I stood in the hallway, tilting my head at the ceiling so I could blink back the tears in my eyes.
“Something interesting up there?”
Heather was leaning against the locker beside mine. I didn’t know how much time had passed; the corridor had mostly emptied out.
“Hey. What’s up?” She half smiled. “So to speak.”
“Nothing. It’s no big deal.”
“Don’t give me that.” She brushed her thumb along the line of my cheek and my jaw. “I know that somebody-was-mean-to-me face.”
“Well, it’s not a big deal if somebody was mean to me. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”
“Yeah, and maybe I should have been all gay-pride in front of the nuns, but I wasn’t, was I? Should’s got nothing to do with it.”
“I don’t care if people think I’m gay. That’s no different from every year since sixth grade.”
“What is it, then?”
Julia. It was Julia. But no, I wasn’t about to tell her that, I wasn’t about to put that out there where she could use it against me. “I just, I’m starting to think you’re right. It’s not a good idea.”
Heather put her hand over my shoulder, and tugged me toward her. “Don’t let them get to you. I know you, you’re stronger than that.”
I jerked away from her. “How do you get the right to say that? To be the one who sticks up for me and pats me on the shoulder? You were on
their
side.”
She stared at me, speechless. As soon as it was out of my mouth I wished I could take it back, I wished it wasn’t there in the air between us holding the moment frozen.
“I knew you couldn’t get over it,” she said. “Why do you think I said it was a bad idea? Why do you think I kept quiet when I realized I had as much of a crush on you as I ever did?”
“I didn’t mean it!”
Heather turned away from me. As she talked, she clipped her words short, pruned the emotions from her voice.
“Of course you meant it. You’re going to deny it, because you want to keep thinking that you’re honor-able and forgiving and peaceful, and—you’ve got stupid petty resentments and grudges like everybody else. So you might as well admit it.”
“I can admit it. I
have
admitted it. But that’s not what this is about.”
I stood there shaking my head, why won’t you listen to me, why won’t you let me try to fix this?
“Go ahead. Tell me that you trust me, at all.”
And I—I just couldn’t get myself to say anything.
It wasn’t distrust. It was a different thing, a hard cold thing that I couldn’t grasp and didn’t want to grasp.
“Obviously I couldn’t just be sensible for once. Obviously I’d have to go and get my heart broken twice in a year. But I thought maybe it’d be different with you.”
“Just—Just let me—”
“Okay.”
Her face softened, her hands went up. “Talk.”
She stayed like that, silent, for longer than I deserved. Long enough to force me to try to wrestle my thoughts into submission.
It was about that dead girl I wasn’t being disloyal to.
I wished I could have told her that. And I tried to, tried to find someplace I could start, but there wasn’t any good place.
In the end I gave up. “Forget it.”
Heather stepped back, her head hanging down. “Cass, don’t do this to me.”
“Seriously, forget it. You’re right. You win.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets, started to walk away, and turned back again. “You’re not walking home, are you?”
“Yeah. I am.”
THEN
T
here was nothing in the world I loved so much as traveling home at night. It felt like there was something waiting for me, warm and reassuring, and it felt like now I had already passed through all the challenges and the hard things, and I could get there if I just waited quietly in the dark and the calm. I fell asleep like that, and when I woke up, the drivers had changed; Amy now. Lissa was sleeping beside me.
I said “Thank you” again, because Ollie was awake now.
“Someday you will owe us a story worthy of eleven hours in an old Buick,” he said. “But today is not that day. Mostly because none of us are very awake. Oh, and say thank you to Lissa too, when she wakes up. We ended up going to this terrible burger place where they fried their fries in beef fat, and when she asked for whatever they had that was vegetarian they gave her a melted piece of cheese on a hamburger bun. And while we’re eating, her
grandmère
calls, and she has to
lie
because she doesn’t want a lecture about how her
grandmère
didn’t spend all that time teaching her to cook just so she could be eating a piece of cheese on a hamburger bun.”
