Nobody but Us

by Kristin Halbrook

  “Hey, that’s so sweet. Here, let me—” I lean over and blow out the candle.

  “Did you make a wish?”

  “I didn’t have to. Look at us. My wishes are coming true.”

  I can’t see it in the dark car, but I know she’s blushing. She’s the type who’s gonna blush at everything.

  We pause at a stoplight. I check the rearview mirror. Empty roads. Keep my hand on the stick, never let the wheels stop all the way. Go.

  “Hey, you ran that red light!”

  “We got places to be.”

  She laughs like it’s a game and peels away the wrapper around the bottom of the cupcake, then passes it to me. The frosting tastes much better than it looks. But she’s cooked for herself and her dad all her life. She knows her way around a kitchen. She even tells me what to do to my ramen dinners to make them taste like real food. Add chicken and vegetables and healthy stuff. ’Cause she cares that I got good food. It’s nice.

  I pull off onto the shoulder of the road and let the engine idle so I can finish my cupcake. I’ll give a minute for Zoe’s cupcake. But my eyes are on the side mirrors the whole time.

  “Want a bite?” I offer her the last piece, but she shakes her head. I shove it in my mouth and kiss her before I’ve swallowed it all. She don’t mind when I get frosting on her lips. She licks it off. “Thank you,” I say, brushing her hair away from her face.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I kiss her again and accelerate back onto the highway.

  I don’t know what time I was born. It’s on my birth certificate, in that folder I was given on my way out. I might be eighteen by now. It’s after eleven. I probably am eighteen. But birthdays don’t matter much to me. All I’ve gotten today was a reminder not to take anything that don’t belong to me and a chorus of “good lucks” from the rest of the cases back at the home.

  And a cupcake. That’s the best thing. Maybe my birthdays will be getting better from now on.

  I look over at Zoe, flexing and unflexing my knuckles. They’re not too sore. They calloused over a long time ago. She’s nodding off on the pillow, but I’m wondering if I should keep her awake. I gave her my own pillow, so she could get used to the smell of me or something. So she can get used to sleeping near me. To sleeping with me. Her neck’s exposed and I want to kiss it. There’s things I want to do to Zoe. I wonder if she thinks about that like I do. If there’s stuff she wants to do to me.

  It still amazes me sometimes that she’s here. But she sticks by my side, thinks I can do something with myself. I ain’t never had a good birthday, until this one.

  “Zoe, baby, you shouldn’t sleep yet.”

  “Mm-hm,” she replies.

  I dart glances at her. Check the rearview mirror. Check the road just long enough to make sure we’re still on it and not heading for some ditch filled with cow shit. I know she’s not gonna be able to stay up all night with me. We’re two different creatures that way: she has the brains and I can stay up all night.

  “Stay awake a little longer,” I repeat. I grab her hand and press it to my lips. She smiles all tired like. “Tell me about what kind of nurse you want to be again.”

  She talks for a while as I drive. Tells me about wrinkly babies and about dads who pass out in delivery rooms. I laugh at that. I would probably be like that, too, someday, all crazy overwhelmed by becoming a dad and all the blood and stuff.

  I figure my own dad didn’t hang around long enough to experience that. I don’t know my dad, but I do know that my mom was on her own when she gave birth to me. After two years she figured it would be better for her to dump me off at her neighbors’ and never come back.

  “Wanna know something?” I ask when she stops talking for a minute. “I think a baby that looks just like you would be beautiful.”

  Zoe leans across the parking brake and kisses the corner of my mouth.

  “Can I sleep now?” She yawns noisily. I check the dash.

  “It’s been, like, about an hour. You think that’s long enough?” She should know. She’s the one who wants to be a nurse.

  “I think I’ll be fine. I’m not dizzy or anything. I think that’s what you have to look out for. Wake me when we get to the state line, okay?”

  She pushes and pulls on the pillow, shaping and testing it three or four times before settling in. I tuck the blanket around her with one hand. It’s hard to keep my eyes on the road. She is so sweet, dozing off in my car, lying on my pillow.

