Breakfast with Neruda Read Free Page A

anyway. Tonight I settle in a dark spot near the football field, behind the training room. The heat forces me to sleep with the windows and the tailgate open.

Chapter Two
    The first thing that wakes me is the light. The sun rises early in summer and hits me in waves. Next thing I notice, of course, is the heat. My T-shirt and boxers are stuck to me. The third thing is the smell of something burning. A cigarette. But I don’t smoke. What the hell? I jolt upright.
    “Morning, sunshine.” Shelly is sitting in the open tailgate of my car, smoking. “Nice place you have here,” she says. “And such a good neighborhood.”
    I run a hand through my hair and wipe my eyes. I grab a pair of shorts and slide them on over my boxers.
    Shelly laughs. “Don’t be embarrassed. I know about morning wood.”
    I’m actually more embarrassed that she found me sleeping in the car. “What time is it?” I ask.
    “Six-thirty or so.”
    I try to conjure the reason that my car is parked behind the school at 6:30 in the morning when our sentences don’t begin until eight. “I worked really late last night,” I say, “and I didn’t want to be late and have Earl turn me in to the court.”
    “Oh,” she says. She glances at the stacks of clothes and stuff everywhere. “Sure,” she says, as if she sees through my lie.
    I slide out of the back of the car. “I work right after school, so I change clothes in here a lot.”
Good cover, Michael
, I tell myself. I turn away from her and pee along the back fence.
    She reaches into her purse and pulls out a twenty. “How about breakfast?” she says. “Steak ’n Shake?”
    “You’re buying?”
    “Technically my dad is buying. But you’re driving.”
    I envy her money. I’m also envious that she has a father, especially one who will give her a twenty with no questions asked. I clean the debris off the passenger seat and toss it all in the back. The door groans as she opens it and gets in. She glances around at the stuff littering the backseat.
    “I am way overdue for going to the laundromat,” I say. Piles of my dirty shirts and pants are tossed on the seat next to my columns of books.
    We drive in silence for a couple minutes, and then she fiddles with my radio. “It only gets AM,” I say.
    “Why?”
    “It’s old, and it didn’t come with FM. The antenna broke off a long time ago, so even what I do get is scratchy.”
    She snaps off the radio. “That’s okay. I’ll just let you tell me why the hell you’re living in your car.”
    My face grows hot. I barely know this chick who, like me, lives on the south side of the law. “First, you tell me what the hell you did to get sentenced to community service.”
    “I already told you. Got caught smoking.”
    “That only gets you a few detentions or Saturday schools,” I say. I shoot her a glance. “I mean, look what I did. And it’s a lot worse than inhaling too many packs of Kools.”
    She crosses her arms. “I smoke Marlboros.”
    “Whatever. I know what you did is at least as bad, if not worse, than me almost accidentally annihilating the school building.”
    She fumbles through her enormous purse. “It’s kind of a long, boring story,” she says.
    I give her a charming grin. “The radio doesn’t work, and I’m not very interesting, so . . .”
    “Fine. We’ll flip for who has to spill their guts first.” We pull into the restaurant parking lot. I glance in the window and see a few kids from school, including my ex-best friend sitting next to my ex-girlfriend. “Not here,” I say, and back out of the parking space.
    “Frenemies?” she asks.
    “Something like that.”
    She glances at her phone. “I guess we don’t really have time to get waited on anyway. It’s like ten after seven already.” I drive down Rocket Road and pull into the drive-thru at McDonald’s.
    I order the Big Breakfast platter with extra butter, an extra biscuit, a large Diet Coke, and an apple pie. Shelly glances at me. “Sure you