Breakfast with Neruda Read Free Page B

don’t want a side of beef with that? Wouldn’t want you to starve.”
    I stifle a laugh. “If I’m telling you my life story, you have to feed me first.”
    Shelly just orders an Egg McMuffin and small mocha. She hands me the twenty, and I pay the girl at the window. It’s Krissy Jones from my AP English class last year. She acts friendly enough, but her eyes dart between the two of us as if she’s a little afraid. I take the change and am tempted to pocket it, but Shelly holds out her hand. I smirk, dribble the coins into her palm, and place the bills in her lap.
    “Shall we flip now?” she asks.
    “Can we eat first?”
    We pull around and park by the exit lane. I open the bags. The uncommon smell of hot breakfast food fills me with glee. Normally all I eat in the morning is a few handfuls of dry cereal and a banana. I hold the plate in my hands like it’s a silver platter and take a giant whiff. Shelly snickers and shakes her head as I stab at the eggs with the plastic fork and practically inhale them.
    Shelly watches me as she slowly nibbles at her sandwich. She waits until I have finished the eggs, sausage, and hash browns and start to butter my biscuit before she says, “Heads or tails?”
    With my mouth full of biscuit, I say, “Heads.”
    She flips one of her quarters. “It’s tails.” She smiles. “Okay, buddy. Spill the story. Why the hell did you want to blow us to smithereens? And why do you live in your car?”
    I glance at her. I wonder how much of the truth I want to share. She already knows how I got in trouble, which doesn’t really relate to how I left home.
    “First of all,” I say, “you are not allowed to say you’re sorry for me, or about anything I plan to tell you. Is that clear?”
    She chuckles. “Okay.”
    “Okay.” I cram the second biscuit inside my mouth and wash it down with a big gulp of Diet Coke. I belch. “Tell me what you think you know about me,” I say.
    “Well, not much, except they actually found enough firecrackers in your book bag to burn down a chunk of the building.”
    “True so far.”
    “Why did you do that?”
    I stare out the windshield, half watching the morning traffic build up on Rocket Road. “I wasn’t planning to blow up the school.”
    “Why the firecrackers then?”
    “It’s complicated,” I say.
    “Did getting expelled get you booted out of your house?”
    I shrug. “Yeah. Kinda.” I let the lie linger. I don’t want to tell her about my mom’s hoarding. Nobody knows about that except Annie and Jeff and me, and none of us is talking. I think Rick suspected too, because I stopped inviting him to my house.
    “Isn’t there some other relative you could live with?” Shelly asks.
    I could have stayed with my grandmother for a while, but she’s crazy too, in her three-pack-a-day, bottle-of-whiskey way, though at least her apartment isn’t filled with useless junk. Grandma Barb lives in a senior apartment facility and has just the one bedroom. I could probably go there in an emergency, like if we get a blizzard this winter, but I can’t live there since I’m not fifty-five-plus.
    “No.”
    “What about your dad?”
    “He’s not in the picture,” I snap. Unlike Jeff, who actually lives with his dad, and saw him every weekend before he moved in with him, I have never met my own father. I don’t even know his name. Flynn is my mother’s maiden name.
    “But you still haven’t told me why you had explosives in your book bag,” she says.
    I slump back in the seat and take a breath. “Do you know Rick Shraver?”
    “Marginally.”
    “Yeah, well, he was my target. Not him, exactly. I was just going to blow up his car.”
    I glance at her but I can’t read her reaction. “Anyway, he and I used to be friends. Since grade school we were tight. But junior year I started seeing Ashley Anders . . .” It’s hard to think about her now. Ashley Anders, with her butter-colored hair and ocean-colored eyes.
    “Go on,” Shelly