by Nina LaCour
Bev smiles her great smile. Her dimple, her crooked tooth.
“There has to be something good about it,” she says.
“Sure. That doesn’t make it a good place, though.”
Jasper begins listing the many reasons to dislike his hometown, and soon the girls walk over with trays of burgers and fries. Meg sets a basket of fries in front of me. I squeeze ketchup onto the white paper.
I put a fry into my mouth, look up to see Jasper eyeing me.
“Vegetarian?”
I nod.
“You like onions?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say.
“Tomatoes?”
“Yeah.”
He slides off the bench and returns a few minutes later with a grilled cheese on a hamburger bun. The sandwich has some kind of sauce and lettuce and tomatoes and onions. It isn’t bad.
“A girl I used to date was a vegetarian. At least she pretended to be, but then if something looked really good she’d eat it anyway. Like, she would make me take her to certain places because they served salads and then she would take all these little bites of my burger. Like small bites don’t count or something. I was like, Newsflash: a little bit of a cow is still a cow. She was a drag.”
“Sounds like it,” Meg says.
Jasper nods. Then, a minute later, he says, “Well, not a total drag. She’s a cool girl. It was just that one thing that kind of got under my skin, you know?”
We eat in the sun, telling Jasper about our plans.
“So where are you going?” he asks. “And then where? What’s it like there?” And the longer we talk the clearer it becomes that Jasper has never been anywhere except Los Angeles one time for a tattoo convention when he was a kid.
“What you got going on in San Francisco?” he asks us. “I mean, other than the band.”
“We just graduated,” I say. “All of us but Alexa.”
Alexa smiles. “I get to come along because I’m the drummer. And we’re moving my sister into the dorms in Portland.”
Jasper looks from Meg to Bev, confused, and then we all laugh because we forget sometimes, that people don’t understand how Meg and Alexa can be sisters and look so little alike.
“We’re both adopted,” Meg says, and Jasper rolls his eyes, and jokes, “I was just about to figure that out. I mean, I was this close.”
He takes a bite of his burger and chews and swallows and then says, “So you graduated. Awesome. Now what?”
“I’m going to Lewis and Clark,” Meg says.
“I’m going to RISD.”
“Whoa,” he says. “RISD. That’s major.”
Bev blushes, seems proud, and it’s the first time I realize that it is a pretty big deal. I wonder if, when the college counselor tried to impress upon her the importance of going straight to school, instead of talking to her about tulips, Bev started talking about art school. Or if it came later. If it was her parents who had the idea. Or if all along, this is what she wanted.
“I’m still in high school,” Alexa says. “One more year. And then I think I’ll probably stay in the city and go to college and get a couple of jobs. There are a lot of things I want to do. I’m going to have to start prioritizing.”
“She has this really cool list—Lex, show him—of jobs she wants to have,” Meg says.
Alexa takes out her notebook and hands it to Jasper, who flips through it in awe. But Alexa doesn’t notice his reaction, because she’s intent on Meg.
“You think it’s cool?” she asks.
“Of course,” Meg says. “It’s so cool.”
“But you always make fun of it.”
“Oh my God,” Meg says. “Don’t take me so seriously.”
Alexa beams. When Jasper hands her the notebook back, she holds it like it’s a thing of tremendous value. Which it is. It must be great knowing that if something doesn’t work out, you have hundreds of backup plans.
Now they’re all looking at me—all of them but Bev—because I’m the only one who hasn’t answered yet.
I think about telling him that I’m taking a gap year, or something simple and closer to the truth, like, I don’t know.
Instead I say, “Bev and I were supposed to go to Europe for a year, but instead she decided to go to college without telling me.”
“Oh,” Jasper says. “Hmm.”
I feel bad for making him feel awkward, but I’m not going to pretend that things are fine when they’re not. So I go on.
“Yeah,” I say. “She told me yesterday. We were supposed to leave next week. She hasn’t told me why yet, though.”
