Me and Ruby were used to riding in taxis with Mom, and sitting there now waiting on this one almost made me feel like we were right back in Gastonia, right back in our old lives, except that now we were with Wade instead of Mom, and we were at the beach instead of out in front of the grocery store or the doctor’s office, waiting for a taxi to take us back home.
“Are we moving here?” Ruby asked.
For a minute I thought Wade didn’t hear her, but when he sighed I realized that he was just tired and hot and didn’t feel like answering a question like that. “No,” he said, “we ain’t moving here. We’re just staying here for a little while.”
“Where are we going to live?” Ruby asked. Wade sighed again.
I leaned forward and looked past Wade at her. “Don’t ask so many questions,” I said. Ruby sat back against the bench where I couldn’t see her. I waited, but she didn’t say nothing else.
CHAPTER 11
The taxi dropped us off at a hotel right on the beach. After checking in, we had to walk by the pool to take the stairs up to our room. In the water were a boy and a girl about my age. The girl was floating on a raft that looked like a killer whale, and the boy had on a pair of goggles. They looked up at us. Ruby waved at them, but neither one of them waved back. A man and a woman who must’ve been their parents were lying on deck chairs. The woman was reading a book; the man looked like he was sleeping.
“I like your raft,” Ruby said, but the girl didn’t say nothing back.
Our room was nice, with two double beds and a little table with two chairs. A big television sat on the dresser across the room from the beds. Wade went around to the far side of the second bed and let the gym bag slide off his shoulder and drop to the floor. He got down on his knees and pushed it under the bed.
“What’s in that bag?” I asked.
He looked up at me, and then he pushed it farther under the bed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just some clothes.” He stood up and clapped his hands. “All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the beach.” The clock on the bedside table said 1 P.M. by the time we finished putting on sunscreen and left the room to go to the beach. We walked over to a little restaurant on the pier next to the hotel and ordered cheeseburgers, french fries, and Cokes, and then we took the steps from the pier down onto the sand.
While me and Ruby rolled out our towels, Wade took a package out of a bag and started opening it.
“What’s that?” Ruby asked.
“You’ll see,” he said, putting his mouth on a little, clear tube.
I knew what it was before he even started blowing it up. “It’s a raft,” I said. Wade blew a big breath into the tube and nodded his head at me. After Wade had given it a few more breaths, I could see the picture on the raft, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.
“I’m not playing with that,” I said. “It’s got a Confederate flag on it.”
“What do you have against the Confederate flag?” he asked.
“It means you hate black people,” I said.
Wade made a face. “That ain’t what it means,” he said. He gave it a few more puffs before closing the tube.
“What’s it mean, then?” I asked.
Wade put the cap on the tube and held the raft out in front of him like he was studying it. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “But I know it doesn’t mean that.”
Me and Ruby sat on top of the raft, and Wade rolled out his towel. We stared out at the ocean, eating our cheeseburgers and french fries. For the first time that day I noticed how tired Wade looked, and I thought about how he’d driven all through the night from Gastonia while me and Ruby had been asleep in the backseat. He must’ve felt my eyes on him, because he turned his head and looked at us.
“Y’all excited about being at the beach?”
“Yes!” Ruby said. She took a bite of her cheeseburger, and then she picked up her can of Coke and took a swallow. “This is the best day ever!”
“Good,” Wade said. “I’m glad y’all are having fun. I want this to be fun.” He took the last bite of his cheeseburger and folded up the wrapper while he chewed it. “All we’re going to do from now on is have fun.” He unlaced his shoes and kicked them off. “That’s the only rule from now on: have fun.”
CHAPTER 12
All day long, Wade had been saying he had a surprise for us, and after dinner that night a taxi dropped us off in the middle of a busy street full of shops and stores and restaurants. Across the street was a boardwalk full of people: families with little kids, women wearing bikini tops with shorts even though it was getting dark, and groups of teenage girls wearing makeup and walking around holding hands with their boyfriends.
“What’s the surprise?” Ruby asked.
“You’ll see,” Wade said. We followed the boardwalk along the beach until Wade stopped and pointed toward some bright lights over the buildings in the distance. “That’s it,” he said. “The Pavilion.”
I looked up and saw the lights of a Ferris wheel peeking just above the roof of a building called the Magic Attic. A bunch of kids not much older than me waited outside in line to get in. None of them had their parents with them. Ruby yanked Wade’s hand to make him walk faster. “Come on,” she said. They walked through an arcade toward the street on the other side of the boardwalk.
That night we rode just about every ride in the park, and Wade and Ruby rode just about every one of them together. I told myself that I enjoyed the tilt-a-whirl all alone just as much as I would’ve with Wade sitting beside me, and up at the top of the Ferris wheel I could see the boardwalk and all the hotels just as good as I would’ve been able to see them if I’d been sitting up there with Ruby instead of all by myself listening to nothing but the wind and the music from the park way down below.
The haunted house was about the only ride in the amusement park just for kids my age, and when we walked past Wade asked me if I wanted to go in.
“Maybe,” I said. He snapped off a couple tickets and handed them to me.
“Go ahead,” he said. He pointed to a bench. “Me and Ruby will be sitting right over there when you get out.”
“Are you not coming with me?” I asked.
“Ruby can’t go in there,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to leave her out here by herself. But you go ahead. We don’t mind. We might even ride something else.”
I turned away from him and walked right up to the haunted house and got in line. To go through the haunted house, you had to climb into a little car that was hooked to other cars, just like they were on the roller coaster.
Somebody laughed in line behind me, and I turned and saw two boys and two girls who were all fifteen or sixteen years old. The boys both had on polo shirts and shorts with their baseball hats turned backward. The taller boy had a huge cup of frozen lemonade with a straw sticking out of it. One of the girls was holding a big teddy bear that a boy must’ve won for her. It was brown and had on blue jean overalls. The boy with frozen lemonade started laughing when I looked at him. I turned back around.
“I don’t know what it says,” one of the boys whispered.
“Ask her,” one of the girls said. She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t even whisper.
“Hey,” one of the boys said. He tapped me on the shoulder. “What does your shirt say?” I turned around and showed him my shirt so he’d leave me alone.
“ ‘Can’t touch this’?” one of the girls said. All four of them started laughing. I turned back around so they couldn’t see me. “Oh my God,” she said. “Who’d want to touch that?”