She squints. I can tell she doesn't believe me.
I pop open my apricot juice and take a swig. I don't talk. Finally she gets impatient; she drops her Ninyassa eyebrows and her face goes weak and mushy. “What is it? What do you have to do?” It comes out sudden and whiny.
I can't think of anything good. “Just stuff.”
“Well, don't you want to come hang out with us?” The whine gets louder, like she wants me to be her friend or something. It's the opposite of school, where I'm always getting shut out for eating kale and sprouted chickpeas, wearing hand-me-downs, not having a TV. Not now.
Now I'm the one who gets to say no.
Even if that means I wind up by myself, it's worth it.
. . .
Risk throws open the doors of fear and habit so that the Divine may enter.
When you're alone a long time, awake blurs into sleep the same way light blurs into dark: slow, without you noticing. I don't hear my mom come in at night, and I don't hear her leave again the next morning. In the too-quiet dawn I brush my teeth and put the batik tulips back on. And lipstick.
Colin said
a couple days
, but he also said
maybe
. I grab my Walkman, get a chai from the dining hall, head out to the parking lot to warm my fingers and wait. It's my fifth time in two days listening to
If You Leave
.
Tires thunder on the gravel and I look up. A truck pulls up, rust eating blue paint on its doors, Colin in the cab with the driver. Colin hops out, and then the driver, wrinkled and leathery, comes around and helps him heave out the engine. It's wrapped in grimy green towels.
“You sure you can get this back in single-handed?” asks the driver.
“Oh, I'm not single-handed,” Colin answers. “I've got Tessa.” He shoots me a grin. The driver eyes us skeptically, looking at my lipstick. I push up my sleeves to show him I don't mind getting dirty.
They set the engine on a plank behind the bus. The driver hitches his pants. “Alrighty,” he says in the kind of plainspoken guy way I recognize from Ohio, and holds out his hand.
“Thanks, man.” Colin shakes. They speak the same languageâmasculine, simple, mysterious. All of a sud-den I stand back and see:
I have a friend who is a man
.
Then the driver pulls away and Colin is a kid again, or something like it. “C'mon,” he says. “Let's get this baby in.”
It takes half the day, lifting and lining up. Finally it's in; my batik's smudged with black like the bumper and his jeans. He offers me a swig of his Sunkist orange soda. Then he says, “Hop in. Let's test her out.”
I don't know if he means test-
start
it or test-
drive
it. And I don't know which one I want him to mean. My heart pounds in my throat. It would be like jumping off a cliff to go with him. I don't know my way around out here, how to get back, how to drive. And I'd be in massive shit if we got caught. But if he wants to take me for a ride? I can't not go.
“C'mon,” he says, cocking his head.
Maybe he just wants to turn the key
. I unstick my feet, unlock my knees, loop around to the passenger side and step up into the seat.
He smiles at me; the engine turns over, coughs, settles into a hum. “See what we did?”
The seat is scratchy. I nod, hoping he can't hear my heart pound through my chest. It's so loud I think he must be able to. He just sits there for a second, watching me, and I almost feel relieved:This is it, we're not going anywhere, I'm not going to have to make a choice.
And then he presses on the gas and we lurch forward.
We make it off the gravel onto pavement, past the lobby and Atma Lakshmi. No one sees. We turn off ashram property, hit the road and speed up, half-naked trees whizzing by, fields stretching out and out and out with no people to clutter them. Cool air floods in through the window. I'm glad I didn't stop us leaving. I feel like I can breathe.
Colin reaches for a backpack at his feet. He has to bend down for it. He keeps a hand on the wheel, but I'm terrified we're going to veer off the road. I sit up straight, keep a sharp eye out for oncoming cars. He unzips the bag, fumbles around, pulls out a tape. “Violent Femmes,” he says. “You ever heard 'em?”
“No,” I tell him.
“Pop it in.”
He hands it to me, sits back up and puts both hands on the wheel. I exhale. The cover has a picture of a little girl in a lace dress looking through a window. You can't see her face.
I jump as bass jangles through the speakers, then a snare drum, then guitar. The singer's voice is tinny, nasal.
When I'm walking, I strut my stuff, and I'm so strung out.
