by Wendy Wunder
“They’re looking for us,” Zoe says and then pets her dead squirrel.
I try not to look at the TV, but I listen to the reporter say that we may or may not be armed with a Taser gun.
“We may?” I angrily whisper to Zoe through clenched teeth.
She lifts her hand up from beneath the table to show me she’s holding an electric razor-shaped device. She smiles and whispers, “Meet Tasery.”
“Zoe!” I say.
“Did you take that from Officer Franz?”
Zoe nods a little guilty child nod.
“Did you USE it on Officer Franz?”
“Of course not,” she says, but she’s not looking me in the eye.
“Oh jeez.” I start to feel that shaky, sweaty panicky feeling you get right before you have diarrhea. “Are you serious?” I am too flustered to figure out our next move. I know truckers are finely in tune with AMBER Alerts, though, and they take them very seriously. Our first step is to sneak out of this diner.
The waitress turns her back for a second to make a vanilla shake at the counter, so Zoe and I quietly dine-and-dash. The only exit is through the gift shop, so we sneak back into Marge’s domain, where she is watching the same channel and studying our photographs. Zoe slams a drinking helmet on my head as a disguise. It’s a plastic hat with two beer-can-shaped holders connected to a straw on the sides. She puts a bright orange hunting cap on herself, and we dash out the door with Squirrely.
“Hurry!” Zoe says as we run across the gravel parking lot.
Adrenaline takes over, and I run fleetly without feeling my limbs. We jump into the car and, with Zoe driving, get back on Route 80, until we notice the flashing AMBER Alert signs lining the highway on both sides.
“Time for the blue roads,” Zoe says. She veers off at a random exit, looks to the sky, and seems to be trying to follow an enormous black storm cloud moving westward in the wind.
BELIEF
I can’t tell if Zoe is paranoid or cautious, but she keeps looking behind us, as if we’re being followed.
“I feel like we saw that Honda CRV in the Bronx,” she says.
“I’m sure there are a lot of Honda CRVs in the Bronx. Why do you think it’s that one?”
“My dear, who’s had some run-ins with the law? You or me?”
“Is it run-ins or runs-in?”
“Who’s had some runs-in with the law?”
“Okay, you,” I say. If you count getting caught by a cop fooling around with Jimmy Russo in the closet of the Municipal Building during her shift at Safe Ride a “run-in.” Safe Ride was cancelled for good after that, in the interest of safe sex.
Zoe puts on some fingerless leather gloves and switches to high gear. “I can smell a pig from a mile away,” she says.
“I don’t like calling them ‘pigs,’” I say. “They’re heroes, actually. They are like your mom. They have to treat everyone with respect and dignity. They learn that. The good ones. The good ones are not too quick to judge people.” I could see Danny as a cop one day, I think. He has the heart for it.
“Oh my god, you are so naïve. There are bad cops.”
“And there are good cops.”
“Well, good or bad, we have to ditch this one,” she says, taking some hairpin turns through the woods at sixty miles per hour and on two wheels.
I turn around and try to find who she thinks is following us, but I don’t see any headlights. “What color is the car?” I ask her.
“White,” she says. “He’s about a quarter mile behind us. Ask Squirrely. He knows, right, Squirrely?”
She has strapped Squirrely into the backseat with a seatbelt and adorned him with Officer Franz’s aviators.
She continues driving, somehow keeping the rain cloud in her line of vision above her, while keeping an eye in the rearview. She hasn’t looked straight ahead in five miles.
“Zo,” I say. “Zoe, no one’s back there.”
“Okay,” she says with a breath. “We lost them. We need to hide, though, be more careful,” she says, downshifting. She turns left into a Walmart parking lot. “No one will find us here. We’ll blend.”
The cloud that she seems to be chasing is building on top of itself into a towering thunderhead that sits on top of Walmart like a hat.
It’s three in the morning, and people are lined up around the store in pop tents in what looks like a very narrow refugee camp.
I look through the passenger window, mouth agape. “What the . . . ?”
“Welcome to Black Friday, my sweet,” Zoe says.
“What are we doing here? You hate Walmart,” I say.
“Well, it’s a safe place to spend the night, and we should probably get some clean clothes.”
I don’t say a thing. I just watch the happy campers walk back and forth sharing coupons with one another.
“Go back to sleep,” says Zoe. “They don’t open the doors for another hour or two.”
It seems like only two minutes, though, before Zoe wakes me up. I was dreaming about Danny, I think. “Come on! It’s time,” she says, poking me. We scramble out of the car, and Zoe drags me toward the door.
“Shouldn’t we wait until the end of the line? I’ve heard of deaths by stampede. This many people could definitely crush us.”
“No! I want to be in the thick of it.”
We squish our bodies around everyone and worm our way close to the front. When I look beneath an armpit in front of me, I see a black-and-white poster taped haphazardly to the glass door entrance next to the store hours. It’s our pictures! Mine and Zoe’s. The split screen of photos from the AMBER Alert. It’s a terrible inkblotty resolution, though. We look like one of those Rorschach psychological tests. I stick my hand beneath the arm of the guy in front of me and point to it so that Zoe sees it and then cover my mouth in surprise.
