The Chance You Won't Return (20 page)

I smiled. “Not a prayer.”

I hadn’t been to the bowling alley in years, but it looked just like I remembered it. The fluorescent sign above the door was supposed to say
LEWIS AND CLARK LANES
but only illuminated
LEW AND LARK LANE
. Inside, they had the same spiral-patterned carpet and the air smelled like French fries and shoe disinfectant.

We rented shoes and took a spot at our assigned lane. “This looks like a good one,” I said. “Lucky lane seven.”

“I called ahead,” Jim said, and nudged me a little. We were both bent forward to slip on our rental shoes, heads almost touching. I smelled his peppermint shampoo and felt a little dizzy remembering how we’d kissed behind the library.

“I’m really glad we’re doing this,” I told him.

“Me too,” he said. We leaned a little closer to kiss; it was brief but I felt it down to my rental shoes.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m going to take it easy on you,” I said.

I was up first and threw a gutter ball. Behind me, I heard Jim laugh. “Where’s all that big talk now?” he asked.

“I’m lulling you into a false sense of security.” I picked up my second ball and took a breath, trying to remember how to step and swing my arm with the right speed and force and timing. The ball rolled steadily down the lane and knocked over nine pins.

“All right, I’m sufficiently nervous again,” Jim said. “Any tips?”

“Try to time your steps with your arms, like this.” I demonstrated the action I meant. “And don’t try to twist your body or arm around.”

“Try to move like I know what I’m doing. Got it.” Jim knocked over four pins on his first try. “You’re good at this sports thing,” he said. “It’s like your body naturally knows how to do it. In gym, you seem to get things, too.”

I shrugged. “It’s not hard to look that capable in Mrs. Harriott’s class.”

He threw another ball and hit two more pins. “No, you’re good. Trust me, I know — I ’m always flailing around after some stupid ball, and you never flail.”

I wondered how long Jim had been noticing me in class and hid a smile. “I flail sometimes. But I guess it’s just something I like doing. You don’t need to stop and think about every little thing — you just go. And when you’re on a team and the other people know what they’re doing, too, it’s like you’re all part of this one motion. You get each other without having to talk about it. For a little while, at least.”

“Do you miss it?”

I stood and picked up another ball, balancing it in my hand. “Sometimes. It’s, like, the first season I haven’t played since I was six, and it already feels like it was part of some different life.” The ball hurdled down the lane and smacked directly into middle pins, sending all the others flying. I did a mini victory dance on my way back to the bench. Jim laughed and the sound made me feel effervescent.

“Okay, if you win,” Jim said, “I’m blaming it on the unfair advantage of you having athletic talent.”

We played three games, and I won all of them. By the last game, Jim caught up so that he just missed winning by two points. “That was really close,” I said. “I almost got worried.” When he raised an eyebrow at me, I laughed. “Almost.”

“Next time, I think we should combine forces and get people to put money on a game,” he said. “Will McNamee would totally take that bet.”

I stiffened a little at the mention of Jim’s friends. “Maybe.”

“They’re pretty cool — Will and everybody,” Jim said, his voice a little sharper than I’d expected. “No pressure or anything, but I think you guys would get along.”

“I know.” I untied my shoes slower than necessary. Jim’s friends seemed fine, but I was worried about being around them and having to keep track of the lies I’d have to tell. It was hard enough with just Jim. “It’s just that I don’t get a lot of free nights, with having to babysit my brother, and I’d rather it be us than a big group of people.” It wasn’t the exact truth, but it was the closest I could get. “And besides, we’ve got to practice a lot if we’re going to destroy everyone else at bowling.”

“You can show me all your secrets,” Jim said.

I half smiled. “One or two.”

“What’s the legal parking distance from a traffic light?” Jim was flipping through a copy of the DMV driving manual, which Mr. Kane had lent me. “I don’t even remember that, which shows that you just need to know all of this for one test.”

