How To Steal a Car Read online

  “Great lasagna,” my dad said.

  “Thank you,” said my mother.

  “New recipe?”

  “I just tweaked it a little,” she said, then winked at me—again.

  I remember now. It was a Nissan Altima. I don’t know what color.

  I drove fast out of Golden Valley and got on the freeway heading north. Jen and I were both talking at the same time, neither of us really saying anything, just blowing off this wild energy. There was a lot of “Omigod, omigod, I can’t believe we’re doing this” and Jen talking about all the people who were going to totally freak when they heard about it. Finally I sort of calmed down and said, “We can’t tell anybody.”

  Jen looked stricken.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “If we tell anybody at all, it might get back to our parents. Or the police.”

  Jen nodded, then said, “Not even Will?”

  Will was our boyfriend, sort of.

  “We can tell Will,” I said. “He doesn’t talk.” That wasn’t true, exactly. Will Ford spoke perfectly well—he just didn’t do it often, which was probably why we were friends. He was the perfect listener. If you told him something and said it was a secret, you couldn’t even get him to tell it back to you.

  Jen nodded and smiled. As long as she could tell at least one person, she was fine.

  “Where should we go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jen said. “It’s after midnight. It’s a weekday.”

  We were almost out of the suburbs, about twenty miles north of Minneapolis, with new housing developments and the remnants of farms on either side of us. I saw some lights up ahead on the right. A low building surrounded by SUVs and pickup trucks came into sight. The neon sign on the roof read B.J.’s BUNKHOUSE, LIVE NUDE DANCERS 24 HOURS.

  “Want to stop off for a beer?” I said.

  Jen laughed—but she stopped when I turned onto the exit ramp.

  “Hey…,” she said, sitting forward.

  “I’m just turning around,” I told her.

  She slumped back in her seat saying nothing as I turned away from B.J. and his Live Nude Dancers, crossed under the freeway, and turned onto the southbound entrance ramp.

  “We could hit the twenty-four-hour Taco Bell,” I said.

  “Okay.” I could tell the thrill was wearing off for her. I could feel it in myself too. The fun part of stealing a car is pretty short-lived if you have no place to go.

  The Taco Bell was close to home and I thought maybe we’d run into somebody we knew, but we didn’t—we just ate some really disgusting thing with way too much cheese in it. Then I dropped Jen off at her house, parked the car a block from the key guy’s house, and walked home.

  I kept the keys.

  When I got home, a text from Jen was waiting.

  OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE WE DID THAT! she wrote.

  I couldn’t believe it either.

  My father is enormous. As far as I know he has never hit anybody, but he looks like a guy who would. He’s about six-five with these huge shoulders and when he wears a shirt with an open collar you can see the mat of gorilla hair covering his chest. And he has big thick eyebrows and dark eyes, and hands so big he can pick up a basketball the way a normal person grabs a softball.

  Of course he knows how he looks. He laughs about it. He says it comes in handy in court. My dad practices criminal law, which means he defends all sorts of scumbags, and he says being so big helps him intimidate witnesses. I guess he sort of leans over them and exudes waves of testosterone until they crack.

  I just thank God I didn’t inherit his enormousness or his hairiness.

  It was around the time Jen and I stole the Nissan that my dad got involved with Elwin Carl Dandridge, the serial rapist. Elwin Carl Dandridge was a skinny little guy, half white, half black, and half something else—gray, maybe—who specialized in terrorizing college students over at the U. He raped eight girls in two months before they caught him. As far as the police were concerned, it was a no-brainer. They had DNA and everything, but because it was what my dad calls an “above-the-fold-headline case,” he offered to represent Dandridge pro bono (that means for free), even though he had to know that Dandridge was guilty, which was pretty embarrassing for me, because nobody wants their dad to be a rapist-defender.

  “Look, it’s not like he’s going to get off,” I told Jen. “My dad will probably just have him plead guilty or something.”

