The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Read online

  “So my asshole stepmom will leave me alone,” Laurel said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s like, she won’t let me even go out at all unless she thinks I’m at practice. So I went the first week, got the clothes, and now I just put them on after school so I’m wearing them when I go home.”

  It wasn’t anything I could ever see myself doing, but it still seemed pretty smart. I would have been too afraid that someone would see me and then want me to play catch or something. They’d see how horrible I was at throwing the ball and they’d know I was a total faker, and then they’d call Mom and explain the whole thing, and it would all be downhill from there.

  I was sitting there digesting Laurel’s explanation when suddenly I felt a sharp prick in the back of my neck.

  “Hey!” I cried.

  When I turned around, I saw Kari looking at something pinched between her finger and her thumb. “You had a weird hair on your neck,” she said.

  “You can’t just pull people’s hair!”

  She looked at me, her eyes dead. “Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t sound sorry. If anything, she sounded pleased.

  I turned around, massaging my neck. I was a little afraid to lean all the way back, since she might strike again. Jake leaned over, whispering so only I could hear him.

  “I think she likes you,” he said.

  “What?”

  He winked at me and went back to driving. I knew there was a strong possibility Jake was just messing with me, but then he might have been telling the truth, and if so, I had something new to worry about. Back then, I was as clueless about girls as I was about everything else in my life. Other boys seemed to have no trouble asking them out on a date, making out in parked cars, but I had never even held hands with a girl.

  “Hey!” Laurel cried, making me jump. “It’s Paul Schooner!”

  I followed where she was pointing—it was hard not to, since her arm was brushing my cheek—and saw two high school kids in a jacked-up black Camaro in the Elks Lodge parking lot. The one driving had slicked black hair and black sunglasses, and he wore a black leather jacket with no shirt underneath. The one in the passenger seat was bigger and pudgier, with only a stubble of brown hair on his sweaty scalp. He had the thickest, fuzziest uni-brow I had ever seen, like a giant black caterpillar.

  Laurel laughed and waved, then changed her wave into giving him the bird. The two guys glared at her.

  “Prick,” Laurel said.

  “Who is he?” Jake said.

  “My old boyfriend.”

  We heard a screech of tires. I glanced around and saw the Camaro peeling out of the parking lot. Jake glanced casually in the rearview mirror, smirked, and went right on merrily driving at barely twenty miles an hour. We were on a two-lane road, one lane each way, but the Camaro still pulled alongside of us. The guy driving leaned over his pudgy friend and shouted through the passenger window.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  “Get out of here, Paul!” Laurel said.

  “Shut up, bitch!” Paul shot back. “I’m not talking to you!”

  Jake looked at him. “Don’t talk to her that way.”

  He said it without raising his voice, but it still came across crystal clear. It also seemed to surprise Paul, who stared at Jake with his mouth open, before recovering his cool guy act.

  “Oooooh,” Paul said. “Laurel your girl now, huh? You know she’s a total ho, right?”

  “I told you not to talk to her that way.”

  “What, call her a ho? How about slut? You like that one better?”

  “Paul!” Laurel cried. “You’re such a loser!”

  A gray van started to pull out from the parking lot of a mini-mart ahead of us, then screeched to a halt just before it banged into the Camaro. Laurel screamed and the guy in the van laid on his horn. I may have screamed a little, too. Thankfully, it was lost in all the horn blaring and Laurel screaming. Paul just laughed. Mr. Uni-brow looked a little more worried. We made eye contact, and it was like we shared a connection. I could see it in his eyes: We both knew how it felt to be prisoners in a situation we didn’t create.

  “Why don’t you go jerk off or something,” Jake said.

  “Dude, you’re so going to regret saying that.”

  Jake smirked. “Oh, is that a threat?”

  “It’s a fact,” Paul said. “You wanna race?”

  “Where?”

  “To the end of this road, right where it curves.”

  Jake looked down the road. He was obviously considering it.

  “Don’t,” I said. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Aw,” Jake said, “it’s just a little fun.”

