Narc (6 page)

“Nice way to change the subject,” Collin said.

“Maybe I don’t feel like talking about this right now.” I hid the Snackmaster inside a barbeque grill display, which was decorated with plastic hamburger patties.

“You never talked about it before,” Collin said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not exactly my definition of a hero.”

“Gee. Thanks,” I said, kicking a shopping cart across the linoleum. “You’re not my idea of an Ivy Leaguer.”

“Oh snap. Sweet comeback,” said Collin, grabbing hold of the cart and pushing it out the door. I followed him into the empty parking lot. Collin was right. I’d always fantasized about busting the bad guys, but that didn’t mean I could hack it. Half of my uncles were army guys. It was the default option, according to Collin, who was graduating a year ahead of me. He wouldn’t stop bragging about his acceptance letter from Tufts.

He started slicking back his hair. He wore aftershave that reeked like floor cleaner and when I called, he wasn’t home. On the rare occasion we hung out, there wasn’t much to say.

“Man, I can’t wait to get out of here,” Collin said, climbing into the cart.

“What? Walmart?”

“This,” he said, spreading out his arms. “You want to end up like them?” He jabbed a finger at the trucks crawling along the turnpike.

“I’m just sick of school,” I said, giving the cart a shove.

“I hear that,” Collin said. “But your grades don’t suck. What’s the deal?”

“It’s not about grades.”

School never fazed me. It was the space in between, the lunchrooms and PE fields, the faces in the hall, that left me numb.

“You better start pumping iron,” Collin said.

I pushed the cart a little faster. “Why?”

“Because the army is going to kick your ass.”

I smashed my weight into the cart. Collin jumped off just as it tipped and slammed into a creek behind the parking lot. It sat there, half-submerged in muddy water, its wheels spinning around and around.

That was the last time I talked to Collin, my so-called best friend. I tried calling his house. He never called back. His mom said he’d gone shopping for dorm stuff: a coffee maker and a duvet. I juggled the word
duvet
in my brain until it made no sense.

I got off the train at Dadeland South Station and hustled across the busy intersection. The air smelled like car exhaust and the sweet smoke of burning meat, thanks to the BBQ spot nearby. When the light changed, I made a mad dash to the bookstore. A Lexus blared its horn, as if I was committing some crime by crossing the street.

When I walked inside the bookstore, it felt like everybody was watching me, from the white-haired woman checking out the Monet calendars, to the Little League boy in the café practicing his times tables. No sign of Morgan and her Cleopatra hair.

I circled around the entire store, then I finally saw her at a table, slurping coffee from one of those complicated, dome-shaped cups from Starbucks. She wore a pair of wooden flip-flops and a dress so frilly it swallowed her whole. The buttons below her neck were shaped like butterflies. I spent a lot of time staring at them as walked toward her.

Morgan had a bunch of art magazines spread across the table, along with her sketchbook. Its pages had swollen it to almost twice its natural size. I took out a pen and drew a smiley face on the cover.

“Hey. No vandalizing,” she said, smacking me away. “Don’t you realize that you’re breaking the law?”

“How so?”

“You’re BYOCing in a bookstore.”

I pulled up a chair. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Bringing your own coffee.”

My fingers curled around the styrofoam cup. “Keep it a secret.”

“It’s cool. I’m on a first-name basis with the entire staff.” As if to prove her point, she waved to the dude at the coffee counter. He was counting change without looking up. “Here’s a present for you,” she said, slipping a rubber band around my wrist. She held her hand there for a second. “Fits perfectly.”

“Thanks,” I said, then looked around some more. “What’s the story?”

“I worked here last summer. But I got axed.”

“For what?

She grinned. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“So it’s like that, huh?”

She mashed her hands together and bent forward. “Afraid so,” she whispered. “I was stealing books.”

“That takes balls. I mean, who robs a freaking bookstore?”

“It wasn’t really stealing. I was borrowing,” she said, flicking her straw at me.

“Nice. That hit me in the ear,” I told her. “By the way … this is a store. Not a library. You’re supposed to buy things.”

Morgan gnawed her straw. “I’m not a big believer in capitalism.”

“So what’s up with the long dress?” I asked. Not the slickest move in the world. Why couldn’t I shut up while I was ahead?

Her neck turned red. She was even cuter when she blushed. “It’s freezing in here, right?”

“Not really,” I said, confused.

“Don’t you love my ensemble?” she blurted out. “It’s so
Little House on the Prairie
. I got it at Miami Twice on Bird Road. You should go there sometime.”

“Sure,” I said. Yeah. I should’ve just tattooed these words on my forehead: I. Have. No. Game.

“Let’s blow this joint,” she said, grabbing her bag and scattering the avalanche of magazines on the floor. I noticed a photo on the front cover of
TIME:
an American soldier leaping out of a helicopter, caught between the plane and the desert, stuck, frozen in the moment. I flipped it open and found Dad’s name in the credits. My stomach burned, like I was about to start crying or throw up or both, if that’s possible.

Dad never let me touch his cameras, which were decorated with strips of masking tape and “A+.” I thought this was some kind of positive-thinking trick, like a pep talk. When I asked about it, he said, “No, son. That’s my blood type.”

The guy behind the counter glared.

“Could you pick that up?” he asked. He wasn’t really asking.

“We could,” said Morgan. She still didn’t move. It was almost funny, but I didn’t feel like laughing.

The bookstore dude was pissed. “Now. Pick it up.”

“Isn’t that your job?”

He stared at her.