  We were at Cedar Lake. It was a few days after the Nissan thing, one of those hot, muggy, windless, semi-cloudy days, and the lake was pretty disgusting in that scummy midsummer way. It had to get way hotter than it was to make it worth getting in the water with all the algae and stuff, so we were just hanging out on the beach and waiting for Will to show up.

  Jen said, “I don’t see why a guy like that even deserves a lawyer.”

  “Well, if we’d got caught stealing that car, I bet my dad would have defended us. Even if we were totally guilty.”

  “I still can’t believe we did that.”

  “I wish you’d quit saying that,” I said, but really I didn’t mind—I thought it was cool. I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my chin on my fist and stared at the weave of my towel, imagining myself getting arrested and thrown in a jail cell with a bunch of skanky prostitutes and drug addicts and baby-killers, even though all we did was drive around a little and eat at a Taco Bell. I thought about my parents looking at me through the bars of my cell. My dad saying, Why on earth would you do such a stupid thing?

  I would tell him it had nothing to do with lack of intelligence.

  You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!

  Yeah, Dad, but it was one of those living-in-the-moment things.

  The thing he would never understand was that it only had to make sense for about one decision-making nanosecond. Later it might seem moronic, but at the time it all made perfect sense. Anyway, we got away with it. Because for every time some kid like me pays the price for doing something incredibly stupid, there are a thousand times she gets away with it.

  “I told Will,” Jen said.

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Cool.’ He said, ‘Cool.’”

  “That’s all he ever says.”

  “He’s supposed to be here.” She sat up and looked around. “There he is.”

  Will Ford was shuffling shirtless toward us with his sizethirteen flip-flops leaving troughs in the sand. A half-empty twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew dangled by its neck from his long fingers.

  “Hey,” he said. That was Will’s other favorite word. Hey. Hey, cool. Cool. Hey. He could express just about any thought with those two words.

  “Hey,” said Jen.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Will folded his half-naked body onto the sand between our towels.

  “Steal any more cars?” Will said.

  Okay, I was exaggerating about him only having two words.

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Cool.” He gave me a sideways look, like he was seeing someone he didn’t know.

  “It was a one-time deal,” I said.

  Will shrugged. “Cool.”

  I should explain about Will being both my and Jen’s boyfriend. Really, he’d been Jen’s boyfriend since second grade, but not like her boyfriend boyfriend, even though they had made out a couple of times. And then last year I sort of hooked up with him in a closet at this party I wasn’t supposed to be at, and Jen found out, and we had this teary three-hour fight. In the end we decided to share him. Neither of us had made out with him since. I should explain about that too. Will was like one of those sex dolls. Not that I’ve ever seen a sex doll, but he was like, hey, cool, whatever. I almost had to grab his hands and put them on me. I don’t know why I even did that except maybe I was jealous of Jen for having him. But it wasn’t any fun because it was like he was kissing me and stuff just to be polite or something and not like he was into it. So we worked it out, me and Jen, and we came to the conclusion t
hat Will just wasn’t interested in sex, and that was how it got to be okay that he was both of our boyfriends.

  “This guy dropped his keys,” I told Will. “I just happened to pick them up, and then later we took his car for a ride. I brought it back, so it wasn’t really stealing.”

  Will nodded. “Know what I’d like to steal? Alton Wright’s Hummer.”

  Jen laughed, and Will’s lips turned up in this half smirk that he doesn’t do very often.

  “That would be fun,” I said.

  Alton Wright’s Hummer was yellow. There is something about yellow cars that is just naturally irritating. And it was a Hummer. Also irritating. And it was Alton’s. Alton Wright was one of those people you wanted to do damage to, but you couldn’t because he had too many friends. The reason he had friends was because he had a yellow Hummer, and he was smart and funny in a cruel sort of way, and he looked like he should be in a movie. But anyone with any taste whatsoever hated him because he was so full of himself. Especially while driving his yellow Hummer.

  So I knew where Will was coming from, but still it surprised me, with Will being so laid-back and all, that he would even think about it.

