The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

though she could tell by the way he held it that he didn’t smoke.
    The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Rose took it and pressed her cigarette into it and then took a deep drag from it and then held the lighter out for him. He had been holding the cigarette in his left hand and took the lighter in his right, trying to manage some rigmarole with his elbows on the steering wheel so he could light his cigarette, but the road began to twist and bump, and he startled, swerved a bit, and managed to drop the cigarette into his lap and the lighter onto the floor.
    “Christ in a basket,” he said, glancing down and up and down and up, one-handing the steering wheel while he scrambled, hunched over, for the lighter.
    “No wonder you almost hit me,” Rose said. Then she said, “Here, relax.” She placed her hand high up on his thigh and bent down, her body twisting just enough to give her scrunching room below the gearshift on the steering column. She could feel her tank top riding up her back and wondered at the peep show she was giving Henry, and hung down there a second longer than she needed to, and then she sat back up, the lighter held in front of her as if itwere a diamond or some other gem she’d just pulled out of the earth. Then she said, “Here, gimme that,” and she reached into his lap and grabbed the cigarette, which had fallen in between his legs. She brushed the zipper of his jeans lightly and he jumped in his seat, sending the truck to the left before pulling it hard back to the right.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    “Jesus, Henry,” she said, laughing. “Settle down, will you?”
    Then she tipped the cigarette between her lips and lit it and then she took a drag off it, her own still lit in her left hand. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and then leaned over and said, “Open,” and then put it in his mouth, where he held it for a moment, not smoking, but breathing out of his nose and the side of his mouth, until he remembered his hands on the steering wheel, one of which he freed to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and hold out the open window.
    “So. Which store am I taking you to?” he asked.
    “I lied,” she said. “I don’t need to go to the store.”
    Then she took a breath and looked at him and said, “It’s been kind of a weird day.”
    “Where are we going, then?” he said.
    “I don’t know. Home, I guess?”
    He looked at her. He’d dropped the cigarette out of the window. “So, weird, huh?”
    “A little, yeah.” She didn’t know why but she felt her voice hitch. Voice hitching wasn’t a normal thing for her. Her sister, sure. That girl’s voice hitched at the drop of a pin. At the first sign of trouble—the house was out of milk, their mother’s cat had been sleeping on the kitchen table, Rose had borrowed herfavorite sweater—you could count on that one for a tremble of the lip, a hitch of the voice. But Rose liked to think she was made of stronger stuff than her sister, and sure, she’d seen some strange look in Tyler Akard’s eyes when he came chasing after her, and sure, the sight of that squirrel might’ve troubled her a touch, and maybe almost getting hit by a truck earlier in the day, etc., but Jesus Christ.
    Pull yourself together.
    “How old are you?” he asked again, catching her off guard, pulling her out of her head.
    “Sixteen,” she said, forgetting she’d wanted to keep that a secret from him. “Well, next week. I turn sixteen next week.”
    He sighed and in that sigh she thought she heard him mutter, “Too young,” but she couldn’t be sure. Then he didn’t say anything and neither did she and then he turned onto Church Street and turned to look at Rose and smiled at her and said, “Just about there.”
    Only later—too late, in fact—would she realize how strange it was, what he said, when he said it.
    Just about there.
    They were, though. They were only a couple of blocks from her momma’s house, and so she didn’t think