The Devil You Know (15 page)

Matt's eyebrows push together and the atmosphere in the tent feels hot and thick, and I'm pretty sure we're not really talking about food anymore. Seems odd that Noah would hold a class grudge against the people he's lived with the past several years. Or maybe he's trying to paint Matt in a not-one-of-us light because he's still jealous. Matt doesn't say anything, and I wonder if he's still mad that Noah wouldn't listen to him about Zolfo Springs. He just takes a long drink of beer and extends his middle finger at his cousin.

“I'm kidding,” Noah tells me. “Except his mom makes the real thing and uses like eight or nine kinds of cheese, and sometimes she really does put lobster in it. Seriously legit.”

“I could go for some of that right now.” I throw a smile at Matt—a small solidarity—but the equilibrium still feels off. It seems like they're both angry about nothing, but I don't know their buttons and bombs. I probably never will. We fall into an uncomfortable silence and just sit awhile,
watching for signs the rain is letting up and munching damp cheese crackers.

Noah falls asleep with his head on the sleeping bag and his legs crossed at the ankles. Molly slinks behind me and curls up between his arm and his side. I smile to myself, only a tiny bit jealous of the dog and only because I know how nice it is right there in that spot.

“You know what I could go for?” Matt says, as if our long-abandoned conversation was still going. “Pie.”

“Oh, yeah,” I agree. “Banana cream.”

“And apple.”

“Rhubarb.”

“Chocolate cream.”

“Key lime.” We say that last one at the same time and laugh together. I glance at Noah to make sure we didn't wake him, but he's still sound asleep with his arm flung over his eyes. His mouth open slightly. His face is relaxed, making him look younger than he is. Not so tough. Kind of adorable.

When I turn back, Matt has a sly grin on his face, and I have a feeling he's plotting something. “I don't think we're as far from the town as he thinks,” he whispers. “Let's paddle up, walk into town … I mean, there has to be someplace that serves pie.”

“But it's raining.”

“It's stopped.”

“We should wake Noah,” I say, but Matt shakes his head.

“No.” He slowly unzips the screen on the tent. “We shouldn't.”

I feel guilty for leaving Noah behind, but I rationalize it away by telling myself he's tired from having to paddle alone today—even though I know that's not even remotely true. I was the one dying on the riverbank while he was entertaining a cabin-fevered cattle dog. It might not be as adventurous as sex in a graveyard, but I like the idea of a clandestine pie run.

The air is swollen with moisture and the ground is squishy beneath my bare feet as we run down to the canoes in the fading light, but Matt is right—the rain has stopped. A slight breeze rustles trees, and it sounds as if rain is still coming down, but overhead slivers of sky peek between the clouds and the glow of the rising moon lurks just behind the bottom of a retreating thunderhead. The frogs and crickets are crazy loud now, masking the sound of the canoe scraping along the sand as we push it into the water.

Matt and I make a silent getaway, not daring to speak for five minutes, ten minutes. Not until we pass under the State Road 64 bridge and round a little bend that puts us at a park on the edge of Zolfo Springs.

“Damn it,” Matt swears softly, as we carry the canoe
up the paved ramp and turn it upside down on the grass. “I knew we weren't that far away. We could have had dinner in a restaurant instead of cooped up in the tent.”

“I don't mind.” I stash our paddles beneath the boat and slide my feet into my flip-flops. “I kind of like our little island.”

“Of course you'd side with him.”

“It's not about sides.” We walk through a wooded campground and past a pioneer village museum with old-timey buildings and a steam engine. If anyone was around, they'd probably think we were homeless, our clothes having dried on our bodies and our hair flattened by rain. Sand and gravel have worked themselves between my toes and my flip-flops, and once again I'm in desperate need of a shower. “It would have been cool to camp here, but whatever. We're engaged in Operation Clandestine Pie, Matt. You and me.”

I wait to be rewarded with a laugh, but when it doesn't come right away, I wonder if there was something in the rain that soaked into their skin. Turned both him and Noah into testosterone monsters. But then a smile splits Matt's face and he laughs, lifting his fist for me to bump, the same way he did the first time we met. “Locked and loaded.”