  “Jake, I really don’t want to die.”

  Paul started making chicken-clucking sounds. “I knew you wouldn’t do it! Total pussies!”

  Slowly, Jake turned and looked at Paul. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was going to do it. I hadn’t been around Jake in a long time, but I knew it the same way I had known he was going to dump his milk on Francine Washburn’s head back in the fourth grade, when she had told him that he smelled like a can of worms. Jake had a line you couldn’t cross, and if you did, he wasn’t going to back down.

  “Ready?” Jake said.

  “Oh yeah, baby,” Paul said.

  “Jake—” I began.

  But it was too late. Jake slammed on the accelerator and the Mustang roared. The car charged ahead, whipping us back in our seats. I heard the screech of the Camaro’s tires, but I was too scared out of my mind to turn and look.

  Jake shifted through the gears, but he obviously wasn’t as used to the Mustang as Paul was to his Camaro, because Paul pulled even with us after just a little while, grinning like a guy in a toothpaste commercial. Then both cars were in fifth gear, and each car was going faster—sixty, seventy—the old downtown changing to a mixture of run-down houses and run-down businesses, then just run-down houses—chipping paint and junk-filled driveways, trees and driveways a blur of green and gray. Laurel was yelling—from excitement or fear, I didn’t know. Kari didn’t make a sound. I braced myself against the dashboard. “Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!” I cried, the wind swallowing my voice.

  Jake had a steely-eyed look, and he was concentrating on the road ahead. The cars were even, the Camaro getting a little ahead, then the Mustang. We were blocking both lanes of traffic, and I kept waiting for a car to pull out of one of the side streets or driveways. I could now see the bend in the road too, and there was a cluster of pine trees on either side of the road down there, making it impossible to see if a car was coming. The Camaro was edging ahead.

  “Ha-ha!” Paul yelled. “Suck-errrrrr!”

  Then a car did round the bend ahead and I cried out in surprise. It wasn’t just any car either. It was a police car—a white one with blue stripes, the sirens blaring on right away.

  Both drivers slammed on their brakes. The Camaro took a hard left onto a side street. I was hoping Jake would just stop and get the whole thing over with—the handcuffs, the time behind bars, the tearful call to our parents—but I should have known better. He screeched to the right, onto a narrow road into a residential neighborhood, just missing a big rusty motor-home. Laurel screamed. I screamed. Jake laughed. Kari didn’t make a peep.

  “What’re you doing?” I cried. “You can’t get away from the police!”

  “He’ll probably follow the other guy.”

  The police car, now two blocks back, screeched around the corner and barreled after us. I stared at Jake.

  “Okay, maybe not,” he said.

  I was going to say something else, but he jerked the wheel to the left and screeched around another corner. A cat, sunning itself in the middle of the road on a manhole, darted out of the way just in time. One-story houses and parked cars blurred past. He jerked around another corner and another. I heard the police siren gaining on us.

  “You’re going to kill someone!” I shouted.

  “You’re
right,” he said.

  He screeched the car to a halt right in the middle of the road and was out of the car before I could even take a breath.

  “Run for it!” he said.

  “What?”

  “Run! Run!”

  He was already sprinting away. Laurel and Kari quickly followed. I sat there like a lump of flesh, trying to get air into my lungs, not sure what to do. Running might make it worse. But if I didn’t run, I would be the only one left to suffer the consequences. The police siren rounded onto the street, and it was as if I’d been jabbed with an electric cattle prod, because I jumped out of the car and started after Jake. Then I remembered I’d left the backpack in the Mustang. I turned. The police car was halfway down the street, lights flashing, close enough that I could see the cop inside—a beefy guy with a hamster-size brown mustache.

  I hesitated. Dad’s portrait was in the backpack.

  “What are you doing?” Jake shouted at me from down the road.

  I couldn’t leave the backpack. I ran back for it, lunging inside and pulling it out. The cop car screeched to a halt next to the Mustang.

  “Stop right there!” the cop shouted.

