“What did you do in my basement when you were nine years old?”
“What didn’t I do in your basement when I was nine years old?” Link turned down the music, which was good, because it was terrible and he was about to ask me how I liked it, like he did every day. The tragedy of his band, Who Shot Lincoln, was that none of them could actually play an instrument or sing. But all he could talk about was playing the drums and moving to New York after graduation and record deals that would probably never happen. And by probably, I mean he was more likely to sink a three-pointer, blindfolded and drunk, from the parking lot of the gym.
Link wasn’t about to go to college, but he still had one up on me. He knew what he wanted to do, even if it was a long shot. All I had was a whole shoebox full of college brochures I couldn’t show my dad. I didn’t care which colleges they were, as long as they were at least a thousand miles from Gatlin.
I didn’t want to end up like my dad, living in the same house, in the same small town I’d grown up in, with the same people who had never dreamed their way out of here.
On either side of us, dripping old Victorians lined the street, almost the same as the day they were built over a hundred years ago. My street was called Cotton Bend because these old houses used to back up to miles and miles of plantation cotton fields. Now they just backed up to Route 9, which was about the only thing that had changed around here.
I grabbed a stale doughnut from the box on the floor of the car. “Did you upload a weird song onto my iPod last night?”
“What song? What do you think a this one?” Link turned up his latest demo track.
“I think it needs work. Like all your other songs.” It was the same thing I said every day, more or less.
“Yeah, well, your face will need some work after I give you a good beatin’.” It was the same thing he said every day, more or less.
I flipped through my playlist. “The song, I think it was called something like Sixteen Moons.”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” It wasn’t there. The song was gone, but I had just listened to it this morning. And I knew I hadn’t imagined it because it was still stuck in my head.
“If you wanna hear a song, I’ll play you a new one.” Link looked down to cue the track.
“Hey, man, keep your eyes on the road.”
But he didn’t look up, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a strange car pass in front of us….
For a second, the sounds of the road and the rain and Link dissolved into silence, and it was like everything was moving in slow motion. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the car. It was just a feeling, not anything I could describe. And then it slid past us, turning the other way.
I didn’t recognize the car. I had never seen it before. You can’t imagine how impossible that is, because I knew every single car in town. There were no tourists this time of year. They wouldn’t take the chance during hurricane season.
This car was long and black, like a hearse. Actually, I was pretty sure it was a hearse.
Maybe it was an omen. Maybe this year was going to be worse than I thought.
“Here it is. ‘Black Bandanna.’ This song’s gonna make me a star.”
By the time he looked up, the car was gone.
9.02
New Girl
Eight streets. That’s how far we had to go to get from Cotton Bend to Jackson High. Turns out I could relive my entire life, going up and down eight streets, and eight streets were just enough to put a strange black hearse out of your mind. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mention it to Link.
We passed the Stop & Shop, otherwise known as the Stop & Steal. It was the only grocery store in town, and the closest thing we had to a 7-Eleven. So every time you were hanging out with your friends out front, you had to hope you weren’t going to run into someone’s mom shopping for dinner, or worse, Amma.
I noticed the familiar Grand Prix parked out front. “Uh-oh. Fatty’s camped out already.” He was sitting in the driver’s seat, reading The Stars and Stripes.
“Maybe he didn’t see us.” Link was watching the rearview mirror, tense.
“Maybe we’re screwed.”
Fatty was Stonewall Jackson High School’s truant officer, as well as a proud member of the Gatlin police force. His girlfriend, Amanda, worked at the Stop & Steal, and Fatty was parked out front most mornings, waiting for the baked goods to be delivered. Which was pretty inconvenient if you were always late, like Link and me.
You couldn’t go to Jackson High without knowing Fatty’s routine as well as your own class schedule. Today, Fatty waved us on, without even looking up from the sports section. He was giving us a pass.
“Sports section and a sticky bun. Know what that means.”
“We’ve got five minutes.”
We rolled the Beater into the school parking lot in neutral, hoping to slink past the attendance office unnoticed. But it was still pouring outside, so by the time we got into the building, we were soaked and our sneakers were squeaking so loud we might as well have just stopped in there anyway.
“Ethan Wate! Wesley Lincoln!”
We stood dripping in the office, waiting for our detention slips.
“Late for the first day a school. Your mamma is goin’ to have a few choice words for you, Mr. Lincoln. And don’t you look so smug, Mr. Wate. Amma’s gonna tan your hide.”
Miss Hester was right. Amma would know I’d shown up late about five minutes from now, if she didn’t already. That’s what it was like around here. My mom used to say Carlton Eaton, the postmaster, read any letter that looked half-interesting. He didn’t even bother to seal them back up anymore. It’s not like there was any actual news. Every house had its secrets, but everyone on the street knew them. Even that was no secret.
