The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“I call it conviction.”

“Back home by nine?”

“Promise,” I said.

Her eyes crinkled.

IT RAINED MOST of the night. When I woke in the morning, the sun was pink, the sky blue, the sidewalks streaked with shadow and moisture. I loved the dead-end street where we lived in our small brick bungalow. All the houses on the street were built of brick and had fruit trees and flower gardens in the yards, and there was a wall of bamboo on the cul-de-sac and, on the other side, a pasture dotted with live oaks that were two hundred years old. I sat down on the front steps with my sack lunch and waited for my ride to school. Saber Bledsoe, my best friend, picked me up every school day in his 1936 wreck of a Chevy, one he had chopped and channeled and modified and customized and bought junk replacement parts for, although it remained a smoking wreck you could smell and hear coming from a block away.

There was nothing Saber wouldn’t do, particularly on a dare. At school he flushed M-80s down the plumbing and blew water out of commodes all over the building, usually between classes, when people were seated on them. The most hated teacher in the school, or maybe the whole city, was Mr. Krauser. Saber sneaked into the teachers’ lounge and stuffed a formaldehyde-soaked frog in Mr. Krauser’s container of coleslaw and caused him to puke in the faculty sink. Saber also unzipped his pants and got down on his stomach and stuck his flopper through a hole in the floor above Krauser’s classroom, letting it hang there like an obscene lightbulb until Krauser figured out why all his students’ faces looked like grinning balloons about to pop.

I was determined this would be a good day. Probably nobody noticed my erection in the middle of the drive-in. So what if I had gotten into it with Grady Harrelson? What could he do? He’d had his chance. The hoods in the Heights? Valerie had said they were just neighborhood guys. I had taken Valerie Epstein to the watermelon stand and driven her back home and sat with her on the glider and even patted the top of her hand when a streak of lightning crashed in the park. Nobody paid any attention to us.

Maybe in the Heights I had found a part of town free of my problems. Maybe I had found a place where fear wasn’t a way of life.

Wrong.

As soon as I got into the car, I could tell Saber was agitated. He backed into the street and headed toward Westheimer, the floor stick vibrating in his palm, his T-shirt rolled up to his armpits. He looked at me, then his head started bobbing on a spring, and he gave me what was known as the Saber Bledsoe stare, a cross-eyed, openmouthed reconfiguration of his face indicating disbelief at your stupidity.

“Why mess around? Just join some suicide unit and go to Korea,” he said.

“You have to run that by me again, Sabe.”

“The word is you got into it with Grady Harrelson at a Galveston drive-in. Then you went up to the Heights and were driving around with Valerie Epstein.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Where did I not hear it? You told some greaseballs to go fuck themselves, one greaseball in particular?”

“There’s no way you can know this.”

“The guy you almost got it on with was Loren Nichols. He shot a man in the chest with a dart gun at Prince’s drive-in.”

Saber had light red hair he wore in a flattop combed back on the sides, and green slits for eyes and the innocuous stare of a lizard and a peckerwood accent and a level of nervous energy that made you think of a door slamming. He pulled a cigarette from a pack of Camels with his mouth.

“They came by my house last night, Aaron,” he said, the cigarette bouncing on his lip. “Somebody must have given them my name.”

“Who came by?”

“Loren and three other greasers.”

I felt a hole yawning open in my stomach. “What did they want?”

“You.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them my old man was drunk and had a baseball bat, and they’d better drag their sorry asses out of my driveway. Guess what? Before I could get the words out of my mouth, the old man came stumbling out of the garage with a Stillson in his hand.”

“We need to forget this, Saber.”

“It’ll be all over school by second period. You helped bust up Grady Harrelson and Valerie Epstein?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. The story will be a legend by this afternoon. You actually went out with her?”

“More or less.”