“Hey, Lance, Ling and I are gonna walk to the studio now.”
“I’ll join you,” he said.
“That’s okay, Penny and I need to talk,” Ling said.
I felt my stomach sinking, wondering what she had to say. I waved to Lance, even though he looked like he was going to try to hug me. Instead he froze where he stood and waved back.
Afterward, as we walked up the pathway toward the dance hall, Ling finally said, “So are you sad?”
Fully expecting her to berate me, I was surprised she was sympathetic. “I’m not sad. We’re gonna hang out tomorrow.”
“But things are going to change between you and Gavin now that Lots is in the picture.” She shot me a wry smile.
“Ha. That won’t last long. He’ll get her name tattooed on his forehead and then be sitting in my driveway a week later.”
“You’re pretty confident about that.”
“We have something. I don’t what it is, but it’s something different.”
When we got to the dance hall, Ling gave me a stiff hug. That was just Ling. She wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but she cared.
Joey was more on top of things that day at practice. I guess Doug had made a serious threat. There were other potential dancers Joey could have been partnered with besides me. I knew Joey hated all the other girls in the program. He wasn’t particularly fond of me either, but I didn’t think he hated me. Even though he was able to pull off the lift he had been struggling with, he still wasn’t getting the timing on thegrand jetémove. We had a few months to work on it before our spring finals performance on May 3. He knew we had to nail it. Our futures depended on it.
THE NEXT DAY,when Gavin showed up at my house, my mother immediately commandeered his attention by having him look at an oil leak under her car.
“It’s like the day after I got the oil changed, all of a sudden it started leaking,” she told him.
Gavin was on his back on his skateboard, looking underneath her car. “It’s not from the oil change,” he said. “Where’d you have it done?”
“I don’t know, one of those quickie places.”
“You should have asked me.”
I wanted to kick him. He didn’t need to be doing favors for my mom when she spent hundreds of dollars a month on Kiki’s pageants.
“Well, if it’s not from that, what’s it from? I mean, don’t you find it coincidental? I’ve never seen a drop of oil on the garage floor. I get the oil changed and then take it for a smog check and they say there’s an oil leak. Now there’s oil on the garage floor.”
“Anne, if you want to get under here with me, I can show you what it might be.” He rolled out from underneath the car, hands and arms covered in grease, and smirked at her. He was flirting. So shameless.
“Just tell me, Gavin.”
He stood and walked over to the open hood of her car. Looking in, he said, “There was no oil in the pan. I unscrewed everything, took out the filter, looked at it. I knew it wasn’t the oil change because the oil was pooling underneath where the engine meets the transmission, which is nowhere near the filter. So it could be a broken seal—”
“What, like a rubber band?” my mother said.
“Like a gasket,” Gavin replied. “Or...” He scratched his chin, wiping grease on it. “Maybe the smog guys dumped some oil down there to make it look like you had an oil leak. Did they offer to repair it?”
“Yeah, and they told me I needed new struts, breaks, and tires.”
Gavin started laughing. “I’m going to wash this out thoroughly, and then check your struts and breaks. I can tell you right now, you don’t need new tires, but I’ll look at everything else.”
An hour later, a very greasy Gavin dropped the hood and said triumphantly, “Anne, nothing is wrong with your car. This baby has many more pageant trips in its future.”
She smiled ecstatically. Jumping up and down, she said, “I’d hug you but you’re a mess, kid!”
He shook his head. “It’s okay. I have to go to work anyway.”
My mother thanked him endlessly before going into the house to start dinner.