  But I was already running.

  chapter five

  In my mind, I saw the whole thing playing out like some episode from Cops. I saw myself running from the scene of the crime, eyes crazed. Maybe I was shirtless. I knew I wouldn’t look good without a shirt, kind of like how one of those hairless cats looks, but the criminals never seemed to be wearing shirts on those shows. I saw the policeman pulling out his gun. I heard gunshots—bam! bam! bam!—three in a row, each one finding its target in my legs. I saw myself going down in a heap. I heard the deep-voiced narrator speaking as I lay writhing on the ground, the camera focusing on my blood pooling on the sidewalk: “Charles Hill had a bright future ahead of him, but it all ended on one tragic afternoon when he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You, kid!” the policeman shouted behind me. “Hold it!”

  But I didn’t stop. Lucky for me, there were no gunshots. Jake and the two girls had already rounded the corner and I ran after them as fast as my puny legs would take me, my backpack slung over my shoulder feeling like it was full of bricks. I heard the police car’s engine roar, and glancing back, saw the car swerve around the Mustang and head right for me.

  Why was I running? It made no sense. I was a good kid. I was not a lawbreaker. I did not want to die.

  I reached the corner, gasping already, and saw the two girls take a hard left after a big ugly green bush. The policeman turned the corner right after I did, tires screeching, and pulled right alongside of me. I didn’t dare look at him. Dogs were barking; an old lady glared at me from her kitchen window; a Hispanic man wearing a baseball cap stopped pushing his lawn mower and stared. I reached the bush and banked left, finding a narrow sidewalk path that connected two streets, the backyard fences on either side making it seem like a tunnel. Jake was halfway down, the girls ahead of him, and he was madly waving me on.

  Behind me, the cop car screeched to a halt. The door opened and slammed shut. I heard heavy booted footsteps on the pavement.

  “Stop!” the guy shouted again. You’d think by now he would have realized that the whole shouting thing wasn’t working for him.

  When I reached Jake, he took off across the street. We were in a cul-de-sac, both sides of the street lined with junky cars, and I saw the girls climbing over a wooden fence of a yellow house. Jake scaled it like a pole vaulter on his gold-medal run. Me, I barely managed to get my leg and one arm up, struggling to get all the way over the top.

  Finally, I fell to the other side, onto a prickly hedge of junipers. I was up in a hurry. Jake was already climbing a fence on the far side. I got to it and managed to get over and down into another backyard before I heard the policeman behind me. This lawn was as immaculate as a golf course, shaped like an hourglass.

  “This way!”

  I turned, and there was Jake, half out of a tall hedge. He ducked inside, and I plunged after him, branches whipping my sweaty face. We emerged into another backyard, the house big, green, and boxy like an army barrack. We rushed around the corner and there were the girls, breathing hard, faces pink. Laurel led us behind a huge woodpile, the rest of us following. It was shadowy and damp, and there were dozens of cigarette butts in the dirt. It smelled like rotting wood and mold.

  “What now?” I said.

  Laurel put her fingers to her lips. She listened for a moment, and when she didn’t hear anything, leaned in close and whispered.

  “I live a few houses from here,” she said. “When the cop’s gone, we’ll go there.”

  “You been here before?” Jake asked.

  “Oh yeah, lots of times.” She smiled. “This is Paul’s house. You know, the guy with the Camaro. We used to hang out behind the wood here and make out.”

  I looked at her, waiting for the punch line. But she was serious. So if the cop didn’t get us, her ex-boyfriend would show up and want to fight. Nice.

  The neighborhood dogs barked in surround sound, and we heard the rattle of a chain-link fence a couple of houses over, but the cop didn’t find us. Neither did Camaro Paul. We waited another minute or so, then Laurel peered into the next backyard. She motioned for us to go, and we climbed into the branches of an apple tree and down into a backyard that was all bark dust, dirt, and fallen rotting apples.

