Three mental patients, two loaded guns, one stolen car and a whole lot of trouble...
Every Friday night Ruckus and Fred sneak out of Shady Grove Home for the Mentally Insane for a ride in their orderly's convertible. A trip to the used book store and Dairy Queen is Ruckus's one little routine among the chaos of pissing all over the lunch trays.There is nothing routine about Apple, another Shady Grove resident who wants to go joyriding with the boys. It quickly becomes obvious she has bigger plans than getting an ice cream cone - plans that could land them in jail or even worse.
When their lives are threatened by three angry ex-cons and a crooked cop, it's up to Ruckus to get his friends back to Shady Grove in one piece. First, they all need to face reality and confront their tragic pasts. Soon Ruckus realizes that if Apple doesn't drive him totally nuts, she just may help restore his sanity.
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Chapter Two
Ruckus sat up in bed and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Something wasn’t right. Something definitely wasn’t right. He listened, but the only sound he heard was Fred gently snoring in his sleep on the other side of the room. It was still too dark to see, so he closed his eyes and inhaled. A familiar scent snaked through his senses and coiled around his spine, gripping every nerve ending like a vice.
Girl.
It took him a moment to comprehend what his instincts were telling him. He inhaled again. There was definitely a female presence in his room. And fruit. Yes, maybe fruit salad.
This was a dream, he told himself. He was still sleeping. Ruckus closed his eyes then rubbed them. He opened them again but it was still too dark to see anything.
Crunch!
Ruckus jumped and hollered, knocking over the lamp beside his bed.
From the other side of the room, he heard Fred yell. Then the blinding light from Fred’s flashlight was in his eyes.
“Get that light out of my eyes!” Ruckus growled.
Fred shined the light against the open window and then at the chair beside the window—the chair with the slender, flame-haired girl wearing blue hospital pajamas and holding an apple. She bit down into the fruit and stared at them as if sitting in their room in the dark was the most natural thing in the world to do.
“What are you doing?” Fred’s crackling voice was laced with fear.
“I’m eating an apple,” she replied before taking another bite.
“Oh,” Fred breathed, sounding relieved, as if the universe suddenly made perfect sense.
Ruckus leaned over his bed and picked up the fallen lamp. He set it back on his nightstand and turned on the light.
“What’s your name?” Ruckus asked.
“Apple,” she answered through a mouthful of fruit.
“We know it’s an apple. What’s—your—name?”Fred enunciated each word as if he was talking to a first grader.
“My name is Apple.” She shrugged and took another bite.
“Oh,” Ruckus and Fred answered in unison.
That’s when Ruckus finally understood that expression, ‘You are what you eat.’
“I’m Ruckus.” Ruckus pointed to himself before nodding at his roommate. “This here’s Fred. Why are you in our room?”
“I’m bored,” she answered before burping into her tiny fist and throwing the apple core over her shoulder.
The core flew in a perfect arc and vanished right through the open window beside her chair. Like the apple was magic. Or maybe Apple was magic.
Ruckus realized he’d never seen her before. After the last few times he’d pissed on the lunch trays, they’d kept him away from the women at Shady Grove, but he should have seen her passing in the hall on the way to warm-ups or to the library.
“So do you want to do something?” Fred blurted.
“Like what?” she asked.
Fred chewed on his bottom lip for a moment before bouncing out of bed. He pulled several paper-clipped and banded books out from under his mattress and walked over to Apple, dumping the books in her lap. “We could read.”
She picked up a book and studied the picture of the pregnant woman and the man with a cowboy hat locked in a passionate embrace. She pulled a face and shook her head while pushing the books onto the floor. “No thanks. I’m not a big fan of romance.”
Fred’s shoulders deflated, making him look like a puppy who’d just been scolded for messing on the floor. He bent over and picked up his books then shuffled back to bed.
Ruckus took a good long look at Apple. At first she’d looked like a kid because of her small size. But as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see she had the slightest hint of wrinkles framing the edges of her large golden eyes and the corners of her drawn mouth. He figured she was on the downhill slide to thirty or maybe older.
She was just a little thin, maybe from eating and shitting apples. She had a pretty face, with the scattering of freckles on her cheeks and small nose, but something about her looked scraggly. Kind of like a nice shoe that had a few-too-many scuff marks.
Then again, she had to be a scuffed shoe if she’d landed herself in Shady Grove.
“Why’d they put you in here?” Ruckus asked.
“I’m a klepto.” As if to prove her point, she stuck out her tongue, revealing one of Fred’s paperclips.
Fred scratched the back of his neck and squinted. “Like those women who like too much sex?”
