“No, you were right. Those meetings can’t help me.”
“Then care for some company?”
He reached across the seat and opened the passenger door. My stomach flipped and a chill went up my spine. I didn’t know if it was nerves or a warning sign or both. But I got in the car.
Within a few minutes, we had left the congested Hollywood traffic behind and were cruising through a different neighborhood from where we’d driven last week.
“You definitely know your way around. Do you live near here?” It occurred to me that he knew exactly where I lived—he
had even seen my house—while I had no idea where he was from.
“Not even close. I’m all the way over on the Westside.”
I assumed he meant the west side of Los Angeles, but that didn’t mean anything to me. “I didn’t realize they talked like Brits over there.”
Nick threw me a sideways glance and flashed his crooked smirk before shifting into higher gear. “And she’s cheeky too.”
My actual cheeks began to burn as I wondered what he meant by “too.” I wasn’t normally this sassy, except with Annie, but Nick somehow brought it out in me. “But seriously, if you live here, why do you have an accent?”
“My father’s English. Mum’s American. We moved here just after I was born, but they shipped me back to the Mother Country for boarding school. Acquiring the accent was the best way to survive. After ten years there, I suppose it stuck.”
“How old were you when you went?
“Eight.”
“Wow.” I tried to imagine what it was like being sent away, so far from home, at such a young age. “Was it lonely?”
“You get used to it.” His foot faltered on the pedal and the car momentarily slowed down.
“When did you move back to L.A.?”
“I haven’t.” Something flashed across his face and his expression darkened. “I’m just here until the autumn.”
“What happens then?”
“I go back.” He said it like it was some sort of sentence.
“Back to England?” My stomach tightened, waiting for him
to answer. Even though I was supposedly going away to college then anyway, I didn’t want to think about Nick leaving.
“Yes.” He released his foot from the gas pedal to change gears. “To Oxford.”
Picking up speed, he stared at the road. A silence settled over us. A ball that felt about the size of a marble lodged itself at the base of my gut. It reminded me that no matter how much I wanted to escape from the rest of the world when I was with him, it still existed. It was also a reminder that there was more to the story that Nick wasn’t telling me.
“My turn,” he said a few minutes later. “What’s your story, Olive…?”
“Bell,” I supplied.
“Olive Bell. It has a nice ring to it, pun intended.”
“Never heard that one before,” I teased. “I still don’t know your last name, by the way.”
“That can be your next question. It’s still my turn.” His voice was now light and playful. “You don’t want to argue with a man behind the wheel.” He made a wide figure eight across the empty lane on the other side of the road. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. It was the calmest I had felt since the last time I was with him.
“So tell me, what’s it like being Olive Bell?”
“Let’s see…” I tapped my fingers on my knee, pretending to think. “I’m a senior at the very prestigious Vista Valley High, which is precisely two point three miles from my house, which is about three point eight miles from the hospital where I was born. And that about sums up my fascinating life.”
“I bet that doesn’t even scratch the surface,” he said, with no hint of irony. My stomach fluttered from the way he looked at me, his gray eyes flashing beneath his bangs.
“Trust me,” I said, thinking about the fact that Nick had spent at least half his life on another continent, while the most adventure I’d ever experienced was with him. “I’ve barely been anywhere else.”
“Then let’s fix that.”
• • •
We cruised down the freeway, heading east, in the opposite direction of home.
“Just let me know if we leave the state.” I pressed the recline button and leaned back in my seat. From that angle, all I could see were the retreating city lights growing smaller and smaller in the side mirror, and the still faint crescent moon rising.
“Deal,” he said, and stepped on the gas.
I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the plush leather seat. Concentrating on the steady rhythm of the humming engine, I tried to ignore the other questions that smoldered in my mind, like who Nick was and whether I could really trust him. Almost fifteen minutes passed before I realized that neither of us had spoken a word since we left the city. The radio wasn’t even on to fill the void, but it wasn’t awkward. It was the opposite: a comfortable silence. The kind where you get lost in your own thoughts without losing your connection to the other person. The kind you normally shared with someone you’ve known a long time, not someone you’ve just met. The kind of silence I suddenly realized I had never experienced with Derek.
Nick made a left off the highway onto an unmarked dirt path. Following it a few hundred feet down to where it ended, he stopped and turned off the engine. The dashboard lights slowly faded, pitching us into complete blackness.
