Going Places

by Kathryn Berla

  “Exactly!” It was such a relief to hear someone other than me put it into words. I hiked myself back on the seat of the bike and spun the pedals backwards.

  “So what’s wrong with Pirkle?” Bounce. Bounce.

  “Nothing. I mean, I can’t talk about it.”

  “I get it. Client confidentiality. Saw this show on TV where the lawyer’s in bed with a stranger, and he reveals something about his client that leads to a whole thing that eventually gets him killed.”

  “Yeah, something like that. Only not quite as dramatic.” I steered my bike in a tight circle as though it was a racehorse chomping at the bit to get out of the gate. “Guess I’d better go,” I said for the second time.

  “Wait. How about a game of HORSE before you leave, Wheeler?”

  Now, I wasn’t a kid who was raised with a manly influence, although my mother did her best. Dad was definitely a man’s man, but he was gone so much, and then he left us so soon. All those things a boy learns from his father, well . . . I missed out on most of that. Sure, I knew what HORSE was—a game that had something to do with basketball. Even if I didn’t know, I probably could have figured it out after spending five minutes in Fritzy’s presence. But did I know the rules? Did I know the proper form for shooting a ball? Could I even make a basket one out of five times? The answer was no, no, and no.

  “I really have to get back,” I said. “I have a date tonight,” I added for a manly explanation that hopefully would appease her.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Just one game. Then we’ll throw your bike in the back of my truck and I’ll give you a ride home.”

  I knew she wasn’t purposely trying to emasculate me. Just one look in those sincere and candid eyes convinced me of that. But at that point her intent didn’t matter. I was already there.

  “You start,” she launched the ball at me, knocking the wind out of me as it made contact with my stomach.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Think, Hudson. What do I do now?

  I took a wild guess and tried to throw it in the basket. Naturally, it didn’t even come close. To give her credit, Fritzy didn’t gloat. In fact, she looked downright disappointed.

  “Okay, now me.” She’d already retrieved the ball and was holding it in her hands. She took her shot and of course swished it right through the net.

  “H,” she said glumly.

  I’m not an idiot, so I obviously knew she was ahead. I also knew H was the first letter of “horse” and either she just won it, or I did. For some reason, I thought I probably won it for missing. “Horse” didn’t seem like a title we’d be fighting over. The ball bounced right back into her capable hands, and she launched it at me again. This time I was prepared and caught it without the aid of my stomach. When she didn’t make a move after a few seconds, I started to take another shot.

  “You have to take it from where I’m standing,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t know. I walked morosely to the spot and took another shot, missing again. She intercepted the runaway ball that was heading for the street. She took her shot and made it. No surprise.

  “C’mon, you’re not trying,” she said irritably.

  Which was really humiliating because I was trying. Obviously Fritzy couldn’t imagine any guy as hopeless as me when it came to sports. Everyone should have her skill.

  The cycle repeated, with the only good thing being that I figured out the rules of the game on my own, without having to reveal my ignorance. And by that point it was almost certain I was about to become the Horse.

  “R,” I beat her to the punch that time. If I was going to be the Horse, then I might as well crown myself with the title.

  “Look, Wheeler. Plant your feet so your body doesn’t move relative to the hoop. You’re swaying all over the place.”

  She wanted competition, and I wasn’t giving it to her. She could have been playing against herself. A slow burn started inside me. This wasn’t my idea. She forced my hand by offering me the ride home. Who did she think she was, anyway? I didn’t care about her stupid game, and now she was getting under my skin and about to ruin my night with Alana. I shot and missed again. She shot and made it again.

  “S!” I almost yelled at her. I threw the last ball without even bothering to aim (what was the difference?), and it flew into the street. “I’m outta here,” I said. “Now I’m going to be late.” Fury colored my cheeks.

  “Wait, Wheeler!” she called after me. “I can give you a ride home.”

  I didn’t even turn around to acknowledge her. I was the wimpy kid running home to Mommy.

  A slow burn can turn into a raging wildfire . . .

  . . . if you’re not careful. And that’s exactly what happened.

  Mom was nice enough to go out with her friends that night. She knew I was doing something with a girl, no specific plans. I guess she figured we’d probably end up at my house at some point. Mom isn’t a hoverer, and a date for me with a girl was a big enough deal that she wanted to make everything perfect.

  But my peace of mind was destroyed by that dumb game of HORSE with Fritzy. It ate away at me all afternoon, and I was only slightly appeased by Alana’s call.

  “Is your mom home? I’ll be over in an hour,” she’d said.

  Almost exactly an hour later, Alana showed up at my door, a six-pack of assorted microbrewery beers in hand.

  “Woah!” Something I wasn’t expecting. “How’d you get those?”

  “My dad. He belongs to a beer-of-the-month club.”

  “How’d you get here?” I envisioned Alana walking the streets, hiding the six-pack under her sweater.

  “My dad dropped me off.”

  “He doesn’t care if you drink?”

  “Why would he? We travel overseas a lot, and in most countries the legal age is eighteen, which I already am. The drinking age here is a joke.” She walked past me, tired, I suppose, of standing in the doorway where it must have seemed like I was guarding the gates to the Palace of Innocence. “Want one?”

