Hooked (Harlequin Teen) (3 page)

“Just promise me you’ll stick close to them. Will you do that,
Fred?” Trevor said again.

I nodded reluctantly, not because I didn’t love my friends, but
because I certainly didn’t need any babysitters. “Turn the light out for me? In
the kitchen?”

“Why?” he said, opening the screen door.

“I want to make sure I can sink putts with my eyes closed.”

“You’re possessed.” He chuckled again.

“Maybe,” I murmured but not loud enough for him to hear.

I swung my club back just below my waist and waited for the
whirling noise of the ball against the plastic rim. It spun around and around
before it finally settled in the bottom of the cup.

I could sink putts all night.

Chapter 2
Ryan

“DUDE, WHERE THE
HELL HAVE YOU
been?”

I ran to Seth’s silver pickup and threw open the passenger
door before the truck had a chance to stop.

Seth slammed the brake, and the truck lurched forward. Under
the dim glow of the dome light, his grayish-blue eyes narrowed as he glared at
me. “What are you, my mother?”

Friday night was definitely off to a bad start.

I was already fighting with my best friend, and I hadn’t
even jumped in his truck yet.

I shook my head and climbed in anyway, slamming the door. My
heart was racing a million miles a minute. “Just blow,” I told Seth, sinking
lower into my seat and not bothering with the seat belt.

“Okay, man. Whatever.” Seth shifted the gear. “We’re outta
here.”

Just hearing those words lightened my shoulders.

The tires screeched across our circular driveway and then
straightened toward Pecos Road. The front end almost took out a saguaro near the
mailbox next to the street, but Seth didn’t lift his foot from the accelerator
for a second. He always drove crazy that way. Crazy Seth. Even crazier than
me.

Seth didn’t bother asking me what was wrong either. He
already knew. “Where to?”

“Anywhere.” I pulled my baseball cap lower on my head.

“Fisher is having a ripper. His parents are in Hawaii.”
Seth’s eyebrows wiggled.

The night was improving exponentially.

“Some of the girls from pom team were invited, too.” He shot
me a sideways glance. “Maybe even Gwyneth...” His voice trailed off in a
grin.

The corner of my mouth turned up in a careful smile.

Gwyneth Riordan had been hot for me since the eighth grade.
Don’t ask me why, but I’d have had to have been blind not to notice and crazy
not to want her. I was a little of both. We usually hooked up on the weekends
and had become a couple by default.

“Beer?” I breathed easier the farther we got from my
street.

“Some.” Seth’s head tilted toward the backseat. I turned and
spied a brown bag. He could always swipe a six-pack from his stepdad’s stash
unnoticed. “Where’s yours?”

“My dad was home,” I grumbled, remembering that my original
plans for tomorrow night were now officially deep-sixed. “I couldn’t chance it.
But I need something stronger.”

Seth pulled a hand over his chin, considering. “Like what?”
he said carefully.

“Anything.”

“You got cheddar?” It really wasn’t a question.

I tapped the pocket to my jean jacket that held the four
fifties from Dad. He expected me to buy a birthday present for Mom’s party
tomorrow night. “Plenty,” I said, staring into the darkness. All I could see was
my angry reflection in the passenger window. It glowed an eerie green from the
dashboard lights. I opened the window and leaned my arm along the frame,
inhaling a gush of fresh air. Warm wind billowed into the front seat, almost
knocking off my cap. Black as oil, the Gila River Indian Reservation stretched
across the right side of the four-lane road, with Pecos Road the clear dividing
line. Even when I squinted, I couldn’t see a single spec of light anywhere—not a
porch light, headlight, even a firefly. It was like squinting at the edge of the
world. When I was a kid, I’d wondered if anyone lived beyond Pecos Road.
Sometimes I still did.

I’d been on the reservation twice in my entire life. One
time with Seth to buy beer and cigarettes with our fake IDs at a gas station
near Casa Grande, the other time on a school field trip in the fourth grade to
spend the day with reservation kids. It had felt like the bus had driven us into
the middle of the desert. Tumbleweeds had bounced across the road like lost
brown beach balls.
Where are all the houses?
I remembered wondering.
The parks? The malls?
The people?
When we’d finally arrived at their school, which was one
big musty-smelling room with desks pushed to the edges, we’d sat on the floor in
a circle, our legs crossed, and listened to an old man. He must have been at
least one thousand years old, with braids that stretched down to his knees and
skin with more wrinkles and folds than I could count. He’d talked as softly as a
whisper, telling us crazy stories about coyotes and stars. I’d sort of half
listened, peering around the room at the reservation kids, who’d numbered half
as many as the ones in my class. With jet-black hair and eyes to match, they’d
all looked alike and fidgeted just as uncomfortably as we had—all except one
girl with ponytails high above her ears. She’d sat across from me. When our
gazes had met, her eyes had sparkled like marbles. She’d smiled at me, revealing
a gap between her two front teeth, but the grin had lasted only an instant. The
girl with the shiny ponytails had never given me a chance to smile back.

