The Most Wanted by Jacquelyn Mitchard

down. She reached up and made her fingers into combs and drew both her hands through all that tangled wet hair and shook it up and back, all without taking her eyes off his. Old Cam finally sort of fell across the room and opened the refrigerator door and started looking inside as if a movie was on in there. Then he slammed the door and took these two giant steps to get into his room as fast as he could. The whole time, there was a coiled-up watching in Elena, like she was the one in charge, as if Cam was trying out for a team or something and she was the coach. She never got nervous, that girl. She still never does.
    “What happened to him? He’s a pretty boy now,” Elena whispered when Cam was finally out of earshot.
    “Pretty worthless,” I answered. “The way he looks is the best thing about him. I think he’s got him some kind of a genetic defect that he can’t pick up his own underwear off the floor and even put it out there so I can wash it. Which I don’t even know why I’ve got to wash it.”
    “You the girl,” Elena said, grinning, carefully extending her shiny legs and laying one on top of the other and then admiring them like they were sculptures. She knew that she could usually get me going by saying something like that—that it drove me nuts how even in school the boys had it so much easier, how teachers would be giving them little hints all the time and looking at the girls like, What did you want, anyhow? But this time I didn’t want to get into it with her. Why were we talking about Cam? What was I going to say when I wrote to Dillon LeGrande, 8477298372, Texas State Department of Corrections, Solamente River, Texas? Did I just talk to him the same as other people and ignore what he was really doing? Pretend he was away at school or something?
    When she finally gave up on getting me talking, Elena pulled out her books, bitching about European history. “And I thought all this time they were saying, ‘Hi, Hitler.’ At least that makes sense.”
    “What Heil really means is ‘hail.’ Like, ‘You’re great.’ ”
    “You mean like, ‘Go, Hitler’?”
    I sighed and just stared past her. My hair smelled like the laundry soap on my hands. I asked her then, “Did you know that the prisoners in concentration camps had numbers tattooed on their arms, and prisoners in our own country have numbers, too, that are used the same as their names?”
    “Tattooed?”
    “God, I don’t think so. When I got this here”—I pushed over the scrap on which Connie had written Dillon’s address—“I thought it was his phone number. But it’s his, like, serial number.”
    “You mean that boy in jail? That LeGrande? You’re not really going to write to him, Arley. I was just fooling. You don’t want to get involved with no boy like that. All those LeGrande boys are bad to the bone, except the little one, Philippe, and that’s only because he’s too little to be bad.”
    “I’m writing a letter is all, and you were the one dared me.” What did she think? That next thing I was going to start riding the bus two hours to bring him chocolate-chip cookies? In between doing this house and my job and my homework?
    “I don’t even see why Connie wants that Kevin, you know? Connie might have a big butt, but she ain’t so bad she has to go to prison to find a boy.”
    “I think Connie’s beautiful.”
    “Her butt looks like two pigs fighting in a bag. I say, ‘Constanza, you can see every spoon of Choco-Mocho you ever ate.’ She ought to learn liposuction along with the corrective makeup. Get herself a home unit she can plug in the wall.”
    It was Elena reminding me of Connie, and her cosmetics course at the technical college, that made me decide that I was going to lie to Dillon. I realized right then that one big thing I’d been worrying about all along was that no man of twenty-five, or whatever, was going to want to write to a little kid in ninth grade. So I would tell him I was in college. It