Welcome to the Slipstream

by Natalka Burian

  Carapace and Laurel climbed down, with surprising agility, and started to dance around again. This time, though, they began to move along the trail as they danced. Marine and I waited until the celebratory parade had snaked a little further away. We stood side by side and looked up at Mom, perched on the ledge.

  “We’re just leaving her here?” I asked.

  “She will be all right, Van. It’s only one night.”

  “But what about bears?” I shouted.

  “There are no bears. Your mother can handle it.”

  “Even when she’s on drugs?” I stepped a little closer to Marine, trying to intimidate her, to get in her face, but she was much too tall.

  “She is not on drugs,” she said, slicing delicate air quotes into the space between us.

  “Well, she’s on something,” I muttered, feeling more helpless than ever.

  “Nothing that will cause her harm. Honestly, this is the safest place she could be right now. Maybe this will really help. Come now, let’s go. It’ll all be over tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t leave on my own. Marine had to steer me down the path. We followed the echoes of singing and drumming back to the campsite. I realized I still held Carapace’s crystal in my clenched fist. I thought about throwing it down into the sand, about running back to Vegas with Alex. I slipped the crystal into my back pocket and moved along with Marine.

  • • •

  The camp was overflowing with celebration when we returned. The smoke from a dozen fires mixed with all kinds of music in the air. Someone had decorated the site with garlands of paper flowers and woven branches. A long line of folding tables had been assembled in front of the bonfire. Laurel and most of our procession, including Carapace, were already sitting.

  “I’m going to talk to Laurel. Make sure you drink some water,” Marine said, her brow furrowed. “There isn’t a spot for me at the head of the table.” She wandered away, toward the rejoicing.

  “I guess I’ll try to find Alex so we can check on Ida.” I said this out loud to myself, like a real weirdo. Everything looked different in the dark. I could barely remember what color tent Ulrike had selected for me. Then I thought about how Alex and I would be sharing that tent. I didn’t know if it was because Marine had just mentioned it, but my throat was suddenly dry as torture. I turned back and found another small folding table draped in cloth and covered with drinks. There were jugs of wine and plastic pitchers filled with vibrantly colored liquids, but no cups. Unopened gallons of water were lined up at the table’s base. I took one, hauling it back to the edge of the campsite. I cracked it open and hefted it to my mouth, sloshing water down the front of my sweater.

  “Good, the water,” a voice said.

  I jumped and spilled more water onto the sand. Ulrike stepped into the light, a terrifying vision of Viking blondness.

  “Jesus, Ulrike, you scared me!” I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and screwed the cap back on.

  “You drink water!”

  “Okay, I hear you,” I said, wondering if everybody in the camp was high. “Um, have you seen my friend? Alex?”

  “Ah-lex,” she said and then waited out a long pause. “No.”

  “Do you remember seeing my tent?”

  “There.” She pointed to the left of the fire.

  “Thanks.” I walked away as fast as I could while carrying the enormous plastic jug of water.

  Nobody noticed me, but then, I didn’t ask any questions, and I tried to keep my gaze down.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sphere of blue light, about the size of a palm. I squinted into the darkness and saw someone doubled over a cell phone. It was a stoop I could have picked out of a lineup of hundreds. Part of me wanted to run over and tell Alex everything I’d just seen, about the dancing, about the vortex, about just leaving Mom in the middle of nowhere. But another part felt suddenly very shy, like I didn’t want to go over there at all. I shuffled where I stood, trying to decide which way to go. Alex looked up and straightened to his full height.

  “Van?” he shouted, just a little too loudly. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” I said as I walked over to him.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not really sure,” I said, and stepped a little closer. He squinted down at me.

  “I think you should sit down. You don’t look so good.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean.” He shook his head. “Just come sit down for a minute, okay? Have you eaten anything?”

  “No.”

  “Come on. You rest in the tent and I’ll get you something.”

  Alex bounded around the improvised avenues between tents and fires to a tent that looked like many of the others.

  “Did you hear from Ovid at all? Or Chantal?”

  Alex slowed his pace but didn’t look at me. “No,” he said. “I tried to call, but the reception out here is terrible. I was going to walk around a little to see if I’d have better luck higher up, but I wanted to wait until you got back.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That would be great.”

  We walked a little more, huddled together.

  “This is the spot. Here you go,” he said, zipping open the front door flap. “I’ll be right back.”

  I thought, again, about being alone, inside, with Alex. I flushed, hoping it would be invisible in the dark.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Do you want me to stay with you?”

  “No, no. I’m just going to sit down in here,” I said, waving at the tent.

  “I’ll try to find a signal somewhere out here.” He gave me a half-serious, stern look. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I nodded and slid inside. Two sleeping bags were rolled out on the ground side by side. Two jugs of water and my backpack were squashed up against the opposite wall. I thought I would lie down for just a minute, just until Alex came back. I turned onto my side and then nothing, only sleep.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I woke up, I was surprised to feel so warm. I remembered thinking, just before I fell asleep, that I should have climbed into the sleeping bag, that it was getting cold. I tried to turn onto my back but couldn’t quite flip over. I shook myself a little, trying to break fully into being awake. When I did, I realized Alex was the reason I couldn’t turn over.

