Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City by Wendelin Van Draanen

feel like I’m watching them in slo-mo, even though we’re zooming by. Marissa’s dad looks awful. His clothes are a mess, and he seems pretty green around the gills. Like any minute he’s going to bend over and barf. And while Mrs. McKenze’sacting really uptight—a no-nonsense get-in-the-car-I-want
-out
-of-here kind of uptight—Marissa seems dazed, very pale and sort of stunned.
    I want to call out to her. I want to bail out
for
her. But I’m a prisoner in the back of this blazing bullet and before you know it we’re half a block past them and Candi’s crying, “There it is!” and cutting across traffic and into a big, open, mostly empty parking lot.
    So wait, I say to myself, the Marriage Bureau and the jail are on the same block? And at that moment I make a weird connection in my head.
    A connection between Marissa and me and Heather.
    And I guess it kind of knocks me upside the head, because out of my mouth pops, “Man, parents can really mess you up.”
    “Shut up!” Heather practically spits, twisting around to face me. “Stay out of it!”
    “Heather, what is wrong with you?” Candi says as she nose-dives to a halt in the wide open. “She was
agreeing
with you!”
    “I don’t need her agreeing with me! And we shouldn’t even be talking about him in front of her! I hate her, you get that? And you hate her, too, remember?”
    So I guess they’d been talking about Warren, but right then all I could think about was Marissa maybe spotting
us
. Like she didn’t have enough on her plate already? I sure didn’t want her worrying about me being so desperate that I’d teamed up with Candi and Heather!
    I mean, talk about hell freezing over.
    And since I didn’t know which direction the McKenzeswould be driving or how long it would take them to leave the area, I kind of dragged and fumbled and, you know,
delayed
getting out of the backseat.
    “Just
leave
it,” Heather says as I’m pretending my skateboard’s stuck, and when I pull it out anyway, she mutters, “You are such a dork.”
    “Look,” I tell her. “You want to get rid of me as soon as possible after we find them, right?”
    “You got that right!”
    “So see? I’m just being optimistic.”
    “Girls, come on!” Candi says, clicking along in her high heels.
    “Stop calling us girls!” Heather snaps.
    Candi tosses a look over her shoulder. “You’d rather I called you boys?”
    I laugh out loud because coming from Candi it seemed really funny. And for the first time ever Candi grins at me.
    Heather catches up to her mother and cries, “That was not funny! None of this is funny!”
    I felt like I’d moved from being a prisoner to being someone tossed in the middle of a battleground. Why couldn’t we just get the job done and
be
done? Why all this sniping and tension and fighting?
    With Heather there were always battles, but after all this time I still had no idea what had actually started our war. Heather had just hated me from day one.
    Something about my shoes.
    And for the past year and a half we’d moved from battle to battle to battle, but … why?
    We’re at the Marriage Bureau now, and Candi is justreaching for the door when her phone goes off. We stop and look at Heather, who’s still holding it, and Heather gives herself away by glancing at me before she steps aside to answer it. “Hello?”
    Candi abandons the door and follows Heather, so I follow, too, and when Heather says, “Yup, it’s me,” I call out, “No, it’s not!”
    Heather hunches over like she’s trying to protect the phone from my voice and says, “No … no … yes.” Then she lets out a little curse and hands me the phone.
    “Hey, it’s me,” I say into it.
    “I’m too tired to play this game, but in case you’re another imposter, here we go again: ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”
    “No.”
    “ ‘Don’t Cry Daddy.’ ”
    “No.”
    “ ‘Peace in the Valley.’ ”
    “I wish … but no.”
    “ ‘Amazing