Free Dead Ends by Erin Jade Lange Page A

I don’t have a car,” I muttered.
    â€œYou should get a red car like that boy.”
    â€œWhat boy?”
    â€œThe one you beat up.”
    I looked up. “Oh, that douche in the Mustang? I would never drive the same car as that loser. He thinks he’s a big shot just because he’s got wheels.”
    â€œIs that why you beat him up?” Billy asked. “Because he has a car and you don’t?”
    â€œNo, that’s not why I …”
    I hesitated. It wasn’t just that the jerk had a car and I didn’t. It was that he had the
freedom
that comes with a car—and I didn’t.
    â€œYeah,” I said to Billy, shocking even myself with the confession. “Yeah, maybe that was part of it.”
    Billy nodded. “You hit people who have stuff you don’t.”
    â€œNah,” I said. “I just hit people who have it coming.”
    â€œHave what coming?”
    â€œYou know—people who are asking for it.”
    Billy’s eyes bulged. “People
ask
you to hit them?”
    â€œNo, it’s not—” I half laughed, half sighed. “I just mean people who deserve it.”
    Billy nodded again, but he didn’t look like he understood so much as he was bored of the line of questioning.
    â€œYou want to see something cool?” He jumped up and pressed his nose against the bedroom window. “Look. My room is right next to Mark’s room. You can see inside it.”
    â€œWho would want to?” I said. “The only action in Mark’s bedroom involves Mark and his own—”
    â€œWell, you can’t see anymore,” Billy said. “He talked to me through the window when we moved in. But then you walked me to school, and he closed the curtains, and now we can’t see.”
    â€œWho cares? Sure, if it were Nina Sinclair’s bedroom …” I leaned back against Billy’s mattress, fantasizing.
    â€œShe’s boring,” Billy said. “Seely is cooler.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œSeely, with the skateboard.”
    â€œOh, Wite-Out?” I cocked a sideways grin at Billy. “You got a thing for her, huh?”
    Billy’s wide cheeks turned pink, and he looked away. “I just like her skateboard.”
    I pictured the red lips popping out from under that white hair and imagined the husky voice coming from that tiny body. She was annoying, but I wouldn’t mind seeing her bent over under an open hood. There was something kind of hot about a girl who knew her way around an engine—especially since I
didn’t
.
    â€œYeah,” I said, closing my eyes and letting a new fantasy take over. “I kind of like her skateboard, too.”

Chapter 11
    â€œAnd then, in Worms, Nebraska—that’s not really a town, just a bunch of houses in the same place—we went to a carnival.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Mom nodded.
    â€œAnd my mom let me ride this one ride that spins around really fast all by myself.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œAnd I didn’t even get sick.”
    â€œGood for you!” Mom grinned at Billy.
    He’d taken her on a stop-by-stop tour of his trip here from Oregon—everywhere from Snowville, Utah, to Frankenstein, Missouri, which apparently had a lot of cemeteries and not much else. I’d lived in Missouri my whole life and never heard of it. And I could have lived the whole rest of my life and happily never heard about it again.
    It had been more than an hour of this, and Mom still seemed riveted.
    She kept piling cookies and chips in front of Billy, and between those and his big atlas he’d spread across our kitchen table, I’d been pushed over to a corner, where I was trying to catch up on algebra and block out their conversation. But it was kind of hard to ignore when your mom went all Betty Crocker with the new kid. The only reason I’d let him in after school was because he was all excited to show me something