“I don’t have a story worthy of all this,” I said. “Not yet. But I think maybe I have a little one.”
I thought I only had a little one, it’s true, but once I’d started talking, the words spilled out of me, and I told them everything of what had happened from the day I’d left to the days I’d spent with Maggie to having my bike and everything on it stolen.
“And so all I’ve got left is these two boxes. One is all the stuff that I’ve picked up because it reminded me of Julia, or because I thought she would like it, or—I don’t know. And the other has Julia’s ashes.”
Which sent a collective shiver through the whole car, and then, just silence.
Oliver, from the front passenger seat, looked back at me. “I’m not going to get upset by whatever you say, or if you don’t say anything, but . . . were you in love with Julia?”
“Come on, Ollie,” Jon said. “That’s a hell of a question to answer before dawn when you’ve just had your heart broken and your bike stolen.”
“Objection sustained.”
Yeah. It was a hell of a question.
“I don’t even know if I’m gay.”
“Still? After all this?”
“It’s one girl,” I said. “How am I supposed to know whether I like girls in general, or only girls, or this one girl who rescued me from a flash flood? One is a terrible sample size to get any meaningful data from.”
I smiled. “I wish I could be sure. That would be so much simpler.”
The sky was starting to lighten, barely, almost imperceptibly. It was the kind of liminal hour when almost anything might be possible. Even putting into words what I’d never been able to put into words before.
“So, look . . .” I said. “When I set out on this trip I thought I was going to California on my bike. And the idea is, if you just keep going west and manage not to get squashed by an eighteen-wheeler, that’s where you’re going to end up. But if it was just about getting to California I could have saved myself a lot of heartache and bought a plane ticket. And I wouldn’t be in the middle of nowhere with you guys right now.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I could’ve known, if I’d thought about it for three seconds. I could have guessed that I wasn’t getting to California. I should have known that things were going to go all off the way I planned them. But just at the same time things are going wrong, things are going right too, like infatuation and working for an old hippie bike mechanic and having friends who will drive all the way from Chicago in a night. Maybe not following the plan I’d set out for myself was the best thing that I could’ve done. So I’m not going to California. That’s fine. I’m going where I’m supposed to be, even when I don’t know where that is. And me being gay, or not, or whatever, it’s like that. I’ll get to where I need to go, even if right now I have no idea of where that is.”
“Cass,” Jon said, a restrained grin tugging up the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“I got news for you.” He motioned backward, and I looked out the rear windshield, at the pale ball half submerged on the horizon.
Yeah, so the sun’s rising. Behind us.
It took me a while to figure it out. I hadn’t slept enough, couldn’t think through the implications well enough. If the sun rose behind us . . .
We were going west.
I called out, “We’re going the wrong way.”
“Are not,” Amy said.
“We thought about it and we took a vote,” Ollie said.
“We aren’t going to let any jackass bike thief get in the way of your mission.”
It hit me with a weight that can’t be put into words: I had the best friends in the whole world or in any possible world, friends who understood me and didn’t mind taking days and days out of their lives just so that I wouldn’t end up crushed and beaten.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I said. “I’ll paint sets, or I’ll . . . I’ll do what needs doing. Whatever it is. I’ll go back home. I’ll make up with Heather and play nice.”
“Yes, you damn well will. But never mind that now,” Ollie said. “We’re going to California.”
The others let out exhausted cheers.
We drove all the way to Albuquerque that day. It was a new thing for me, how quickly the landscape flew by us, patches of green changing to patches of red and yellow as the ground seemed to dry up under us.
“Cars go fast,” I giggled with the kind of simplicity that comes from being either very drunk or very tired. Ollie floored the gas suddenly, and the old Buick sprang into action, sailing down the highway at a speed that made the girls shriek.
We got a hotel room that night, late enough that nobody wanted to drive any more, but almost as soon as we got up there Amy was fiddling around in back of the TV to hook up her DVD player.
