by Pete Hautman
“He said he’d be right back,” I say.
“We asked him to leave,” Allie says. Randy looks at her. “I mean, Randy asked him to leave.”
“Oh! Why?”
“He was acting a little weird,” she says.
“Weird how?”
“Well, he was drunk, and getting kind of aggressive.”
Randy emits a little snort. I think it’s a laugh.
“Unpermitted touching,” he says. “That’s the definition of assault. My dad’s a lawyer.”
I am confused. “He touched you?” I ask Randy.
Randy gives his head a tiny shake and looks at Allie, who seems vastly uncomfortable.
“He came in my tent.”
“What did he do?” I’m clenching my fists, and my face feels hot.
“Nothing. I mean, Randy grabbed him and pulled him off me before anything happened.”
I’m flashing back to the mushroom caves, and for a split second Gaia and Allie become one person.
“I never liked him,” Randy says.
I see Ben Gingrass’s face, lit by candlelight. I see Bran’s wolfish smile. Both times I was useless. My fists are clenched so hard, I can feel it all the way up my arms.
“When he gets back,” I say, “I’m going to—”
“He won’t be back,” Randy says.
Nobody speaks for a couple of seconds. Then Allie says, “You didn’t give him your keys, did you?”
• • •
I run through the woods, driven by fear and fury, then out into the open and across the field to the causeway.
I can see the parking lot. The empty parking lot.
I keep running until I skid to a stop where my car was parked. Gasping for breath, I look around. Maybe this is the wrong parking lot.
It’s not.
Maybe Bran just moved the car, as a joke. Maybe he’ll bring it back, I think.
I recall the last time I saw his face, grinning and saying, Thanks, dude.
He won’t bring it back. I stand there, paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Call the police? I have no phone, and even if I did, what then? What could I tell them? That a guy named Bran stole my car? Except it’s not technically my car? That I don’t even know the license plate number? That I’m seventeen years old? From Minnesota? Staying in an illegal camp on an island with a couple of art school dropouts?
I don’t think so.
I force myself to breathe normally and take stock. I still have money in my wallet. I have the iPod. I have the clothes I’m wearing.
I have a place to stay the night.
• • •
The fire has burned down to embers by the time I find my way back to the camp. I don’t see Allie or Randy, but the faint glow of a candle is coming through the wall of the bigger tent.
“Hello?” I say.
I hear some scuffling. The flap opens, and Allie sticks her head out. Her hair is even wilder than usual; I can barely see her face.
“You’re back,” she says.
“Where would I go? Bran stole my car.”
She nods, unsurprised, then ducks back inside. More scuffling about, and soft voices. Allie crawls out of the tent holding a small flashlight. She is barefoot, wearing gym shorts and a sleeveless tee.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Not really. Do you think there’s any chance he’ll bring it back?”
“I doubt it. He’ll probably just drive it to wherever he’s going and leave it there. Kansas City, maybe. That’s where he’s from. You’ll probably get it back eventually.”
I don’t say anything. Kansas City is three hundred miles away, on the other side of Missouri. Even if I went there, what could I do? Technically, I stole the car too.
“You shouldn’t have given him the keys,” she says.
“You think?”
“Sorry,” she says quickly. “I guess that was kind of obvious.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I should have warned you about him.”
I shrug.
“I cleared out my tent for you. I left a candle and matches in there. Maybe we can figure something out in the morning.”
Even though the answer is clear, I have to ask. “Where are you sleeping?”
With her flashlight she gestures toward the bigger tent. I nod, push my sleeping bag through the flap of the small tent, and crawl in after it.
X-Men
When I think back over last summer, I think of breathing. Long, slow inhalations. Breathe in, Gaia fills my world. Those were the times we grew close, almost as if we became one creature. Exhale, and those were the bad times when she would withdraw, or I would say something stupid and she’d get mad. Then the in-between times, groping in the dark, trying to find each other. How many cycles did we go through? Why did it keep happening?
The day after I had the run-in with Geoff Kinney at the Squeeze, I called Garf. I had a whole speech ready to leave on his voice mail, but he picked up on the third ring.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. So I launched into my prepared remarks.
“Listen, I’m sorry I acted like a jerk. I was having a bad day.”
That was pretty much my whole speech.
He waited, I guess to make sure that was all, then said, “Okay.”
“So, we cool?”
“You kind of freaked out Geoff, you know.”
“Yeah, well, he wrecked my TIE fighter.”
“Yeah, and you wrecked my mint copy of X-Men number twenty-five. The one where Wolverine loses his Adamantium!”
It was true. I had spilled Coke on it.
“That was an accident.”
“Yeah, and I didn’t give you grief about it.”
“You want me to buy you a new one?”
“It was worth, like, forty bucks.”
I winced. “Seriously?”
“It used to be. Before you spilled Coke on it. Anyway, you should cut Geoff some slack.”
“Okay. But I still don’t like him.”
“You don’t like anybody.”
