We stand in front of the metal monstrosity.
“Who thinks up these things?” Dylan wonders.
“Probably someone related to you,” I tell her. I lie down on the seat and barely take up a quarter of the bench and Dylan snaps my picture. She tries to rock me, but the giant swing barely moves. She groans and pushes as hard as she can and the bench wobbles in response. I kick my feet against the pavement below and try to get it going, but the metal chains only moan and squeak.
Dylan hands me her camera and sits down at the very end of the bench. I snap a picture of her from a side angle. She’s so far away, she almost disappears in the back of the shot.
“All it’s missing is the world’s largest front porch,” she says as she hops up. I hand her the camera and we head back to the car. It’s so unnatural to walk next to Dylan without touching her. I suddenly don’t know what to do with my hands. I concentrate on the shadows of leaves painted on the ground by the bright sunlight.
We drive back to the interstate and stop at a roadway restaurant called Mamma’s Place. It shares a parking lot with a taxidermist, which makes sense since I’m sure most people are in the mood to eat after handling dead animals. A banner stretches between the two businesses that says, “You Kill It, We Fill It.”
How appetizing.
In the window of the taxidermist, I notice there’s a sale going on for mounted deer heads. I also notice the venison sausage is on special at Mamma’s Place, according to a white board on the sidewalk. I point out this unsettling fact to Dylan.
“You might want to avoid ordering meat in this place,” she says. When we walk in, I look around at all of the stuffed squirrel bodies and deer heads that clutter the restaurant walls and shelves. I assume they get a discount.
The restaurant is filled with local patrons in cowboy hats and dirty baseball caps. Denim appears to be the rural fashion trend. I realize why it’s so busy—we’ve made the early bird special.
Dylan scoots into a booth and I almost slip in right next to her out of habit, until I remember she isn’t mine and I have a pretend girlfriend and Dylan has an over-achieving, smart, outdoorsy boyfriend who could model for a Patagonia catalogue with all his stupid dogs. I hope they get married and own a dog shelter together and start a reality show about their stupid, charitable, perfect life.
For some reason, I feel the pathetic need to annoy Dylan, because her presence is sexually annoying the crap out of me. I had a hard-on three times last night, and one this morning. It’s like a headache in my pants.
Dylan opens her menu and I open mine and the waitress comes up and asks if we’re ready to order. I order coffee and Dylan orders lemonade, and then I clear my throat.
“I have a question,” I ask the waitress, but I pin my eyes directly on Dylan’s. “I was wondering which was moister.” I say moister slowly and delicately, giving every consonant and vowel carful enunciation. “The cinnamon rolls, or the muffins?”
Dylan scrunches her nose like she smells something foul. When we first met she told me what her three least favorite words were. Her long term memory sucks, but mine is prolific. It’s one of my weaknesses. I remember everything. The challenge is to try and forget.
I look away from Dylan and smile at the waitress, an elderly woman who appears to have more red lipstick on her teeth than on her lips. She chews on the end of her pen while she considers my question.
“By moister, you mean?”
“I mean exactly that,” I say. “Moist, as in having a spongy, porous texture saturated in pockets of moisture.”
Dylan covers her mouth with one hand like she’s about to gag. She takes a long breath and blows it out slowly between her fingers.
“Ah-huh,” the waitress mumbles. “The homemade raspberry muffins are popular,” she offers.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll have one.”
I smile at Dylan’s frown. This is going to be fun. Hey, if I have to be mentally, emotionally, and sexually tormented by her presence, than the least I can do is return the torture. I’m mature like that.
Dylan narrows her eyes after the waitress walks away. “Is it torture-Dylan day?” she asks. “I hate the m-word. Passionately hate.”
“I know,” I tell her. “You hate the words moist, protoplasm and membrane.”
She sets her menu down on the table. “How do you know that?” she asks, her eyes suspicious, as if I was reading her diary.
“You told me,” I remind her. “When we first met.”
She blinks with surprise, trying to recall the memory. “I don’t remember saying that.”
I shrug. “I do.”
“What else do you remember?” she asks.
I stare at her. “Everything. It’s my curse.”
“Wow,” she says. “I have trouble remembering anything. Names. Places. Dates. I barely passed freshman history.”
Must be nice. “That’s probably why you take so many pictures,” I tell her. “It’s your way of remembering.”
She smiles at me, a Dylan smile that’s part lips and part laugh and it always catches the corners of my lips and pulls them up. Even when I fight to hold them down.
The waitress comes back with coffee for me and lemonade for Dylan. She slides a muffin down on the table.
“Did you decide on breakfast?” the waitress asks. Dylan orders the apple pancakes and I stall.
“Well, again, I’m just looking over your menu,” I say, “and I’m wondering which is moister, the pancakes or the waffles?
“Um, the French toast is popular. I think it’s moist,” the waitress offers.
“Sounds great,” I say. I close my menu and hand it to her. “I’ll have that.”
She nods and sticks her pen behind her ear and walks away.
I look down at the giant muffin. Its billowing top is as big as the entire plate. I peel a piece off and stick it in my mouth. “Mmm, that is the moistest muffin I have ever had.”
