Read Online Shift by Jennifer Bradbury - Free Book Online Page B

‘mess
up
the grass,’ he said ‘mess
on
the grass.’” Then Win collapsed across his handlebars, shoulders convulsing with laughter.
    “The lady wouldn’t like that!” the man said louder, holding the light a little higher this time.
    “Um, okay,” I said, edging my bike backward. “Well, do you know where we might be able to camp instead?”
    Win sat up straight and stopped laughing. “Yeah, maybe someplace they’re not totally psycho?”
    It took a half second for the man to realize that he—and by extension, his lady—had been insulted. I swore at Win, turned my wheel, and started to ride. Win just stood there laughing a secondlonger before he joined me. The man was walking toward us now. “Time to go,” Win said.
    “The lady wouldn’t like this!” the man shouted as we rode away.
    Win shouted over his shoulder, across the forty feet of blacktop that now separated us. “Well, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t like the lady. Tell her the yard isn’t even worth taking a dump in!” he said as the little pink flashlight sailed dangerously close to his ear, clattered to the pavement, and began rolling toward the road.
    “Holy crap!” I said.
    Win laughed louder as we pulled away. I shifted up a gear for good measure and looked back to check on Win’s position, only to find him slowing at the bottom of the driveway, where he stopped, quickly reached down to retrieve the fallen flashlight, and then clipped back into his pedal as the man drew closer.
    “Win, come on!”
    He began to pedal, leaving the campground behind as he pulled even with me.
    “Least we’re not leaving empty-handed,” he said, waving the flashlight at me.
    “Great. We can use it to light up the road while we ride in the dark looking for a place to sleep,” I muttered.
    “We’ll find something,” he said.
    “In another twelve miles.” I spat, pulling away a bit.
    “In time I think you’ll come to recognize the hilarity of the situation,” Win said.
    I didn’t respond, but I knew it was funny. And if I hadn’t beentired and hungry and sore as hell, I would probably have been laughing with him. But we needed a place to sleep.
    Five miles later Win spoke again. “Light’s fading.”
    “Seven miles to go,” I said. “Keep pedaling.”
    “Or we could scamp,” he said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Scamp. You know … sneak around, scam a free campsite …”
    As pissed as I was at him, I didn’t want to ride any farther. “Ah,
scamping
.”
    We stopped and looked around. A sign for an Assemblies of God church about twenty yards ahead was all we could see in either direction. There was a stand of thick pines, and we could hear water falling somewhere nearby.
    “Scamping it is,” I said as we pushed our bikes off the road and headed into the trees.
    A few minutes later we’d found our home for the night.
    “Nice spot,” I said, tossing my helmet to the ground in a small clearing a hundred yards from the road. It was. A narrow stream ran nearby where we could filter water to cook the mac and cheese we’d stolen from Mom’s stash. Best of all, it was in the only place guaranteed not to see any action on a Saturday night: the grounds of an isolated country church. It felt good—vaguely dangerous—to be getting away with something.
    “The lady would approve,” he said, adding, “And the price is right.”
    “Where’s the aspirin?” I asked as I pulled the tent and ground sheet off my rear rack.
    He shrugged, removing his shoes. “How should I know,Eagle?” he asked, peeling off a pair of socks that I could smell from ten feet away. “You packed.”
    I threw the tent onto the carpet of brown needles. “But you were supposed to pack the first-aid kit, dork,” I said. “Didn’t you get any aspirin?”
    “Just Band-Aids … toenail clippers … the essentials,” he said.
    “Toenail clippers? Since when are toenail clippers essential?”
    “Since I get blisters on my toes if my nails get too long,” he said as