Chapter 18
NICOLETTE LIKED ADULTS BEST WHEN they stayed in their lane. When they didn’t try to dress like you, or listen to your music, or speak your slang, or stick their tongues in your best friends’ mouths.
Had Sam—no last name offered—not been making out so heavily with Lorelei in the front seat of his beast of a car, he might have been tolerable for a grown-up.
He was a good-looking dude for his age, easygoing, polite enough.
He didn’t talk over them or treat them like they were kids.
In that way, he reminded Nicolette of Mr. Hawksfield, everyone’s favorite teacher.
But Hawk would never stick his tongue in a student’s mouth.
Unless you asked him to.
Lorelei had only known Sam for a few hours, and already she had him wrapped around her little finger.
Lorelei had that certain somethin’ somethin’ that made demands sound like requests, that made boys want to do things for her.
It was in the way she carried herself, the way it never seemed to occur to her that someone wouldn’t like her, the way she could make you feel like the most interesting person on the planet just by listening to you.
Nicolette might have a prettier face and nicer hair, but Nicolette tried really hard to achieve those things.
Lorelei, on the other hand, seemed to draw people to her without any effort whatsoever.
Charisma was the word that came to mind, and you either had it, or you didn’t.
Lorelei had it. Which was why Lorelei was always the yardstick for how Nicolette measured herself.
And Barb . . . well, Barb was Barb. Sometimes they forgot she was there.
Sam’s car was a burgundy-colored Lincoln Continental that was so embarrassingly big, nobody at the drive-in could park behind them. Nicolette had balked when he’d pulled up to Barb’s house to pick them all up.
“It’s like a pimpmobile straight out of the eighties,” she’d said, noticing that he was wearing the same Blondie T-shirt he’d had on at Wonderland earlier that day. “Do you even know what decade we’re in?”
“Shut up,” Lorelei hissed.
But Sam wasn’t offended. “A pimp is exactly who I bought it from,” he said, delighted. “This is a ’79 model, the last year they made a two-door car this big.”
“Size matters,” Barb quipped.
Everyone laughed except Nicolette. “That they made them at all is insane,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’m not getting in that thing.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Sam said with a smile. “Because it runs like a motherfucking dream. You don’t want to get in it, pretty lady, that’s cool. I have no problem leaving you right here on the curb, and you can walk your little ass to the drive-in.”
Nicolette heard Barb gasp from somewhere behind her.
It wasn’t often someone spoke to her like that, and she hadn’t quite known how to react to Sam’s unexpected zinger.
Though she could feel the heat in her cheeks underneath her three layers of foundation, acting unbothered was the only armor she had, so she’d simply shrugged and climbed into the car.
She did wonder if the pimp story was true, however.
If it was, it was actually kind of cool.
Lorelei didn’t seem to have an opinion on the car either way, but that was because she never thought about anything other than whatever was currently happening.
Lorelei never stressed about yesterday or worried about tomorrow, believing that everything would always work out.
And for her, it usually did. Which was so fucking annoying.
The Continental had plush cream leather seats and a red dashboard, atop which sat a pine-scented air freshener designed to look like a gold crown.
Combined with the aroma of cigarette smoke, Sam’s cologne, and the faint whiff of greasy food that seemed to permeate the interior, Nicolette was hit with a sudden wave of nausea.
Reflexively she put a hand over her stomach, willing the sick feeling to go away.
She couldn’t easily exit the two-door car from the backseat.
If she wanted to get out, she’d be forced to ask the lip-locked lovebirds in the front seat to step out first.
“It stinks in here,” she whispered to Barb.
They were only a half hour into the movie, huddled together in the middle of the sofa-like backseat so they could see the screen clearly in between the front headrests.
“I swear I can smell every fast-food burger he’s ever eaten in this car, mixed with pine trees and cigarette butts. ”
“It doesn’t bother me.” Barb’s eyes were fixed on the giant screen on the other side of the Continental’s windshield, where a pregnant Natalie Portman was dancing around an empty Walmart.
She seemed mesmerized by the movie, her round face reflecting the dim flickers from the screen.
“It smells like adventure. You can tell he’s been everywhere. ”
Nicolette rolled her eyes. Barb was always saying shit like that; she had this way of idealizing everything and turning it into a fantasy.
Sam had told them that he’d been making his way north from San Diego for the past couple of months with no real destination in mind, stopping wherever and whenever he felt like it, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week or two if he could pick up some work.
It clearly sounded exciting to Barb, and she’d spent most of the drive here peppering him with questions about the places he’d been, the things he’d seen, the people he’d met.
Nicolette had only half paid attention to his answers, her mind on other things.
