Passenger by Andrew Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

put the towel over my head, wiped my face.
    “Don’t sweat it, Billy. We all have bad days. More than not, I guess. But this is going to be our good night together. Right?”
    My pants and socks were lying crumpled on the floor. Quinn nudged them with his toe, the way you’d prod something dead in the road. “You ain’t going to put those things back on, are you?”
    I wrapped the towel around my waist and stepped around the wall. “It’s all I got.”
    “You know. I used to have a knife exactly like this one here,” Quinn said.
    I looked at him. “What happened to it?”
    “I don’t know,” Quinn said.
    Sure you don’t, Quinn.
    The kid bent over and picked up my pants, the belt with the knife I’d found attached to it. And I remembered the broken lens was still in the pocket. I didn’t want Quinn to see it, but I could tell that his fingers had already felt it out.
    “What’s this you got?” Quinn said.
    “Don’t. Please.”
    I snatched my pants from Quinn’s hand.
    The kid looked at me. He was too smart, and I hated that. Because he didn’t need to say one word for me to know that he was already thinking up a way that he’d find out what I was hiding in my pocket.
    Quinn grabbed my wrist. Yeah, he was strong, and my hand was sore and swollen. “What happened there, Odd?”
    He turned my palm over, lightly touched the cut that gapped my flesh open from the base of my thumb to the arc of Jack’s lifeline.
    “I cut myself.”
    “Come here. Sit down.” And Quinn led me across the cool concrete floor while I dripped water and held on to my dirty pants and the towel I was wrapped in with one hand. He pulled me along by my wrist like he was helping a little kid at a street corner.
    Quinn sat me in a chair at a small square table pushed up against the wall. He pulled my arm across the surface so he could look at the cut on my hand. His face was so close to me that I felt the tickle of the air he exhaled from his nostrils.
    He didn’t say a word, got up from the seat beside me, and returned with some bandages and antibiotic.
    “Does it hurt?” Quinn smeared medicine into the cut with his index finger.
    I thought about the messages that had been painted on the wall in that house.
    “Yes,” I said.
    Then he wrapped my hand up with clean white gauze and medical tape.
    “You gotta watch that, Billy. Things can get in you here. Don’t you know that?” Quinn smiled and winked at me.
    “I was too busy watching all the other stuff.”
    “Ha-ha-ha!” Quinn laughed. “It’s been too long since I talked to any Odd with a sense of humor!”
    I felt embarrassed. Quinn patted the underside of my forearm softly when he finished with the bandaging.
    “Hang on, Odd. I’ll get you something to wear.”
    So I rolled my pants tightly and wrapped my belt around them, making sure the lens was wadded up deep in the center.
    Quinn came back from his closet and handed me a pair of green mesh gym shorts. G.H.S.X.C. was stenciled in gold on the right leg. Glenbrook High School Cross Country. They were the same ones Conner and I wore when we trained.
    And I thought, This is bullshit. The kid has to be fucking with me.
    This whole place is fucking with me.
    “These are good for sleeping in,” Quinn said.
    That’s what was bothering me about Quinn: He was too hovering, like Stella had been, always watching me, standing a little too close, breathing on me, watching, always watching. It made me feel like a prisoner, like I was under glass. So I fumbled at getting those shorts pulled up without standing up or taking off my towel, because it bugged me how this kid was just sitting there taking in the Jack show like he’d been standing in line all his life just to bug the shit out of me from his front-row seat.
    When I slipped them on, the shorts hung down past my knees, and I had to hold on to them with one hand just to keep them from sliding off my hips. At least they’d never actually been mine or Conner’s.
    Then