The Disenchantments (3 page)

“Hey,” I say to Bev, “we should do this photo thing in Europe, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re going to meet so many people. We can keep a log: where we were, who the person was, what we were talking about.”

“That sounds really good,” she says, but there’s something about the way she says it—like she’s doing her drifting away thing.

“Okay, let’s think about it more. We can
refine
it,” I say, using the phrase Bev’s favorite teacher uses instead of saying that something’s a bad idea. Bev smiles her amazing smile—that dimple in her left cheek, her one crooked tooth, from the time we crashed bikes and she went flying—and turns up the volume.

We’re exiting the bridge, and “Turn It On” by Sleater-Kinney has begun.

“Nice choice,” Bev tells Meg.

“I thought I’d give a nod to our origins,” Meg says. “Show the Riot Grrrls a little love.”

The summer after ninth grade, Bev showed me this book on the Riot Grrrl movement she found at Green Apple and told me, “I’m going for this.” And I think I said something like, “Why go for something that reached its peak the year you were born?” But she rolled her eyes and I ended up admitting that, yes: Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney were so much better than any girl bands around now, and after
a laptop screen marathon of mid-nineties concert footage with terrible sound quality but dozens of badass girls jumping around in miniskirts or pounding on drum sets or strumming bass guitars (braless, in thin white shirts), I succumbed.

Yes, it was time for a resurrection. Yes, even though she had never played music before in her life, Bev could be the one to do it. Because even though some of the Riot Grrrls were awesome musicians, the real criteria were to care about injustice, to be antiestablishment, and to be hot in a way that was raw and authentic.

A few months later Bev and I saw Sleater-Kinney play at Great American Music Hall. We stood in the crowd, older people all around us, under the ornate ceiling and red balcony. I kept looking over at Bev, who was cocking her head, letting her blond wavy hair fall into her eyes, trying to look like this was nothing new when really all of it was new: standing in this dark room so close to strangers that we seemed to breathe in unison, all waiting for the same moment.

And then the lights went out and the applause began, and Bev was trying not to smile but I didn’t care about seeming cool. Instead I grabbed her hand and we wove our way through the crowd, getting as close as we could to the stage. Usually I think that’s a jackass move, which is why I always get to shows early and sit down on the floor for an hour before the opening act goes on. I like to be in the front but I don’t believe in cutting. There are a couple loopholes
to this etiquette, though. One is if the band you are seeing is your favorite band and you arrive late because you have to finish cleaning your room before you leave the house, and another is if rumors of the band retiring are swarming across music magazines and blogs everywhere and this might be your first and only chance to see them up close and possibly be graced with a drop of hot girl sweat by one of the two singer/guitarists. Both of these were true for Bev that night, so I took her by the hand and said “excuse me” about forty times.

We ended up right next to a giant speaker, and my ears would be ringing for days but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that Bev was also grinning by now, and Corin strummed her pretty gray-and-white guitar and sang these elastic, ecstatic notes, and Janet’s drums sounded like a cross between kids clapping in unison and the best punk drummer there ever was, and right above us, so close that we could have hopped the barrier and touched her, Carrie played her guitar and sang responses to Corin’s phrases, and every now and then she would squint into the lights and do these lazy hops and kicks like she was feeling mellow and dancing in her living room.

“I have such a crush on her,” Bev said, staring as Carrie stood above us, her hand strumming fiercely, gazing out into nothingness.

I said, “You’re gonna have to fight me for her,” and we both laughed and looked back to the stage where Carrie was
now moving her ankles around in some weird part-march, part-moonwalk way.

For the rest of the night, Bev hardly looked at the other two, even during Janet’s drum solos, even though Corin had the cutest porcelain doll face and did things with her voice I didn’t know were possible. I watched Carrie sing “Modern Girl,” which was slower and had lyrics I knew by heart because Bev had been listening to it on repeat for months. When “Modern Girl” ended and the raucous, catchy songs resumed, I pulled out the sketchbook I carried and started a list of things we’d need to have so that Bev could start her band.
Guitar. Amp. Drum kit. Bass and/or second guitar. Another amp. Songs (four to start). At least two more girls.

