Beau, Lee, The Bomb

by Mary McKinley

  I try to redirect them to the subject of not running away.

  “Any wayssss . . . I don’t think a note is fair. I think you could just tell her you need a break and want to see the ocean.”

  “No, she’s all involved in suing everyone she can think of. Which she can’t afford to do. She’d just want me to stay. We would have a big fight. I’m just going to leave.”

  “Beau . . .”

  “Rusty, I’m not going to stay here and ruin my mom’s life. Especially when she was so cool to me when I came out.”

  “What did she do when you told her?” I’m very curious about this one.

  “Cried at first. But said she loved me just the same. She was just crying because life’s made so much harder for gay people. Which, guess what—is true.”

  “Your mom’s so cool.” I am utterly sincere. His mom is wise.

  “Yeah. Some of her designers are gay. She realizes life can go on. So, yeah. She is cool. That’s one huge reason I love her and I’m running away.”

  I am again impressed. He admits to loving his mom. Easily. I nod reflectively.

  “But now I think she’s mad and she’s going to try to make it better all by herself, and if I’m not here, it might take the wind out of her sails a little, you know? She doesn’t need to be hiring a lawyer for a million bucks just now.” He looks worn out and hollow-eyed.

  “You need to rest if you’re taking off,” I say, buying time.

  “Yeah.” He nods, exhausted. “I was going to leave tonight, but I might wait another day. My face feels like crap. I stopped taking those pain pills.”

  “Then I’m going to give you three ibuprofen, and you take a nap, and when you wake up, I will help you write a note, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll text you when I wake up.”

  When we go out of his room, Leonie hisses.

  “Why are you helping him?”

  I look at her.

  “Because I’m going to go with him.”

  I go back to my house. I have an idea. Maybe a good one.

  No one is at home; Paul is at the dojo and Mom is at the hospital. So far so good.

  I go into my room. I have a bank account, but I also have money under the mattress.

  I know; I’m not exactly one of them there Biz Kid$. I’m not making my money grow like I could because I’m sort of paranoid. But I have $1,723 in twenties and smaller, right here. I smooth them out. When I put them in an envelope, it’s so fat it looks gangsta. So I plug in my iron and press the money under a cloth till it looks more respectable. Then I unplug and put the bills back in the envelope. I get a piece of paper. I think for a minute then write:

  Dear Mom:

  Beau and I are going to go visit his uncle in San Francisco. I am taking the van because it’s an emergency, but I’m leaving you my money. I will send more ASAP, but I looked up the blue book on our van, which is $1,600 (because of its mileage), so really you are making $123.00 on the deal. Please don’t be mad, because this is really important and I will call you when we get there. I won’t pick up though because I don’t want to get yelled at. Sorry.

  Love,

  Rylee

  I look at the note. Then I add:

  I love you (both) very much.

  I stick it in the envelope with the $krilla.

  When Beau’s text came through, I was ready. I had my extra sweats and stuff packed and some food and juice and water. I got my pillow and two sleeping bags we never use and a pillow I know my mom doesn’t really like from the couch and headed over to his house.

  When I get there, Beau is already sitting on his front steps. When he sees me, he stands up and brings his stuff to the van. He looks like he feels much better. Way less puffy. I look him over. He’s got the uniform: hoodie and skinny jeans. Bubble jacket, unzipped.

  “You look better. And I like the Clash tee and them fancy fresh kicks!” He has on his new red and black checkerboard Vans.

  Beau smiles and sticks out one foot, acknowledging their awesomeness, but then returns abruptly to the business at hand. He speaks rapidly. He’s got a plan.

  “I can afford a ticket to Portland, okay? Would you take me to the bus station? I want to leave tonight. I do feel better.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Okay. I’m coming with you.”

  He looks over at me sharply. Doesn’t say anything for a while, considering. Then:

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I just gave my mom a bunch of money for the van, and we can drive down the coast. I’ve only ever been about as far south as Long Beach.”

