Page 253 of Ominous: Part 1
I dig my nails into my skin. “You wanna go to Sky Wash?” I want to get moving.
Manda slowly looks up at me from her treat, gripping the wooden stick tightly. A smile spreads on her face. I feel a strange pang of guilt I’ve ignored so many of her messages, only texting her when I needed a distraction.
“Yeah,” she says slowly, like I might take it back. “Yeah, I do.”
The walk is warm,and it seems like the temperature rose even as the sun has fallen. Still enough pink and yellow light to see by, it’s dim outside, and I like it this way.
Amanda tossed her ice cream stick in the overflowing trashcan of her mom’s kitchen, and we told our parents we’d be back before too long. Mom rented a motel room for us for the night, not quite on the ocean, but I’m kind of, finally, excited for it. No Reece. No Sebastian. It should be nice.
“So,” Manda says conspiratorially, and she seems to have lost a little of her animosity toward me, “you remember Sebastian’s friend?”
We turn a corner, walking over grass-infested sidewalk, green shoots sprouting between sea-worn cracks. I glance at the yellow and blue and white lumpy houses beside me. The scent of the ocean is strong, humidity causes little hairs to stick to the back of my neck, even though I pulled my hair into a braid.
I forgot how much I loved this.
I feelgoodhere, despite the fact everything wasn’t when I lived in this town.
Up ahead, little kids ride a red and yellow pedal car, another in only a diaper as he trails behind and a woman sits on the sagging porch, smoking a cigarette. When we pass by, I can smell the tobacco in the air.
“Which friend?” Sebastian has a lot of friends. Drugs do that, oddly enough. Bind you to people living in the gutter alongside you. No one wants to be down and alone.
I glance at my phone and see a text from Eli.
I open it up as Amanda prattles on. I’m half-listening, but I get the gist of what she’s saying. Dating one of Sebastian’s old friends, which seems like a terrible idea, but who am I to judge?
Eli: Send me a picture.
I roll my eyes and don’t reply, crossing my arms again as the scent of bubbles and car soap pick up on the light breeze passing through. Up ahead, tucked on the side of the road not far from a food truck and a trailer, is Sky Wash.
It’s crowded, by manual carwash standards. A pickup truck pulled into one of the bays, a yellow Mustang backed into another, but it’s the bay at the far end, one empty between it and the Ford, that Amanda flings her hand toward, a tarnished gold bangle jumping on her wrist.
“Oh my God,” she says, white teeth flashing in a smile, a tiny hint of yellow sludge from the cartoon ice cream between her front two. She drops her hand and turns to me, suddenly tugging at her tied-off white shirt, pulling up her high-waisted yoga pants. “Do I look okay?” she asks, seeming to blush from head to toe, her entire body a light shade of red.
I frown at her, the sound of vacuums and the swoosh of hoses background noise as we stand by an air-vac a few feet from the bays, the gray, coiled tube not in use. “You look great.”
She flicks her curly red hair over one shoulder, a strand or two damp and stuck to her forehead. “Are you sure?” she asks, scrubbing at her teeth, as if she knows the ice cream is clinging to her like the last, shredded remnants of girlhood.
To push it all away, she cups her own breasts while she yanks at the V in her shirt, trying to expose the freckled tops of her chest.
“What’s going on?” I ask, glancing at the older man rinsing his Mustang and staring at us, and the frizzy haired lady at the pickup with pink foam flecked on her cheeks.
My gaze finally rests on the old Cadillac reversed into the last bay, and I assume there’s a person in there, judging by the spray of water over top of the pale blue car, but I can’t see them.
“It’shim,”Manda says, gushing like I’ve never seen her do before.
“Who?” My phone vibrates in my hand, but I don’t look at it, arms still crossed as I squint at the last bay, as if squinting will help me see more instead of less.
“Zachary!” Then she’s grabbing my hand, unwinding my arms and ignoring my flinch as she hauls us toward the last bay. Her jelly flip-flops slap against the asphalt almost as fast as my heart pounds in my chest, my sweaty hand wrapped tight around my phone, like a lifeline.
Zachary?
My mind buzzes through everything she told me on the walk here, but I was only half paying attention, and I don’t feel guilty, but I’m suddenly nervous as we get closer to the last bay, water running in rivulets along the pavement, draining off from the cement stalls.
Sebastian’s friend.
Zach or Richard.
I was fourteen then. He was seventeen. Which means he’s… twenty or twenty-one now? How did Manda even meet him?
