When the car stops on the side of the road I ask, “Peeing again?” But then I notice there’s a person outside, standing near the car. I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl because they are wearing jeans and an oversized hoodie with the hood pulled up. They’ve got a backpack on and heavy-looking boots. “Wait, are we picking up a hitchhiker?”
“It does appear that way,” Zack replies.
“Are you crazy? Didn’t you learn this lesson with the stoners?”
“I think maybe they were actually meth heads or something,” Zack says.
“You never pick up hitchhikers. They are bound to shiv you.”
“Shiving may be a prison-exclusive activity,” Zack says.
“Maybe the hitchhiker is an escaped convict. Shiving could be a way of life.” I am joking, but my heart is going like a tiger in a cage. I’ve seen the movies. Nothing good ever happens with a hitchhiker.
“Open the door,” Charlie tells Zack, who does what he’s told.
Zack flips forward the seat, and then the person—a girl, I realize, not much older than me—climbs in. My heartbeat slows a little. Yes, teenage girls can be psychopaths—I mean, of course—but she has a soft face and freckles across the brown skin of her nose and doe eyes. Also I think that Charlie, Zack, and I could take her if it came to that. Unless she has a gun.
I draw my legs into my chest. I’m not going to sit in the death spot with no seat belt. So she has to sort of crawl over me, tossing a button-covered backpack onto the floor in front of her. Once she’s settled in, I say, “They picked me up outside Atlanta, and I’ve been in the back of this car ever since.”
Her soft look falters for a minute, but then Charlie says, “She’s my sister. She’s a liar.”
“I can see that,” the girl says. I don’t know if she means she can see the family resemblance or that she can tell just by looking at me that I am not to be trusted, but either way, I’m not too happy. I look out the window.
“My name is Harper,” she says.
“Really?” I ask.
“Really,” she replies.
“Like the author?” I ask.
“Like the author,” she agrees.
“I’m surprised you knew that, Lexi,” Charlie says.
I hit the back of his seat. “Don’t use our real names, dumbass.”
“Why not?” Charlie asks.
“She’s not using her real name. Clearly. I mean, it would be like if someone picked you up and you were like, ‘My name is J. D. Like the author. J. D. Salinger.’”
“I would be more likely to use F. Scott.”
“I didn’t make the author connection,” Harper says. “You did.”
“Everyone would. How many Harpers are there in the world?”
“At least two,” Harper says.
“Where are you heading?” Zack asks.
“New York City,” she says. “Which, you know, was clue one that you were lying seeing as how we are heading toward Atlanta right now, not away.”
I raise an eyebrow. “New York City, huh?”
“What?” she asks. She lowers her hood, revealing a mess of curls. I tuck myself in closer to the side of the car. She smells like the clove cigarettes some of Seth’s friends smoke, the ones that are already out of high school and going to Essex College.
“Nothing,” I mumble. I zip my hoodie up so it covers my chin.
She swivels in the seat so she’s facing me. “It was obviously something. Just go on and say it.”
“Don’t mind my sister,” Charlie says. He shifts the rearview mirror so he can get a better view of her. “Lexi is angry.”
“Of course she is,” Harper says.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter. “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. Is that one of your buttons?”
Harper stares at me with something like disappointment. But also something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. Those big doe eyes are confusing. I wonder if it’s hard to go through life with those so-called windows to the soul thrown wide open so anyone can climb in. “I know what you’re thinking, anyway,” she says. “Small-town girl chasing her dreams to New York City.”
She’s right. I say, “Struggling on the mean streets, just trying to make it big.”
She reaches down and picks up her backpack. The buttons aren’t sayings. They’re all different abstract designs in bright patterns that stand out like flowers against the dirty beige canvas of her bag. “Good guess, but New York is actually just a stop along the way. I have a friend there and I’m going to stay with her a couple of days and then I’m going down to Florida. Another one of my friends moved down there and got a job in a restaurant. She says the pay is real good and I’m sick of this winter, so—”
“What about school?” I ask.
