The People We Keep(29)

“Brave girl! You must be freezing.”

“I do okay,” I say.

“I’m sure you do,” he says, smiling. His teeth are too small, so it looks like he has too many of them. He’s not much bigger than me. His cheeks are round and flushed and he has a little button nose. His hat is probably covering a receding hairline and his eyes have the faint start of the kind of crinkles Margo calls crow’s toes. I had this book about Santa Claus as a kid, and Adam looks like one of his elves, the one who wasn’t good at making toys and had mismatched shoes.

“Well, I tell you what,” Adam says, “they know me here. They’ll vouch for me. I’m safe.” He digs his wallet out of his back pocket and fiddles through some business cards until he finds the one he’s looking for. He pulls a pen from his shirt pocket, writes a number on the back. “You get too cold at the campground, you call me.”

I want to jump at the chance to take another warm shower and sleep on a couch in an actual building with actual heat, but something about Adam saying he’s safe makes me worry he’s not. My dad always says anytime someone offers you something you have to figure out what’s in it for them. I don’t think Adam could be in it for whatever free coffee I could pass his way, so it’s exactly the kind of situation Margo would warn me about.

Adam holds the card out, but I don’t take it, so he kinda shakes it—the way you jog a fishing lure—until I do.

“Why would you…”

“I know what it’s like to be your age,” Adam says. “I wouldn’t go back if you paid me.”

I tuck the card in the band of my skirt without looking at it. Mumble, “Thanks,” to be polite, but set in my head that his place is not an option.



* * *



I think about dropping hints to Bodie that I need a couch to crash on. Maybe just asking if he knows someone who needs a roommate or where there’s a cheap hotel or rooms for rent. Not coming right out and saying “Can I stay with you?” because that would be needy and gross, but giving him the opportunity to offer. Except every time I get close to Bodie to start a conversation, he nods or winks, or gives me that chin-first smile, and I clam up. I practice what I should say in my head while I wipe down tables, settling on: So, I need a place to crash for a few days while I find new digs. Any idea where to look? I get to the point where I’m pretty sure when I say it out loud, I can make it sound like something I just thought of. But by the time I work up the right resolve and Carly sends me to the kitchen with dirty dishes, Bodie is gone.

Some guy with curly red hair, a backwards baseball cap, and total pizza face is hacking at a head of iceberg lettuce with a cleaver, yelling “Ha!” with every slice, dumping the remains into a bin on the sandwich prep station.

I don’t introduce myself, and he doesn’t bother looking up. I put the dishes on the counter and walk out. As the door closes behind me, I hear the sharp smack of the cleaver against the cutting board again, and he yells, “Take that, motherfucka!”





— Chapter 13 —


Knowing I could be warm on a couch at Adam’s place makes it that much colder at the campground. In elementary school they taught us about stranger danger, but what if hypothermia is a possibility, and the stranger has a warm place to stay?

I start my car and let it run with the heat full blast until it’s so warm I can hardly breathe. Then I turn it off and sleep until I wake up shivering again.

That business card in my bag, tucked in the inside pocket so it won’t get lost—the thought of it makes my teeth itch. At least if I was duct taped to a chair in Adam’s basement I’d be warmer than I am now. I think about calling from the pay phone by the bathrooms. Instead, I start the car again. Soon as the air turns warm, I put my hands in front of the vent. Hold them there until I feel like they might burn.



* * *



When I wake up, the campground man, with his flappy hat and ruddy beard, is watching me through a clear spot the sun melted in the ice on the windshield. My heart jolts. I reach over to make sure the door is locked. The guy taps the window, his finger cracked and yellowed. With his other hand, he slaps a piece of paper on the glass, writing side down, so I can read what it says: Car out 9 AM.

His eyes are the exact same grey-blue as the sky behind him.

I nod.

He crumples the paper, jams it in the pocket of his jeans as he walks away.

It’s too cold to even think about using that shower. I run to the bathroom to pee, brush my hair and teeth, and change my bandage. The cut across my knuckles is starting to scab, but it’s still pretty grisly. At least it’s not red and puffy. According to Margo, when she used to check my scraped-up knees, that’s the sign of infection you have to watch for. She knows all that stuff because her mother was a nurse.

I don’t have anything to pack up from the campground, because I’ve slept in my car the whole time, but it’s strange to just go. I feel like I should take something or leave something. Like this was my first home away from the motorhome and there should be a gesture about that. I choose a stone from the fire ring. It’s smooth and grey, charred on one side. It smells like a campfire, and I wish I’d made one while I was here. I drop the stone in the well of the car door and drive away.



* * *