Page 8 of Stay in Your Lane!

“I mean, I’ve got my phone?” I could easily spend hours on my phone. “And I bought some food for the cat.”

“Whatcat?”

“The one that lives here.”

The guy seemed a little dizzy. “Are you fucking serious? There’s an animal on-scene? That’s going to complicate so many things. The cops should havetoldme that, and I need to?—”

“Whoa, hey!” I held up my hands in the universal“no worries”gesture. “No, I mean, there’s a cat that lives somewhere in this trailer park. It was kind of skittish earlier, but I think it was just hungry, so I got it a bowl and some food. I’m gonna see if I can get it to come out and let me pet it some more.”

“Are youkiddingme?”

“Dude, you’re kind of stressy, aren’t you?”

He looked as if he wanted to relieve some stress by clocking me in the head with the Pinkie Pie camera.

“What’s your name?” I asked in an effort to distract him.

“Excuse me?”

Maybe I’d asked too fast. “What’s…your…name?”

He stared at me in silence for a long moment, and my heart fell. Maybe he didn’t want to tell me because I was making him uncomfortable. Or angry. Or?—

“Oh. I should’ve—earlier, when we—” He shook his head and laughed. “Sorry. Kyle. Kyle Bowman.”

I beamed at him. “Nice to meet you! I’m Everett.” Wait. I’d already told him that. Damn. But then his name started bouncing around in my skull. Bowman, Bowman… “Are you related to Detective Bowman? Or Officer Bowman?”

The vaguely content expression on his face vanished, replaced by something bitter. “You know them?”

“Both of them. Not well, of course. I just pick up the bodies.” I shrugged. “They don’t care to talk with me much.”

His lips twisted. “Me either.” Then he turned around and went back into the house, and…I guess that was that.

Shit. That could have gone better. On the other hand, he’d taken the camera. He’d listened to my theory about the death not being a suicide. He’dbelievedme, which was more than most people ever did. Plus, he had glasses.

Glasses were so stinking cute. Chalk it up to my first crush being Mr. Moore, the high school librarian, but I loved a guy in glasses. Not that I lovedthisguy, but—anyway.

Cat food.

“Here, kitty kitty,” I said as I went back to my car and got out the kibble. It was organic and expensive as hell, but I wasn’t going to feed this poor little guy processed pig noses. He deserved better. “Helloooo.” I poured out a bowl, then went back to the bush where the little guy had been hiding earlier. Sure, lightning didn’t strike twice in the same spot, but cats were creatures of habit. Maybe I’d get lucky. “Pspspspspsssss…”

I called out to the cat for a few minutes before one of the neighbors shouted out their window, “Will you shut the fuck up? I’m tryna sleep in here!”

It was only…nine-twenty-seven at night, but who was I to mess with someone’s sleep schedule? “Sorry,” I called back.

“Fuck off!”

Okay, so. No pspspsps. But maybe the scent of the kibble would do the trick on its own. In the meantime, I went back to my car, took out my phone, and started browsing through my tabs waiting for something to pluck a chord in my brain.

War of the Roses, echidna genitalia, the Roman empire during the time of the triumvirate, how to wash your hair in zero gravity—ooh, cool, yes. Start there.

The video I watched on washing hair in zero gravity sent me down a rabbit hole of a dozen new tabs, open to things like“best movie depictions of being in space”and“dry shampoo”and“how female astronauts deal with their menstrual cycles in zero G,”which was fascinating but also a little bit overwhelming. Dude. Just living was so hard sometimes.

I glanced over at the house where Kyle was still cleaning up from the death. Living was hard for a lot of people, and I wondered what had been too much for this poor guy—Richard Leighton, I knew because I’d had to write it on the bag, the spelling of his last name had given me some trouble. What had driven him to kill himself? Maybe his addiction? It was hard to say. He had a nice trailer…for a given value of nice, but it could have sucked way more. He had a friendly neighborhood cat. He had pictures of a pretty girl holding a baby on the wall—his baby, I assumed, even though it didn’t look like either girl nor baby lived here. He had things to live for. So why was he dead now?

Kyle would just have to help me figure that out.

Don’t be weird. I had to remind myself sometimes that“normal”was a moving target when it came to what other people thought. My family was used to me, to the point where I think they forgot I was anything other than naturally adept at annoying them, but I couldn’t even count how many group projects I’d been kicked out of in high school and college for being“too random”and“unable to focus.”

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