  I accepted one of the chilled bottles, wondering what Mom would think if she came home and found us drinking unsupervised. She was pretty cool, but this could be pushing the limits. I had no way of knowing since it was all new territory for me. Mom and I skipped the drinking-with-girls-in-the-house talk. Alana followed me into the kitchen where we popped open the beers and tilted the first swallows into our expectant mouths.

  “Anything interesting on TV?” she asked. “Or we could rent a movie or something.”

  “How long can you stay?” I wondered whether Bryce would be expecting her for some post-game victory celebration or a loss consolation (which is what I was really hoping for).

  “As long as I want.”

  “Bryce? Does he know you’re here?”

  “Of course. He’s cool with it. He knows we’re just friends. In fact, he’s happy I have something to do so I don’t nag him about football.”

  Somehow I didn’t want Bryce to be happy that Alana was with me, distracting herself while he attended to the macho business of football. I would have liked him to be concerned, maybe even a little threatened. It would be even better if Alana had lied to him about where she was because she knew he couldn’t handle the competition. But no. He was happy.

  She sprawled out on the sofa and continued working on her beer. I sat in the arm chair next to her. The cold bottle in my hand felt good on that hot summer night.

  “Hudson,” she said after a gulp. “Do you ever feel suffocated in this town? I mean, you’ve spent your whole life here, right?”

  The truth was, I did feel suffocated. Often. But I also felt a sense of loyalty. Alana traveled around from town to town, country to country. What could she know about belonging to a community with all its faults, but also its rewards? What could she know about making peace with a pre-school crybaby like Gus Ligety, growing u
p with him, accepting the things about him that drove other people crazy because you know how they all began? She couldn’t possibly know what loyal friends could be made out of people who ate paste with you in Kindergarten, sniffed scented markers with you in second grade, and dug holes with you in the playground at recess. She couldn’t know how a school could rally around a ten-year-old boy to make him feel not so alone when the terrible news came that his father had been killed in action on the battlefield.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But it’s a good place to grow up.”

  “Yeah, maybe to grow up.” She was flat on her back now, and her braless shape was perfectly visible. A glossy sheen of sweat covered her arms and chest just below her neck. I could see a dewdrop of perspiration in that dip just above her lip. “I don’t know. I’m glad that it’s senior year and I’ll be out of here soon, though. What about you, Hudson? What have you decided about next year?”

  I finally felt comfortable enough around Alana to tell her the truth. “I’m not sure, but not college. Not for me.”

  “I kind of figured that,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I picked up on about you with the homeschool and all. I feel the same way. Life’s too short, and I want to travel and go places. Have . . . experiences.”

  “Yeah, me too. Experiences.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant since I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  She got up and walked to the kitchen and came back with two new bottles of beer, handing one to me before reclaiming her spot on the sofa.

  “Hey, Hudson, wouldn’t it be cool if we traveled together? Traveled around the world just working here and there for a few months until we made enough money to go on to the next place? Just, like . . . throwing a dart at a map of the world and going wherever it landed?”

  The nearness of her beauty, the sultry night, and the cold beer in my hand . . . It all drew me into her fantasy. Her dream, not mine.

  “That would be so cool,” I said, honestly believing at that moment it was exactly what I wanted to do. That I had been planning it for, in fact, my entire life.

  “A coral atoll surrounding a blue lagoon. Fishing for your dinner and drinking coconut juice. Mangoes for breakfast every single day,” I said dreamily. I pictured Alana, bare naked, emerging from the water in slow motion; droplets clinging to her flesh, unwilling to let go until the last minute when cruel gravity forced them to fall away from her soft skin.

  She looked over at me as though someone just woke her from a dream. “Yeah, that would be nice for a little while,” she said half-heartedly. My fantasy, not hers. “But don’t you want to visit the major cities? Just feed off of the river of humanity? There’s so much to learn from others. So much to see. Wouldn’t you be excited to see all the greatest art from every culture around the world?”

  I wanted to be excited about seeing the greatest art from every culture around the world. For her sake. But the truth was, the only art I cared about at that point was my own. I wanted my art to be the greatest art.

  And then, as if reading my mind, she asked me, “Can I see your graphic novel?”

  I squirmed uncomfortably, but hopefully not visibly.

  “It’s not very far along yet,” I said. “And I have a lot of revisions to make.”

  “Please, Hudson! Don’t worry, I won’t judge it as more than a work-in-progress. I’m just curious and really excited for you.”

  Maybe it was the second beer that allowed me to show it to her. I know I’d have kept it from her otherwise. It was definitely not ready for prime time, but I brought it out from my bedroom and placed it into her hands. She held it so carefully, like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While I stared at the wall and pretended its surface was of great interest to me, she pored through each of the five pages of my so-called graphic novel. Taking much more time with each page than I knew they deserved.

  “I haven’t thought out the dialogue yet, so I just put in general ideas and notations,” I was already laying the groundwork for a defense. “And obviously, some of the drawings aren’t finished, but you get the idea.” I knew it wasn’t perfect, but the layout was great, and I had ideas for where to go with it.

