by Una LaMarche
“Yeah, I don’t know what happened.” I stretch my arms over my head and yawn. “I must have just crashed.”
“Mmm hmmm.” Cass gives me a look.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She zips up her backpack and crawls out of the tent.
“What?” I prod.
“Nothinnnng.” She skulks off toward Goldie, and I take out my frustration over her constant moodiness on the tent, ripping it out of the ground like the Hulk.
“Hey, can I help?” Tim comes jogging over, his khakis rolled up over his knees, damp hair sticking up in what I hope is an unintentional mohawk.
“Yeah, can you fold this monster?” I brush my hair out of my eyes self-consciously, realizing I must look like one of Lil Wayne’s mug shots by now. First order of the day will definitely be stopping somewhere to clean up.
“It’s a beautiful morning, huh?” He smiles up at me as he wrestles the poles into submission.
“Yeah, not bad.” I feel a little awkward talking to Tim after last night. It’s not like anything really happened, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to act. Are we friends now that we know each other’s secrets? Is it incredibly pathetic that holding his hand gave me more butterflies than kissing Ernest Hudson?
“I think it’s going to be a beautiful day,” he says, wrapping up the now-cylindrical tent in a Velcro strap. “In fact, I’ve got a wonderful feeling that everything’s going my way.” Tim shoots me a big, goofy grin. “Get it?” he laughs. “Oklahoma! The musical!”
“Nerd,” Leah says with a smile, walking up behind him, her arm draped around a still-damp Denny. I guess a night in the tent was all they needed to get past the Chocolate Frosting Incident.
“Is he like this all the time?” I laugh, and Leah nods.
“He serenaded me in the cafeteria on my birthday last year. It was soooo embarrassing.”
“It was not!” Tim says, feigning offense. “I was totally on-key!”
“That’s not what I meant,” she groans, following him to the car. “It was the dancing. The dancing! Why did you have to choreograph it?”
“I thought you loved Glee!” Tim says playfully. He lifts up the trunk door and starts moving stuff around to fit the tent poles in. Alongside our bags of clothes and food, there are piles of old magazines wrapped in twine and plastic shopping bags filled with stuff Mom stores in the car for unknown reasons. I’ve never looked in them because I’m too afraid I’ll find something illegal, so when Tim goes to open one, I freeze.
“What is this stuff?” he says, reaching in. Then he sees something, stops, and says, “Oh my God.”
“Just leave it!” I lunge over to grab the bag, but Tim’s faster than me and is already pulling out a silver cylinder attached to a long, clear tube. I snatch it from his hands and toss it onto the grass. “That’s none of your business!” I shout, and he and Leah look at me like I’m crazy.
“Michelle,” he says. “It’s a siphon pump.”
“What?”
“A siphon pump,” he says, breaking into a smile, grabbing my shoulders. “For gasoline. And I saw an empty can in there, too.”
“Oh!” I start laughing, I’m so relieved.
“What’s so funny?” Denny asks.
“We’re gonna make it,” I say, lifting him up and kissing him on the cheek. “We’re actually gonna make it to California.”
“We weren’t before?” Leah asks, stricken, and Tim and I exchange a guilty look. “Whatever, you guys are so weird,” she says, climbing into the backseat.
• • •
To work the siphon pump to our advantage, we have to stage a breakdown on the side of the road. Goldie’s jacked-up exterior is for once a plus; the only potential snag is that we’re a bunch of kids without a chaperone, and it’s a good half hour past when even the crunchiest hippie schools would start. This, I tell myself, is why four cars pass me without so much as slowing down, even though I’m doing my best down-on-my-luck half smile and Miss America wave (Devereaux rule #5: Work what you’ve got. As Mom likes to remind me, “You won’t be this cute forever.”)
“Maybe you should have Denny get out with you,” Cass calls through the open window.
“Nah,” I yell as a freight truck screams past, making me jump back even farther on the shoulder. “If anyone’s going to die trying to steal gas, it should be me. Besides”—I lean out tentatively, squinting at the flat, wheat-colored horizon shimmering like a desert oasis—“I’m sure somebody will stop.”
