Wild Child Read Free Page B

flare of anger rose in her—Lisette was right—and then it died away and she was scared. Just scared.
    “Sorry,” he murmured, “sorry I’m late, I—” and he didn’t finish the thought or excuse or whatever it was because he was pushing open the door now, the driver’s door, and pulling himself out onto the pavement. He took a minute to remove his sunglasses and polish them on the tail of his shirt before leaning heavily against the side of the car. He gave her a weak smile—half a smile, not even half—and carefully fitted them back over his ears, though it was too dark for sunglasses, anybody could see that. Plus, these were his old sunglasses—two shining blue disks in wire frames that made his eyes disappear—which meant that he must have lost his good ones, the ones that had cost him two hundred and fifty dollars on sale at the Sunglass Hut. “Listen,” he said, as Lisette pulled open the rear door and flung her backpack across the seat, “I just—I forgot the time, is all. I’m sorry. I am. I really am.”
    She gave him a look that was meant to burn into him, to make him feel what she was feeling, but she couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or not. “We’ve been sitting here since four,” she said, and she heard the hurt and accusation in her own voice. She pulled open the other door, the one right beside him, because she was going to sit in back as a demonstration of her disapproval—they’d both sit in back, she and Lisette, and nobody up front—when he stopped her with a gesture, reaching out suddenly to brush the hair away from her face.
    “You’ve got to help me out here,” he said, and a pleading tone had come into his voice. “Because”—the words were stalling, congealing, sticking in his throat—“because, hey, why lie, huh? I wouldn’t lie to you.”
    The sun faded. A car went up the street. There was a boy on a bicycle, a boy she knew, and he gave her a look as he cruised past, the wheels a blur.
    “I was, I had lunch with Marcy, because, well, you know how hard I’ve been—and I just needed to kick back, you know?
    Everybody does. It’s no sin.” A pause, his hand going to his pocket and then back to her hair again. “And we had some wine. Some wine with lunch.” He gazed off down the street then, as if he were looking for the tapering long-necked green bottles the wine had come in, as if he were going to produce them for evidence.
    She just stood there staring at him, her jaw set, but she let his hand fall to her shoulder and give her a squeeze, the sort of squeeze he gave her when he was proud of her, when she got an A on a test or cleaned up the dishes all by herself without anybody asking.
    “I know this is terrible,” he was saying, “I mean I hate to do this, I hate to … but Angelle, I’m asking you just this once, because the thing is?”—and here he tugged down the little blue discs so that she could see the dull sheen of his eyes focused on her—“I don’t think I can drive.”
    When the valet brought the car round, the strangest thing happened, a little lapse, and it was because he wasn’t paying attention. He was distracted by Marcy in her low-slung Miata with the top down, the redness of it, a sleek thing, pin your ears back and fly, Marcy wheeling out of the lot with a wave and two fingers kissed to her lips, her hair lifting on the breeze. And there was the attendant, another college kid, shorter and darker than the one upstairs frowning over the tip but with the same haircut, as if they’d both been to the same barber or stylist or whatever, and the attendant had said something to him—Your car, sir; here’s your car, sir—and the strange thing was that for a second there he didn’t recognize it. Thought the kid was trying to put something over on him. Was this his car? Was this the sort of thing he’d own? This mud-splattered charcoal-gray SUV with the seriously depleted tires? And that dent in the front fender, the knee-high