All You Never Wanted by Adele Griffin Page A

gifts.”
    Thwop!
The heel of Joshua’s hand cuffed me hard and mean behind the ear. Like I was a dog. He hadn’t even taken his eyes off the road. “What the
hell
?”
    “I said the get. Not the gift. The get. Who said I was buying anything?”
    “For God’s sake, could you be more dickishly white trash about it?
Hitting
me? Are you for
real
? That
hurt
, Gunner.” Becauseit honestly seemed way too far on the abusive side. No matter if he’d been aiming for one of those casual, rough ’em up, oldest-Gunner-brother moves. No matter how pissed he was about my calling him a dirtbag. Now I was pissed, too. I sulked. Then he felt bad—I could tell from how he cranked the radio. We drove in a harsh silence. My ear was humming.
    I didn’t speak up until he turned onto Route 1. “Where are we going, anyhow? Now that you’ve kidnapped me?”
    “Stratford Mini-Putt.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “Somewhere else you gotta be?”
    “That’s almost forty minutes out. And right now I can’t think of anything worse than playing mini-golf with you.”
    “We’re not playing anything. We’re stealing Brandon the Whale.”
    I was still rubbing my head, although it didn’t hurt anymore. “Why?”
    “Al’s and my first date was here. It’s kind of a private joke.”
    Which flattened me. Instant deflate. Could I be more foolish? Could I be more pathetic? It took everything in me to find even a trace of Gia-blasé. “So glad I can be part of your time-consuming lovebird prank. Especially if it might mean getting arrested.”
    “I need the extra pair of hands.” He smiled. Like it was perfectly fine to demolish my afternoon. Like I had nothing better going on with my life than aiding and abetting.
    But he knew, of course. He knew I’d do it.
    It turned out the Mini-Putt was closed two weeks for repairs. Which Joshua already knew. We loped around and checked it out through all different chinks in the chain-link. It was every bit ascheeseball as I remembered, with the Dutch windmill and the freaky clown mouth, and of course Brandon the googly-eyed whale on the ninth.
    Joshua jumped onto the fence, catching a toehold in his vintage Ballys. “The fence is too high to swing over. But they padlock it with a Master Lock number five and that’ll be cake. No alarm system, since there’s nothing in there to steal.”
    “Right. Except the alarm system of everyone watching from the highway.”
    “Nah.” He let go, dropping to the ground and brushing his hands against his jeans. “We’ll get Pizza Hut across the street and then come back here when it’s dusk—but before we get a glare off the streetlamps.”
    “I don’t really like pizza. Especially not from the Hut.”
    “Order a Pepsi, then. We need the soda can.”
    “Pepsi’s not dinner.”
    “Really? I thought for a girl it was. Diet Pepsi and a stale breadstick? Yum.” But he was hardly paying attention to what he was saying. In the theft zone.
    I dropped back to signal my general irritation as I watched him swagger. That Cheerios-blond hair. That hard nothing butt. I didn’t have much choice but to follow him. Across the highway and into the Hut. We took a booth in the back. Its smell of cigarettes and burnt green peppers was insta-grease on my skin.
    Joshua ordered and started texting like Mozart. Not to be outdone, I texted Lily Genovese—we’d been having a nice back-and-forth ever since I sent her an apology for not being sensitive about her brother and how hard it must be for her family. No needto get stuck on Lily’s bad side, right? And I did feel bad about it. No fun to be had in making anybody cry about their dead anything.
    The reward for my groveling was that Lily and her boyfriend, Adam, were coming to the party tomorrow. Which meant I’d now snagged Adam’s posse—aka the top hot guys of varsity wrestling.
    “Ever hear from your dad?”
    I looked up. I’d been at it so long, I hadn’t even noticed that the food had arrived and Joshua’d