“Is that right?” the guy says. He chews, like he has an invisible toothpick in his mouth. “What’s in Cincinnati?”
The sky darkens, and I almost hope it rains. I’m sweltering from the walking, but also because my body is running random symptoms by me, waiting for one to stick. I was nauseous a little bit ago, then woozy. Now it’s hot flashes again and I could use a cool shower.
It would make me look even more vulnerable, counteracting Arden standing there looking like she missed the entrance to the country club. It would distract me from the blood pounding in my ears. Even from the voice in my head that laughs because I’m a fraud, I’m a big fucking fraud, and this Bobby is probably gonna bounce any time now.
“A job. I mean, I’m hoping, anyway. Aunt Lynne said if I could get my ass out there, she could get me on at the Waffle n’ Steak.”
The clouds shift, light spilling on us again. The guy looks Arden over, then straightens up. “What’s your story?”
I panic. The car dealership turning us away, that rattled me and acting like I’m some white trash banger is getting to me, and I know a couple things in the world. Truck drivers with dogs named Avignon, maybe they don’t give a shit when they look at Arden and see a boy wearing a lip gloss, but a Bobby does. A Bobby will beat the shit out of her just for fun; me, too, for that matter, if he knew I was queer.
So before Arden says fucking anything, I jump in.
“He can’t hear you.” I wave my hands around like I’m shaping words out of my flesh. I’m a dick and I know it, but I also know as far as a Bobby’s concerned, Deaf and slow are the same thing. Arden being slow explains the way she’s dressed; that’s safer than queer. “He’s Deaf. May as well just talk to me.”
Arden’s eyes narrow, and there’s an ugly storm there. She doesn’t have to say anything; I know I’m doing wrong. Then, all of a sudden, she puts on an ugly smile and raises her hand. Her thumb trails along her jaw; her palms scrape and rasp. When she curls her fingers, it’s lightning fast. They dart to the same place in the air, small, then big.
I think she’s signing for real, and I’m gonna have to ask her. Later. Turning away from her, I tell the guy, “He says you have a nice car.”
The Bobby purses his lips, taking a step back. “You bucking for a ride or something?”
“No, no,” I swear. I know I have him off balance—he can’t quite get a read on us and it’s making him nervous. Coming a little closer, I lower my voice. “Normally, I wouldn’t ask . . . but do you know somebody who could rent a car for us?”
Looking me over slowly, the Bobby trails his fingers against his own car. Now he sees the money in it. He sees how Arden looks, and how desperate I am. Right now, he’s trying to calculate how much work he’s going to have to do versus how much money he’s going to make. His gaze flicks toward Arden, but he asks me, “What if I could get you something clear?”
I try for innocent. “For real? That would be fucking choice. I don’t have much money, though.”
Right now, two things can happen. The Bobby can name a figure and make a car appear. Or he can walk away and hope something easier comes along. My skin feels like it might split, and all my insides spill out. Reason tells me that it’s a Tuesday afternoon. He’s probably not going to get lucky until Friday night at the earliest. Raw, naked fear says maybe I don’t know dick about playing a game like this.
“What if you had five hundred dollars?” he asks, mental math registering on his face.
There’s a flurry, and Arden starts to go into the bag. But no, that’s too much; even for me, as bad as I am, letting Arden pay for things she shouldn’t be paying for, five hundred dollars is too much. That’s near a month’s rent in Section 8 housing, and I don’t even know what we’d get out of it. After all, this Bobby could take our money and leave us with nothing.
Conning a con man—what the hell was I thinking?
But wait. I’ve got something right up his alley. Oh yes, yes I do, rattling around, ready to bite. I brush Arden’s hands aside and dig into the bag. Hoping that I’m not shaking too much, I lift my yellow prescription bottle just enough for this guy to see.
“What if I traded you?”
“You a cop?” he asks, suddenly.
I roll my eyes and push the bottle back down. Faking hand gestures at Arden, I say out loud, “Come on. He can’t do anything for us.”