I start to laugh and Dylan narrows her eyes. “I bet I can make you a hundred times more uncomfortable than you could ever make me,” she says.
I shake my head. “I know you too well,” I say. “Nothing you do can surprise me.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Is that a dare?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say.
She wipes her fingers slowly across her napkin. She dabs the corners of her mouth clean and I start to regret my words.
She scoots out of the booth and stands up. She straightens her t-shirt over her jean shorts. She walks into the center of the narrow isle, between our booth and the line of tables, turns to me, and clears her throat.
Oh, no.
“HAPPY BIRHTDAY TO YOU,” she belts out in low vibrato, like a baritone opera singer. She’s not trying to sound good, she’s going for loud. Embarrassingly, nauseatingly loud. Her voice echoes off of the walls. She sounds exactly like Chevy Chase singing Joy to the World in the movie Christmas Vacation. I can feel every pint of blood in my body rush to my face.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU,” she continues. Every conversation in the restaurant has ceased and every pair of eyes is on me. I swear even the deer heads look alarmed. I cross my arms over my chest and stare at Dylan. Her eyes are beaming down at me.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR, SHELDON.”
I glare up at her. Of course she has to give me a lame ass name. The cooks are out of the kitchen, staring and smiling. I feel myself sinking into the booth seat. I contemplate hiding underneath the table.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU.” Dylan rings out the final line with an exaggerated vibrato and a sweeping arm motion that ends with a deep bow. The restaurant rips into applause and laughter. Dylan turns and waves to the patrons before she sits down. She calmly picks up her fork and helps herself to my muffin.
She’s quiet and I wonder if she ripped a vocal chord with her little dramatic performance. I almost wish she did.
“We had an Olympic-style truth or dare competition in my neighborhood every summer when I was growing up,”
Dylan tells me. She points both of her thumbs at her chest. “Eight year, gold medal winner,” she says. “Dare with care.”
I set both of my hands on the table. “I promise I will never say the m-word for as long as I live,” I tell her. “Just, please, swear on your mother’s life that you will never sing like that again.”
“Was it that terrible?” she asks.
“The worst thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.
She smiles like I paid her a compliment.
“Okay, truce,” she says. “Pinkie swear.” She holds out her hand but I shake my head.
“Thumb swear,” I say.
“What?”
“It’s much more sincere than a pinkie swear,” I tell her.
She sticks her thumb out and I wrap my thumb around hers and squeeze. My hand starts to tingle from the connection and I drop her thumb with annoyance and glare at my hand. Apparently even her thumb turns me on. God, can you cut me a break, here?
“Amanda coined that swear,” I say. “She owns the patent, so you can’t use it unless you’re family.” I drink my coffee and Dylan sucks down half of her lemonade.
“Happy Birthday, Sheldon,” an older woman says to me as she passes our booth. I politely nod in response.
“You don’t wear baseball caps anymore,” Dylan notes.
“I shaved my hair,” I say. “It doesn’t get in my eyes.”
She smiles. She knows me better than that.
“That’s not why you wore hats,” she says. “You’re letting more in.”
“Maybe,” I admit.
“You’ve changed a little bit,” she says.
Our waitress brings our food and informs us a customer paid for our bill. She offers me more coffee, but I shake my head.
“Have a great day, Sheldon,” she tells me and pats me on the shoulder. When she walks away I roll my eyes at Dylan.
“Sheldon?” I ask her. “Really? The singing wasn’t bad enough?”
“Hey, we just stretched our travel budget,” Dylan points out, as if I should thank her.
“I get the feeling freebies are common for you.”
She lifts her hands. “Life loves improv,” she informs me. “The more dares you’re willing to take on, the better.”
I back pedal to her earlier comment. “So, how have I changed?” I ask her.
She sits back in the booth and studies me. “I can’t quite place it. There are the obvious physical changes. Beer gut. Double chin. Receding hair line.”
I laugh with amusement and it makes her smile.
“You’re more relaxed,” she says. “Maybe even happy?”
I don’t disagree with her. But I don’t tell her why I’m relaxed. Why I’m happy. Her energy has always had that effect on me. She energizes me but in a completely calming way, like lying out in the sun, feeling your insides heat up, all the way to your core.
“You must be happy you played so well this season,” Dylan guesses. “I heard you say you got VIP?”
“MVP, Dylan,” I correct her.
“Right. Or maybe it’s because of Rachel?” she suggests.
I lock eyes with her and Guilt stomps hard on my chest and it makes my shoulders tense. He must wear steel-plated boots. But I ignore his persistent kick. Rachel is the only wall I have left. It’s my only line of defense right now.
“It’s something else,” I admit. “I’m starting to get why you like traveling so much.”
“Why’s that?” she asks.
“It’s just freeing. Going to a brand new place where no one knows you. You get a fresh start. It’s like you purge your old life and you’re new again. You get to reinvent yourself.”
She nods. “Everyone needs to do it. People get so domesticated.”
“That’s because we’re designed to domesticate,” I point out. “We’re not wild animals. We have this whole evolutionary gap with apes for a reason.”
