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Mom turns her smile up a couple of notches like this is the best idea since the invention of the curling iron. Dad stares at
the floor. You can tell he didn’t have much input into this decision. And, of course, the first words out of Lacy’s mouth are, “Me! Why me? Why doesn’t Ceejay have to go?”

I admit I’m thinking the same thing. Not that I want to spend time with a grandmother who basically thinks I’m a thug, but it’s hard not to feel like this is yet another way for the parents to let me know I’m not a real part of the family. After all, why else would they choose my weakly little fourteen-year-old sister over me? I’m definitely not going to argue about their choice, though.

Mom keeps her smile at a steady wattage. “Ceejay’s going to work for your uncle this summer,” she tells Lacy. “We’ve had that planned for a long time.”

“But what about my plans?” Lacy whines. “What about all my friends?”

I’m thinking,
What plans
? Her and her friends lying around the public swimming pool all summer hoping some idiotic junior high boy will buy them a Coke?

“It’s just a month or so,” says Mom.

“A month or so!” Lacy whines. “I’ll die if I can’t be around my friends for a month.”

Finally, Dad gets into the act—“I don’t want to hear any more talk like that.” His voice has a stern edge. Usually playing sergeant at arms isn’t in Dad’s nature, but he’ll do it if he thinks he has to back up Mom. “Your grandma is part of this family and we don’t turn our backs on family. We have to be there for each other.”

Right, I’m thinking. Like how you didn’t turn your backs on Bobby when the town assholes sent him into the army.

“But why does it have to be
me
?” Lacy’s practically in tears now.

“Your mother already explained that,” Dad tells her.
“Besides, it’ll be good for you to think about someone besides yourself for a while.”

At least someone finally had the sense to say that to her. I’m just surprised it was Dad. He usually treats Lacy like she’s a shiny little princess who does no wrong.

She shuts up after that, but I know the look on her face. She’s plotting something, probably some way to trick the parents into sending me to Grandma’s instead. It’s hopeless, though. Mom and Dad have their minds made up.

On our way upstairs after the family conference, I nudge Lacy’s shoulder and tell her not to worry. There will probably be a whole fresh crop of boys she can drool over in Davenport.

“Why don’t you go over there then,” she fires back. “Maybe you’ll meet a boy who likes you for a change.”

“Hey, don’t get smart-ass with me.” I give her earlobe a hard flick. “I’m not the one making you go.”

“But it wouldn’t make any difference if you went,” she says. “You’d be better off not hanging around with your stupid friends anyway.”

I start to go for her ear again, but she cups her hand over it. “You’re such a little bitch,” I tell her. But I have to admit she’s not altogether wrong, at least when it comes to Gillis.

In my room, I flop down on my bed and listen to the phone ring. Without even checking, I know it’s Gillis. He’s afraid to come over here and face me eye to eye, but he’s called and texted me so many times today it’s not even funny.

This time, though, he leaves a message on my voicemail I’ll have to respond to. And if it turns out he’s lying, that’s the end of us. For sure. Not only that, but I ought to crack his other eyebrow. Give him a fat lip. An Indian burn. A Dutch rub. Pink belly. An atomic wedgie. I could tell him he’s ugly too, but he already knows that.

It’s not like he’s the greatest friend anyway. Actually, he’s the kind of person you hang out with not so much because you like them as that they’ve just been around forever. What kind
of real friend tells you he has testicular cancer and he needs you to help him rub salve on it?

But I have to wonder about this message. Maybe it’s just his way of making sure I finally call him back. Or maybe he’s actually telling the truth. There just might be a chance I wasn’t imagining things the other day when I thought I saw Bobby in Sophie Lowell’s Toyota. Because that’s what Gillis’s message is about.

“I wanted to talk to you in person about this,” he says, “but since you’re so stupid and won’t call me back, I have no choice but to talk to your voicemail. After you left the party, Sophie Lowell showed up, and I told her how you thought you saw her and Bobby.” There’s a pause. He probably thinks I’ll go ahead and pick up, but since I don’t, he goes, “And so Sophie’s like, ‘Maybe she did. Maybe I was driving him over to see my sister.’ ”

I almost drop the phone.

Now I
have
to call him back. The phone rings about six times. I know he’s just letting it ring to get back at me. Eventually, he answers. “Oh, hey, Ceejay,” he says casually. “What’s up?”

