“Copilot?” I say, and Bev nods. Alexa hands up the maps and directions.
Bev slips off her sandals and presses her feet against the dashboard, and as I start the bus I try not to look for too long at her ankles, her calves, her knees, the place where her thighs widen to her hips and the frayed hem of her shorts begins.
Nearing Arcata, we pass signs advertising the legend of Bigfoot, a place called Confusion Hill, a drive-through tree.
“Who thinks of these things?” Alexa asks.
“It sounds super fun,” Meg says. “I want to go to Confusion Hill.”
A little later, off the side of the road, Alexa spots a squat, beige building called the World Famous Exotic Dancing Club.
“Yeah, right,” Meg says. “World famous.”
“Sounds awful,” Alexa says.
“Why is it awful?” Bev asks.
Alexa says, “Places like that degrade women.”
“How do you know?” Meg asks. “I bet Colby would like it.” She reaches forward to rumple my hair.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “The idea of sitting around with a bunch of drunk middle-aged men paying girls to strip for us sounds awesome.”
“Maybe the girls like performing,” Meg says. “Maybe it turns them on. Bev, you’d be good at it.”
Bev turns around to face her. “What are you talking about?”
“The whole look but don’t touch thing.”
“Look but don’t touch?”
“Yeah,” Meg says, but she sounds less sure now, like she’s regretting what she’s saying before she even says it. “Just, you know, you lead people on sometimes.”
Alexa tries to take over. “It isn’t a bad thing,” she says. “You know what you don’t want to do, and that’s good.”
Bev is staring at them in disbelief. “I’d make a good stripper? Look but don’t touch? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t even know why I said anything.”
“You’ve said it, though,” Bev says. “So tell me.”
Meg sighs. “It’s just that you’ll make out with people, but everyone knows it won’t get past that.”
“Why do they say that?”
“Because it never has,” Meg says. “At Stewart’s house a while ago a bunch of us were standing around and talking about Disenchantments shows, and we realized that apart from Alexa and me, everyone we were hanging out with had made out with you.”
Bev turns back around in her seat. I glance at her; she’s carving the beginnings of a person.
“Go ahead,” she mutters.
“It wasn’t that many people,” Meg says. “Just Stewart and Amy and Jake.”
“And Sara,” Alexa says.
“Oh, yeah. That’s when Amy and Sara were going out. But they all thought it was funny, you know, that they’d all made out with you but none of them got very far. So that’s all that I’m saying about the stripper thing. A lot of people would like to do a lot more with you, but you’d rather have them look but not touch. Or at least not touch that much.”
“I thought you had sex with Stewart,” I say, and Bev doesn’t answer me, doesn’t look at Meg when Meg says, “Whoa, what?”
She just keeps carving and says, “Can we not talk about this?”
Alexa says, “You guys, it’s fine if Bev doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s personal.”
But Meg says, “No way. You had sex with Stewart? Why did he say you didn’t? And why didn’t you tell me?”
Bev offers some weak answer, something about how she can’t be held responsible for what Stewart does or doesn’t say, but her face is red and I don’t think it’s because the memory of having sex embarrasses her.
I think it’s because she lied to me.
Because really, if Stewart had had sex with Bev, everyone would have known. Not because Stewart is an asshole or anything, but because all he would’ve had to have done is tell a couple people and word would have spread instantly.
The night she told me, we were at a show at this venue on 11th Street where we went a lot, because it’s one of the few that admits all ages. It was like any other night we’d go to shows. I’d leave her during the opening act to get us drinks from the bar, excuse myself back through the crowd to her, hand her her drink. Coke, usually. Beer if we got lucky and the bartender was too busy or bored to care. For some reason, though, this night felt different. I think she was dressed up more than usual. Her hair was different. When I told her I’d go get us drinks, it felt, for the first time ever, like we were on a date. Even when I ordered I wondered what the bartender thought as she handed me my sodas, if she expected that I was going to head back to my girlfriend. I caught sight of Bev’s long blond hair and made my way back to her, and let myself imagine it—what it would be like, if Bev were my girlfriend. And then I handed her the Coke and when our hands touched I allowed it to be significant. Through the show I stood next to her, but a little bit behind her. We were surrounded by couples, and they were all leaning into each other or holding hands. I wondered if she felt me standing there the way I felt it. Knew that if she leaned back only a centimeter, her head would be resting on my shoulder.
And then the opening act finished their set and she turned to me and said, “I had sex with Stewart last night.”
And I felt all of the air escape the room, but managed to ask, “When?”
“During the party.”
“Okay,” I said. Which was a stupid response but all I could come up with.
She shrugged. “It was fine,” she said. “He wanted to, and I figured why not just do it, right?”
I couldn’t figure out when it could have been, because I had seen them making out on the back deck, and then I saw her, just a little while later, with Meg and a few of their other friends, and the time in between seemed too short. But I didn’t know. Parties did something to time, I thought. Sped things up. What felt like a few minutes could have been half an hour. And really. The when of it didn’t matter. What mattered was the who, and the who wasn’t me.
