“I know you’re having troubles at home, Imogen, and I want to help you,” Shirleen said carefully, as if she were reading a script. “Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but you know this is unacceptable. It’s grounds for termination.”
I swerved around the pickup and floored it for the freeway entrance.
Terminationechoed in my brain.
Wait, she wasfiringme? I knew the video looked bad, me bobbing around in my towel, but… “It had nothing to do with work,” I said to her. “What I do in my free time is nobody else’s business.”
“When you do it inmybusiness, it is.” Her voice had gone freezie-cold.
Her business? But… “What video?”
“You making out with a boy in back of the counter by the dispensers.”
Brayden. His face flashed in my mind. Dead eyes, looking skyward from his slump in the red desert dust. Bullet in his forehead. The headrest had been black with blood.
“One of my other employees has made a formal complaint,” she said. There were only two other employees. One guess as to which would make a complaint. “They sent me the video.”
I’d kissed a dead boy. I pressed my lips together in revulsion, but the pressure only made it feel more real. Like I was kissing him again.
My throat tightened, and I sob-choked into the line. “It won’t happen again, I swear.”
“I’m willing to work with you this one time,” Shirleen continued, as if by rote. “But you can’t be bringing anyone in the back. You know that.”
“I—I don’t knowanythinganymore,” I said, thick and miserable.
“Oh, sweetie,” Shirleen said, all the piss going out of her voice. Tears always did that to her.
The 60 was moving fast and free going west at this time of day. In less time than one shift at the Freeze, I could be back at school in California… I merged into the second lane and hit the gas. Blinking away tears, I checked my rearview. Scattered cars behind me. None too menacing.
“You’re just going through a rough patch,” she told me.
“That’s an understatement.” I was crying openly now.
Quest failed. Epically failed.
“But it’s going to get better,” Shirleen told me. “Let’s get together tomorrow before open at the Freeze and talk,”—her tone tried for stern again—“but consider yourself on probation.”
Probation was better than termination. I hiccupped again. “Okay, and I’m sorry.”
Sorry for Brayden. And way sorry for myself. Because if I didn’t figure this out,like now, then I was going to be dead too.
I didn’t want to go home—Dane knew where I lived—but Mom was there and I couldn’t let her face him alone.
He’d killed Brayden for a glove.
I glanced down at my left hand as I drove.This glove, which was clearly a weapon of some kind. But how it had become dangerous baffled me. Brayden said he’d left something at the Freeze, but he had never touched my gloves.
It didn’t make any sense, and it wasn’t like I could ask him. He’d kissed me. Almost cost me my job. But he hadn’t left a damn thing.
Unless…
I swerved across the lane to catch the next exit. There weren’t many cars, so I didn’t hit anybody. Up a long lane of clean concrete, I found myself in far east Mesa, land of the cookie-cutter, master-planned neighborhoods, mesquite trees placed at even, pretty intervals. The houses in this neighborhood were all white or tan stucco with red Spanish tile roofs. Desert landscaping was the norm—flowering bushes stuck in colored gravel with fakey little dry rock-bed creeks breaking up the monotony. Two cars in the driveway, kids on bikes in cul-de-sacs. No litter. Suburban heaven.
I wound my way to a community park. No cars followed me. The streets were calm and peaceful.
I stopped at the side of a playground. Checked my phone. Found Shirleen’s email with the terse message,This behavior is unacceptable and against company policy. We need to meet immediately to discuss your employment.
Yeah, yeah. Probation. Shirleen was a softy.
