I imagine that she’s thinking about me.
I picture her finding the hoodie I left on the seat, bunching it up and using it as a pillow. The hoodie just came out of the laundry last night, so she’s smelling the detergent that fills our kitchen on laundry days, and the clean deodorant smell, and the aftershave I put on this morning. She’s breathing it in and thinking it smells amazing, thinking that it smells like me. And just like me, she can’t wait either. To spend every moment of every day together, traveling from ancient cities to tiny islands. To wake up with me in hostel rooms in unfamiliar countries. She’s imagining waking up and looking at me, still sleeping in the bed next to hers.
She’s realizing that she doesn’t want to be in a bed without me, so she pushes aside her covers and climbs under mine. The bed is so narrow that she has to press against me in order to fit, and I can feel her breasts against my chest, her leg across my legs, and in my sleep, I reach out to hold her closer. She kisses me below the ear, and then farther down my neck, and her hand travels from my chest to my stomach, and I wake up just in time to feel—
“Colby,” she calls to me from the back row.
I slam on the brakes and I hear Meg yelp and I glance back to see that Bev is not lying down but sitting up, holding her milk shake and leaning over the seat. Our eyes meet for a second. My face gets hot.
“Yeah?” I say, speeding up again.
“I need you to pull off at the next exit.”
“Why?”
“We should stop for gas,” Bev says.
“The tank’s three quarters full.”
“Still.”
“But we could go hundreds of miles on this.”
“Colby,” she says. “I need you to take the next exit.”
“All right,” I say. “Whatever you want. Can someone reach my hoodie? I left it in the back.”
Meg’s hand appears next to me, clutching the gray fabric.
“What do you need that for?” Meg asks. “It’s, like, three hundred degrees out.”
“I just don’t want to lose it,” I say, and I drape it across my lap in a way I hope looks casual, and a few miles later I steer the van off the freeway and pull into a gas station.
I get out and Bev gets out with me. I swipe the credit card, wait for the prompt, and start filling up my already-full tank.
“Are you gonna be like this the whole way?” I ask her. “We’re not going to get very far if you make us pull over every five miles.”
“I can’t go,” she says.
“Where?”
“I can’t go to Europe.”
A car next to us blasts hip-hop, the bass like thunder. I swear I didn’t hear her right.
“I got into RISD,” she says.
Her words don’t register. I don’t know what she means.
“RISD?”
“I’m going to college.”
Neither of us says anything. I turn toward the street, but I know her face by heart, and I can still feel her blue eyes watching me.
“Oh my God.”
“I didn’t think I’d get in.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You really didn’t apply anywhere?” she asks.
It’s hard to breathe. There’s the smell of gasoline and now Bev is taking out a cigarette. She promised me she quit smoking, but here she is with a cigarette and shaking hands, lighting it.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Do you want to blow us all up? And no, I didn’t.”
“Nowhere?” she asks.
“No,” I say. And everything seems unreal: this unfamiliar gas station, the hot air, her questions. “Of course I didn’t apply anywhere. I thought that if we both said, ‘Fuck college, let’s go traveling,’ we both meant we weren’t applying to college and were going traveling.”
“It wasn’t something I was planning,” she says.
“You don’t apply to school by accident.”
“I was writing that paper on Kara and one night I just looked it up and it was so easy. It only took twenty minutes.”
“Kara?”
“Kara Walker. She does those silhouettes?”
She stares at the cigarette, unlit between her fingers.
“Why?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Won’t answer me.
On the gas pump screen, numbers are frozen in time. A car waits behind us. And through the glass of the bus windows, two girls’ curious, concerned faces stare at Bev and me, waiting to know what has gone wrong.
“Do they know?”
“No. No one does. Except my parents.”
“You should tell them now,” I say. “Tell them before I get back in.”
Bev reaches toward me, touches my arm, but I jerk away and she disappears into the van. I can’t move. I have no idea what to do. I watch as the waiting driver passes us and stops at an empty pump. As he fills his tank and washes his windshield and gets back into his car and drives away. He does all of this so casually, as if everything certain about the future hasn’t just been crushed and swept away.
And then I feel myself grab the gas nozzle and yank it out of the bus, slam it back onto the pump, and hit the NO button with my fist when the screen asks me if I want a receipt. Then my hands are in my hair and my voice is choking out a long string of obscenities like I’m one of the crazy men waiting in shelter lines South of Market. And then I’m leaving, walking across and behind the station and out of sight from everyone and my sneaker kicks the curb over and over until my foot feels numb and swollen, and then I crumple into this pathetic heap on a nasty patch of weeds that smells like piss and garbage and yell the loudest yell of my life—louder than I yelled when Bev flew off her bike and landed hard on Nineteenth Avenue; louder than I yelled when I was six and got locked in a closet during a hide-and-seek game gone wrong; louder than I yelled when a group of us found ourselves up on Twin Peaks at 1:00 A.M. on a Saturday, drunk and exhausted but refusing to call it a night, and we felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.
