“So true,” I say and look out ahead through the windshield. “Though I have to come clean—I’m usually one of them.” I wince admitting it.
“Yeah, me too sometimes.”
Everything gets quiet all of a sudden and it becomes the first quiet moment that the both of us notice. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing, wondering about me and wanting to ask, just as I’m curious about so much when it comes to him. It’s one of those moments that are inevitable and almost always open the door to the stage where two people really start to get to know each other.
It’s very different from when we were on the bus together. We thought that our time was limited then and if we were never going to see each other again, there was no reason to get all personal.
But things have changed and personal is all that’s left.
“Tell me more about your best friend, Natalie.”
I keep my eyes on the road for several long seconds and I’m slow to answer because I’m not sure which part of her I should tell.
“If she’s even still your best friend,” he adds, sensing the animosity somehow.
I look over.
“Not anymore. She’s sort of whipped, for lack of a better explanation.”
“I’m sure you have a better explanation,” he says, putting his eyes back on the road. “Maybe you just don’t want to explain it.”
I make a decision.
“No, I do want to explain it, actually.”
He looks pleased, but keeps it at a respectful level.
“I’ve known her since second grade,” I begin, “and I didn’t think anything could break up our friendship, but I was so wrong about that.” I shake my head, disgusted just thinking about it.
“Well, what happened?”
“She chose her boyfriend over me.”
I think he expected more of an explanation and I intended to give him more, but it just came out the way it did.
“Did you make her choose?” he asks with a subtly raised brow.
I turn around to look at him. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.” I sigh long and heavily. “Damon—her boyfriend—got me alone one night and tried to kiss me and tell me he wanted me. Next thing I know, Natalie is calling me a lying bitch and says she never wants to see me again.”
Andrew nods one of those long, hard nods that show he completely understands now.
“An insecure girl,” he says. “She’s probably been with him for a long time, huh?”
“Yeah, about five years.”
“You know, this best friend of yours, she believes you, right?”
I gaze over at him confusedly.
He nods. “She does; think about it, she’s known you practically all her life. Do you really think she’d just toss away a friendship like that because she didn’t believe you?”
I’m still confused.
“But she did,” I say simply. “It’s exactly what she did.”
“Nah,” he says, “it’s just a reaction, Camryn. She doesn’t want to believe it, but not so very far down, she knows it’s true. She just needs time to think on it and to see it for what it is. She’ll come around.”
“Well, by the time she does, I might not want her.”
“Maybe so,” he says and flips on his right blinker and switches lanes, “but I don’t take you for the type.”
“Unforgiving?” I say.
He nods.
We speed past a crawling semi and move around in front of it.
“I don’t know,” I say, unsure myself anymore, “I’m not like I used to be.”
“How did you used to be?”
I’m not even sure about that, either. It takes me a second to find a way around mentioning Ian. “I used to be fun and outgoing and I…,” I laugh suddenly as the memory tickles my mind, “…and I used to run naked into a freezing lake every winter.”
Andrew’s whole beautiful face twists into a curious, energized smile. “Wow,” he says, “I can just picture it….”
I smack him on the arm again. Always smiling. He pretends it stings, but I know better.
“It was a fundraiser for the hospital in my town,” I say, “and they put it on every year.”
“Naked?” He looks thoroughly confused aside from grinning thinking about it.
“Well, not fully naked,” I say, “but in a tank top and shorts in freezing water, you might as well be naked.”
“Shit, I should sign up for hospital fundraisers when I get home,” he says, hitting the steering wheel once. “Didn’t know what I was missing out on.”
He tames the smile a little and looks back at me. “So why is that something you used to do?”
Because Ian was the one who talked me into it and who I did it with for two years.
“I just stopped about a year ago—just one of those things you fall out of.”
I get the feeling he doesn’t believe there’s not more to it than that, so I jump onto something else to distract from it.
“What about you?” I ask, turning around at the waist to give him my full attention. “What’s something crazy that you’ve done?”
Andrew purses his lips in thought, looking out at the road. We pass another semi and get around in front of it. The traffic is thinning out the farther away from the city we drive.
“I hood-surfed once—not so much crazy as it was stupid, though.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
He reaches his left hand up and puts the underside of his wrist into view. “I fell off the damn thing and sliced my wrist open on no telling what.” I peer in at the two-inch scar running along the skin from the bottom of the thumb bone and onto his arm. “I rolled across the road. Cracked my head open.” He points to the back right side of his head. “Got nine stitches there in addition to the sixteen on my wrist. I’ll never do that again.”
“Well, I would hope not,” I say sternly, still trying to see the scar through his brown hair.
He switches hands on the steering wheel and takes a hold of my wrist, sliding his index finger over the length of the top of mine so he can use his as a guide.
I pull closer, letting his hand guide mine.
“Right about…there,” he says when he finds it. “Do you feel it?”
His hand falls away from mine, but I watch it for a moment.
Coming back to the issue of his head, I look up and run the tip of my finger along an obvious uneven smooth strip of skin on his scalp and then I part his short hair away with my fingers. The scar is about an inch long. I run my finger over it one more time and reluctantly pull away.