“That’s what Gaia says, but it’s not true. I like her. And you’re not so bad.”
“Thanks a lot. How about the other seven and a half billion people on the planet?”
“I haven’t met them all.”
“Back to Black”
Amy Winehouse
4:00
That night in the little tent was the longest night ever. Tossing, turning, fantasizing about catching Bran, punching him in the face, getting my car back. . . . The sleeping bag too hot. I unzip it and doze off and wake up shivering. And the rain. Thunder at first, then lightning bright enough to light up the walls of the tent. A patter of fat raindrops followed by a deluge. Water leaking in through the flap, through the seams. Water everywhere.
I must have slept a little. I open my eyes, and one wall of the tent is lit up by the sun. I never undressed last night except for taking off my shoes and socks. The backs of my jeans and shirt are soaked. I wriggle out of my sodden sleeping bag and crawl outside. It’s cold. The sky is bright blue and cloudless. The wet grass is sagging from the rain. If it was any colder, the grass would be frosted.
Allie and Randy are trying to get the fire started. Allie is tearing pages out of a paperback book, one at a time, crumpling them. Randy adds the pages to a small pyramid of smoldering sticks.
Allie looks up at me and smiles. A giant asteroid could be heading for Earth; she’d look up at it and smile.
“Did your tent leak?” she asks.
I nod.
“Ours too,” she says. With a smile.
Randy ducks his head down sideways and blows on the paper and twigs; a small flame appears.
“More pages,” he says.
Allie looks at the book in her hands. “But we’re getting to the part I haven’t read yet!”
“Tear off the cover,” he says. She does so; he feeds it to th
e growing flames.
“I never thought of myself as a book burner,” she says.
I stand barefoot on the cold wet grass and watch them. Randy keeps feeding the fire little sticks that hiss as they touch the flame, then darken, smoke, and catch. He adds a chunk of driftwood and watches hopefully as the small fire dries the surface. I feel as if I should help, so I go over to the cardboard box where Allie stored some of the groceries. There is one bag of Funyuns left. I toss it to Randy.
“Funyuns for breakfast?” he says.
“For the fire. They burn great.”
He frowns at the bag, shrugs, and stuffs it under the driftwood. The bag bursts into flames. Randy quickly piles on more sticks and branches, and soon we have a real fire. I move in close, sucking up the heat.
“Cold wave coming,” Randy says. “Time to head south.”
We warm our hands at the fire. Eventually it burns down to a bed of glowing embers, and Randy puts the bedspring grill over it. Allie digs in the cooler and comes up with a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts. She lays all twelve of them on the grill, lining them up neatly, like cards in a game of solitaire. We all stare at the Pop-Tarts as they cook, hypnotized by the colored sprinkles on white frosting. As soon as the edges turn dark brown, Allie lifts them off the grill and piles them on a red plastic plate.
I’m not that hungry, but I crave warmth. I eat four of them. Allie eats three. Randy eats the rest. Nobody is talking. I crawl back inside the tent for my shoes and socks. They didn’t get wet. It feels glorious to pull dry socks over my cold damp feet. I pull out the wet sleeping bag and drape it over the tent to dry.
“What are you going to do?” Allie asks me.
Last night she was trying to talk me into going to Louisiana with them, but this morning I hear no invitation in her voice, and her smile means nothing.
“I’m going back to the parking lot to see if Bran returned my car.”
Randy snorts out a laugh. “He’s probably back in Kansas City by now.”
“I’m going to check anyways,” I say.
• • •
By the time the parking lot is in sight, my feet are soaked from walking through the wet grasses. There is no Mustang. No anything. I head back to the camp. When I get there, Allie and Randy are rolling up the bigger tent.
“You’re going today?” I ask, although it’s obvious.
Allie smiles. I’m starting to find her smile really irritating.
“No car?” she guesses.
I shake my head and watch them struggling with the wet nylon.
“How are you going to get there?” I ask.
Allie smiles, and this time it is definitely forced. “We were hoping you could, you know, drive us down, but now . . .”
“We’ll hitch,” Randy says. He pulls the straps tight on the tightly rolled tent.
“You think I could get a job at the festival?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure by now that their plans included me only as long as I had a car.
“Maybe,” Allie says slowly.
Randy says, “We’re hitching. Nobody’s going to stop for all three of us.”
Okay, that seems pretty clear.
“There’s no guarantee of a job once you get there,” Allie says, barely holding on to her smile.
“Last night you said there were lots of jobs.”
Finally her smile goes away completely. I feel a sick sense of triumph.
“Maybe you could be the guy with his head and hands in the stocks,” Randy says with an unpleasant laugh. “People could throw tomatoes at you. You’d be perfect.”
“If you have money, you could take a bus,” Allie says.
“You have money?” Randy suddenly looks very interested in me.
“No,” I say, but I say it too quickly. They can tell I’m lying. “Not much,” I say.
