The Key to the Golden Firebird (4 page)

“I can't control the volume!” he screamed as a greeting. He killed the power so that the radio switched off. “Sorry,” he said. “It's a new thing. The volume only goes up to eleven.”

The last word was said in some kind of British accent.

“Eleven?”

“It's from…nothing. It's a quote. So what happened?”

“Brooks pulled a Brooks,” May explained, throwing herself into the seat and shaking off some of the rain. “She knew I needed a ride, but she went somewhere.”

“Oh. Well, good thing I was home. Let's go.”

He turned the key. Nothing happened.

“Huh,” he said, rattling the key in the ignition.

“What?”

Pete flicked the key several times and stomped his foot on the gas. Still nothing.

“It's been doing this,” he said, knitting his brows together in concentration. “It usually starts. Eventually.”

“In how long?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes. As long as I keep trying. The longest it ever took was like half an hour. Unless it's the transmission.”

“The transmission?”

“Well, I had to have mine taken out last week,” he said, flicking the key in disgust and shifting through the gears a few times. “They put in a dual battery instead. It was cheaper than getting a new engine, you know? But it's been weird ever since.”

May faced straight out and counted the uncollected newspapers on the Starks' front porch. She told herself to be calm as Pete tapped strategically on the dashboard, trying to make the car come back to life.

“Just give me a second,” he said, reaching under his seat. May heard a popping noise. “Be right back.”

Pete jumped out of the car and disappeared behind the raised hood for a moment. She could hear him banging on something furiously. He came back a moment later, his great mass of hair sending water flying in all directions.

“Yeah, it's the transmission,” he said, wiping his hands on his pants. “I don't think I should have let them take it out.”

“Does that mean it isn't going to start now?”

“Probably.”

May sank her head into her hands. Her desperate gesture must have touched the car because suddenly the engine purred. May refused to look up until it was actually moving for fear of making it stop again.

“Take out the transmission?”

May opened her eyes to see Pete grinning down at her. He was alternately glancing between May and the road, obviously pleased with himself.

“Take out the transmission?” he repeated. “Replace it with a battery?”

Age seventeen, tormenting May with little car pranks. Age seven, tormenting May by sneaking up on her and sticking Cheese Puffs up her nose and then pulling them out and eating them. It was all pretty much the same thing.

“What?” May shot back. “That means nothing to me.”

“A
dual battery
?”

“Car isn't my best subject.”

“The transmission makes the car go vroooom,” he said. “It makes the wheels go round. If anyone offers to take it out of your car for you, say no.”

“I'll remember that if I ever drive. But that's probably not going to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“I failed my exam this morning,” May said.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It's fine. I just want to get to work.”

“What happened?”

“What did I do wrong?” she said. “You want the list?”

“But you never fail things. You're test girl.”

“Well, now I'm failure girl.” She sighed.

“Who taught you?” he asked. “Your mom?”

“She tried, but she doesn't have a lot of time.”

“What about Brooks?”

“Reliable Brooks? The one who's taking me to work tonight? The one who goes over speed bumps at eighty miles an hour?”

He nodded, understanding this. Pete knew a lot of things about them, including some things May would have preferred to keep private. Like the fact that they were broke, for instance, and that going to a driving school was not really an option.

Soon after May's father's death, an unpleasant fact had had to be faced: Life is not like the movies—you don't just get money when someone dies. Sometimes you lose money. There are strange expenses and taxes. Mike Gold had taken only minimal steps in the way of insurance, so without his income, they were in trouble.

In the summer and the fall, May had sat with her mother and helped work out their budget. They'd canceled her father's subscriptions to his sports magazines, turned off the cell phones, and limited the cable service. Her mother had switched to working nights and bumped up her hours. She'd also accepted a few small family loans—enough to pay for May's tuition and a bit of the mortgage. Still, things were not looking very good.

Pete's dad was an accountant. He did their taxes, and he knew the score. Pete's mom often sent over strange assortments of extralarge items she picked up at the wholesale club—jumbo bottles of dishwasher detergent, twelve-packs of soap, jugs of shampoo with pump dispensers. She'd say, “It was such a good
deal, I couldn't pass it up!” or, “It was two for one, so I just figured I'd give this one to you!” to try to keep the whole thing from being awkward. It still always was.

They pulled into the shopping center where May worked, which was between a collection of housing developments and the access road from I-95. Pete drove up to the brown building in the far corner of the parking lot, the one that had been born as a Pizza Hut but had lived through several incarnations since then.

“Do you need a ride home tonight?” he asked.

May looked out at the rain. She had no other option, aside from walking through the downpour in the dark.

“I don't want to mess up your plans…,” she said.

“I just have to go over to school later and finish hanging some lights for the show. We're doing
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
.”

“It sounds like an infomercial.”

“It's a musical,” Pete clarified. “They're always musicals. So, what time are you done?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven,” he repeated, again in the strange accent. “So, I'll come back then.”

With that settled, May stepped out into the rain and ran to the door, and the Cutlass rolled out of the parking lot and vanished beyond the gray horizon.

 

Presto Espresso wanted desperately to look like it was part of some huge chain of coffee bars. It had the wooden tables, the wall murals, and the recycled cups. It had drinks with catchy
names, always prefaced with the words
our signature,
as if Presto Espresso made coffee in some special, famous way. It had generic jazz music pumped into the air from hidden speakers. What it didn't have was customers. Working there was a long exercise in killing time—stacking cups and grinding coffee and standing around. Specifically, it was an exercise in killing time with Nell Dodd, the assistant manager.

