difficult; I will not ask you to break the law or do anything that you don’t want to do. All I ask is secrecy.”
As she spoke, she walked around the back of the truck. A fiberglass top covered the bed. She opened its hatchback, then the truck’s tailgate.
“Your name?”
“Kayla.”
“Kayla, I’d like you to ride up front with me. You boys in the back.”
Leon and Chris tossed in their packs, their instrument cases, and their skateboards, then crawled in after. The truck’s bed was covered by a piece of plywood, a scrap of old, orange shag carpet that smelled of dust and yarn, old sun. The two boys stretched out flat as Natalie closed them in. After a moment, the truck began moving.
“‘I will not ask you to break the law,’” Leon said, and snorted. “Right.” Flat on his back, he clasped his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes.
Leon’s hair was black, curly, and there were dark freckles across his nose. He hated to be called “husky,” but that’s what he was, and strong, his arms and legs muscled, his wrists thick, his movements always slow and calm. He could sleep anywhere. Chris rested on his side, looking at his friend, then rolled onto his back. He stretched out, lining up his feet with Leon’s, then dragged himself up, so they were the same height, lying there with their shoulders touching. He kept his eyes open, staring up at the cracks in the white fiberglass shell.
The truck jerked and jolted, the shock absorbers shot. Chris sat up, to check where they were. They’d crossed the river now and were still on Burnside, traveling through downtown, climbing up a slope. He looked forward, at the back of Natalie’s head; her hair was swept to one side, and he could see her necklace, just four or five thin copper wires against the pale skin of her neck. Two panes of glass separated the front of the truck from the back, two sliding windows there; last time Natalie had opened them, handed pieces of beef jerky back to Chris and Leon. Today she looked straight ahead. Kayla, meanwhile, sat with a heavy book in her lap, reading, probably about electricity. That was her deal—the hard science, the numbers; Chris was better at history, at English; Leon specialized in music, in debate, but he could do it all. Now, he slept.
Chris squinted through the two windows. He saw writing on Kayla’s hand, ballpoint pen. LEON, it said; why hadn’t he noticed that before? And why not his name, too? He checked her other hand. It was bare, unmarked. Then he watched as Kayla leaned forward and changed the radio’s channel; her shirt rode up, and he saw the almost nonexistent hairs at the small of her back, in a crescent there like a rising sun. The soft hairs of his own arm rose in a shiver. He knew that Kayla wished the hair on her own arms was blonder, so it wouldn’t show; he knew that she’d just started shaving her legs. He pressed his ear against the window and heard something, past the truck’s rattle; it sounded like a classical station, some cheesy Mozart. His head facing out, he looked through the porthole window of the fiberglass shell. A cemetery, a hillside of white gravestones, flashed against the dark sky. It was going to rain; Natalie never had work for them when the weather was decent.
Chris checked his elbow again; there was a disappointing lack of blood, and what there had been had already dried. It wouldn’t even be a decent scab.
“Well?” Leon said, his eyes still closed.
“Heading toward Beaverton, maybe.”
“You want to quiz me on my Biology?”
“Not right now,” Chris said.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Did you finish The Sound and the Fury?”
“Over-rated,” Chris said.
Leon sat up, rubbing at his eyes, looking from side to side. “It’s a good thing she has a lid on this thing,” he said. “You know, dogs that ride in the back of trucks are always getting their retinas detached; they go blind. There’s a whole area in any Humane Society, any dog pound. Cages and cages of these blind dogs. Rednecks’ dogs, mostly.”
As he spoke, he pulled his instrument case toward him and undid the hasps. He opened it; instead of his trombone, it held all the equipment that Natalie had given them to keep. All the straps and ropes and buckles and gloves. The orange phone headset spilled out, trailing its cords, alligator clips at the ends. Kayla said she was going to figure out how it worked; she was reading up on it, on the Internet.
“I saw Kayla change the radio channel,” Chris said.
“Perfect. What did Natalie do?”
“Nothing. How old do you think she is?”
“Too old to trust,” Leon said.
Out the window, strip malls and new condo developments trailed off. Open fields stretched; cows and sheep, green grass.
“So what do we think her deal is?” Chris said.
“We’re still gathering information.”
“I know that.”
“It’s interesting,” Leon said. “We’ve all agreed on that. Not boring, yet.”
“Yet,” Chris said.
Natalie skidded to a stop on the highway’s gravel shoulder; Chris and Leon jostled against each other, just sitting upright again as she jerked the back doors open.
“Out!” she said. “Line up, now.”
This was part of it. The skateboards were left behind in the truck, the backpacks, with Chris’s clarinet and Kayla’s flute. Chris stood between Leon and Kayla, facing Natalie, who was excitedly pacing, pointing up and down the highway, at the setting sun, the darkening fields, the black wires between metal towers.
“Beautiful,” Natalie said. “What time is it, now?”
“Eight,” Chris said.
“I’ll be back at ten,” she said.
“Nine-thirty,” Kayla said. “It’s a school night.”
“All right,” Natalie said, turning away, looking over her shoulder. “Don’t disappoint me!”
And then she leapt back into the truck, slammed her door and accelerated away, gone.
“Whoa,” Leon said. “Was she acting that crazed the whole drive?”
“Not really,” Kayla said. “She was just talking.”
“She wasn’t even wearing a watch,” Chris said.
“What was she talking about?” Leon said.
The three friends sat on the shoulder of the highway, alone for miles in every direction, fields stretching out. They began to untangle the harness, the ropes. There was not the slightest hint of a breeze. The power lines ran between metal towers, their tops spread in triangles and with smaller metal triangles like ears on top, so they looked like the faces of cats. The wires stretched over low, distant hills, trees clear-cut to make way.
“Oh, man,” Kayla said. She pointed across the street, to where the lines ran between regular wooden poles. “Not on this side. Let’s go over there, where at least the voltage has been stepped down some. What’s she thinking? Holy crow!”
“What kind of expression is that?” Leon said. “‘Holy crow?’”
“Are you going to disallow it?”
“Not yet.”
The three had rules about clichés and hip phrases, and did not allow cursing.
“So what was Natalie talking about?” Chris said.
“Nothing,” Kayla said. “Creepy questions about being a girl, about which one of you was my boyfriend, just ridiculous and stupid adult stuff.”
“She’s just another