She laughs. “Been there, failed that.”
“Super cool,” I mutter. “The whole car is full of dropouts.”
Charlie has been stealing glances at Harper in the rearview mirror, but now he glowers at me. “Where in Florida are you going?” he asks. He’s got something stuck between his teeth, but I don’t tell him.
“The Gulf Coast. Near Tampa.” She chews on the corner of her thumbnail. Charlie takes a ramp onto Interstate 84 and the car shudders as we accelerate. “My friend told me it was eighty degrees and sunny there today. And yesterday. And the day before that.” She smiles. “The sun is good for you, you know? That’s why we’re all pissy up here. Not enough sun. You never hear about pissy people in Florida.” She holds her bag in her lap, hugging it like it’s her old teddy bear.
“But there are lots of old people in Florida,” I say. “And old people are always pissy.”
Charlie rolls his eyes, but Harper laughs. It’s a deeper laugh than I would have expected from her. “What about all of you? Where are you going?”
Charlie rubs his forehead right above the bridge of his nose and I wonder if he has the good sense to be embarrassed by our quest. “Pennsylvania,” he tells her. “We’re looking for Adrian Wildes.”
She nods as if this is the most normal thing in the world and I wonder about some of her other rides. Where were those people going and what did they tell her? “What’s the strangest ride you’ve ever gotten?” I ask.
“Well, nothing too weird on this trip yet. I’m just starting out. But once I got a ride with cat breeders. They had the female cat and were going to meet the sire. The cat didn’t sound too happy about any of it.”
“No one likes an arranged marriage.”
“Not even a marriage,” Harper says, smiling at me. “It was like an arranged hookup. An arranged impregnation.”
“Gack,” I say.
“Gack,” she agrees.
“Is anyone hungry?” Charlie asks. “I’m really, really hungry.”
“Me, too,” Zack says.
“Mind stopping for something to eat?” Charlie asks Harper.
Harper shifts in her seat. “Okay, I guess.” She glances at me and then back at the road. For all her bravado, she’s still kind of scared.
There’s a sign for all the fast food places we can pick from: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell. “What do you like?” I ask her.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Harper says. We’re curling off the highway and onto some little side road.
Charlie pulls into the parking lot of a restaurant called the Chowder Bowl. Charlie doesn’t like chowder. He says it’s too creamy. “I think it’s always good to go to local places,” he says.
“Sure, okay,” Harper says.
Is he trying to impress her? Whatever, I don’t care. Charlie might not like chowder, but I love it.
A hostess seats us at a table near the back. The chairs are shiny, wooden, and round, with bright pink seats. The menus are heavy, plastic-coated ordeals with some sort of ribbon around the edges. They have seventeen different types of chowder: corn, harvest, fish, potato, on and on. They even have three different types of clam chowder: New England, Manhattan, and Rhode Island. “What
’s Manhattan clam chowder?” I ask.
“It has tomatoes instead of cream,” Harper says.
“What? That’s not even chowder. That’s soup. Next you’re going to tell me that Rhode Island clam chowder doesn’t even have clams in it.”
“Rhode Island clam chowder is made with quahogs and bacon,” says our waiter, a twenty-something guy who has appeared out of nowhere. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, bow tie, and vest. “Our specialty is the harvest chowder, which pairs a medley of seafood with the vegetables of the harvest: winter squash and corn.”
“Is this true?” Harper asks, pointing to something on the menu.
The waiter leans over her shoulder. “Yes. If you can stand on one foot, balance a chowder spoon on your nose, close your eyes, and recite the alphabet backward, your meal is free.”
“The whole table or just one person?”
“Just the performer,” he tells her.
“We’re in,” she tells him.
“You need to order first. Order and eat and then you do the thing before the bill comes.”
“Okay, then. I’ll have the harvest chowder. A bowl of it. And I want the roll on the side, and also extra packs of oyster crackers.”
The waiter writes it down. “To drink?”
