How To Steal a Car (2 page)

“Going for a ride,” I said.

“Are you
crazy?”

“Maybe. Get in.”

I didn’t think she was going to do it, but then she opened the passenger door and hopped inside. Her cheeks were flushed. I knew her heart had to be banging like crazy too.

“Go!” she said. “Go! Go!”

We went.

I did not have this screwed-up home life that you would think would drive me to crime. My parents were nearly perfect. I don’t mean
perfect
perfect, but compared to a lot of parents, like the ones who beat their kids and lock them in closets and smoke crack and stuff, my parents were practically ideal. For one thing, they were still married after twenty years, and they were completely nonviolent, and neither of them had ever been arrested as far as I know. My dad was a lawyer who ran three miles every morning except Sunday, when he worked as a deacon at our church. He’d been doing that ever since I could remember. My mom worked part-time selling real estate and belonged to like a dozen different do-good organizations—PTA, MADD, ASPCA, AAA—I don’t know what all else. And no, she was not a drunk. Only at Book Club. And sometimes wedding receptions. Other than that, she was almost perfect, and even when she wasn’t, she tried really hard.

I remember one time when she came rushing home at like ten minutes to six with a bag from Byerly’s. I was sitting
at the kitchen table doing some lame American history assignment. She pulled a slab of deli lasagna out of the Byerly’s bag, fitted it into a pan, and stuck it in the oven. She had also bought some corn salad and roasted peppers. She said nothing to me as she transferred the salad and peppers from their plastic cartons into a matching set of serving bowls.

I said, “Wow.”

My mother stopped what she was doing and looked directly at me for the first time. She winked at me, which she never does, then went back into action, stashing the Byerly’s cartons in the trash and opening a bottle of wine and making up a bread basket with some organic dinner rolls, also from Byerly’s.

Twenty minutes later my dad got home and we sat down to eat. We always ate dinner together, because my nearly perfect mother had once read an article that said children thrived in families that ate home-cooked meals together every night.

“Great lasagna,” my dad said.

“Thank you,” said my mother.

“New recipe?”

“I just tweaked it a little,” she said, then winked at me—again.

I remember now. It was a Nissan Altima. I don’t know what color.

I drove fast out of Golden Valley and got on the freeway heading north. Jen and I were both talking at the same time, neither of us really saying anything, just blowing off this wild energy. There was a lot of “Omigod, omigod, I can’t believe we’re doing this” and Jen talking about all the people who were going to totally freak when they heard about it. Finally I sort of calmed down and said, “We can’t tell anybody.”

Jen looked stricken.

“I’m serious,” I said. “If we tell anybody at all, it might get back to our parents. Or the police.”

Jen nodded, then said, “Not even Will?”

Will was our boyfriend, sort of.

“We can tell Will,” I said. “He doesn’t talk.” That wasn’t true, exactly. Will Ford spoke perfectly well—he just didn’t do it often, which was probably why we were friends. He was the perfect listener. If you told him something and said it was a secret, you couldn’t even get him to tell it back to you.

Jen nodded and smiled. As long as she could tell at least one person, she was fine.

“Where should we go?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “It’s after midnight. It’s a weekday.”

We were almost out of the suburbs, about twenty miles north of Minneapolis, with new housing developments and the remnants of farms on either side of us. I saw some lights up ahead on the right. A low building surrounded by SUVs
and pickup trucks came into sight. The neon sign on the roof read
B.J.’s BUNKHOUSE, LIVE NUDE DANCERS 24 HOURS.

“Want to stop off for a beer?” I said.

Jen laughed—but she stopped when I turned onto the exit ramp.

“Hey…,” she said, sitting forward.

“I’m just turning around,” I told her.

She slumped back in her seat saying nothing as I turned away from B.J. and his Live Nude Dancers, crossed under the freeway, and turned onto the southbound entrance ramp.

“We could hit the twenty-four-hour Taco Bell,” I said.

“Okay.” I could tell the thrill was wearing off for her. I could feel it in myself too. The fun part of stealing a car is pretty short-lived if you have no place to go.

The Taco Bell was close to home and I thought maybe we’d run into somebody we knew, but we didn’t—we just ate some really disgusting thing with way too much cheese in it. Then I dropped Jen off at her house, parked the car a block from the key guy’s house, and walked home.

