The Thrashers(35)
“Can’t believe he just lets you out with your boyfriend when he’s not in town,” Rosa grumbled.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You were in a truck with two boys on a Friday night,” she said matter-of-factly.
“They’re friends.”
She clucked her tongue and said, “For now.”
Jodi rolled her eyes. Rosa had never had trouble turning friends into boyfriends. When Jodi was twelve, she sat eagerly at Rosa’s knee and listened to her tell stories about Jodi’s mother and her, how they’d gone out to clubs at fifteen and been invited backstage to rock concerts. Jodi had been looking forward to it. But instead of her aunt’s breasts, she got her thighs. Instead of her mother’s hips, she got her father’s stomach.
Her grandma’s house was a sweet two-bedroom in River Park, a buried little neighborhood on the other side of the college campus. Rosa parked in the driveway and led her up to the house.
“Grandma is sleeping,” she said, opening the front door quietly.
“No, I’m not.”
Her grandma was sitting in the chair in front of the television, watching infomercials.
“Hi, Grandma.” Jodi went to press a kiss to her forehead, but her grandma stopped her with a hand.
“Let me see it,” she said, gesturing to her leg.
Jodi rolled down her sweatpants to her knees, forgoing modesty, but winced at the sight of the stitches. Her grandma hissed and whispered something in Spanish that might have been a prayer. Jodi pulled up her pants and reached out to help her grandma out of the chair, but she swatted her hand away. She was only sixty-five, and she refused to be treated like an old lady.
Grandma Anna Maria was the only grandmother she’d known, but she was enough grandparent for all of them. She was the kind who snuck you cookies, who made crass jokes, who slipped twenties into your hand with a wink. Her husband had died a year after Jodi’s mother had passed, and Jodi was old enough now to see why Rosa would willingly live with her mother throughout her twenties and thirties. When she was younger she didn’t get why Rosa didn’t get married and move out—she had plenty of boyfriends. Jodi had never had a sibling, but she’d come to realize that losing a sister and father within a year would probably make her afraid, too.
They let Jodi rest in Rosa’s bed until morning, but she couldn’t wind down. She kept seeing Pennywise stretch off the screen and into the sky as the screen collapsed. The sound of Julian screaming in her ear. The streetlamp flickering.
Was Zack right? Were they being punished for hanging out again? Jodi pushed the stupid idea to the side and curled into Rosa’s pillow. Zack hadn’t mentioned any news crews, but she could assume that the freak accident at the Sacramento drive-in would be newsworthy.
She hoped “the Thrashers” wouldn’t be highlighted again, so soon after their last headlines. But the next day she woke up to the headline EMILY MILLS’S BULLIES INJURED AT DRIVE-IN. An entire profile on Julian, his water polo stats, his involvement in the Emily Mills case, and his current condition took up half a page.
* * *
Julian wasn’t at school on Monday, which was for the best. He was the most banged up out of all of them. Jodi and Paige’s limps were already attracting an insane amount of attention, and the stitches at Lucy’s hairline were even more gossip-worthy.
During art class, Oliver begged Jodi to tell the story, promising not to put anything on Tumblr or TikTok she didn’t want. Nikita was riveted.
“How badly is Julian Hollister hurt?” Oliver asked, shaping his clay.
“Off the record?” Jodi said, and he pouted but nodded. “I don’t think he’s playing water polo this season.”
Oliver shrugged. “He was scouted last year. He might be fine.”
But when she looked over to Julian’s seat in anatomy later that afternoon, she wondered if he saw it that way.
She took notes for him in anatomy for the rest of the week. According to Paige, he’d tried to come to school on Wednesday, but at lunch someone had accidentally knocked into him. It jarred his ribs so badly that he had to go home, popping Vicodin like candy on the way out.
Jodi couldn’t ride her bike or else the stitches would open, but she hopped on the bus after school on Friday and headed to his house in the tree-lined Fab Forties, the “king-size Snickers on Halloween” blocks. As she walked up to the driveway, she scoffed when she saw a brand-new black truck in front of Julian’s house.
The Hollister house was Sacramento-famous—an English Tudor-style mansion with a pool and manicured gardens that stretched back to the next block over. It was the house Ronald Reagan lived in while he was governor of California. Despite it being the largest and nicest house between the group of them, they never had parties or hangouts at Julian’s. It was rare that he invited anybody over but Zack. Jodi thought maybe his parents warned him about keeping the house “historically preserved.”
Ray Hollister was a housing developer who’d met a daytime soap star in Hollywood, left his first wife, married the actress, and then had Julian. Jodi didn’t see him or his wife, Nina, often, so when Ray opened the front door and said, “Josie! Nice to see you!” she didn’t bother correcting him. Ray Hollister wasn’t someone who was often corrected.
He gestured for her to find Julian in his room upstairs, and Jodi traced the path she had only taken once or twice before. She twisted up the stairs and headed for the room at the end of the hall, passing the loving family photos and framed catalog ads that Julian had done for GapKids and American Eagle. She knocked on his door and heard “What” in response. The sound of video game guns and explosives rippled under the door.