  “You’ll mess up your grades and attendance and all. Break doesn’t start till next week.”

  “Maybe not. I’ve nearly got enough credits to graduate right now. But if I do mess up, it won’t be for long. I’ll just figure it out in community college.”

  He turns and looks at me.

  “Dude, you’d do that for me? I know how important being smart is for you.” He smiles at me affectionately.

  I’m embarrassed, as always, so I creak out, “No big deal,” in the direction of his groovy ruby shoes. I feel myself welling up.

  I am made of blubbering blubbery blubber. I nod quickly and, thank gawd, get a text.

  It’s Leonie. She’s coming over.

  She’s there almost immediately. She’s on her skateboard.

  “Good . . . I was afraid I’d miss you.” She’s out of breath. Smoker. She has a lumpy pillowcase.

  “I’m coming too.” She says it like we are going to respond, “Oh no, you aren’t.”

  We look at each other. Beau shrugs. Laughs.

  “Fine!”

  I look at her.

  “Do you have any money?”

  She digs in her pocket.

  “I’ve got thirty-seven bucks and fifty . . . eight cents. I had forty, but I got a small drip.”

  “Did you bring anything like a sleeping bag or a pillow?”

  She looks stricken.

  “Oh . . . uh-oh.”

  “Dude.” I sigh. “It’s okay.”

  Beau chimes in.

  “What’s a drip?” He’s not from here. I eyeball Leo.

  “Drip coffee. For, like, way too much—when she should be saving it for our trip!”

  Leo looks distressed again and starts to deny and defend, but Beau intervenes.

  “Never mind! Look, put your stuff in; I’ll just get you a pillow from my house.”

  When he goes in, Leonie looks at me. Like she’s filled with a huge prophesy.

  “I told him I was leaving and he better make up his mind. And I’m not coming back, either . . . unless he calls.” She nods like she thinks she’s made progress.

  I start to open my mouth to debate her, but I clamp it shut. Not the time.

  “Great. Good idea,” I manage out the side of my mouth. I put her pillowcase through the open side door of the van.

  I’m not going to spin my wheels right now trying to talk her out of this toxic teacher. But maybe if she gets away from him . . .

  “Did you tell your mom?”

  “Nah. She’ll take a while to notice.”

  I’m always sad when Leonie says things like that. Her mom doesn’t seem to be around much, and Leonie never seems to know where she is either, which must suck. Poor Leo.

  Beau comes back with a pillow and a folded comforter.

  “I thought this felt good.”

  “Ooh! Thanks! It’s squishy and perfect. She won’t mind?”

  “Nah. She can get a billion of them.”

  Leonie stows her skateboard as she gets in the van. She takes over the short middle bench behind the driver. Beau gets in shotgun.

  “Did you leave a note?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “That I loved her and say hi to Matt and I was going to go talk to my uncle like she suggested.”

  “Yeah, okay then. That pretty much says it all.”

  We adjust ourselves for d
rive time.

  “All right! California, here we come!” I start to ease out of the driveway. We go a block.

  Leonie leans forward. She is framed in the rearview mirror. She has an idea.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Leo! Why didn’t you eat before you came over?”

  “Because! There was, like, nothing in my house. Except white wine, which I hate, and some bread in the fridge. I ate the bread.”

  Beau and I look at each other. We suddenly feel very fortunate.

  “Okay. We’ll stop before we get going. Let’s go to Silver Fork before it closes.”

  We head to our little greasy spoon, which is what my mom and Paul and I call it. Mom used to bring us there for breakfast sometimes on Saturdays. It reminds me of better days. The food’s good.

  We are hardly even seated before we have a ton of food and our own pot of coffee, the cute old-school kind, pre Starbucks. We all start hamming. It’s like truck stop food, which it probably was, when Rainier was a major train track through Seattle. Now, however, there is I-5, which we will be getting on, southbound for sun, in just a little while.