“How much?” Randy asks. I have nothing but my wet clothes and a soggy wallet, and my iPod.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and start walking.
“Don’t you want your sleeping bag?” Allie calls after me.
I don’t want to haul around a soaking wet sleeping bag. I keep going. I’m at the causeway when I hear a shout. I look back. Allie is running across the field toward me.
“Stiggy, wait!” She is carrying something dark under her arm. Does she want to come with me? Did Randy do something? All these thoughts flick through my brain in seconds, even though I’m not sure I want any of them to be true.
Allie stops and thrusts the thing she is carrying at me. It’s a sweatshirt. A zippered, dark blue hoodie.
“Take this,” she says, breathing heavily. “It was Bran’s.”
“I don’t want anything of his.”
“It’s cold.” Allie is trying to smile but is not quite getting there. “You’ll freeze.”
It is cold. I take the hoodie. There is a white arrowhead shape on the chest with the initials KC in red. On the back is the word “CHIEFS.”
“Bran’s a football fan?”
“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I really thought it would be cool if we could all go to the RenFest together, but—”
“But Randy doesn’t want me around.”
“It would be . . . awkward.”
I put on the hoodie. It’s dry, and it fits.
“Are you going to be okay? I mean, are you going back to Minnesota?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“I wasn’t going with you anyway.”
“Oh.” She takes a step back and half smiles. “Okay.”
I turn my back to her and walk off across the causeway with no idea where I’m going. Just like I thought I wanted.
On the Beach
All the way through the rest of July and most of August I saw Gaia every day. We did things. Even if sometimes—like that day when we walked to East River Park—they didn’t turn out so good. Even when I acted like a jerk, or when she was mopey and withdrawn, we still needed to be together. I felt empty when she wasn’t around.
During those weeks I always had a Trojan with me. I have it now as I stand in the empty parking lot and stare at the space where my car used to be, and wonder what to do next. Where to go.
With Gaia I was always hoping we’d end up someplace private, someplace we could melt into each other and, well, have sex again. But it didn’t happen. Only that once. I asked her about it a couple of times—okay, a lot of times—but she always slid the conversation around to something else. It was frustrating. She was happy to kiss, to press her body to mine, but when I tried for more, she would push my hands away.
“Not now,” she would say. I bet she said it a hundred times.
“Why?” I’d ask her. “When?”
“I want to,” she would say. Then she’d kiss me and we’d hold each other, and then she’d push me away. “Just not right now.” She would grab my hand, and we’d keep walking or doing whatever it was we’d been doing.
One hot August day at the swimming beach on the Saint Croix—boats on the river, families all around us, kids splashing in the shallows—I asked her again.
“So how come we did it that one time?”
She didn’t answer right away.
A mom and dad with two boys—one a toddler, the other maybe five years old—were sitting near us on a big beach blanket. The mom was spreading sunscreen onto the older boy’s back. A couple of stoners rubber-legged their way past us and waded into the water. One of them, a pot-bellied guy with long blond hair, stopped knee deep and said, “Whoa!” The smile on his face was flabby and loose; the whites of his wide-open eyes glowed red. “My toes are going, like, whoa!” His friend joined him, and they stood there wriggling their toes in the river sand and going, “Whoa.”
“Because I wanted it to be my decision,” Gaia said.
“Huh?” I’d been watching the stoners, and it took me a second to remember the question I’d asked her.
“It really scared me, what almost happened,” she said.
“What do you mean? You mean because you could’ve gotten pregnant?”
“No!” She gave me that incredulous Are you even listening? look. “I mean, what almost happened in the caves!”
“You mean with Ben?”
“Yes! What if he’d done it? What if the first time I had sex, it was rape?” She dragged her forefinger through the sand next to the blanket, making a spiral. “Would that make sex bad for the rest of my life?”
“Uh . . . was it?”
“No!” She looked at me and smiled. “I’m glad we did it. You were sweet.”
“I am not sweet.”
“You are when you want to be.” She looked over at the family with the kids. The father was helping the older boy build a lumpy sandcastle. “You could be a good dad.”
“I don’t want to be any kind of dad,” I say.
“Me neither. I mean, be a mom. At least I don’t think so.”
The stoners moved off, wading along the shore, still going, “Whoa.”
“So why don’t we do it anymore? I got condoms.”
“So you’ve mentioned. About a hundred times.”
I thought about my wallet, and how if you looked at the back of it, you could see a faint circle pressed into the leather. The shape of a rolled-up Trojan, still in its wrapping.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I said.
Her face went hard. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s okay.”
“Are you sure that’s what you mean?” She had that angry edge in her voice, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“What did I say?”
Gaia compressed her lips and looked out across the water and shook her head.
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
She took a breath and said, “Okay. It sounded like you were promising not to force me.”
“I was? I didn’t . . . What?”
“You said I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. That should go without saying.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said.
“I know that. It’s the kind of thing guys say all the time, and they don’t think they mean it. Like it’s their decision to make.”
