Wild Awake (3 page)

He turns his eyes back to me, his expression still curiously flat. I’m starting to wonder if maybe he is on drugs, one of those evil downers that steals your soul.

“Nah. Let’s go.”

I waver. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m just a block away.”

I glance down the street. On the one hand: stud belt. On the other hand: trudging all the way back home with my stupid busted bike.

Well, if it comes down to it, I’m pretty sure I could out-run him.

I nod. “Okay.”

“It’s this way.”

He starts walking, and I lope along next to him, wheeling the bike between us. He doesn’t talk, so I fill the heavy silence with charming banter.

“What band was that?”

“Pax Satanica.”

“You into metal?”

“Not really.”

I wonder why he offered to fix my tire if he’s just going to be surly and monosyllabic. Maybe he’s not used to talking to people. Maybe he’s on a bad trip and I look like some kind of bicycle-wielding demon.

Either way, I shut up.

We turn onto a residential street lined with old wooden houses with rotting porches and bars on the basement windows, the kind of neighborhood that used to be dignified but now feels beleaguered, like a scuffed antique nightstand at the Salvation Army.

“I’m Kiri.”

“Skunk.”

That shuts me up again.

We stop in front of a white stucco house with a drooping pink roof and sagging white gutters, like a wedding cake left out in the rain. There’s a little lawn in front of it, bordered by a dilapidated fence that comes up to my waist. Skunk lifts the metal latch on the gate, and I follow him through. There’s a flower bed next to the house with a few bedraggled clumps of those pink and purple flowers they sell outside the hardware store for ninety-nine cents—pansies or posies or something like that. It looks like an animal’s been digging them up.

Perhaps, I think to myself, a skunk.

Instead of going up the stairs and through the front door, Skunk goes down a concrete walkway along the side of the house. A motion-sensitive light comes on a few seconds later, and I see old cigarette butts in the gravel on the side of the path. I’m half expecting to see three or four more Skunk lookalikes hanging out in the backyard, drinking Jack Daniels while their pet pit bulls growl and strain against their chains.

We come around to the back of the house, where there’s a small concrete courtyard with a couple of rusting chairs, a toolshed, and some potted plants. There are no pit bulls—at least, none outside. His meathead friends must all be at the Pax Satanica show. The house backs out onto a gravel alleyway with chain-link fences smothered in blackberry canes. There’s an old brown van parked behind the house, next to the garbage and recycle bins. Skunk takes out his keys and unlocks a sliding glass door. I’m all set to refuse to come into his creepy rape-hole, but he doesn’t invite me in.

“I’ll be right out.”

He slides the door open and goes inside, coming out a moment later with a cardboard box. He puts the box on the ground.

“Can I see your bike?”

I hand over my bicycle. He flips it over as if it weighs nothing and pulls up the lever to release the back tire. I watch incredulously. Skunk’s hands look like they were made to demolish buildings, not disassemble delicate bicycle parts with the grace and fluidity of a heart surgeon.

“You a bike mechanic?”

“Nah.”

He roots around in the cardboard box, pulls out a little plastic hook, and pries the tire off the metal rim. It’s unnerving and a little gruesome, like watching someone skin a rabbit. I wince when he reaches under the tire and pulls out the rubber tube like a long black piece of intestine. He holds it out to me.

“You want to take this home and patch it?”

“Uh, sure.” I take the tube.

“It’s not a big tear. Should patch up just fine.”

“Yeah.”

Now I’m the one being monosyllabic. I stuff the damaged tube into my pocket.

He reaches into his box again and pulls out a new tube. He uncoils it and sticks the plastic stem through the stem-hole in the tire, then wraps the tube the rest of the way around the rim. He picks up the plastic hook again and starts forcing the edge of the tire back onto the rim with the new tube nesting inside it. His motions are so quick and smooth you can tell he doesn’t need to think about it at all. He looks like one of those Japanese chefs you can watch making sushi rolls through the glass window at Miyako on West Fourth, who pat down the rice, lay down avocado and crabmeat, roll it into a cylinder, and chop all in one seamless motion.

In ten seconds Skunk has the tire back on the wheel and is filling it with air from a wheezing hand pump. He pops the wheel back onto the bike, locks down the lever, flips the bike upright, and hands it to me without saying a word.

“Thanks for the fix,” I say.

He nods.

A breeze blows through the courtyard, and I shiver. Time to be going home. But just when I’m about to say so, Bicycle Boy talks to me.

“Where’s your helmet?”

I can’t help it. I am an Eyebrow Person from a tribe of Eyebrow People; I raise my eyebrows. “You smoke cigarettes and you’re asking me where my helmet is?”

He shrugs. “People drive like jerks.”

“I’ll be fine.”

I squeeze the brake levers on my bike and glance toward the walkway. Suddenly it feels very, very late.

“I should get home. Thanks for helping.”

He nods again. I stand there for a second to see if he has anything else to say. He doesn’t.

“All right. Peace, man.”

I turn my bike around and wheel it toward the side alley. The tires feel firm and healthy. My bike feels whole and reassuring, back to its old reliable self. Even though I’m worn out, I’m kinda looking forward to the ride home.

“Hey.”

I stop and turn my head. For a second, I think he’s going to ask for my number, but instead he takes something out of the cardboard box and tosses it to me. I catch it. It’s a little blinker light. When I press the button, its white LEDs start to flash on and off.

