died and Trey and I were six, he helped me tie her tribal bracelet into my hair, where eleven years later that colored band of tiny shell beads remains tangled into the strand in back I keep longer for that purpose. Over the years he had to retie it for me a few times, and once he restrung the beads and feather when the leather had frayed.

Then when we were eleven and my dad left, Trey waited a few months until it was for sure he wasn't coming back, then organized a ceremony to separate me from him. He called it an exorcism, after this movie we'd both seen, and he said stuff about him he'd mostly learned in Sunday school and from Star Wars videos. Stuff like “we banish thee to hyperspace where Moses shall smite thee for thy transgressions against this Jedi, thy son Tucker.” Since I couldn't bring myself to think anything about my dad, it was a great comfort to have Trey doing it for me. Trey had made us lightsabers for that ceremony that he carved from maple branches like he later did his favorite drumsticks, and we crossed them, then battled with them until they were shredded back to mere sticks and we had a few satisfying scratches. My stomach had been aching in a weird way until that ceremony. It settled some secret feelings I'd been carrying and made me feel calmer.

• • •

“This'll be the last bonfire of our junior year,” I mentioned to Bud when we saw that all-clear weather bulletin on TV. “Would've been too bad if it'd got rained out. Everybody's psyched.”

Bud whistled a bit of something through his teeth, then said, “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.” He curved his hairy hands and tapped his long nails on the chair arms a few times, which was another thing that worried Janet, not because it meant Bud was depressed but because it was shredding the upholstery. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” he repeated. “Makes no difference once the fiddler stops the music and turns out the lights.”

It wasn't easy piecing Bud's old guy–isms together. Once the fiddler . . . what?

Trey honked for me. I jumped up and maneuvered around sleeping Ringo, then grabbed my jacket from the closet. “Later, Bud. I'm off to the bonfire.”

Bud raised a hand in farewell, and I was out the front door and down the porch stairs in three or four strides. But once I'd loped across the street and had the passenger-side door of the Mustang open, Trey called across, “Hey, come around and drive, will you?”

I swallowed my shock and bent to get a better look at his face, trying to see if he was just messing with me. He had his wallet spread against the steering wheel and was excavating deep for something. His expression was at first hidden behind the curtain of his long red hair, then I guess he saw my shadow falling over him. “Hey, man,” he turned to greet me, nodding in recognition as though I had just that second walked up.

Then he went back to his intense scavenge through his grungy wallet.

Trey, his crazy tangle of hair in a constant state of flux and his nearly transparent skin stretched across the wide bones of his face, his long drummer's fingers always moving, always fluid. Trey, so innocently and genuinely shocked when something went missing, not ever once realizing that it happened to him all the time, at least daily, almost hourly.

Actually, Trey was sort of a flake, though it was the last thing people would have thought. He was one of the most take-charge guys in school, in complete control when a bully needed to be put down or a drum needed to be played or, well, when the Mustang had showed up in pieces at the junkyard. But he routinely left behind his sunglasses, his money, his jacket, his little sister who waited for him patiently wherever he was supposed to pick her up. He never remembered to study, never memorized his locker combination, lost five or six phones before he finally gave up on his ability to have a phone and just started borrowing my phone or Zero's when he needed one. He often had no concept of what day or month it was, or, on Saturdays, whether it was noon or midnight. He lived in the present, minute by minute, and I admired that. But I occasionally worried that his innocent carelessness might get him into real trouble someday.

“You're not serious about the driving, right?” I quietly asked him.

He'd restored that vintage red convertible himself and nobody touched it, ever.

“Yeah, man, take the wheel so I can do this thing,” he grumbled in a friendly way, propelling himself and his wallet over the gearshift panel and into the passenger seat without looking up. “It's
gotta
be in here someplace.” His tone, as usual in this sort of situation, was of total disbelief, as if his horribly bulging wallet was perfectly organized and functional.

I ran around and slid into the driver's seat. Late-afternoon shadows were painting the Mustang's white leather seats the color Janet calls lavender blue. It's the sort of mellow shade that lulls you into thinking nothing bad can happen in life, which now seems like a wicked joke, considering what
did
happen only a few hours later.

I remember that I felt truly fine myself, driving that truly fine machine. I was pure muscle and bone, nothing more. I felt simple and happy as an animal, maybe a wolf or coyote, moving swiftly across the warm earth under the cool October sky.

As we cruised through the neighborhood,
Trey kept throwing bits of wallet junk out the window and into the gulley that dribbles through our subdivision. A few old ticket stubs, some pictures of girls, a damp-looking book of matches.

Finally, he maneuvered out an accordioned twenty and kissed it, then waggled it in my face and yelled, “Tucker, my man, I found it! It's party time!”

I gave him a grin as I eased the car toward the curb, figuring he'd want the wheel back. But he motioned for me to keep going, extravagant in his generosity now that he'd found that twenty. If I saw this right, it had been stuck to the back of an Ozzie Smith baseball card by a leftover bit of some smashed candy bar he'd been saving in his wallet. I think it was a Snickers, his favorite. Not that it matters. Nothing like that matters now.