The street value of honest-to-fuck oxycodone is thirty dollars a pill. Each pill. That’s because I have the eighty-milligram tablets. I know this because I’ve listened to my mother and Lynne, up late talking. Well into the second bottle of whatever, my mother has a tendency to wander back to how expensive all this has been, and how she would have just had to die of cancer if it had been her. Then Lynne points out that we’ve got a goldmine in prescriptions.
—This is what you do, sugar. Take one bottle, and cut all them pills in half. Give me the other half, and I know some people.
—Don’t think I’m not tempted.
—Well, why not? Don’t you deserve something?
—I figure someday, I’m gonna want to get into heaven.
Sweating in my sheets, teeth chattering, I loved my mother so much right then. I loved her, and her pretty smile. I loved her stubby fingers and the sound of her voice. It was a sign she loved me back, at least a little. Because she told me all the time she didn’t believe in heaven or hell or anything like that. Dead was dead, in her opinion. So it had to be love, even a half-moon sliver of it, that kept her from taking pain meds out of my mouth. Had to be.
But now the guy, this guy, this Bobby just like the one my mother was hounding for two hundred dollars, extends his arm. Holds out his hand in a “stop” gesture. “Come on, now. Nobody said that.”
For two seconds, I’m victorious. I want to jump up and fist- bump Arden. But then I see the look on her face, unsettled and still.
Okay, so this is a bad thing I’m doing. I’m a bad person. I know bad things. I do bad things.
But now we have a car.
(DRAWN BOUNDARY)
I don’t know what the silence is right now. Or quiet, I should say. The car’s loud on the highway; the radio kind of works but it buzzes. But since I paid for this ride with a handful of pills, Arden hasn’t had much to say.
Now that we’re on the road again, I’m starting to feel bad about the whole thing. She has a fucking Amex. Her dad told her to spend money on it. We should have bought bus tickets. Or train tickets. Or hell, plane tickets. So why didn’t we? In the back of my head, little asshole-me knows why. Flying means the adventure is over. Buses and trains mean the adventure’s not ours.
I won’t cry because this is another thing that’s my fault. But I want Arden back, even though I’m too afraid to reach for her hand. I think my heart might stop, for real, if she pulls away. The side of the road streaks by, flashes of tree and debris, and highway signs. Rubbing instead at the ache beneath my ribs, I roll my head to look at her. She stares straight ahead, both hands grinding against the steering wheel.
Now it feels like I have no room inside me for a breath. “Are you mad?”
“Do you think I’m mad?”
“I didn’t know how else to get us a car!”
Sputtering, she comes to life. I just wound her key, and she’s filling up the tight cab of this ancient Honda Civic with all of her Arden-ness. “Okay, that’s one thing! We could have gotten on Craigslist or something and bought a beater from somebody! You’d still have all your medicine! Do you still need it? Have you been lying to me? Are you still sick?”
Rearing back in shock, I shake my head. “What? No!”
“Then why do you have them?”
“Because they’re mine!” I raise my voice, even though I’m trembling. This is the bad kind of adrenaline. It coils up, acid and green in my stomach. I used to get panic attacks in the hospital, all the time, but that was a hospital; I was supposed to feel like I was dying there. Fuck, please don’t let me get a panic attack in this car, o
n this road, with Arden watching, fucking please.
Arden stares at me hard, then puts her eyes back on the road. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
And like that, I feel every inch the poor white trash I’ve always been. Some of my problems have nothing to do with the fact that I was sick. I wish they did. It would be nice and neat that way. If I was a nice guy with a good life and happy parents, then maybe I could focus on being a miracle. I could shoot for the wounded angel thing: the strong, battle-ready human-interest story.
But you know what? I am what I am. The cancer’s gone, but let’s see if I’m ever really better.
This is why I should have left Arden alone. She could have kept on believing I was better. Like her. Good and selfless and innocent.
When me and Arden fought in the game, and it almost never happened, it was just a squall. It came and went and we kept on playing. This is slow-moving, one of those tornadoes that spreads for miles and creeps along. You know it’s coming; you can’t do anything about it—and in the end, it destroys everything.
