100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith Page A

big deals. I believed it was Monica’s act.
    Cade silently mouthed five dollars to me and pointed at the pizza.
    He laughed.
    I suddenly lost my appetite.
    I said, “Well, you are not going to drive anywhere. You’re drunk. And so’s Monica.”
    Cade slid his keys across the coffee table. They landed on the floor beside my knee. Cade had taught me how to drive, too.
    I was horrible!
    My dad would have a stroke if he knew I’d driven Cade’s truck before; and driving right after a seizure was definitely a dangerous idea. One time, I’d crashed Cade’s truck into somebody’s mailbox. Cade Hernandez thought it was hilarious. I still felt guilty over bending the mailbox.
    Someone had to be the grown-up, I thought.
    â€œOh, yeah. Right,” I said. “If you drive, we end up in jail, and if I drive, we end up in the hospital. Lose-lose, Win-Win.”
    Then Julia said, “I have a car. I can drive.”
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    So the four of us started off, walking toward Julia Bishop’s house. Actually, it was five, counting Laika.
    We crossed the road and followed the creekbed north.
    In May, there was no water in San Francisquito Creek, just afew spots where puddles had been trapped in some of the deeper depressions of the bed.
    Cade and Monica followed slowly at a distance, like twin satellites being pulled along by the gravity of Julia Bishop and me. I’d turn around from time to time and catch one of them opening another beer. Once, I saw Cade pissing into the brush.
    On the way up the canyon, Julia Bishop told me she’d come out only to look at the moon. She said the moon was in perigee that night, the closest it got to the planet of humans and dogs.
    â€œSo,” I said, “were you just going for a walk to see the moon, or were you honestly trying to meet your epileptic neighbor?”
    Julia Bishop was a good subject-changer. “Did you know this is the second brightest moon tonight in more than a century?”
    â€œIs that right?” I said.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen you could see it from anywhere,” I pointed out.
    â€œOkay, then,” Julia admitted, “I heard you lived in that big house. I wanted to see.”
    â€œUm,” I said.
    I cleared my throat and toe-kicked a rock. “You didn’t get a chance to answer my question before. Why did you do that—clean up after me, I mean? You didn’t have to do something like that.”
    â€œI felt bad for you. You were so sad, and I thought you were just scared,” Julia said.
    â€œBut that was, um . . . pretty disgusting, what I did,” I said.
    â€œIt was no big deal. I’ve done it before.”
    â€œWhat? Cleaned up a sixteen-year-old kid’s pee?” I said.
    â€œWell, no. But I’ve changed a baby’s diaper,” she said.
    â€œWow,” I said. “A diaper. That really makes me feel like killing myself right about now.”
    Then she laughed and touched my arm.
    She said, “Forget about it.”
    I said, “Well, sorry. And thank you for what you did, Julia.”
    Cade and Monica weren’t paying attention to us at all.
    Laika had run off somewhere into the dry wash of the canyon.
    While the earth travels twenty miles per second, it pulls the moon with it through space. And the moon, dragged along, trudges around us at a little more than half a mile per second.
    The moon is slow.
    It is the hair of the earth.
    â€œCompared with us, the moon moves like a glacier in space,” I said.
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    There has never been a shortage of dead things in San Francisquito Canyon.
    Julia Bishop had no idea. There were hundreds of accounts of ghosts wandering the canyon at night. I do not believe in ghosts, unless they are just lingering atoms from the dead; atoms that didn’t know how to let go of one another.
    So I told her about William Mulholland, who was a self-taught civil