The Last Chance Texaco (9 page)

Things got quiet for a second, and Ben said, "Well, it's Thanksgiving in Kindle Home, and I can't think of any place I'd rather be."

"Me too," Gina said, smiling at Ben.

"Same here," Leon said.

"And me as well," said Mrs. Morgan.

Was this true? I thought. Were all four counselors here on Thanksgiving because they
wanted
to be?

"I can think of a place I'd rather be," Eddy said. "Do they have Thanksgiving at the Playboy Mansion?"

"Every day's Thanksgiving at the Playboy Mansion!" Roberto said, and everyone laughed again.

Leon raised his glass. "To Kindle Home."

"Fork, please!" Mrs. Morgan said to Melanie, who was eating stuffing with her fingers.

Ben raised his glass. "To Kindle Home! And to everyone who lives here." Gina raised a glass, reached across the table, and clinked it against Ben's.

The sound of clinking glasses sure got us kids' attention. Suddenly, everyone was raising their glass and clinking it against all the other glasses. We were drinking sparkling cider, and more than a little of it got spilled on the tablecloth, but I noticed that Mrs. Morgan didn't say anything about that.

"Okay, okay!" Ben said. "Enough with the clinking already."

"Save room for dessert!" Gina said. "We've got pumpkin pie."

"I hate pumpkin pie," Joy said.

"Me too," Leon said. "That's why we made a blackberry pie too."

And suddenly, I knew what was so different about this Thanksgiving. It wasn't the food. It was a feeling. But it was such a bizarre feeling that I couldn't remember ever feeling it before, at least not for a really long time.

Thanksgiving at Kindle Home felt comfortable. It felt real. It felt like home.

• • •

We may have had pumpkin and blackberry pie after dinner, but our real dessert came later, when all the kids in the house gathered for our meds. Three times a day--morning, afternoon, and evening-- the counselors unlocked the medicine cabinet in the kitchen so they could give us all our pills. Everyone except Melanie had to take something--I took Paxil for anger control and carbamazepine as a mood stabilizer--but no one took exactly the same thing. So one counselor would hand us our particular pills with a glass of water, then mark us off on a chart inside the cabinet. Then another counselor would stand and watch us actually swallow the pills.

That night, Yolanda and I were standing out in the foyer waiting our turns in the kitchen when Damon accidentally knocked an expired water-park coupon off the bulletin board.

"Lucy'11 pick it up," said Joy, standing nearby. "She's getting really good at picking up garbage."

"Get conked," I said.

"Hey, I was just complimenting you on your work. But you know, if you need more practice, I saw some dog shit out in the front yard."

I ignored her. I turned to Yolanda. "I ate so much, I may never eat again," I said, and she nodded once.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joy looking at me. But after a few seconds, she turned and stared at Yolanda, thinking. Then she sniffed the air. "What's that I smell?" Joy said. "It ain't cigarette smoke. I think it's propane."

"Huh?" Yolanda said suddenly.

Joy exaggerated a nod. "Oh, yeah. Funny time of year for someone to be out having a barbecue, don'tcha think?"

Yolanda's eyes got wide.

I turned to Joy. "Shut up!" What sort of person made fun of someone because their parents were killed in a propane explosion?

She sniffed the air again. "You don't smell it?"

I turned to Yolanda. "Just ignore her." I tried to think of something to say. "Maybe we can go to the park tomorrow."

"There's something cooking," Joy said. "But I can't figure out the meat. Is it chicken? 'Cause I smell burning skin."

Yolanda whimpered. I glanced into the kitchen at Gina and Mrs. Morgan, the two counselors handing out the meds. But they were too involved in counting out the pills.

"Maybe it's ribs," Joy said. "Nothin like a pair of bloody ribs."

I whirled on her. "I'm warning you!"

"Or pork," Joy said nonchalantly. "But pork is the other white meat, ain't it? It don't smell like no white meat to me."

That was it! The pot inside my head suddenly boiled over, and I knew I was taking her down. I jerked back a fist to slug her. Joy must have seen me, but she didn't even flinch.

"Lucy! Stop!" It was Yolanda. She had grabbed my arm, keeping me from hitting Joy.

"You can almost hear it sizzling!" Joy said.

I tried to shake Yolanda off me.

"Lucy!" Yolanda said. "She
wants
you to hit her! So you'll get kicked out of Kindle Home!"

Yolanda's words changed everything. It was like someone had snapped a lens over my eyes and now I saw everything in a different light. Yolanda was right, of course. Joy was purposely goading me into hitting her--and in a group home, it
did
matter who started a fight. And if I
had
hit her, I suddenly knew she wouldn't have fought back, making herself look completely blameless. She was trying to get me back for the thing with the cigarettes. The oldest trick in the book, and I'd almost fallen for it.

"What's going on!" said a voice. It was Gina, drawn from the kitchen by the raised voices. It was obvious Joy and I were facing off like a couple of feuding cats.

My fist dissolved into a handful of fingers, which I ran though my hair. "Nothing," I said, with a practiced innocence. "Why?"

"Joy?" Gina said.

Joy looked absolutely baffled by the question. "Me? No. Nothing's wrong."

