“May we help you?”
Walt’s voice brings me back to the now. I turn in my seat, flick his cap up, and kiss him on the cheek. “Walt, my God, you are a thing of beauty.”
“Hey, hey, I’m Walt!”
“Mim, what’s going on?” says Beck.
“Nothing, it’s just—we need to make one last detour.”
Beck’s eyes are searching, as if he’s inside my head, walking around with a flashlight, inspecting a certain dusty corner. Oh, says tiny-Beck-in-my-head, I see. Yes, we really should take care of that.
“Where to?” he whispers, half smiling like he does.
I point back to the highway. “Next exit.”
“Wooooooooster,” says Walt between chugs of Dew.
(Gummies five through nine, down.) “Not Wooster, buddy. Ashland.”
34
Ashland Inn
BY THE TIME we pull into Ashland, the sun is long gone. Beck suggests parking somewhere and sleeping in the back of the truck again, to which Walt says, “Uncle Phil hurts my bones,” to which Beck smiles, to which a thousand metaphysical Mims do a flash dance to the tune of “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang.
Walt offers to pay for a hotel; after some discussion, Beck and I agree to use a small amount of Walt’s father-money and find the cheapest motel available.
“How does thirty-three bucks sound?” asks Beck, returning from the front office of a dingy one-story called Ashland Inn.
“Bedbuggy?” I say, climbing out of the truck. “Sketchy? Murdery?”
Beck grabs his duffel and Walt’s suitcase. “So, perfect, in other words.”
“Very other words.” I sling my JanSport over my shoulder and decide to keep quiet regarding my mom’s theory on motels, and their subsequent place of prominence in my heart. It’s best if Beck just thinks I’m a typical girl in this regard. The regard of me assuming motels are grime pits, full of vermin and sperm bunnies.
Inside, the room is cheap and small, even by cheap, small motel standards: two twin beds, one nightstand, one love seat, one tiny dresser with one TV. The carpets, a grayish maroon, have what I hope to God are coffee stains scattered every few feet. Looking up, I notice the ceiling is stained, too, which seems an interesting achievement.
Beck pokes his head in the bathroom and whistles low. Joining him in the bathroom door, the first thing I notice is the toilet: any lower, and it would be in the floor. The sink looks more like a porcelain salad bowl, barely deep enough to fit your hands under the faucet. But worst of all is the shower. If the outer room is small, the bathroom is comically small. And if the bathroom is comically small, the shower is oompa-loompally small.
“That could be problematic,” says Beck.
“Problematic?” I raise an eyebrow. “For a hobbit, maybe. Impossible for us. That showerhead can’t be more than four feet off the ground.”
He smiles at me, tilts his head, and there it goes—the jellification of my heart, the sinking of my brain into my shoes.
“I didn’t peg you for a Middle-earth gal, Mim.”
“Oh, I’ve got game.”
“So it would seem,” he says, looking back at the shower. “Well. It’s gonna take more than a Ringwraith to keep me outta that shower tonight. I’ll just have to make it work.” He joins Walt by the television, leaving me to imagine Beck Van Buren “making it work.” In a shower. Showering. With the . . . water, and all the soap, and . . .
Pull it together, Malone.
We spend the next fifteen minutes watching Walt crack up at an old episode of I Love Lucy. Beck’s phone rings, and while he goes outside to take the call, I decide to brave the shower from the Shire.
It’s far from ideal, which is to say I have to hunch over the entire time, and the water isn’t quite as hot as I’d like, but it’s a shower, and I’m grateful. Afterward, I pull out the last of my clean clothes, including Mom’s old Zeppelin tee. Slipping into my stained jeans, I peer into the foggy mirror and do what I can for my hair. After a few tussles it’s not half-bad. The cut really took, it seems. More rakish than mod, maybe, but still . . . not bad. I give myself a once-over.
Things could be better: the jaw, the nose, the cheekbone, still too Picasso.
Things could be worse: people pay millions for Picasso.
Millions, Mim. You’re worth millions.