  “He comes into Ducky’s,” Will said. “I have to vacuum it out like every week.” Ducky’s Auto Laundry was the car wash and detailing shop where Will worked weekends. “One of these days I’m gonna get a dead rat and hide it in his glove compartment and hope he doesn’t find it till it explodes.”

  That was the longest sentence I’d ever heard from Will.

  “Where are you going to get a rat?” I asked.

  Will shrugged.

  Jen said, “So did you hear that Kell’s dad is defending a serial rapist?”

  That night I watched Gone in 60 Seconds with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. The idea is that Nicolas Cage is this retired car thief who, for reasons too ridiculous to say, is forced by a bad guy to steal fifty cars in one night, which he does, but of course he has to kill the bad guy in the end, and he saves a cop’s life at the same time, so the cop lets him go. I don’t know what Angelina Jolie is doing in the movie, but her hair is really weird, and now that you know what happens, you don’t have to waste your money renting it unless you really like Nicolas Cage, in which case consider yourself warned.

  Kelleigh Monahan: five foot seven, a hundred ten curvaceous pounds, thick silky black hair, full lips, perky nose, and sparkling hazel eyes. It’s true. Or it would be true if I was wearing stack-heeled boots and hazel contact lenses and a push-up bra, and got collagen injections in my lips. And lost seven pounds.

  The perky nose I really have—I got that from my mom—and I do have black hair, which I got from my dad, but it’s not all that silky.

  Actually, I do not hate the way I look. Sometimes I see actresses on TV who remind me of myself, give or take a few major details like complexion and bust size and so forth. But there is always room for improvement, so for purposes of reading my story you should go with the tall, sleek, puffy-lipped, perky-nosed, hazel-eyed, silky-raven-haired beauty. It’s close enough.

  When I was nine years old I used to watch this old show called Flipper on TV Land. It was about this really smart dolphin who saved the day in every episode. I got all excited about dolphins—or porpoises, as they are also called. So for my tenth birthday my dad gave me a dolphin necklace. It was just a chain with this dolphin carved out of soapstone, but it was nice of him to remember that I liked Flipper.

  I wore it to school, and of course everybody noticed and said how cool it was. A few days later, this girl Madison who wanted to be my friend gave me a pencil with an eraser shaped like a dolphin. I didn’t really want to be her friend because I already had Jen, but I said thank you and used the pencil at school. And then my mom bought me a new bedspread that had jumping dolphins on it. Pretty soon, for birthdays, Christmas, or no reason at all, people were giving me dolphin things and I didn’t know how to make them stop. I didn’t even like Flipper anymore. So one day—it was about a week before my thirteenth birthday—I had a complete dolphin meltdown. I took every dolphin thing I owned and made a pile in the backyard fire pit and poured half a can of gasoline on it. My mom noticed me out there and came out to see what I was doing with my bedspread and stuffed dolphins and dolphin posters and dolphin T-shirts and everything else piled up in the fire pit, and I lit it.

  Gasoline is more flammable than I’d thought. There was a huge whoosh! and I jumped back, but not quick enough. I ended up losing all the hairs on my right arm, my right eyebrow, and some off my bangs too. Fortunately, my clothes didn’t catch on fire. My mom freaked, of course, and so did my dad when he got home. You’d have thought it was the worst thing anybody had ever done in the history of people doing bad things. But I didn’t feel all that bad about it until my dad said, “Did you burn the necklace too?”

  Actually, it was the one thing I kept. But I didn’t tell him that.

  I was grounded for a week and they made me see a therapist. After a couple hours of taking tests and talking and crying, the therapist told my parents I was a normal kid who sometimes had difficulty expressing her feelings. She also told them not to give me any more dolphin stuff.

  I mention this because it sort of relates to what later happened with Alton Wright’s Hummer. Because people just love to know things about you, as in Kelleigh Monahan has a dolphin fetish or Stuey Kvasnick has only one testicle or Kathy Forest will do it with any guy who smiles at her. Anything that makes you predictable and classifiable, like it gives them a mental file drawer to put you in and forever after that’s where they keep you. It only takes one thing for them to create that file.