Thirty miles out of San Francisco, I am hit with a realization: “Our tickets!” I say to Bev.

I started looking at prices and flights a year ago but Bev didn’t want to get them too far in advance. Prices were high and Bev kept talking about her cousin who always gets last-minute flights for cheap, especially when the tickets are only one way, like ours are. We know that we want to leave right after tour, but we don’t know when we’ll want to come home, or even where we’ll be by then. We’ll be gone for at least a year, so maybe we’ll be living somewhere unexpected, like Norway, or, I don’t know, Cyprus or somewhere.

“I should call my dad right now and have him pay for
them,” I say, and I get this rush when I think about him pressing “purchase” on the website for these tickets with Bev’s name and my name on them, tickets that will take us to Paris and leave us to wander Europe by ourselves.

“Grab my phone?” I say to Bev, and she opens the glove compartment where we had tossed our phones earlier so they could sit with Uncle Pete’s random objects: a pocketknife and several cassette tapes, a blue feather and a gray stone carved with the Chinese character for Patience, his membership cards to the Vintage Volkswagen Club of America and the Sunset Table Tennis Club—an affiliation I’m going to have to ask him about at some point. I’ve never even heard him mention table tennis.

“No service,” Bev says.

“Really?”

She nods and after a minute she says, “I have to pee.”

I exit the freeway and pull into a McDonald’s lot, and I’m about to check for a signal on my phone when Bev asks me to come inside with her and buy her a shake while she uses the bathroom.

So I stand in line for a vanilla shake, Bev’s dessert of choice since forever, and she emerges just as I’m collecting the change. I hand her the shake.

“Thanks,” she says.

I take a few steps toward the door and turn around. She’s still standing at the counter, watching me.

“Did you want fries, too?”

“No,” she says.

“You did want vanilla, right?”

She nods.

“Ready, then?” I ask, and she finally steps forward and follows me out.

Bev tells me that she’s feeling tired; she needs to sleep before tonight’s show, so she opens the passenger door and takes out her stuff, and then moves to the backseat. Which means that now I’m alone in the front. Alexa offers to come up to copilot, but I tell her that as long as she can keep track of where we are from the middle row she can stay where she is. I’m an only child; I’m used to spending time by myself. And really, pretty much all I want to do is think about Bev and me in Europe right now, so I pull back onto the road and as soon as I have Melinda up to an acceptable speed—something that does not happen quickly—I can relax and space out for a while. We have fifty more miles on 101 before we need to start looking for the next road.

I drive past telephone wires and Adopt-a-Highway signs and miles and miles of golden hills, and I think about Bev, lying in the back row, and I wonder if she’s sleeping. I imagine her back there, staring at the diamond-patterned fabric of the bus ceiling, not seeing the billboards or the hills or any of what I’m watching out the window.

I imagine that she’s thinking about me.

I picture her finding the hoodie I left on the seat, bunching it up and using it as a pillow. The hoodie just came out of the laundry last night, so she’s smelling the detergent that fills our kitchen on laundry days, and the clean deodorant smell, and the aftershave I put on this morning. She’s breathing it in and thinking it smells amazing, thinking that it smells like me. And just like me, she can’t wait either. To spend every moment of every day together, traveling from ancient cities to tiny islands. To wake up with me in hostel rooms in unfamiliar countries. She’s imagining waking up and looking at me, still sleeping in the bed next to hers.

She’s realizing that she doesn’t want to be in a bed without me, so she pushes aside her covers and climbs under mine. The bed is so narrow that she has to press against me in order to fit, and I can feel her breasts against my chest, her leg across my legs, and in my sleep, I reach out to hold her closer. She kisses me below the ear, and then farther down my neck, and her hand travels from my chest to my stomach, and I wake up just in time to feel—

“Colby,” she calls to me from the back row.

I slam on the brakes and I hear Meg yelp and I glance back to see that Bev is not lying down but sitting up, holding her milk shake and leaning over the seat. Our eyes meet for a second. My face gets hot.

