Chapter Eight

Trig

The beginning of December rolls around and Jane asks me to come for dinner to celebrate Maggie’s birthday. She tells me she’s running around like a crazy person and wants to know if I can pick up a cake from the bakery, a new little shop that opened on the main square. I decide to get the cake before I pick up Maggie from school, so it’s there waiting for her when she gets home.

As I pay for the cake, I see a sign taped to the cash register. They need a part-time baker on the week-ends so I take a business card.

I can’t imagine Maggie working here making cakes like the one Jane ordered for her. The cake is decorated with daisies and a pink trim. Doesn’t seem like Maggie’s MO. She’d rather ice cakes with jet-black icing. The thought makes me smile.

When I drop the cake off at the house, I toss Maggie’s present on her bed. It’s a winter coat. Jane hasn’t noticed that grunge girl goes to school in the same black hoodie every damn day. Weeks ago, I gave her money to buy something for herself but she’s in the same ugly stuff she’s been in since day one. I figure if I give her money to pick out a coat, she’ll squirrel it away. She can either wear what I got her. Or freeze.

I can hear her reply in my mind. Whatever…

An envelope lies on her bed, from the College Board. For weeks, she’s waited for her SAT scores to arrive, nervously speculating on her results. One day she frets she’s bombed the reading portion. The next day she’s sure she did horribly in math.

I turn the envelope over in my hand, wondering what her scores are. Wes and Jane wouldn’t dream of opening her mail, but I have no such problem. She’s permanently mad at me anyway. I have nothing to lose.

Jane keeps going on about how smart Maggie is in math and that she should study accounting. Accounting! Shit. Sounds like torture to me, and it makes me wonder if Jane’s getting even with Maggie for being such a surly little shit. Accounting… Jesus.

Strolling back to the door, I tear open the envelope and read the scores. Total is 1480. Damn. I knew the girl was smart, but that’s really good. Jane likes to brag about her 1400, the score that got her into Brown. Wait till she sees Maggie’s score. I scan the rest of the document and stop at the Math score. She got an 800. A perfect score. I blink and tilt the paper toward the light. I read it right.

All the way to the high school I can’t keep from smiling. When I pull up to the front of the school, she’s talking to Kyle and two other girls. Talking and laughing with them, she hasn’t seen me and I have a chance to watch her. Usually, when we’re together, she’s either got a sassy-as-hell expression or a carefully guarded look on her face. Rolling her eyes at something one of the kids say, she looks young and carefree. Nothing like the frightened little bird from a few months ago.

She and Kyle come to the truck, her face pinched from the cold.

“Can we give him a ride home, Uncle Trig?” she asks.

Her tone is pure sass.

“Sure. Fine.” I drum my fingers on the steering wheel.

They pile in and Maggie’s sitting so close to me I can smell the floral soap she uses. Nice. Sweet. Not what you’d expect from a girl dressed in black from head to toe.

“Hi Trig,” Kyle says, leaning forward and smiling. “Thank you for the ride.”

“No problem.” I wave the envelope. “Your scores, Maggie.”

“Dang,” Kyle mutters. “That means mine are in my mail box.”

He groans, maybe because he didn’t knock it out of the park like Maggie.

She snatches the envelope and noticing the tattered edge, elbows me. “Nosy.”

I thought she’d give me way more grief than that, but she’s too excited to bitch about it right now.

Kyle and Maggie peer at the report, their gaze downturned, heads almost touching. They touch each other every so often, I notice, but not in a romantic way. I’m pretty sure Maggie was right about Kyle being gay, but I’m one hundred percent positive she isn’t gay. She just likes to yank my chain, rile me up, then laugh about it and call me a sucker.

I keep driving. After a few moments, there’s a reaction.

“Holy. Shit.” Maggie’s voice is no more than a whisper.

“You… bitch,” Kyle murmurs.

“You’re a pretty smart girl, aren’t you, Maggie? Glad I didn’t let you go to Vegas?”

“Ugh,” she grouses.

“You were going to go to Vegas? Without me?” Kyle asks.

“It was before I met you. I was running away. Trig stopped me.” She explains without looking up from the report.

“Huh,” the boy replies. “What were you going to do? Strip?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe.”

“You could make a killing. With that rack.” He whistles.

I glance over at Kyle to give him a look, one that tells him to shut the fuck up, but he’s staring out the window.

“Is this something I need to know about, Maggie? Something between you and Kyle?”

Her eyes sparkle. “Kyle and I are lovers.”

Kyle snorts. “She swam at my house in the beginning of the year.”

Maggie leans close to whisper. “Nekkid…”

Kyle shakes his head, giving me a wide-eyed, scared-shitless look, like he expects to have my fist in his face any moment.

“She wasn’t naked. She was in a swimsuit… Sir.”

“But I could make money doing that,” she says earnestly. “Going to Vegas. I know lots of foster kids, girls obviously, who did that when they turned eighteen. They earned enough to start a nail salon or bakery or whatever.”

I grit my teeth. Great. Just great. I hand her the best damn SAT scores in the history of college entrance and she’s talking about Vegas. I shoot her a warning look. “We need to have another little talk?”

We almost never talk about that day.

Her smile vanishes. “No. I’ll stop. Besides, I want to go to Colorado. Remember?”

I grunt in reply. I know she’s giving me shit about stripping, but the conversation reminds me of how easily she could have slipped away. When I’d caught her trying to run away, I’d reveled in thwarting her plans. I’d put on the mean and dangerous act as much for Wes and Jane’s sake as for Maggie’s. I wanted to spare them the pain and despair of having one of their kids disappear.

But something’s changed in the last few months. I don’t just want Maggie in Wes and Jane’s home, safe and cared for, I want good things for her. I want her to reach her hopes and her dreams. I don’t know if she has any, but maybe this piece of paper will prove something to her.

I stop at Kyle’s house and he gets out and turns with a mournful expression. “I’ll call you with my scores. I don’t think they’ll be like yours. Now I get why you know more than Mr. Phillips.”

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“Our math teacher. Maggie had to explain the difference between linear growth and exponential growth.”

“Wow.” I nudge her with my shoulder. Kyle’s out of the truck and she could shift over to his spot, but she’s still sitting right beside me, probably because she’s freezing.

“Good for you,” I tell her. “You little math wiz.”

She blushes. I can’t believe it. The girl actually gets rosy cheeks. She doesn’t say a word all the way home, not one single smart-assed reply. She’s hopefully trying to imagine what her amazing scores might mean. I’m wondering too. When I was her age, I’d dropped out of high school so I could recover from the wreck and from there I went straight to work. Back then, there was only one path in front of me. Maggie’s got a thousand.