Bleed Like Me (2 page)

“Skate girl, huh?” a voice broke into my cocoon, and I blinked the menthol buzz away. A tall, too-thin boy stood in front of me, smirking. A bright blue patch of hair dropped in front of his left eye, and a retro Sex Pistols shirt clung to his lanky frame.

“What?” I blinked again and shook my head.

He gave me a small smile and shrugged. His eyes traced over me, and it took everything I had not to cross my arms over my chest and move away.

“Why aren't you with the rest of the chain-smokers at the Punkin' Donuts?” he said. He took a step toward me, and I slid back so I could see him better. My eyes dropped to the aerosol can and paper bag he held.

“What are you doing with that?”

He sprayed the can into the bag and stuck his face into the fumes. His chest puffed out as he inhaled. I pressed my hand into the grass beneath me, plucking at the cool wetness. Wetness I could feel along the back of my jeans.

He coughed and dropped the bag to his side. “Livening up the evening.”

I looked him over again. The rest of his hair was dark brown like his eyes. His jeans hung low on his hips, but not in the annoying way where they practically fall off. The bones of his shoulders jutted out from his shirt. He grinned at me, slightly dazed.

“Are you retarded?”

“Nope,” he said, and the grin cocked up even higher on the side of his mouth not hidden by hair.

“You sure? No one huffs here. It's country.”

“Country?” He shook the can again.

“Yeah, as in it's for idiots who can't find better drugs.”

He chuckled, and I stared at the way his hair fell across his dark eyes and clear skin. No acne. How does this even happen to guys? He brushed his long fingers over his mouth, and I followed them as they fell back to his side. Hands have always been interesting to me, and his moved too gracefully in comparison to the rest of him. Like they didn't know they were on the end of a sloppy boy.

“Well,” he said, dropping the can into the paper bag,
“huffing wouldn't be my first choice, but we're in the suburbs. Sometimes you gotta work with what you've got.”

“We're like three El stops from Chicago. My grandmother could score drugs in this town.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I like the fumes.” I looked him over again. The thumb of his left hand hooked in his jean pocket while his other fingers drummed against the denim.

“Huh. My brothers huffed on the streets of Guatemala to keep from getting too hungry.” Why'd I tell him that? Why was I even talking to him? Shit. Shit. Shit.

He took another half step toward me. “Yeah? Your brothers are from Guatemala?”

“Adopted.”

“Obviously.” He motioned to my pale face and blue eyes. Something was written on his palm. I squinted to see, but it was too blurred.

Enough. I stood up and grabbed my messenger bag. “Okay. Well, it was nice meeting you. I'm gonna go talk to some of the boarders.”

“What's your name?” He reached out and fingered the hoops running up the side of my ear. I flinched and knocked his hand away. Goose bumps prickled along the back of my neck. It'd been too long since someone touched me.

I took a step around him. “Amelia Gannon. But no one calls me Amelia. It's just Gannon.”

He pushed his hair off his face, and I saw a metal bar peeking from his eyebrow. “Gannon. Yeah, I like that.”

“Glad you approve. I live to please. Really.” I slid my pack of cigarettes into my pocket. I took a step to the side and he countered. People normally weren't this interested in having a conversation with me. I crossed my leg behind me and stared at him for an uncomfortable amount of time. “So?”

His eyes looked glazed, and it occurred to me his interest might be more from the fume high than anything else. It made sense. I wasn't exactly the kind of girl guys got in big conversations with, even random blue-haired boys with eyebrow piercings and nice hands.

“So what?” he said, reaching out to trace my hoops again.

“Dude, back off.” I grabbed his wrist and dug my nails in. “Why are you touching me?”

He dropped his hand. “I like your hoops. They're sexy.”

My cheeks heated, but I squinted my eyes at him. “Listen, whatever your name is, you can't just go around touching people. You'll get your ass handed to you.”

He tilted his head back and laughed. His Adam's apple bobbed along his slender neck. I gulped as something warm pooled in my stomach. Shit.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you a boarder?”

