“It smells like you in here,” I say after a long moment.
“It does?” ?e steering wheel on this van is enormous. I just noticed. Also, the seat is one giant thing that goes across the whole front of the van. And there’re tiny rubber monsters stuck to the dash: an alien and a hydra and a Loch Ness Monster and a Godzilla. Wait, not an alien: a green shark. Huh. ?ey’re all sea creatures—all famous water monsters. What doesn’t kill you …
“Coconut,” I say. “You always smell coconut-y.” ?en, because it’s dark in the van, and because I’m wiped out from all the panic and my guard is down, I add, “You always smell good.”
“Sex Wax.”
“What?” I sit up a little straighter.
He reaches down to the oorboard and tosses me what looks like a plastic-wrapped bar of soap. I hold it up to the window to see the label in the streetlight. “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax,” I read.
“You rub it on the deck of your board,” he explains. “For traction. You know, so you don’t slip off while you’re sur ng.” I sniff it. ?at’s the stuff, all right.
“I bet your feet smell heavenly.”
“You don’t have a foot fetish thing, do you?” he asks, voice playful.
“I didn’t before, but now? Who knows.”
?e tires of the van veer off the road onto the gravelly shoulder, and he cuts the wheel sharply to steer back onto the pavement. “Oops.”
We chuckle, both embarrassed.
I toss the wax onto the oorboard. “Well, another mystery solved.”
“Not a big one. Let’s get back to yours.” He turns down a small road on the edge of town. ?is must be the way Grace suggested. “I remember you mentioning something about not liking movies with guns in them when you were with Patrick in the video store.”
Ugh. ?is again. I hug my stomach and look out the passenger window, but there’s nothing but residential houses and it’s dark outside. “God, you really did hear everything that morning, didn’t you?”
“Pretty much. What happened? I mean, I did tell you about the whole shark incident, and I barely knew you then.”
“Yeah, but you’re all open and talkative. You probably tell everyone that story.”
“I actually don’t.” His head turns toward me, and I see his eyes
ick in my direction. “People at school know better than to ask
me.”
And I didn’t.
“Look, I’m not going to force you to talk about something,” he says. “I’m not a shrink. But if you want to, I’m a good listener. No judgment. Sometimes it’s better to get it out. It festers and gets weird when you bottle it up. I don’t know why, but it does. Just speaking from personal experience.”
I don’t say anything for a long while. We just ride in silence together through the dark streets, silhouettes of mountains rising on one side of the town, the ocean spreading out on the other. ?en I tell him some of it. About my mom taking the Grumbacher divorce case when I was fourteen. About her winning it for the wife, about the custody she got for the wife’s daughter.
And about Greg Grumbacher.
“He started harassing my mom online,” I say. “?at’s how it started. He’d post nasty comments on her social media. When she didn’t respond, he started stalking my dad, and then me. I didn’t even know who he was. He just started showing up after school a lot, hanging outside where the parents carpool. I thought he was one of my friends’ fathers, or something.
“We only lived two blocks from school,” I continue, “so I usually walked home with a friend. One day when I walked home alone, he walked with me. Said he was my mom’s coworker. And because he’d done all this detailed research online, he rattled off all this stuff about her, so it seemed like, yeah, he did know her. And I was too trusting. A stupid kid.”
“I did stupid things when I was younger too,” Porter says softly. “What happened?”
“I knew something was wrong by the time we’d gotten to the door, and I wasn’t going to let him into the house, but it was too late. I was small and he was big. He overpowered me and pushed his way inside… .”
“Shit,” Porter murmurs.
“My mom was home,” I continue. “She’d forgotten some paperwork she’d needed for a case. It was just a lucky coincidence. If she hadn’t have been there … I don’t know. Everyone’s still alive today, so that’s a good thing. Still, when there’s a crazy man waving a gun around in your house, threatening your mom—”