Then I pick myself up and go back to the van.
“I can drive if you want me to,” Meg says when I open the driver’s door. I’ve never heard her voice so careful.
“Nah, I’ll do it,” I say. I turn the ignition and Melinda’s engine starts to hum, and when I get to the intersection I idle for a moment, because to turn right would put us back on the path to Fort Bragg, which is the plan, which is what they all expect, but to turn left would get me back home and out of this bus with Bev.
Probably thinking that I’m just disoriented, Alexa leans forward from her seat in the middle row and says, “Do you want me to sit with you now? Copilot?”
But I just shake my head and turn right. Like I’m supposed to.
I drive.
Soon Alexa directs me onto 128. The road narrows, the car is silent.
Out the window, delicate trees with leaves so purple they are almost black line the road. I know that we’re passing everything but it feels like everything is passing me.
Rows of mailboxes for out-of-sight houses.
A barn with a sunken roof.
A hitchhiker.
Thousands of yellow wildflowers.
All of this is my kind of thing, and under any other circumstances I’d be pulling over and getting out and sketching, but I can’t enjoy any of it. Instead I’m reliving the last four years of my life.
This morning, which feels like forever ago, when I said we should do the photo thing in Europe, and I imagined all of these people who exist somewhere in the world meeting us, hanging with us, smiling for our camera. Last April and May, when our friends all found out what schools they got into and decided where they would go, and started talking about Boston and Ohio, and dorms and majors and roommates, and Bev and I talked instead about plane tickets and the Eurorail, the Louvre and the eighteen-year-old drinking a
ge. The beginning of the year, when I was writing a research paper on graffiti artists, spending hours looking at Banksy images on London streets, and added England to our list of destinations. The end of eighth grade, when Bev and I raided my parents’ old movies and watched Bande à part one night, and then watched all the rest of Godard’s films over the next two days. And Bev said, “Let’s go to France as soon as we can. Let’s go the second that we’re free. We’ll stay the whole summer.” Sophomore year, when I saw a documentary on tulips, and started dreaming about the Netherlands, and said to Bev, “We should go there, too.” Junior year, when Bev said, “And Stockholm, and Berlin.” I said, “This will take more than the summer.” And she said, “I want to go everywhere. I want to see everything,” so neither of us asked our teachers for recommendation letters, and instead we pored over maps.
So when was it that she changed her mind? It couldn’t have been after December. Which means that all of the planning we did after that, everything we talked about and decided on, every time I said, Won’t it be great when . . . and she said, Yes—all of that was a lie.
Up ahead to the left sunlight glints over a hand-painted sign for a farm and a street I can turn onto to get off the highway. I turn without notice and drive down the narrow driveway lined with white wildflowers and a wooden fence, and park in front of a barn. No one says anything. No one moves. I unbuckle my seat belt and turn to them. Meg is curious, Alexa concerned, their faces so easy to read. But Bev? She just waits. I don’t trust myself to guess what she’s thinking.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I say.
Alexa widens her eyes and shakes her head in denial, and Bev looks down at her hands, and Meg says, “Let’s talk through this.”
But at this moment I don’t feel capable of talking through anything. All I know is that going on a road trip while my life is falling apart feels crazy. Driving from small town to small town, setting up equipment and tearing it down, making small talk with strangers I’ll never see again—all the while searching for what I’m going to do now and seeing Bev everywhere I look.
“I don’t need to talk it through.”
Alexa checks her watch. She says, “All right. How about this. We’ll stop here for a little bit. This place looks nice. We’ll give you some time to think and then, when you’re ready, we can decide what to do next.”
She waits for an answer, hope flashing across her face, so I say okay, yeah, we can stop here for a while. She nods her thanks and opens the car door. Meg and Bev file out after her. I wait until they are out of sight before leaving the bus.
The air is dusty and warm, not at all like San Francisco. I lean on the bus and look at the scattered rows of apple trees that fade into the distance.
I’ve been waiting for this for so long—something new, life after high school. I head to the orchard, walk between the rows of trees, over and down small slopes, around the occasional empty ladder stretching up to higher branches. I want an apple, but I don’t think I should pick one, so I search the ground and find one, at a spot that overlooks a river, unbruised and ripe. The river makes me think of the canals in Amsterdam that I now will not boat down, will not sit and overlook with Bev, a pair of beers in our hands. Of all of the islands in the Stockholm Archipelago that I will not discover.
I slump onto the grass and pull my sketchbook and pencil out of my backpack because drawing is the only way I’ll survive this detour before going back home to start my life over, or at least try to figure out a next step. I rough out the landscape, but I don’t get far before Meg and Alexa are here, hovering above me.
“Time to talk,” Meg says. She plops next to me, and Alexa sits gracefully, tucking her legs beneath her.
