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“No, but maybe I don’t want to do all this anymore. I don’t understand why everyone else gets to decide for me.”
I only realized then, from the panic in her voice, what she was after, pestering me about the cigarettes, Tiffany, the future. She didn’t know if we’d see each other after this. I didn’t know, either. Maybe I wouldn’t if I didn’t keep things up with Tiff. The truth was, I had little control over the situation, and Lake had even less. “I’ll get you your books,” I promised.
“Forget the books. I don’t care about them.”
“You should,” I said more harshly than I meant. “If you don’t know your options, how’re you going to know what to major in?” Truth was, her dad wasn’t a big man, but he scared me. He had power over Lake. I had wondered more than once if she’d even ever considered a school aside from USC. This was too big a decision to let her dad make for her. “How’re you going to stand up to your dad if he tries to force you into something you don’t wanna do?”
“What if I don’t want to go to school at all?”
I gripped the steering wheel, frustrated, even though I knew she didn’t mean it. Neither of us had any control over this situation and she was looking for something to hold onto. “That’s not what I meant. You know it isn’t.”
“It was just all laid out for me before I was even born.”
“Then ask yourself what you really want, but don’t say it isn’t college. It is. The question is where you want to go and what you want to do when you get there.”
“What do you mean ‘where’?” she asked quietly.
“Doesn’t have to be USC, Lake. Doesn’t have to be what anyone else says.”
She bit her thumbnail and sat quietly a while, obviously thinking. I hoped she was beginning to see she had options. She wasn’t going to figure it out tonight, but it was a start.
We entered town suddenly, a building or two at first and then we were on the main boulevard passing fast food joints, log cabin inns, and souvenir shops.
“I live in Long Beach,” I said, hoping it might calm her down a bit. “I’ve got a roommate and a kitchen that barely fits two people.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “That’s far.”
“From where? You? About a forty-minute drive.”
“Oh.” The vinyl squawked as she adjusted her foot. “Are you happy there?”
I couldn’t remember feeling much more than complacency since Maddy’s death. Lake was the only thing recently that hadn’t been some kind of job or obligation. “I guess. I’m not really one thing or another.”
The first liquor store I passed was dark, so I pulled into a bar called Phil’s a few stoplights down. It took me a minute to decide where to park. There were people out front, and I didn’t want anyone to see Lake in the car. I chose a space off to the side, farthest from the building.
“Why are we here?” Lake asked.
“Picking up booze.” A flyer on the window advertised line dancing. Three women stood by the door, smoking, and my mouth watered for a cigarette. “I’ll only be a minute. You can’t come in, so just lock the doors and wait, all right? Don’t get out for any reason.”
“What do you think’ll happen in a minute?”
I guess she didn’t know yet that one minute could change your life. That if I’d left baseball practice one minute earlier, things might’ve been different for Maddy. Lake was intuitive but too trusting. She hadn’t hesitated to have me come into her parents’ house that day, even though I was three times her size and carried tools that could kill a grown man with one swing. She should have someone looking out for her. I wanted to be that someone.
I got out of the car, slammed the door shut, and waited for the thunk of the locks. The girls were average-looking. Jeans, cowboy boots, tank tops spotted with sweat, hair stuck to their foreheads. “Hey there,” one of them said. “Looking for a dance partner?”
I went into Phil’s and took out the twenties. “Can I buy some beer off you?” I asked the bartender.
“How about Jack instead?”
“That’s fine. Whatever you got for forty bucks.”
He nodded and headed into the back.
“Got a cigarette I can bum?” One of the girls from outside sat on a barstool next to me. I had a pack in my shirt pocket, but cigarettes cost money, and money was finite. I only spent it on what I cared about. “No.”
She took a swig from her beer. Her ring caught my eye, a big, bulky thing with a silver band that looked oddly familiar. The bulbous, dark stone covered everything below her knuckle. I looked closer. Maybe it was glass, and hunter green, not black stone.