  At the end of what was way too long, she set the pages down on the table beside her and looked me dead in the eye.

  “Hudson. I don’t know how to say this exactly but . . . it’s beneath you. You’re so much better than this.”

  So maybe she was right. Maybe nobody but me would be interested in that storyline. But I knew the art was good. I knew the panels were laid out effectively and creatively. It felt like a sucker punch to the gut, and I thought about the basketball I’d stopped with my stomach during the game of HORSE with Fritzy. It didn’t occur to me hers was only one opinion—at that moment, hers was the only opinion that mattered. I was ashamed.

  “Well, thanks, I guess,” I mumbled. “It needs a lot of work.”

  “I don’t mean that,” she interrupted. “It’s just that you’re a quality person, and you have so much that’s so important to say. Don’t sell yourself out by going for something commercial. Speak from your heart.”

  If I have so much to say that’s so important, what is it? What if this is all I have to say? I wondered if Alana was seeing the real Hudson or if she was just seeing a reflection of herself. A guy who would travel the world to bathe in the “river of humanity,” or whatever she called it. I was mad at myself for not having something deeper to write about. Something meaningful to other people. Something worthy of her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe that came out sounding harsh. But I mean it in the most respectful way, Hudson. I have faith in you. One day you’re going to write something that’ll make people’s souls tremble.”

  Until that happy day, only my soul was trembling, and the nagging feeling that all was not right in the world rekindled my slow burn. Alana suggested we get the dogs and go out for a walk, but I thought it unwise to show up at a client’s door unannounced with alcohol on my breath. Dogs to Alana were a symbol of stability. She was never able to have one because she never stayed in one place long enough. And as much as she shunned the boring and suffocating lifestyle of my town, it seemed to me like she made an awful big deal about dogs.

  Because I didn’t come up with a better plan fast enough, Alana decided it would be fun if we went to the football game. But instead of sitting in the bleachers and cheering like everyone else in our school, we’d climb up the hill above the stadium and sit under a tree where we could be disinterested observers, poking fun at the whole scene beneath us. Both literally and figuratively beneath us, of course. The loud, brassy squawking of the pep band confined to the far end of the bleachers. The cheerleaders jumping and bouncing around like popcorn kernels in a pan of hot oil. The wave-like roar of the crowd. The occasional angry dad’s voice rising above the roar to holler at a son, or a referee. Not for us. We were the future swimmers in the river of humanity. We had important things to do and say. My slow burn got a little warmer.

  We sipped at the last bottles of beer which we’d brought with us, warm and flat by that time but deliciously defiant at a high school football game.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Alana said, more than asked. “You can create a beautiful situation out of anything. It’s all just how you look at it.”

  I looked at the flowering vine which ran up her neck and saw the beauty in that, although the artwork was amateurish. Her rumpled hair clung damply to the back of her neck. There was beauty in that too.

  “Look, there’s Bryce!” She grabbed me by the arm, a little too hard for someone as disinterested in the spectacle below as we were supposed to be. “Look,” she pointed to the sideline. “I think he’s going to play now, right?”

  Although she knew nothing about football, I suppose she knew Bryce well enough to decipher his body posture even from that distance. She could read his pent-up anticipation as he prepared to go
in.

  “Yeah. Change of possession,” I said as indifferently as I could. I downed the last gulp of my beer. “How long do you want to stay?” I asked. “We could go downtown and walk around or something.”

  “No, let’s stay a little bit longer. It’ll be funny to see Bryce play.”

  I didn’t know why it would be funny, but she was determined to stay. At least for a while. I still clung naïvely to the belief she saw us as superior somehow to everyone on the field and in the bleachers. That we knew something they didn’t. That we shared an important secret.

  I stared blankly at the field below. A giant pool of green, lit to daylight proportions by a panel of powerful lights. Like toy soldiers, the players took up their positions. The crowd grew quiet. The snap went to Bryce. He surveyed the field, spotted his opening, and ran for the touchdown. And then all Hell broke loose. The roar of the crowd reached dynamic proportions impossible for me to dismiss without some kind of comment, which I was working on.

  “Did you see that?” Alana squealed with delight. “Bryce just scored a touchdown. Right?” In spite of herself and her self-declared antagonism towards the game of football, she broke out in the widest smile I’d personally seen on her pretty face. “Right?” She turned to me for confirmation.

  “Yup, he sure did.” I didn’t want to sound petty and it wasn’t the time for sarcasm.

  “We’re winning, right?”

  “Yup,” I said again, feeling a little foolish I had nothing better to say. Nothing witty. Nothing insightful. Nothing that could bring us back to the place we’d been just minutes before. Just yup.

  We’re winning, she had said. Us. Our school. Our team. It wasn’t us versus all of them down in the bowl anymore. It was us versus those in the opposing bleachers.

  I felt my slow burn rise. The fire spread through my belly. I didn’t want to be the outsider looking in. I knew I wasn’t going to be the star quarterback in life or anything approaching that. But I wanted to be able to handle myself. Feel comfortable with the physical part of my being. Learn some rules. Be a regular guy. Light up the face of a girl like Alana.