“For god’s sake.” She reached down and plopped the magazines on the table. A bunch of people turned around and shushed us.

“Yo. I’m calling the manager,” the guy said, grabbing the phone.

“Whatever,” said Morgan.

“Okay, troublemaker,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

By this time, my ears were tingling and I couldn’t find the door fast enough.

“So you’ve traveled around a lot?” asked Morgan, as we made our way through the sweltering parking lot.

I got the feeling she was trying to place me in some category and couldn’t settle on one yet.

We climbed into her “suburban assault vehicle,” a dented Ford Explorer. The bumper was plastered with faded stickers—everything from the Miami Dade Humane Society to Apple computers, along with local bands like Poison the Well and Jacuzzi Boys. If I could’ve given Morgan a heads-up, I’d tell her to keep her car clean, but I wasn’t there to dish out warnings.

I climbed into the passenger seat, scrambling over a heap of crumpled soda cans.

“Sorry about the mess.” Morgan cranked the engine and rolled down the windows, just a crack. A blast of heavy bass squirted out of the radio speakers, what my old band teacher would’ve called a crescendo. “Is this one of those pirate radio stations?” She winced. “They play this song like a hundred times a day.”

“You call this a song?” I snorted. “Sounds like the seventh circle of hell.”

“Never heard of them. Were they on Total Request Live?” She asked. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. She popped the glove box, rustled around inside, pulled out a tiny sandwich bag and something metallic, as slim as a credit card.

“Ever read
The Divine Comedy
?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said, sprinkling weed into the circular dent at the end of the card. “Is it funny?”

“Hilarious.”

“That would make a great name for my band … if I had a band.” Morgan jerked the steering wheel and made an illegal U-turn out of the parking lot. She reached for her tote bag, found a Zippo that said
South Beach
in fancy cursive. When she lit up, the damp vegetable smell of pot hung heavy in the car.

Man, I could’ve used a hit. This girl was making me nervous. She was on another level I could never hope to reach.

“I’m trying to get a band going,” she said before lapsing into a fit of deathlike coughing. “Basically, I had a band. Past tense. It was just Skully playing the piano and me singing. Sort of like Mates of State. Only we sucked.”

I nodded like I understood.

“And we were, like, eight years old,” she added. “That’s why I hang out with Skully. Our checkered pasts.”

Morgan smile wickedly and dangled the pipe in front of me. A million thoughts raced through my mind: What if we got pulled over? What if she crashed?

“I’ll pass.”

“You sure?” She waved it back and forth, as if trying to hypnotize me. “Aren’t you the boy who’s always drawing pot leaves on your notebook?”

“That’s just for show.”

Morgan twisted around to look at me. “I know the truth, right?”

“What’s that?”

She grinned. “You’re really a narc.”

The car grew quiet.

I tried to laugh, but the air got caught in my throat. “I just don’t smoke when I’m drinking.”

“I hear that,” she said, laughing.

Morgan shifted and the Explorer stalled in the middle of US-1. Cars honked and swerved around us while she jiggled the stick. “Okay, okay.” She gasped. “Give me a second.” At last, the engine roared and we lurched forward.

“Hey. What about the Silver Palm Leaves?” I asked.

“You’d christen my band after a smoking accessory?”

“It’s the perfect name. Not to mention, the classic design of the nineties.”

“I prefer Circle of Hell,” said Morgan.

“Hey. Did you hear about the hole they dug in Siberia?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t know. These scientists or something. They dropped a microphone into the hole and they heard people screaming down there, like an entrance to hell.”

Morgan fiddled with the radio, clicking past static. She settled on 90.5, “our local college station,” The Voice. “Why would they drop a microphone into the hole?”

“No idea. I looked it up online. It doesn’t really sound like hell, though,” I told her. “More like Dadeland Mall on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Now that
is
the seventh circle of hell.”

Both of us giggled over this for a while. We could’ve talked about the most random shit and that was cool with me. I’d never felt like that before. This was majorly weird because: number one, I could be myself with Morgan. But on the other hand, I wasn’t being myself at all. I was nervous and not nervous at the same time. Weird.

She revved the engine, and we punched through a red light. My pulse was beating everywhere, in my throat and fingertips, and although I wasn’t driving or smoking, I was the one who felt guilty.

6 :
The Party House

The party house was the real deal. According to Morgan, some big-shot architect designed it for Skully’s rich parents. The triple-decker building overlooked Biscayne Bay. You’d think they wouldn’t need a pool, but they had that, too—Olympic-sized, heated, and filled with salt water.

We pulled around the corner, past the D
EAD
E
ND
S
TREET
signs. Headlights speared the palm leaves. A million cars had parked on the grass, long rows of tank-sized SUVs and sharklike convertibles. People scattered into the street, clutching bottles, smoking cigarettes.

“There’s Danica Stone,” I said, pointing to a girl in a sparkly tube top, remembering her nails on my arm last year.

Morgan made a face. “That skank freaks me out. Why is she here?”

“Everyone is here,” I said.

And it was true. Man, I was already starting to shake.

I climbed out and started walking with the crowd.

“It’s like trick-or-treating,” Morgan said.

“That explains your costume.”

“Shut up, Mr. Abercrombie,” she said. “This dress is not a costume. It’s vintage.”

I wanted to tell her that everyone was in costume, whether they knew it or not. Me most of all.

Skully’s driveway was paved with gravel. My sneakers crunched as I made my way across it.

“Sounds like somebody eating a bowl of cereal.” Morgan laughed and I laughed, too.