“All right, give me a minute,” I said. We were sprawled in the backseat of my mom’s car, leaning against opposite doors with our legs crowding the middle of the seat. We’d been practicing actual driving for an hour — again around the back roads. (This time, however, Jim had me drive most of the way there. It was the first time I saw an oncoming car. When I saw the headlights, I hit the brake even though the other car was safely in its lane.) After doing the road practice, I suggested we go over the manual, which meant we made out in the backseat for a while. It was like that first time behind the library — just Jim, me, and the stars, everything exactly right. Finally we agreed we should do at least a little studying before I had to be home. Even with our shirts back on, it was kind of hard to concentrate on laws about distances and speeds. I kept remembering the pressure of his lips against mine and how good he looked without a shirt. “Ten feet?”

“Close. Thirty.”

“Oh, come on, that’s way too much. Who needs all that room to turn?”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “Have you seen your turns?”

“Really funny.” I kicked his shin a little. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m an awesome driver. I take those hairpin turns like a pro.”

“Sure, once you pass driver’s ed you’ll be ready for the Indy 500.” He grinned. “Maybe in class you should practice going from 0 to 120 in under four seconds. Mr. Kane would love that.”

I laughed. “I don’t think the driver’s ed Volvo could take it.”

“It’ll go out in a blaze of glory.” He flipped through the manual. “All right, how about this one: What does a single broken line on the road mean?”

“You can pass cars, if there’s no traffic coming from the opposite lane.” In the backseat, on the side of the road, it felt like our own little world. I leaned against the door and the cool glass of the window. “Give me another one,” I said.

Jim paged through the manual. “You know this pretty well.”

“I already took the permit exam. You had to pass that to get into driver’s ed.”

“I failed it my first time — the permit exam. By three points.”

I tugged at a loose thread on my shirt. “How about that time you drove into a house?”

Jim reached back and rubbed his head. “Yeah, how about that?” He paused, and I wasn’t sure if I had gone too far. I was about to tell him never mind, but he said, “So Will McNamee and I’ve been friends since first grade — even our parents are friends. Barbecues in the summer, trips to D.C., that kind of thing. He’s the one who always knows who’s having a party, so I’d go out a lot with him, to people’s houses or to some random field if somebody’s brother could get a keg. Or we’d smoke up in his basement. It wasn’t a
problem,
but I wasn’t exactly doing a lot else with my time. And one night we raided his parents’ liquor cabinet, which wasn’t anything new, and then I drove home. I wasn’t even crazy drunk, just a little buzzed.” He drummed his fingertips on the front of the driving manual. “Plus, I’m kind of on epilepsy medication —”

“You’re epileptic?” I said.

“Yeah, sort of. I get petit mal seizures — not the big stuff, jerking around on the floor. I kind of zone out for maybe half a minute. And that night I didn’t take my medication because I wanted to drink with Will. I didn’t want to have to deal with it, you know? Which was really dumb of me because that’s actually what did it. I had a seizure, and by the time I came to I was face-first in an air bag.”

“Did you get hurt?”

“A broken arm from how the hood crunched in, and some cuts and bruises. Otherwise I was fine. I had the seat belt on.” He laughed grimly. “Safety first, right? And it was, like, all of a sudden, my parents were right there — my mom crying and yelling at me, and my dad not saying anything, which was worse, because usually he’s the first person to yell at me.”

I remembered seeing Jim’s home that cold morning, with the neighbors crowding the driveway, the tow truck pulling the car out of the Wileys’ yard, and the chunk of brick and plaster missing, exposing part of the Wileys’ house. I remembered Jim’s dad reaching out to touch the broken pieces.

“He was so pissed at me,” Jim said. “My dad. He didn’t talk to me for days. Then when he did, he said, ‘You could have killed us.’ Which was true. So I wasn’t too upset when they sent me to my grandparents.”

I wasn’t sure Mom would notice if I drove a car into the house. Or maybe she would, but she would make an excuse for it, call it a malfunctioning plane. Blame faulty equipment. “Is your dad still mad at you?”