“I imagine you have a lot of scars,” I say.
He smiles. “Not too many; got one on my back from when Aidan clipped me with a bicycle chain, swingin’ it around like a whip (I wince, gritting my teeth). And when I was twelve, had Asher riding on the handlebars of my bike. Hit a rock. Bike flipped forward and sent us both skidding across the concrete.” He points to his nose. “Broke my nose, but Asher broke an arm and had fourteen stitches on his elbow. Mom thought we’d been in a car wreck and were just lying about it to cover our asses.”
I’m still looking at his perfectly shaped nose; don’t see any evidence that it had ever been broken before.
“Got a weird L-shaped scar on my inner thigh,” he goes on and points to the general area. “Not gonna show you that one though.” He grins and puts both hands on the wheel.
I blush, because it really took me all of two seconds to start envisioning him dropping his pants to show me.
“That’s a good thing,” I laugh and then lean up toward the dashboard so I can pull my babydoll Smurfette shirt up just over my hip. I catch his eyes on me and it does something to my stomach, but I ignore that. “Camping one year,” I say, “jumped off these bluffs into the water and hit a rock—I almost drowned.”
Andrew frowns and reaches over, tracing the edges of the small scar on my hipbone. A shiver runs up my spine and through the back of my neck like something freezing racing thr
ough my blood.
I ignore that too, as much as I can.
I let my shirt fall back over my hip and I lean back against the seat.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t drown.” His eyes warm up with his face.
I smile back at him. “Yeah, that would’ve sucked.”
“Definitely.”
15
I WAKE UP AFTER dark when Andrew slows down through a toll. I don’t know how long I slept, but I feel like I got a full night in, despite being curled up in the corner of the passenger’s seat with my head against the door. I should be trying to rub out a couple of stiff muscles like when I rode on the bus, but I feel good.
“Where are we?” I ask, cupping my hand over my mouth to cover the yawn.
“Middle of nowhere Wellington, Kansas,” he says. “You slept a long time.”
I rise up the rest of the way and let my eyes and body adjust to being awake again. Andrew pulls onto another road.
“I guess I did, better than I slept on the bus the entire trip from North Carolina to Wyoming.”
I look at the glowing blue letters on the car stereo: 10:14 p.m. A song is funneling low from the speakers. It makes me think of when I met him back on the bus. I smile to myself feeling like he made sure to keep it at a low level in the car while I slept.
“What about you?” I ask, turning around to see him, the darkness casting his face in partial shadow. “I feel weird offering because it’s your dad’s car, but I’m good to drive if you need me to.”
“Nah, you shouldn’t feel weird,” he says. “It’s just a car. A precious antique that my dad would string your ass up from a ceiling fan for if he ever knew you were behind the wheel, but I would totally let you drive it.” Even in the shadow, I see the right side of his mouth pull into a devious grin.
“Well, I’m not so sure I want to anymore.”
“He’s dying, remember? What’s he gonna do?”
“That’s not funny, Andrew.”
He knows it’s not. I’m fully aware of the game he’s playing with himself, always looking for anything to help him cope with what’s going on but coming up short. I just wonder how much longer he’ll be able to keep this up. The misplaced jokes will eventually run dry and he’s not going to know what to do with himself.
“We’ll stop at the next motel,” he says, turning onto another road. “I’ll get some shut-eye there.”
Then he glances over at me. “Separate rooms, of course.”
I’m glad he had that part sorted out so fast. I may be driving awkwardly across the U.S. alone with him, but I don’t think I can share a room with him, too.
“Great,” I say, stretching my arms out in front of me with my fingers locked. “I need a shower and to brush my teeth for about an hour.”
“No arguments there,” he jokes.
“Hey, you’re breath isn’t all that great, either.”
“I know it,” he says, cupping one hand over his mouth and breathing sharply into it. “It smells like I ate that horrid shit casserole my aunt makes for Thanksgiving every year.”
I laugh out loud.
“Bad choice of words,” I say. “Shit casserole? Really?” I mentally gag.
Andrew laughs, too.
“Hell, it might as well be—I love my Aunt Deana, but the woman was not blessed with the ability to cook.”
“Sounds like my mom.”
“That must suck,” he says, glancing over. “Growing up on Ramen noodles and Hot Pockets.”
I shake my head. “No, I taught myself how to cook—I don’t eat unhealthy food, remember?”
Andrew’s smiling face is lit up by a soft gray light pouring from the light posts along the street.
“Oh, that’s right,” he says, “no bloody burgers or greasy fries for little Miss Rice Cakes.”
I make a bleh! face, disputing his rice cake theory.
Minutes later we’re pulling into a small two-floor motel parking lot; the kind with rooms that open up outside instead of an inside hallway. We get out and stretch our legs—Andrew stretches legs, arms, his neck, pretty much everything—and we grab our bags from the backseat. He leaves the guitar.
“Lock the door,” he says, pointing.
We enter the lobby to the smell of dusty vacuum cleaner bags and coffee.