But five minutes and as many cars later, no one has. My cheeks hurt, and I can feel my hairline starting to sweat. Aren’t Midwesterners supposed to be really nice and trusting? Did I just pick the wrong spot, some stretch of state highway only traversed by dicks and the legally blind? I know there’s a third possibility, but I really don’t want to believe it’s that. So when Tim offers to take over, I say no, both out of stubborn pride and because I don’t want to see a car stop for him that wouldn’t have stopped for me.
“Let me stand with you, at least,” he says and steps out into the blinding sun before I can stop him. Before we left the campsite, he changed into one of Denny’s clean(ish) oversize T-shirts, a silkscreen of Obama’s face with BARACK THE VOTE! in big red block letters. With the khakis and the loafers, it makes him look like an overeager canvasser who doesn’t realize his guy already won.
“I’m really okay,” I say, shielding my eyes from the glare.
“I need some air,” he says. “And besides, I want to learn from the master. In case I ever need to do this someday.”
“Yeah, I can really picture you with a Tommy Hilfiger hobo bindle.”
“You know,” Tim says, bending slightly to whisper in my ear, “I’m not as clean-cut as you think I am.”
“Is that right?” I put my hands on my hips and look at him expectantly.
“I’ll have you know that after junior semiformal I drank three rum and Cokes and ended up sleeping in a stranger’s hammock.”
I grin in spite of myself. “Hey!” I yell to a passing pickup truck, pointing at Tim. “Public enemy number one right here!” The driver, an elderly man wearing a baseball cap, frowns in confusion.
“Is that your sales pitch?” Tim laughs. “No wonder you can’t get anyone to stop.”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe you should show a little leg, like in It Happened One Night.”
“What happened one night?”
“It’s just this movie,” he says, smiling. “It’s old. This reporter and this socialite end up traveling together and—”
“He’s a raging misogynist?”
“What? No! He’s Clark Gable.”
“But he makes her pimp herself out to stop a car?”
“He doesn’t make her. It’s her idea.”
“Yeah.” I shake my head, looking back out at the empty highway. “That’s not my style.”
“I know! I was kidding. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”
I cross my arms and level my eyes at him. The sweat’s slowly crawling down the back of my neck now. “Why don’t you show some skin?”
Tim raises his eyebrows. “What?”
“Show off that a cappella body. And get some color so you look less like end-of-life MJ.”
“MJ?” he asks.
“Michael Jackson,” I clarify. “Please tell me you’ve heard of him.”
Tim puts his hand in his pockets and looks down at the ground, and I’m about to really lay into him when he executes a perfect moonwalk, his face suddenly all kinds of smug. In response, I launch into the “Thriller” dance, which Cass and I taught ourselves the summer MJ died, when Denny was a newborn and all Mom wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch tribute concerts on TV.
Neither of us notice the white SUV pulling up alongside Goldie until it stops a few feet away and a short-hai
red, middle-aged woman with wraparound sunglasses and aggressive highlights peers out from her window.
“Car trouble, or y’all having a dance-off?” she asks with a friendly smile.
“Oh!” I wipe the damp hair off my face and try to smile through my humiliation. “A little of both.”
“We were driving our brother and sisters to school when we ran out of gas,” Tim jumps in, his dimple in full effect. “My mom told me it was low, but I thought we could make it. We’ve been stalled here for over an hour now, and we’re really late.” He could have more conviction in the delivery, but I have to hand it to him: His body language is great. He’s leaning a little against her car, like he’s so exhausted he can barely stand, even though he’s wisely keeping a nonthreatening distance at the same time. I try to look pained, like the thought of missing school is unspeakably awful, when the truth is that I haven’t thought twice about it since I made that U-turn Wednesday morning.
“Oh, honey, nobody’s stopped?” the woman asks. Her voice has a slight drawl to it, which for some reason makes me think of pie. It’s probably all those cooking shows. “Did you call your mom?”
