“Would you like me to look at them?”
The truth was, the sketches felt too personal, too unnerving to share with anybody. When Conn had glanced at my open notebook, I’d felt defenseless. Small.
“It’s okay.” Lily quickly interpreted my silence. “You don’t have to show me.”
“It’s just … I don’t think they’re good enough to be Whatever I Want.”
“Speaking about what we want…” Mischief crept into Lily’s voice. “Are you and your class partner making any, hmm, progress?”
“No.” I told her what Conn had said after English. “It’s all about his grade.”
Lily lifted the rack, leaving a perfect triangle of pool balls. She offered me a cue. “Want to break?”
I shook my head. “Go ahead.”
She lined up the white cue ball. “I know what I saw in his eyes, that first day of school.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Really? What?”
The white ball punched into the triangle, shattering it. Colored spheres spun away and slammed into each other like this was the Big Bang, and the start of the universe.
“Fascination.”
8
Conn had a motorcycle. Of course.
It was sleek and gray and, as far as these things go, quiet. Not to mention dangerous. I stared at Conn, trying to remember what, exactly, I’d done to earn the dubious honor of riding with him on his rumbling, wheeled death contraption.
“Don’t pretend you’re nervous,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll be genuinely nervous.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Cross my heart and hope not to die,” I said, though a little proud that, somewhere in the course of our short acquaintance, I had convinced him that I was a toughie.
“You wanted transportation,” he said. “This is what I’ve got.”
I took a deep breath and held out my hand. “Helmet?”
He gave me a look of surprise mingled with reproach. Apparently, he had decided my fear was a total charade, and now I was taking it too far. “You don’t need a helmet.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“Illinois state law doesn’t require that drivers or passengers of motorcycles wear helmets.”
“Yeah, but the law of common sense does.”
He seemed unnecessarily confused for someone suggesting I risk splitting my head open like a ripe melon. “Darcy, you won’t get hurt. And I won’t let us crash.”
Well, I wasn’t the first girl to let a boy talk her into doing something stupid.
The engine continued its low growl as Conn instructed, “Wait until I’m ready, then hop on using the pegs above the rear wheel as if they’re stirrups and this is a horse.”
I climbed up behind him, touching his shoulder for balance. It went rigid under my palm.
I quickly let go, my fingertips slipping from the smooth brown leather of his jacket. I shifted on the seat and decided to focus on not falling off.
He cleared his throat. “As we ride, keep your feet on the pegs.”
And my hands? If this were a Spanish soap opera, for sure I’d be expected to wrap my arms around this muchacho’s warm waist. Conn, however, was obviously not thinking along ¡Ay, caliente! lines. “There are bars for your hands on either side, just behind you.”
I tried not to feel like I had been reprimanded. And for what? Touching his shoulder? That had been innocent enough.
I gritted my teeth. I gripped the bars, and we were off.
My nervousness disintegrated into exhilaration. Trees blurred by in a smear of autumnal gold. As I shouted directions in Conn’s ear, we hit the highway, and he opened up the throttle.
The wind buffeted me, strong and cold. The only shelter from it was Conn—whom I wasn’t supposed to touch, whose body radiated heat. I tried not to want to press myself against his back. My fingers tightened around the freezing bars.
When we finally slowed and Conn parked at the commuter train station, my skin vibrated from the motorcycle’s engine. I jumped off. If one small part of the ride had been difficult, if a sliver of me felt the pain of impossible things, the rest of it had been thrilling. “That was fast!” I said.
“Not really.” Conn killed the engine and dismounted.
I laughed. The sound began as self-mocking for having been afraid of a motorcycle, for thinking something was fast when it was slow, but then my laugh changed of its own free will. It grew heady, throaty … happy. It startled me.
It startled him. He looked at me, really looked at me, and caught his breath.
“What?” My pleasure shrank. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
I touched my chilled cheeks, sure that there must be the remains of a dead bug somewhere, then reached for my ponytail. The tie had vanished, leaving a snarled disaster in its wake. “Whoa. Banshee hair. I bet I look like a member of an eighties post-punk boy band.”
“Post-what?”
Jims was right: Conn was oddly clueless about obvious things. I was about to lecture him on the revolutionary significance of punk, but he asked, “What are we doing here? You don’t want to take the train to Chicago, do you? I can drive us to the city.”
“This is our destination. Actually, there is.” I pointed at the tracks. “Follow me.”
I led the way down the rails, over the rubbly white rocks. “Usually the tracks are kept clean close to the stations, but in between stops on the line you can find a lot of useful junk.”
He raised one skeptical brow. “Useful.”
I picked up a tube of rusted metal. “Like this.”
“I don’t see how that’s useful for our class assignment.”
“That’s because you lack vision.”
“I lack many things.” He kicked at the rocks. “But not my sanity.”
I unzipped my backpack, tucked the tube inside, and tried to explain. “J. Alfred spends the entire poem wandering around, talking about cheap hotels and chimney soot. He thinks about dirt. Trashy stuff.” I crouched to uncover a pile of springs.
He looked down at me with an expression of growing wonder, so I continued. “Also, J. never actually goes anywhere. He’s always between places, and takes forever to make up his mind. So I thought of this”—I swept my hand at the tracks—“because it’s in between stops and littered with trash. I don’t know where this junk comes from. I guess it falls off the trains, which doesn’t really boost my confidence in the safety of Chicagoland commuter rails. But why not build a sculpture about the poem from what we collect here? The junk from an in-between place?”