Scam by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online

all he said was, “I’ll drive you.”
    There were no lectures on the way. No advice except “Do what you have to do.” And as I closed the car door and walked to Lindsey’s front door, I didn’t have a clue what I could do to help. All I knew was that I wanted to be there for her.
    It was a pretty fancy house, and there were two cars in the driveway—a Mercedes and a BMW. Lindsey must have heard the car drive up, because she opened the door. She looked like she’d been crying for a really long time.
    “Where are your parents?” I asked.
    “Finally asleep, thank God. The police came to tell us. It was horrible. When they left, my mom was crying and my dad started blaming her for this. Then she tore into him. They’d been drinking. I just shut myself in my room. That’s when I called you.”
    “Why me?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I just knew you were the one I needed to talk to.”
    I wrapped my arms around her and held her close. “Stay with me,” she said. “Don’t leave.”
    She led me up to her bedroom, and she threw herself down on top of her bed. I cautiously lay down beside her. A little lamp was on, and there was a soft glow in the room. I lay on my back with her beside me and she cried a bit more, and then I held her until she fell asleep. I didn’t fall asleep that night. I just listened to her breathe—ragged at first, and then slower and more steady.
    What happens next? I kept asking myself as I lay there. What do I do?
    But there were no answers.

Chapter Thirteen
    I awoke to a knock on the door.
    “Lindsey,” a male voice said. “Your mother and I have to go deal with this. Will you be okay?”
    Lindsey sat upright and saw me lying there on top of the bed. She cleared her throat. “Yeah, Dad. You go do what you have to do.”
    Then a woman’s voice said, “Lindsey, are you sure you’re okay? Can I come in?”
    “No, Mom. Really. I’m okay. Don’t come in. I just want to be left alone right now. I just want to sleep.”
    “Okay,” she said. And I heard their footsteps on the stairs, and then the front door opened and closed.
    I sat up beside Lindsey and looked around her room. It seemed odd that it was filled with so many little-girl kind of things—dolls, stuffed animals and photos of her when she was younger.
    I was still blinking the sleep out of my eyes when she leaned into me and began to cry again. “I can’t believe he’s gone. This can’t be happening,” she said. “I just want to go somewhere and hide.”
    “Were you two close?”
    “We used to be. When we were young we did a lot of things together. Bike riding, swimming, skateboarding.”
    “Somehow I can’t picture you on a skateboard.”
    “I was awesome,” she said, trying to smile, but the smile gave way to a new wave of sadness.
    “I bet you were.”
    “But we were bad too.”
    “I can believe that,” I said.
    “We put our parents through hell.” She looked at me long and hard. “And now this.”
    “Yeah, this.” I hugged her to me and couldn’t help but think about my own loss.
    “Caleb wasn’t much good at any particular thing until he got into the graffiti. I mean, he was always trying too hard to be like someone else. Always trying to be good at sports when he wasn’t. Trying to be tough when it wasn’t his nature. Trying to win over girls when they didn’t want anything to do with him. He would get depressed. Really depressed. For days at a time. And I’d try to snap him out of it.
    “And then he decided he wanted to be an artist, and he ended up with spray cans of paint. Most people would think of it as vandalism, but it was his thing. He was proud of what he did. Kids admired him for it. The crazy dangerous and difficult places where his work would show up. And he never got caught. Not once. But he didn’t deserve this.”
    “No, he didn’t. I wish I could have gotten to know him.”
    “Thanks for saying that.”
    We sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. There was mostly