“Let’s make a stop in Chandler. I hear Grady’s selling,”
Seth said.

I blinked. “Cool.” Then I closed my eyes and filled my lungs
with more desert air as Seth cranked the stereo to something with plenty of
electric guitar. We flew all the way to the Interstate with the reservation
right beside us, still and endless. It felt like driving straight into the
sky.

When we reached the light before the freeway on-ramp, Seth
pulled up alongside a big dude on a motorcycle. The guy was dressed all in black
like he was freaking Zorro or something. We were the only vehicles waiting for
the green. This light always took forever to change.

“Let’s have some fun,” Seth said, turning down the
stereo.

“Don’t—” I said, but I was too late.

With one arm draped over the steering wheel, Seth lowered
his head to peer out the passenger window and yelled, “Nice leather!”

The guy turned, the whites of his eyes widening with
surprise. Black hair blended with his jacket and hung down to the middle of his
back. First he looked at Seth. But then, with his nostrils flaring, he glared at
me.

My heart began to hammer against my chest. I spoke through
clenched teeth, “Don’t do anything, Seth.”

Seth revved the truck engine anyway.

Biker Guy shook his head like we were both idiots. After a
few agonizing seconds, he pulled back on the throttle. The motorcycle roared one
hundred times louder than Seth’s engine.

There was only one thing left to do.

The light turned green and Seth and Biker Guy jumped on
their accelerators, tires squealing, racing toward the freeway.

Seth let out his maniacal laugh, the one that meant we were
headed for nothing but crazy trouble and I would end up regretting it the
most.

I braced my arm against the door as the truck picked up
speed. “Don’t!” I yelled into the wind. “Don’t race this guy!” The last time
we’d road-raced a guy from school, Seth had almost flipped the truck.

Still laughing, Seth replied by cranking the stereo. The
bass competed with my pounding temples.

As the lanes merged from two into one, Seth ground the
accelerator to the floor. Blue-and-white smoke billowed around our windows in
angry circles.

The front of the truck stayed even with the motorcycle. One
heartbeat later, Seth flew the truck past Biker Guy, pinching him off. On
purpose. Biker Guy had to swerve into the emergency lane to avoid getting
clipped, but not before glaring one last time at our truck, his gaze settling
squarely on me.

“Dumb Indian!” Seth yelled, even though the wind and the
stereo drowned out his voice. “Nothing can beat my truck!” He slapped the
steering wheel with both hands.

I turned to Seth, breathing like I’d just run a marathon,
and shook my head.

He mouthed,
What?

“You’re freakin’ crazy!”

He kept grinning, the green lights from the dashboard
glinting in his eyes. “I told you we were gonna rock tonight!” He offered me a
fist bump.

I ignored it. But then a smile slowly built across my face
when I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Biker Guy stopped on the side of
the road, the front tire of his motorcycle still spewing gray smoke. He was
giving us the finger. For some reason, I thrust my hand out the window and
returned the gesture, maybe because I was mad at him for challenging Seth, mad
at the whole world for simply existing or just relieved that we’d never see
Biker Guy again.

Mostly I was glad no one had wound up in the hospital.

My head was spinning and my lips were feeling rubbery when
someone at Zack Fisher’s party mentioned something about Coach Lannon.

My ears began to function, even though Gwyneth Riordan was
sitting in my lap, grinding against my crotch. She had been saying something
about renting a houseboat at Lake Havasu for spring break. “We just need your
parents’ credit card for the deposit,” she said after getting me so hot that I
would have gladly stolen all of Dad’s credit cards and given them to her.

Three of my teammates from the Lone Butte High School golf
team and their girlfriends were crashed around a glass table in Zack’s backyard
next to the swimming pool. Music blared from hidden speakers in the corners of
the patio, and the pool lights cast a wavy glow across everyone’s faces. I had
to blink a few times to focus.