“We’re here.”
We started down a thick, ragged path of overgrown brush. I so desperately wanted to reach out and grab onto his arm, but the sound of twigs and branches snapping beneath our feet stopped me. It reminded me of the haunting noises that invaded my brain, like the crunch of broken bones, rupturing any sense of calm. A small part of me still wondered if Nick was really some masterful serial killer who had lured me to the middle of nowhere, if I had willfully ignored all the signs until it was too late.
A few hundred yards down, we came to a wide clearing illuminated by the moon, directly above. Once my eyes adjusted, I could make out the distorted shapes of branches ahead and the soft, expectant expression on Nick’s face as he waited for me to catch up. It was definitely not the look of a mad killer, but of someone who could steal my heart.
“Where are we?”
“The real California.” He stopped by a cluster of trees and lay down on his back. He patted the cracked earth to his left, an invitation to join him.
Up close I could see the branches were burnt and bent, the remains of a wildfire. I lay down, careful to keep a few feet between us. I couldn’t tell what I was more afraid of—his next move or how I was feeling. It was almost like lying down in
my own backyard, only the blooming flowers were replaced by blackened wood, my own jagged breathing by Nick’s steady breath.
“Why here?” I asked. The face of his gold watch caught the moonlight. There was a hairline crack on the glass at the left side, where both hands were frozen on the number nine. I wondered how it broke, what had happened at nine forty-five and why Nick still wore it.
“So that you can say you’ve been somewhere, a place of your own. And I thought you would like it. Out here nothing’s hidden. It’s kind of
jolie laide
.”
“What does that mean?” I had taken a year of Spanish for my foreign language requirement but didn’t speak a word of French.
“It literally means ugly-beautiful, but there isn’t really a proper English translation for it. It’s what this place is, though.”
I wrapped my arms around my chest as another chill ran through me. Was that what I was, too? Ugly-beautiful? Only I wasn’t sure what the beautiful part was.
“Beneath the palm trees, this is what L.A. is really like,” he continued. “A desert. The trees don’t just naturally grow there. Practically nothing does.” He gathered a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers. “This is what’s real, all around us. This is the way things are really supposed to be.”
I thought about my neighborhood and the lush green lawns that spread out before each house, block after block. The even rows of palm trees lining Vista Boulevard and the sprinkler
systems that went off like clockwork every morning to keep the illusion in place.
We stared up at the open sky. It felt so much bigger than the pocket of night I was used to from my tiny patch of grass. I imagined looking down at Vista Valley from an airplane, where the view revealed that everything was divvied up into neat allotments. Our town was just one of hundreds like it. It was like discovering that there were so many more planets in the galaxy than the eye could see, that life encompassed so much more than the subdivision I was born into. I turned my head so my cheek was touching the cool, dry earth. Under the shroud of darkness, I stared at Nick. It wasn’t just his physical features that defined him. It was everything: from the way he moved to his battered car to his frayed jeans and his broken watch. He clearly didn’t care what anyone else thought of him, like he was used to being the only one around, the way we were in the vast open desert.
I reached into my bag and took out the camera. Like my copy of
Mrs. Dalloway
, I had been carrying it around every day, since the day I had taken it. But this was the first time I was inspired to use it.
“You’re a photographer?” Nick asked, propping himself up on his elbows.
“Hardly.” I was glad it was dark because I felt my cheeks start to burn again. “I just…borrowed this from someone.”
I got up and walked over to the tree looming precariously next to us. The branches were gnarled and twisted, but up close, intricate patterns, like interweaving veins, emerged beneath the
charred top layer. I removed the lens cap, zoomed in, and adjusted the aperture. As more moonlight filled the small glass frame, I understood what Nick meant. And he was right. It was ugly-beautiful.
When I looked back, he was lying down and his eyes were closed. Without thinking, I aimed the camera toward his face, zoomed in as close as possible, and clicked.
He opened them a minute later, after I had already screwed the lens cap back on and the camera was dangling from the strap around my shoulder. But it still felt like I had been caught in the act, like I had stolen something from him.
“OH NO,”
I muttered as I made my way up the walkway. My father’s Buick was already in the driveway. He had beaten me home. The engine was even still crackling.