“Uh . . .” Tim looks at me, and I feel a pang of shame at not having talked to my real mom yet. “We left her a few messages,” I improvise, “but she had a big meeting this morning, so she probably hasn’t checked. Anyway, I called school, and they know and we’re all fine but . . .” I give Tim a look, and he picks up right where I left off, like we’ve been practicing this grift for years.
“If you could let us siphon some of your gas, we have our own pump, and we’d be happy to pay you for it,” he says. “We only need a gallon or two to get us there, and then we can figure it out, call a tow or something.”
I look hopefully into our reflection in her sunglasses, holding my breath.
“Well, no,” the woman says. “I will not take your money.” I feel Tim exhale at the same time I do. “And I will not give you a gallon and then just leave y’all to fend for yourselves. I just filled up, so you take what you need.”
“Are you sure we can’t give you a few dollars?” I ask.
“Please,” she says. “If you were my kids I’d want someone to do this for them, so consider it a gift.” She raises an eyebrow. “And listen to your mother next time!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tim says and jogs over to Goldie to get the pump. He’s the only one who knows how to work it, so I fall back and watch as he makes charming chitchat with the woman while he fills up our two-and-a-half-gallon container. When it’s full, I see her gesticulate out the window, and he comes back over with a shocked smile on his face.
“She says she won’t leave until I fill up at least two more times,” he says, pouring the gas into Goldie’s tank. I grin into my fists in the shadow of the rear bumper.
Our success puts me in such a good mood that on the way to Oklahoma City I try to make surviving for the next few days into a fun game, more like Extreme Cheapskates than Lord of the Flies. “Each of us has to come up with our own way to score free food or goods,” I say, shouting a little over Goldie’s now constant clanging. “The only ground rules are no stealing—if it has value, it has to be given to you willingly—and no straight-up begging for money.” I have nothing against panhandlers—hey, you do what you gotta do—but I want to save that as a last resort.
To my surprise, Leah volunteers to go first, citing the mall as her target. “I can do way better than leftovers,” she says confidently.
Malls are a goldmine for scavengers, a glittering oasis full of free samples, public restrooms that actually get cleaned on the regular, and dressing rooms where you can change clothes in private. Picking through Cass’s and my luggage (which is really just a garbage bag stuffed haphazardly with wrinkled clothes), Leah finds a gray T-shirt she deems “not horrible” and a pair of dark jeans that ride loosely on her hips. (She seems very excited about the brand, which is apparently high-end, and I don’t want to burst her bubble by telling her I got them for $20 at Marshalls’ on-fire sale.) We put it all in Cass’s backpack along with dry underwear and a clean shirt for Denny and walk through the automatic doors into the blast of Cinnabon-scented air conditioning and streams of midday shoppers.
We head straight for the bathrooms, and while Tim helps Denny de-lake himself in the men’s room, Cass, Leah, and I take over a bank of sinks in the ladies’ and start scrubbing our faces, arms, and any other exposed skin we can reach. I show Leah how to put a blob of dispenser soap on a paper towel and rub it under her arms for “deodorant” (Devereaux rule #7: Be prepared to improvise), and she helps me restore some bounce to my curls with an application of soapy water and a few minutes under the hand dryer.
“If there’s a Sephora, we can even do our makeup!” Leah says enthusiastically, and Cass retreats into a stall, either to administer a shot or just to hide. Much to Leah’s disappointment, there is no Sephora, but there is a Bath & Body Works, and she’s able to find a pot of clear lip gloss with a TRY ME! sticker that she insists on applying to both my lips and eyelids. “Trust me, you look really pretty,” she says, and when I turn to Tim to crack a joke, I catch him looking at me in a way that makes my stomach flip.
Leah leads us to the food court—your typical brightly lit, abundantly littered square of fragrant chaos—and starts to tentatively case the joint, pretending to look for a table. I see her pass by perfectly good half-full sleeves of fries and lonely, untouched broccoli spears left on greasy Chinese-food trays, and it’s all I can do not to jump in and show her the ropes. Finally, she homes in on a half-eaten burger. She stands over it, looking around nervously, combing her hair with her fingers, before finally snatching the tray. Even though it’s not what I would have chosen (I try to pick things that haven’t touched anyone’s mouth if possible—stuff you eat with a fork), I’m weirdly proud of her. But then, instead of coming back over to us, Leah makes a beeline for the Burger King register and starts talking animatedly to the cashier. Almost instantly, she’s holding a tray with a brand-new, uneaten burger and a side of large fries.
