Saints of Augustine (7 page)

“I love
The Poseidon Adventure
!” Justin said. Then, in a gentle voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else, he said, “What's your name, honey?”

“Nonnie,” Melissa said, getting into it.

“Nonnie, your brother's dead.”

Melissa clapped. “Red Buttons! Very good!”

Justin looked at Sam. “Will you be there?”

“Me? Oh, I—yeah, I'll be there.”

“Cool,” Justin said, grinning. “We'll all go down together.”

Melissa grabbed a napkin from the counter. She wrote down her address and phone number and handed it to Justin, who scribbled on a second napkin. This he tore in half and handed a part to each of them. “That's my phone, and my e-mail.”

“Thanks!” Melissa said, tucking the paper into her pocket.

Sam just stared down, amazed that he was holding it.

“You guys are great,” Justin said around a spoonful of yogurt. “I should get going, though. I've got to find my mom a birthday present. Something ceramic and nauseatingly cute. So…see you on Monday?”

“Definitely,” Melissa said. “I'll send you the info.”

“Well, it was great meeting you both,” Justin said.

A moment later he was walking away from the Goody-Goody, the words
FOLLOW IT
receding into the food court and then out into the mall.

“Well,” Melissa said, turning back to Sam, “
that
was interesting.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “He's nice. You two really seemed to hit it off.”

She laughed and tossed her empty cup into the trash can next to Sam's hip. “Actually,
you
two were the ones who were hitting it off. But I can pretend I didn't notice, if you want me to.”

 

Wow
. Riding his bike home from the mall, Sam could still see Melissa mouthing the word to him, after Justin's blatant admission that he was gay. It hadn't
even been an admission; he'd
offered
the information. Sam had never known
any
one to just come forward with something like that before. And now Justin's phone number and e-mail address were traveling home in Sam's pocket. Never mind the fact that he'd probably never get up the nerve to use either one. It was all pretty amazing.

But another remark Melissa had made had caught him completely off guard—that crack about offering to pretend she didn't notice what was going on between him and Justin. The implication was that Sam was…or that Sam might be…
Man
, he thought,
you can't even say it to yourself!
Had he ever told her anything to imply that he felt that way? He remembered one afternoon when they'd been lying on the floor in Melissa's bedroom leafing though
People
magazine, and they'd come across an article about a hot-looking movie-star couple who were getting a divorce. “Her loss,” Sam had remarked without thinking. Melissa had looked shocked. “
His
loss is more like it,” she'd said. They might have been defending the husband and wife, respectively, as good spouses, even good money earners. But they might
also have been speaking of who was the hotter “catch.” If that was the case, did it make Melissa gay, too?
You're losing it
, he thought.
The whole world is not suddenly turning gay.

When he got home, Teddy's car was in the driveway. Sam steered his bike into the garage and went in through the kitchen.

It was after ten
P.M
. His mom and Teddy were sitting close together on the sofa, watching TV. They had their feet propped up on the coffee table—something Sam and Hannah weren't allowed to do.

“Hey, Nerfball!” Teddy practically shouted.

His mom shushed Teddy and said, “Hannah's asleep.”

“Hey, Nerfball,” Teddy said in a loud whisper. “How's the yogurt flowing?”

Kill me
, Sam thought. He stepped into the living room and glanced at the television. “What are you guys watching?”

“A movie your mom's all fired up about. I think you'd call it a chick flick.”

“Excuse me?” Sam's mom said. “You've been pretty caught up in it yourself.”

“That's because I was figuring out the plot. They've been feeding that dead guy to the detective, I know that much. I just don't know who killed him.”

“That's
not
what it's about,” Sam's mom said—but in a playful tone of voice that Sam hadn't heard her use since Hannah was little.

“I'm going to bed,” Sam said. “Good night.” He started across the living room toward the hallway.

“Well, wait a minute. How was work?” his mom asked.

“Fine.”

“Does Mr. Webber know you're about to cut down your hours because school's starting?”

“He knows.”

“I still don't like the idea of you working during the school year. You don't have to, you know.”

“I want to,” Sam said. “It'll be fine. Good night.”

“Do you want to watch some of the movie?”

“You should!” Teddy said. “Your mom's right, it's not really about a murder. It's about these two girls who want to get it on.”

“Teddy!”

Sam knew nothing about the movie they were watching and told himself to keep moving before Teddy made another stupid remark. He walked across the living room and nearly made it to the hall when his anger got the best of him. He turned and said, “So it's about
mariposas
?”

“Sort of.” Teddy shrugged.

“You know, you can say the word
lesbian
,” Sam said. “It won't turn you into a
mariposa
.”

“Good
night
, Sam,” his mom said.

“Why do you let him talk that way?” Sam asked, suddenly angrier at his mom than at Teddy.

“Whoa,” Teddy said. “Mr. Crankypants.”

Sam glared at his mom for another moment, then stormed off down the hall.

He would have slammed his bedroom door, but he remembered that Hannah was sleeping. He dropped down onto his desk chair and glared at his computer screen. Clenching his jaw, he thought,
Stay away, just stay away
.

She did. He waited several minutes, but she never tapped on the door, never came in to talk to him. For some reason, this made him even angrier.

What could she possibly see in Teddy? How could anyone even
stand
him? Okay, so he wasn't walking around with an ax chopping people up, but he was over-the-top annoying. He practically showed up in the mornings with a napkin tucked into his collar, asking what the breakfast special was. Dropped by any afternoon when Sam's mom wasn't at work. Stuck around until late at night.

Sam thought about cranking open the window above his bed, removing the screen, and slipping outside. Maybe going for a late-night run. Hell, he could even just throw some stuff into his gym bag and take off—but where would he go? Not to his dad's, because his dad was on the other side of the Atlantic, with David.
Think big
, he told himself.
Blow the scene
.
You've got the money; use it. Mexico…Canada…Follow your bliss.
But he could never do that to Hannah.