  Because he was asleep right next to me. Because his arm was settled over my body. Because I was pulled close against all of that tallness—his stomach to my back and the fronts of his legs to the backs of mine.

  I didn’t know what to do. Should I pretend to be asleep again? Should I just sneak out? What I did know, though, was that it felt great. It felt great and warm and exciting. It felt the opposite of everything I’d just experienced out in the vortex. I let go of the tension in my back and neck and let myself sink back into Alex’s arms and body.

  As I considered the new, thrilling closeness, I wondered what it was going to mean—in the space of our friendship, in this bizarre Mom-retrieval mission, in the return to Vegas, but especially, I wondered what it was going to mean in the tent. Right then. Alex was the first real friend I’d ever made, apart from Mom and Ida. How was that going to change with so much of my body touching so much of his body?

  I wondered if there was any way I could stop myself from liking it. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe Alex hadn’t meant to pull me in like this—he was sleeping, after all. Maybe when he finally dozed off he started dreaming about his real girlfriend. What about the girlfriend Marcos was talking about? Maybe it would be best to just remove yourself from the whole situation, I told myself.

  I flipped over so that Alex and I were face to face. I don’t know what possessed me to do that. He was so pretty, even prettier up close, with those long eyelashes that fluttered on his cheeks. Oh shit! I thought. His eyelashes are fluttering! I quickly pulled back from under his arm and wriggled over onto the farthest edge of my sleeping bag and curled up, resting my head on my arms, and pretended to be asleep. />
  I tried not to squeeze my eyelids too tightly and kept my breathing even, and from my stomach. Ida told me that was how you could spot a fake sleeper—if your breathing was coming from your chest and not your stomach, you weren’t fooling anybody. I listened to Alex shifting and heard the swish of his clothes over the slippery top of the sleeping bag. I felt the heat of his body move away and stretched out my arms and legs as I pretended to wake up. I cracked an eye open and saw that he had turned away.

  I looked up at the roof of the tent. I imagined that ours was the only tent in the clearing, that the camp was empty. Would I know how to get out of there if it really had been abandoned? More importantly, would I know how to find Mom again? I didn’t think so. It struck me that now would have been the perfect time to extract Mom from the camp, since she was alone and everyone was asleep.

  I remembered the singing and drumming and Carapace’s breakfast-in-bed tray, but I didn’t remember anything about the walk to Mom’s energy vortex ledge. The turns, the way the rock wall looked, whether or not we walked up an incline—all of those details eluded me. I thought about heading out in some general direction I could recall while everyone was asleep, but decided against it.

  “Don’t make things worse than they already are,” I said to myself, out loud.

  “What?” Alex’s voice rumbled.

  I shook my head, wondering if my stay in the camp was making me lose my mind. I hoped Alex’s phone had worked last night. Suddenly I was anxious to ask about Ida. He must have gotten in touch with someone. Chantal at least.

  “Alex?” I whispered.

  Nothing. I moved closer, hovering over the space where his throat met his ear. More than anything, I wanted this to be my only problem: liking a boy, being in a tent with him, not knowing what to do about it. “Alex.” I said it a little louder, and then I touched his ear, like a real weirdo. I couldn’t help myself. His eyelids opened and I pulled away.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Sorry I woke you up.”

  “Did you sleep okay?”

  “Actually, I did,” I said, surprised by the honesty of the answer. “Do you know what time it is? How’s Ida? Did you ever find a signal?”

  Alex’s face fell a little as he shook his head. “I didn’t. And my phone died, so . . .” He trailed off and shrugged his shoulders. “Is anyone awake out there yet?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.” I sat up and pulled my knees to my chest.

  Alex plucked at a loose thread on his sleeping bag and kept looking down at the thread and up at me, and back down again. The pale morning light bled through the walls of the tent, giving the impression that we were inside of some kind of giant egg. I don’t know why I did it—it didn’t feel like me, it felt like not-Van—but I reached out and held both of Alex’s hands.

  “Alex,” I started, looking down at all of our gripping fingers, realizing then that he was holding my hands as tightly as I was holding his. “Thanks for helping me. I guess.” I looked up and found Alex’s hazel eyes staring at me. “I guess what I want to say is, thanks for being my friend. I don’t think I’ve ever really had a friend before.”

  When I looked up again, this time he was looking down. We were both quiet for a minute and listened to the first birds moving and chirping in the trees around the camp. Alex cleared his throat.

  “Van, how have you never had a friend?”

  “Jesus, I know, I’m such a weirdo! Why did I even tell you that?” I said, pulling my hands out of his grasp and putting them up to my face.

  Alex gently pulled at my wrists, opening my face back up to our conversation. This time, he let my hands go.

  “No,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, you are weird, but that’s what I like.”

  That’s what he likes? What is that supposed to mean? I thought.