I fished my keys out of my bag and gently pushed open the front door. I held on to the doorknob to minimize the noise until it latched shut. I made my way inside, still clutching my phone. Nick had taken it from my lap and keyed his number into it when he dropped me off. I tiptoed down the dark hall and peered toward the kitchen. All the lights were off.
Maybe he’s already asleep
, I thought, relaxing my shoulders and continuing toward the kitchen.
“Olive?” my father’s voice called out.
I nearly tripped over myself as I flicked on the lights, revealing my father sitting at the table, in the dark, his right hand gripped around his nightly glass of scotch.
“Are you, like, waiting up for me or something?” I asked, standing by the door. Knowing that he regularly came home so late made me feel like I somehow had license to question him before he had the chance to question me.
“I must have dozed off.” He cleared his throat to get his voice back, then took a sip of his drink. His tie was loosened around his neck. His jacket hung from the back of his chair. He always wore a full suit, even on the hottest days of the year. How many times had he sat here like this, in the dark, after the lights went off? “You look like you’re in a good mood. Where were you?”
I didn’t realize I was still smiling, but relaxed my cheeks when I saw the numbers on the stove clock flash 1:57. It was much later than I thought. Had I really been out with Nick practically all night? “I fell asleep at Annie’s,” I said. “We were studying for midterms.” It surprised me how easily the lie rolled off my tongue.
My father’s face lit up. “I’m glad to hear that you’re getting back into your school work. You’re a smart girl. I have no doubt you’ll be caught up in no time.”
The truth was, I hadn’t actually opened a book in days. But it wasn’t like before, when I first came back and was too shell-shocked to do pretty much anything. Now I couldn’t concentrate for a different reason. Because of Nick. Every time I tried to read
Mrs. Dalloway
or do a math problem set, I’d find myself doodling his name across the page. It was as if the song was also conspiring against me, pulling me further and further out to sea, away from my regular life here and toward him.
“How about you?” I asked. I didn’t want to go any deeper into the topic of my homework. “Why are you still up?”
“I’m working on a closing and lost track of time.” He rattled the ice cubes around in his glass. “One second it was six o’clock
and next time I looked up it was already one in the morning. I was just having a drink to wind down.” He said it so casually, like it didn’t happen almost every night. Maybe he had his own reasons for lying. Just like I did.
“So, how does it feel to almost be a high school graduate?”
He posed the question the way a distant relative might, in an effort to strike up conversation. Lately it felt like we were barely part of the same family. This was practically the first time we’d talked since the drive home from the hospital. He was never around but I wondered if that even made a difference. “Okay, I guess. Thankful it’s almost over.”
“Can’t wait to get out into the real world, huh? I remember that feeling.”
“I guess.” That wasn’t the way I meant it, but I didn’t bother correcting him. I hadn’t thought much about the future since the accident. I no longer knew what it looked like, no longer knew what I
wanted
it to look like. “Not that college really counts as the real world.”
“That all depends,” he said, gazing outside. With the kitchen lights on, the windowpane reflected his image, like he was staring into a mirror. “Sometimes it’s the other way around.”
“What do you mean?” I came into the room and pulled up a chair.
“I almost dropped out of college before I even started.” He got up and walked over to the counter to refill his glass. He was so relaxed, it seemed like he was almost about to whip out a glass for me, too. My dad was usually so lawyerly, when he wasn’t being all Father Knows Best. But tonight was different;
tonight he was acting more like a friend. “I had this hippie English teacher in high school, Jerry Cooper. He insisted we call him by his first name, which, in those days, was considered countercultural.” It still was, at least in Vista Valley, I almost said, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. “At the end of senior year, he pulled me aside and gave me a copy of
On the Road
, you know, the classic by Kerouac.” I had no idea what he was talking about but nodded anyway, eager for him to get to the point. He sat back down with his refreshed scotch. “So Jerry told me to read it before making any decisions about my future. He knew my plan was to go to law school and become a lawyer, just like my father, but he thought I should explore becoming a writer.” He paused to take a sip of his drink. “I thought he was crazy. I’d only written a story here and there, nothing that would make me give up everything, but I was also flattered, so I decided to read the book. I devoured it in one day. It was a Sunday. I remember because the banks weren’t open. I waited until the next morning to empty my account, buy the cheapest car I could find, and hit the road, just like Kerouac. I didn’t tell a soul. Not even your mother, and I skipped out just two days before high school graduation.”