He switched on his music. It was System of a Down, and he began finger-drumming the complicated beat. Trey played with various bands in the summer and sometimes on weekends. He was the real thing and actually got paid for drumming. The rest of us felt lucky to flip burgers in fast-food places or, in my case, to do landscaping in the summer for Greenfield's, selling Christmas trees there during the holidays, sorting seeds and planting seedlings most weekends in the spring.

“Get Zero first, then Steve!” Trey called above the thump of his fine retro speaker system. “Then take us to that SpeedMart out on West Fork. I brought my brother's ID, but I probably won't need it since my cousin Leo will be working tonight. Everybody else asked off for the bonfire.”

I picked up speed on the stretch of asphalt leading to Zero's trailer park at the edge of town. The wind sheered along my left elbow where it finned outside the open window. Night was coming on and everything felt so right, so good and so free. I even thought about howling, like Trey was doing.

But Trey was always the howler of the two of us, so I just grinned instead.

• • •

The Vagabond Park is a dusty field of pale trailers set up on concrete blocks in small patches of brown grass, but there's an exciting neon sign at the entrance—a huge, flashing pink and green palm tree. Zero said he thought that sign had dazzled his mother, that and the name of the place. He expected her to move them once she noticed the blandness of her surroundings, but when she and Zero had been in Clevesdale for a few months, she instead behaved like the true artist she is and transformed their trailer to match the sign.

We helped, Trey and I. It was the summer between eighth and ninth grade and Steve hadn't moved here yet. Zero's mother got a bunch of blue paint, I remember it was called Electric Turquoise, and once we had the trailer covered in three coats of that, she detailed it out with orange paint in a fringe around the windows and door, then welded big metal starfish and sea horses here and there. She painted a mermaid on the propane tank at the edge of the yard. Some people at the Vagabond put lattice around their ugly gas tanks in a weak attempt to hide them, but Zero's mother drew attention to hers, turning it into a striking piece of sculpture. That's the way she does things. You get it or you don't.

We nailed together a big wooden porch to cover the front portion of brown grass. Zero painted it purple. On that front porch is always a steel drum that Zero's mother actually knows how to play and, after some serious nagging by him, taught Trey to play as well. Also six or seven of Zero's skateboards, and several iron vats his mother uses to cook her dye for the batik dresses and wall hangings she sells online.

There are two mimosa trees in Zero's backyard and one in the front, all planted by his mother three years ago. The one in front grows through a jagged hole we hacked in the porch floor. His mother has tiny colored lights woven through all their branches because she says that reminds her of her childhood home in Haiti.

It was dusky enough that the lights were twinkling in the front porch mimosa by the time we got to Zero's that afternoon to pick him up for the bonfire. He was sitting cross-legged on the porch floor, streamlining one of his skateboards with his serious-looking pocketknife. He carefully wiped that tool and pocketed it, then just as carefully replaced that board. Only then did he turn to us and punch the darkening sky with both fists.

“Dudes! The bonfire is
on
!” he shouted, running to the Stang and diving into the backseat through the window. Zero never took the time to enter anything by a door.

Zero and his dreadlocks, his ever-present cutoffs exposing white scars that ran like hieroglyphs up and down his muscular brown legs, telling the proud stories of his many excruciating skateboard wipeouts. Something came ahead of him, always. Or maybe I mean something floated around him. He stirred the air. All that smartness, all those scars, those moving dreads. Zero popped out at you and made you jump back a step.

“Hey, Tucker's driving!” Zero's head appeared in a sort of energy burst between our front seats. “Whassup with that, huh?” He looked from me to Trey then back to me.

“Yeah,” I agreed as I shifted down, cornered under the flashing palm tree and bumped out onto the road to Steve's. “I dunno why Trey's letting me,” I added.

I indeed was driving, and I couldn't stop grinning about it.

“This being our last bonfire of the year,” Trey explained in a drifty way, focused more on the music coming from the speakers than on his answer. “This being our last one of those, young Tucker, whose legendary innocence is, well, you know, pretty much legendary, will be our chauffeur tonight, which we've never had before because there's always more. More bonfires. More lake parties and what have you. Now, there won't be more, not junior year, and everybody knows junior year is best. Junior year. Party year.”

I did a quick translation. They'd be drinking more than usual tonight.

Zero pushed back to sprawl in his seat. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that his eyes were sparking as he stared out the window. His arms were stretched wide along the top of the seat and he was jittering his fingers. His quick-fire mind was already on to the next thing. Me being the driver had been left behind in the dust.

“I'm flying down Hawk's Slope soon!” he called up to us above the wind that was now rushing through our open windows. Steve's ranch was several miles out and I was giving it the gas. “I wanta get to the top tonight so I can eyeball any major crevasses and figure my angle of descent, then I'll graph it out and probably fly it next week, before we get our first freeze and the gravel makes a big shift.”