I finished my Coke and she finished hers, too, so I took our empty plastic cups and didn’t set them by our feet like I usually did. Instead I made my way through the crowd again over to the side of the stage where the trash cans were. I threw them away. When the band we came to see started playing, I didn’t even try to get back to Bev. I found a place to lean against the bar that wasn’t taken because of a beam that stood from floor to ceiling and blocked the view of the entire stage. I stayed there for a while, and then, toward the end, made my way back to her. When I found her again I made sure not to stand too close.
All at once, it isn’t even a question I’m entertaining. I know that I’m right. Bev never had sex with Stewart. Which means, I think, that she hasn’t slept with anyone. So now I’m left with this need to know, again, why she would lie to me. About so many things.
Alexa and Meg are still talking about the ethics of the sex industry. They keep the debate going for miles, but Bev and I mostly stay quiet, and that night at the show plays over in my head until she interrupts the memory by asking, “Have you told your mom yet?”
She says this quietly, only for me. It pulls me back from the feeling of that night and the road and the trees out the windows, back into this space with her.
“Told my mom what?” I ask.
I glance in the rearview mirror. Meg’s pressing down the edges of her tattoo bandage, she and Alexa still deep in conversation.
“That you aren’t going,” Bev says.
Signs for highway changes appear in the distance. Bev holds the directions but she has forgotten to direct us; she doesn’t even look at them. Reflected in the windshield glass, her face looks faraway and sad.
“Why would I tell her that?” I ask, turning onto a new highway because its sign says Arcata.
“Are you going anyway?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe.” But really I’m just saying this because it’s better than saying that I don’t want to go by myself, th
at whenever I thought about traveling I pictured traveling with her.
“I wish I could go with you, just to your mom’s. At first I was thinking that I might be able to go and then fly from Paris to Rhode Island, but I don’t have enough money.”
“We’ve been saving since freshman year,” I remind her.
The highway has turned into a smaller road. I drive past a gas station, a Mexican restaurant, some random piles of lumber, and lots of small houses.
“I know,” Bev says. “But I need it for school. My parents are taking out a loan for the tuition but I’m paying for my rent and food.” She pauses, then adds, “The dorms are really expensive.”
She’s saying this all in the quietest voice—I can hear that she’s sorry. But still. Picturing her sitting at the table with Mary and Gordon with loan applications and budgeting notes and the shiny RISD catalog, planning her next four years while I was still thinking that we were going away together to have an adventure, to do something different and meaningful, makes my vision blur and my hands clench the wheel so tightly they hurt.
We make our way past shops and restaurants and a theater, no longer in the outskirts of the city.
“Bev, I don’t know where to go,” I say, and I sound loud and frustrated enough that the whole bus falls silent.
“I know,” Bev says. “I’m sorry.”
“I mean right now,” I shout. “You’re holding the fucking directions, I just need you to read them.”
She fumbles with the papers, trying to find the right one, to see where we are now, but I pull over and stop fast and grab them from her. I find out where we’ll need to turn and pull back onto the road, keeping the directions on my lap.
“I can take it from here,” Bev says.
She reaches for the directions but I tell her I got it.
“If I need your help I’ll let you know,” I say, and we drive the rest of the way in silence.
We drive through a residential neighborhood, past houses with neat fences and colorful gardens positioned next to houses with overgrown yards and boarded-up windows, until we reach the café. When the VW guy said hot tubs I pictured the places around the city that look super sketchy and weird, but this place is cool. It looks like it belongs in a Scandinavian village or something.
We walk in to find a couple guys our age at the counter. One is steaming milk, the other stands with his back to us, carefully placing lettuce leaves in a bowl.
“Hey,” says the barista. He scans the girls’ faces, lifts his head at me. “You here for the café or the hot tubs?”
A few seconds later, they are poring over the hot tub price lists and I am ordering an eggplant sandwich, thankful for real food, and setting my backpack down on a table. No one invites me, and I’m not going to presume anything. Anyway: the three of them naked together might be a little more than I could handle.
The girls walk out into the back garden, bleached white towels slung over their arms. I take a seat. I’ve chosen a corner table, facing an unlit fireplace.
I finish my sandwich and pull out my sketchbook. A tabby cat sits on the table next to me as I draw the old man reading the paper at a table across the room. He doesn’t look so hot. His ankles are red and swollen, and the closer I look at him, the more I start to think that he’s probably homeless. I work for a while, getting the folds in his paper and the shadows across his shirt. His eyes are downcast and tired. How did he end up this way? I wonder what kind of plans he might have once had, what got in the way. The cat comes closer, and I pet her a few times, and as I pick up my pencil to go back to my drawing I see a red dress and pink hair.
“Come on,” Meg says. “I’m buying us half an hour.”
She starts packing up my stuff as I try to stop grinning. I follow her out of the café and into the back, where cobblestones form a trail through flowers and shrubs to several wooden sheds. We find our shed and step in. The air is cooler inside and the light is dim.
