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Lila laughs, leaning back against her headrest.
“What?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Lila says. “You have nice friends.” She touches my shoulder lightly with the tips of her gloved fingers.
A shiver starts low on my spine. For a moment I remember the feel of her bare hands on my skin.
It’s just the four of us in the car, and even though the plan is to go to the movies tomorrow, I have to try really hard to convince myself this isn’t anything like a double date.
“That’s right,” says Sam. “You knew our man Cassel back when. Got the dirt for us?”
She looks at me slyly. “When he was a kid, he was a total shrimp. Then around thirteen, he shot up like a beanpole.”
I grin. “And you stayed a shrimp.”
“He loved cheap horror novels, and when he started one, he’d read it straight through until the end, no matter what. Sometimes his grandfather would come into his bedroom and switch off the lamp when it got really late, so Cassel would climb out the window and read by the streetlight. I’d come over in the morning and find him asleep on the lawn.”
“Awwww,” Daneca says.
I make a rude sound, accompanied by an equally rude gesture.
“One time, at a fair in Ocean City, he ate so much cotton candy that he threw up.”
“Who hasn’t?” I say.
“He had a black-and-white film marathon, after which he wore a fedora.” She raises her brows, daring me to contradict her. “For a month. In the middle of summer.”
I laugh.
“A fedora?” Sam says.
I remember sitting in the basement for hours, watching movie after movie of rough-voiced women and men in dapper suits with drinks in their gloved hands. When Lila’s parents got divorced, she went to Paris with her father and came back smoking Gitanes and outlining her eyes in smudgy black kohl. It was like she’d stepped out of the movie I wanted to be in.
I see her now, the stiffness of her body as she leans deliberately away from me, pressing her cheek against the window. She looks tired.
In Carney, back then, I didn’t care about blending in. I wasn’t constantly trying to bluff my way into seeming like a better guy. I had no secrets I was desperate to keep. And Lila was brave and sure and totally unstoppable.
I wonder what the kid I was then would think of the people we are now.
* * *
Cops are standing by blockades far from where the march is supposed to be. Traffic cones are set up, flares sparking with sizzling orange flames. There are people, too, more than I expected, and a distant roar that promises even more than that.
“There’s no place to park,” Sam complains, slowly circling the same block for the third time.
Daneca pokes at her phone as we inch along behind a line of cars. “Turn left when you can,” she says after a few minutes. “I have an app that says there’s a garage a couple blocks from here.”
The first two we pass are full, but then we find cars just parking on top of the median and along the sidewalks. Sam pulls the hearse onto a patch of green grass and kills the engine.
“Rebel,” I say.
Daneca grins hugely and opens the door. “Look at all these people!”
Lila and I get out, and the four of us head in the direction most are going.
“It makes you feel like everything could change, you know?” Daneca says.
“Everything is going to change,” says Sam, surprising me.