“We’re famous,” Zoe mouths to me.
“Notorious,” I mouth back.
A blow horn sounds, and the doors open as people scream and squash themselves forward, a hungry gluttonous horde waving coupons in the air and making a wild dash for the televisions. I get smacked in the face with a flabby triceps, and Zoe catches the moment on film. I hear her winding the dial for the next shot, and I follow that sound. I can’t see her. The only thing I can see are the letters e and a because my face is squashed into the Bears jersey of the gentleman in front of me.
“Zoe!” I scream.
“Allemande left,” she yells. It is our secret move from the father-daughter Girl Scout square dance where we stood in for each other’s fathers every year. I know she wants me to snake myself around some folks and then dart out to the left down toward the cosmetics, which most people are avoiding right now. They’re all making a beeline for the electronics.
When I break free, I see Zoe grab some plaid shirts and leggings, some stiff jeans, and dry socks.
“Cool.” She smiles when she sees me. “Ladies’ room, pronto.”
She’s holding two boxes of hair dye. Honey Wheat for me and Pure Diamond for herself, a bold Marilyn Monroe platinum, which will be drastic, but it might look good with her turquoise eyes.
“We’re dyeing our hair?”
“You saw the poster. If we want to be on the lam, we need disguises. It’ll be fun!”
Zoe works some magic with the plaid shirts, rigging them so they fit us perfectly and hug our figures, and we change out of the sleeping-bag coats and into some new clothes. They are scratchy and cheap, but just the fact that they are clean makes them an enormous improvement.
We wet our hair in the sinks and then start squirting in the bleach. It smells like sulfur and chlorine and makes my eyes water. Zoe, because she’s going from black to white, needs to leave hers in for at least an hour, so we sit on the radiator and wait. No one at Black Friday is going to risk missing out on saving their precious twe
nty dollars (really, that’s all they could possibly be saving) by taking a bathroom break, so we have the place to ourselves.
“What’s it like, anyway?” Zoe asks out of the blue. “AA.”
“Well . . .” I imagine myself rubbing my hands together in a sneaky scheming way. Maybe I can use AA to get her to “share” whatever happened at Ethan Drysdale’s that night and get back to normal. Maybe I can teach her some intangibles, like serenity, acceptance, wisdom. “It’s just group therapy, really. You come in, and the leader starts the Serenity Prayer. If it’s a step meeting, someone starts a discussion of a step, and then people share their stories of working that step.”
“What are steps?”
“They’re like sequential actions you take on the road to getting sober. Step one is admitting you’re powerless over your addiction. Step two is believing in God or something bigger than yourself. Step three is letting God take care of you. Step four is the hardest—taking a moral inventory of yourself. This is starting to burn,” I say, wrapping my finger in some toilet paper and wiping around my hairline.
“Go rinse. So, do you believe in that stuff? That you are powerless and you need to trust God?”
We never really went to church, so AA is the closest thing I had to a religion. And secretly, I do like it. All you have to do at AA is: Come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. That’s it.
You don’t have to believe that someone died and came back to life. You don’t have to believe that you’re God’s chosen people, or that women should hide their hair, or that some guy found a golden book that told him to go west and polygamize.
You don’t have to eat God’s body or drink his blood. You don’t even have to call him God. And you don’t have to call it him. You call it a higher power. And you can imagine it any way you want. You can imagine your higher power as a golden pulsating egg lying on a patch of soft grass. Or you can imagine it as a supermodel. Or Scooby-Doo. Or a giant lake—my lake—into which you pour all your troubles. Your desire to drink, your hurt feelings, your sense of injustice, your unrequited loves, your epic failures, your bad hair, your big butt, your ego. You throw it all in there, maybe tie it to a rock first, and then imagine it splashing to the bottom with a satisfying kerplunk. You let your higher power worry about all that stuff. And then you get on with your day.
Because this day is all that you have.
“It makes living easier,” I tell her.
“Isn’t it more like giving up, though? Don’t you need to take charge of your life and not surrender it to God?”
“It’s the only religion I’ve ever known.”
“Yeah, but it’s for sick people, and you’re not sick. Your dad is sick, right? And you need to tell yourself that every time you talk to him, so he doesn’t hurt you. You need to pretend you wrote SICK across his forehead with a Sharpie, okay?”
She’s right. His words sink like hooks into my flesh, and I need to make sure not to let them become who I am. But I’ve thought about this before, and have a hard time coming up with a single person whose forehead deserves to be labeled HEALTHY.
“Who has HEALTHY written across their forehead?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she says after a minute. “But I probably wouldn’t trust them either.”
“Right. Everyone’s a little messed up.”
I check a lock of her hair, and it’s a yellowish white. “You have a little to go,” I tell her.
Just then, Zoe seems to hear something and dashes for a stall.
“What?” I ask her just as she panics and sticks her head in the toilet.
“Zoe! What are you doing?”