The tune is bouncy but there's something dark, a little scary about the singer and the words. It's not like any songs I've ever heard on the radio or on my tapes: not about loving someone and then they go away and you want them back, please don't leave, how you will never forget. The next song has this talk-sing countdown thing about loneliness and lost causes and pills, and the chorus tells the world,
You can all just kiss off into the air
. Colin sings along. It's like he's saying it back to the whole world, everyone who ever gave him trouble, and I wish I knew the words well enough to sing too.
Fields give way to houses, houses to storefronts, that song to the next one; Colin asks me, “You want Dairy Queen?” It's cold out, almost time for DQ to close for winter, but I tell him yes. We take a turn and drive past crumbling brick buildings, 1950s drugstore signs, papered-over windows. Scraggly trees poke up through pavement, black scratch marks against the white sky. Shaindy's Girls-Boys Fashions and Sruly's Bakery look like they've been locked for years: everything's out-of-date, faded, full of dust. Trash blows by like tumbleweeds.
He gets a Butterfinger Blizzard; I order a vanilla cone with cherry dip. He pays. Ice cream gives me goose bumps in the late fall air, so we get back in the bus. The silence suddenly feels huge, but Colin just looks out the window, relaxed, jiggles his knee to some tune inside his head like he doesn't even notice.
Finally he sucks his straw noisily and turns the key, pulls out of the lot. The Violent Femmes guy comes back on, loud and sudden, singing,
Why can't I get, just one kiss
. Then
Why can't I get, just one screw
, and then
Why can't I get just one
âColin pops out the tape. His ears are red. I concentrate really hard on my cherry dip. Out of the corner of my eye I see him lean down, pick another from his bag. He rewinds bit by bit, furrowing his brow. While the tape's whirring backward, he asks, “You know Neil Young?”
Thank god he finally talked. I shake my head no. This look comes over his face like he can't believe it.
“You never heard of
Neil Young
?”
I shake my head again.
“Wow,” he says. “Crazy.” Then he thinks for a second. “There's a lotta stuff you need to get introduced to.”
I don't know what to say to that. “Okay.”
“Okay. So this album is called âHarvest.'Neil Young recorded it in 1971, right after Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young split up. You do know them, right?”
I know Crosby, Stills, and Nash from my mom. I never heard the “Young” part, but I fake it. “Yeah, I know them.”
“Cool. Okay. So CSNY is breaking up, and Neil recruits this country band called the Stray Gators and they hole up and record this album. It was the only one he ever did with them, but it's a classic.”
“Cool.”
He finds the beginning of the song: some acoustic chords, then a harmonica. I start to ask about more Neil Young history, but he says, “Shh. Listen.”
Another nasal voice comes in, this one warmer or more soft or something. It doesn't sound dark like the Violent Femmes guy, just a little ragged.
I wanna live, I wanna give, I've been a miner for a heart of gold
. Even though Colin and I aren't talking, I feel somehow connected to him, like the song's a string between us. We pass through the rest of town, back into fields and hills, farther and farther from the ashram. I see the sign for Levner's River Cottages and realize that I sort of know where we are, even though we're in a place I haven't really been before.
Out the smudgy window I watch the half-bare trees dangle their last leaves. The song builds to its end,
Keeps me searching and I'm growing old
, and I get this weird sad feeling, like missing something I haven't even felt yet. When the song ends, Colin turns the volume down. “Beautiful, huh?” he asks, and I say yeah.
We drive for a minute, quiet, that string still stretched between us even though the music's over.
Then he asks, “So whaddya think, Tessa?”
What do I think? “What do you mean, what do I think?”
“That's what I mean. What do you think?”
“About what?”
“I don't know,” he says. “About anything.”
It's funny how when you're allowed to say anything at all you can't ever think of something; when a big space stretches out in front of you, it's hard to find your place in it. It's always easier when there are lines drawn, limits traced around the ground you're standing on. I can't find one thing to pick, but I want to tell him something more than
I don't know
.
“I think . . . the trees look sort of sad, like they're about to miss their leaves, and I think that's kind of how I feel about Neil Young, and I think I'm glad we got the engine built, and I think . . . um.”
He looks at me, waiting for more.
“Um, I think the ashram is weird? And that that cherry dip was good? And I'm kind of wondering where we're going, but I kind of don't really care at the same time.” That came out sounding maybe snarky. “I mean, not in a bad way.”
“No, I know what you mean,” he says.
“Why?” I ask him, stepping out on a limb. “What do you think?”
