“What?” She’d worn her butterfly jeans again today, just because she was seeing him, even though they were a day dirty. They were her best jeans and she’d wanted him to notice her. Now she just felt stupid. It wasn’t fun seeing Kenny, when she knew she could go to jail.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, there is. You mad at me?”
She kicked a clod of dirt on the ground with her toe. “No.”
“Then what?”
He sounded like he might start to cry if he were a girl. Kelsey turned her head to check and she was right. His face was sad and not at all laughing at her like it usually was.
She hated when people were sad. Especially if it was her fault. “I’m sorry, Kenny.”
He didn’t say it was okay. He just stared at her a minute. And then said, “What’s wrong?”
She’d promised not to tell. But maybe Kenny didn’t count, since he was part of it.
“Do you know how much trouble we could get in?”
He shrugged. “Not if we don’t get caught.”
He wasn’t too worried and Kelsey figured he didn’t know about the jail part.
“But Kenny, what if we do?”
“How can we? We’re just kids.”
Should she say it? Could she let him get in that much trouble without telling him? “They have kid jail.”
His eyes got narrow like he was thinking, but he was looking at her.
“You know?”
She nodded.
“How’d you find out?”
“Don has a lab in his garage,” she told Kenny. It felt so good to finally say the words out loud, instead of just in her head. And maybe together, she and Kenny could figure a way out of this. “I accidentally walked into it on Friday and he and my mom freaked out. Don said I had to keep quiet about you and the lab, too, ’cause he does experiments you’re only supposed to do in real labs and not at home…”
She couldn’t say the words fast enough there were so many of them. But she stopped when Kenny started shaking his head.
“What?” she asked him.
“You’re such a baby, you know that?”
“I am not.” She hadn’t been a baby for a long time. And now she could go to jail.
“That wasn’t a science experiment, Kelsey,” Kenny said, sounding like a know-it-all. But nice, too. “It’s a meth lab.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KELSEY TILTED HER HEAD against the sun’s glare. “What’s a meth lab?”
“You know, where they make tweek…glass…crank…”
He was acting like she knew what he was talking about.