We find a family-style restaurant across the street from the park. It's nothing fancy, and the place is deserted except for a couple of guys drinking coffee at the lunch counter, but they have pie. An older waitress seats us at a booth with a clear view of a television silently broadcasting the news.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asks, placing plastic-covered menus in front of us on the table.

“Couple of Cokes?” Matt looks at me to check if that's okay, and I nod. “And we don't need menus,” he says. “We'll take one slice of every kind of pie you have.”

Her going-gray eyebrows shoot up. “Every kind?”

“Yep.”

“Hon, we have six.”

“I know.”

“This some kind of joke?” Maybe she thinks we're the dine-and-dash type. The Kendrick brothers and I tried it once at the IHOP in Lake City, but I snuck back to pay for our food. It was busy that morning, and we weren't even gone long enough for our waitress to notice we skipped out, but I still felt bad. Maybe she was a single mom or weighed down by debt. What if IHOP made her pay our bill?

Matt leans to fish his wallet from his back pocket and slaps a hundred on the table. “Will this cover it?”

“Well.” The waitress sighs as if she still thinks we're pulling some sort of scam on her, but Matt flashes her one of his sweet smiles—he's so good at those—and her demeanor softens. The corner of her mouth twitches. “All right, then.”

“And could we please have some sound on the TV?”

She doesn't acknowledge the request, but after putting in our order for six kinds of pie, she takes a remote from under the counter and unmutes the television.

“I need to go attend to some business … in my office,” Matt says, as he slides out of his side of the booth. “Save a little pie for me, okay?”

He heads off to the men's room, and I turn my attention to the television.

“… and finally, a tragic ending in the search for a
Florida man who went missing Tuesday in Georgia's Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge,” the newscaster says, as a white banner at the bottom of the screen declares Missing Florida Man Found Dead, and I wonder if that's the missing guy Duane was talking about this morning. “The body of twenty-four-year-old Brian Patrick Clark was discovered this morning by park rangers. The Jacksonville man, who relatives say was camping alone in the park, was reported missing after he failed to return home last weekend. Cause of death has not been issued, but park officials say Clark was found with a single gunshot wound to the head. No suspects have been named, and Clark's death remains under investigation.”

“Such an awful shame,” the waitress says as she places our Cokes on the table. “What kind of person would do such a thing?” She stands there for a moment, looking up at the television as if the answer will appear, then sighs. “I'll be right back with your pie.”

Thinking about how Brian Patrick Clark's family must be feeling right now makes me think about my dad. There's some small comfort in knowing Duane ran interference for me. Dad knows I'm okay and that I'll be home soon. As much as I'd love to go to Flamingo with Noah—and spend every last possible second with him until he heads off into his real life—I need to get back. I miss Danny. I even miss Dad.

“So what's happening in the real world?” The booth seat squeaks as Matt returns.

“A whole lot of nothing.”

He picks up his fork and taps the tines on the paper placemat in front of him. “So, Cadie, are you going anywhere for school?”

My grades weren't great, but good enough to be admitted somewhere. Except Mom left such a hole in our lives that I just stopped thinking about college. My guidance counselor encouraged me to apply. She even gave me the applications, but I had Danny to worry about. And Dad. So the applications sat in my desk drawer until the deadlines passed. They're still there now.

“I haven't really figured out what I want to do yet,” I say. “I'm—well, I'm kind of handy with a sewing machine, so—okay, don't laugh, but I thought maybe I could start my own shop.”

Justin used to lie on my bed while I stitched secondhand clothes into new patterns—skirts, tops, and I even tried my hand at shorts once—but I never told him about this private dream. Now that I've told Matt, it's out of my head and into the universe. He doesn't make fun of me, though, and I'm happy about that.

“It's just that I don't have much money,” I say.

“Have you thought about selling your stuff online?” Matt asks. “You'd have barely any overhead, you could do
it from anywhere, and people love handmade shit. Not that what you make is shit. I'm just saying that's what I would do.”

