How To Steal a Car (12 page)

Speaking of closure, I finished
Moby-Dick
that night. The last five chapters were pretty good, or at least a relief, because finally the whale showed up and did his thing and almost everybody got killed.

The next morning, I wrote a review and posted it on the school library website. There were a bunch of other reviews up, including a review of
Speak
that Jen had written. (I happened to know she had already read it last year, but, as Will would say,
whatever.)
Alton Wright had posted a long review of
Of Mice and Men
that I would bet anything was written by his girlfriend, Tracie. Nobody else had read
Moby-Dick
or any other book as old and long and complicated, so I figured I’d get extra points or something for that, even though my review was kind of critical of whaling in general. It was funny that about ten seconds after I posted my review, Deke called. I saw it was him from the caller ID, so I let it go to voicemail. Then I waited a few minutes before listening to the message.

“Hey, crazy girl,” he said. “You in jail, jailbait? I guess not or you wouldn’t be getting this. Listen, I got some cheese for ya. Pizza with extra cheese. Yum. You know where to find me. Lunch break’s at two. See ya.”

My mom had Book Club again, so I offered to drive her, and of course, being ever-eager for mother-daughter bonding opportunities, she said that would be nice. “We’re meeting at
Francine’s this month,” she said. “She always puts out a nice spread. I bet she’ll have those little fruit cups.”

I ran upstairs to change. I put on a clean pair of pants and a long-sleeved cotton blouse that I’d picked up on sale at The Gap.

“You look nice,” my mom said, giving her head a critical tilt.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She laughed. “My black-and-gray daughter. I guess I should be thankful you’re not running around in nothing but a tube top and a thong.”

It was only a ten-minute drive to Francine Abrams’s house, but on the way there, Mom managed to tell me that Dad had called and he was coming home and everything was okay in Colorado. From which I inferred that they’d had some other sort of conversation entirely, and they weren’t going to get divorced after all.

She also told me she was quitting smoking for real on her fortieth birthday which was in September, and that I should never start smoking, and that she was planning to make individual chicken potpies for dinner.

“I already made the crust and the filling,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I just have to put them together and throw them in the oven.”

“Wow,” I said.

“It’s easy,” she said.

“I mean, wow, you’re actually smoking in front of me.”

She cracked her window and expelled a lungful of smoke. “You’re old enough to see that your parents are not perfect.”

I laughed. I was going for a friendly chuckle, but it came out sarcastic.

She looked at me sharply. “Wait till you have a daughter of your own, then you can judge me.”

“I’m not having children.” I meant it.

My mother laughed a laugh just as dry and sarcastic as my laugh had been.

“Sweetie,” she said, “you have no idea.”

“Neither do you.”

She shook her head and blew more smoke out the window.

When we got to Francine Abrams’s house, I told my mother I wanted to sit in the car and listen to music, and that’s what I did for a while. I saw her look out the window at me twice. I waited until a full five minutes went by without her peering out at me, then I started the car and drove to the mall.

Deke Moffet was sitting in the food court, sucking on a giant soda, tapping his right foot, and glancing around with little jerks of his head. He looked straight at me twice before he recognized me. He started to stand, but froze halfway up
and sat back down. I walked over and stood across the table from him. He stared at me, hollow-eyed, jaw pulsing, and sucked down a few more ounces of soda. He shrugged, looked away, scratched himself behind his ear, looked back at me and said, “Every time I look at you, I freak out. Little Miss Perfect Kelleigh Monahan, car thief.”

“I’m a retired car thief.”

He muttered something, but because he had the straw back in his mouth I couldn’t make it out.

“I stole a couple cars,” I said. “But it’s not who I am. There’s a difference.”

“Not if you get caught, which you will, if you keep doing shit like you did yesterday.”

“It was the day before yesterday.”

He looked away. “Whatever.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Here.”

I took the money and put it in my purse without counting it.

He said, “Neal knocked off a couple hundred for the wiper blade and the dents on the hood. He’s a prick.”

“Whatever.”

Deke looked over his shoulder toward Wing’s Wild Wok. “I hate this job,” he said.

“So quit.”

“I can’t. Parole violation.”

I turned away.

“Wait a second!”

I turned back.

“Neal needs an Escalade.”

“Call Marshall.”

“Marshall’s messed up. Dude hasn’t slept in like two weeks.” I wondered how long it had been since Deke had slept. “Listen, I can get a key,” he said. “I can get a key tomorrow, I think. The vehicle’s a demo just sitting waiting at Prestige over on 394 and I know one of the salesmen there. Same deal. We grab it and drop it at Byerly’s. Piece a cake.” His knee was going up and down so fast his whole body was shaking.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait!”