“Coach said he was going to make a big change to the team on
Monday,” Zack yelled over the music as he chugged from his beer can. The table
was littered with gold-and-silver cans and empty bags of potato chips. Zack
crushed his can underneath his foot and tossed it with the empties. “Didn’t say
what, though. But that’s what I heard.”

Zack was an okay dude, but he was always hearing things;
most of the time he got it wrong.

“Who said that? Who said he was making a change?” I leaned
forward, pushing Gwyneth’s legs to one side, struggling to stop seeing double.
Gwyneth pouted, but golf was one of the few things at school that mattered to
me. The team had struggled last year, and this year we expected to do better. We
had to. Every varsity team at Lone Butte except ours had won a state
championship—football, basketball, wrestling, even fencing. Who fences?! Anyway,
we wanted our trophy in the glass case at the front of the school with all the
others. And Principal Graser wasn’t exactly shy about pointing out its absence
at assemblies.

“Walesa said so. He overheard Coach talking to another
teacher during gym class.”

“When?” Seth asked, sitting straighter.

“Friday morning,” Zack said.

“When will he tell us?” My lips sputtered as I tried to
release a strand of Gwyneth’s blond hair from the side of my mouth.

“Monday after school, I think,” Zack said. “Maybe he’s made
some changes to the schedule. Maybe we’re in more tournaments this year or
something.” His shoulders shrugged like it was probably nothing major.

I leaned back against my chair. I turned to Seth, who also
gave me a shoulder shrug as if to say,
Hey, it’s no big deal.
And then he smirked and
nodded toward Zack.
Consider the source,
he mouthed.

Gwyneth turned herself around in my lap, eager for more
attention. She wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her glossy lips
against mine. She tasted like candy. Her hair cascaded over my shoulder,
invading my nostrils with strawberry.

My nose wrinkled. It felt as if I could suffocate from the
sweetness in her hair, but I pulled her closer, searching for her tongue with
mine. She wanted me, and I guessed I wanted her, too.

Tomorrow I wouldn’t remember a single thing anyway.

* * *

Saturday night, all available bussers and waitresses at the Wild
Horse Restaurant, along with a gray-haired guy on a sad-sounding wooden flute,
sang a Native American birthday song to Mom for her fortieth birthday, even
though she’d begged everybody not to. The song seemed better suited to a funeral
than a birthday. No one in my family understood the lyrics either, the words
sounding more like grunts and heavy exhales.

Dad grinned uncomfortably at the six-person wait team who’d
tended our table all evening, clearing dozens of white porcelain plates and soup
bowls, filling crystal water goblets whenever they drained only a fraction,
scraping crumbs from the linen tablecloth with razor-blade knives. My younger
sister, Riley, and I sank lower in our chairs while everyone else in the packed
restaurant interrupted their five-course dinners of grilled venison and mackerel
salads and turned to stare at our round table smack-dab in the middle of the
floor. The only thing missing was a strobe light pulsating above us as we
watched the presentation of a six-layer, custom-made mesquite-honey mousse cake.
It was pure torture.

I tried to tune out the misery by picturing the cheeseburger
and fries that Riley and I would scarf down as soon as we got home and ditched
Mom and Dad for the nearest Burger King. The sooner this nightmare dinner was
over, the better.

Mom beamed at her cake, pressed her hands against the base
of her neck where her birthday present rested, mouthed
I love you
to Dad and then
blew out the half-dozen candles in the middle of the cake. “Thank you for not
ruining this gorgeous cake with forty candles,” she told the waitress, a thin
woman with black hair and matching eyes. Her twisted bun was pulled back so
tightly that it raised her smooth cheekbones. Like the rest of the restaurant
staff, she wore black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt. The only color she
sported was a teal-blue silk sash threaded through her belt loops.
The real
colors,
the menu boasted,
should unfold on your plates and through the
restaurant windows where you can see uninterrupted desert all the way to the
Estrella Mountains.

Riley had laughed when I’d read it aloud to her with a
haughty English accent, and Mom had frowned from across the table, but, you had
to admit, it sounded cheesy.

The waitress cut the cake in four equally huge slices and
placed each slice on a microscopically small plate even though the only one
who’d eat it was Mom. As the waitress cut each piece, she handed the plate to a
younger girl, the same one who’d kept dropping things all night—the rolls from
the bread basket, the extra soup spoon Dad requested, ice cubes from the water
pitcher that crashed down into our glasses whenever she poured. I wondered why
our waitress didn’t simply banish her someplace else. She was definitely not
waitress material. Even I could see that, hungover or not.