“A Coke.”
“We have Pepsi products. Is that okay?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Um, sorry, no.” I think she’s joking, but she says, “I’ll have an iced tea.”
She shrugs off her coat and settles in while the rest of us order. I get the Rhode Island clam chowder, Zack chooses harvest, and Charlie, traitor to the chowder cause, chooses Manhattan.
When the waiter leaves, Harper says, “I am a master of getting free meals. It’s an essential life skill.” She picks up the soup spoon at her place and sets it on her nose. It slides right off and clangs onto the table.
“I have money,” I tell her.
“Yeah, so do I, but free is better than paying, don’t you think. Also you guys should order extra packs of oyster crackers. Having some of those in your bag can save you.”
A busboy fills our water glasses, and we all drink. Harper tries again to get the spoon on her nose. I pick mine up. It’s wide and flat and I can see why it’s so hard to get it to stick. I huff a breath onto the smooth surface, then rub it with my thumb. I put it on my nose and hold it there for a moment before letting go. It stays and I say, “Just a little trick I picked up along the way.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” Charlie asks.
“What? I just cleaned it off a little,” I say with a smile.
“Warm and damp sticks better,” Zack says. “Good thinking.”
While we wait for our chowders, we practice saying the alphabet backward. “The hard part will be standing on one foot with our eyes closed,” Zack says. “That will totally mess up your balance.”
“I don’t know why you guys are working so hard at this. It’s a little humiliating, don’t you think?” Charlie asks.
“It’s a free lunch,” Harper says.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Charlie says back to her.
“Sure, sure. No free lunch and no free ride, but here we are.”
The waiter places our bowls of chowder in front of us. They are enormous. Bigger than my head. “Can I have some extra oyster crackers?” I ask.
He sighs. “Sure.”
“Oh my God,” Zack says, letting out his breath. “This is freaking fantastic.”
He’s right. It’s the best chowder I’ve ever had. It’s sweet and salty and slips over my tongue like silk. I feel warm from the inside out.
The waiter finally cracks a smile. “We’ve won Best Soup/Chowder for nine years straight. And the seven years before that.”
“What happened in the year you missed?” I ask.
“Voter fraud,” he says with a frown. “I’ll be back with your crackers.”
We eat without saying much, like we are starving wolves who have just taken down a deer. Even Charlie seems content. It’s hard to be angry when you’re eating soup. Unless, I guess, you are Penelope.
“So what’s your thinking on Adrian Wildes?” Harper asks.
I zip my lips tight. This is the topic that always gets me in trouble.
Charlie says, “We’re going to this abandoned amusement park that he wrote about because we think he might be there.”
“Cool,” she says.
“You could come,” he suggests. He opens a package of oyster crackers.
“I don’t think that’s on the way to Florida.” She speaks down into her soup. “I really just need to get closer to Danbury. I should be able to get a ride to New York pretty easily from there. Also, I’m serious about the crackers. Eat the bread now, crackers later.”
“And that’s today’s Travel Tips with Harper Lee.”
She smiles. “What do you think he’s doing there? Just hanging out on the carousel?”
“We think he’s trying to get away from it all,” Zack says.
“Like you,” I say.
She swallows. “Me?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Pack up one life, put it away, and start again. Become a new person.”
Putting down her spoon, she looks right at me. “You can’t become someone else.” She says it so matter-of-factly, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Like I’m a toddler and she has to explain that we can’t go into the television and live on Sesame Street. But isn’t that what we’re all trying to do all the time? Become someone else. Throw off one life and choose another.
“So why do you need to go someplace new?”
“I need to go someplace new because that’s where the job is. And because I get itchy staying in one place. Anyway, so, listen, if Adrian Wildes is trying to get away from it all, why don’t you just let him get away?”
Zack slurps his chowder. Charlie spins his soup in his bowl. So it’s up to me to talk. “I guess we just think he might be in some danger?”
“Okay, sure, I get it.” She looks at each of us in turn. “I wasn’t sure if this was just like an excuse for a road trip or what.”