“You know what’s up, leprechaun. What’s the story on Sophie?”

“Oh, that. Nothing much, except she told me Bobby might have called up her sister Mona a couple nights ago and said he was staying at Chuck Dunmire’s place.”

Chuck Dunmire! He was Bobby’s best friend in high school. The two were thick. But still, it doesn’t make sense. Why would Bobby come back and not tell his own family? Sure, he hasn’t exactly been in close contact with us for a while now, but last time I talked to him he said he had to lie low for security reasons. Still, you’d think the military would let him call and tell us he’s coming home early.

I go, “What’s all this
maybe
and
might have
stuff? Did any of this happen or not?”

“I’m just telling you what Sophie told me,” Gillis says.

“Well, you should’ve asked her more about it.”

“She was plastered. There wasn’t any getting any more out of her.”

“You mean
you
were plastered.”

“How about this, then,” he says. “I’ll take you over to Chuck Dunmire’s and we’ll see what’s up for ourselves.”

I pause for a moment. Gillis is not exactly who I want to hang out with today, but checking into this Bobby and Mona deal is the most important thing right now, so I tell him to come over as soon as he can. I’m not getting my hopes up, though. I’ve done so much hoping where Bobby’s concerned, I don’t hardly trust hope anymore.

When Gillis shows up at my front door, I have to admit it’s pretty satisfying to get a good look at his face. His eyebrow’s all swollen and yellow-purple around the edges from the head butt. He probably should’ve got stitches, but his parents are the type that won’t send their kids to the doctor unless there’s actually a bone poking out somewhere.

On the way to Chuck’s, Gillis never says he’s sorry for acting like such a jackass at the party. I guess he figures driving me around is as close to an apology as he wants to get. Even so, I know I’ll end up forgiving him sooner or later like I always do, but I’m not going to make it easy. One- or two-word answers are about all he gets out of me the whole way over to Chuck’s apartment.

Chuck was a real cool guy in high school, but now he’s kind of a lowlife. Always stoned, can’t hold down a job, knocked up Layla Evans but doesn’t have anything to do with the kid. He used to be pretty good-looking, a real player with the ladies.
I even had a crush on him for about a year—but he’s swelled up a little bit since high school. Now he lives in Truncheon Gardens, a flimsy stack of cardboard-boxlike apartments behind the Quick Stop.

When Gillis knocks on Chuck’s door, we can hear the TV through the thin wall, but no one answers. Gillis knocks again, and I yell, “Hey, Chuck, it’s me, Ceejay. Open up.”

The door still doesn’t open, so we keep knocking and yelling till finally Chuck calls out, “Hey, hold on, dammit, Ceejay, let me put some pants on.”

Finally, he opens up, but he just stands there blocking the doorway, nothing on but his jeans. He has a beard now, and it’s so thick you can hardly tell where it leaves off and his chest hair begins. Without bothering with any small talk, I come right out and ask him if he’s heard anything from Bobby, and he’s like, “Bobby? How would I hear anything from Bobby? He’s still out on the east coast, right?”

“The east coast?” I say. “Last I heard he was in Germany.”

So Chuck’s like, “Yeah, right, that’s what I meant—the east coast of Germany.”

Something’s weird. Germany doesn’t even have an east coast, does it? Besides, Chuck seems antsy. I look around his shoulder into his apartment. Beer bottles clutter the coffee table, and right in the middle of them sits a single girl’s shoe. A pair of panties lies next to the couch. No trace of Bobby, but obviously Chuck has some kind of action going on in there.

“Look,” Gillis says. “We got it on pretty good authority Bobby came back to town early and he was staying over here.”

“Who’d you get that from?” A surprised look passes across Chuck’s face, but it seems exaggerated, like a bad soap-opera actor.

“Sophie Lowell,” I say. “Mona told her.”

Chuck shrugs. “Well, why don’t you go talk to Mona, then. I don’t know anything about it.”

Just then, a voice calls out, “Are they gone yet?”

Chuck turns around, and that’s when I see who he has in there with him—Amber Galen, one of the cupcake twins! I can’t believe it. There she is at the end of the hall, nothing but a blanket draped around her. I know Chuck gets around quite a bit, but I never expected an uppity type like Amber to go for a guy like him.