He turns his attention to the TV, where contestants are questioning their way through
Jeopardy!
answers, as I sit here wondering why an online shop never occurred to me, especially considering how much of my life I've wasted on the Internet. Dad dipped into my meager college fund to pay Mom's hospital bills, so I don't have enough to pay for even a semester of college. But I do have enough for a new sewing machine and probably enough to set up a virtual shop.

“Thanks,” I say, and Matt looks back at me as if he's already forgotten the conversation. “For the online idea. It's a good one.”

He winks. “I'm handsome and smart.”

“So after your camping trip in Florida, what are you going to do?”

“I go back to college in the fall.”

“Where?”

“Yale.”

I tie my straw wrapper in a knot. “That's pretty impressive.”

“I guess. I don't know. Yeah.” Matt shrugs like getting into an Ivy League college is nothing special. There might be a few kids from my high school who were admitted to
Harvard or Yale, but most everyone I know is going to a state university or joining the military. Or not going anywhere at all.

“Smart and handsome,” I say, which makes him grin.

The waitress comes up to the table bearing a tray filled with plates of pie—apple, cherry, banana cream, chocolate cream, pecan, and, of course, key lime—and we line them up in a row on the table between us.

“Which one should we try first?” I ask. “Should we have a plan or just go for it?”

Matt severs off the point from the slice of cherry and forks it into his mouth, talking around the pie. “Don't overthink it. Just eat.”

I decide to sample them in order, least favorite to favorite, starting with pecan because I hate pecan. He shakes his head as I wash the offensive taste down with a big mouthful of Coke.

“Why eat it if you don't like it?” he asks.

“I want to be fair.”

“Life is too short, Cadie.” He extends his arm across the Formica-topped table, bringing his fork to my lips. Speared to the end is a bite of key lime pie. Tasting it will throw off my system because key lime is my all-time favorite, but the last time a cute boy fed me pie was never. “You have to take what you want.”

I open my mouth to accept the bite he's offering, and
his gaze is a bonfire on my face as he watches me chew the sweet-tart pie. I'm overcome with the same need to flee that I felt the time he kissed me. Not because the way he stares bothers me, but because it doesn't. And it should. Shouldn't it?

“It's too bad Lindsey didn't stick around.” I focus on the plate of apple pie sitting in front of me. “I wonder if she made it home okay.”

“Do you want to call home?” Matt digs his phone from his pocket and glances at the screen. “Or, maybe not. No signal.”

“Weird.”

One of the men at the lunch counter is talking on his cell phone, telling someone a loud story about the cracked exhaust manifold on his Ford Ranger. Matt's gaze follows mine. “I've had spotty coverage since we've been in Florida,” he says. “That's what I get for not going with the nation's largest network, huh?”

“We are pretty much east of nowhere,” I say. “And I've lost signal walking from the kitchen to my bedroom, so—”

“If you need anything else, let me know.” The waitress drops the check on the table, and Matt slides the one-hundred-dollar bill on top of it without bothering to look. I don't think he does it to impress me, but I have to appreciate that he can afford to make that kind of move without a second thought.

“A box,” he calls after the waitress, as we survey the leftovers—the crust ends of half a dozen types of pie. “We'll take the leftovers back to Noah as a peace offering.”

The guilt I left back at the campsite catches up with me, and I'm sorry we didn't invite Noah to come with us. “Do you really think we need to make peace?”

“I don't know,” Matt says. “Maybe. He might think we stole the Cougar and headed to Flamingo without him. He can be kind of … volatile.”

I've known them only a couple of days, but “volatile” seems like too strong a descriptor. I mean, threatening Jason, getting jealous over Matt, and whatever general crankiness he was suffering back at the tent—those things aren't insignificant but they're also not volatile. “Really?”

“Well, okay, he's pretty much kept himself in check since he came to live with us. But you know about his …” Matt gestures at his forehead in the spot where a scar would be if he were his cousin. I nod, even though Noah didn't share the whole story. I only know the boot-to-the-face part. “And that part of his sentencing was to get anger management counseling?”