you heading out to see Alex’s band play at The Brick House?” Kevin asks as I join him at the front of the car. The flashlight in his mouth makes him mumble his words, but I understand him.
“Yep,” I respond, and notice his eyes surveying my little costume instead of looking at the car. His light’s beam falls right on my cleavage and I scramble to cover the girls. He yells, “Crap,” when he drops his flashlight into the mess of cables surrounding the engine.
“Nice costume,” he comments, digging around for the light.
“Thanks,” I reply, pulling the jacket closed in order to cover up even more.
“Got it,” he announces.
“You fixed Lexi?”
He laughs. “No, I found my flashlight.”
“Oh.”
“It looks like you’ve got some loose wiring going on here, but I should be able to fix it up quick and get you on your way.” The smile he sends me is comforting and puts me a little at ease. As I look around at the darkness surrounding us, though, that ease is quickly diminished.
“Thanks again for coming all the way out here to help me like this. I really appreciate it,” I say as Kevin passes by me on his way to the truck to retrieve more tools.
“That’s what friends are for, right?” he answers while opening his driver’s side door.
“Yeah, that’s what they’re for,” I murmur under my breath. I feel bad that I’ve been such a crappy friend to him.
Some rustling from across the street causes me to spin around to see what caused it. “Uh, Kevin? Did you hear that just now?” I ask, still keeping my eyes on the area I was sure the noise came from. There’s no response from him. “Kevin?” I look over at his truck and see the driver’s side door open. His lights are off, and no one’s standing there. “Kevin?” My voice wavers with a twinge of fear.
“Found what I needed,” he calls out while popping up in the driver’s seat, filling me with relief. For a second there, I thought Unknown might have done something to him.
Kevin laughs as he approaches me. “I really should clean out my truck. I can’t seem to find anything in there lately.”
I grin. He can be so cute sometimes. Kevin has always been a happy-go-lucky kind of person, and it was always hard to make him angry. He’s like a handyman pacifist or something.
“Hey, so now that we have some time, want to talk about Janice?” he asks, beginning to tinker with some wires near the engine.
“What exactly do you want to talk about?”
“The fact that I don’t blame you for what happened to her,” he replies and stares at me intently. “I mean, I know you brought her to the party, but what you didn’t see was how crazy she got when you went off to chat with that Parker guy.” I can tell from the way he says Parker’s name that Kevin’s not that fond of him.
“What? Janice was being crazy?”
“I tried telling her to take it easy on the alcohol, but she kept drinking. I left the party completely ticked off with her. She was dancing all over guys and being a real…well, you know. It was like she was a different person or something.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Are you sure we’re talking about the same Janice?”
“Yeah. Hard to believe, huh? There’s really no telling what happened to her, or who’s responsible since she was pretty wrecked. I tried to get her to leave, but she refused. She went on and on about how her mom did this to her. I don’t know. I just wanted to make sure you knew all this. Maybe it might help in some way,” he explains with a saddened expression on his face.
I sigh. “Actually, it kind of makes me feel worse. I was her enabler. She was just itching to get out, and now look what’s happened to her.”
“You can’t keep blaming yourself, Dani. She made a lot of bad decisions that night, and though it may have resulted in a sad outcome, they were her decisions.”
“When did you become such a psychology major?” I ask with a halfhearted laugh.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking after what happened to Janice. I guess this all may be some kind of a coping mechanism for me. If you really want to get into it, I’m just as much to blame for her disappearance as you are. Yeah, it wouldn’t have been pretty, but I could