100 Sideways Miles

by Andrew Smith

  I realized too that Blake Grunwald had just come inside the house from his parents’ backyard and stood glaring at me with his flabby chest puffed out and his arms bent back like a gunslinger in an old Western.

  This was definitely not a good time or place for me and Blake to rekindle our fistfight.

  So I attempted to defuse the situation with a sober and sincere-sounding lie.

  “Hey, Blake. Great party, man.”

  “Who told you you you could come and be here, Easton?”

  Blake Grunwald was exceedingly drunk, stoned, chewing tobacco, and hurling an excess of pronouns too.

  “Oh, uh, Cade said it it it was okay as long as we brought some girls.”

  “What girls?” Blake demanded.

  “Uh. They were here just a minute ago,” I said. “Maybe they’re outside. Getting high. Smoking the weed. Man.”

  I only hoped that Julia wasn’t like that. I had the idea she wasn’t, but it’s always so hard to tell these things about kids.

  Blake said, “Huh?” and glanced over his shoulder, out the sliding, postmodern seventies-style glass door through which he’d entered. And as soon as he did, I spun around and headed for the front exit.

  Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop stood on the curb beside Julia’s Mustang. Monica smoked a cigarette, taking big, dramatic, disaffected drags.

  “You guys can’t take off,” I said. “Blake Grunwald wants to kill me.”

  “Why does he want to do that?” Julia asked.

  Monica Fassbinder, being a sort of mascot to Cade Hernandez, knew all about our issues.

  “We just hate each other,” I said.

  “Oh,” Julia said with a tone that implied she understood perfectly well that sometimes boys just hated each other for insignificant reasons.

  “Well, Monica asked if I would take her home,” she said. “I was going to come back to get you.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” I said. “I’ll ride with you.”

  I realized this meant I would be the solitary boy riding with Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop inside a brand-new Ford Mustang, and it made my atoms feel very fertile.

  Monica exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and said, “What about Cade?”

  “Uh, he needs to sleep for a while. He’ll be okay. Julia and I will come back for him. We’ll keep him safe for you, Monica.”

  • • •

  So that’s how I ended up alone with Julia Bishop, driving twenty miles per second through the deserted streets of Burnt Mill Creek after midnight, and under the second brightest moon in more than a century.

  Sixty billion miles.

  “What about you?” I said. “Won’t your boyfriend want to kick my ass for getting you to drive me and my wasted friends to a shitty party?”

  We’d dropped Monica Fassbinder off at her host family’s house, which happened to be across the street from the left-field fence at Burnt Mill Creek High School’s baseball diamond. Monica’s host “mother,” Mrs. Shoemaker, was a substitute teacher at our school.

  I’ll admit my question was a rather obvious way of asking what I didn’t have the nerve to say directly to Julia Bishop.

  She said, “Finn Easton, Right Field.”

  “How did you know what position I play?”

  Julia kept her eyes fixed forward. We stopped at a red light on Old Mill Boulevard, at an intersection across from Flat Face Pizza.

  “Because I’m a stalker and I ruin boys’ lives,” Julia said blankly.

  “Oh.”

  Then she laughed.

  “I’m in the yearbook class. I looked you up,” she said.

  I remembered seeing “Yearbook” on her class schedule the day I showed her around the school, and I wondered if she’d been as interested in finding out about me as I was about her.

  That couldn’t possibly be the case, I thought.

  “Oh,” I said. To be honest, I was relieved that she was only messing with me and that she wasn’t actually a stalker who ruined boys’ lives.

  Then she said, “I wasn’t stalking you or anything. It’s just that I didn’t know anyone here at all. You were the first nonadult person I met, so I remembered your name. And I looked at your pictures.”

  “Oh,” I repeated.

  “You say that a lot.”

  “Uh.”

  “But my boyfriend wouldn’t kick your ass, anyway. He’s in Illinois.”

  “That would be a long way to come just to kick someone’s ass,” I said.

  I knew I was stupid for feeling it, but when Julia Bishop admitted she had a boyfriend, I kind of sank lower in my seat and thought about what a loser I was.

  “It wouldn’t be too long for him,” Julia said. “He’s an airline pilot.”

  “Oh.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think it was overly strange for Julia Bishop to have a boyfriend who was probably in his forties, even if it was really creepy. My throat knotted up when I thought about how, if Julia Bishop’s boyfriend actually was an airline pilot in his forties, then they most likely had sex all the time.

  That’s what forty-year-old airline pilots are going to do, after all: have sex. What other things could possibly happen between them? Conversations about prevailing headwinds or what happened today in high school yearbook fucking class?

  I worked myself up into an angry storm rather quickly; another Finn Easton patented wild mood swing.

  Then Julia laughed. “I’m just messing with you.”

  “Uh, I knew that,” I said, but I didn’t really.

  “Would you smile?” Julia asked.

  “I am smiling,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “This is how I smile,” I said. “I smile with my atoms on the inside.”

  “Try getting some of the outside ones to show it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Julia Bishop moved to San Francisquito Canyon, which is the site of the worst human-caused engineering disaster in California history, from Chicago, which is the site of one of the tallest buildings in the United States.

