Passenger

“Sorry.”

“Jeez.” Co

Co

He threw his clothes into my lap and pointed at the ice-block wall separating his room from his own personal bathroom. “Get in there. Rinse off. Wake up. Snap the fuck out of it, Jack. You have three minutes and then I’m going to come in and drag you naked into the street if you don’t get your shit together. Now. Come on.”

*   *   *

I’d kept those glasses and the cop’s card twisted up inside my dirty clothes. Co

Wondering.

Co

But ever since I broke that lens in Ben and Griffin’s garage, things had been changed, moved around, and that was scarier than anything I had ever seen since my whole fucked-up journey started, back on the night of Co

He drove.

I sat.

And I couldn’t help but look back, one time, to see if maybe there was a black Cadillac following us, or maybe if we had Freddie Horvath’s body tied up in the bed of Co

I hadn’t gotten away from anything.

We didn’t have to say the first word about where we were going. We always ate at the same places: Chinese food if we went to the mall, or Uncle Herb’s, a twenty-four-hour pancake diner, if we didn’t. And we weren’t going to the mall.

“Dude. Turn right up here,” I said.

Co

“I want to go by this place where some kids I know live.”

“You don’t know anyone that I don’t know. And this is the crackhead part of town.” He laughed.

But Co

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” Then he sounded a little perturbed, but it was just Co

I tried to laugh.

“Okay. Where am I going now?” he said.

“Here. This street. Forest Trail.”

Forest Trail Lane was a cul-de-sac of older homes that had been built twenty years ago. This was the only neighborhood in Glenbrook that had apartment buildings, too, and every kid in town knew that if you wanted weed or meth, you could find it here.

“Go slow.”

“Dude. What the fuck?”

Co

“Please, Con. Just go slow.”

Ben and Griffin’s house was at the end of the cul-de-sac; nice, tile roof, a gate on the side leading around to an old L-shaped swimming pool. I swam in it with them. So did Co

Just the way it was supposed to be.

Their station wagon was parked in the driveway. The back door on the driver’s side stood open and Griffin’s mom bent inside it, looping plastic Walmart bags onto her fingers.

“Stop here.”

Co

“You never been here before?” I said.

“You’re scaring me, Jack.”

I waved my arm. “Excuse me! Mrs. G?”

And Mrs. Goodrich turned and looked right at me.

Let me tell you something. You know how sometimes you’ll run into a person—at the mall, waiting in line for movie tickets, stuff like that—and you know you recognize the person? But then, when you make eye contact, you can plainly see that you’re a complete stranger to them. That’s exactly how Mrs. Goodrich looked at me. And there was no reason for it. Of course she knew who I was. She had to. I’d been over to that house plenty of times. I could tell you every detail about what was inside it.

She almost seemed angered, frightened, like she thought Co

“Whoa.” Co

I slumped down into the seat, put the window up.

I sighed. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

*   *   *

This is real.

I am sitting here in the front seat of my best friend’s car in the town I grew up in.

This is all real.

And nobody knows anything about me.

We hardly say another word on the way to the diner. Co

Ben.

Griffin.

My friend thinks I’m insane.

I want to ask him about the lens, the garage. I want to tell him about the glasses I left in my clothes, but I am afraid.

I am afraid of what Co

This is real.

Welcome home, Jack.

*   *   *

“You’re staring at me.”

“Huh?”

“You keep staring at me, Jack. It’s creeping me out.”

Co

I felt myself turning red, getting ready for another one of Co

“Sorry.”

“Well, quit it.”

But I couldn’t. I saw something in his eyes. Something that wasn’t the same as before. So he kicked my foot under the table.