He smiles. “Hmm. Let's see, Tessa.” It's just my name, but it feels like something real when he says it. “I think . . . I know exactly what you mean about Neil Young, and about the ashram too. I mean, who
are
those people, right?” He gives a little laugh. “I think it's good for you to get out of there sometimes, 'cause you're smarter than they are. Know what I mean?”
I don't want to seem conceited, but secretly, I do agree. I nod.
He nods back. “Yeah. Like everyone's living in this little pretend world they've constructed, ants in an ant farm, pouring themselves into some mold and copying each other and thinking that's the only way to live, when you can think of so many other ways to be but no one will let you do it. Right?”
I nod again.
“Yeah, I kind of know how that feels.” He almost looks sad when he says it. Then he washes over it with that grin. “Oh, and I also think there's a ton of bands you really need to learn about, immediately.” He turns Neil Young back up. The song says,
Old man, look at my life; I'm a lot like you were
.
Past Mount Hope Road and Butrick Way, Colin turns off Route 51. The trees thicken as the road gets narrower, sunshine-yellow leaves making overlapping shadows on the ground. When I was little and my mom and I were on the road, I'd watch the woods go by out the window, in love with the half-dark stretching out and out, roots webbing the wreckage of fallen trees, every inch of forest holding some kind of story. I don't even know what I thought went on in there, just
something
, many things, all different from anything I knew. My mom would drive, wrapped up in her music, and I'd slip out the window, disappear into the woods, imagining myself someplace new. Now it's different, though, because I could really go there. I could ask Colin to pull over if I saw a path to walk down, and I think he would. He makes a left and then another left, the road getting rougher, narrower; then it opens up. A field stretches out on both sides of us, green hills pouring down into a valley, at the base of it a huge old oak tree reaching out and up.
“Wanna see my favorite tree?” Colin asks. As soon as I nod yes he stops the car, climbs out, and takes off down the hill.
He's like a kid out here, tumbling down the hill, goofy and hollering, and the wind hits my open laughing mouth as I run to catch up. Suddenly I'm not scared, and I'm not worried that he'll run too far ahead; I'm not embarrassed or anxious or shy. I'm just running, eyes watering from the wind, and when I tumble onto flat ground at the bottom of the hill, breathing hard, he's there, grinning that grin by the trunk of the tree, and my feet keep moving forward and I stumble into him and lift my face and plant my mouth on his.
This kiss has nothing to do with Randy Wishnick. No ketchup, no fish flopping around in my mouth, no cafeteria background noise or Quiet Riot T-shirts. Randy Wishnick was a kid, like me, and then he turned into just another kid who didn't really like me.
This is a completely other kind of kiss.
At the end of it, Colin wraps his arms around my waist, strong like the tree we're standing under. I can feel his whole body press against my stomach and my shoulders and my chest. He looks at me. “Wow,” he says. “Where'd you learn to do that?”
The last thing I want to do is bring Randy Wishnick into it. So I just tell Colin, “I don't know,” shrug and smile, stay there in his arms.
“Wow,” he says again. He shakes his head like he's trying to clear it. “So. What was
that
all about?”
He keeps asking me these questions like I have all the answers. Funny, it's usually the other way around. I don't know what to tell him so I just kiss him again.
We stay till it starts to get dark. When I get cold, Colin gives me his flannel shirt; it's plaid and soft and the best thing I have ever worn in my life. We sit leaned up against the tree, my head on his shoulder, his arm around mine. My heart stops beating so hard; the feeling of him slows down in me, leaves my throat and settles in my chest.
When I lift my head up I catch him watching me. I can't tell what's going on in his mind, but I feel like I can ask. I squint my eyes at him. “So, what do you think?”
He does a double take, then laughs to himself. Then he says, “Nothing.” But I can tell he's thinking something. “Nothing? Really?”
“Okay. Not
really
nothing.” He takes a pause. “I meanâyou sure that you're okay with that? That wasn't weird?”
“No,” I tell him. “No. It wasn't weird at all.”
. . . . .
On the drive back, Colin's quiet, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. That free feeling running down the hill is gone, and now the silence makes me nervous. When he asked if it was weird, my
no
came out so clear and strong, the crossed currents I always feel about everything washing out of me like water. But now that we're driving and it's dark and he isn't saying anything, I start to wonder if he asked me that because
he
thought it was weird. I start worrying that maybe it actually was. I mean, he is twenty. .