“She was waiting for me when I got home. I couldn’t shake her. And how do you know this, anyway?”
“Never mind how I know. I know. She was with you when I called from Michigan too.”
“We were doing homework.”
“For sex ed?”
“Exactly,” he says sarcastically. “We were doing our sex ed homework.” He looks into my eyes. “It’s over, okay? She’s already moved on. I’ve moved on too.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
He takes my coat off and lets it slide slowly down my back. Then he makes a bed with it between the ice cream coolers in the truck. We lie down together on our sides. He stares at me, moving his finger from my forehead, down my nose, over my chin, along my neck until it lands between my breasts.
“Oh look,” I joke, “I’m wearing buttons.”
“I see that,” he tells me, and he uses his nimble fingers to deftly, expertly savor each one before he pops it open slowly.
There, in a parked ice cream truck just outside of Buffalo, Wyoming, I say yes. I resign myself to finding God. And it’s true what they say. You can find God anywhere.
• • •
“Now, we have to go,” I tell him. “Seriously.” We’re lying on top of the grimy nylon coat in the aisle of the truck. He is tracing his finger along the outside whorls of my ear.
He takes out his phone, holds it at arm’s length, and takes a picture of us.
“Do you document all your conquests?”
“Nope.”
It’s then that we hear a knock on the door.
“Hannah Morgan,” demands a sharp male voice.
Shit, I think. I thought this is what I wanted. Help from the authorities. But now that Danny’s here, I have all the help I need. I don’t want them to question me or send me home. I want to find Zoe.
We shuffle around getting dressed inside the truck.
“We need to ditch them,” I tell Danny. “I thought . . .”
“Shh,” he says, holding his finger to his lips. He stuffs his wallet into his pocket, walks to the back of the truck, and puts his hand on the big lever that opens the escape hatch in the back. The one you practice exiting from in safety drills on the school bus. He holds fingers up and silently counts. One. Two. Three. On three, he pushes the door open. We jump out of the truck and run fast.
“Stop!” the police officers say. “Stop in the name of the law.”
They actually say that? I think.
“Serpentine!” I yell at Danny. I heard somewhere that you should run in a zigzag formation to avoid bullets. He smiles and yells, “No, just run straight for the highway!” We run through some brush across the access road and to the edge of the highway, where I see another tumbleweed. I don’t have time to appreciate it, though. The overweight officers, dressed in tan, camouflaged in the dry landscape, are in hot pursuit. But we easily dodge the speeding cars on the highway with alacrity, and their cumbersome bodies can’t keep up. We hear a horn whine and blare, and the screeching of brakes behind us. We keep going up an embankment on the other side of the road, and we run up and over another brown spiky bluff to the exit ramp on the other side.
A McDonald’s looms ahead in the distance, but that’s it. For miles. It looks like a McDonald’s on the moon. Nothing is growing. No flora or fauna. And nothing is moving in any direction as far as we look. The landscape is completely mineral. We need a truck. Or a train or some kind of vehicle to jump upon.
Danny makes a dash for the McDonald’s drive-through. And I follow him, though we’ll be too easy to find, hiding in the only place to hide.
“Shouldn’t we find a different McHidingSpot?” I ask him, panting for breath.
“I can maybe hot-wire one of those cars in the parking lot. Come on!”
I’m reluctant to steal a car. And I’m really reluctant to steal a car from a McDonald’s employee whose entire paycheck goes into the upkeep of the car just so he can drive back to work. Like that story of Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill and never getting anywhere.
“Can you make sure it’s the manager’s car?” I say as we run.
Danny just shakes his head and runs faster.
We squat down between a rusted-out old Honda Civic and a small, blue Ford pickup truck.
“Which one does my princess prefer?” Danny asks.
“The truck,” I say. “Definitely the truck.”
He wiggles something, and we’re in.
There is one bench seat across the front, and it is shiny, vinyl, and hot. I slide in first. He looks beneath the steering column, finds the wires he needs, just like in the movies, and the truck sounds like it’s clearing its throat for a second and then grumbles to life. Danny gets in, slams the heavy door, and puts on a baseball cap he finds in the front seat. “Get down,” he says. “They’re expecting two of us.” I crouch down into the seat well, and he pulls slowly out of the parking lot so as not to draw attention to us.
I look up through the window into the side mirror and see the exhausted old cops finally arriving to the parking lot on foot.
“You’re not eighteen, are you?” I ask him.
“Not yet,” he says, and I hope that makes a difference in the penalty for grand theft auto. I hope the jury will understand how we needed the truck to rescue Zoe.
We drive south across the moon.
A little prism hangs from the rearview mirror, and it throws tiny rainbows around the cab as we drive. There is also a pair of pink fuzzy dice. “Do you think she would go to Vegas?” Danny asks, pointing at the dice. “I have a feeling about Vegas.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I need to hear a weather report. She has a thing about the weather.” I lie down across the front seat and rest my head in Danny’s lap as he drives, incognito in the hat and a pair of large sunglasses he also found in the truck.