  We grub in silence for a few minutes. Beau stops eating first. Leonie cleans her plate. Then his. I know she’s hungry, but she always eats like a starving dog during lunch, and the only place she ever seems to gain weight is her boobs. She is like Lara-Croft-anime-chick built. It’s amazing. It would be totally daunting to hang out with her if I wasn’t several light-years from being in the same league, but as it is . . .

  I keep eating.

  Beau leans back and watches us: Leonie in the booth on his side with me across the table. He looks around idly. I can see his eye is much better.

  “This place is like a hundred years old.”

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s always been here. We used to come here on weekends, my mom and brother and I.”

  “That’s nice, to have a place you can come back to like that. Like this.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “What’s its name again?”

  “Silver Fork.” I have toast in my mouth, which I know is rude.

  Beau thinks for a minute.

  “Wait, isn’t that the name of that town?”

  “Silver Fork?”

  “No, just ‘Fork.’ You know—where they filmed Twilight? I thought that was around here somewhere.”

  “Oh, Forks . . . well, sort of. It’s over on the coast. I used to go there for supplies with my dad before he took off. It’s really close to this little fishing village we used to stay at by the ocean, called La Push.”

  Leonie has gotten very interested.

  “You guys! We should totally go there first! I’ve never been!”

  I look at her. She wants to go to La Push?

  “You want to go to La Push?”

  “No! To Forks!” Her eyes are huge.

  “What?! No way!” Is she kidding?

  “Yes! It would be awesome!”

  “Lee, why would we want to go to wet, rainy, awful Forks?”

  “Because, Rusty! Twilight! Besides, it’s not that far.”

  Beau chimes in. He looks interested in something for the first time in a while.

  “Seriously? How far is ‘not that far’?”

  “Just over to the coast.”

  “Lee, I’m not from here. How far away is the coast?”

  Leonie looks at me helplessly. Because she has No Clue.

  “Practically two hundred miles is all!” I say.

  She turns to Beau.

  “Maybe two hundred miles is all.” She gestures dismissively.

  He looks from one to the other of us. I can see the wheels turning behind his eyes. At least the good one.

  “How long would that take?”

  Leonie replies with a vengeance.

  “Not long! Maybe an extra day.”

  “Leonie, that is so not true! It’s, like, little logging roads all through the outback. It’s through a rain forest! It takes all day just to get there. You have to go on a ferry and all kinds of crap.”

  I am 100 percent not enthused.

  But they both look at me and I can tell they want to.

  Omg. Freaking Twilight. Gross.

  Yeah, yeah, I know: I was the only one my age on the planet, in the entire space-time continuum, but I guess I’m (again) a freak of nature because I find Twilight and, in fact, all things Twi-hard completely wince-worthy. And it’s not like I don’t get how lethally hot everybody is. It’s just: I so don’t care. They all just seem to flail around, driven hot and bothered to un-death by each other.

  Especially Bella. I have never seen anyone as bothered as Bella.

  And I so can’t be. Bothered.

  But watching these two, with Beau looking all happy for the first time in a while, I sigh. I try one last feeble attempt at a veto.

  “Guys, they don’t really live there, you know. Robert Pattinson does not have a house in Forks, Washington, and for sure nobody is going to be running around without a shirt on this time of year. After we finally get there.” I crunch my crust crossly.

  They look at each other and laugh. Twilight! They are maniacal with delight.

  “It’s so not far!” Leonie says again. They high-five each other.

  I look at Leonie like a Sunday-school teacher. An insanely cranky Sunday-school teacher. “Two hundred miles is a very long way. Also, through the Olympic rain forest is about the skinniest winding roads you’re gonna find. And it’s dark by four in the afternoon. So that’s great: It’s going to take all night, and when we get there, we are going to be chased, really fast, by vampires and a pack of buck-naked werewolves. Freaking great!”

  They stop cackling and look at me with matching pained expressions.

  “Rust, just because you don’t like Twilight is no reason to make fun of it to us just because we do,” Leonie informs me with feeling. Then she stares right at me.