Arden’s furious. The thumb she rubbed against mine this morning (this morning, a lifetime ago), flickers hummingbird fast against the wheel. “When this car breaks down—”
“Who said it’s going to break down? It might not.” I argue because I can’t stop myself. “Japanese cars are immortal. They run forever.”
Frustrated, Arden taps the brakes and the car jerks. “I’m just saying, if it does, I’m handling the next ride.”
“But. You already paid for gas, and the motel. And what about your car, and—”
“Don’t save me,” she interrupts. “I’m not trying to save you, am I?”
Something in the dashboard pops. Icy air pours from the vents. My skin goes tight, soaking up all that delicious chill. Instead of unpacking what Arden just said to me, I convert to the air conditioner cult. Nothing matters but getting the sweat on my skin dry, the heat on my face erased. Putting both hands on the dash, I let the air sweep up my sleeves, cooling me from the inside out.
I don’t know what she means. And I’m not asking, either.
(2264)
There’s nothing but tension between us right now.
When I lean toward Arden, I press into something physical holding us apart. A wall of static. An electric bubble. It’s invisible, but real. Right now, I think touching her would be like palming a cactus.
The problem is, I know how to do all this shit, but I don’t know how to feel guiltless about it. Maybe that’s something you learn in the advanced class. It could be time, heat, pressure. Whatever it takes, I don’t have it. Heavy with remorse, I cling to my seat belt and stare at the horizon. I already said sorry; I don’t know what to do now.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
She answers my question by way of not answering it exactly. “I thought we’d eat when we stopped for the night.”
Leaning my face against the glass, I soak in the countryside. Trees and bits of city—sort of. Suburbs and shit, I guess. The highway dips and rises, sound walls and concrete blocking the view in a lot of places. When we come out of a low, deep turn, I blink.
There’s the Eiffel Tower, right in the middle of Ohio. The seat belt slides through my hands and my mouth drops. It’s not a mirage or an illusion, it’s seriously the Eiffel Tower. Green, with an antenna on top, a single red light blinking faintly in the daylight.
Since it’s not possible that we took a wrong turn and ended up in France, it has to be some attraction. One I never knew about, and I’m not sure how that happened.
“Arden, look,” I say, reaching over to shake her. “Look!”
Arden leans over the wheel, her mouth turned down. “Yeah, it’s King’s Island.”
The name sounds familiar—it’s an amusement park. As we get closer, I make out the loops and whorls of rollercoasters. They fingerprint the horizon, framed by what looks like a giant water park and a whole bunch of woods. In the middle of it, an Eiffel Tower. Not the, not the one. I don’t care; I never expected to see that. Seeing any Eiffel Tower is a gift.
“I’ve never been on a roller coaster,” I tell her, twisting to take in the sight of them. They’re not totally foreign. I’ve seen them on TV and stuff. I even saw one in person at a fair, but I was little then. Real little; all I remember is that we rode the tram, and my mother let me drink lemon shake-up out of her cup.
Slowing, melting, Arden finally looks at me again. “Everybody’s been on a roller coaster.”
“Not me,” I say. The signs for the park flash by, pointing out parking lots and inns and restaurants all around it.
“Why not?” Arden asks.
There are lots of things I haven’t done. I never went camping, or saw a concert. Never have been inside an airport, or a plane. Or a boat. Or a submarine. To be fair, she probably hasn’t been in a submarine, either. Settling back, I say, “By the time I was big enough to ride, I was sick.”
“Oh.”
The silence stretches to the sky and back.
“Do you want to—”
“No.” And without thinking, I brush my knuckles against hers. There’s spark and there’s heat, and—all right, I don’t know why, but it’s there. I think it is. (Please let that be true, please, please, please.)
So I do it again. It’s an experimental touch—one to reassure her—one to reassure me. One that begs her to come back close again. However bad I am, I’m lonely, too. And I think, I’m just guessing, that so is Arden.
Behind the wheel, she tenses but doesn’t pull away.
