Caring Is Creepy Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned to the side, I saw who it was.
    “Hayes,” I said, loud enough to make him jump a couple inches off the seat. I snapped the phone shut. “How long have you been back here? What the hell are you doing?”
    Hayes crossed the worn, green carpet to shut the door, but I beat him to it, wedging my foot in the gap right as he grabbed the handle.
    “Little Flipper.” He tried a couple of different smiles out on me before he settled on one that made him look like he had to go to the bathroom. “Right. Shouldn’t you be in bed? School comes early and all that.” He looked down at his wrist, but he had no watch. “I didn’t even realize you were here.”
    This was such an obvious lie I didn’t even respond to it. I went up on my toes to get a better look at what he’d been doing in there. He shifted his body to block my view. But I caught a quick glimpse anyway. A pile of crumpled Ziploc bags and two brown plastic serving trays from the hospital covered one side of the vanity table. On the other side was my grandma’s old wooden mortar and pestle and a Tupperware container with a long, yellow cigarette burn onthe lid. Hayes turned his face away and spit something into his hand, gave it a quick glance and then dropped it into the front pocket of his red plaid cowboy shirt.
    I shifted back and forth, but he moved with me. A sort of half-assed country two-step. “Doing a little early evening grinding, huh?” I asked.
    Hayes made a noncommittal grunting sound.
    “Mom doesn’t mind you using all her stuff, I guess.”
    I leaned my body to the left as though about to take a step in that direction and then faked him out and went right. He moved to the left to block me, but I slipped on by, smiling all the while. Once I stepped into the light, I saw a pile of orange pills and green pills on one of the hospital trays and a little mound of white powder in the Tupperware container. It looked to be pill pieces he was mashing up in the pestle, but the crunched-up bits weren’t orange or green.
    “Doing some freelance work for the pharmacy? I’m glad you finally found a job.” If Mom knew about this shit, I thought, she’d jab him in the ass with a serving fork, and with good reason. “So if I ask Mom about this, she’ll know what you’re up to? She don’t mind you doing this in her room, huh?”
    “Well, see …” Hayes kind of trailed off, nodding his head and chewing at his lower lip. “I’m in a bit of a jam here, Flipper. Your mom knows about the one part of this—”
    I held up my hand. “Don’t, Hayes,” I said. “Ain’t none of it any of my concern. Don’t tell me about it. Please. Then I won’t have to lie for you if anyone asks. I don’t want to have any part in—” I waved my hand at the mess he’d left behind on the vanity table. “But I know one thing. Mom’d throw a huge fit if she saw your crap spread out like that. I can’t even start to guess why you chose her bedroom to do all this in.”
    “I needed the wooden thing. You know, the—” He made agrinding motion with his hand. “—the crunch-crunch thing over there. And you were sleeping and I didn’t want to, uh, disturb you. Look, I’ll finish up pretty quick and be out of your hair.” He pulled the little thing he’d spit into his hand out of his pocket and polished it with the hem of his shirt. It was a pill with greenish speckles on it. It looked to me like he’d been sucking the color off the pills and then mashing them into powder.
    “No, no, no. You got to get this project or whatever it is out of here, Hayes. I can’t have the police coming in here, say, and finding you sucking on pills and then crunching them. That kind of bad thing. Mom would kill us both.”
    “Hey, sure, no problem, I get it.” Hayes set to scooping up his stuff and dumping it into bags. He hummed that little tune again as he packed. The melody was cheerful and familiar and seemed to jolly him along a little. He picked up the mortar and