Jim shrugged. “Not as much as before. But sometimes he just looks at me and it’s like he can still see the house all smashed up.”

“My mom never lets anything drop,” I said. It wasn’t exactly true anymore, but saying it made me feel like it was real. “If I do one thing even a little wrong she’s all over it.”

“And we’re supposed to mess up, right? It makes us learn from our mistakes so we’re better and stronger for it.”

“Obviously we’re going to be really strong people.” I reached across the seat and brushed his hand. “So do you still get seizures?”

He paged through the driver’s manual. “Sometimes. Not that often. I got new medication and I’m better about taking it. That was, like, the third time I’ve had a seizure that even did anything. The first time anyone noticed was when I was in second grade and I was playing Little League. I was awful anyway, like, could not hit a ball, and in the middle of the game I’m at bat and not hitting anything and I collapse on home plate. Little League was too stressful for me, apparently.”

“That’s so scary.”

“I was passed out, so I don’t remember much. My parents were freaking out. The next year was a lot of testing to make sure my brain was okay, which it is. As far as I know.”

“Good,” I said. “I like your brain. I like all your parts.”

Jim laughed and looked pleased. “I like all your parts, too.” He tapped me with the driver’s manual. “We should keep our parts safe. No more driving into houses.”

I inched forward until our faces were almost touching. I liked getting to know the curve of Jim’s face and the pressure of his hands, and I didn’t want him to cause any other accidents. “Here’s to keeping each other safe,” I said, and kissed him until we couldn’t breathe.

Halloween was on Sunday, which was the worst day for it because there was school the next day, so you could never be totally happy about trick-or-treating or watching horror movies. Teddy saw the upside; he’d gotten to wear his costume to school on Friday, for the elementary-school Halloween carnival, and then on Sunday he wore it around the house all day long and spent the day fighting aliens. This year he was an astronaut. Dad had helped him make the costume — his helmet was a white bucket with a square cut out for his face, with NASA stickers stuck on the side. His rocket pack was a couple of milk cartons painted white and superglued together.

“You’re going to mess up your costume,” I warned Teddy while he flung himself around the living room.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

“Dad’s not going to make you another one.”

Dad was going to take Teddy trick-or-treating that night. I was supposed to stay home and hand out candy until Dad and Teddy got back, and then I could go to Maddie’s house for scary movies. But it didn’t feel like Halloween, and not just because it was Sunday. Usually the house was decorated with plastic pumpkins, pipe-cleaner spiders, and ghost stickers. Mom was really into decorating for holidays. A few weeks before, she’d get us together and cover the house in anything festive. She’d even dress up to hand out candy on Halloween. One year, when I was really little, she was a witch and cackled so well that I got scared. It was hard to see her under the makeup and fake warts. When I’d started to cry, she’d washed it off and said, “See, it’s just me.” But this year we forgot all about decorating until the last minute. As it was, the only decoration we’d gotten up was a life-size paper skeleton hanging on the front door.

I hadn’t mentioned the scary movie thing to Jim. If it came up, I figured I could tell my friends he was busy.

In our room, Katy was getting her own costume ready. For a while, Katy wasn’t sure if she wanted to dress up this year, but a group of girls from her gymnastics studio talked her into dressing up with them as
The Wizard of Oz
characters. Katy was the Tin Man and had stolen all the tinfoil and duct tape in the house.

“Do we have a funnel?” Katy asked. “For the hat.” When I suggested she check the kitchen, she frowned at her piles of tinfoil. “Maybe later.”

Since Mom had gotten back from the hospital, Katy had been avoiding her. Before Amelia Earhart, Katy would tell Mom everything. Now, when she wasn’t obsessively doing her homework, Katy spent a lot of time at Amy White’s house. Dad told Mrs. White that Mom wasn’t feeling well, so she’d taken over gymnastics pickup entirely and invited Katy over for dinner a lot. Amy was fine, Katy told me once, but mostly she just liked pretending that she was part of a normal family.