Weird Girl and What's His Name by Meagan Brothers Read Free Book Online

‘Doggett and Reyes Aren’t So Bad’ manifesto.”
    â€œGuess I’ll have to follow up next week.” I coughed. It was a quarter to eight. “What’s going on?”
    â€œAre you ready to hear something really weird?”
    â€œThis isn’t that Mexican goatsucker thing, is it?” I sat up in bed, yawning.
    â€œNo, not that weird,” Lula laughed. “But close. Leo wants to borrow your car.”
    â€œDo what now?”
    â€œLeo wants to borrow the Beast. Remember Trey Greyson?”
    â€œThe Burnout?” I rubbed sleep junk out of my eyes. “What did he do now, drive the lawn mower into the Caddy?” Trey Greyson, aka John Harrell Greyson III, aka the Burnout, was once, literally, a poster child for excellence. His family owned Greyson Pork, and Trey was the cute blond kid who sang the Greyson Bacon song in those commercials with the dancing pig. (I know—now the jingle is going to be stuck in your head for days. Sorry.) In addition to being a bacon heir, Trey was a star basketball player and scored so high on his SATs that our school district used a picture of him in their ads for Raise Those As !, their county-wide incentive program to get us mere mortals to stay in school and “A-chieve!” But, in the end, Trey Greyson flunked out of Princeton during his sophomore year. He’d fried his brain on LSD, which, apparently, he’d been doing since his sophomore year of high school, along with a whole buffet of alcohol and drugs I’d never even heard of before. After all that “A-chievement,” he ended up back in Hawthorne mowing lawns, including Janet and Leo’s, for a living.
    â€œHe walked off the job last week,” Lula explained. “He said Leo ‘harshed his mellow.’ Leo got so pissed he said he’d do the yard his own damn self, but he just got the Caddy detailed, so he doesn’t want to get the trunk all dirty with manure or whatever.”
    â€œSo he wants to put a bunch of manure in the trunk of my car?”
    â€œHe said he’ll pay for you to get it washed afterward. Whadda ya say, Theodore? Up for an outing?”
    â€œSure. Let me throw on some clothes.”
    â€œRight on, man,” Lula drawled in her best burnout voice.
    The house was quiet. Mom and Rick the Dick were still sleeping it off, so I left a note and went over to Lula’s. Janet insisted on feeding me pancakes first. And sausage.
    â€œJanet wants us to go organic,” Leo explained as I drove us to Walmart. “She just read some damn book about reducing our carbon footprint. We’ll see what she has to say about our carbon footprint when the whole front yard turns brown and dies.”
    â€œWe could have a Zen rock garden,” Lula piped up from the backseat. “You can rake it every morning. It’s very relaxing. Your blood pressure will go down.”
    â€œMy blood pressure’d go down if that damn lawn hippie hadn’t up and quit on me,” Leo groused from behind his aviator shades. Lula and I caught each other’s glance in the rearview mirror. We were both holding in laughs. Lawn hippie. “How in the Sam Hill is having to rake the lawn every morning going to make my blood pressure go down?” Leo asked.
    â€œLeo,” Lula sighed, as if it were obvious. “That’s the mystery of the Zen.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Leo get this look on his face like he always did when Lula was goofing on him. Like he wanted to be pissed off but was also trying not to laugh. Not that Leo laughed. It was more like a “humph” noise and a slightly-less-pissed-off-than-usual look. It was strange to me how a guy like Leo can actually be really nice, beneath his gruff exterior, while my mom could seem like she’s being nice and pleasant and even fun, but then she turns around and cuts you down with some comment about what a burden you are, or why don’t