I kept the keys.

When I got home, a text from Jen was waiting.

OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE WE DID THAT!
she wrote.

I couldn’t believe it either.

My father is enormous. As far as I know he has never hit anybody, but he looks like a guy who would. He’s about
six-five with these huge shoulders and when he wears a shirt with an open collar you can see the mat of gorilla hair covering his chest. And he has big thick eyebrows and dark eyes, and hands so big he can pick up a basketball the way a normal person grabs a softball.

Of course he knows how he looks. He laughs about it. He says it comes in handy in court. My dad practices criminal law, which means he defends all sorts of scumbags, and he says being so big helps him intimidate witnesses. I guess he sort of leans over them and exudes waves of testosterone until they crack.

I just thank God I didn’t inherit his enormousness or his hairiness.

It was around the time Jen and I stole the Nissan that my dad got involved with Elwin Carl Dandridge, the serial rapist. Elwin Carl Dandridge was a skinny little guy, half white, half black, and half something else—gray, maybe—who specialized in terrorizing college students over at the U. He raped eight girls in two months before they caught him. As far as the police were concerned, it was a no-brainer. They had DNA and everything, but because it was what my dad calls an “above-the-fold-headline case,” he offered to represent Dandridge pro bono (that means for free), even though he had to know that Dandridge was guilty, which was pretty embarrassing for me, because nobody wants their dad to be a rapist-defender.

“Look, it’s not like he’s going to get off,” I told Jen.
“My dad will probably just have him plead guilty or something.”

We were at Cedar Lake. It was a few days after the Nissan thing, one of those hot, muggy, windless, semi-cloudy days, and the lake was pretty disgusting in that scummy midsummer way. It had to get way hotter than it was to make it worth getting in the water with all the algae and stuff, so we were just hanging out on the beach and waiting for Will to show up.

Jen said, “I don’t see why a guy like that even deserves a lawyer.”

“Well, if we’d got caught stealing that car, I bet my dad would have defended us. Even if we were totally guilty.”

“I still can’t believe we did that.”

“I wish you’d quit saying that,” I said, but really I didn’t mind—I thought it was cool. I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my chin on my fist and stared at the weave of my towel, imagining myself getting arrested and thrown in a jail cell with a bunch of skanky prostitutes and drug addicts and baby-killers, even though all we did was drive around a little and eat at a Taco Bell. I thought about my parents looking at me through the bars of my cell. My dad saying,
Why on earth would you do such a stupid thing?

I would tell him it had nothing to do with lack of intelligence.

You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!

Yeah, Dad, but it was one of those living-in-the-moment things.

The thing he would never understand was that it only had to make sense for about one decision-making nanosecond. Later it might seem moronic, but at the time it all made perfect sense. Anyway, we got away with it. Because for every time some kid like me pays the price for doing something incredibly stupid, there are a thousand times she gets away with it.

“I told Will,” Jen said.

“What did he say?”

“‘Cool.’ He said, ‘Cool.’”

“That’s all he ever says.”

“He’s supposed to be here.” She sat up and looked around. “There he is.”

Will Ford was shuffling shirtless toward us with his sizethirteen flip-flops leaving troughs in the sand. A half-empty twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew dangled by its neck from his long fingers.

“Hey,” he said. That was Will’s other favorite word.
Hey. Hey, cool. Cool. Hey.
He could express just about any thought with those two words.

“Hey,” said Jen.

“Hey,” I said.

Will folded his half-naked body onto the sand between our towels.

“Steal any more cars?” Will said.

Okay, I was exaggerating about him only having two words.

“Not today,” I said.

“Cool.” He gave me a sideways look, like he was seeing someone he didn’t know.

“It was a one-time deal,” I said.

Will shrugged. “Cool.”

I should explain about Will being both my and Jen’s boyfriend. Really, he’d been Jen’s boyfriend since second grade, but not like her
boyfriend
boyfriend, even though they had made out a couple of times. And then last year I sort of hooked up with him in a closet at this party I wasn’t supposed to be at, and Jen found out, and we had this teary three-hour fight. In the end we decided to share him. Neither of us had made out with him since. I should explain about that too. Will was like one of those sex dolls. Not that I’ve ever
seen
a sex doll, but he was like,
hey, cool, whatever. I
almost had to grab his hands and put them on me. I don’t know why I even did that except maybe I was jealous of Jen for having him. But it wasn’t any fun because it was like he was kissing me and stuff just to be polite or something and not like he was into it. So we worked it out, me and Jen, and we came to the conclusion that Will just wasn’t interested in sex, and that was how it got to be okay that he was both of our boyfriends.