Softer now, I admit, “I really don’t. This morning sucked, and I’m sorry, and I just wanna keep going.”
The quiet this time is thoughtful. Like a miracle, Arden brushes her knuckles back against mine. “They’re not that great,” she says. “Roller coasters, I mean. You stand in line for a couple of hours. When it’s your turn, they jam you into a seat like this big. It feels like a high chair, I’m not kidding. Because then they pull this thing over your head and it’s heavy. They push it until it locks, so you can’t breathe. Meanwhile, your ass is going numb. Then the train takes off and it’s loud.”
The stone in my belly starts to dissolve, tension ebbing away. In fact, I almost laugh, because she’s just so sincere. There’s more than one way to touch; she’s so good with saying the right thing. Smiling at the right time.
“You’re not going to convince me roller coasters suck,” I tell her.
Eyes twinkling, Arden keeps a straight face. “They do. They’re the worst. Clack, clack, clack, slower and slower all the way up the first hill. When you crest it, you pause for a split second, and I’ll admit, that’s pretty great. It’s usually a good view of the rest of the park. But there’s all this, like silent anticipation, you know?
“Then the dudebro in front of you starts screaming. Spit everywhere, and whoosh. The whole rest of the ride, you slam against one side. You slam against the other. And you try really, really hard not to open your mouth because Spitman is spraying like a fountain.”
“Are you kidding?” I ask her, getting brave and hooking my forefinger in hers. “I love it when strangers spit in my mouth.”
Arden heaves, leaning away from me. “Sick, Dylan.”
“I thought we had that in common. It’s like I don’t even know you. Next thing, you’re going to tell me you only drink Pepsi.”
She stares as if mortally offended. “You don’t? Oh, no. This is over. You and me? Dunzo.”
This is better. This is so much better. We’re talking about stupid things again; we’re talking again. It felt like the end of the world without her, it really did. My heart beats so fast, I’m light-headed. It’s a good feeling, euphoric—that one, I know how to pronounce for sure. It rolls on my tongue, sweet like candy as I lean into Arden’s space again.
“Tell me,” I say. “What other body fluids do you have opinions about?”
“You’re gross,” Arden winces. “And I went to summer camp. That’s a
long list.”
“Start at the beginning.” I tell her. “I’ve got nothing but time.”
(ROAD CONVERSATIONS)
“You’re smiling,” Arden says.
Brushing my fingers against my lips (because I wasn’t sure I was smiling and wanted to check), I say, “Just thinking about future stuff. All the stuff in old science fiction is real now. Except transporters.”
“I think that’s on purpose,” Arden muses. “You can’t go on road trips if you have transporters.”
“Maybe if you dialed up stops on the way,” I say.
Arden drums her fingers on the wheels. “Then you could see both balls of twine in one trip.”
“Stay in your weird motels. You know there’s some that look like concrete tipis?”
“No way . . . wait, have you seen pictures of the Gobbler?” she asks, suddenly excited. “It was in Wisconsin; I guess it’s closed now. But it was all tangerine walls and bubble windows, and shagadelic carpet and round waterbeds . . .”
I laugh. Dragging my fingers through my thin hair, I try to imagine this and fail completely. “There’s an underwater hotel in Florida. It only has two rooms, though. Also shagadelic.”
“Let’s go there next time,” Arden says.
Rolling my head to look at her, I wonder what she sees when she looks back at me. “Sounds good. Let’s try not to get your car stole early on though. This scrambling for rides shit . . .”
“Sucks,” she says.
“Hardcore.”
How about that, though? There’s going to be a next time.
(PICK SOMETHING)
The gas station is selling souvenir t-shirts, two for ten dollars. I buy a pair, both extra-large. I like my clothes baggy and I don’t know what size Arden is.
The shirts are soft; they smell like the cherry pipe tobacco they were sitting next to. There’s a picture of an old-fashioned plane on it, and it says OHIO: BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION. Since they printed it on preshrunk cotton, it must be true. I leave two pennies in the kitty on the counter, and head back out to the car.
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