I kept on walking.

I think the main reason I was attracted to Deke was because my expectations were so low to begin with that I figured he couldn’t possibly disappoint me. On a professional-car-thief level, that is. But it didn’t work out that way.

Sooner or later everybody turns out to be a disappointment.

Two weeks later, on my sixteenth birthday, Dad and I went to the DMV in his Lexus so I could take my road test. On the way there he told me that Elwin Carl Dandridge had been
released for lack of evidence. The DNA collected from two of the women he had allegedly raped turned out to be contaminated, and there was some question about the chain of custody—the way my dad explained it, it looked as if the investigators had pulled some “funny business.”

“These guys try so hard sometimes to make an airtight case, they just can’t resist cheating a little,” he said.

“You mean they knew the guy was a rapist, so they made up evidence to put him away? Is that bad?”

“Actually, they had some pretty solid evidence in two of the cases, and they figured if two cases were good, three would be better. So they duplicated it. If Dandridge had been forced to rely on a public defender, he’d still be in jail.”

I loaded my mouth with sarcasm and said, “Wow. Good
job,
Dad.”

He laughed.

He
laughed.

I wanted desperately to shake him, but I knew if I went after him for his ethics he’d just want to argue me out of it, and being a professional arguer he was really good at that. So I said, “You know, if you and Mom want to get divorced, it’s okay with me.”

That wiped the smile off his face.

“Why would you think we want to get divorced?”

“Because you’re having an affair and Mom hates you.”

He looked over at me and I saw his face take on that blank, serious, sincere look that he used in court.

“That
is simply not true,” he said.

“Which part?”

He pulled into the parking lot and focused all his attention on finding the perfect parking space. Once we were parked he said, “Kelleigh, I don’t know what you think you’ve seen or heard, but you are misinterpreting it.”

“Like that DNA evidence?”

“That’s right.”

He said that with a straight face.

I aced the road test.

I took Will and Jen out for a ride in my mom’s Camry—my first legal road trip. We went to Wagner’s Drive-In for burgers and malts. Will didn’t have any money, of course, and all Jen had was her mom’s credit card, so I paid out of my car theft money.

Looking at the wad of cash I pulled out, Jen said, “Birthday money?”

“I stole a car and sold it,” I said.

They were both sort of quiet.

“Just kidding,” I said. Then, to change the subject, I asked Will how his romance with Phoebe Line was going, which took Jen by surprise.

“Phoebe Line?” she asked.

Will shrugged. “I just said I thought she was nice.”

“She
is
nice,” said Jen after a moment.

I didn’t say anything. I felt like I was a thousand miles away, alone, driving through mountains and desert, and Will and Jen were nothing but hologram projections out of my past.

Three days before school started, I was at Ridgedale all by myself, looking for a new sweater in black or gray, but mostly thinking about my dad and my mom and Jen and Will and Deke and Jim Vail and Elwin Carl Dandridge, and they were all tumbling through my head like clothes in a dryer. Then I saw the guy whose Nissan Jen and I had taken a couple of months earlier. He was walking through Macy’s with his briefcase. I remembered then that I still had his keys in the bottom of my purse. I wondered if he’d had his car re-keyed. The more I thought about it, the more curious I got, so I went out to the parking lot and walked up and down the rows of cars until I found it.

The key fit.

I got in the car and closed the door. It wasn’t as quiet inside as a Mercedes, but still, it was comforting to be sealed up in there. I could hear the thrumming in my head again, the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I started the car and
pulled out of the parking space. The car had a full tank of gas, which was good even though I had no place I had to be, but that was okay, because at least I felt like I was going somewhere.

I think that a lot of car thieves just like to steal cars and drive. Also, they think they will never get caught even though most of them eventually do and they know it but they just don’t care.

Copyright © 2009 by Pete Hautman
Jacket design by Christopher Stengel

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hautman, Pete, 1952-
How to steal a car / Pete Hautman.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Summary: Fifteen-year-old, suburban high school student Kelleigh, who has her learner’s permit, recounts how she began stealing cars one summer, for reasons that seem unclear even to her.

ISBN-13: 978-0-545-11318-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-545-11318-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

[1. Automobile theft—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.H2887How 2009

[Fic]—dc22

2008054146

First edition, September 2009

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

E-ISBN: 978-0-545-23171-8