he decides, black T-shirt so nobody sees you out there in the night; sneakers, so they won’t hear you creeping up.
He’ll hole up in the car for as long as it takes, waiting for him to go to bed. No, better. To go out.
Then he’ll break in.
9
Steffy McCall
The next person to meet Dan Carteret is Steffy McCall. The last thing Steffy wants to do is meet anyone. Not today, not with her mom and dad running around crazy, all ragged and disrupted. Something happened last week, and they have gone to a place that there’s no getting back from.
Steffy saw her very own mother from upstairs in this deserted house. Her mom came wandering out of the Publix lot and across the street. She was way too close to where Steffy and them hide out and smoke weed, like, right down there in the yard. She was this close! She plopped down under the banyan tree underneath the attic window, which scared the shit out of Steffy. Your mother, outside your private place!
Mom! She’d wreck everything if she found out.
Steffy and Carter Bellinger that she is secretly in love with, plus Billy and lascivious Jen, have been hanging out here ever since the day Carter broke in. For the first time, Steffy had her own safe place and it was wonderful. Then, last week – last week! – her clueless, fat-assed mom wandered across the street from the Publix and sat down under the big old banyan; you could see the top of her head from here.
They were all loaded by that time, out of their heads on Jolt Cola and weed and it was killing Steffy, but she had to play mean bitch and shush them before Mom heard. ‘Shut your hole,’ she told Carter who she really is in love with, and she almost fucking cried. ‘That’s my mother, so shut your fucking hole.’
If she saw them it would be the end of parties in this house, and Mom would be up her ass with a fine-toothed comb. As it turned out Mom’s mind was on something else. She just flapped like a confused penguin and went tottering off, so, whew.
It was good she was too distracted to hear them, but as it turns out, Mom was distracted by something really bad. By the time Steffy got home that day she had written a whole cover story that her folks were too upset to hear. Dad was dragging the rollaway bed to the far end of the house and everything was different.
Thank God for this place. She and Carter and them were rolling out of the Publix with the trunk full of beer and munchies that day. Instead of driving out to Pierce Point to get loaded like always, he broke into this creaky old house and they ran everywhere. In the attic, Carter said, ‘This is the place.’ It was like fate. Yang.
Steffy was all ying, ‘And we are the ones.’
They scavenged outside the big places on Coral Shores and Carter stole some great stuff from his pool house. Jen had an air mattress and pillows and a step-on pump to keep it fat and Billy brought the beer. Their attic looks like home now – except for this ancient dressmaker’s dummy, saying a snotty fuck you to their X-Box posters and Cinemart lobby cards which are kind of mocking her now that she is here alone and everybody else is on the bus.
If Carter really loved me, he’d have stayed back. But no, he was like, ‘Come on, it’s fun!’
Fun just doesn’t seem right to her, given the way things are at home.
Nobody knows where she is.
Mom thinks she’s on the class trip to Busch Gardens. Her friends think she’s at the dentist. If Carter really cared, he’d have known that Steffy was too messed up to go. He’d have stayed back with her and they’d be kissing now. They might even be, oh, Steffy’s too young, but she thinks about Doing It; she thinks about it all the time. Alone in the dry attic, she has to wonder: do other kids sneak in here when we’re not around?
If Carter had stayed back today . . . Yeah, right. Shit. If he wants to get with Jen Cashwell in the back of the bus, OK, let him, Steffy is on to bigger things.
Like personal space. She only just found out she had one – it was in a magazine Mom had. Unless this is her own