He snorted. “Fuck, no. I was never sober enough to learn
when everyone else was figuring it out. Seems kind of stupid to try it now.”

“You mean when everyone learned in, like, fifth grade? One of those child addicts, eh?”

His face froze for a half second, but then he grinned. “Something like that.” He drummed his fingers on his jeans again. “So do you skate?”

“No. Not in a long time. Too busy working. I just come here for the amusement of watching guys fall on their asses.”

He grinned. “One of those types, then?”

“What types?”

He looked me up and down, and my stomach knotted. “The angry girls.”

My fingers tightened around the strap of my bag. “Not quite.”

He leaned closer. “Then what type are you?”

“I'm not any type.” I inched back. My strong instinct to bolt warred with the depressing realization that I had no place to go and the even sadder fact that this guy was the first guy in a long time to talk to me without asking for money or cigarettes.

“So where do you work?” he said, dropping to the grass and patting the spot next to him.

I didn't move. “Standard Hardware.”

He patted the spot again. I stared at his fingers and tilted
my head, trying to decide if he was being friendly or stalky. Chitchat wasn't my strong suit, so it was hard to say. He released a sigh before yanking me next to him. I scrambled to get up, but then his hand touched my side and I froze.

“Relax, Gannon. It's a nice night. I want to talk to you. You don't have to be so cagey.”

I shifted away and narrowed my eyes. He offered me a goofy boy grin. I hugged my knees to my chest and focused on the boarders.

He grunted. “So a job at the hardware store must mean you know your way around tools?”

I couldn't help smiling. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

His hands moved to the sleeve of my hoodie and he brushed away a piece of dried grass. His fingers lingered over the outside of my wrist before I snatched my hand away.

“I like girls who know their way around tools.”

“Are you being gross?”

He laughed and nudged me with his elbow. “That's
your
head in the gutter, not mine.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Michael Brooks. But Brooks to you. Okay?”

I shrugged.

“So . . .”—he picked at a piece of loose string on the edge of my jeans—“do you want to hang out for a while?”

“Not really.” I had nowhere to go, but I still wasn't sure
about Mr. Grabby Hands Brooks. Or my weird response to him.

He chuckled. “You don't like me?”

“You're a little handsy for my taste.”

He laughed harder and pulled his hand back from the loose string. “Not normally. It must be something about you.”

It was a line. It had to be. But why was I being singled out to be on the receiving end of cheesy lines? “What are you talking about? You just met me.”

“I go to your school.”

I stretched my legs out in front of me. “Since when?”

“Three weeks ago. Haven't you seen me?”

I turned to him and laughed in his face. “It's a big school. And why would I have noticed you?”

“I've seen you,” he said, and shifted his knee so it touched mine. The warmth of his leg made me feel strange and, if I was being completely honest, a little bit good. “Come on. Let me walk you home.”

“You're not walking me home. I'm not telling you where I live.”

“Okay, I'll walk you somewhere else, then.”

“Who even said I was leaving?”

He nodded to the flickering street lamp behind us. “Skate park's closing soon. What're your plans for the rest of the evening? Is there any place else you'd like to watch guys fall on their asses?”

I pulled my phone out of my messenger bag to check the time. It was too early to consider going home. My brothers would still be up.

“I think I'll stay here a little while longer.”

He inched close enough that his whole thigh pressed fully against mine. “Me too, then.”

I shrugged and tamped down the heat on my cheeks, grateful for the growing darkness. “Suit yourself.” I held out my pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

He scoffed. “Filtered menthols? I don't think so. I smoke real cigarettes.”

I lit another cigarette and dropped my lighter into my pocket. Smoke curled around me, and wetness from the ground seeped further into the back of my pants. But the warmth of Brooks's too-close leg kept me from paying much attention to the cold discomfort. Neither of us said a word. I opened my mouth to ask what he was doing there in the first place, but somehow the question felt like an intrusion into the strange peace blanketing the night.