Dylan gives me an unbelieving stare. “But maybe we are wild,” she says. “I think deep down, in the oldest part of our reptilian brains, we still have that instinct in us. I think we’re meant to be wild, at least for a while.”
She makes a good point.
“Don’t you ever feel like you’re running away, when you’re leaving all the time, when you never stay in one place for very long?” I ask her.
“No. I’m not running away,” she says. “I’m just on my own path. It’s hard to explain because it’s uncharted. It isn’t paved out and marked with street routes. It’s invisible to everybody but me. I think that’s the best part about it.”
I listen to her talk and her words slide into places inside of me. They fill empty spaces and cracks like caulking fills holes and I’m nodding in agreement.
“Moving to New Mexico was the best thing I ever could have done,” I tell her. “And I get to leave every summer to play baseball. It’s almost too easy. I feel like I’m cheating. I get to leave all my problems behind, shove them in a closet and forget about them.”
“It gets old though,” she says and finishes her last bite of pancakes. “And your problems always resurface, no matter how deep you bury them.” I’m surprised to hear this.
“That doesn’t sound like White Fang talk.”
She shrugs. “The last time I was home, I spent a couple of hours just walking around my house. I was enamored with our basement. My parents have a storage room with all these boxes of decorations labeled for every holiday. They’re in neat stacks piled all the way to the ceiling. It made me jealous.” She sets her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. Her eyes turn thoughtful. “I wonder what that would be like,” she says.
My forehead creases. “To have a holiday decoration box?”
She laughs. “To have some consistency. Rituals. Traditions. My only tradition is to be nontraditional.”
I smile and swipe the last smudge of syrup off my plate with a piece of toast.
“After a while it’s nice to be around people that get you,” she says. “Starting over all the time, making new friends, it gets exhausting. When nobody knows you it’s hard to even know yourself.”
I read into all the things she’s not saying. Is Dylan considering settling down?
“Do you think you’ll ever go back to college?” I ask.
“I went to a class this spring,” she tells me. “I was living in Minneapolis, and one of my friends was a student, so I went with her to experience this whole ‘college phenomenon’ everybody talks about.”
“And?” I ask.
“They were all introductory courses,” Dylan says. “Intro to biology or intro to drawing. I watched people study in coffee shops, quizzing each other with note cards, memorizing words that mean nothing to them. Real life isn’t like that. You don’t get ABCD options. You can’t fill in the blanks of your life. It’s maddening if you think about it. Life doesn’t start out easy and eventually get harder. Life asks really hard things of you, right away. That’s what I love about it. Life’s the best teacher.”
“So what are you going to do next?” I ask.
She lifts her shoulders. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
I try again.
“What’s your final destination?”
She meets my eyes. She knows what I’m asking.
“Flagstaff,” she says.
I nod slowly. That’s all the validation I need. She’s still a drifter, a dreamer, an ambling vagabond. She doesn’t plan five minutes into the future. She can’t follow an outline for her life. She’s only capable of letting it unfold, one scene at a time. Dylan hasn’t changed. I doubt she ever will.
I leave a ten dollar tip on the table and slide out of the booth. I follow Dylan outside where the sun is already beating down on the black top. Even after a cup of coffee, my eyelids are heavy. I hand her my car keys.
“It’s your shift,” I tell her. When we get in the car, I text my parents to let them know I survived the tornado apocalypse. I’m surprised Dylan hasn’t texted Snickerdoodle yet
. But then I remember Dylan’s attachment to people is out of sight out of mind. Nick might as well get used to it.
PART TWO: THE DETOUR
Gray
I wake up to music pouring through the speakers and the sun is glaring in my eyes like it’s mad at me for sleeping the morning away. I squint out the window at the farm fields bordering the highway, scorched and brown from the summer sun.
I hear the song Faith playing, by George Michael. If Dylan is right, and listening to local radio stations is a cultural experience, then it appears most of America is stuck inside an 80’s time warp.
I twist in the seat. My neck’s stiff from attempting to sleep and hold my head up at the same time. I blink at the dashboard clock with surprise. It’s already past noon. I look out the front window at a beige highway that seems to never end, just repeat itself over and over with monotony and sun-bleached billboards advertising fast food restaurants and hotel chains. It feels like we’re going nowhere, just circling a wide track of road. I suddenly feel too constrained. My knees are pinned. My legs want to stretch. I stare out at the western horizon and I just want to get to Arizona. I want to put distance between me and Dylan. I want to drop her off and drive away without ever looking back and think, finally, forever, we are DONE.
“Isn’t the open road great?” I hear Dylan say. “It’s like having wings.”
I turn my neck and wonder if Dylan is talking to me, or to herself. I watch her take a bite of red licorice, and then use it as a drum stick against the steering wheel to match the acoustic rhythm of the song. She’s nodding her head, singing along to the lyrics.
I stretch my arms out and Dylan notices and says, “Hey, look who decided to join us.”
I wrinkle my forehead and wonder what she means by us, as if she has an imaginary friend or a split personality. Either scenario wouldn’t completely surprise me. Dylan has always hovered dangerously between being mildly insane and having a full blown personality disorder.
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