The Incident on the Bridge Read Online Free Page B

yellow, particulate, plus there were a surprising number of people walking around—tourists, it looked like—though that guy on the steps was definitely Jake Grossman, and the girl with him was Mandy Shue, both of whom had been at Clay’s party three weeks ago. They’d see her get out of Clay’s car in her pink rubber boots and remember her lying there on the rocks with her head all bloody. What was she going to say when she got out of Clay’s car?
    Why aren’t you down at the Of, Jake? I think all the cool people are down at the Of.
    Better to cruise for a bit down Orange Avenue and find a darker but still conspicuous place to leave the car. Roll down the window and stop inhaling the weed-coconut-tequila smell that was an extension of Clay’s body, a unique and powerful drug. She breathed Clay Moorehead out of her lungs and turned right on Ocean Avenue, but the pangs rose like the waves that rose and fell in the dark, one following another following another following another.
You could have waited for Jerome. Once you knew the fortune cookie was not from Jerome, you should have said no to Clay Moorehead
.
    She’d tried to tell Jerome it was all a mistake and he could trust her—they could start over—but he wouldn’t talk to her. She didn’t blame him. Why should he? Why would he even be interested in her now?
    You could ask yourself the same questions a million times, but if you didn’t know the answers, you didn’t know.
    The houses along the beach were
grandiferous,
one of Ted’s made-up words. Also beautiful. You could hate them and think they cost too much but part of you still wanted one.
    She turned Clay’s car inland to cruise past normal-er houses that had soccer nets in the yards, minivans in the driveways, wet suits hung up to dry: Ashlynn Myrick’s house, Eric Feingold’s, and Daisy Koop’s, where a banner that hung down from the porch roof said USC . Meaning,
Look where our daughter got in!
Five months ago, all Thisbe had thought about was getting a letter that said
Welcome to the Trojan Family.
She hadn’t known Clay at all except as a boy who took easy classes and drank a lot.
Say goodbye to that situation, Thisbe Locke. Grade point average down the toilet. You’re not getting into USC with a 3.5.
    These streets were no good. There were no red curbs along here where she could leave Clay’s car, and his Starbucks French roast weed sitting out for cops to see when they towed it, just quiet houses, one sleeping block after another until she got to Fourth Street, the Way Out of Coronado via the bridge.
    She felt in her hoodie pocket at the red light on Orange and there was her driver’s license—so
that
’s where she’d left it—and a little slip of paper, one of the stupid fortunes, probably. The light turned green and she held the slip in her hand—just, like, rolling it in her fingers as she floored it to make the car climb up the bridge. Not the strongest car, this one. Kind of weak.
Tick tick tick
went the streetlights like a picket fence, on and on, up and up, and it felt so different being the driver. When she was a passenger, she could look over the rail at the huge navy ships made small like models in a museum, the water rippling with moonlight and yellow sodium, but she had to concentrate when she was driving and keep Clay’s car close but not too close to the concrete zipper that curved down the center line. Where was she going, anyway? It felt good to leave.
    The road was like a tunnel to the sky, a ramp that went up and up and up, but really she was just headed for San Diego. What was she going to do? Drive north on the 5 until she ran out of gas? She needed to get off the bridge and think, which meant the Barrio. She turned right where the bridge curled slowly into Cesar Chavez Park. The concrete pylons that supported the end of the bridge were painted all over with the faces and fists of angry women and men, Aztec gods, enormous flowers, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The