“Ta-da!” she says, smiling broadly even though her hands are visibly shaking.
“What did you say?” I ask, plucking a golden, still-grease-hot fry from the top of the pile. The taste of warm, fatty food after thirty-six hours of dry crackers is positively transcendent.
“I said I found a hair in it,” she says with an innocent shrug.
“So you lied,” Tim says.
“That’s not a rule!” Leah protests. “Right, Michelle?” She hands the burger to Denny, who takes a bite much larger than he can chew.
“It’s not a rule,” I say, cramming another fry in my mouth and swallowing it nearly whole. “If it means the difference between starving and eating, it’s allowed. Plus, it’s Burger King, not a mom-and-pop shop. They can swing a freebie.”
“If you say so, coach,” Tim says with a little smile.
Leah’s con is quickly forgotten as we pass the tray around, demolishing the meal in what seems like seconds. Only Cass doesn’t eat much, claiming she feels sick. But somehow the rest of us are all even hungrier after getting some real food in our stomachs, so Leah repeats her trick at Wok ’n’ Roll with a plate of General Tso’s chicken.
“You have officially earned your scout badge,” I say, and she does a little curtsy.
It’s after school hours by the time we tear ourselves away from the buffet, and as we pass a Chuck E. Cheese’s on our way to the exit, Denny spots a bunch of balloons inside.
“My turn, please?” he begs. “Max has an idea.”
“We’ll never see him again,” I joke as he sprints into the noisy restaurant.
“On the bright side, maybe Max will fall in the ball pit,” Tim says, and we high-five.
But the meatball comes through, dashing out ten minutes later with a cupcake clenched in one hand and a slice of pepperoni pizza in the other.
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“Hey,” I say gently, kneeling down to meet his eyes, giving him a reassuring squeeze. “Did you take that stuff off someone’s table?”
“Nope,” he grins. “There was a birthday party, so I just sat down and someone gave me food.”
I give him a big, wet kiss on the forehead. “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not a genius,” I say, and he takes a victorious lick of blue frosting. He hands the pizza to Cass.
“I know it’s your favorite,” he says.
“Thanks, buddy.” She takes a small bite from the end but grimaces a little as she swallows. I hope she doesn’t have a stomach bug or something. If Goldie gets vomited in, we’ll have to spend my last $61 at the car wash. That, or set her on fire and walk away in slow motion like cool action-movie heroes. Right now I could go either way.
• • •
“So what’s your game?” I ask Tim as we get back on the highway heading toward the little top hat of Texas.
“I’m still fine-tuning,” he says, rubbing his chin with one hand. “But I had to go last because I didn’t want to make you guys look bad.”
“Trash talk, okay, I see how it is,” I laugh. “Bring it. Next city we stop in, it’ll be you and me, head-to-head, winner take all.”
“What do I win?” Tim asks. “A car that actually runs?”
“Go ahead, keep talking,” I say, batting my glossy lids. “You’re digging your own grave.”
We score another full tank of gas between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, split between three Good Samaritans who stop in quick succession, no dancing required. After watching Tim do it the first time, I learn to do the siphoning myself. It gives me a cheap thrill to add to my list of self-sufficiency skills, and I want to show Cass and Leah that you don’t need a man to do the dirty work for you. There are a lot of ways I don’t want to turn out like my mom, but I have to give her credit for teaching me how to survive on my own. Just as many nights as she locked herself in her bedroom with a bottle of wine, she was down under the sink perched on her bare toes, banging away at a leaky pipe with some dog-eared how-to book open on the floor next to her. She figured it out because she had to, because she didn’t have anyone else who would help voluntarily, and because she couldn’t afford to pay anyone. And that’s how she taught me to live.
