Wish I May, Wish I Might

Chapter 2

Everyone's got one of those friends that couldn't be anywhere on time to save their life. You know the type. You've got one of those friends yourself. Unless you don't have friends. Or, you're like me, and you are that friend. On the other hand, my best friend and life partner in crime, Cash, was always on time. Like, to the absolute second. It was so amazing, I had to ask myself if at some point I had wished that he always got places on time. I don't think I did. I think Cash is just on the same wavelength as my mom. Although my mom's wavelength was more business, and Cash was military all the way.

Either way, Cash pulled into my house's driveway at 6:46, the exact same time as always. And as if he was somehow unexpected, he honked the horn. Like always. I stroked Finnick's ears and wondered who would kill me faster, my cat or my friend if I threw the cat at him.

I heard Tucker yelling something else, though, and smirked. He was probably yelling at Cash about the possibility of the northern Illinois sky raining blood. And Cash thought that Tucker wasn't just nuts, he needed to be locked up. I gave Finnick a kiss on the head and put him on the counter, getting my bag and muttering a wish to make the rain stop. I didn't need the rain anymore, and I had a sneaking suspicion of what would happen as a result of my little rain shower.

Cash looked like he was wishing for the dark clouds that were still above to strike him with a lightning bolt as I walked out and locked the door behind me, holding my smoothie cup in my teeth.

As always when I saved him from Tucker's rants, Cash looked relieved to see me. "Oh, I gotta go," he said urgently. "Carter's here."

"Carter saw the blood too!" Tucker yelled from his position behind the bushes that separated Tucker's weedy patch of grass from my dad's manicured lawn. It was a fact of life - Midwest middle-class guys' lives revolved around their yards when they reached age forty. Which furthered my personal theory about Tucker, that he wasn't from Illinois and was hiding from something in the piece of the shit town of Apple. I didn't know about being a draft dodger, but that was a possibility, I guess.

"It was just regular rain, Tucker," I said in a placating manner over the roaring of the idle car. I looked back at Cash, who was still sitting in the driver's seat. I crossed my arms. "Um, no. Pretty sure we took this car yesterday."

Cash had bought his '87 Camaro for $985 dollars three years earlier, and for all that time and even a year before that, it was the love of his life. I told him at the time that he was paying 985 too much for the piece of garbage, but he went and bought it anyway, and looked for absolutely any excuse to drive it. This is why he was currently still sitting in the driver's seat, even though it was Friday, and Friday was a Drive-Carter's-Not-POS-Camaro day.

"But it's raining!" he protested. The grin on his face suggested that this was something he just came up with on the fly. "We can't take your new car when it's raining!"

I pointed up at the clouds that were rolling away as the sun came up. "It's not raining anymore."

Cash's grin didn't falter as he tried to come up with some other excuse on why we should take his piece of crap to school. He knew he would win eventually; like he always did when he put up a good fight. "But my car is sexy!" he argued, our eternal joke continuing.

"I've seen watermelon sexier than this hunk of metal." I nudged the nearest tire with the tip of my brown leather combat boot. "My car is on a whole different planet of sexy. She's sexy from two inches away. This old boy is sexy from fifty-fifty."

"Fifty-fifty?"

I smiled. I loved being able to give new additions to the joke. "Sexy from fifty feet away at fifty miles an hour."