Besides, the one time he'd actually tried running away had turned out to be one of the worst nights of his life.

It was over a year ago, back when his father was still living at home and his parents had been fighting
heavily. If they weren't snapping at each other or having a full-blown argument, they were as silent as stones. It was awful to be around. One night during dinner, Sam asked where they were going for their family vacation that year. He was met with dead silence. He asked again.

“We're not sure,” his mom told him.

“Well,” he said, “it's almost summer. Shouldn't we know by now?”

“Sam!” his dad snapped. “Stop giving your mother such a hard time! It's really getting to be a problem, all right?”

His dad had been fighting with his mother for weeks; now he was suddenly sticking up for her.

Sam couldn't remember what he said back; whatever it was, it was something smart-mouthed enough to get him sent to his room in the middle of the meal. He fumed for several hours. He pounded a fist against the mattress and looked around the room for things to break, but everything was his, so what good would it do? Finally, after he was sure everyone had gone to sleep, he took the pillowcase off his bed, jammed it full of clothes and the measly contents of
the Barney bank he still had from when he was little, and slipped out the window.

It was late and very dark outside. He had no idea where he was going, and as soon as he got ten feet from his house, he only wanted to see Charlie. He walked directly to Charlie's house, three blocks over.

Charlie's bedroom window was dark. Sam dropped his pillowcase behind the bushes and tapped on the glass—softly, so that Mr. and Mrs. Perrin wouldn't hear. No one came to the window. Then Sam remembered that Charlie had just gotten a new tent and had talked about putting it up in the backyard. Leaving the pillowcase beneath the bushes, Sam walked around the house and passed through the side gate.

Sure enough, there was an orange tent with dark-blue flaps pitched in the middle of the yard, its sides glowing from a flashlight within. Sam crossed the yard, and as he neared the front of the tent, which was zipped closed, he whispered Charlie's name. The light jostled against the tent walls. He whispered the name again.

Slowly the zipper came down and Charlie peeked his head through. “What are you doing here?”

I'm running away. You want to come with me?
Sam couldn't bring himself to say it. The idea sounded crazy now that he was standing over Charlie. “I couldn't sleep,” he said. “I thought I'd see what you were up to.”

“Just…reading.”

“You alone in there?” Sam joked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, do you want to hang out?”

“Now?”
Charlie looked up at the night sky, then glanced into the tent behind him. “Yeah, sure. We just have to keep the noise down 'cause my folks are asleep. Lose the shoes.”

Sam stepped out of his sneakers without untying them. Then he squatted down and entered the tent.

It was warm inside. There was a sleeping bag taking up half the floor, a few magazines, and a little battery-operated camping lantern in the corner. Charlie was sitting on the sleeping bag, wearing only a pair of green Cernak High gym shorts. Sam sat down on the floor next to him. “What is this, a nudist colony?”

“It's my
tent
,” Charlie said. “I'm in
nature
. What
the heck are you doing roaming the neighborhood in the middle of the night? You're gonna get picked up for being a pervert.”

“I don't think so. I'm not the one camped out nude in some creepy tent.”

“Doesn't this tent rock? It's almost twice as big as my old tent.”

“It
is
pretty cool,” Sam said. He glanced around at the orange vinyl walls and dark window netting. The tent was plenty big enough to sleep two people comfortably. The idea of running away came into his head again: He pictured the two of them on the road, living by their wits, pitching the tent at night wherever they happened to be. They could live like that for years.

Charlie stretched out flat on his back on the sleeping bag and put his arms behind his head. “You know that girl who does the Anchor Club announcements during homeroom?”

“No.”

“You know her. She's got dark hair and it's kind of wavy. Her name's Kelly, or Kate, something like that.”

Sam shrugged. “What about her?”

“She's
fine
, that's all. I was just thinking about her.”

“I thought you were
reading
,” Sam said, making finger quotes around the word.

“Shut up! She and I have the same lunch period, that's all. I was thinking about her.”

“Well, I have the same lunch period with Mrs. Ornest, but I don't spend my time thinking about
that
old bag.”

“Don't be a doof. You know what I mean,” Charlie said.

“You're hot for her.”

“If this tent had door prizes, I'd give you one.”

“She's been going out with that guy on the year-book staff, Brad Crawford,” Sam said a little too quickly.

“So you
do
know who she is.”

Sam shrugged again. He knew who she was—but only because Brad Crawford was so cool and good-looking, and was always hanging on to Kelly, or Kate, or whatever her name was, in the halls between classes.

“I don't think they're a real couple or anything,” Charlie said.

“How would you know? You're not even sure what her first name is.”

“Doesn't matter. I've seen her checking me out.” Charlie gazed up at the orange ceiling. “I mean, I don't know, maybe she'd never want anything to do with a jock. Maybe to her, all jocks are stupid. A lot of girls feel that way. But I think if you really like someone, if you really can't get 'em out of your head, you owe it to yourself to at least try.”

Sam felt his mouth go dry. It was a warm night, even warmer inside the tent, and he was already sweating. He could see a lacquer of sweat on Charlie's chest and stomach. “What do you mean, try?”

“I don't know.
Try.
Make your move. Maybe you say something. Maybe you just lean over one day and plant a kiss on their lips, see if there's any kind of spark. If it doesn't work out, you cut your losses and move on.”

“That's pretty bold,” Sam croaked.

“Well, maybe that's what it takes. If you're not
bold, you'll never know what you're missing out on.”

The two of them lapsed into silence for a long moment, Charlie staring at the ceiling and Sam staring at Charlie. Then Charlie glanced over, grinning. “And I know who
you're
thinking about right now, so don't even pretend you're not.”