Meg takes a giant breath. “Colby, the thing is, you have to come on the trip.” Alexa nods and the bells on her headband chime, and she keeps chiming and nodding all through Meg’s speech. “I know you’re going to say we can just cancel the first show and, like, rent a van or something, and make up the time tomorrow. But we can’t rent a van.”
“Why not?”
“Because you have to be twenty-five to rent a car. Or else it costs a million dollars.”
“So you want me to stay with you because you need the bus.”
“Yes,” she says. “True. But that’s only part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Because we need you,” Meg says. “Because there wouldn’t be a band without you. And it’s good to have a boy with us. And because . . .”
Alexa stops nodding and fixes her dark eyes on me. “Because you’re Colby,” she says. “You’ve been with us since the beginning. You know how much this trip means to Meg and Bev and me, and I think it means the same thing to you. It’s the last time we’ll all be together. Also,” she says, choking up a little, “these are probably the last nights I’ll spend with my sister.”
“Well, there’s always summer vacations,” Meg says.
“But by then we’ll be different. We will have lived apart. It will be good, but it won’t be the same.”
“You guys,” I say. But I don’t know what to say next. They’re sitting here next to me in this beautiful place, two sisters, my friends, who look nothing alike because they aren’t related by blood, and they’re telling me that they need me and I know that they do.
“I just don’t know,” I say. And I feel actually, physically injured when I tell them, “I don’t know if I can.”
Meg leans closer to me and says, “Just so you know, we’re in shock. We can’t believe this either. She never said anything to us.”
Alexa says, “Things happen for a reason. It doesn’t make sense now, but eventually it will.”
I don’t mean to be an asshole, but I can’t help laughing. “I’m screwed,” I tell her. “If things happen for a reason, I was meant to get fucked over.”
She looks hurt but she nods and says, “I would probably feel that way, too.”
“So will you come?” Meg asks. “You’re screwed either way. At least this way you’ll have fun instead of moping around your house.”
“I don’t plan to mope,” I say. “I plan to figure something out.”
“But we can help you,” Alexa says. “We can brainstorm when you’re ready. There are so many things you could do. I’ll help you plan it.”
I pull a fistful of grass from the earth.
“Without you there would only be us,” Alexa says.
Just then, Bev appears in the distance, walking toward us, and I stand up and say, “There’s a river over there. I’m going to check it out.”
I leave them before Bev gets too close to us, and walk past the parked bus and over a short bridge. I hike down to the water, apple in one pocket, music in the other. A few people are down here—two women in bathing suits and wide-brimmed hats, a man with a dog. I put in my headphones, pull up the bottoms of my jeans, and kick off my shoes, wade out over smooth stones into the cold water.
Soon I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s a little kid, gesturing for me to take out my headphones.
“Can you step a little that way?” he asks.
I step to the right. He bends down and picks up a stone from where I had been standing.
“I’m collecting the red ones,” he says, and reaches into his pocket for a fistful to show me.
Then his dad is here, telling me as they pass, “It takes a lot of years for these stones to get this smooth, friend. A lot of years and a lot of water.”
They speak with an accent, Scottish or Irish, maybe. They walk a few steps downriver, and then the dad turns around.
“Hey,” he calls across the water. “I noticed you up in the orchard. You and those girls.” He squints into the sun, lifts a tan, rough hand to shield his eyes. “I have to ask. Is it just you and them? Traveling together?”
“Yeah,” I shout back.
He laughs and shakes his head as if this is something terrifically funny and hard to believe. Maybe it is.
“Good luck.” He
chuckles again, turns around. His son has become a small figure in the distance, still searching.
I put my earbuds back in and bite into my apple. It’s probably the best apple of my life, and I try to enjoy it. I watch for a long time as the man gets farther and farther away and catches up to his son. Eventually, they move out of sight.
A few minutes later, in the quiet space between songs, I hear footsteps in water and smell cigarette smoke. Bev stands next to me but doesn’t say anything. The next song starts and I act for as long as I can like her proximity is nothing significant.
After a while I take out one earbud and say, “I can’t believe you started smoking again.”
Bev runs her free hand over her hair.
“I’ll quit after the tour,” she says, and takes a drag.
She exhales and I step away from her and wave the smoke out of my face.
“What?” I say. “Why are you standing here?”
But I feel like I’m playing the part of an angry person, because here she is: Bev. My best friend. And even though I’m almost trembling with anger all I want is for her to change her mind.
So I just say it: “Just because you got in doesn’t mean you have to go right now. You could defer for a year.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Just think about it,” I say.
“Believe me,” she says, her voice sad, “I’ve already thought about it.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
“I needed to be sure. I didn’t mean for it to take so long.”
“Was it because of the tour?”
“You would have come anyway.”
“Why would you think that? There are better things I could do than be a roadie for the worst band in history.”
I want to hurt her, but she doesn’t flinch.
She just says, “You should come on with us tonight. Play tambourine or something. You don’t need to be a roadie.”