“I just downloaded a torrent of this last night. It’s so new it was subtitled by someone who barely even speaks English, but it’s about a grim reaper and he’s the guy in—you remember the one where everyone’s in love tragically and they die prettily in the snow?”
“Oh, that guy,” Lissa said. “He’s yummy.”
“Grim reaper, really?” Jon asked. “I thought we were full up on morbid over here.”
“No,” Amy argued. “It’s a feel-good movie. He has a golden retriever.”
We were all exhausted, but we didn’t argue. Didn’t even bother making token protests about getting up early in the morning. It just felt good, finally, to be together again. To go back to where the constants in life were bootleg movies and staying up too late. Even if we weren’t talking about the things we needed to talk about yet, even if these friendships still had their brittle places, we had this. And we fell asleep in our clothes, warm and comfortable slouched on top of each other like newborn puppies.
The next day Ollie rallied us to hit the road early, determined to make it to the coast by night, but after we passed the state line the traffic started to snarl up around us—some idiot had managed to plow himself into a guard rail and swing out to obstruct two lanes of traffic. I felt somber; traffic accidents still made me think of Julia. And by the time we were past that snarl, we were well into the tangle of the morning commute from places like San Bernardino.
There was a kind of mystique to this place, to the sudden bursting out of civilization from all over the place (even if they did count shopping malls as civilization), and the greenness everywhere after the desert. Even if it was fake greenness kept up by endless lawn-watering.
We drove all the way up to where we could see the ocean glittering in the morning light. Ollie climbed out to explore while the rest of us lay dozing—and then, ten minutes later, he came back to the car and waved his arm for us to follow him, in the direction of the beach, the pier.
There was a little shop there called Surf ’N’ Turf that rented out surfboards and roller skates and a couple of racks of beach cruisers, green and yellow old-fashioned bikes with big banana seats and streamers on the handlebars.
“You gotta cycle all the way to the shore,” Ollie said. “It’s only right.”
We pooled our money, including my two dollars in change, and rented five bikes between us, and then we came down to the still mostly deserted beach and pedaled all the way down the wooden path that led up to the pier, squealing and chasing after each other. I squeezed myself down, trying to get myself into an aerodynamic position, and then started pedaling at an all-out clip, sailing past everyone else, and then they caught on and tried to keep up with me.
“That’s not fair!” I heard behind me, and then, “Hey Lance, wait up!”
When a spray of sand caught me in the back I finally gave up, circled around to give the rest of them a little head start, and let my pace slip to something more reasonable. As we neared the shore we got off our bikes and went down onto the sand. Then I could let my attention wander to other things: how the sea was both bright and gray at once, silvery and quiet. I saw people in shorts and bikinis trickling down to the shore, carrying surfboards and towels and paperbacks. A skinny kid with spikes of blond hair was stumbling forward, his nose stuck in a copy of
The Brothers Karamazov.
Someone had brought their poodles to the beach—big black beasts buried under curls of hair.
They saw us at the same moment that I saw them, and barreled toward us, red leashes snaking across the sand. We all screeched to a halt nearly at the same time, and it seems like we all fell onto each other in the sand—dogs, bikes, and us.
But once we’d untangled ourselves and were sitting together on the beach again, it was gloriously peaceful. Each of us seemed to hold on to a little piece of innocent childish silliness; Jon kept running into the surf and letting the waves chase him back out again. Amy bought an entirely too large bag of goodies from a shop on the boardwalk that sold old and obscure kinds of candy, and we were all dipping into it, eating nearly as much sand as candy in the process.
And Lissa started building a sand castle.
She worked slowly and carefully, packing sand into place without any tools, shaping things that were becoming vaguely recognizable as walls, as towers.
And I knew what I was going to do.
“Ollie, can I have your keys?”
“Huh?”
“I need to grab something out of your car.”