Million Dollar Road (18 page)

Lireinne wasn't going home.

Mr. Con got in twenty minutes later that morning, but Lireinne didn't say a word about the confrontation in the kitchen. Instead, an impotent anger and a kind of sick acceptance warred inside her while she filed and typed on the computer and he talked on the phone at length with somebody way up in Washington, D.C., about the wastewater situation. Although she couldn't stop thinking about her own trouble, it didn't sound like things were going so well for Mr. Con this morning either.

“What the
hell
?” Mr. Con growled. “What do you mean, we're going to court?” He pounded his fist on the desk and shouted at the person on the other end of the phone. “What about the senator? I thought we had this shit wrapped up. You gave me your word, you lying son-of-a-bitch—worse than that, you took the money!”

Ultimately, Mr. Con hung up on the guy, but Lireinne couldn't hang up on the scenes replaying in her head. She could only give half her attention to the flow data from the wells until lunchtime finally rolled around at 1:30. Today lunch was out of the question. Lireinne had made up her mind to keep to the office instead of going out to the kitchen to eat with the rest of the staff. Why sit down with Tina, Jackie, and 'Cille when everybody hated her?

“Ready for lunch?” Mr. Con asked, getting up from his desk.

“No thanks,” Lireinne said, trying to find a smile. “I'm not hungry.”

“Sure?” He raised a questioning eyebrow. “It's 'Cille's famous chicken and dumplings today. C'mon, Lireinne—you don't want to get too skinny.”

Mr. Con was standing behind her chair. He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “You're much too pretty for that.” Almost before she realized what he was doing, he casually brushed her hair away from her face before returning his hand to her shoulder. That felt . . . wrong, his touch felt really wrong, especially today.

Lireinne suppressed the strong, sudden impulse to push him away. “No, really. I'm good.” She sat in her chair, frozen, until Mr. Con removed his hand. With a perplexed shake of his head, he left the room.

What if Tina had walked in and seen Mr. Con acting like that? Lireinne could bring her own freaking lunch from now on and eat in the office instead of at the table with everyone else, but she couldn't avoid Tina forever. That bitch came in and out of the office whenever she felt like it and Lireinne knew she'd take Mr. Con's handsiness as proof there was substance to her accusations. No wonder he and Emma were divorced, Lireinne thought with a tight, humorless smile. She's a freaking fake, and he must have run around on her something chronic.

She'd never say a bad word about Mr. Con to anyone, though. He'd given her a chance when nobody else ever had. That made him a good person in Lireinne's book, even if he was a toucher. She just wished he'd stop it because it felt creepy. It looked bad, too.

No, she'd find a way to handle up on this mess somehow. There was too much riding on this job not to.

 

After lunch, Mr. Con had to leave the office to go home and check on his wife.

“We've got a new puppy, too. Have to let the little guy out of his crate sometime. Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off?” he said, shrugging into his light, buff-colored suede blazer. “You've been hard at it all day. It's Friday. Go on, get started on your weekend.”

Even though leaving early was sure to cause more talk, Lireinne couldn't wait to take him up on his suggestion. She'd go home and spend some time with Mose for a change, and then when Wolf got back from school maybe they could go into town and hit the Walmart. The thought cheered her, so much so that when she walked past Tina in the hall on her way to her car and the farm manager hissed
slut
under her breath, Lireinne could pretend she hadn't heard it, although her hand itched to backhand the other woman. She, at least, knew how to behave like a professional, even if Tina didn't.

When Lireinne got in the car, though, her hands clenched the steering wheel till they ached. She was still seething when she got home and changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Feeding and grooming Mose didn't take the edge off her mood either: in fact, the more Lireinne thought about it, the madder she got. This persecution was high school all over again, and once more there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing. It didn't matter a damn that she wasn't a hoser anymore, because just like always, she was powerless to do a damned thing to defend herself.

Those career women Lireinne had been thinking of earlier this morning, the legions of them getting in their cars, putting on their lipstick, driving to work: had they ever had to face being called whores, simply for doing their jobs? Lireinne didn't think so.

The rest of the afternoon passed with glue on the soles of its shoes. Night had fallen by the time Wolf came home and knocked on her door. Lireinne was lying on her bed, not really watching the fuzzy movie on the TV, but was staring moodily at the ceiling instead and imagining ways for 'Cille and Tina to die—slowly, painfully, with a lot of pleading for their lives. At Wolf's knock, expelling an aggrieved sigh she got up to crack open her door.

“Where've
you
been?” Lireinne asked, feeling peevish. “I was thinking maybe we could check out Walmart, but I don't want to anymore.”

“Chemistry project,” Wolf explained briefly. “I missed the bus but I got a ride home.” Wearing his favorite Goth gear laden with tons of zippers and chains, faded from black to almost gray from too many washings, he leaned inside the door. His normally taciturn expression seemed more animated than usual.

“Hey, sis, can you drive me to Bolt's house? His folks are gonna be gone till tomorrow so we got the whole place to ourselves,” Wolf said with a grin. “Party in the Parish, you know? It's already going on, got started about an hour ago.”

“Fine,” Lireinne said. She shrugged a listless acquiescence. Okay, so giving Wolf a ride into town beat lying around on the bed with all that bad stuff echoing in her head like a stuck CD. At least she wouldn't be by herself for a while. “When do you want to go?”

Wolf's grin widened. “Whenever
you
do. I'm ready whenever,” he said, turning to leave. He paused in the doorway as if struck by a thought. “Hey, why don't you come party with us?”

A party? Lireinne hadn't been to a party in years, and this was the first time Wolf had asked her to go to one with him. A teenage party might be an improvement over hanging out in the trailer by herself—not much of an improvement, but still better than being alone. If anyone called her the old names, she could just leave, right? It would be something to do, even if it meant trying to hang with Wolf's lame-ass Goth friends.

