Strange Girl by Christopher Pike Read Free Book Online

overheated and cracked the night before we set out for the Roadhouse, just after we’d driven back from our gig at Stoker High. The parts and repairs would have cost us over a grand but we were lucky Janet’s father—Mr. Bradley “Bo” Shell—wasn’t merely a mechanic but an expert welder. He kept us from having to go out and buy a new radiator. He just welded the crack shut. Given the internal pressure an overheated radiator could generate, it was an amazing feat. On Saturday morning, before we left town, I helped him finish up with the repairs in his garage while Janet packed for our trip inside their house.
    “I can’t thank you enough, Bo,” I said. Everyone called him by his nickname, even Janet. “When we get rich and famous, none of us are going to forget it was you who kept this RV running. Seriously, without your help we wouldn’t be a working band.”
    Bo chuckled at my remark as he scrubbed away at the thick, rusty buildup near the spot where we needed to plant the radiator. Bo was the most popular and respected mechanic in town and was never at a loss for jobs. He worked hard—seldom less than sixty hours a week—and made good money. But the Shell home had only two bedrooms and a kitchen you could hardly turn around in. Everyone knew he was saving his money for Janet’s college education. He was that kind of guy.
    He was a football freak, though, particularly when it came to the NFL, and had indulged in an expensive giant-screen TV. I loved watching games with him. He always had plenty of beer on hand and three decades ago had played right tackle at the University of Michigan. He knew the game from the inside out and I usually ended up turning off the babbling commentators so I could listen to his more colorful remarks.
    He still had his bulk from those days, although it was now more fat than muscle. He had put on the pounds when his wife—the relatively young and far more educated Cynthia Shell, Janet’s mother—had divorced him for a Wall Street lawyer. That had been seven years ago and Janet had actually left town with her mom to live in Manhattan in a ten-million-dollar penthouse that overlooked Central Park. Talk about a step up from Elder.
    But a year later Janet had returned home to be with her father and I could only assume it was because she’d had a falling-out with her mom. The woman didn’t exactly have a strong maternal instinct. Janet swore her mother had been born on the planet Vulcan.
    Janet had never told me why she’d left such a glamorous lifestyle to return to Elder, or why, for that matter, she’d left Elder in the first place. The topic was taboo with her, which was weird because Janet and I talked about everything.
    Bo continued to chuckle at my comment. “Does that mean you’ll give me a share of your songwriting royalties?” he asked.
    “No way,” I said.
    “That’s what I thought.” Bo stopped to give me a serious look. He could have been a handsome man but with his weight and the grime from his job—and the hard years—he wasn’t going to be meeting another Cynthia soon. Still, I never looked at him without seeing a sparkle in his eyes. He had suffered terribly when his wife had left but he had his daughter back and that was all that mattered to him.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Jan tells me you’re writing great stuff. She’s told me about the demo you’re working on. She says it’s a given—you’re going to be big. Huge.”
    “Best friends make lousy critics.”
    “Jan always speaks her mind. You know that.”
    I shrugged. “Well, I hope she’s right.”
    A half hour later we had the radiator in place and were good to go. The RV was already loaded with my guitars, and after taking a quick shower at Janet’s house, I drove over to Shelly’s and collected the rest of the band’s sound system. Mike had recently picked up a used bass amp—bass amps were notorious for being heavy—and we had to struggle to fit it in the back.
    We hit the