  “I’ll wake you when we get there,” I tell her.

  ZOE

  IT’S BEAUTIFUL SLEEPING IN HIS CAR. I’VE NEVER SLEPT anywhere but in my own bed in my own room. Unless you count the times I blacked out on the floor. But I don’t think of that as sleeping.

  It’s not a deep, constant sleep, because even though my body wants to rest, my brain doesn’t. It wants to be awake with Will, watching what we’re passing, looking back at what we’re leaving behind. Feeling the touch of his hand on my neck, hearing his steady breath next to my ear.

  Sometimes my body wins, and I doze. I dream about lying next to Will in ways we never have before, feeling the heat of embarrassment mixed with nervous longing as I sleep; but other times my brain wins and I wake drowsily and ignore the pounding in my head to play with the fairy song of my mom’s chimes or to smile at Will and put my fingers on his cheek. He’s handsome to me, in his rough way. I’ve always thought he was handsome, since the day he transferred to the home and, later, to my school.

  Being in the home gave him a ready-made group of people to hang out with. He spent that first day walking the halls with Charlie Harmon, who graduates this year and plans on going into the army, and Lexi Simon. She’s two years younger than Will but dropped out a couple of weeks ago when she found out she was pregnant.

  He commented on the bruise on my forehead that day, an unfamiliar voice floating out of a group crowded around a couple of lockers, and I tripped over my own feet.

  I suppose everyone else in town was used to seeing them. The dark marks I tried to cover with makeup. I figured I had been doing a really good job, because nobody said anything when I showed up with some new disfigurement. But then this guy I’d never met before walks up and talks to me and he makes me doubt everything I thought I believed.

  I guess it was just a case of the old stain on a hidden part of the wallpaper. When you see something often enough, it becomes invisible.

  But it’s okay now, because Will saw. He came to visit me after that. At home—but only one time, because my dad told him to get lost—during lunch, after school. Sometimes he snuck me away in the middle of the night under a secret-keeping moon.

  In a handful of weeks he’s become my new belief.

  This night is the black kind of dark when there is no moon and it’s hard to see the houses we pass only every ten minutes or so. But I can see the stars if I lean forward and look out the top of the windshield. The stars don’t seem to move, even though we’re flying down the highway. There are always lots of stars in this part of North Dakota. They crowd in sympathetically, as though they can’t bear for any place to be completely deserted. As if aloneness scares them, too.

  “Will, do you think there will be this many stars in Las Vegas?”

  He looks at me for a long time before answering, and I feel my face flush with heat. He smiles at me, his easy smile, and looks back to the road.

  “Sure. Stars are the same everywhere, ain’t they?”

  That doesn’t sound right, so I laugh at him and he laughs back, but I don’t contradict him because I can’t put my finger on the right answer, either. Something about the hemispheres, but it’s hardly worth taking the time to remember right now.

  “If there ain’t, I’ll get you some of those glow-in-the-dark sticker stars to put on the ceiling, okay?”

  I blush again because suddenly I’m thinking about the apartment we’ll share and the room we’ll share and the bed we’ll share. We’ve been together for almost two months now, but h
e’s never put a hand out of place. I think he’s like that because he respects me. I hope so, at least. But sometimes I wonder about his hands out of place, and the thought of it brings heat to my cheeks.

  “Sounds good.”

  I doze again, dreaming of greenish sticker stars in the sky. Will wakes me up when we’re about to cross into South Dakota, and I search for a Welcome sign. It’s my first time out of my home state. Not for Will, though. He was born in Nevada and made his way here by little hops and moves throughout his life. He tells me I’ll like it there, even though he left when he was four and probably doesn’t remember Nevada. He wants me to like it because … I think we’re going to be there, together, for a long time.

  I believe him—that I’ll like the desert, the Southwest—because he never lies to me.

  I expect there to be more excitement as we cross into South Dakota. And maybe there are more lights, but the road is still quiet and lazy. I can’t figure out why Will keeps checking his mirrors, jittery like we’re in the middle of some big-city rush hour. I see the sign, and my heart quickens for just a moment before I settle back into the serene darkness.

