The Great Good Summer by Liz Garton Scanlon Page B

a word in miles. You’re making me kind of nervous. Seriously. C’mon. What’s up?”
    I pull my knees up under my T-shirt and squeeze my arms around them, making myself warmer and warmer and tighter and tighter and littler and littler. I squeeze and squeeze, like I might make myself disappear. But no matter how little I get, I’m still here, and so is this truth:
    â€œHallelujah Dave is in jail,” I say.
    â€œWow,” says Paul. “Okay, wow. Yeah. Well, that’s a heck of a clue,” he says, kind of shocked. But from the looks of the little twitch in the left corner of his mouth, he still thinks this is kind of an adventure. Maybe that should make me mad, but honestly? I can’t help but thank God for that little twitch.

    A Greyhound bus does not, it turns out, go straight from Houston to Tallahassee. It stops bunches of times, in places that are all at least half as creepy as Houston. Sometimes you just want to get to the place you’re going.
    We mostly stay on the bus at the stops, though Paul gets off once because there’s a food stand right outside and he is starving. I keep thinking that the less I do—the less I eat, the fewer times I weave down the bus aisle to the bathroom—the quicker we’ll get to where we’re going. Plus, I lost my starving-ness somewhere between home and here.
    But it’s then, when Paul gets off the bus to buy a po’boy sandwich in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that Skinny Man decides to lean across the aisle and talk to me. I am telling you, if this had happened this morning, I would’ve screamed or fainted or, God forbid, thrown up again. But this morning was a long time ago. So I look straight at him and say, “Can I help you?”
    â€œI doubt it,” he says, “but I might be able to help you.” He stops and coughs and chokes on whatever’s in his lungs. He really doesn’t seem like the helping sort. “I heardja talking, and it seems like someone you know is in some trouble. And I just happen to know a thing or two about jail.”
    Mmm-hmm. I’ll bet he does. Oh, mercy me. Why am I not surprised?
    â€œYeah?” I say.
    â€œYou kids aren’t gonna get anywhere, nosing around a cop shop,” he says. “They’re gonna be more interested in getting the lowdown on you than giving you the lowdown on the guy you’re looking for. I can guaran-dang-tee you that.”
    It’s hard to look straight into his eyes because the bus is dark and he makes me nervous, but I can feel in my bones that he’s right. We are just a couple of kids with T-shirts and backpacks. Even when we’re trying to be all mature, we look like we should be in school, not in jail. We just plain do, and thank goodness for that, I guess, but it’s a fact that is not gonna be helpful at all in these circumstances.
    So by the time Paul gets back onto the bus, I’ve arranged to go with Ricky, which is Skinny Man’s name, to the Leon County Jail. It turns out he knows exactly where it is—again, not a big surprise—and that he’s got to head to that part of town when he hits Tallahassee anyway.
    â€œI owe a lot of folks some kindnesses,” is how he put it, “but most of ’em won’t have none of it, and I can’t blame ’em. Giving you guys a hand, it’s just something I can do.”
    Here’s the thing. I don’t want to trust him, I promise you that. A smoky, scary, skinny-looking guy who knows way too much about jail than anyone ought to? No, thank you. But honest to goodness, what choice do I have? So I arranged it. I arranged it for me, and I guess I went ahead and arranged it for Paul, too.
    â€œHe’ll be like our guide or our chaperone or something,” I say, and Paul looks at me like the crazy that my mama has might be catching. But he doesn’t say anything like that. He just reaches across the aisle to shake