  “Besides, how are you even so sure that the werewolves were buck-naked? Aha! You do so like Twilight! Rusty, it’s okay! We think it’s awesome! Edward was hella awesome! They’re so cool and tragic! Omg! They were so hella doomed!”

  Okay, I knew the werewolves were only half naked. I was just dogging them. And, in my own defense, I saw a pic of Werewolf Guy online (not on purpose) just last week; it’s not like it isn’t still everywhere. I don’t exactly need to seek it out to absorb it. But I gotta say: doomed or not, nice six-pack.

  In response, I roll my eyes at them so far back in my head I remember my mom used to tell me to stop or my face would stick like that.

  We finish eating, and I calculate 20 percent for a tip and pay. Another friend on Facebook, Erica, hates people who undertip since she waits tables. She’s my mom’s friend and also studying to be a registered nurse, which is how she met Mom and friended me.

  We get in the van. I have carefully painted over “soooy” with blue fingernail polish that somewhat matches so you can only see it when it glitters. That reminds me of stupid Twilight again, because I heard stupid Edward glitters for some stupid reason, so I get all torqued off again. It’s like really bad poetry: I’m all torqued and goin’ to Forks.

  We pull out onto Rainier and get onto I-5 going north bound. I know we could get there somehow from town, but I’m going the way my dad always took us. We’ll head to Edmonds and catch the ferry to Kingston. After that we’ll drive through deep, deep forest; like forever, approximately. Then we’ll be in beautiful downtown Forks, where they better not blink or they’ll miss it, but then we can keep going to La Push, and Beau can see the Pacific Ocean in all its crazy winter glory.

  And I will too . . . again. It is wild.

  I actually start to get a little stoked. I hum while we drive. The hour or whatever it takes to get to Edmonds goes fast.

  And, of course, the ferry has just sailed by the time we get there. I get a schedule. There is one more sailing in the wee hours of the a.m.

  We settle in and wait.

  *  *  *
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  “Actually, I’m still hungry.”

  “Leonie Caitiff! No way!” I’m indignant.

  “Well, I am.”

  “Omg, Leo, seriously. We just ate, and I don’t think there were any IHOPs or anything around. Just get comfy and we’ll be on the ferry in a little while. It’s only like a half hour ride. You’ll be fine.”

  Unbelievable. If I’m not even hungry, how can she be already?

  We sit with the iPod playing through the van speakers. My van, my music. Except for Macklemore (Seattle’s fave son) and a few others, it’s all retro and emo, like David Bowie and Sting and U2, plus other groups I learned from people who were teenagers back in the day. But you’d be surprised how much you can kind of recognize from sampling.

  There is a rap on the window and it’s a cop. I look at Leo and Beau. Have we been called in already? They look back with wide eyes. I try to be calm and unroll the window.

  “What’s up? You kids okay? You’re out way past your bedtime.” His voice is accusing.

  I take a deep breath and put on my oldest, most trustworthiest voice.

  “No, it’s fine, officer. We missed the ferry, and we’re just waiting for the next one.”

  He sticks his face in the window and looks inside at Beau and Leonie, then inhales deeply.

  Ha-ha! Nothing to smell! His light is in our faces, and we squint.

  “What happened to you?” he asks Beau.

  “Fight at school, sir.”

  “Yeah? What were you fighting about?”

  “Um, I guess it was just a difference of opinion, officer,” Beau says mildly.

  “A difference of opinion, huh . . .” He shines his flashlight around the backseat again. Looks up at the sky and over at the dock. We can see him deciding.

  “Okay, listen, get on the ferry and go home. I’ll be back to check for you after it sails . . . so don’t be here. It’s past your bedtime.” Which he had just said half a minute ago.

  “We will, officer. Thank you for making sure we’re okay!” I try to fuel-inject feeling into the words with my best smile. My face practically creaks.

  He nods, scowling, then turns and walks off. He swaggers like he’s a badass.

  I look at Beau, who is as white as a sheet.