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arm. “All set,” he said with a smile,
then stuck the key in the ignition and fired up the engine. I was surprised it actually
started.
    I climbed into the truck, heaved the
door shut, and had just begun to reach for my seatbelt when Skye took off like
a shot. “Holy crap,” I exclaimed as the truck lurched down the street. He’d
stuck the sandwich bag on the dash and I caught it as it came flying at me.
“You want to slow down just a bit there, Skye? My plans for today didn’t
include getting splattered all over the inside of your windshield.”
    “Yeah, okay,” he said, easing off the
accelerator slightly and grinding gears with the stick shift. “I just want to
make sure we get to Oakland before that place closes, but I think we’ll have
enough time.”
    I’d located the seatbelt, but it really
didn’t want to latch. In an act of desperation, I tied it to a lap belt that
spanned the center of the bench seat, double-knotting it and pulling the ends
tight. Skye glanced at what I was doing, then grinned at me. “I hardly ever
wreck. Don’t worry.”
    “Hardly ever? That’s not very
reassuring.”
    “In the ten years I’ve been driving,
I’ve only wrecked twice. Those are pretty good odds.”
    “Ten years? How old are you?”
    “Twenty-one.”
    “But that would mean you were driving
since you were eleven.”
    “Yup.”
     I absorbed that for a beat, then
said, “I mean, I get that your mom is a free spirit and all. River told me
about being raised in a commune. But letting an eleven-year-old drive? That’s
pretty irresponsible.”
    “Actually, I didn’t grow up with my mom,
or with River. He and I had different dads, as you can probably guess by the
fact that he’s half-Latin and I’m Wonder Bread white. Anyway, my dad moved from
Louisiana to Oregon when I was four and took me with him. He loved to go out
drinking on Friday nights, and taught me to drive so I could get him home
safely.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I think he made the right call.
Responsible kid versus drunk adult? Put your money on the kid every time.”
    While I was preparing about fifty
rebuttals to that, Skye reached for the sandwich bag that I’d set down between
us. I pulled it away and exclaimed, “You’re barely staying in your own lane as
it is, and now you want to add eating to the mix? We’re about to get on the
bridge. Can you please hold off on lunch, at least until crashing through the
retaining wall and plunging into the bay is no longer a possibility?”
    He smiled at that. “You’re pretty
uptight. But I like you, Trevor.”
    “I’m not uptight. I just don’t want to
die.”
    He patted my knee reassuringly. Then he
said, “We all have to die sometime.”
    “ What ?”
    Skye burst out laughing and said, “Oh
man.” He actually downshifted, slowing the truck to match the flow of traffic
instead of weaving through it. “See? You are uptight. You’re cute
though, so I’ll forgive you. Plus, you’re nice enough to let a total stranger
drag you to a junkyard in Oakland. I don’t think many people would volunteer
for something like that.”
    “What exactly are we picking up,
anyway?”
    “A clock.”
    “You can’t lift a clock on your own?”
    “Apparently it’s a really big clock.”
    It actually turned out to be enormous.
After surviving the drive across the bridge and cutting through a highly
questionable part of the East Bay, we arrived at our destination. Skye
murmured, “Oh wow, look at that,” as we pulled into a barbed wire-ringed yard
and came to a stop beside the colossal timepiece.
    The thing was maybe eight feet across.
Half of its metal numbers were missing, and its big brass hands dangled
loosely. It was already unusual because of its size, but what made it truly
bizarre was the fact that the plastic clock face had been painted to look like
the Man in the Moon. It had huge green eyes, a creepy, leering grin, and
painted-on craters that sort of made it look like it had a skin