Bev is staring at the table, not saying a word.
“Why, Bev?” I ask.
“Really?” she says, looking up at me. “You want me to tell you this now?” I can’t remember ever hearing her voice sound this way: broken and angry.
“Actually,” I say, “I wanted you to tell me yesterday. And a few months ago would have been even better.”
“Jasper,” Meg says, all loud and dramatic like she’s onstage. “What do you do? Besides giving spectacular tattoos, of course.”
“I have a lot of money saved,” Jasper says. “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. I heard there’s some reality show where a guy travels around the country in an RV and gives random people tattoos. Doing something like that would be cool. To tell you the truth I’d do just about anything to get out of here,” he says. “I was thinking about college. For a little while. But no one in my family’s been, and I don’t know. I had my place waiting for me at the shop. But maybe someday,” he says.
Bev picks up her tray and heads to the trash, and soon Alexa is pronouncing it time for us to go, and I’m feeling a little better to be in the company of someone who seems to have his shit together only slightly more than I do, considering that yeah, he has a skill and a job, but he isn’t satisfied and doesn’t know how to change that.
“San Francisco,” he says to me. “At least if you have to change your plans, you’ll be doing it there.”
“Yeah,” I say. “True.” Because I know San Francisco’s a great place to live and that I’m lucky to have a house to return to and parents to pay the bills and a million shows to choose from on any night of the week and things to sketch everywhere, and it would be a jackass move to turn to someone who doesn’t seem to have any of that and say, But I want something else. Which is exactly how I feel.
We walk back to the tattoo parlor, to the bus, and say good-bye to Jasper. He says he’ll call when he talks to his boss about the bird tattoo.
“I think that something is going to come out of this,” Alexa says. “Something important.”
“Well, I hope so,” Jasper says. “I mean, what are the chances that you guys would end up in Fort Drag and decide to get a tattoo and come here and pick up one of the oldest look-books and find a tattoo that one of your moms made?”
“It’s a mystery,” Meg says.
“Hell yeah, it is. But don’t worry, I’m going to figure it out.”
Jasper steps back from the bus.
“Meg, take care of that tattoo. No Saran Wrap,” he says, and then, to me: “I’ll call you later, bro.”
Meg wants to drive. Bev climbs into the passenger seat. I sit in the row behind them, off to the side, and Alexa lies down in the back row.
Meg pulls the bus away slowly, and when I glance in the rearview mirror I can see Jasper outside the shop, taking his time walking up the stairs, only reaching the door as the road curves and we leave him behind.
“Maybe we should have invited him to come,” Meg says.
No one says anything.
But, yeah, maybe we should have.
We stop at the edge of town to get gas. I jump out and Alexa climbs out after me, takes snack orders for later and accepts our wrinkled bills, disappears into the mini-mart. Bev and Meg stay in the front seat, their windows rolled down, each of them wearing sunglasses that cover half their faces. We talk for a while about how great M
eg’s tattoo looks, and how much it hurts, and when the tank is full, I start on the windows.
“Sweet ride,” says a guy at the pump across from me as I wipe down Melinda’s windshield.
“Thanks,” I say back. He’s leaning against his own VW, a vintage black bug. “Not so bad yourself,” I say.
He nods. “Bought it off my neighbor. Fixed it up. Yours?”
“It’s my uncle’s,” I say. “We’re borrowing it for a trip.”
And then Alexa prances past him. She’s holding something behind her back.
“Everybody,” she says. “Listen. I have found something amazing.”
Meg and Bev stop talking and turn to her from inside the bus. I look. VW bug guy watches, too.
Slowly, with one of the widest grins I’ve ever seen, Alexa presents us with a CD.
“The Essential Heart!”
I’m pretty sure Meg is rolling her eyes from behind her sunglasses.
“Thanks, Walt,” she deadpans, but Alexa is unphased.
“It’s a greatest hits album! Two discs!”