When she sees me staring at her, she ducks back into the bedroom, and that’s when I see the army-green duffel bag leaning against the wall at the back of the hall.

“What’s that duffel bag back there?” I ask.

Chuck looks at it for a second like he’s waiting for it to answer the question, then he goes, “That’s just my laundry. That’s all that is—laundry.”

His whole attitude seems out of whack, but that might just be because he’s in a hurry to get back to his cupcake. One thing for sure—we aren’t going to get anywhere else with him right now.

“Come on,” I tell Gillis. “Let’s take Chuck’s advice and go over to Mona’s and find out just what’s going on around here.”

“I wouldn’t go over there,” Chuck warns.

“Why not?”

“Her husband’s kind of paranoid. He’s liable to freak if you start in asking questions about his wife’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Let him,” I say. “Doesn’t make any difference to me.”

If Bobby’s likely to look up anyone in town before his own family, it’s Mona—even if she did go and get herself married while he was gone. She and Bobby dated all through his senior year. She was almost as wild as he was. One time he jackknifed into the Little River from the highest flimsy limb of this gargantuan oak tree on the bank, and she followed him right in. Hit the water so hard her bikini top came off. When Bobby used to climb out the window of one car into another while racing down the highway, she was one of the drivers. I was in the backseat when she came within two inches of sideswiping Brian Greer’s Chevy. She just laughed and laughed.

Not that they didn’t fall out every once in a while, but they were still tight when Bobby got sucked into the army. She cried on his shoulder the day he left and everything, said she’d wait
on him for a million years. Three months later I saw her riding around town with Garrett Dillon. Guess they don’t make a million years like they used to.

At nineteen, she moved in with Mark Schnabel. A year after that, she dumped Mark and married Rick Nichols. He’s fifteen years older than her and has a beak like an owl, but he makes more money in a day from the construction business than poor Mark makes in a year driving a Coke truck.

Now she and Rick have a pretty fancy house in the Summer Gate addition. Obviously, she won’t be able to say a whole lot if Rick’s there, but I figure maybe I can get her out on the front porch. No way am I just going to call her. It’s too easy to lie over the phone.

After a few punches on the bell, the door finally opens. It’s Rick. He’s not very tall but pretty wiry, the kind that thinks he’s a tough guy, but I get the feeling, if it came down to it, he’d find a way to back out of a fight with a real badass.

“Is Mona here?” I ask him. He looks at us more like we’re a couple of panhandlers stopping by to put the bite on him.

“Mona’s not home,” he says, and starts in quizzing me about what I want with his wife. I give him a made-up name and say I’m trying to find Sophie, that she’s a friend of mine. That loosens him up, and he tells us Mona and Sophie took a trip into the city to shop, but we might be able to catch Sophie back at her place around eight o’clock or so.

“If you happen to see Mona over there,” he says as we start to turn away, “tell her I’ll be waiting up for her.”

It’s kind of creepy the way he says it. You get the idea he’s trying to keep Mona on a short leash, but he can’t get a good grip on it.

Sophie’s a couple of years out of high school and lives in a
duplex with Kara Jackson, which is quite a few steps down from the house Mona scored for herself. Sophie and Kara are sitting on the front porch steps smoking cigarettes when we get there. No Mona in sight.

“What’s up, Ceejay?” Sophie says as we come up the sidewalk.

I’m like, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? Gillis here says you’ve been going around telling people my brother’s back in town.”

“I’m sure Gillis says a lot of things.” She glances at Kara, at the shrubs, at the porch step, but never makes eye contact with me.

“Come on,” Gillis says. “You’re not going to pretend you weren’t at Dani Grant’s party saying Bobby called Mona up, are you?”

She exhales a stream of smoke through her nostrils. “Oh, that. Turned out he wasn’t actually in town after all. He was calling from New Jersey or somewhere.”

I’m like, “New Jersey? Are you sure? He’s supposed to be in Germany.”

“Look.” She stubs her cigarette out on the porch step. “Maybe he is in Germany. I’m not the one who talked to him.”

“You’re going to tell me I didn’t see Bobby in your car driving by Corker Park?”

“Wasn’t me,” she says. “But I let Mona drive my car all the time.”

Thinking back, I can’t be sure Sophie actually was driving. I was paying too much attention to the passenger. “Well, where’s Mona then? We went over to her house and her husband said she was shopping with you.”