“More than that,” I tell her.
She nods and I wonder what she’s agreeing to. “I saw him in concert once,” she says. “It was like pre-supercelebrity days and he was opening for this girl group I loved. Opal Essence. Remember them? I’d say I was maybe twelve years old? So, like, when he was just bursting it big onto YouTube.”
“Was it any good?” I ask.
“Sure. I mean, I was twelve and he was cute, and the girls in Opal Essence said he was great, so that colored my view a lot.” She shrugs. “I guess I can see how he felt pigeonholed. How he was sick of being that person.”
“It’s gotta feel like an anvil,” Charlie says.
The waiter comes back. “Dessert?” he asks.
“Is that part of the free meal deal?” Harper asks.
“If you successfully complete the challenge,” he tells her.
“Awesome. I’ll have a piece of that lemon meringue pie I saw on the way in.”
“Me, too,” I agree.
Zack chooses cheesecake, but Charlie doesn’t get anything, not even the brownie sundae, which is what he always gets and Mom always steals bites from him.
As soon as the desserts come, Harper says, “Let’s do this.” She stands up, takes her spoon, and places it on her nose. “Come on, guys, all for one and one for all and all that.”
Zack and I stand up, too, but of course Charlie stays sitting down. We put the spoons on our noses and close our eyes. Carefully, I lift one foot.
“All contestants are in the proper position,” the waiter says.
I want to giggle at that, but Harper says, in a solemn tone, “Ready. Let’s begin.”
“Z-Y-X-W,” we begin, slowly and deliberately. “V-U-T.”
“Damn it,” Zack says, and then I hear the clatter of the spoon hitting the floor.
Harper and I keep going. “L-K-J.�
� On and on. “H-G-F.” All the way to “C-B-A.”
“Congratulations,” the waiter says in a flat voice. “You each have won a free meal.” Harper and I high-five and her eyes are bright and shiny. The waiter takes our picture with a Polaroid camera and says he’ll put it on the wall at the front. “Take another,” I say.
He glances over his shoulder, then takes another quick picture of us. I watch as we develop. We are off-kilter and fuzzy, but smiling, arms around each other. We eat our pie, gleefully. It is well-earned pie.
“I should make you pay for yours,” I tell Charlie when our bill comes. But we both know he doesn’t have any money.
“Make sure you tip him well,” Harper tells me. “Tip him on what the amount would have been.”
I agree and leave one of my twenties on the table.
On the way out, I look at our picture on the board. It is in better focus. Harper and I grin like idiots. Charlie is in the picture, too. Behind us, sitting at the table and staring angrily at nothing.
BEFORE
September
Seth told me that all I needed to do was pretend. “Pretend to be these girls. You know them. You can embody them.” He set up his camera on a tripod.
Seth had one thing in common with Adrian Wildes: his own YouTube channel. But he wasn’t like internet-celebrity-turned-regular-celebrity Adrian Wildes. He was just getting started. He’d only uploaded one video, just some off-the-cuff, slice-of-life observational humor. “The rant is a mainstay of modern comedy,” he told me.
He commented a lot, and took part in discussion boards. Online he was StinkySalmon. I was Lexile3000, but I didn’t comment or interact much. My favorite YouTuber was a girl named Possum. Just Possum. She always wore hand-knit hats that looked like all different animals—although never a possum. She played the mandolin, which is close enough to a ukulele to be hip, but a thousand times more beautiful. Sometimes she played the banjo or the fiddle. Anyway, some of her songs were silly, but most of them were the funny kind that hid a deep, deep sadness.
It was what Adrian Wildes wished he could be, but he just ended up schlocky. I was clicking through her Tumblr while Seth set up. He looked over my shoulder. “I can’t tell if she’s pretty or not.” We’d been together three weeks. He still felt new to me. It still felt like maybe I shouldn’t touch him or else he might disappear into a puff of smoke.
Good and Gone Page 11
