No Safe House

Four

“WANNA have some real fun?” the boy asked.

That worried Grace. Maybe not a lot, but a little.

She had a pretty good idea what Stuart was getting at. They’d already been having some fun — just above-the-waist stuff — parked out back of the Walmart in his dad’s old Buick. This car, it was an aircraft carrier. Massive hood and trunk, and inside, well, you hardly had to get into the backseat. The front — which went all the way across, no console or shifter in the middle — was the size of a park bench but way, way softer. The car was from the seventies, and when it went around corners, she felt as if she was in a huge boat way out past the sound, out in the Atlantic or something, getting carried away by the waves.

Grace was okay with what they’d done so far — she’d let him touch her in a couple of places — but she wasn’t sure she wanted to take things any further. Not yet, anyway.

She was still just fourteen, after all. And even though she knew, with absolute certainty, that that meant she was not a kid anymore, she had to admit that Stuart, being sixteen, might know slightly more about the whole sex thing. It wasn’t even so much that she was scared about doing it for the first time. What scared her was looking like a total amateur. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that Stuart had already been with plenty of girls. What if she ended up doing it all wrong? Ended up looking like a total idiot?

So she decided to play things cautiously. “I don’t know,” she said, pulling away from him, leaning against the passenger door. “This has been, like, good, you know? But I’m not sure about taking things, like, to the next level.”

Stuart laughed. “Shit, I’m not talking about that. Although, if you’re thinking you’re ready, I’ve come equipped.” He started to reach down into the front pocket of his jeans.

Grace slapped his hand playfully. “Then what are you talking about?”

“It’s something totally cool. I swear, you’ll wet your pants.”

Grace could guess. Maybe some pot, or X. What the hell? She could give something like that a try. It was actually a little less scary than letting him get into her pants. “So what is it? I’ve tried a few things. Not just pot.” A lie, but one had to keep up appearances.

“Nothing like that,” Stuart said. “You ever driven a Porsche?”

That took her by surprise. “I’ve never driven anything, you idiot. I won’t have a license for two more years.”

“I mean, you ever ridden in a Porsche?”

“Like, is that the sports car?”

“Jesus, you don’t know what a Porsche is?”

“Yeah, I know. Okay. Why you asking me if I ever had a ride in a Porsche?”

“Have you?”

“No,” Grace said. “At least, I don’t think I ever have. But I don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to what kind of car I’m getting into. Maybe I was in one and didn’t know it.”

“I think,” the boy said, “if you’d been in a Porsche, you’d kinda know. It’s not like an average car. It’s all low and swoopy and shit and fast as fuck.”

“Okay, so no.”

Stuart was kind of hot looking, and one of the cool kids, although not exactly in a good way. He had that don’t-give-a-shit thing going on, which had some appeal to a girl who was sick to death of having to make safe choices. But after being out with him three times, she was starting to think there wasn’t a whole lot going on inside that head of his.

Grace hadn’t told her father she was seeing Stuart, because he knew exactly who the boy was. She could recall her dad bringing up his name more than once, back when Stuart was in her dad’s English class two years earlier. He’d be marking papers in the evening at the kitchen table and say something about this Stuart kid being thick as a plank, which her dad didn’t do very often because he said it wasn’t professional. He said it wasn’t right to comment on the work of students his daughter might know, but once in a while, if the kid was dumb enough, he slipped.

Grace remembered a joke her dad had made. For a long time, right up until this year, she’d thought she might like to be an astronaut, someone who went up to the International Space Station. Her dad had said maybe Stuart could be an astronaut, too, because all he did in class was take up space.

Tonight, Grace had to wonder whether maybe her father had this boy nailed.

One time, Stuart had asked her what she wanted to do when she finished school, and when she’d told him, he’d said, “Seriously? They only send guys up into space.”

“Hello?” she’d shot back. “Sally Ride? Svetlana Savitskaya? Roberta Bondar?”

“You can’t just make up names,” he’d said.