By the time I open the bathroom door, I don’t feel like complete shit, which is really saying something. “Have you guys thought about din—”
On the television, Lucy is stomping grapes at a vineyard, but no one is watching. The room is empty.
I cross the carpet in my bare feet (avoiding stains like landmines), and peer through the curtains. The truck is gone. Beck and Walt are gone. They’re gone. I let the curtains fall back in place. They’re gone. It’s a heavy weight—I feel it in my shoulders first, sinking like an anchor into the depths of Mim. They’re gone. My elbows, heavy. My hands and hips, heavy. My thighs, my knees, my feet, heavy, heavy, heavy. They’re gone. I am sinking into myself, falling to the bottom of this immense heaviness. It’s an ocean. They’re—
The door opens.
“Hey, hey.”
Walt enters, carrying a plastic bag. Beck is right behind him, holding a plastic bag of his own. Walt sits on the bed, pulls out some Combos and a Mountain Dew, and laughs as Lucy picks a fight with another lady in the grape vat.
“We got hungry,” says Beck, digging around in his bag. “Went out for gas station dinners. Hope you like beef jer—” He stops when he looks up. His face changes, and while I’ve learned most of his looks, this one is new. “You look . . . nice, Mim.”
The smile takes root in my stomach; it grows, weaving up through my chest and arms, shoulders and neck, before blooming in my face. I locate the only word between what I want to say and what I should say. “Thanks.”
After our gas station dinners, Beck decides to take a shower (gulp), and Walt promptly falls asleep. I turn down the volume on the TV and drop on the couch as another episode of I Love Lucy begins. Eventually, Beck emerges from the bathroom, wearing a clean gray V-neck and jeans. His hair is wet, and while I try not to picture him in that tiny shower, all making-it-work and whatnot, I just can’t help myself.
“I don’t watch this show very often,” says Beck, “but chick seems to be quite the troublemaker.” Lucy is currently stuffing pieces of chocolate down her shirt. “I don’t really get it.”
“It’s . . . sexy slapstick?”
Beck looks back at the screen, baffled. Lucy has her mouth full of chocolates now, like a chipmunk preparing for winter.
A chocolate chipmunk.
“That’s supposed to be sexy?” says Beck, plugging his cell phone in by the nightstand.
“Yeah, I don’t get it either. I guess back in the fifties, most girls were busy, you know, balancing books on their heads and baking pies. Knees were sexy back then, too, I think.”
“Knees?”
I nod. “And Lucy showed a lot . . . of knee.”
Beck crosses the room, reaches for the light switch. “You need this?”
I shake my head, yawn, and curl my legs up on the couch. In this new darkness, Beck sits next to me, and together we watch the lost art of Lucille Ball while I try my best not to jump Beck’s bones.
“You ever notice how motel rooms all smell the same?” he says.
I swear he and my mom would be friends.
“Moth’s shoe,” I say.
“What?”
“My mom, when she was younger, used to hitchhike through Europe.”
“Wow, really?”
“She’s British.”
“Oh.”
“Oh-nothing. It’s still awesome.”
“Right. I mean, sure. It is.”
“Anyway, she stayed in a bunch of hostels and said they all smelled the same. Like a moth?
??s shoe.”
Beck sniffs the air. “Yep, that’s it.”
Walt’s snores are a freight train, but we’re too tired to laugh.
“Speaking of moms,” says Beck, “I told mine. On the phone. Just now—or, before, I mean.”
It takes me a second to put his sentence back together. “You told her what you’re doing? About Claire and everything?”
He nods.
“What’d she say?”
“She said—” Walt turns over in his sleep, grunting. Beck runs his hands through his wet hair, and lowers his voice. “She said I’m making a huge mistake, dropping out of school. Said I should come home. She said a lot, actually. You know what she didn’t say? ‘How’s Claire?’”
His pain is visible, even in the dim light of the television. “What’re you gonna do?”
“No idea.” He looks at Walt for a second, shakes his head, turns back to the TV. “I saw her, you know.”
“Your mom? When?”
“No, not—Never mind. It’s silly.”
