The Summer the World Ended (22 page)

“Wow…” Riley let her sandwich drop to the plate. “I’m sorry.”

“Long past now, Squirrel.” He made a sheepish smile at her visible wince. “Sorry. Her loss though. Mom chose her superstition over her son.”

She studied the pattern of browns on the side of the bread, searching in vain for an answer to the question nagging at the back of her mind. Mom had been a staunch atheist. Riley grinned.
She so would’ve given me crap about asking her to watch over me yesterday.
The old man at the funeral certainly didn’t make much of a case for faith. Was everyone religious as mean as him and the paternal grandmother she never met?

Probably not. Guess it’s just my bad luck again.

Dad rushed off to the radio as soon as he finished eating. Riley picked at her breakfast, sitting at an angle on the chair, taking black coffee in small sips while Dad leaned over his electronics like a buzzard. When her plate held only crumbs, and she couldn’t slurp any more coffee out of her mug, she put the dishes in the machine and trudged to her room, grabbed a towel, and headed for the bathroom at the end of the little interior hallway.

She made a quick pass in the mirror on ‘zit patrol,’ happy to find none, and shirked out of her pajamas. A shower passed in no great hurry, after which she wrapped herself armpit to knee in the towel and darted to her bedroom.

As soon as she pulled the towel off, the doorbell rang. Riley jumped but rolled her eyes, reaching for her underwear drawer.
Dad’ll get it.

“Riley? See who it is…?” he yelled.

“In a minute, I’m…”
not going to yell ‘naked.’

She hurried into her panties, skipped a bra, and grabbed the first pair of jean shorts she saw. The top item in the shirt drawer turned out to be a pink spaghetti-strap shirt. Without thinking, she rushed out of her room to the front door.

A skinny man in a grey jumpsuit and baseball cap leaned right and left, peering in. He had a few days’ worth of beard on his face, shaggy black hair, and an Adam’s apple sharp enough to cut with. The low diesel rumble of a truck engine rattled outside. Riley pulled open the door and a blast of warm air hit her shower-dampened body, making her aware of quite a bit of exposed skin. Bare shoulders, only a layer of thin cloth over her chest, and shorts small enough to make Dad faint if he saw her. Mom allowed that particular pair only because she had sworn to always wear them over leggings.

Oops.

The delivery man’s hurry evaporated to a leering grin. Already bulging frog-eyes got bigger as he ogled her legs. “Hey, cutie.”

She clung to the door, ready to slam it in his face and scream if he twitched. “Who are you?”

“Got a delivery for a…” It took him a few seconds to peel his gaze off her thighs and check his clipboard. “Christopher McCullough.”

“That’s my dad.”

He flicked his eyebrows up twice. “Is he here?”

Yes, fifteen yards away and surrounded by enormous guns.
“Yeah, he’s on the phone.”

“You look old enough to sign. C’mon and show me where I can put it.”

She blushed. “W-what?”

“The car?” He pointed with the clipboard behind him, where Mom’s Nissan Sentra sat on top of a flatbed truck.

For a moment, she forgot about the way this man stared at her and crept out onto the porch. When she caught him trying to stare down her top, she jumped back with a yelp and clamped her hands over her chest.

“Perv!” She backed into the house. “Dad!”

The man’s face reddened, and he coughed.

“One moment, sir.” The sound of headphones hit the desk. “What is it, Riley?”

The driver waved his hands at her, pleading.

She narrowed her eyes. “Mom’s car is here. Where do you want it?”

“Next to the truck is fine,” yelled Dad.

The guy bowed at her like a gracious monk.

“I didn’t want him to kill you.” She crept up to the door, half-hiding behind it. “Leave it by the Silverado.”

“Sorry,” he whispered and ran to the truck.

Beeping rose up outside as he backed the truck up, jockeying it around to line the car up with the drop off point. Riley raced to her room before Dad could see how she had dressed, and changed into shorts a hands’ width longer as well as a bra and full tee shirt. By the time she got back to the porch, Mom’s car was on its wheels and the driver wound a winch cable back up the inclined ramp.

She took a step outside the door, not daring to go far from the house. Even in her more modest clothes, the driver looked at her every few seconds or so, smiling. She couldn’t tell if it was apologetic or if he’d gone back to fantasizing about her. After he’d leveled the flatbed and rolled it forward to lock, he trotted over with the clipboard held out.

