Train Wreck Girl by Sean Carswell Page A

it. “Look what we have here,” she said, straddling me. I reached between her legs. She was already wet and ready. I slid right in.
    Afterwards, Sophie found a Replacements cassette and we listened to the whole album. Sophie sang along. I watched her mouth and listened to the guitar. The album ended. We listened for the storm, but it was gone. The others in the house had long since passed out.
    Sophie and I walked out into the breaking morning, the sun shining through the eye of the hurricane. No birds flew around. The fronds that still hung off palm trees hung loosely. Jennifer’s yard was covered in torn shingles and shutters and a Big Wheel that would never ride again. Not even a light breeze blew. The air was wet hot like a jungle. Sophie and I started toward the beach.
    The streets were deserted. Fences had been ripped apart. We passed a house without a roof. A broom handle was stuck in a palm tree, half in and half out like those gag arrows we used to wear on our heads as kids. We walked through the wreckage of the day. Everything sunny and wet and ominous. The storm was only half done.
    We walked all the way down to the beach, where we caught the first glimpse of the second half of the storm. Rain clouds stampeded from the east, fast and angry and climbing over themselves. The ocean frothed white and rabid. We started back for the shack. The rain pelted us from the side, as if it were being shot out of a low flying fighter jet. A baby doll flew past Sophie’s head.
    The house was only a hundred yards away. I could’ve sprinted to it in seconds. But not without Sophie. Sophie walked. A palm frond nailed me in the back at fifty miles an hour. It left a welt. I grabbed her hand and made her run with me. Sophie ran.

10
Knucklehead Chronicles
    ITINERARY FOR FINDING A PAD IN COCOA BEACH
    1:30 P . M . Stop daydreaming about Sophie. Either it won’t happen or it’ll be a bad idea if it does.
    1:31 P . M . Walk back to Janie’s house. You’ll see Taylor on the way home. She’ll flip you a bird. Wave back.
    1:43 P . M . Get to Janie’s. Nod when Janie says, “I’m fucking serious, Knucklehead. You have to be out of here by 5:30.”
    1:44 P . M . Nod again when Janie says, “Are those my husband’s baggies you’re wearing?” Stop nodding when she adds, “You little shit.”
    1:45 P . M . Take a shower. Notice the granite walls of the shower. Wonder when your sister got so rich. Tell yourself, “I didn’t want to stay in this bourgeois pad, anyway.”
    2:01 P . M . Leave Janie’s house. You will have a few ideas as to where to go, but none of those ideas are good ones. Just start walking.
    2:12 P . M . Get to Woodland Avenue. Pay attention to everything you’ve come to associate with Woodland: weedy lawns, concrete apartments built in the sixties with names that celebrate the ocean or the Space Center north of town, scattered duplexes in the shadows of these apartment buildings, junk cars in carports or on the weedy lawns, rusty beach cruisers locked to skinny palm trees, a big kite surfing kite stretched across a live oak, yellowed surfboards behind the screens of front porches, stained mattresses by the dumpsters, the detritus of blue collar lives in trash bins as people upgrade or downgrade from one block apartment to the next depending on the winds of the local economy. Everything about this neighborhood screams out Danny McGregor. It’s your old neighborhood. A wave of optimism will build on the horizon. You’ll paddle for it, but you won’t catch it.
    2:13 P . M . Begin an hour of up and down Woodland Ave. Notice that there’s a new library at one end of Woodland. Remember when there used to be a movie theater there. A draft house. The place that would sell you beer when you were only fifteen years old. The place where you could go see stoner movies after midnight and make out with Rosalie while everyone else