I stare him down, wait for him to continue. He will. I know this, and so does he. After almost a full minute, he comes through.
“I saw Claire,” he says. “Walk out of that bathroom at Jane’s Diner.”
“What?”
“Not actual Claire. I mean the kid looked nothing like her. But when she walked out of that bathroom, the look in her eyes was just . . .” Life, it seems, delivers the best punch lines only after we’ve forgotten we were part of a joke. I suddenly feel like I need to throw up. “. . . so fucking pained, you know? Crushed. By the world.”
Beck’s voice, along with the blue-lit room, dissolves, and I feel those things—I feel the weight of the world, I feel fucking pained.
I’ll scream.
I’ll tell on you.
“Mim? You okay?”
I feel his eyes on me now, trailing from my hair, down my body, lingering in places they don’t belong . . .
“Mim?”
. . . for the first time in a long time, I feel like a helpless girl. “You are beautiful, you know.”
“I’m not,” I say, I don’t know how loud.
“You’re too good,” he whispers, leaning his head closer.
“I’m not good,” I say. “I’m no good at all, Isabel.”
“Yes, Mim,” says a voice, cool like a fountain, and comforting. “You are.”
Nothing will happen.
“Mim, look at me.”
Nothing you don’t want.
“Look at me.”
I open my eyes. Or eye. And I’m sick of things the way they are, my many oddities, my limited depth perception, as if it’s not bad enough I only see half the world, but it always seems to be the wrong half.
“Mim,” whispers Beck.
And I’ve never so loved the sound of my name.
“Hi, Beck.”
His face comes into focus now, in front of a familiar stained ceiling. Somehow, I ended up on the floor, my head in his lap, his hands on the back of my neck. In his eyes, I see a look I’ve never seen, not in him, not in anyone. It’s a recipe of fierceness, fire, and loyalty.
“I knew it,” he whispers, shaking his head. “When you called him Poncho Man, I fucking knew it.”
Beck holds me like that on the floor well into the night. We don’t talk. We don’t need to. Sleep is close, and I’m okay with that. Because among the not-knowing of sleep, I’ll know Beck. At some point, he carries me to bed and lies down next to me. It isn’t weird, though maybe it should be; it isn’t wrong, though it definitely could be. I curl up next to him, put my head on his shoulder. He wraps an arm around me, and I swear we were once a single unit, a supercontinent divided millions of years ago—like my fifth-grade science project—now reunited into some kaleidoscopic New Pangaea.
“I’m Madagascar,” I say, sleepily.
“You’re what?”
“I’m Madagascar. And you’re Africa.”
He squeezes my shoulder, and—I think he gets it. I bet he does.
I AM WOKEN by the sharp edges of my brain, a thought more persistent than sleep. “Beck,” I whisper. I have no idea what time it is, or how long we’ve been asleep like this. The TV is still on. The curtains are dark. “Beck. You awake?”
I feel his breath catch in his chest as he clears his throat. “Yeah.”
For a moment, I am acutely aware of my youth, and the recklessness that comes with it. I am aware of the darkness, and of every possibility it offers. I am aware of our comfortable nearness, of his scent, of us being with. But my sharp edges are more persistent than the recklessness of youth, the possibilities of darkness, even Beck’s comfortable nearness. “I thought you left me.”
“What?”
“Earlier, when I came out of the shower. You were gone. You and Walt. I thought you left me.”
It’s quiet. Just when I’m beginning to wonder if he fell back asleep, he answers. “We wouldn’t leave you, Mim. Not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“Like—high and dry.” He clears his throat again. “At the very least, you’d get a liquid good-bye.”
And that’s when I know what this is. Or rather, what it’s not. I remember our conversation from last night, out under the stars, in the back of Uncle Phil, and I know. “This isn’t a crush, you know.” I say it with my head in his arm—I want him to physically feel my words.
“I know,” he says.
“It isn’t.”
“I know.”
Tell him, Mary.