She rounds to the other side of the bus and soon a power ballad emanates from the speakers. I turn to the VW guy and shrug.
“How’d you end up with all of them?” he asks, amused.
“They’re my friends,” I say. “And their band’s on tour.”
“Are you their manager or something?”
“Not really. Maybe. I don’t know.” Somehow this answer satisfies him enough to move on.
“Where you headed?”
“Arcata.”
“No shit, really? That’s where I live.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re playing somewhere called The Alibi.”
He nods in recognition and checks his phone for the time.
“You’ll get there with time to hang out first,” he says. “There’s the main square with stores and bars and places to eat. But actually,” he says, eyeing the girls, “I know a better place. There’s this café a few blocks off the square that has hot tubs in the back. Clothing optional,” he says.
I glance into the van, at Alexa with her eyes closed listening to the music and Meg smirking and Bev watching me, and at first it pisses me off that he’s picturing them all naked but really, who could blame him? Certainly not me.
“It’s on Fifth and J,” he says. I can tell that he’s waiting for me to write it down so I open the door for the maps and a pen and write down the directions.
“Thanks, man,” I say.
“No problem,” he says. “Have fun.”
“Meg, will you start the song over?” Alexa asks when I’m back in the bus with the door shut. “I want Colby to hear it.”
Meg presses the back button and there it is: epic chords giving way to lyrics about loneliness and love.
I give Alexa a smile and a nod, not sure that I’m all that convincing.
“What was that guy telling you?” Bev asks.
“Not much,” I say. “He’s from Arcata.”
“What did you write down?”
“He just told me about this place.”
“You guys, listen,” Alexa says. “Here’s the chorus; it’s so good.”
“What place?” Meg asks, shouting over the louder singing and drums of the chorus.
“A café,” I say. “With hot tubs.”
“I like hot tubs,” Meg yells. The song is now at its climax, the singer shouting “What about love?” The drums heavy, the guitars chaotic.
“We should go,” Bev says. “Sounds fun.”
The song fades out.
“You guys didn’t listen,” Alexa says, sounding hurt.
“Sorry, Lex, but I’m just not into them,” Meg says.
“They’re really cool. They’re these really strong women, and they’re sisters, and they’ve had tragic love lives and a career that’s lasted forever. But it’s fine. If you guys don’t appreciate them you don’t have to listen.”
She seems so disappointed that I say, “No, they’re fine, Lex. We’ll listen. Bev, turn this one up, it sounds good.”
But the damage is done, and Alexa has unbuckled her seat belt and is now reaching to the front to eject the CD.
“So we all have favorite girl bands now,” Meg says, ignoring the sudden absence of music. “Yours is Heart. Mine’s the Supremes, obviously. Bev’s is Sleater-Kinney. Colby?”
I start to answer but Bev says it first: “Colby’s favorite girl band is The Runaways.” And there’s something about that, the way she says it, that wrecks me. How hearing Bev say a simple fact about me reminds me of who we are to one another. And this—the distance, the anger—all feels so stupid. I want to find something to say that will bring us back, jolt us out of this, but then I catch her in the rearview mirror and the girl I see is a stranger. A stranger and a liar and a crusher of hopes. And my best friend.
“The Runaways,” Meg says. “Impressive.”
“Not really,” I say. “They were just cool. When we started listening to Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre and all of them, I started thinking about how The Runaways did it first. And Joan and Cherie were super hot, which helps.”
Alexa says, “See, this drives me crazy. Colby, I’m not blaming you for this, but it seems like guys only like female musicians that are beautiful. All men need to succeed in the music industry is talent, but women have to be hot. It’s infuriating.”
“I don’t know if that’s completely true,” I say.
“Believe me,” she says. “It’s true. Even Anne struggled with it because she wasn’t naturally skinny. She used to starve herself and then, when that didn’t work, they hardly even showed her in the videos. They just wanted to show Nancy all the time because she was prettier.”
It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s talking about, but then I see her staring down at her CD booklet and realize that she’s still on the subject of Heart.