He kept his gaze locked on her eyes. “Need you to inspect the car and sign off that there’s no damage.”

Oh, no friggin’ way am I going out there with you.
“Dad?” she yelled. “He says you gotta check the car for damage and sign. I can’t ‘cause I’m only fourteen.”

Riley felt somewhat vindicated at the look he made when he learned her age. She didn’t want to imagine what thoughts had been bouncing through his head. Fortunately, he didn’t seem disappointed. A wave of panic flashed over his face. Dad jogged up and offered a handshake. She edged into the house, feeling guilty.

“Hon, keep an ear on the headset please?”

“Sure… how do I work it?”

“No need to ‘work’ anything, just put it on and yell like crazy if anyone calls for me.”

“Okay.”

With Dad going outside, she wandered to his bedroom. She hesitated at the door, as if she were about to invade some kind of inner sanctum. Dark blue carpeting and the blackout curtains left the room cave-like and cool. She sat on the edge of the still-warm wheeled office chair and put the uncomfortable military-style headphones on. A faint hiss filled her ears, like a stereo on a dead frequency with the volume all the way up. With each passing minute, her guilt grew.

Soon after the rumble of a departing truck rattled the walls, Dad walked in. Riley relinquished the seat and headphones without an inkling of protest.

“Nothing. No one said a word.”

“Good news.” He smiled, sat, and clamped the headset over his ears.

“Dad?” She stared at her toes.

“Hmm?” He pulled one earphone off.

She murmured through a story of what happened. He got angry for a moment, but it wasn’t clear if it was directed at her, at the driver, or in general. Dad leaned forward and held her hand.

“I trust you’ll not wear those again.”

“It’s not all
my
fault.” She gave him a wounded look.

“No, I’m not saying that. Thank you for being honest. He didn’t touch you?”

She shook her head. “Just tried to peek down my shirt.”

“You’re probably right. I would’ve at least hit him.”

Dad let the headphone snap back in place, squeezed her hand with a smile, and swung the mic boom in front of his mouth. “Baker-four-four, SITREP, copy?”

Riley wandered the house for a while, thinking about Mom’s system of awarding her tokens for doing chores. Tokens she could redeem for things like shopping trips or ‘get out of grounding’ free cards, though that one was expensive: 50. She’d probably had 32 in the jar when Mom…

She sighed.

For a moment, she stood at the sliding glass door in the dining room, gazing at a small spread of uneven red patio tiles and desert beyond. A patch of sun warmed her toes, and lofted the scent of wood in the air.
I wanna go home. I miss trees.
She went to the couch, sat, laid sideways, draped herself over the arm, rolled to face the back, rolled flat, and eventually slithered onto the floor. After lying there for about a half hour bored out of her mind, she got up and trudged to her room.

She flopped on the floor, back against her bed with her legs crossed, elbows on knees and chin in her palms.
This sucks.
She frowned at the shelf of books by the closet. Somehow, the school’s summer reading list’s titles had wound up right where her eyes landed on
The Good Earth
. She smirked.
If school wants me to read it, I bet it’s boring.
She looked up and over to the top shelf at
Lord of the Rings
. Despite finishing it twice, it was more tempting than something she was
required
to read.

Riley blinked. “Duh. I’m not going to that school anymore… and technically, the one in this hellhole hasn’t given me any summer work.”

She laced her fingers behind her head and leaned back, proud to have won an argument with no one. Her good mood faded as she remembered the day Mom had taken her shopping. A stop to buy books she wasn’t really interested in reading had been softened by Starbucks hot cocoa. Two thousand and change miles away, the bookstore at Menlo Park Mall went on as though she’d never existed. Someone may be walking through her house at that very moment, thinking of buying it.

Instead of crying, she sank into a sullen pout and wrapped her arms around her knees.
Maybe I’m coping.
Her throat ached from the pain of stalled sobs, but it didn’t feel like it would do much good. She glanced to her right at the green glow where her Xbox controllers charged, all but useless without Internet. She looked at the game console, debating bot-matching and shooting AIs. She hadn’t touched
Call of Duty
in three weeks. It used to be a nightly ritual. As much as they horsed around, she and Amber had been pretty good in retrospect. They probably could’ve ranked in a tournament, though in no way did she expect to win.