“This guy dropped his keys,” I told Will. “I just happened to pick them up, and then later we took his car for a ride. I brought it back, so it wasn’t really stealing.”

Will nodded. “Know what I’d like to steal? Alton Wright’s Hummer.”

Jen laughed, and Will’s lips turned up in this half smirk that he doesn’t do very often.

“That would be fun,” I said.

Alton Wright’s Hummer was yellow. There is something about yellow cars that is just naturally irritating. And it was a Hummer. Also irritating. And it was Alton’s. Alton Wright was one of those people you wanted to do damage to, but you couldn’t because he had too many friends. The reason he had friends was because he had a yellow Hummer, and he was smart and funny in a cruel sort of way, and he looked like he should be in a movie. But anyone with any taste whatsoever hated him because he was so full of himself. Especially while driving his yellow Hummer.

So I knew where Will was coming from, but still it surprised me, with Will being so laid-back and all, that he would even think about it.

“He comes into Ducky’s,” Will said. “I have to vacuum it out like every week.” Ducky’s Auto Laundry was the car wash and detailing shop where Will worked weekends. “One of these days I’m gonna get a dead rat and hide it in his glove compartment and hope he doesn’t find it till it explodes.”

That was the longest sentence I’d ever heard from Will.

“Where are you going to get a rat?” I asked.

Will shrugged.

Jen said, “So did you hear that Kell’s dad is defending a serial rapist?”

That night I watched
Gone in 60 Seconds
with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. The idea is that Nicolas Cage is this retired car thief who, for reasons too ridiculous to say, is forced by a bad guy to steal fifty cars in one night, which he does, but of course he has to kill the bad guy in the end, and he saves a cop’s life at the same time, so the cop lets him go. I don’t know what Angelina Jolie is doing in the movie, but her hair is really weird, and now that you know what happens, you don’t have to waste your money renting it unless you
really
like Nicolas Cage, in which case consider yourself warned.

Kelleigh Monahan: five foot seven, a hundred ten curvaceous pounds, thick silky black hair, full lips, perky nose, and sparkling hazel eyes. It’s true. Or it would be true if I was wearing stack-heeled boots and hazel contact lenses and a push-up bra, and got collagen injections in my lips. And lost seven pounds.

The perky nose I really have—I got that from my mom—and I do have black hair, which I got from my dad, but it’s not all that silky.

Actually, I do not hate the way I look. Sometimes I see actresses on TV who remind me of myself, give or take a few major details like complexion and bust size and so forth. But there is always room for improvement, so for purposes of reading my story you should go with the tall, sleek, puffy-lipped, perky-nosed, hazel-eyed, silky-raven-haired beauty. It’s close enough.

When I was nine years old I used to watch this old show called
Flipper
on TV Land. It was about this really smart dolphin who saved the day in every episode. I got all excited about dolphins—or porpoises, as they are also called. So for my tenth birthday my dad gave me a dolphin necklace. It was just a chain with this dolphin carved out of soapstone, but it was nice of him to remember that I liked
Flipper.

I wore it to school, and of course everybody noticed and said how cool it was. A few days later, this girl Madison who wanted to be my friend gave me a pencil with an eraser shaped like a dolphin. I didn’t really want to be her friend because I already had Jen, but I said thank you and used the pencil at school. And then my mom bought me a new bedspread that had jumping dolphins on it. Pretty soon, for birthdays, Christmas, or no reason at all, people were giving me dolphin things and I didn’t know how to make them stop. I didn’t even like
Flipper
anymore. So one day—it was about a week before my thirteenth birthday—I had a complete
dolphin meltdown. I took every dolphin thing I owned and made a pile in the backyard fire pit and poured half a can of gasoline on it. My mom noticed me out there and came out to see what I was doing with my bedspread and stuffed dolphins and dolphin posters and dolphin T-shirts and everything else piled up in the fire pit, and I lit it.