Hot or not, the dude just seemed aimless.
He had no home, no job, no ambition, no goals. Not her type. No thanks. Hard pass.
Honestly, Nicolette should have bailed on tonight and left Barb to play third wheel, because at least that was something Barb was good at.
She could have come straight home after Wonderland, packed a bag, and caught the bus up to Seattle to see Ray.
Her mother, Deanna, had kicked him out a few months back, less than a week after their father was convicted, saying he was eighteen now and she couldn’t financially support them all.
But they all knew that was just an excuse.
Her mother had never bonded with her husband’s firstborn, not that she ever tried.
If there’d been a choice, Nicolette would have preferred no father at all to the one she and Ray got.
Richard Montes was a member of the Devil’s Dukes, a “motorcycle club” (translation: biker gang) that had plagued Seaside for two generations and counting.
His weekdays were spent working as a mechanic at Clove Street Auto Repair, which shared a parking lot with the Double D clubhouse.
Weekends were spent running guns, selling coke, and drinking too much; he was hardly ever home.
When he was, his arguments with Deanna could last hours, ending in broken lamps, shattered dishware, and kitchen cupboards ripped off the hinges.
Richard never did beat his wife or kids. But he had a terrible temper when he was drinking, attacking anything and everything with a ferocity that was terrifying. It was the anticipation that he might one day turn his rage onto them that made their home feel unsafe.
When the cops came to arrest him a few months ago, Nicolette had been both traumatized and thrilled to see him escorted out of the house in handcuffs. Good, she thought. I hope you die in your cell.
Even with Richard and Ray gone, things still weren’t great at home.
Her mother’s drinking had worsened, and with no husband or stepson to take her rage out on, Nicolette was the only target Deanna had left.
If it weren’t for Barb’s house right across the street to escape to, she would have run away years ago.
Mrs. Bonifacio could be strict, but there was always food in the fridge, they never had their electricity or water shut off, and their TV had all the good channels. Barb had no idea how lucky she was.
She should be nicer to Barb. She knew that.
It was just . . . Barb had no sense of style.
She never wore makeup or did anything with her hair.
She spent too much time at school, getting straight A’s and writing her short stories and working on the stupid yearbook and gazing dreamily at Mr. Hawksfield when she thought nobody was looking.
All that, combined with her goody-two-shoes personality, made her so fucking annoying most of the time.
“But if I tell my mom we’re going to the drive-in, she’ll ask who’s driving,” Barb had said to them earlier, as Nicolette and Lorelei were freshening up in her bedroom.
Lorelei was fussing with her clothes, Nicolette was fussing with her makeup, and Barb was just fussing.
“If I lie about where I am and she finds out, she’ll ground me for a month. ”
“Then don’t lie,” Lorelei said, twisting around to see how her butt looked in the mirror.
She had changed into a skirt that was even shorter than the one she’d been wearing at Wonderland.
“Just tell her we’re going to the movies.
She won’t ask where. And if she figures it out, tell her we’re going with Marty.
He’s working there tonight.” She glanced over at Barb with a stern expression.
“Don’t punk out on us. It’s going to be fun. ”
An hour later, fun wasn’t necessarily the word Nicolette would have used to describe it.
She desperately wanted to bail, but there was no one to drive her home.
The Starlight was out in the middle of nowhere, and it was too long of a walk back to town.
For now, it seemed she was stuck in the backseat with a symphony of odors attacking her from all angles. This night sucked balls.
Lorelei’s head popped up to peer at her friends in the backseat. Her face was just a shadow backlit by the movie screen on the other side of the windshield. “Let’s switch,” she said to them. “You guys come sit up front, and we’ll take the back.”
They switched. Within a few minutes, the sounds Lorelei and Sam were making in the backseat were so loud, Nicolette was forced to turn up the volume on the Continental’s stereo so she and Barb could actually hear the movie.
Tonight’s double feature was Where the Heart Is, starring Natalie Port-man, followed by Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe.
Nicolette found herself hating the first movie, which was about a pregnant teenager who’d run off with her boyfriend, only for him to abandon her at a Walmart.
She was then forced to sleep at the Walmart secretly because she had nowhere else to go.
Nicolette could relate all too well to the desire to get out of a small town in the hopes of finding a bigger and better life, so the movie was hitting a little too close to home.
Unlike Natalie’s character, Novalee, Nicolette had no intention of leaving Seaside pregnant, only to get stuck in some other small town, pregnant. No fucking way would that happen to her. She rubbed her belly. She needed to make a decision soon.
Even though Hawk didn’t believe the baby was his, at least he’d offered to pay for the abortion.