“I was trying to help,” Robin muttered. “My inability to speak an untruth made me more of a hindrance than a help.”
I blinked. “Wait, you can’t lie?”
“I can’t utter a statement that I know is false,” he corrected. “That doesn’t mean I can’t adequately deceive most mortals. But that was why I couldn’t confirm your statement that we were wed.”
That was good to know. Food for thought. Later I would pick apart all of our interactions and reexamine the things Robin had told me.
Turning my attention back to the paper, I scanned the names. “So, these are all of his conquests.” Or his potential conquests. More than half the names had a line through them. A couple had stars. Frequent flyers?
Ick. Ick. Ick.
My gaze screeched to a stop. “Uh oh.”
“What?” Robin glanced over my shoulder. “Find something useful to our cause
“There’s someone on here….” I shook my head and then stared at the name that had a single line through it. Ursula Green.
But that couldn’t be right. Could it? Ursula was even younger than I was, by several months. Her parents had been—or more accurately currently were—strict. They’d never let her date.
My mind raced with the possible implications of this discovery. Because of her crazy gymnastics rivalry, Ursula and I weren’t close. She was stuck up and stand-offish but easy to ignore. I thought it was because people talked about me and she was sick of it. Or maybe jealous that the attention wasn’t on her.
After my accident though, her patent dislike had gone from passive to active. Prank phone calls in the middle of the night coming from a blocked number, her tossing food at me in the cafeteria. Spreading rumors. One time she had even keyed my mother’s car. I knew it was her, I’d seen her from my bedroom window. But I never told anyone about it. At the time it hadn’t mattered.
But seeing her name on Billy’s list shed a whole different light on Ursula’s and my relationship. I just didn’t know what to do with the information.
Robin still stood there, waiting for me to do something, to make some sort of decision.
“I need a minute,” I said to him and then turned my back and walked away.
“Lamb?” He called but didn’t follow.
I walked up the street, past the senior parking lot where I spied Bill’s Z-28 Camaro. It was shiny and black with rims that glinted in the October sunlight. A deep bubbling emotion, dark and sticky like tar threatened to fill all the hollow places in my chest. I had kept the feeling simmering on the back burner ever since I heard Bill tell his friends that I was next on his hit-it-then-quit-it list. Seeing the car though stoked the flames to a fever pitch. I walked through the lot until I stood in front of the vehicle.
The door was unlocked. I slid inside on the passenger’s side. It smelled of Axe body spray, old French fries, and teenage hormones. White fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see them.
In my mind’s eye, I could still picture the view from within. The lurching panic as the tires spun, the sickening sound of metal as the passenger’s side door crumpled in. The tinkling sound as glass shattered. The jerk of the seatbelt, which kept my body in place as the car was brought to a final stop by the telephone pole. The taste of blood as the vehicle that had felt so sturdy and powerful moments before crumpled into where I sat trapped. The pain, the fear….
Suddenly, I understood Ursula a whole lot better than I ever imagined possible. This much pent-up emotion needed an outlet. It needed someone to blame for causing such unrest. If there had been keys in my pocket, I would have seriously messed up his ride.
But I didn’t have keys. And if I damaged the car in any way and got caught, I’d get tossed in jail.
So I did the only thing I could do.
I snagged his parking pass off the dashboard and stuffed it in my pocket. Then I headed to the nearest payphone and called the impound lot.
Satisfaction filled me as I watched the tow truck haul Bill’s ride out of the lot. It wasn’t Georgia, obviously. She was still living as George in Tennessee. But it had felt good. The driver, Floyd Weatherby, hadn’t questioned that I was an administrative assistant to Principal Mott. I had assured Floyd