What You Don't Know(80)

“Why does it matter what anyone thinks?” his mother asks when he complains about his lack of wheels. “So what if you have to walk?”

“You don’t understand,” he says. “You don’t have to walk anywhere.”

And she doesn’t, because she already has a car. He loves his mother, doesn’t want to fight with her, but how’s he supposed to get anywhere without a car in this city—how’s he supposed to get a girlfriend?

“You’re still young,” his mother says. “Walking will do you good.”

“You have a car.”

“I have to get to work.”

“So do I,” he says. “You could buy me a car, you know.”

She snorts and waves her hand, goes back to watching the local news. That’s all she’s been watching the last few days, ever since that Simms girl turned up dead. It wasn’t all that long ago that she wouldn’t even talk about Seever, wouldn’t let anyone mention his name, because it could’ve been Jimmy buried in his crawl space, he could’ve been one of those poor kids on that long list of names.

I only met him once, he’d say when she’d start in about those dead kids, usually after some wine, but she didn’t want to hear it. We lived down the street from him for six months before we moved. I mowed his lawn twice.

My Jimmy’s a lucky boy, his mother had told the nice lady reporter from the newspaper all those years before, when Seever’s trial was ongoing and everyone was talking about him, and his mother had been so pleased when her name had actually been printed, she’d clipped out the article and saved it. Seever didn’t take a shine to him. He let my boy live.

“You know we can’t afford another car,” his mother says now. “If your father was alive—well, that doesn’t matter. We don’t have the money.”

Jimmy shrugs into a coat, not wanting to see his mother have another breakdown about his father, who fell asleep behind the wheel on the interstate and never even saw that tree coming. It’s been three years since then, and she still brings up her dead husband every time Jimmy asks for money, as if they’d be straight-up millionaires if her husband were still alive. He figures he’ll save up for a car, although it’ll be years before he has enough for something good. Tough titty, said the kitty, as his dad used to say.

“I’m outta here,” he says, but his mother isn’t listening, she’s so caught up in the news about that girl. He thinks about ripping the plug out of the wall, reminding his mother that he might be next, that whoever went after Simms might need another victim, that’s what the cops had said when they’d called that morning, that Jimmy and his mother should be careful, that they were contacting anyone who’d ever been connected to Seever, just in case. He thinks about telling his mom that she’d better drive him to work so he’d stay safe. But if he said that her imagination would start running wild, and then she’d be all over him, she’d want to take him to work every day, and then pick him up, and she’d sneak into his bedroom at night to check on him to make sure he was okay. So he doesn’t say anything, just shrugs into his coat and zips it up as far as it’ll go before heading outside, out into the cold. It’s the middle of the day, and the Second-Story Killer, or whatever they’re calling him, seems to be after only women, so he’s safe.

Outside, it’s freezing. It often gets cold here, but this—this is something else. It hasn’t been cold enough for the schools to close yet, but they’ll probably be shut down tomorrow; they don’t want kids getting frostbite while waiting for the bus or walking to class. But at least they’re all inside now, not out here with him, trudging through the piles of snow his dickhead neighbors never bother to shovel off their sidewalks, and by the time he gets to work his feet’ll be soaked through and he won’t be able to feel them until they start to thaw and hurt like hell.

It’s mostly the thought of his feet that makes him decide to take the bus, although he hates everything about public transportation. He hates the extra-long buses the city has, like two worms connected in the center by an accordion, and he hates the fact that even though most of them are brand-new, they still smell like piss. He doesn’t know why that is. The plastic seats are shiny and free of gum and the floors are mostly spotless, but they still smell. Like some guy stood in the middle of the bus, right in the springy thing that keeps the whole thing connected, and unzipped, spraying urine everywhere.

But what does Jimmy Galen hate most about the bus? That anyone can see him riding it. Anyone. And riding a bus is even worse than walking, especially if your friends see you doing it, and they blast by while you’re waiting inside the clear plastic walls of the bus stop and shoot you the finger, screaming and laughing, because their parents bought them a car to drive, and you’re the fucking loser waiting to take a bus to your job at the mall, where you sell shitty sports memorabilia to lame kids or single old guys with nothing better to spend their money on.

“If you signed up at the community college I might let you take my car to class,” his mother said that fall, after everyone went back to school and the streets seemed empty.

“I just graduated.”

“Two years ago,” his mother said, snorting. “If you want to get a good job, you have to go to college these days.”