“How do you know all of this?”
“Walt told me about it,” she says. “He knows all about them.”
Meg starts a new playlist, this one also beginning with a Supremes song, and I lean against one window and try to draw what I see through another.
But we pass it all so quickly: the telephone poles and wildflowers and hand-painted billboards for Jesus. The derelict farmhouses, the rusted-out trucks, the signs that tell us how close we’re getting to the next small town. Everything I see is fleeting.
So, instead, I draw the back of Bev’s neck for the seventh time today, and then I can’t look at her any longer.
I dig through my stuff and pull out the calendar. Today and the next six days are filled in, but after that everything is empty. I mark my birthday and my parents’ birthdays. I circle Christmas. Still, every blank square is filled with uncertainty. I find the day we’ll arrive back home. Unpack, I write. Laundry. But these things are so simple, really more like items on a to-do list. So, on the next day, I write, Get over this girl.
A Sleater-Kinney song comes on and Bev leans forward and turns up the volume. She nods her head with the beat in this way that’s kind of nerdy but still gorgeous. I write, Get over this girl on the day after, too. And then I keep writing it over and over, until it covers the summer months. Until my plans seem less open.
The bus has fallen quiet. Meg steers us through a turn in the road and, as soon as the curve ends, we are in the middle of a tiny coastal town, with only two short blocks of houses and stores lining each side of the road, most of them old and falling apart. A pink, rusty bike lies in a lot overgrown with dry grass. Next to the bike, four little kids wait at a table, two sitting, two standing, watching the road.
Meg breaks our silence: “Lemonade!”
She pulls the bus over and jumps out. The rest of us follow her into the sun.
“Colby. Bev. We are about to do one of the best things there is to do in life. We are about to buy lemonade from a lemonade stand from grimy little kids who probably didn’t wash their hands before squeezi
ng all the lemons and dumping in the sugar. But we aren’t going to mind because this is how it is supposed to be. And there is no fighting at a lemonade stand. And no sad looks or awkward silences, because all memories of lemonade stands are and forever must be pure and good and beautiful. Understood?”
We nod.
“All right then.”
We cross the grass and gather in front of the table and Meg points to the hand-painted lemonade sign.
“Lemonade sounds sooo good right now!” she says to the kids.
The girl and boy at the table, clearly the leaders, check us out, skepticism in their tan, round faces.
They must be ten years younger than we are. Which makes me, for the first time ever, feel sort of old.
“How much?” Meg asks.
At the same time, the boy says twenty-five cents and the girl says fifty. He blushes. She ignores him, locking eyes with Meg.
“We can swing fifty.”
The boy looks relieved, and when he smiles, I see where a new tooth is growing in, larger than the others. But the girl is strictly business.
“Four orders?” she asks.
We all say yes and nod, and she pours pink lemonade from a plastic pitcher into five Dixie cups. She moves carefully, arms shaky with the weight of the pitcher, careful not to spill.
“Two dollars,” she says, and then all four of the kids stand with their hands extended to take our change.
We dig through our pockets, try to divvy the change among them. Bev is short a quarter.
“My wallet’s in the bus.”
Apparently, Meg’s speech has made me benevolent, because before I realize what I’m doing I’m telling Bev, “I can cover you,” and handing my coins to the girl. She counts them, making sure I haven’t cheated her, and as I look down at her wild long hair and her dusty knees and her bike cast off to the side of her, I remember Bev and me when we were little kids, pedaling fast on our bikes through Golden Gate Park, down the trails and across the grass, past the tea garden and through herds of tourists who stepped to the side when they saw us coming.
And I wonder if Bev is thinking the same thing. She has her faraway look. She must be. It makes me want to step closer to her, so I do.
The kids hand us our Dixie cups and we finish the lemonade—really just pink water—in a single sip, crumple the cups, throw them away. I climb into the driver’s seat and Bev climbs in shotgun.
