hoodie and pull out the water bottle. I take a small swig. I try to hold back the coughing fit of the liquor hitting the back of my throat, but I hack a few times anyway. “Wrong pipe,” I explain. Then I hold the bottle out to Dyl. “A little water to wet your mouth before the shine?”
She eyes me suspiciously, but takes the bottle and takes a long swallow. She gasps and chokes worse than I did and in the front seat, Cash has figured out what’s going on because he curses and pounds the barrier between us before flinging open his door.
I am already grabbing the bottle of shine back from Dyl while the words pour from my mouth. I can’t wish to die, though. Or I can’t wish to only die. If I’m gonna reboot everything, I at least want to give myself time to live before I die. So I wildly build on Dyl’s wish, figuring that I’m at least keeping the spirit of it intact.
“To me being a person who wants more and takes chances. Good and bad chances and everything in between, like going with that terrible guy instead of Dyl and—” My door swings open. Cash reaches in. I finish in a rush, “May all your wishes come true, or at least just this one.”
The bottle touches my lips. Cash grabs hold of my arm. He jerks me out of the car. Too late, though. The shine is on my tongue and then burning all the way down once more.
His hands hold me in a bruising grip and he’s shaking me the same way he did such a long time ago, when I was little and gave him his wish.
But not this time. I smile. Barely feeling the pain.
“Not made of Swiss cheese.” I push the words out between my rattling teeth while behind Cash, the sky lightens.
My eyes remain fixed on that distant ribbon of color where the sky meets the earth, watching. Waiting. It doesn’t take long.
The noise and lights and Cash all recede as the sun finally creeps over the horizon and swallows everything—including me.
GONE TO THE DEVIL
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
“I gave you my name for a reason, Lennie. It might not be worth much now, but someday, someday real soon, I’m gonna make it so Cash is a name nobody ever forgets. I’m serious, Lennie. People are gonna remember us.”
When I was a little kid, I didn’t get tucked into bed with a story or a song. Instead, I listened to the ravings of my father. The nightly routine ended on my sixth birthday. That was the day he made the nightly news for the first time and they rechristened Leonard Cash the Bad Daddy Bandit.
Over the next two months, Daddy and I crisscrossed the country on a hold-’em-up, shoot-’em-down crime spree. With me in tow, he took down six banks and three toy stores, killing two people who got in the way. He was finally pinned down at a Chuck E. Cheese’s, but managed to escape by taking the guy dressed in the mouse costume as a hostage. They found me hours later, burrowed deep in the ball pit, still waiting for Daddy’s all-clear whistle.
The only place I’ve seen him since then is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted webpage.
That all happened eleven years ago, but it’s not the sort of story people forget. Maybe if I’d become a super-smart honor-student nerd or a chipper rah-rah leadership council type, they’d dwell on it a little less often. But I’m not either of those things, and most people think it’s just a matter of time before my daddy comes back for me and the two of us pick up where we left off at Chuck E. Cheese’s oh so many years ago.
To a stranger, I might look like a typical sullen, angry teenager, but everyone in town knows I’m the furthest thing from typical.
I’m Lennie Cash.
And my famous name is a big part of why, at this exact moment, instead of dividing my time in English class between clock-watching and trying to figure out exactly how those two crazy kids, Romeo and Juliet, managed to mess things up so badly, I’m hanging out with a total nutcase who just forcibly removed two of my fingers.
I can’t help but ask myself, how the hell did I get here? And then I remember.
Dyl.
My best friend, Dylan, really wanted me to meet up with this weirdo guy named Rollo she’d met online, and