She lifts her head out, flips it back, and wrings it out, all without making a sound. I’m guessing that’s why she didn’t turn on the sink, and then she sneaks to the bathroom door and holds her finger up to her lips. “Shhh,” she whispers. “They’re out there.”
“Who?”
“The fuzz,” Zoe says, and then points to a security camera that’s been eyeing us this entire time.
“What do we do?” I whisper.
“Run!” she says as she bursts the door open, holding the Taser in front of her with outstretched arms like a Charlie’s Angel.
I run behind her with my head down so as not to get caught in the potential cross fire or any more security cameras.
Zoe grabs a few more things from the shelves with her free hand as she runs, and then says, “Catch!” as she throws two heavy rolls of nickels to a cashier named Ryan. Then we sprint out the doors headed for the LeMans. When we get there, panting, I realize no one is chasing us.
Zoe cackles.
“Zo. What was that?”
“You should have seen your face,” she laughs. “It was just a little make-believe. Wasn’t it fun? Here, put some conditioner on your hair or you will be a ball of frizz.” She tosses me the tube that came with the hair dye, and then dumps the rest of her booty on the hood of the car. A red slouch hat, some scissors, Cheetos, some trail mix, and mud flaps with silhouettes of silver naked girls on them.
Zoe combs out her own hair, uses the conditioner, and then begins cutting it with some barber shears she stole from cosmetics. She cuts it quickly into a cute, asymmetrical number and then dries it with a towel from the backseat. The whitish color looks great. Her bangs sweep expertly over one eye. She looks like an impish superhero.
I look in the side-view mirror of the LeMans. Honey Wheat, I have to say, does nothing for my complexion. I have reddish highlights and should have gone red. “Um, can you throw me that hat?” I ask Zoe.
“It looks great. Sort of. You can fix it when you get home,” she says, primping it a little.
My hands are still shaking as I squeeze another cold glob of conditioner onto the ends of my hair. “That wasn’t funny, Zoe.” She knows getting busted at anything is scarier to me than almost anything else. It was a weird friendship moment where for one of the first times ever we are not on the same wavelength. “That was not funny at all.”
“Oh, calm down, Hanns. Reality gets a little sad and boring sometimes. When things get like that, you have to use your imagination. A little make-believe goes a long way. People forget that as they get old. The power of pretending.”
“Um. Yeah,” I tell her, using my own power of pretending to convince myself that wasn’t a little weird. “But you scared me. Let me in on the joke next time,” I tell her. “We’re in this together. “
“Okay, Hannah Banana,” she says, grabbing me around the shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
GOD
While Zoe is pimping our vehicle with the mud flaps, I notice that Squirrely is gone. His log sits empty and abandoned in the hatchback, and his chestnut has rolled all the way into the back corner of the car.
“Where’s Squirrely?” I ask Zoe as we climb into the car.
“I set him free while you were asleep.”
“Where?”
“I just pulled up to some woods, put his log down on the ground, and let him hop away.”
“Zoe, he has no organs,” I say.
“Well, he didn’t need them. Hurry up, there’s a tornado watch near Toledo.” Zoe had apparently gotten a five-finger discount on an old transistor radio that reported the weather in a robot voice transmitted by local weather stations. It made scratchy static sounds as she turned the dial and held it up close to her ear. My dad always had one in the kitchen. He called it Charlie and found it more reliable than all the fancy Doppler radar computers at the TV station. He always listened to Charlie before he headed out to work.
“So we’re storm chasing now?”
“Unless you have something you want to see.”
“I would like to see you fall asleep. I’ll drive. You sleep,” I say, and I wonder what I would like to see on this trip. Maybe Mount Rushmore. Chicago? The Mall of Am
erica? The Grand Canyon?
School doesn’t teach geography or U.S. history anymore, so I learned most of it from American Girl doll catalogs. We could never afford to get an actual doll, but Zoe and I read the catalogs and the books from the library, and we would categorize the rich girls we met according to which doll we thought they might have. She’s a Molly. That one’s Samantha. The true iconoclasts had Kaya dolls, which is the one we both coveted the most. She came with a pet wolf.
What I really want to see right now is Danny Spinelli. I try to push that out of my mind. How I wanted to be absorbed into his body. And I think that’s probably not healthy.
“Is it healthy to want to be absorbed into his body?”
“That’s what an orgasm feels like.”
“WHAT?”
“Well, for a split second before it happens there’s this sense of nothingness. Like you and he have melded and become just light. Just energy. You become Nothing for a split second. Or maybe you die or become God. Because when everything comes rushing back, like a prolonged luxurious sneeze throughout your entire body, that’s what you say.”
“What?”
“Oh my god. That’s what most people say anyway. So maybe God is orgasm.”
“You could probably get arrested for saying that in this part of the country.”
“Churchy people know that. Why do you think they have so many kids? You’re the only one who doesn’t know that. Yet, anyway. Have you ever?”
“What?”
“Met God.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You would know if you did.”
“Then, no.”
“I want to make sure that you’ve got that in place before I go.”
