Take Me There by Carolee Dean

to make her laugh.
    “With a boy who looks like that, there’s no such thing as
just friends
,” said Katie. “But we can take a hint. Come on, Alice. Four’s a crowd.”
    When they had left, Jess turned to me. “Do you ever look at the people around you and wonder how you ended up with them?”
    I thought of Wade and how I’d met him during in-school suspension at Downey High School. “All the time.”
    “Come on,” she said, hopping over the brick fence and leading me into her backyard. She sat on a porch swing and I sat down next to her, facing the beach.
    This was a place I could get used to.
    “I love to watch the sun set over the water,” Jess said, looking out at the flame red horizon.
    “Yeah. It’s different every day.”
    She looked surprised.
    “I like to unwind on the weekend by driving up the coast,” I told her.
    She nodded, then reached out and touched my right hand, tracing the crude tattoo of the cross with her fingertips. The sensation of her skin against mine was like an electric shock.
    “Ellee. Is that your girlfriend?” she asked, reading the letters beneath the cross.
    “No.”
    “But it is a girl.”
    “A woman.”
    “Really?”
    “No. It’s not the way it sounds.”
    “You have her name tattooed on your hand. She must be important.”
    I wondered how much I should tell Jess about Ellen Carter. I knew if I hung around her much longer I was going to fall hopelessly in love, and that would be terrible because we would never end up together, not in a million years. Maybe if I told her the grisly details of my past, I could scare her away and avoid the heartache.
    “When I quit school my uncle Mitch got me a job with a friend of his, a guy named Jake Farmer, who owns a used car lotin East L.A. Last summer he got me and Wade to start chopping cars for him.”
    “Chopping cars?”
    “Stripping down stolen cars for parts. Taking out the CD players, radios, anything of value.”
    “Oh.” Jess raised an eyebrow. “Did your uncle know?”
    “No,” I said, though I’d never been sure exactly how much Mitch knew about Jake’s side business. He and I never talked about it, even after I got busted.
    “Jake said me and Wade would never get caught ’cause he had us working out of an abandoned warehouse. He said even if we got arrested, we’d never do time because we were juveniles.”
    “What does this have to do with Ellee?”
    “Ellen.”
    “Your tattoo says Ellee.”
    “Wade was afraid we’d get caught, and he got a little sloppy with the nail.”
    “The nail?”
    “That’s how you do ’em in jail. Either that or a piece of wire. You gotta poke the skin and dab in the ink that you make with lead shavings and toothpaste.”
    “I see,” she said, taking a deep breath. Good! It was working. I was obviously scaring her. Any minute she was bound to tell me to get lost.
    “Ellen was an innocent old lady who got in the way of the gangbangers who stole her car. So they ran her down. She’d left her cell phone in the glove box, so it was easy for the cops to track the GPS to the warehouse with me and Wade the next morning. That’s how I know Ajax and Spider. They’re in the gang.” I didn’t mention that Ajax was the one who’d killedEllen. I realized that if I’d ratted him out he’d be behind bars, and the streets would be safer for Jess.
    Of course, I’d also be dead.
    “I made a bargain with God. If he let Ellen Carter live, I’d clean up my act and go straight.”
    “What happened?”
    “God didn’t keep his end of the bargain.”
    “Wow.” Jess was quiet for a long time. Plotting her escape, I assumed. She pretended to watch the sun sinking into the sea, leaving streaks of red and gold. It was almost dark, and here she was sitting in front of her beach house with an ex-convict.
    I watched the people going by, laughing and talking. Not sad, desperate people, but folks with hope and a future. I wondered what it would feel like to be a person with a future.