Gina stared at us for a second, not fooled at all by our acting jobs. But she finally turned away. The instant she did, Joy's placid expression dissolved into a frustrated sneer. This time, I turned my back on her for good.

• • •

That night, I woke up to the sound of screaming.

For a second, I didn't know where I was, that I was in my and Yolanda's bedroom in Kindle Home. For a second, I thought I was in some other place entirely. But then I realized it was Yolanda screaming and thrashing in her bed, and the feeling quickly faded.

I reached over and turned on the light.

"Yolanda!" I said, and she jerked awake in mid-scream.

I watched her for a second, her eyes confused by the walls of the bedroom. She'd been somewhere else too.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"What? Oh. Yeah."

The door to our room burst open, and Ben skidded inside. "What is it?" he said. He was wearing just a pair of boxer shorts, and I could see his hairy chest and how fast he was breathing.

"It's nothing," I said. "Yolanda just had a nightmare."

Ben looked at her. "Is that right?"

Yolanda nodded. "Yeah. I'm okay."

With another look at both of us, Ben withdrew to his room, closing our door behind him.

"What was it?" I asked Yolanda.

She shook her head like she was shooing away a fly. "Nothing. I don't remember."

But I knew. She'd been dreaming about her parents, about the day they were killed. The after-effect of Joy's little prank down in the foyer.

"I'm okay," Yolanda said, hunching down in bed again and rolling away from me.

I stared at her back for a second, and suddenly I remembered what I'd been thinking when I first woke up, where I thought I'd been. It was just after my parents died, and I'd been sharing a bedroom in a foster home with my little sister. She'd just woken up from a nightmare too.

Not too long after that, my little sister had been adopted, and I used to imagine that her new parents were really demons in disguise holding her hostage. In my fantasies, I'd rescue her, and we'd run off to live together in that perfect mountain cabin from
Heidi
.

Now I felt that way about Yolanda--that I wanted to rescue her, to take her away from what was making her so miserable. But there was no way to protect her from the demons in her mind, and nowhere to take her even if there was. My perfect mountain cabin existed only in my imagination.

I reached over and turned out the light. But this time, I found I couldn't sleep.

• • •

After school the following Monday, I was picking up garbage in this narrow plaza between the tennis courts and the student center, and I turned and found myself facing Nate. He was standing, garbage sack in hand, at the top of a short set of concrete steps maybe fifteen feet away.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said.

For a second, we both looked everywhere except at each other. I glanced up at this big window in the side of the student center. I guess it was there so kids inside the lunchroom could look down on the action on the tennis courts below.

Finally, I sort of turned toward Nate and said, "Guess what? I just found a dollar." He'd said "hey" to me first, and it seemed kind of bitchy not to say anything back.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yeah." I had found a dollar, but suddenly I felt like an idiot mentioning it to Nate. As if someone rich like him would care about a stupid dollar.

He shuffled down the steps and walked over to me. As he did, he stuck his hand into his trash bag, rummaged around, and pulled out a little white plastic canister. "I found an asthma inhaler," he said. "Still works, too." He pressed it a couple of times, and it misted.

I nodded at my own bag. "I found a floppy disk." I wasn't about to dig it out, though.

"I found a can of racquetball balls," Nate said.

"I found a tin of chewing tobacco."

Nate smiled. "It sounds like we're kids comparing candy on Halloween."

"Yeah," I said, even though I hadn't been out trick-or-treating ever since I'd entered The System. Something had always come up.

"You find anything else?" he said.

I thought for a second. Then I smiled. "Just the Holy Grail."

"The what?"

"You know--Jesus' cup from the Last Supper? That the Knights of the Round Table were looking for? It was in the parking lot next to the pool." I don't know what had gotten into me. Suddenly, I just felt like joking around.

Nate laughed. "The Holy Grail, huh? Well, big deal. I found the Fountain of Youth. It was in the grass behind the football field."

"Yeah? Well, I found the Golden City of El Dorado on the other side of the faculty parking lot."

"I found the Lost City of Atlantis."

"I found the Northwest Passage."

Nate had to think for a second. "I found the Elephants' Burial Ground!"

"I found the Loch Ness Monster!"

"I found Bigfoot!"

"I found the Missing Link!"

Nate had to think again.

"Well?" I said.

He grimaced. "I guess you win, because I can't think of anything else!"

We both started snickering. Nate was laughing louder than me, but even so, I couldn't remember smiling so much in a long time. It felt good, but a little weird, and not just because Nate Brandon was the one I was laughing with.

Suddenly, something thumped loudly against the big window just over our heads. We both started in surprise. For an instant, I thought someone in the student center must've slapped the inside of the glass in order to scare us. But then something black dropped from the window to the ground near our feet.

"What the--?" Nate said.

I stared down at it. "It's a crow. It tried to fly through the window." I glanced up at the sky and saw a mockingbird flapping away. I'd heard that mockingbirds chased crows. The other bird must've forced the crow right into the glass.

"Good thing it didn't break," Nate said.

"The bird?" I said.

"The window." He was staring up at it.

I crouched down to get a closer look at the bird.