Oh well. It wasn’t like she had to marry him. She just wanted to have some... fun. She wanted to take a few... risks. And wasn’t that just what he’d asked if she’d like to do?

“I have definitely never ridden in a Porsche.”

Stuart grinned. “Want to?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

A cell phone started buzzing.

“That’s you,” Stuart said.

Grace dug her phone out of her purse, glanced at the screen. “Oh, jeez.”

“Who is it?”

“My dad. I’m kind of supposed to be home by now.” It was nearing ten.

Adopting a deep baritone voice, Stuart said, “You get home right now, young lady, and do your homework.”

“Stop it.” Even if her dad was a huge pain in the ass at times, she didn’t like other people mocking him. She hated it, at school, when she’d hear other kids running her dad down. It was no picnic, going to the same school where your dad taught. All these extra expectations to be a good kid, have above-average marks. After all, they’d say, she’s a teacher’s daughter. Talk about a cross to bear. Not that her marks were bad. She did pretty well, especially in science, although sometimes she’d write a couple of wrong answers just so she wouldn’t get a hundred percent and have the boys call her Amy Farrah Fowler, the nerdy scientist girl on that TV show.

“You gonna talk to him or not?” Stuart asked as Grace’s phone continued to buzz.

She stared at it, tried to will it to stop, which it finally did after a dozen rings.

But seconds later, a text. “Shit,” she said. “He wants me to call home.”

“He’s got you on a tight leash. Your mom a control freak, too?”

If she were home, Grace thought. If she hadn’t bailed on them two weeks ago, after the thing with the pot of boiling water. She’d gotten the bandage off only three days ago.

She ignored his question and turned things back to the topic at hand. “Okay, so did your dad buy you a Porsche?”

“God, no. You think he’d be driving around in a shitbox tank like this if he had?”

“Then what?”

“I know where I can find one and take it for a spin.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can get my hands on one in, like, ten minutes, one that we can borrow.”

“What, like at a car dealership?” Grace asked. “Aren’t they all going to be closed?” Who’d let you take a test drive this time of night?

Stuart shook his head. “No, at somebody’s house.”

“Who do you know who’s got a Porsche?” She grinned. “And how dumb would they have to be to let you borrow it?”

“No, it’s not like that. It’s at a house that’s empty this week. It was on the list.”

“What list?”

“A list, okay? That my dad’s got. They try to keep it up-to-date, when people are on vacation, that kind of thing. I check out places where people are away, see what kind of wheels they got. One time I took out a Mercedes, just for, like, twenty minutes, and no one ever knew. Not a scratch on it. Put it back in the garage just the way it was.”

“Who keeps a list like that?” Grace asked. “What’s your dad do? Does he do, like, security stuff, too?” The thing was, she had an inkling of what this boy’s father did and would have been surprised to learn it had anything to do with making people feel safer in their homes.

“Yeah,” he said offhandedly. “That’s what he is. Security.”

Grace kept thinking about the call and the text from her father. When she’d left the house, she’d told him she was going to a movie with another girl from her class. Her mom was going to drive. It was a seven o’clock show that was supposed to get out around nine, and she’d get a lift home after.

What would her dad do if he found out she’d lied? Because as lies went, this was a doozy. Grace wasn’t with that girl, and they weren’t at the movies. Stuart — not her friend’s mother — was going to drop her off a block from home. Her father would never have let her go out with a boy who was old enough to drive.

And certainly not this boy, this onetime pain-in-the-ass know-nothing student in her father’s class. With, as Grace suspected her father knew, a kind of questionable home background.

“What you’re talking about sounds like stealing,” she said.

Stuart shook his head. “No way. Stealing is when you take a car and keep it, or sell it to someone who packs it up in a big cargo container and ships it over to some guy in Arabia or something. But we’re only going to borrow it. Won’t even try to see what it can do, because the last thing you want when you’re borrowing somebody’s car is get a speeding ticket, you know?”

Grace waited a long time before she said, “I guess it would be fun.”

He started up the land yacht and headed west.