Crooked by Laura McNeal

Author:Laura McNeal
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307433244
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

25

AMOS ACCOSTED

Amos pulled his jacket collar snug and headed back home the way he came. It could’ve been worse, he decided. It could’ve been colder tonight. He could’ve been walking uphill instead of down. He could’ve been the one to unload his dinner instead of Sands Mandeville. Still, it was all pretty disappointing. And—a real surprise—although he’d had his hand around Sands Mandeville’s breast, he couldn’t remember exactly what it felt like, and if you couldn’t remember the particulars and, worse, wound up feeling grimy besides, how big an achievement could it be?

He turned right on Genesee and checked his pace as he approached Clara Wilson’s house. Clara Wilson, whom he had betrayed, out loud and in public. There was a light in an upstairs bedroom, slight shadowy movement on the ceiling. Probably it was Clara’s room and Clara’s shadow. Amos looked around. On the dirty sidewalk, there were wet pebbles of just the right size to tap at her window without breaking it. But what would he say even if he got her attention? “Hi, I was just walking by after feeling up Sands Mandeville and calling you a dink”?

Amos walked on. He was tired and cold and miserable. He wanted nothing now except to be home, to talk to no one, to crawl into bed and stay there for about a year. Most of the houses he passed were dark or had just a single light on in some dim room. Only an occasional car would pass, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A lighted bus droned by, carrying a single rider. When a car slowed alongside him, Amos had the fleeting fantastic thought that it was his father, smiling, alive, coming to pick him up in the old Econoline, to give him a warm ride back to a warm, normal life, and so Amos turned with a kind of pleasant expectancy.

It wasn’t his father’s Econoline, of course.

It was half car, half truck. The front portion contained two seats and looked like a large sedan; the rear had been fitted out with pickup bed and lockbox. There were three people in the front seat. The passenger-side window went zipping down. The driver leaned past the passenger and spoke in a soft crooning voice. “Hello, Hero.”

Amos stopped, completely dumbfounded. And then, trying for nonchalance, he lifted his chin and said, “Hello, Eddie.”

Eddie was leaning forward and grinning past a girl in the middle of the seat and, on the far end of the seat, his brother, Charles, who was paying little attention to the girl and even less to Amos, or so it seemed. Charles stared straight ahead. In profile, Amos could clearly see the strange veiny contours of his shaved scalp. He said something under his breath, and the girl let out a raucous laugh. Charles smiled thinly and let the girl tangle herself more tightly into him. Eddie ignored them. “C’mon over closer,” he said to Amos. “I don’t like to yell.”

Eddie was acting more normal than the time Amos had seen him in the west-wing bathroom.

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