Ruckus stifled a laugh. “That’s a nympho, Fred.”
Apple momentarily averted her gaze while she ran slender fingers through her cropped hair. Finally, she fixed Fred with a comical stare. “I’m a nympho, too.”
They both gaped at her for a long moment.
Fred closed his slackened mouth then blurted. “You’re a klepto-nympho?”
She flashed a dazzling smile and nodded.
Something about the feral expression in Apple’s eyes as her gaze shifted from Fred’s crotch, then to his crotch, rubbed Ruckus the wrong way. Instinctively, he pulled the pillow from behind his back and placed the protective barrier over his lap.
He didn’t think being a klepto and a nympho was such a good combination, and he wondered the real reason she was in their room. Narrowing his gaze, he leveled her with a question that sounded more like an accusation. “They catch you stealing dicks?”
Fred gasped. “That wasn’t funny, Ruckus.”
“It’s a serious question.” He wagged a finger at Apple. “I don’t want her stealing my dick when I’m sleeping. I need it to piss.”
Fred’s eyes widened to saucers and he grabbed his crotch while scooting back against the headboard. “I need my wiener, too, Ruckus.” he cried. “I don’t want to pee sitting down.”
“I’m not going to steal your wieners,” she hissed. “I just thought you two might want to go somewhere.” She stared hard at Ruckus, a knowing expression in her gaze. “I heard you know how to hotwire Otis’s car.”
Fred jumped to his knees and raised his hand in the air like he was a grade-school brown nose vying for the teacher’s attention. “He doesn’t hotwire it. Mr. Otis leaves the keys in his gym bag.”
“Don’t tell her that,” Ruckus snapped before turning to Apple with a scowl. “Who told you about Mr. Otis’s car?”
“Yeah,” Fred squealed. “That’s a secret. Nobody knows.”
She rolled her eyes. “What are you talking about? The whole town, except Otis, knows you take his car joyriding.”
“They do?” Ruckus rasped.
“Duh,” she sneered.
Fred gave Ruckus a deer-in-the-headlights stare before he swallowed hard. “I wonder why nobody’s ratted us out.”
“Otis is the town asshole. That’s why.” Apple stood and faced the window before turning to them with a sly grin. “He leaves his keys in his gym bag, huh?” She snaked one thin leg through the window.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Ruckus jumped out of bed and threw the pillow to the floor. “That’s our car. You can’t steal it!”
“I’ll tell you what.” She cocked a brow, her cool gaze assessing him from head to toe. “I’m going for a ride in that car. If you want to come along, you can.”
“Where are you going?” Fred asked. “The bookstore and Dairy Queen are closed now.”
“So that’s all you guys do?” she laughed. “Go read books and eat ice cream?”
“Yeah.” Ruckus folded his arms across his chest. “What about it?”
“Ohhh,” she cooed. “You’re real rebels. Real rule breakers.”
“That’s right. I am a rule breaker. I piss on lunch trays.”
She jutted a hand on her hip. “Well how’d you like to piss on lampposts and mailboxes?”
Ruckus opened his mouth in a retort, then paused. Mailboxes? He wondered if she meant the kind in front of houses or the big blue cylinders with pull down slots, perfectly sized for small packages or streams of piss. “On mailboxes or in them?”
One corner of her mouth turned up in the slightest smile. “Take your pick.”
“I don’t know about this, Ruckus.” Fred slipped underneath his blankets and pulled them over his eyes. “This isn’t how we do things.”
Apple stuck out her wrist, making a big show of checking the time on her invisible watch. “The donut shop will be opening in a few hours.”
“Donuts?” Fred tossed back the covers. “I haven’t had donuts in a long time. Do they still have holes in them?”
She turned up her chin, nodding. “They’ve got plenty of holes.”
Ruckus and Fred exchanged long looks. Hopeful, nervous, frightened looks.
Finally, Ruckus spoke. “Maybe we should try something different.”
“Okay.” Fred slipped out of bed. “May I bring a book?”
“Grab a book, Fred.” Apple jumped out the window.
Ruckus rushed to the window and looked down. She’d jumped onto a nearby oak and was maneuvering down the length of the branch with the dexterity of a cat on the prowl.
He let out a low whistle. This Apple was the most unusual person he’d ever met – more like a forbidden fruit than a woman. He wondered if maybe he should have resisted the temptation to follow her.
Sure, he was a rule breaker. A rebel. But not too crazy. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
He groaned, then involuntarily shuddered when a chill snaked up the nape of his neck. He’d stirred up a lot of trouble at Shady Grove before, but somehow, he knew this girl would have him in a whole heap of new trouble by night’s end.
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