She got up and moped to the kitchen, stopping with her hand on the wall phone.
What the crap is Amber’s number?
Riley had always tapped her face in the contact list. The only time she had ever typed the number out was the day Mom got her the iPhone two years ago.
The iPhone!
I might not have cell reception, but I can look up the number.
Riley ran to her room, digging through the nightstand drawer. She hugged the white iPhone 4 to her chest as if it were a beloved kitten and clicked the power button.

Dead.

“Shit.”

Riley tore her room apart, hunting for the charging cable. When she didn’t find it a half-hour later, she darted across the hall to the junk room and attacked the unopened boxes of ‘stuff from the house.’ The sight of Mom’s things broke her resolve not to cry more, but she kept on searching. The precious white cable turned up perched atop mom’s recipe book in the ninth box she checked.

Still sniffling, but wearing a broad grin, she rushed back to her room and plugged the phone in. The screen remained black. She bounced up and down on the bed, chanting, “Comeon comeon comeon.”

Ten agonizing minutes later, a white Apple logo appeared. She shook the slab of technology, as if that would convey the message it needed to boot faster. As soon as it came up, she pushed the contact icon, and Amber’s entry. The number hid behind a pop up warning her she had 10% battery power.

“Argh! Go away!” She mashed the dismiss button.

She read Amber’s phone number four times, speaking it aloud. After repeating it twice more without looking at the screen, she put the phone down and marched back to the kitchen chanting it. When she picked up the handset and reached for the buttons, dead silence in the earpiece knocked the number right out of her short-term memory. Riley slouched, and let the receiver fall against the wall, bouncing on its cord.

“Dad?” she whispered, trudging to his room. “Dad?”

“Yes, hon?” He looked up from his radio. He seemed simultaneously happy to see her as well as scared.

“Your phones don’t work.”

“I know. You see any wires outside?”

“Actually, yeah. There’s one off the pole.”

“That’s main power. The phones came with the house. Telco wanted to charge me twelve hundred bucks to run cable out this far.”

Why do you live in the ass end of nowhere!
Her mental voice shrieked. Outside, she remained despondent and silent. “Oh.”

Head down, she plodded back to her room and collapsed on her knees, leaning against the bed with her head atop her crossed arms. Sobbing lasted a shade less than fifteen minutes, after which she slid like a murder victim to the rug. She didn’t like these people. She wanted her
friend
back. All Lyle and Camila wanted to do was have sex with each other. Jesse was just a little kid, even if he was supposedly thirteen, and Luis…
Luis smoked himself retarded
.

Riley cringed at the imagined voice of her mother chiding her for using that word. ‘Sorry it just slipped out’ didn’t make Amber any less pissed when Stacy dropped an ‘N-bomb’ in casual conversation. She felt guilty, not to mention hypocritical―she’d felt as angry as Amber. Overwhelming boredom seeped in. She lost track of time for a while, but eventually sat up and turned on the Xbox and her TV, leery of breaking Mom’s decree by hooking it up to the big screen. She went into the game, growing more and more forlorn at the separation from her best friend as the familiar screens popped up. The game nagged at her about not being able to connect, but she managed to get it to start a single-player match against an army of computer-controlled opponents.

It had long ago become boring as it offered zero challenge compared to thinking enemies… not to mention she couldn’t squeaker-troll the computer. At first, she played lazily, not caring how well she did. Playing at all felt like some kind of betrayal of Amber. Had she sworn off the game since they could no longer play it together? Had she been lurking in the lobby every night wondering why Riley hadn’t shown up? Guilt grew to anger, and the digital automatons paid a heavy price in pixilated blood.

Riley went on a rampage.

“That’s a lot different than the movies you used to like.” Dad leaned on her doorjamb. “Looks like you’re pretty good at it, Squirrel.”

“Do you
have
to call me that?” She mowed down a dozen unthinking soldiers with a heavy machine gun.

“You used to laugh at that name.” He sighed with a wistful stare into space. “Sometimes when I’d use it, you’d go grab a cookie and nibble on it.”