  “I mean,” he continued, “what about your life made it so that you never had any friends? I just want to know more about you.”

  I shrugged and tried to get more comfortable on the sleeping bag, but only managed to contort myself more. “Um, well, my mom and I have always been travelling. Usually to places where there weren’t other kids or families. Sometimes to places where there weren’t many other people in general.”

  “Like, where? Was your mom doing the same kind of work?”

  “We lived in Iceland, and in Texas.” I looked away, at the wall of the tent. “Thanks, by the way, for setting up the tent.”

  “You’re welcome—please don’t change the subject. I really want to know.”

  “We lived all over South America, mostly.”

  “Is your mom from there?”

  “No, she’s Belarusian.”

  “What?” Alex said. “I was definitely not expecting that. Did she come here for college or something?”

  I paused. Mom had never been to college for anything. I thought about how much I should explain to Alex, and, flushing with embarrassment, decided that if we were friends, he should know everything.

  “Mom came over in the nineties. To marry my dad.”

  “Like a mail-order bride kind of thing?”

  “Exactly like a mail-order bride kind of thing.”

  “This is crazy!” Alex threw his arms up in the air, like he’d never heard anything more outrageous.

  “Yeah, it is crazy. Mom married my dad, the big Van Morrison fan.”

  “No shit, that’s why your name is Van!”

  “Very good,” I said dryly.

  “Don’t make fun of me—I’m just trying to keep up here.”

  “She married my dad, and was really young, like eighteen or nineteen.”

  “What’s your dad’s deal? Is he a musician, like you?”

  “What was my dad’s deal,” I corrected. “He’s dead. And I don’t know. He lived in Seattle. I know that because that’s where I was born. But he OD’ed when I was a baby.”

  “No shit,” Alex said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I didn’t know him.”

  “So what did your mom do?” Alex asked, his growing interest as vivid as face paint.

  “Well, at first, I’m not really sure. Things weren’t good. I only remember a little bit about it,” I said and shivered. “Mom doesn’t like to talk about it. And honestly, I don’t either, but . . .”

  Alex looked at me expectantly, like he wanted all of the dirt.

  “I’m pretty sure we lived on the street for most of that time. Or, I guess we were vagrants, or whatever.”

  Alex’s expectant look flickered into a horrified one, and I was really satisfied by the change for some reason. It was like, Ha! This is not some lighthearted anecdote. This is a real, terrible thing that happened to us. This is why I am the way I am.

  “Oh my God, Van,” he said. “I’m so incredibly sorry.”

  “It all turned out okay.”

  “So what happened?” Alex cautiously asked.

  “Mom got married again, to a guy named William. I’m not sure how she met him.” But I did know, or had an idea anyway. She wasn’t exactly working the corner, but she did what she had to do to keep us alive. It was the only way she could make any money—her English back then was still pretty bad. It wasn’t like my dad had left us anything or had any family who cared about what happened to us.

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight maybe.” We weren’t keeping very good track of the years at that point. “Anyway, she married William—Lowell was his last name, that’s why it’s ours, obviously. William had this business. He would analyze companies and figure out where they were losing money and tell them how to stop losing money. He mostly worked with South American companies, which is why we travelled there so much.”

  “What was he like?” Alex asked.

  “He was really nice. He loved my mom. But he died. Heart attack. He was a lot older. Anyway, he taught my mom everything he knew, and she picked it all up really fast and took over the business. That’s when she hired Ida, by the way.” />
  “Anyone can see that your mom is smart, Van.”

  “Yeah, she is. I wish I’d inherited some of her better qualities.” But not any of the ones she’s displaying right now, I thought.

  “What? You’re so smart!” Alex said the word “so” like dunking a basketball.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  “You’re frighteningly smart.” He looked down and started to fiddle with that thread on his sleeping bag again. “And you’re really cute, too.”

  “Cute?” I half shouted in horror. “Like a baby?”

  “No! No, no, not like that. Pretty, you’re really pretty. I’m sorry. Did I make you uncomfortable?”

  “You just compared me to a baby!” I said, and gave his arm a thwack. Although, I was so contorted, I almost fell over when I did it. I tried to dispel the awkwardness, but it clung to us like the smell from the campfires.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend? Sorry if that’s too personal or whatever, I just . . .” I looked down so I wouldn’t have to see Alex’s expression.

  “No, it’s not too personal, and no, I don’t.”

  I still couldn’t look at him. “It’s just that Marcos said something about it. At your birthday party.”

  “Yeah, I bet he did.” Alex sighed, and then he was the one looking down. “There was a minute there, with Joanna.”

  “With Joanna?” I felt a little sick.

  “Not anymore, though. We weren’t really dating or anything—and I think Joanna and I both know that we’re better off as friends. What about you and Marcos? Anything going on there?”

  “No.” I shook my head and shifted awkwardly. “What do you think’s happening out there?” I asked, nodding toward the tent’s door.

  “I’m not sure. But I did hear last night that they’re doing a big morning thing and then going back to get your mom.”