I pushed myself back up. He kept staring at me. I realized I wanted to kiss him.
I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the way he looked at me like I was the only thing he wanted to look at.
How did one go about it? Ask him if I could? Or maybe quick and unexpected would be better. He made a pretty easy target, sitting there, docile for once, and kind of sleepy.
I really needed Finnegan’s Magic 8 Ball. But I could guess what kind of answer it would give me. Ask again later. So freaking noncommittal.
No, none of that. Decision: Outright questioning.
Just say it, said the voice. Ask him. Blurt it out. What can he say?
He can laugh in my face.
Let him. It’ll be a douche move on his part. You’re only being honest.
I don’t know.
Do you really think after all this, he’d brush you off like that?
Maybe.
Maybe he likes you, too. Maybe that’s why he stares so much.
Maybe.
Screw it. I was chickening out. Quick and unexpected— GO!
I leaned forward and kissed him. I don’t think he caught on until it was too late.
He froze up as soon as I touched him. Of course—he didn’t like to be touched. I should have asked. I should have asked, I should have asked . . . . But then, like a building wave, I felt the heat pouring off of him. His fingertips brushed my neck. My heart tried to strangle me and I jumped away from him.
A band of moonlight lit up his eyes like fluorescent bulbs.
“Sorry,” I said, standing and hurrying back up to the copse to find my baseball bat, trying to figure out what I’d been thinking.
He was still sitting there when I stumbled back into the street.
“So, um.” My jaw tingled, lungs contracted, throat tightened. “I’ll see you on Monday, I guess.”
He didn’t say anything.
I barely kept myself from sprinting through Red Witch Bridge. The wind thundered in the trees, and when I finally looked back, Miles stood at the door to his truck, outlined by moonlight, staring right back at me.
Chapter Twenty-three
I spent the rest of the weekend wondering what I was going to say to Miles on Monday. We both knew secrets about each other now. The only difference was he didn’t know that I knew. It felt unfair, somehow. Like I was lying to him.
When I woke up on Monday morning, I remembered the pictures on my camera and wondered how long it would take Celia to find me and kill me after I’d handed them over to Claude. Tucker and I had exhausted the library’s databases on Scarlet and McCoy, with no further clues about McCoy’s particular brand of psychosis. So either I asked Celia what exactly was going on with McCoy—she probably wouldn’t give me a straight answer—or I found another source of information.
I told myself to drop it. I told myself it wasn’t worth it. But then I looked at the picture of Celia spray-painting that car, and all I could see was myself spray-painting the Hillpark gymnasium.
Two minutes before seven, Miles’s truck idled in the driveway, tailpipe gushing exhaust into the frosty air. My mother stood at the front door, holding her coffee mug in both hands, her face pressed against the screen. I would’ve gotten mad at her, but she’d bought me a case of Yoo-hoo over the weekend. So I poked her out of the way as I shouldered my backpack and grabbed a Yoo-hoo from the hallway table.
“That’s Miles?” My mother shifted to see better when Miles let his arm dangle out the truck window, as if that arm would give her his life story.
“Yes. He brought me home after the bonfire, remember? And on Friday.”
“You should invite him over for dinner.”
I laughed into the Yoo-hoo straw, making the drink bubble up. My face got hot. “Hah, right.”
“You need to learn to be more sociable, Alexandra, or you’re never going to—”
“Okay bye Mom love you!” I charged past her and out the door. She huffed loudly as the screen door clattered shut.
I jogged down the front yard, perimeter checking as I went, and climbed into Miles’s pickup.
“So, how was your weekend?” I asked, trying to sound casual. His gaze snapped up to my face—I think he’d been staring at the Yoo-hoo bottle—and he shrugged.
“Same as usual.” He left something hanging in the air, like he wanted to finish with except for Saturday night. Same here, buddy. He backed into the street.
“You work at Meijer, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. The corner of his lips curled up. “I work at the deli counter. Have to give people their succulent, chemical-ridden salami and whatnot.”
I pictured Miles in a dark room, standing at a butcher’s block with a large knife in one hand a bloody cow’s leg steadied under the other, a huge Cheshire grin spreading over his face—
“I bet the customers love you,” I said.
“They do—when my manager is around.”
“So do you run jobs there, too?”
“No. I don’t steal from them, thank you very much,” said Miles. “I’m above common thievery. Outside of school.”
“Why do you do it all?” I asked. “It can’t just be for the money.”
“I have reasons.”
“But, I mean, you know sometimes they just want to humiliate you. Like, don’t you think if you’d gone back through Red Witch Bridge on Saturday, Cliff and the others would’ve tried to scare you?”
“Probably. Trust me, I know. I’ve had plenty of embarrassing jobs.” He parked the truck and reached around his seat for his bag. “It’s all schadenfreude. People just want to laugh at you.”
“Can you really speak German?” I already knew the answer.
Miles glanced out the side window, and then said, almost too low for me to hear, “Ja, ich spreche Deutsch.” A smile stretched across his face. “But don’t ask me to do it—it makes me feel like a monkey doing parlor tricks.”
We got out of the truck and started toward the school. “It must be awful for Jetta,” I said.
“I think she’s used to it. Whenever someone asks her to say something, she curses at them.”
“She speaks French and Italian, right?”
“And German and Spanish and Greek and a little Gaelic.”
“Wow. Can you speak all those?”
“Not really. I’m just . . . German.” We crossed the parking lot. “Hey, since we were talking about it—I have another job to run on Thursday night. I want you to help.”