  Creeping along, crouched like a platoon on a patrol, we crossed that yard, and two more after it, then went into the backyard of a big two-story white house with a covered porch that made me think of the house from The Waltons. I’m not sure if I’d ever seen an episode of The Waltons, but it’s the house I imagined people like the Waltons would live in. Clean-cut, nice people. Not people like Laurel, who smoked and kissed jerks behind woodpiles.

  We stood on the side of the house, with a view of the backyard, a huge pine tree above us blotting out the sky. Laurel closed the wooden gate, holding the latch so it didn’t make a sound.

  “Stay here,” she whispered. “My stepmom might be home.”

  She went around the corner. Kari stood off to the side, picking something out of her fingernails with a pine needle. My legs felt like jelly. My shirt was soaked with sweat. I wondered how I was going to get out of this mess without getting into any more trouble.

  When I’d gotten my breath back, I said, “They’re going to find out it’s us, you know.”

  “Nah,” Jake said.

  “They will. They’re going to trace the license plate, then they’ll call Harkin and he’ll tell them we stole it.”

  He shrugged. “So what’s in the bag?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your backpack. What’s so important that you had to go back for it?”

  “Uh . . . well, it’s got like all my information in it. They’d know it was me for sure if I left it back there.”

  He shook his head. “I saw the look you had. There’s something important in there you didn’t want to leave.”

  I didn’t want to tell him about Dad’s portrait. I knew he’d never understand and that he’d probably just make fun of me. Laurel came around the corner, saving me from having to say anything.

  “She’s gone,” she said. “My brother said she went to the store.”

  “Tim’s here?” Jake said.

  “No, Tim’s at soccer practice. He’s really into that sports stuff. I mean my brother Gabe. I don’t think you’ve met him—lives in Bend. Just here for the day, I think. Don’t worry, he’s cool. Smokes too much pot, but cool.”

  We followed her onto the deck and through the sliding glass doors into the house. I was still worried that the cops might show up at any minute. We entered a family room with dark-paneled walls, leather furniture, and a big TV/stereo setup. There was a green felt poker table in the corner and pictures of poker-playing bulldogs on the walls. The room was cool and had the air-conditioned staleness of a house that didn’t get a lot of fresh air.
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  I wasn’t paying attention to where Jake was, and suddenly my backpack was jerked off my shoulder. I lunged for it, but he pranced away with it above his head.

  “Got it!” He laughed.

  “Give that back!”

  “Not until I see what’s inside.”

  “Jake—”

  “More love notes to Tessa Boone?”

  “It’s nothing like that! Give it to me!”

  The girls just stood and watched. Laurel giggled. Somehow Jake managed to keep his body between me and the backpack, his back like a wall, despite how hard I tried to get around him. I heard him unzip it.

  “No!” I protested.

  “Let’s see here,” he said, dropping some books on the floor, “boring school stuff, some notebooks with notes—”

  “Jake!”

  “—a wadded-up paper sack with . . . ewww, broccoli and cauliflower—”

  “Stop!”

  “—some nerdy sci-fi paperbacks, a cheap Swiss army knife, a . . . compass? Okay, weird. And . . .” He trailed off.

  Finally, I managed to get past his blockade, and I saw that he was looking at my drawing notebook. Not only that, but he had it open and he was looking at the portrait of Dad. I snatched it away from him, cradling it against my chest. He looked at me. All the joking was gone, and he looked at me in a totally different way. He looked impressed.

  “You drew that, man?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s really good. Who is it?”

  “Nobody.” I felt a warmth in my cheeks.

  “Let me see it!” Laurel said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Aww, come on!”

  “It’s not any good.”

  Jake shook his head. “Dude, you’re selling yourself short. That’s a totally frickin’ awesome drawing.”

  Laurel put her hands on the pad and tugged at it. I put up a little resistance, but not really that much, and she took it away from me. The truth was, I wanted her to like it. I wanted it to be true, what Jake said, but I was afraid he was just full of it and she would say something like, “Oh, that’s nice,” in that fake way that people use when they can’t be bothered to form an opinion either way.