“Sly!” I called out as I ran over and wrapped my arms around him.
“Hey, Jimi.” He laughed and squeezed me back.
“What are you doing here?” Rex asked as he walked up. He smiled as he said it, and he held out his hand for Sly to shake, but there was an edge to his voice, as well. He wasn’t just asking as a pleasantry.
I took a step back away from Sly and screwed up my face at him. “Yeah, were you following us?”
He smiled awkwardly. “Guess I need to work on my tailing skills. Yeah, I was following you.”
“What’s that about?” Rex asked. All that was left of his previous smile was a slight tug at the side of his mouth. Then that went away, too.
“I was sent to pick you up,” he said, turning serious. “Jimi, actually.”
“Who sent you?” I asked. “And why?” It’s different when you know the person picking you up and they don’t put a hood over your head, but I’d kind of had my fill of unanticipated van rides.
“I’m not supposed to say,” he replied quietly.
I looked at Rex and rolled my eyes. It was a phrase I’d heard too many times from Rex when he couldn’t tell me the details of some involvement with Chimerica. I understood why he couldn’t, but I still didn’t like it, and I was glad that in recent months it hadn’t come up. But here it was again.
“‘Not supposed to’ isn’t the same as can’t,” Rex said.
Sly snorted. “Come on, man. You know how it is.”
“Yes, I do,” Rex said, his voice hard. He was still involved in Chimerica, although not like Sly was, but I don’t think Sly would have told him even if I hadn’t been there.
I poked Sly in the midsection, playfully, hoping a friendlier tactic might work. “Come on, what’s it about?”
His face softened. “It’s important. I can tell you that much. So will you come?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have my passport with me, and last time you swooped in like this I ended up whisked out of the country and held against my will.” Last time he had swooped in I was also being pursued by bad guys, but I didn’t mention that.
“It’s not that far,” he said. “No one’s going to hold you anywhere, and we’ll have you home for dinner. I promise.”
I glanced at Rex and he shrugged. I could see in his eyes his protectiveness toward me conflicting with his commitment to supporting Chimerica.
“It really is important,” Sly said again.
“And I’m just supposed to take your word for that?”
He looked hurt. “You think I’d lie to you?”
“People don’t always agree on what’s important.”
“Well,” he said, sounding only slightly mollified. “I guarantee you’ll agree that it’s important.”
I growled in frustration. The truth was, I did trust Sly. “So, you want me to trust you, but you don’t trust me, or at least not enough to tell me what was so important.”
“Jimi, you know it’s not like that.” Now he looked hurt again, which was starting to bug me, too.
I growled again and threw up my hands. “Fine. Whatever,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Sly turned to Rex. “She’ll be fine.”
Rex snorted. “Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”
Sly started to say something, but Rex simply nodded, slowly but insistently.
“Okay,” Sly said. “Sure, why not.”
Rex and I turned toward the front passenger-side door, and Sly cleared his throat. I stopped and looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “What?”
“You’re supposed to get in the back.”
The windows in the back were covered with an opaque film. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m trusting you; you can trust me.” I looked in the window and saw that it was a bench seat. “Besides, there’s room up front for all of us.”
Sly threw up his hands. “Okay, whatever.”
There actually wasn’t quite enough room in the front for all three of us, not if one of us was Rex. But by the time that was obvious, we were already packed in—with me in the middle—and Sly was driving us away.
Rex held onto the strap over the window, like he was trying to pull himself tight against the side of the van, so as to not smoosh me.
“Cozy, ain’t it?” he said, looking down at me.
“Plenty of room in the back,” Sly muttered.
“No, we’re fine,” I said, squeezing Rex’s knee.
Things were vaguely awkward at first. I don’t think Rex and Sly were used to being on the opposite sides of any kind of issue, but Rex seemed to want to make it clear that as dedicated as he was to Chimerica, if sides were to be chosen, he’d be choosing mine.
Before long, though, that point had been made, and the fact that we weren’t really on opposite sides of anything became clear. Still, it was strange, and we didn’t talk a whole lot, because all the things we wanted to talk about, we couldn’t. We wanted to ask Sly questions about where we were going and why, and he couldn’t answer those questions. And Rex and I wanted to talk about what Ogden had said, but we both knew we couldn’t discuss that in front of Sly until we had discussed it more just between the two of us, and until we had a better understanding of the situation.
We were headed east on the Atlantic City Smartway, toward the coast.
“Man,” I said. “I haven’t been to the shore in years.”
According to my Mom, when she was a kid, the Jersey Shore was a hugely popular resort. When I was a kid, they were still trying to keep up with the erosion and the sea-level rise, dredging sand from the ocean floor to build up the beaches and the dunes and building sea walls to keep the towns from being inundated. Now, the fight had been abandoned in a lot of places, with some towns partially or fully submerged and others having become stilt towns, with houses up on pilings that were completely surrounded by water half the time. The houses that weren’t up on pilings were mostly washed away.
“I remember coming here with your family a couple of times,” Rex said, looking off into space as if he were picturing it. “What town was it?”
“Wildwood,” I said. “Yeah, that was fun.” I smiled at the memory, but I also remembered being disappointed because most of the rides on the boardwalk had been washed out the previous winter. They looked fine from a distance, but they were closed and the lights were off. One night we were walking on the boardwalk and my dad was trying to make me feel better by describing what they used to look like, with all the colored lights, and the rides swinging and spinning and zipping along tracks, and hundreds of families laughing and having fun. I could almost picture it from his description, but all I could see were the skeletal hulking shapes, black against the dark blue night sky, looking strange and sad and out of place. It did not make me feel better.
He told me they’d be up and running by the following summer, and we’d come back, but that winter they got hit even harder, and in the spring, they tore them all down. We missed the Golden Age of Wildwood, New Jersey, by one year.
Sly laughed. “I always forget that you two go way back. It’s weird.”