  Even your closest friends.

  Will called me up a week after the first car thing and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said back.

  “Doing anything Saturday?”

  “Why?”

  “I need a favor.”

  The Hummer dealership was only four blocks from the car wash. The guy at the service counter took the key without looking at me. He asked me my name. I told him it was Cordelia Fink. He set the key on the counter, typed something into his computer, and frowned.

  “Did you purchase the vehicle here?”

  “It’s my boyfriend’s. Alton Wright?”

  The service guy stared at me for a couple seconds. What he saw was a girl wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap (my dad’s) that covered up all her arguably silky black hair. She was also wearing an oversize pair of Gucci sunglasses (my mom’s), a baby blue tunic top (also my mom’s), and lipstick (which I never wear). I was incognito.

  The guy typed in Alton’s name. He scrolled around a bit, then said, “I’ve got a Dennis Wright.”

  “That’s Alton’s dad. The car’s probably in his name.”

  “You know you could have just called this in,” he said. “We could have made a new key from the VIN number. Had it ready for you.”

  “Next time I throw my boyfriend’s spare keys in the lake, I’ll be sure to do that.”

  The service guy laughed. “Alton Wright. I remember that kid now,” he said. “I don’t blame you.” He picked up the key. “I’ll have Johnny cut you a new one. Take about twenty minutes. He’s a little backed up this morning. Make yourself comfortable.” He pointed me toward the customer lounge.

  I texted Will.

  getting key. 20 min.

  A few seconds later Will texted me back.

  hurry!

  When I got to Ducky’s, Alton Wright was in the lobby, yelling at the manager. I stopped outside the open door to listen.

  “Sir, I’m sure your vehicle will be ready any moment now—”

  “Since when does it take an hour for a Speedy Detail?” He pointed at the sign behind the counter. “‘In and out in thirty minutes!’ That’s what the sign says. ‘Speedy Detail—Fastest Auto Detail in the Metro.’ That’s false advertising!”

  “If you’ll just wait here, sir, I’ll go back and find out what’s taking them so long—”


  “Damn right you will.” He looked at his watch. “See if I ever come back here!”

  The manager disappeared, and so did I. I didn’t think Alton Wright would recognize me—he probably didn’t even know who I was in the first place—but why take chances? I ran around the building to the back entrance of the detailing shop. Will was waiting hard.

  “What took you?” he said, not very nicely. He grabbed Alton’s keys from me and ran back into the shop, yelling, “I found them!”

  “You’re welcome,” I said to the air.

  Later that same day I called Jen to vent.

  “Your boyfriend was rude to me,” I said.

  “Your boyfriend’s rude all the time. Maybe we should order a new one.”

  “From Boyfriends ‘R’ Us?”

  “Or eBay. What did he do?”

  I told her about the key thing.

  “Why did he want a copy of Alton’s key?”

  “Don’t you remember? He wants to put a dead rat in Alton’s Hummer.”

  “Oh.” Even over the phone I could tell she was making a face. “That doesn’t sound like something Will would really do.”

  “Remember last May? Will was walking by the curb and there was this puddle and Alton came driving by and, like, soaked him on purpose. Will was pissed for days.”

  “Sounds like he’s still pissed. You think he’ll really do it?”

  “No. But just knowing he can if he wants to is probably enough. Anyway, I still have the copy of the key.”

  Which is why I wasn’t completely surprised when Will texted me a couple of hours later.

  I walked over to Charlie Bean’s and found Will at the back table, sipping on an iced coffee. I tossed the duplicate Hummer key on the table in front of him.

  “Cool,” he said.

  “You owe me twenty bucks and a Phrap-o-chino.” That was Charlie Bean’s quadruple-shot blended espresso drink, the best legal alternative to mainlining crystal meth.

  “Cool. Only I’ll have to owe you. I’m tapped.”

  Tapped is normal for Will Ford. He spends all his money on music and games. I bought myself a Phrap-o-chino. When I got back to the table Will was still staring down at the key.