It’s deep and real and fucking old-school. It’s a fortress of passion, a crash—a fatal collision of neurons and electrons and fibers, my circus of oddities coming together as one, imploding in a fiery blaze. It’s . . . I-don’t-know-what . . . my collection of shiny.
It’s love.
I don’t say any of this, but not because I’m afraid. Wrapped up in Beck, I might never know fear again. I don’t say it because I don’t have to. Beck sees what it is.
I feel his weight shift on the bed; he rolls sideways, toward me, his face hovering over mine. We stare at each other for a second, silent, unmoving. I drink his green eyes, shiner and all. I drink his sharp nose, his jaw covered in desert-island stubble. I drink his eyebrows, thick and just the right amount of wild.
And I sense the move before it comes.
Beck leans in, slowly, and kisses my forehead. It isn’t brief, but it’s gentle, and full of sadness and gladness and everything in between. The sensation of his stubble lingers long after his lips are gone. His breath is robust and pleasant, how I imagine a ski lodge might smell, or a late-night jazz club. And just as I’m wondering how it would smell-taste-feel to have his lips pressed against my own, to feel his weight on top of me, to forever reunite Madagascar with Africa—he whispers the answer to last night’s question.
“I’m too old for you, Mim.”
Another kiss on the forehead, lighter this time, and he’s gone. He pushes himself off the bed. In the semidarkness, I watch him step over to the couch and lie down. That’s that. Game over. My fortress of passion crumbles around me, the most ruined of ruins.
And then, with nothing but two soft words from across a stained room, Beck rebuilds it. “For now.”
35
Olfactory Lane
September 5—morning
Dear Isabel,
In my very first letter to you, I declared myself incapable of fluff. And it’s true. On a typical day, you might even say I’m unfluffable. (Oh God, will you please?) But I’m not quite myself this morning, which is to say I’m feeling spry. Peppy. Full of morning-person stuff, and yes, even a little fluff. So, taking advantage of this rare a.m. energy, I reread some of my previous letters, and would like to, hereforthwith, attach a few amendments. I hope you don’t mind. Actually . . .
> Amendment, the First—In reference to these amendments, I just said, “I hope you don’t mind.” I really don’t give a rip one way or the other. Until delivered, the letter belongs to the author. I will attach amendments, as it is my right to do so, and whether you mind or not. (Le Boom.)
Amendment, the Second—On September 1, I wrote this about pain: “. . . I know it’s the only thing between me and the most pitiful of all species—the Generics.” While it’s true that pain will keep you from becoming a Generic, I take back what I said about that particular group being “the most pitiful of all species.” Make no mistake, of all the despicable qualities available to a person, trying to be something you’re not is by far the most pitiful. (I would know.)
Amendment, the Third—On September 2, I wrote, “I don’t think a vivid imagination is all it’s cracked up to be.” I went even further, lamenting the burden of having such an imagination. I’ve thought about it, and in light of a few recent developments, would like for you to ignore everything I’ve written as it relates to imaginations. I wouldn’t trade mine for a single ounce of practicality.
Amendment, the Fourth—In my last letter, I wrote, “. . . most people are egotistical, neurotic, self-absorbed peons, insistent on wearing near-sighted glasses in a far-sighted world.” Ha-ha. How very Mim of me. Chock-full of cutting cynicism and wit, no? Well. While I hold to this general sentiment, it’s possible I’ve underrepresented a certain demographic: Good People. There are a few out there. And, okay, I promise not to go on and on about this (lest you think I’m a card-carrying member of the Generics), but if I don’t tell you about one of these Good People, my head might explode. It won’t be all, dear diary, I met this boy and he’s like, so totally hott, and now my life has, like, total value and stuff! Lol.
Instant nausea, right? Right. Still though . . .
I met a boy. And he is, like, so totally hott. And stuff. Laugh out loud.
My fetching photog. My heroically flawed Knight in Navy Nylon. My New Pangaea. His name is Beck, and he’s beautiful, intelligent, and kind. He challenges my spirit while comforting my everything else. Beck is teaching me how to be a better person, and when you find someone who inspires you like that, you hold on for dear life.