“Miss Hester, I was just drivin’ slow, on account a the rain.” Link tried to turn on the charm. Miss Hester pulled down her glasses a little and looked back at Link, un-charmed. The little chain that held her glasses around her neck swung back and forth.
“I don’t have time to chat with you boys right now. I’m busy fillin’ out your detention slips, which is where you’ll be spendin’ this afternoon,” she said, as she handed each of us our blue slip.
She was busy all right. You could smell the nail polish before we even turned the corner. Welcome back.
In Gatlin, the first day of school never really changes. The teachers, who all knew you from church, decided if you were stupid or smart by the time you were in kindergarten. I was smart because my parents were professors. Link was stupid, because he crunched up the pages of the Good Book during Scripture Chase, and threw up once during the Christmas pageant. Because I was smart, I got good grades on my papers; because Link was stupid, he got bad ones. I guess nobody bothered to read them. Sometimes I wrote random stuff in the middle of my essays, just to see if my teachers would say anything. No one ever did.
Unfortunately, the same principle didn’t apply to multiple-choice tests. In first-period English, I discovered my seven hundred-year-old teacher, whose name really was Mrs. English, had expected us to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, so I flunked the first quiz. Great. I had read the book about two years ago. It was one of my mom’s favorites, but that was a while ago and I was fuzzy on the details.
A little-known fact about me: I read all the time. Books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while. I had a map on my wall, and every time I read about a place I wanted to go, I marked it on the map. New York was Catcher in the Rye. Into the Wild got me to Alaska. When I read On the Road, I added Chicago, Denver, L.A., and Mexico City. Kerouac could get you pretty much everywhere. Every few months, I drew a line to connect the marks. A thin green line I’d follow on a road trip, the summer before college, if I ever got out of this town. I kept the map and the reading thing to myself. Around here, books and basketball didn’t mix.
Chemistry wasn’t much better. Mr. Hollenback doomed me to be lab partners with Ethan-Hating Emily, also known as Emily Asher, who had despised me ever since the formal last year, when I made the mistake of wearing my Chuck Taylors with my tux and letting my dad drive us in the rusty Volvo. The one broken window that permanently wouldn’t roll up had destroyed her perfectly curled blond prom-hair, and by the time we got to the gym she looked like Marie Antoinette with bedhead. Emily didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night and sent Savannah Snow to dump me three steps from the punch bowl. That was pretty much the end of that.
It was a never-ending source of amusement for the guys, who kept expecting us to get back together. The thing they didn’t know was, I wasn’t into girls like Emily. She was pretty, but that was it. And looking at her didn’t make up for having to listen to what came out of her mouth. I wanted someone different, someone I could talk to about something other than parties and getting crowned at winter formal. A girl who was smart, or funny, or at least a decent lab partner.
Maybe a girl like that was the real dream, but a dream was still better than a nightmare. Even if the nightmare was wearing a cheerleading skirt.
I survived chemistry, but my day only got worse from there. Apparently, I was taking U.S. History again this year, which was the only history taught at Jackson, making the name redundant. I would be spending my second consecutive year studying the “War of Northern Aggression” with Mr. Lee, no relation. But as we all knew, in spirit Mr. Lee and the famous Confederate general were one and the same. Mr. Lee was one of the few teachers who actually hated me. Last year, on a dare from Link, I had written a paper called “The War of Southern Aggression,” and Mr. Lee had given me a D. Guess the teachers actually did read the papers sometimes, after all.
I found a seat in the back next to Link, who was busy copying notes from whatever class he had slept through before this one. But he stopped writing as soon as I sat down. “Dude, did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“There’s a new girl at Jackson.”
“There are a ton of new girls, a whole freshman class of them, moron.”
“I’m not talkin’ about the freshmen. There’s a new girl in our class.” At any other high school, a new girl in the sophomore class wouldn’t be news. But this was Jackson, and we hadn’t had a new girl in school since third grade, when Kelly Wix moved in with her grandparents after her dad was arrested for running a gambling operation out of their basement in Lake City.
“Who is she?”
“Don’t know. I’ve got civics second period with all the band geeks, and they didn’t know anythin’ except she plays the violin, or somethin’. Wonder if she’s hot.” Link had a one-track mind, like most guys. The difference was, Link’s track led directly to his mouth.
“So she’s a band geek?”
“No. A musician. Maybe she shares my love a classical music.”
“Classical music?” The only classical music Link had ever heard was in the dentist’s office.
“You know, the classics. Pink Floyd. Black Sabbath. The Stones.” I started laughing.