“Close your eyes.”
I do.
I hear the rustle of Meg’s dress.
“No peeking, young man,” she says, and I laugh, open my eyes anyway, see her standing in black panties with her arms above her head, her dress covering her face. I shut them before her dress comes off completely and she steps out of her underwear, but after enough time to see her full hips and thighs that are nothing like Bev’s but still gorgeous.
I hear her step into the water.
“Shit, this is hot,” she says. “Hold on. Okay, we’re good.”
I open my eyes to see Meg partway in the water, still in her bra with her tattoo safely dry.
She covers her eyes with her hand.
“Your turn,” she says.
I undress quickly and step in.
“Don’t splash me!”
I ease into the hot water and she lowers her hand. We sit across from each other, smiling, steam rising around us.
“This is the closest I’ve been to a naked girl,” I tell her.
“Liar,” she says. “You hooked up with that girl at Bev’s party last year.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t get that far.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I wasn’t really that interested.”
“Anyway, I’m not naked. Don’t you see this bra? This is the nicest bra I own. I paid forty bucks for it.”
“Well worth it,” I say.
“I know, right? Check out the lace on the sides.”
“Yeah, that’s hot.”
“It’s romantic,” she corrects me.
“Okay,” I say.
“Just for the record, I’m not hitting on you,” Meg says.
“Yeah, I know. I’m not hitting on you, either.”
“Oh, I know,” Meg says, meaningfully, and even though I don’t know what’s happening with Bev and me, it still feels kind of good for Meg to say that. It makes it feel like there is something between us.
“So, what’s going on with her?” Meg asks.
“What do you mean?”
She moves her hand slowly across the surface of the water.
“What kind of secrets is the girl keeping.”
“I have no idea,” I say.
The ends of her hair are wet now, turning a deeper pink, closer to red.
“I mean, I don’t blame her. I’ve had my darker moments,” she says. She changes positions and the surface of the water moves. “But why do you think she’s keeping things from us?”
Light shines through slats in the roof. Steam rises. No explanation comes to me.
“I’ve never understood Bev less than I do right now,” I say.
Meg reaches around the back of her neck, gathers her hair in one hand, and brings it around to one shoulder.
“That sounds really simple,” I add, “but it isn’t.”
“It’s just weird,” Meg says. “I always count on Bev to be blunt about everything. Like during the play last year, she would always say if we made a choice that didn’t work for her. I don’t know why she wouldn’t just tell us.”
She wrings the ends of her hair out. Drops of water run down the unadorned side of her chest. She reaches out of the hot tub to grab a hair clip, and it takes all my willpower not to look at her body as she’s looking away. It is dark in here, but my eyes have adjusted, and the water is only water, nothing I can’t see through. But then Meg is facing me again, and it’s enough to look at her breasts rising over her bra as she sighs and clips her hair back.
“What did you mean,” I ask her, “that you’ve had your darker moments?”
“So we’re done talking about Bev now?”
“I’m just wondering,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll tell you. Short version or long version?”
“Whatever you want.” I lean back against the side of the tub and concentrate on Meg’s face as she decides how to begin. She tilts her head, casts down her eyes.
“I went through this hard time in sixth grade,”
she says. “I started having panic attacks.”
“Was something going on?”
She shakes her head, no. “It didn’t really have anything to do with what was happening in my life. I mean, there were things that weren’t helping. This friend of our parents’ was dying. He had always been around and I really loved him, and then he got so sick and weak—he was suddenly old and it scared me to be around him. I started thinking about death all the time. And I had this teacher who I really liked but who kept saying these inappropriate things to me about the way I looked, just like all of these compliments all of the time that I knew were not really okay for him to say even though I kind of liked the attention. Also I was failing math. It didn’t matter how hard I studied or how good of a tutor my dads got me, I failed every math test I took. But really, it wasn’t about any of that. Anything could set me off. Like this one time, I was spending the night at my friend’s house and I wanted to take a shower because we’d been swimming all day and I smelled like chlorine. So I took the shower, and when I got out I couldn’t find a towel. So I started freaking out and crying because all I had was my bathing suit and I was too embarrassed to go back out into her house only wearing that.”
She laughs, but there’s sadness in it. “All I needed to do was stick my head out and call for her down the hallway and she would have gotten me a towel. But instead I was all shaky and couldn’t breathe and stayed in there until her mom knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. So, as you can see, it wasn’t about the stuff that was happening. It was about me.”
As she tells me all of this, I watch her from across the water: her smooth, pale skin and flushed cheeks, her lips that I’ve rarely before seen unsmiling. Sometimes it seems impossible to really know anyone. Before this moment I had thought of Meg as always confident, always fun, never nervous or sad or anxious about anything.
“So the panic attacks kept coming and they were so fucking scary. I mean, I was, what, eleven years old? I didn’t even know that panic attacks existed. I thought I was dying.”