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“Yeah, that wasn’t a problem.”
“A girl?”
He nodded.
“Well, good. I’m really glad you had such a good time!”
“She wore this thing with long white fringe—”
“You know what?” said Tatiana. “I really don’t care what your girlfriend was wearing.”
“My girlfriend? No, you asked me to tell you what Kaira DeLeon had on.”
“I don’t have time for this now,” Tatiana said, then walked away.
In economics he gave Matt Kapok the dollar back.
Matt seemed surprised. “Uh, thanks, Arm—” His white face turned even whiter. “I mean, I mean, I mean, Theodore. Thanks, Theodore.”
“You really helped me out,” Armpit said. “I owe you one.”
On the back of their souvenir T-shirts was a list of the fifty-four cities on the tour. Ginny and Armpit looked at them every day for the next week and a half and tried to predict where Kaira was.
“Maybe she’ll call from Albuquerque,” said Ginny, studying the T-shirt. “Al-bu-quer-que,” she repeated. She liked saying that word.
Armpit laughed. “She’s not going to call,” he said, as if he never gave it a thought, when in truth it was practically all he’d thought about since he’d last seen her. Every time the phone rang his body went to red alert. He hated leaving the house for school or work because he was afraid he might miss her call. But after a week and a half, that didn’t seem too likely anymore.
“It’s like she says in her song,” he told Ginny. “She’ll get around to you, and then she’ll be on her way.”
He just wished he could have held on a little bit longer.
He had failed a quiz in economics earlier that day. He hadn’t read the last two chapters. He couldn’t concentrate.
At work the day before he’d installed a sprinkler system in the front yard of a house. Jack Dunlevy had trusted him to do the entire job himself.
Armpit had made sure the sprinkler heads were evenly distributed, so that the water would cover the entire lawn. He had carefully secured each connection.
The problem was that it was all just attached to itself. The pipes formed one giant rectangle, with no way for any water to enter the system.
He ended up having to work overtime, digging a new trench, cutting into the pipes, and attaching the main water line. “You don’t have to pay me for the extra time it took,” he told his boss. “I’m the one who screwed up.”
“Unfortunately, I do,” said Jack Dunlevy. “It’s the law.”
How could he explain it was all because a Kaira DeLeon song came on the radio?
At least he hadn’t heard from Detective Newberg again. Maybe X-Ray was right. The Austin Police Department had better things to do than investigate who had sold counterfeit tickets to an African American teenager who lived on the wrong side of I-35.
He wondered if she had checked his record and found out about his prior conviction. He didn’t want her to think badly of him.
Cherry Lane called once, to ask how he was doing. His mother had answered the phone and was very impressed when she realized who she was talking to.
Armpit was disappointed it wasn’t Kaira.
“Why’d the mayor call you?” his mother asked him.
“Remember, I told you I met her? I did some work at her house.”
For the first time in a long while, his mother looked at him and saw someone who maybe wasn’t all bad.
