Page 5 of Roadrunner

“Does it bother you that I’m not twenty-one?”

He shrugged. “If it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”

I got up and stood beside him. He had a foot on me easily. At five-two, I was used to being the shortest person in any room.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“You been up to Mount Lemmon?”

I hadn’t, though it was on my list. Going with him moved it a few rungs up. “Never heard of it,” I lied. “Where is it?”

“Thirty minutes from here. There’s a spot up there. You’ll see.”

“When will we be back?”

He held the door for me. “School starts when? Third week of August?”

I had eleven weeks of summer left before that happened, and I was already hoping this was only the start of them. I stopped between him and the doorway.

“August twenty-fourth,” I said. He smelled like leather and sweat and something underneath that was just him. “Eleven weeks. I’ve got nothing planned.”

“Or everything,” I added, over my shoulder, walking toward his truck on legs that didn’t feel mine.

“My vote’s for everything,” he said.

I looked back at him, surprised things were going exactly the way I wanted.

He must have read it as doubt. “Don’t worry,” he said, almost smiling. “I’ll have you back before school starts.”

CHAPTER THREE

Alex

Then

We parked the bike on the shoulder of a two-lane road that wound along the mountain’s edge. A NO PARKING sign stood posted a few feet away warning of sheer cliff that it protected the unknowing from wandering into it. Half a mile below, the road we’d climbed threaded through the canyon like something that had been dropped and left there.

I followed Riley up the rock formation beside where we had parked. From the top, saguaros stood scattered across the foreground like sentries for the mountains stacked along the horizon behind them.

“The farthest range looks blue,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Atmosphere,” he said. “Same reason the sky’s blue. It scatters the light.”

“Impressive that you know that.”

“I wondered about it as a kid, so I asked my dad. He’s got an answer for everything.”

“Do your parents live near here?”

“Twenty minutes. In Tucson.” He glanced at me. “Are you close with yours?”

It wasn’t a simple answer. We didn’t fight. We just weren’t close, and I didn’t know how to say that without it sounding worse than it was. Fighting at least meant someone stayed in the room.

“We’re okay,” I said.

“Okay?” He almost laughed. “What does that mean?”

I wanted to tell him something better. That we ate dinner together, that they hadn’t missed my last fifteen birthdays. Instead I told him the truth, or close to it.