  Somebody in Illinois must have studied engineering at a regular school.

  Imagine that.

  • • •

  Julia Bishop was nothing if not mysterious.

  She told me very little about her life, and why she’d come to move two thousand miles during the last months of her eleventh-grade year.

  Julia Bishop was beautiful and evasive.

  “The earth moves two thousand miles, the distance from Chicago to Burnt Mill Creek, in one minute and forty seconds,” I said.

  “It only took my parents about that long to decide to send me away from home,” Julia Bishop said.

  “I wish you’d quit doing that—messing with me,” I said.

  “I’m not,” Julia said. “I’m really not messing with you. I needed to get away from there for a while, so they moved me out here to live with my aunt and uncle.”

  “So. Um. Why did you need to get away?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. And I kind of don’t want to talk about it.”

  I felt my face redden. I suppose I got somewhat angry at her game playing. Julia Bishop had seen my most embarrassing and hidden truths, and I knew almost nothing about her. I turned my face and looked out the passenger-side window.

  “It’s going to be a left turn up there,” I said.

  “Are you mad or something?”

  “No.”

  “You sound mad,” she said.

  “This is how my atoms sound when I’m happy,” I answered.

  “You’re full of shit, Finn Easton.”

  Julia let the car drift slowly toward the curb. We were on the street where Blake Grunwald lived, but the house was halfway down the block.

  Julia Bishop parked there.

  She said, “I don’t really like to say what happened. Is that okay?”

  “It’s your story,” I said. “It’s okay for you to tell it or not tell it.”

  “Okay,”
she said.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  Julia stared down the street as though she were looking to see who was still hanging out in front of Blake Grunwald’s shitty party, but I could tell she was really trying to figure out how to talk to me, how to crack me.

  She said, “I did have a boyfriend there.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not like that,” Julia said. “Well, it kind of got out of control with him and he started doing things that scared me, scared the shit out of my parents.”

  “Like, was he dangerous?” I asked.

  “Totally.”

  “Do you want me to go to Chicago and kick his ass?” I asked.

  Julia smiled and shook her head.

  “So, then—just checking—he doesn’t really fly airplanes, does he?”

  “No. He played on my school’s hockey team.”

  I calculated probabilities. “Oh. Baseball players generally don’t fare so well in matchups against hockey players.”

  Julia laughed.

  She said, “You never even kissed a girl before, did you?”

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  Julia nodded up at the sky. “Out there.”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re right. I haven’t ever kissed a girl. Um. Before. . . .”

  “It’s all behind you now.”

  I thought about how long ago it had been—since Julia Bishop grabbed my arm, spun me around, and kissed me.

  “It was about a hundred thousand miles, I guess, since the last time I kissed a girl.”

  “I like how you do that.”

  I didn’t know what she could possibly be talking about. She certainly couldn’t have been referring to my abilities as a kisser.

  “You like how I do what?” I said.

  “The way you think about how far we go in space. I never thought about that stuff at all before I talked to you tonight. To me, it all just seems empty and nowhere—like we never really get anywhere at all. I mean, when you—when most people—look up there, nobody ever really thinks those are actual places that we’re moving toward. You make everything seem so big, like it really matters. I think it’s something remarkable that you made me think about how far we actually move.”

  I shifted in my seat. I was unbearably hot; I needed some air. “I can’t help it. It’s what I do. Kind of like you messing with me is what you do.”

  “I’m not messing with you, Finn. I really think you’re an okay guy.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  When Julia Bishop said I was an “okay guy,” my atoms began to swirl and vibrate. I felt very aroused and daring.

  I said, “Tell me something. It’s hard for me to figure out if I’m normal and shit with a best friend like Cade Hernandez. And I don’t know anything about kids in Chicago, or hockey players, or girls who look like you. So. Did you and your old boyfriend—you know, did you guys have sex?”

  Julia laughed. “Where’d that come from?”

  “A Lazarus Door,” I said.

  Julia said, “Oh. Well. You know what? We shouldn’t have.”

  I said, “Oh. Um. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  I wasn’t looking at her when I apologized for asking my question. I was too flustered to because all I could think about at that exact moment was Julia Bishop having sex with some hockey-playing beast from Chicago, and what it would be like if she ever had sex with me.

  She put her hand on mine, and I swallowed the knot in my throat.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  Then I leaned across the gearshift and kissed Julia Bishop.

  Inside the swirling calamity of our kiss, as we parted our lips and explored each other’s tongues, I turned completely inside out.

  I poured myself into Julia Bishop’s warm, delicious mouth. We sailed along, wrapped wholly and firmly together, flying twenty miles, twenty miles, twenty miles, twenty miles. And in that turning, unfolding, opening, I forgot everything about me. It was as if all the words anyone ever dreamed up migrated from my head, through my mouth, and into Julia Bishop, a flooding exodus of everything uncontained, all those nouns, articles, verbs, emptying me completely.

  Our kiss lasted only about one hundred sideways miles, but it was the best stretch of distance my fourteen-billion-year-old sexually inflamed teenage atoms had ever covered.