I finally have time to reflect on the fact that I just lost my virginity and found God in the same moment. I’ve heard that doesn’t usually happen.
He draws figure eights around my waist and then slides his hand beneath the waistband of my jeans and leaves it there. The proximity of my head to his “manhood,” as they call it in romance novels, and the feeling of his whole hand on the soft skin around my hip make me want to pull over and find God again. It’s addicting and more powerful than I ever imagined. No wonder salmon die, swimming upstream, leaping right into the open mouths of hungry bears by mistake.
“I like spawning,” I tell him.
“I hope we didn’t spawn anything,” he laughs.
“We were careful. I want to be careful again,” I say, sliding my finger down the inseam of his jeans.
“Easy there, killer. We need to put a little distance between us and the fuzz,” he jokes.
“Can I sit up yet, then? I can’t be touching you. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Wow, I created a monster.”
“You don’t feel it?”
“Of course I feel it,” he says, looking at me. “I want to pull over and touch every inch of your naked body. Your armpit. The arch of your foot. The flat trail beneath your belly button. But I’ve been feeling it for five years, and I’m used to suppressing it.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything? For five years? It would have made those five years a lot better for me. A lot better.”
“I was afraid I’d scare you away. You are so studious and serious all the time.”
“So why Rebecca Forman?”
“Practice girlfriend.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone to practice with. Develop some relationship skills.”
“Did she know she was your ‘practice’ girlfriend?” I say, making air quotes. I never thought in a million years I could feel sorry for Rebecca Forman or pissed off at Danny Spinelli.
“No
. She never needs to know that. We practiced with each other. She’ll move on. She’s tough like that. Besides, I taught her some mad skills.” He laughs. “She can take them with her.”
“But what if she fell in love with you? What if you broke her heart?”
“We never said ‘I love you.’”
“But what if she secretly felt it?”
“I think she secretly felt love for someone else.”
“Who?”
“Ice.”
“Oh, they’d be perfect together.”
“Right? So all’s well that ends well. They’ve already gotten together. Which leaves me with no guilt. I am completely free and available to love you.”
“Did you just say what I thought you said?”
“I said I was available to love you.”
“But do you? Love me? We hardly know each other.”
“I know you.”
“You do?”
“I know that when you eat lunch, you’re the only one in the cafeteria who actually places her paper napkin on her lap.”
“So?”
“I know that you have a freckle right underneath your left eye. I know that when you smile, your eyes close into adorable half-circles and all that’s visible are a little gleam of light and your thick black eyelashes. I know that you are really nice to that kid with Tourette’s and you sit patiently and help him with his math homework even though he’s uncontrollably barking ‘cocksucker’ at the top of his lungs every five minutes. I know that you are trying to improve your life even though the odds are stacked up against you, and that you hide in the attic of the Cunty Day School to try to learn as much as you can. I know that you would give your left arm to help Zoe if she needed it, and that’s why we’re here. I think I know enough.”
“I’ve always known.”
“What?”
“That I loved you.”
“You came out of the womb loving me?” Danny jokes.
“Probably. I remember the day you came to the bus stop for the first time in kindergarten. I think I loved you then.”
“That’s kind of gross that you loved a five-year-old.”
“Well, I was five too.”
“I don’t believe you loved me when you were five.”
“Fine,” I say, giggling.
“You are beautiful,” Danny says.
“I feel lucky.”
“You do? In the middle of Wyoming running from the law?”
“I do.”
“Let’s try your luck in Vegas, then, high roller.”
ROMANCE
We drive another twenty miles, until it’s safe to pull over at a diner called the Jackelope. The jackelope is a mythical creature in these parts. Part jackrabbit, part antelope; a taxidermist creates it by putting some horns on the rabbit. Since taxidermy seems to be a theme of this adventure, I think it’s a good omen, and we choose it as a place to stop and regroup. I even wonder if Zoe stopped here as well. I get a weird tingly Spidey sense that she has been here before us.
The gift shop is cluttered with western crapola, but luckily they do have a 1998 road atlas for sale. I buy it with the last roll of nickels I have in my pocket, and I open it up in the diner, where I order an egg-white omelet with mushrooms and a short stack of blueberry pancakes.
Danny stares as I put the meal away, with some slow, methodical shoveling of my fork.
“It’s been a while since I’ve eaten,” I explain with my mouth full. “Zoe isn’t really motivated by food these days.”
“I love a girl with a big appetite,” he says.
“Well, that’s good for the both of us. Here,” I say and I hold out a bite of pancake for him.
I look at the Wyoming page of my atlas and measure out the miles between us and Las Vegas with the bent-up part of my forefinger between the second and third knuckle.
“What are you doing?” Danny asks.
“Measuring. The distance between your second and third knuckle is approximately an inch, and it’s thirty miles per inch on this map.”
“Everyone’s forefinger is the same size between the second and third knuckle?”
“Approximately. We have an inborn uniform standard of measurement.”
“Is that how they discovered the ‘inch’?”
“Maybe. And then a ‘foot’ must be the average length of a person’s real foot.”