“Yeah?” I say, speeding up again.

“I need you to pull off at the next exit.”

“Why?”

“We should stop for gas,” Bev says.

“The tank’s three quarters full.”

“Still.”

“But we could go hundreds of miles on this.”

“Colby,” she says. “I need you to take the next exit.”

“All right,” I say. “Whatever you want. Can someone reach my hoodie? I left it in the back.”

Meg’s hand appears next to me, clutching the gray fabric.

“What do you need that for?” Meg asks. “It’s, like, three hundred degrees out.”

“I just don’t want to lose it,” I say, and I drape it across my lap in a way I hope looks casual, and a few miles later I steer the van off the freeway and pull into a gas station.

I get out and Bev gets out with me. I swipe the credit card, wait for the prompt, and start filling up my already-f tank.

“Are you gonna be like this the whole way?” I ask her. “We’re not going to get very far if you make us pull over every five miles.”

“I can’t go,” she says.

“Where?”

“I can’t go to Europe.”

A car next to us blasts hip-hop, the bass like thunder. I swear I didn’t hear her right.

“I got into RISD,” she says.

Her words don’t register. I don’t know what she means.

“RISD?”

“I’m going to college.”

Neither of us says anything. I turn toward the street, but I know her face by heart, and I can still feel her blue eyes watching me.

“Oh my God.”

“I didn’t think I’d get in.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“You really didn’t apply anywhere?” she asks.

It’s hard to breathe. There’s the smell of gasoline and now Bev is taking out a cigarette. She promised me she quit smoking, but here she is with a cigarette and shaking hands, lighting it.

“Don’t do that,” I say. “Do you want to blow us all up? And no, I didn’t.”

“Nowhere?” she asks.

“No,” I say. And everything seems unreal: this unfamiliar gas station, the hot air, her questions. “Of course I didn’t apply anywhere. I thought that if we both said, ‘Fuck college, let’s go traveling,’ we both meant we weren’t applying to college and were going traveling.”

“It wasn’t something I was planning,” she says.

“You don’t apply to school by accident.”

“I was writing that paper on Kara and one night I just looked it up and it was so easy. It only took twenty minutes.”

“Kara?”

“Kara Walker. She does those silhouettes?”

She stares at the cigarette, unlit between her fingers.

“Why?”
I ask.

She shakes her head. Won’t answer me.

On the gas pump screen, numbers are frozen in time. A car waits behind us. And through the glass of the bus windows, two girls’ curious, concerned faces stare at Bev and me, waiting to know what has gone wrong.

“Do they know?”

“No. No one does. Except my parents.”

“You should tell them now,” I say. “Tell them before I get back in.”

Bev reaches toward me, touches my arm, but I jerk away and she disappears into the van. I can’t move. I have no idea what to do. I watch as the waiting driver passes us and stops at an empty pump. As he fills his tank and washes his windshield and gets back into his car and drives away. He does all of this so casually, as if everything certain about the future hasn’t just been crushed and swept away.

And then I feel myself grab the gas nozzle and yank it out of the bus, slam it back onto the pump, and hit the
NO
button with my fist when the screen asks me if I want a receipt. Then my hands are in my hair and my voice is choking out a long string of obscenities like I’m one of the crazy men waiting in shelter lines South of Market. And then I’m leaving, walking across and behind the station and out of sight from everyone and my sneaker kicks the curb
over and over until my foot feels numb and swollen, and then I crumple into this pathetic heap on a nasty patch of weeds that smells like piss and garbage and yell the loudest yell of my life—louder than I yelled when Bev flew off her bike and landed hard on Nineteenth Avenue; louder than I yelled when I was six and got locked in a closet during a hide-and-seek game gone wrong; louder than I yelled when a group of us found ourselves up on Twin Peaks at 1:00
A.M.
on a Saturday, drunk and exhausted but refusing to call it a night, and we felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.

Then I pick myself up and go back to the van.

“I can drive if you want me to,” Meg says when I open the driver’s door. I’ve never heard her voice so careful.