I glanced over my shoulder, on the lookout for neighborhood narcs. “Put that out.”
“No.” He swiftly shielded his pot from me. “She got to you, didn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Nancy Reagan and her ‘Just Say No’ bullshit.”
“Sure, Allen. She personally called me last night and begged me to save your soul.”
Before he could reply, I snatched the blunt from his fingers, stubbed it out on the gutter pipe, and tossed the smoldering butt into his lap.
“Dude!” he huffed, patting it out before shoving it into his jacket pocket. “You’ve changed, man. You used to be cool.”
“I was never cool,” I said. “You were just too high to notice.”
“No.” He stared at me, blinking hard. “No, I distinctly remember you being cool once.”
“Whatever you say.” I shrugged. “Are you coming up or what?”
I didn’t wait on his reply… because I knew he was coming. Allen was one of those guys who’d wander in place if you didn’t give him direction. We walked through the dusty garage and then up a set of interior stairs. Once at the top, I gave the apartment door a good shove and it burst open, taking me with it.
“The only part of this place that’s not easily accessible,” Allen mumbled, following me into the apartment. “You could literally crawl through that hole in the wall, but god forbid the door swing open with no resistance.”
“Don’t be crapping on my place,” I said, although I did itplenty myself. There’d never been a day I’d walked in here and thought,Ah,home sweet home. This place was a shithole. The secondhand—no, the dumpster-dive furniture, the flickering light, the surfboard propped against the wall as its lone decoration. “At least it’s a roof over my head.”
My buddy looked up at the exposed rafters. “Barely.”
“A technicality,” I said, grabbing a Tab from the fridge and not offering Allen one. I had a strict BYOB rule. If Allen didn’t bring one along, he’d be slurping tap water from the faucet. “Anyway, I got a good thing going here. Don’t fuck it up for me.”
“You live in a garage.”
“I live in an apartmentabovea garage,” I corrected, as if neither of us remembered the time I’d almost died when Meg’s boyfriend left his Pinto idling a minute too long and the rising fumes from its exhaust pipe damn near had me knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.
“You got anything to eat in there?” Allen went straight for my fridge.
“Just an old sandwich.”
My fridge was never stocked. Most of my eating took place in fast food parking lots, and the rest came out of a cereal box.
Allen retrieved the old sandwich, gave it a sniff, and then asked, “You gonna eat this?”
“Knock yourself out.”
There were more sandwiches where that came from. I was friendly with one of the cooks at the resort and he slipped me food when he could. Pretty sure he thought I was homeless because he’d caught me showering in the locker room, even on my days off. I didn’t correct him. The ham sandwiches were worth it. Besides, the apartment didn’t have a shower, which made my surf job the one I couldn’t afford to lose.
“Hmm,” Allen said through a mouthful, sitting on a loveseat I’d found on the side of the road and dragged back here for fourblocks on my skateboard. “How old did you say this sandwich was?”
“I didn’t.”
He swallowed, examined the hoagie, then took another bite. “So, your Aunt Dawn… she was the one with the birdhouses, right?”
“And your Uncle Frank… he’s the one who hated soup, right? Where are we going with this?"
“You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“She died, dude. Like, her brain exploded.”