Speaking of feet, Danny has taken off his shoes under the table, and he is slowly sliding his foot up and down my calf beneath my pant leg.
“Um,” I say, trying to ignore him. “Can you ask them if they have the Weather Channel on that TV?”
He politely summons our waitress and asks her to turn on the Weather Channel while I map out the quickest route to Vegas. We basically have to shoot diagonally across the entire state of Utah. And part of it is through the Rockies, so we’ll need to make sure it’s not snowing. I hear it’s suicide to drive through the Rockies in a snowstorm. People have been buried alive in their cars and forced to eat their pets or their belts. Maybe that’s an urban legend, but I don’t want to take the chance.
When the weather map comes up on the TV screen, it thankfully shows no storms through Utah, but the weathercaster, a woman in a red dress with a matching long red jacket, points to Vegas and warns about a weather “event” containing unusual amounts of lightning moving from west to east across the southwest United States. “We don’t know yet what to call it,” she says. “We’re waiting for it to take shape and define itself, but for now, we’ve issued a general storm warning for all of Clark County, Nevada.”
Danny has somehow worked his sock-covered foot all the way up to my seat between my legs, and I’m massaging it underneath the tablecloth.
“Danny!” I say, coming to my senses.
“Let’s go to the bathroom,” he says, pointing his head in that direction.
“Together? That’s too advanced,” I joke. “I’m new at all this, remember?”
“Okay,” he says, nudging me once more with the foot.
“Plus we have to get there,” I say, pointing to the lightning-covered map, “before that storm does. I’m afraid of what she might do.”
“How far is it according to your knuckle?” he asks.
“At least twenty more knuckles. If we don’t hit traffic or weather or whatever.”
“How bad could traffic be in Utah?” he asks. “Do Mormons even drive? Or do they do the thing with the horse and buggy like the Amish?”
“They drive, you idiot. And you totally just jinxed us about the traffic.”
We pay the bill and buy a jackelope to give to Zoe when we find her. Danny has brought all of his ice cream man money with him, and he’s burning through it pretty quickly. It kills me thinking of the big box of coins sitting on the floor of the LeMans. I hope the cops have saved it for evidence and haven’t pilfered it to do loads and loads of their laundry.
We leave without visiting the bathroom together, but in five miles Danny finds a deserted rest area, where he parks behind a tree and I climb on top of him in the driver’s seat.
“Okay, that’s it!” I say when we are done. “We need to focus on Zoe. No more of this until you bring me Zoe,” I joke.
“I know you’re new to all this, but you should never use sex as a bargaining tool,” he says jokingly.
“I’m using it as a reward.”
“I guess that’s okay then,” he says.
We get back on the road and drive through Utah, where everything is the Crayola crayon color Burnt Umber and the sky is Cornflower Blue. The rock formations and the crested buttes are absolutely fabulous.
“Erosion is my new favorite artist,” I say.
“Erosion rocks,” Danny says. “There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I haven’t perfected it yet.”
We’re both s
o unaccustomed to so much space. It’s liberating and intimidating, and it’s making us giddy. We feel overexposed. Compared to this place, our home seems like a little village in a train set. Everything at home is miniature and green and close together, which makes it seem quainter.
Nothing here is quaint, I think, looking out the window.
I take a little nap, and then we switch, and I drive the rest of the way to Vegas while Danny sleeps.
Every once in a while, I glance over at his face. His five o’clock shadow is beginning to grow, but it grows in uniformly and just serves to shade and accent his best features. His chin is perfectly squarish. A chin is very important, I realize, in my very subjective estimation of masculine beauty. It has to be pronounced and squarish, but not so big that you can grab it like a handle. He has a perfect chin, and his hair is growing longer and curlier and blacker, less Brillo-y now that it’s long, and more inviting to the touch. I want to feel those curls wrapped around my fingers.
• • •
I wake Danny up when I get to the Strip because no one should miss their first ride into Vegas. Three in the morning is probably the perfect time to arrive here. The retro, iconic WELCOME TO FABULOUS LAS VEGAS NEVADA sign is lit up in its full glory—even though it’s a little-known fact that the Strip is actually located in a town called Paradise, Nevada, and not Las Vegas at all.
Everything is illuminated. Some big old grumpy father in the sky is looking down on Vegas and yelling, “Don’t forget to turn off the lights!” It makes sense that Zoe’s alien friends would meet her here, because it’s probably the only town that’s visible from space.
Billboards and marquees advertise comedy shows, washed-up vocalists, bands from the eighties, French circuses, wedding chapels, tattoo parlors . . . In the periphery, we can see mini landmarks from around the world. The Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Venice canals.
“This is quite the spectacle,” Danny says groggily.
“You said it,” I say, cruising at ten miles per hour in proper cruise position, with my forearm leaning against the open window of the pickup truck. Which—we found out after searching through the glove compartment—belongs to a man by the name of Samuel Rodriguez. We have every intention of returning his vehicle to him as soon as possible. Danny even wrote him a postcard from the Jackelope diner.