“Thanks.”

I snap it onto the seat post of my bike and give Skunk an awkward wave good-bye. He picks up his box and stands there watching as I walk my bike down the side of the house, as if to make sure he put the wheel on right.

I get to the street, hop on, and don’t stop pedaling until I can see the lights on my front porch.

“I can’t believe you went down
there. You
do
realize that guy who called you was running a scam.”

Lukas unscrews the glass jar with the fuzzy green nugget of weed at the bottom. He reaches in, breaks off a tiny chunk, and places it in a silver grinder. Lukas packs a bowl like it’s a Japanese tea ceremony: formal, lengthy, and full of cryptic little steps that absolutely have to be done the right way.

“Oh, come on, Lukas—”

He cuts me off. “Let’s see. Calling people on the phone, telling them you have valuable heirlooms belonging to their dead relatives and all they have to do is meet you downtown alone at night to pick them up. Sure, Kiri, doesn’t sound like a scam at all.”

“He didn’t say he had anything valuable, he just—”

“He could have knifed you. He could have stolen your bike. I mean, no offense, but wasn’t your sister kind of a druggie? What if it’s one of her druggie friends?”

“Sukey wasn’t a druggie. What makes you think she was a druggie?”

“Didn’t she die of an overdose or something?”

“No!”

“How’d she die, then?”

“She was in an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“What kind of accident do you think? There’s a
reason
I’m still not allowed to drive.”

I say it a bit too vehemently. Lukas glances up.

“Sorry. I’m just saying maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t find him.”

My cheeks flush. At the time Sukey died, I was a giggly seventh grader whose idea of a good time was playing my favorite Disney songs on the keyboard over and over with my equally giggly friends. I know there are details about the accident that Mom and Dad have never told me, and a pathetic little part of me is grateful for that. Just thinking about the
possibility
of details makes my mouth go dry and my stomach clench like I’m going to throw up—if I knew exactly what she had been doing, or where she had been going, or who she had been fighting with on her cell phone before she crashed, I’d feel sick for the rest of my life.

Lukas takes the lid off the grinder and taps the weed out onto the book on his lap.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I gave it to him for his birthday. He unzips his pencil case, takes out the teak pipe he got at the Balinese import store on Commercial Drive, and packs the weed into it carefully like he’s tucking it into bed. His eyes narrow in concentration.

“Why don’t you ask your dad about it?” says Lukas. “Your parents can get email on their cruise ship, right?”

I reach behind my head and massage the muscles in my neck. Even though I didn’t get home until late last night, I still got up early and practiced piano for five and a half hours before coming over to Lukas’s house, just like my schedule said, and I can feel it in my shoulders and back.

“My dad would just tell me I shouldn’t have gone down there.”

“What about your mom?”

“She never knows anything about anything.”

When confronted with any kind of life situation, Lukas can be trusted to direct you to one of two handy flowcharts:

1. Ask Parent A
Ask Parent B

or

2. Ask Parent B
Ask Parent A
.

If your problem cannot be resolved by talking to Parent A or Parent B, both charts direct you to
C: Problem Not Worth Solving
.

Which he does right on cue.

“Why do you want to find this Doug guy so bad anyway?”

“He has her things.”

“What things?”

I cross my arms. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“What things?” he insists.

Sometimes, I hate Lukas.

“Well, he didn’t say
specifically
.”

Lukas lets out a self-satisfied grunt. “See? I told you. Scammer.”

He flicks his silver lighter and takes one long puff. He closes his eyes when he exhales, and I watch the smoke pour out from his lips and float up past the top of his head. Lukas never takes more than one hit, as if his senses are so refined that anything more than the slightest puff would leave him more baked than a tray of cookies. He hands the pipe to me. “Here.”

I flick the lighter over the bowl and suck too hard. Lukas has been trying to teach me the right way to smoke weed for months, but I always end up burning the back of my throat. My eyes water. When I open my mouth, a huge cloud of smoke billows out, like I swallowed a burning building. Lukas watches me critically.

“Try to hold it in longer before exhaling.”

I shut my mouth again before the rest of the smoke escapes. It’s hard to hold my breath with Lukas watching me like that. I nod, cheeks puffed out, wishing I’d chosen a slightly sexier expression to freeze my face in.

“And don’t draw so much in at once.”

I let out my smoke, gasping. “No kidding.”

I put down the pipe to take a breather. The room seems to sharpen, like I’m looking at it through the lenses of a new and miraculous pair of glasses. I gaze at the Christmas lights. “Lukas, did you ever notice that there’s a pattern in the ceiling that looks like the Big Dipper?”

Lukas smiles, which inexplicably makes me think of clean-faced Russian peasants singing folk songs, and reaches out to gently pry the pipe from my fingers. “You, my friend, are a little high.”

“I’m going to go back there and find that guy. I don’t care if he’s Hannibal freaking Lecter.”

“All right, Nancy Drew. Hand over the piece.” Lukas’s fingers close around mine, trying to extract the pipe, which I have suddenly decided to hang on to.

“Just a sec, it’s almost cashed.”

Lukas has been teaching me stoner terminology to go with my smoking lessons:
cashed
for used up,
piece
for pipe. I think he’s worried I’ll make us look dumb in front of the older, cooler bands we’ll naturally start hanging around with after we win Battle of the Bands if I don’t learn proper form.