Lireinne shrugged. “Whatever. I guess I could stay out for a little while.”

“Cool,” Wolf said, nodding approval. “You're working too hard anyhow.”

Lireinne almost confided in her little brother then about what the women had said to her, but decided she wouldn't. Wolf could probably get how bad that bullshit had made her feel, but she didn't feel like explaining the troubling problem Mr. Con's handsy-ness was for her, not to her little brother. He didn't need to be worrying about her anyway. She would take care of herself like she always did.

“Just don't let that creep Bolt get any big ideas,” Lireinne warned. “One drink, then I'm outta there, okay?”

 

It was late, surely after midnight, and the cool air had turned warmer. Lireinne hadn't meant to stay out this long, but she'd run into a girl she half remembered from French class at school, she'd had a couple of drinks, and now she was on her way to being shit-faced.

Bolt's house was in a run-down section of Covington, not far from the feed store, and the party had outgrown its cluttered, low-ceilinged rooms that smelled of microwaved nacho cheese dip, boiled hot dogs, and Bolt's pet ferret, Black Death. Inside the house five die-hard EverQuest gamers were camped out in front of the big-screen TV while another factionalized bunch of kids was arguing loudly about whether they were going to play Dungeons & Dragons, or Magic, the new card game. Everyone else, a fluid mix of some fifty teenagers, was hanging out on the front steps or standing in groups in the road under the streetlight, drinking from plastic cups and smoking weed.

Far from the small party she'd imagined, it was as though half the high school had turned out for this gathering, and to Lireinne's surprise it felt kind of, well,
okay,
being here tonight. The kids all seemed so young, so harmless now. Hardly anybody seemed to remember that she'd once been the fat chick Brett Schenker had nailed in his truck. Several of her nodding acquaintances told her she looked incredible, saying they almost didn't recognize her since she'd lost the thirty pounds, and that felt pretty great. Too, in another boost to her cautious self-confidence, most of Lireinne's former tormentors had gained a lot of weight in the last year. Like string-tied pork roasts, now the hot girls who'd giggled over her undeserved reputation bulged with rolls of arm fat, back fat, and muffin tops spilling out of their tight, abbreviated shirts and low-slung jeans. In the yellow pools of streetlight, their makeup was so heavy, so thick, they seemed to have aged ten years. Like, they could be their own mothers.

What goes around comes around, Lireinne thought with some satisfaction. Her old enemies were staying out of her way tonight, probably knowing they'd only look worse if they stood next to her. Too, she'd learned her nemesis, Brett Schenker, had dropped out himself and gone to Hammond to work for the International House of Pancakes there. He was a freaking
busboy
.

What goes around comes around, for sure.

Carefully, Lireinne set her cup down on the hood of her car. The party's refreshments had boiled down to a couple of cases of warm, cheap beer somebody's big brother had bought, or the alternative: a plastic garbage can full of punch made from the tail ends of various bottles kids had hooked from their parents' liquor cabinets. This alcohol-riot was mixed with the new Mountain Dew product, Live Wire, a high-octane, fluorescent orange soda that, like a toxic river, looked as though it could burst into flame at any minute. The taste of the punch was constantly shifting as people arrived with bottles of amaretto and peach schnapps, bourbon and rye, blackberry brandy and last year's muscadine wine, but the spooky orange glow stayed the same no matter what else got poured into the garbage can.

Lireinne wasn't sure how much she'd had to drink, but her previous low, angry mood had been replaced with a fine hilarity. The punch—“vat,” the kids called it—fizzed through her veins like savage butterflies, making her fuzzy head feel as though it was filled with solid plans for revenge.

Like, what about pretending she'd gotten food poisoning from 'Cille's cooking? No, Lireinne decided, that wouldn't be near good enough. Wait, she could take a bag of Mose's newly fly-free manure to work and hide it under the front seat of Tina's car. It might be days before that bitch figured out where the stink was coming from. Now
that
would be cool.

Lireinne threw back a big gulp of orange inspiration. Too bad she couldn't get any kind of payback with Emma Favreaux.
Call me anytime
. Yeah, I call bullshit, you fake.

“Hah!” Lireinne snorted.

“Hah what, sweet thang?” It was Bolt. He was stumbling over to the car, Black Death the ferret clinging to his shoulder. With a belch, Bolt propped himself up against the Explorer's front end. He was looking about as stable as a truck perched on a cheap jack, as though being vertical wasn't going to be an option for long.

“Nothing,” Lireinne muttered, finishing her drink. “Beat it, Keanu.” Bolt was got up tonight like Neo, Keanu Reeves's character from
The Matrix
. Wearing a long fake-leather overcoat and sunglasses, he was totally lame-ass like always because Neo was majorly hot and Bolt was about as sexy as a burping recliner, draped in black Visqueen.

“Go pass out someplace else,” Lireinne ordered. “And get off my freaking car before you puke on it, you loser.”

“Aww.” Bolt belched again. He stroked Black Death's fuzzy tail. Back arched, the ferret chittered anxiously. “Don't be that way, L'reinne.” Bolt took off his sunglasses, his vague little eyes blinking in the dim streetlight. “I ain't gonna bite, am I, Deathy? Y'know, babe, you're looking
fine,
now that you're not fat anymore. Hey—you wan' a hit?” He fumbled in his overcoat's big pocket. “Yeah, here we go.” Bolt flourished a homemade pipe made from a half-crushed Live Wire can, a ring of ice-pick holes starring the hollowed, middle part of it. “Got some killer weed, good-lookin'.” After a few fumbling passes with a lighter, Bolt got the dope lit and took a deep drag from the can's slot.