  “That was it,” I whisper to the window.

  “We shoulda brought confetti so you could throw it out the window. Or a camera.”

  It feels a little as though he’s making fun of me, but I push the discomfort aside. Of course he’s not making fun of me. Just teasing a little, maybe. I can do it, too.

  “Yeah, but that means I’d have to teach you to use one.”

  “It’s just pressing a button.”

  “And pointing it. That’s two things at once. I’m not sure if boys can manage that much.”

  “Ha!”

  He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and aims it toward me, flicking on the car light at the same time. I hear the click of the camera and he turns the phone around so I can see myself on the screen.

  “There. Now you got an ‘Entering South Dakota’ picture.”

  I study the face on the phone. The tired eyes, the swollen lip. The new shadow on my temple. I close my eyes against it. This is what Will sees. He sees it when my face is naked, when I have my makeup on: it doesn’t matter. This is what he sees when he looks at me.

  “I look awful.”

  The car swerves so abruptly that my seat belt locks as I’m thrown to the right. We hit gravel and he slams on the brakes. I worry that I’ve made Will angry when he gets out of the car, slams his door shut, and comes around to open mine. He unbuckles my seat belt and pulls me out of the car.

  “You. Are. Beautiful.” His arms are strong and tight around me. Desperate, even. “Don’t ever say you’re nothing but beautiful, understand? This—” He touches my lip, my eye. “This will fade and your heart will heal and you’ll never have to worry about hiding nothing ever again. Understand?”

  Tears spring to my eyes under the intensity of his gaze. I tuck my head into his chest to avoid his eyes and burrow against the softness of his shirt.

  “You’re so beautiful. No one’s ever gonna hurt you again.”

  I nod.

  “I’m so excited for this. For this life.”

  “Me too,” I whisper.

  “Okay.”

  He moves aside the pillow and blanket so I can get back in the car. He tucks me in again, even though I’m too warm. I’m warm even though it’s early spring and still coat and hat and mittens weather. I reach my face up to kiss him, long and slow, and my skin is suffocating under the blanket. Will puts a knee on my seat so he can better reach me and spreads his hands on my face. They are like a brush of night breeze against my skin.

  “Amazing,” he says once he’s pulled away. “You.” He says it like he means it, and I have to believe it’s the truth.

  He closes my door gently and returns to his side of the car. He gives me a smile and another kiss and pulls back onto the highway.

  WILL

  I LOVE THE TASTE OF HER.

  Sweetness and a little bit of acid.

  Alive and warm.

  It’s the most delicious taste ever. It’s been hours since she was awake, and the sun’s practically up, but her flavors are still right there. Right in my mouth.

  The gas tank thing’s on E and has been for a few miles now, but if I stop for gas, she could wake up. If I stop for gas, they might catch up. Her dad. Shelly. The cops. I’m waiting for them, but I’m also waiting for that free feeling, that one where my fingers don’t shake and I ain’t gotta keep looking over my shoulder. When does that come? How far I gotta travel for that?

  I know there ain’t a whole lot of gas stations in this corner of the world, though, so I gotta stop at the next one. She stirs when I pull off the highway and slow the car. I creep to the pump, like she’ll adjust to the changing car speed if I do it real slow.

  Her breathing changes. She’s waking up. I wrap my fists around the steering wheel and grit my teeth. Like it’s so much to ask that I could do this one thing right.

  “Sorry. We need gas.”

  “It’s okay,” she whispers.

  “You need anything from the store? Are you hungry?”

  She shakes her head.

  “We’ll stop at the next diner we come to for breakfast, okay? I’ll just grab some water for now.”

  She nods and rests her head on her pillow again but doesn’t close her eyes.

  I feel her watching me as I walk into the 7-Eleven and grab a bottle of water. I feel her watching me as I pull two twenties out of my wallet, for the gas and the water, and toss them to the clerk. I don’t look at her when I walk back to the pump, but I’m smiling ’cause I can’t help it and now it’s a game. She wants me to look at her, I know it, and I wanna tease her instead.