“Two singles side by side if you’ve got them,” Andrew says, whipping out his wallet from his back pocket.
I swing my purse around in front of me and reach in for my little zipper wallet. “I can pay for my room.”
“No, I got it.”
“No, seriously, let me pay.”
“I said, no, alright, so just put your money away.”
I do, reluctantly.
The middle-aged woman with graying blonde hair pulled into a sloppy bun at the back of her head looks at us blankly. She goes back to tapping on her keyboard to see what rooms are available.
“Smoking or non-smoking?” she asks, looking at Andrew.
I notice her eyes slip down the length of his muscled arms as he fishes for his credit card.
“Non-smoking.”
Tap, tap, tap. Click, click, click. Back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse.
“The only singles I have right next to each other are one smoking and one non-smoking.”
“We’ll take them,” he says, handing her a card.
She pulls it from between his fingers and all the while she watches every little move his hand makes until it falls away from her eyes down behind the counter.
Slut.
After we pay and get our room keys, we head back outside and to the car where Andrew grabs the guitar from the back seat.
“I should’ve asked before we got here,” he says as I follow alongside him, “but if you’re hungry I can run up the street and get you something if you want.”
“No, I’m good. Thanks.”
“Are you sure?” He looks over at me.
“Yeah, I’m not hungry at all, but if I do get hungry I can just get something from the vending machine.”
He slides the keycard into the first door and a green light appears. He clicks open the door afterwards.
“But there’s nothing but sugar and fat in those things,” he says, recalling our earlier conversations about junk food.
We walk into the fairly dull-looking room with a single bed pressed against a wood headboard mounted behind it on the wall. The bedspread is brown and ugly and scares the crap out of me. The room itself smells clean and looks decent enough, but I have never slept in any motel without stripping the bed of the bedspread first. There’s no telling what’s living on them, or when the last time was they were washed.
Andrew inhales deeply, getting a good whiff of the room.
“This is the non-smoking room,” he says, looking around as if inspecting it first. “This one’s yours.” He sets the guitar down against the wall and walks into the small bathroom, flips on the light, tests out the fan and then goes over to the window on the other side of the bed and tests the air conditioner—it is the middle of July, after all. Then he goes to the bed and carefully pulls back the comforter and examines the sheets and pillows.
“What are you lookin’ for?”
He says without looking at me, “Making sure it’s clean; I don’t want you sleeping in any funky shit.”
I blush hard and turn away before he can see it.
“Kind of early for bed,” he says, stepping away from the bed and taking up the guitar again, “but the drive did take a lot out of me.”
“Well, technically you haven’t slept since before we got off the bus back in Cheyenne.”
I drop my purse and bag down on the foot of the bed.
“True,” he says. “So that means I’ve been up for about eighteen hours. Damn, I didn’t realize.”
“Exhaustion will do that to you.”
He walks to the door and places his hand on the silver lever, clicking it open again. I just stand here at the foot of the bed. It’s an awkward mome
nt, but it doesn’t last.
“Well, I’ll see you in the morning,” he says from the doorway. “I’m right next to you in 110, so just call or knock or bang on the wall if you need me.” There’s only kindness and sincerity in his face.
I nod, smiling in answer.
“Well, goodnight,” he says.
“Night.”
And he slips out, shutting the door softly behind him.
After absently thinking about him for a second, I snap out of it and rummage around inside my bag. This will be the first shower I’ve had in couple of long days. I’m drooling just thinking about it. I yank out a clean pair of panties and my favorite white cotton shorts and varsity babydoll tee with pink and blue stripes around the quarter-sleeves. Then I find my toothbrush, toothpaste and Listerine and head to the bathroom carrying it all with me. I strip down naked, happily pulling all of the days-old dirty clothes off and tossing them in a pile on the floor. I stare at myself in the mirror. Oh my God, I’m hideous! My make-up has completely worn off; I barely even have any mascara on anymore. More wandering strands of blonde hair have fallen from my braid and are smashed against one side of my head in a rat’s nest.
I can’t believe I’m been driving around with Andrew looking like this.
I reach up and pull the hairband from the braid to release the rest of the hair and then run my fingers through it to break it all apart. I brush my teeth first and leave my mouth full of mint Listerine long until after the burning has already stopped.
The shower is like heaven. I stay in it forever, letting the semi-scalding hot water beat on me until I can’t take it anymore and the heat starts to lull me to sleep standing up. I clean everything. Twice. Just because I can and because it’s been so damn long. Lastly I shave, glad to get rid of that gross wig I was starting to grow on my legs. And finally, I turn off the squeaky faucets and go for the white motel towel folded OCD-like on a rack over the back of the toilet.
I hear the shower running in Andrew’s room next door and I catch myself just listening to it. I picture him in there, just showering, nothing sexual or perverted even though something like that wouldn’t be hard to do at all. I just think about him in general, about what we’re doing and why. I think about his dad and it breaks my heart all over again knowing how much Andrew is hurting and how I feel helpless to do anything for him. Finally, I force myself back into me and into my life and my issues, which really have nothing on Andrew’s.