“My dorm was right near this massive cell phone tower,” Nell was saying as she arranged a pile of cups in bowling-pin fashion at the far end of the counter. “And it's a well-known fact that cell phone signals give you brain cancer. So I talked to the residence life staff, but they completely refused to move me.”

“Uh-huh,” May said.

Nell had started college in September and left after two weeks. She'd been living at home and working at Presto for the last nine months while contemplating her “new direction.” May had started working at Presto in December, and she'd heard this story at least fifteen times since then.

“Everything about the place sucked,” Nell went on. “Like my roommate. My roommate was this total crypto-fascist sorority-girl wannabe. I mean, pretty much all she wanted from college was to pledge Sigma Whatever Whatever, which is just about the saddest thing I have ever heard. I showed her a book once and she kind of shrank away, like Dracula from garlic or something.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And my classes were just kind of stupid, you know? All kinds of stuff I didn't need. For my core science class I was taking their highest level of Biology 101, which was for majors,
and I wasn't a major. But it was
nothing
. I did
all of that
in high school because we had a completely amazing biology program. My high school was
so
much harder, you know? Because I went to an alternative school, right?”

May was taking seven periods of biology a week, along with an introductory chemistry class to prepare her for the two more years of chemistry she still had to face. She somehow doubted that Nell had ever done the same amount of work, but she said nothing.

“So I'm kind of taking some time to think it all over,” Nell continued. “I want to reapply to some really good schools, like Bennington and Smith. You know Bennington and Smith?”

“What? Oh. Uh-huh.”

“Bennington is like amazingly cool, but it's really expensive. Sylvia Plath went to Smith, and she totally exposed it for everything it was, but I think it's really cool now. Did you read
The Bell Jar
?”

Actually, May considered, this wasn't the worst of the stories she'd had to endure. Nell had once entertained May with a two-hour saga on how she'd been vegan for two years during high school, but then someone had slipped her some cheese-mushroom ravioli and the whole thing had fallen apart, ending with her decision to revert back to ovo-lacto. There had been another grueling evening in which May had learned all about Nell's eight piercings: the two on her face, the three on her ears, the one on her belly button, and two small rings that she actually called “knocker knockers.” Now
that
had been a really bad night.

Nell snapped her fingers in front of May's face.

“What?” May jolted.

“A guy. A guy is here.”

May followed Nell's gaze. She was staring out the front windows at Pete. He was getting out of his big gray sedan.

“What?” May said. “Him?”

“You see another guy?”

“That's Pete,” May said. She realized as she looked at the clock that Pete was fifteen minutes early.

“Pete?” Nell asked.

“Yeah. That's Pete.”

“Right. Got that part. And who is Pete?”

“Oh,” May said, “he's kind of like our neighbor. A family friend. Kind of like one of our old friends.”

“Boyfriend?” Nell said.

“What? Mine? No.” May hastily dusted off her apron. “No.”

“Check out that hair. He's got a full-on 'fro. You like him?”

“He's Pete,” May said.

“Oh.” Nell nodded. “It's like that. Okay.”

“Like what?”

Pete came in before Nell could answer and before May could remove the baseball cap with the cartoon of the dancing bean on it. That was probably for the best anyway—Nell would have noticed if she'd taken it off.

As the assistant manager, Nell was able to use her rank to push the uniform to the limit, adding a studded black belt to her ragged cargo pants and wearing a torn black mesh shirt over her white T-shirt. She decorated her fiendishly healthy complexion with a few small bits of metal, including the stud in her nose and the ring through her lower lip. She didn't have to wear the hat, the name tag, or the apron. May did. Nell liked to
point this out—as a joke, or so she pretended. Nell had an annoying sense of humor like that.

“You're early,” May said. The abruptness of her remark caused Pete to stop in his tracks. Nell snorted. Her nose always whistled a bit when she did that as the air passed by the nose stud.

“If you're busy”—Pete motioned toward his car—“I can go….”

“Are you kidding?” Nell threw herself down on the counter. “A customer! We are at your service!”

Pete stared down at the back of Nell's head, then looked at the pile of cups that she had arranged for her game of bowling for Kona.

“You guys are bored,” he deduced.

“Is it that obvious?” Nell asked, looking up from her prone position. “Please stay. We are but two young virgins trapped in this remote outpost, with no men to talk to.”

May winced. Okay, maybe Nell could joke around with a word like
virgin
—a description that probably didn't fit her—but May couldn't. She kept a wide berth around that term.

“We have nothing to do,” Nell went on. “You know those people whose job it is to paint the Golden Gate Bridge? They start at one end, and it takes them a few years to paint all the way to the other side, and when they finish, they just go back and start over? That's kind of like what we do. No one comes here because this place totally blows. Right, Ape?”

“Ape?” Pete repeated.

“My nickname,” May said, without enthusiasm.

“Yeah, when May first started, I had to make her name tag,
and I forgot which month her name was. I thought it was April.” Nell reached over and grabbed at the strap of May's apron and flashed Pete the tag for proof. “So I call her Ape.”

May silenced Pete with a stern look before he could make any reply. Nell was staring at Pete's chest.

“I like your shirt,” she said.

Pete was wearing a T-shirt that read, mysteriously enough, Best Wishes to Your Family.

“Well,” May said, quickly untying her apron, “we're pretty much done here, right?”

“Sure,” Nell said. “Why don't you two go?”

“Okay, then,” she said, before Nell could say anything else. “See you later.”

May felt Nell's gaze following them as they left the store.

“So that's where I work,” she said, sliding back into Pete's car.

“She's interesting,” he said.

“She's a special person,” May said, giving Pete a light punch on the shoulder. “Just like you, Camper.”

“Not special. Challenged.”