Page 42

* * *

“Are we there yet?”

For a moment, Hank stares. Jeannie meets his eyes, her own full of a contempt level enough to goad him beyond surprise. He snaps:

“What do you think?”

Jeannie leans forward. A smile tugs at her lips; almost, but not quite, a smirk.

“I think you’re lost—Dad.”

Click.

Stepped in it there, didn’t you? someone says conversationally. Traps work both ways, Hank-o. That’s why they come with instructions.

“Shut up,” he hisses.

Jeannie recoils.

Booger’s wide awake now, watching the two of them in rapt fascination. The green Slime drips, forgotten, down the side of his leg.

Almost as good as TV, Hank thinks. Then: It’s starting.

What’s starting?

Christ, I’m getting hysterical.

Jeannie’s smile has hardened, near enough to grim to call it cousin.

“Stop the car.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Hank says, automatically.

Quietly: “So now I’m stupid?”

Click.

All right. All. Right.

“Yeah,” Hank begins. The words are a cut vein, too fast to catch and too wounded to plug. “Yeah, that’s right. You’re a stupid little girl who wears too much makeup, and listens to too much crap on that stupid walkman, and thinks the world owes her something, which it doesn’t. Any more than I do.” Pause. “And what do you think of that?”

Jeannie’s eyes hold Hank’s. Beneath them, something familiar stirs. Something akin to the same sticky stew of rage currently aboil behind his own.

“I think you can go fuck yourself,” she says.

Booger shrieks, clapping his hands next to Hank’s ear with all the subtlety of a mortar shell explosion. “Jeannie said the F-word!” he sings happily.

“Fuck you too, Booger,” Jeannie shoots back.

Booger drums his heels on the back of Hank’s seat, transported. “Jeannie said the F-word again!” he howls.

The road swims before Hank’s eyes. “Shut UP, Booger,” he hears himself say.

“Dah-dee!”

Jeannie knocks Booger aside and leans forward. “Gimme the keys.”

Hank glances back at the road, and finds it whipping by so fast it’s starting to blur.