I'd gotten a job at Standard because it was a really good way to avoid my family on the weekends. My boss, Dennis, liked me and let me fiddle with all the tools and even showed me how to use most of them. When I wasn't scheduled to work, I planted myself in the storage garage across the alley behind the store. Graffiti riddled the outside of the garage, but no one had managed to break into it. Dennis had two industrial-strength padlocks on the outside and had only given me a key to them after I'd been working at Standard a full year. And even then it was because he'd gotten sick one day and I'd had to track him down at his compulsively tidy bachelor-pad apartment to open everything up.

The best part of the storage garage was all the stuff I could build out of scrap or slightly deformed wood. It wasn't rocket
science, but it took a certain kind of concentration to work a circular saw and that made everything else in my brain shut off.

Carpentry can be both an art and a science. On top of me not having the best quality wood, things occasionally got mucked up. Especially when I was impatient or doing half-baked rush jobs. I'd learned how to make some cool things out of screwed-up projects or even how to change the design of a project to fit in with my mistakes. There were tools for almost everything, and over the past two years I'd fiddled with almost all of them.

My hands moved automatically over pieces of wood, plucking one that appeared to be the right size. I marked lengths with measuring tape and drew cut lines using my T square. My movements were quick, focused, confident.

I'd been working on a low bookshelf for my room. Nothing too elaborate, but a place to keep my movies. Yeah, I collected movies when everyone and their brother streamed. I liked vintage. I got DVDs at garage sales for a dollar and had a collection of almost a hundred.

The shelves had been the trickiest part because I'd beveled the edges so the movies could sit on a slant. I'd gone through my entire vocabulary of swears and an embarrassing amount of wood before I finally got them how I wanted.

Now I was making a small door to attach to the front of the shelf. No sense tempting my brothers with the sight of my movies. Not that a closed door wasn't temptation enough.

“Gannon.”

I looked up from the belt sander to see Ali with her hands on her hips, tapping the toe of her Converse, her bleached hair pulled into three random topknots. I flicked the power button off the sander and raised the safety goggles Dennis made me wear.

“What?”

“How long are you gonna be here?”

Ali was my best friend, but we both had enough shit going on in our lives to use the term loosely. I suspected Ali was as paranoid of people getting in her business as I was. She lived with her mom and on most nights, her mom's skeevy boyfriend, Dave. I'd only met the douche bag once, but his gaze hadn't left the curve of Ali's ass one time during our conversation. Classy.

“I'm almost done. What do you need?”

“Fortification.”

This was my and Ali's code for bumming cigarettes off each other. She was the only other girl I knew who smoked filtered menthols, and if either one of us was without, we could pretty much count on the other. Though nine out of ten times I was Ali's supplier. Her mom wouldn't let her work because her grades sucked, so she spent most of her time hanging out at the Punkin' Donuts across the street from Standard, bumming cigarettes off other people until they tired of her.

“Well's dry at the Punkin', huh?”

“Yeah. Plus, no menthol smokers today.”

I put away the sander and rubbed sawdust onto the thighs of my jeans. I tossed the goggles into a pile in the corner of the garage and grabbed my bag before locking up.

“Dennis,” I shouted, walking through the back door of the store, a tiny alarm beep signaling my entrance.

“Yes?” A shock of white hair popped out from the plumbing-supply aisle. Dennis's dorky red vest tugged across the pooch of his stomach. His glasses were carefully taped on one side, and his plaid shirt was tucked into his jeans.

“Ali and I are taking a break. I'll be back in ten minutes. I locked the garage, but I'm not done in there.”

He nodded at Ali and turned his wrinkled face to me. “Don't light up in front of the store. My customers keep complaining about the smoke.”

I frowned. “Okay.”

“And don't be gone too long. I'm gonna clock you in to help me with this paint-sample display when you get back.”

I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder. “You could have called Ricardo,” I said. “I'm not even supposed to be here today.”