  I try to wipe the smile off my face and look cool, but I don’t got much control in the Zoe department and she sees it. She always got to me, stripped my bullshit down with a look. Charlie never missed a chance to tell me I was whipped.

  I still ain’t looking at her, even though I can hear her laughing at me. I clear my throat real loud, set the latch on the gas pump, and pop my head in through my window.

  “Okay, you win.”

  “Yep.”

  “You always gonna win at this game.”

  “Yep.”

  Her eyes are bright and all crinkly at the corners when she smiles like that. I’m gonna make her smile like that all the time.

  I stifle a yawn, and her smile slips a little.

  “Don’t worry about it. I ain’t tired. Just need something to drink.” I break the cap on the water and chug half the bottle. The cold goes right to my head. Burns inside my chest. But at least I feel awake again.

  “I can drive,” she says. “You’ll have to teach me. But it’s not like there’s any patrol out here.”

  I hesitate before answering her. Look around, sweep the gas station parking lot. The roads. Like the cops’ll show up just ’cause she said their name.

  I nod. She should learn to drive. She needs to, and this would be as good a place as any to teach her. Plus, it’s the perfect excuse to give her the ID I got made for her. I’ll tell her it’s for driving, and not ’cause she’s fifteen and I’m eighteen and I don’t wanna get screwed when someone finds out I’m with this girl in another state. There’s rules about that. I know that shit.

  I open my wallet and look at her ID. It looks good, made from her yearbook photo, with the ugly white background. It should look good. It cost enough. I pull it out and close my wallet. I look at my car, and I look at Zoe. My car’s pretty much all I got, but it ain’t worth as much as she is.

  The gas pump lever clicks off.

  “All right. Gas station guy says there’s a town with a diner about thirty miles up the road. You can drive there. I’ll be all right once I got something to eat.”

  She’s all excitement and happy squeals and I suddenly want to pull her out of the car and kiss her until she makes more of those noises, but for me, not the steering wheel. But I turn back to the
pump instead and screw the gas cap on.

  “Let’s get away from the station before I let you in my seat. If you hit one of these pumps you’ll blow us all up.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  She’s clutching her seat all bouncy-happy, and my chest swells, ’cause that’s me who did that. I made her excited.

  When we get a mile down the road, I pull off onto the shoulder and trade places with her, passing the keys off when we meet at the front of the car. She dangles the keys in my face with a laugh and hops in.

  ZOE

  “DON’T KILL ME,” HE MUMBLES AS I SLIDE INTO THE driver’s seat. I sock him in the shoulder. Then I kiss him because I feel bad. When I pull back, he pats the car with exaggerated sympathy, looking at me sideways the whole time, and I don’t feel so bad about the punch anymore.

  “Here.”

  He passes me a card and it’s my face staring back at me.

  “I probably should already have one of these,” I say. “I mean, a real one. When did you get this made? And … eighteen? Wow. I don’t—I don’t think I can pull that off.”

  “You’ll be fine. You’re mature. And it’s only a couple of years. You look legal now.”

  “To drive? I only have to be sixteen for that.”

  “Yeah.” He looks over his shoulder for a second. “And, you know, to do whatever you want.”

  I follow his gaze, seeing nothing but desolate land in the space behind us.

  Whatever I want?

  “Um, that sounds good to me. Doing whatever I want.” I shove the card in my jeans pocket. “Now teach me to drive this bad boy.”

  He looks back again, laughs. I grin in response.

  “Okay. That pedal on the far left is the clutch. You gotta push that in when you start the car and when you shift. Do that with your left foot. Use your right for the brake and the gas.”

  “At the same time?”

  “No, not at the same time. Do you want to stop and go at the same time?”

  “No.” I snicker.

  “The brake’s in the middle and gas’s on the right, the narrow one, there. Put your foot on the gas when you wanna go. On the brake when you want to stop. The car’s in neutral right now, so go ahead and try starting it up. Remember, push the clutch in when you start it up.”