  Julia slid her hand up inside my tank top. She rubbed my chest and pinched at my nipples.

  It was wild.

  I desperately wished to make everything else just stop, so Julia Bishop and I could stay there, wrapped up in each other forever—so we could let everything else on this world slide endlessly past us into the big black knackery of our universe.

  I jumped when something slapped against my window.

  Cade Hernandez.

  He said, “Dudes, you’re giving me a total boner.”

  That made two of us.

  Cade Hernandez looked as though he’d recovered, at least, but he was missing a few articles of clothing. In fact, all he had on were the blue jeans he’d worn earlier when he went to work at Flat Face Pizza. And his fly was half-open. You could see the white of his underwear.

  Cade Hernandez was a mess.

  Cade stood on the curb barefoot, sockless, and naked from the waist up.

  I opened the car door and attempted to stand. I grabbed myself with both hands and pulled my tank top down to cover the embarrassing bulge inside my flimsy shorts.

  “Um,” I said, “where’s the rest of you?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it.” Cade flipped the seat forward and climbed into the back of the Mustang.

  “We need to go back to Blake’s to get Cade’s clothes,” I told Julia.

  “Did you guys leave Monica there?” Cade asked.

  “I drove her home,” Julia said.

  “Then you should just take me and Finner back to his house,” Cade said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to go back to Blake’s house for my shit.”

  I said, “Um.”

  Cade continued. “When I woke up, I couldn’t figure out where I was and shit. All I knew was it smelled like a fucking sweaty locker room. It smelled like Blake’s balls. And then I just started puking everywhere. All over Blake’s fucking bed.”

  I found this to be very funny.

  Who wouldn’t laugh at a guy like Cade Hernandez vomiting in the bed of an asshole like Blake Grunwald?

  Cade said, “It was bad, dude. Really. I must have puked a gallon all over his pillows and sheets. I tried to get up, but I just kept puking and puking. Then I finally made it into the hall, and I puked all over the floor there, too.”

  “Those carpets were nice,” I said.

  “Berber,” Cade affirmed.

  He went on. “I tried to make it to the bathroom, and I kept puking and puking all over everything—the door, the wall, the counters, the linen rack. By the time I made it to the toilet, I was pretty much emptied out. But I did puke in the bathtub and on the toilet lid too.”

  “What happened to your shirt?” I asked.

  Cade shook his head. “I left it under Blake’s pillow. It was fucking destroyed, dude. I have no idea what happened to my shoes and socks.”

  “Um.”

  I heard Cade flipping his can of chewing tobacco.

  He announced in a very cheerful voice, “I do feel a hell of a lot better now, though.”

  “Nothing like a good puke to make you feel alive again,” I said.

  Cade packed a wad of tobacco into his lower lip and added, “But I don’t think I should go back for my clothes and shit. Blake’s gonna be fucking pissed.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “that’s probably not such a good idea.”

  Sometimes kids just have to write off lost articles of clothing at the end of a party.

  THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

  Julia Bishop dropped Cade Hernandez and me
off at my house at three o’clock in the morning.

  I gave her my phone number.

  I wanted so desperately to kiss her again, just like we did when Julia parked her car on Blake Grunwald’s street. But I was afraid to do something as bold as that with Cade watching.

  What an idiot I was.

  It was very frustrating for me—being torn between the need to taste Julia Bishop in my mouth one more time and my unwillingness to risk failure in front of my sexually accomplished best friend.

  Now there’s a guaranteed formula for extinction.

  • • •

  Cade Hernandez and I did not wake up until noon. When we got out of bed, Cade, moaning, walked downstairs and let himself out into the backyard. He stood at the edge of our pool, held his arms out like airplane wings, and then, wearing nothing at all but white cotton briefs, let himself fall into the cool water.

  “Don’t pee in my pool, Cade,” I warned.

  “Dude, I always pee in your pool. Why should today be any different?”

  Laika whimpered inside Sputnik 2.

  I let her out with a warning. “And stay away from me. You stink.”

  My dog slunk away to a shaded corner of the backyard. I was neither physically nor mentally prepared to deal with bathing the wretched odor of dead coyote atoms from Laika’s oily fur so early in the teenage day.

  Cade assumed a faceup dead-man’s float in the middle of the pool.

  He said, “I am so fucking hungover, dude.”

  Here was my friend, floating in his underwear in my pool.

  I said, “You’d never know it, Cade.”

  Cade added, “Be a pal and toss my can of chew out here. I can’t move.”

  “Uh.”

  Maybe it was our late bedtime, or perhaps the lingering aftereffects of my blanking out the day before, or the sleepless sweaty night I spent fantasizing about having sex with Julia Bishop, but something struck me as being eerily still and quiet that day. It was as though things had changed, that somehow the earth had frozen in its journey and time had finally come to a standstill.

  That would be nice.

  I thought, even on a Sunday morning there would be plenty of traffic noise through the canyon—obese weekend Harley riders traveling in packs up to the old bikers’ bar called the Rock Inn, airplanes flying overhead, the ambient weekend sounds of Southern California in its constant buzz and rumble.