Train I Ride

by Paul Mosier

  My chin tilts up. It gets dimmer, like my eyes are closing.

  Then the door slides open noisily. Dorothea is standing there. She doesn’t look mad. She looks really calm, which is sort of scary.

  “It’s time to say good night to your friend,” she says.

  I turn to the face inches from mine. “Good night,” I say.

  “Good night,” he answers. He turns and bows slightly to Dorothea as he goes through the door.

  I sigh. “Are you gonna yell at me?” I ask.

  “Have I yelled at you yet?”

  I think about it. “No.”

  She nods. “He seems like a nice boy.”

  “He is.”

  We leave the vestibule, and Dorothea leads me back to our seats. I sit by the dark window, she sits on the aisle.

  “I was watching the two of you for a minute,” she says.

  “You were?”

  “Through the window of the door.” She smiles, kicks off her shoes. “I let you have as much time alone as I could. But I couldn’t let you kiss him.”

  “I wasn’t gonna kiss him.”

  She chuckles. “Oh yes you were.”

  “I was?”

  She nods, eyes closed and smiling.

  I close my eyes and think about how I almost kissed a boy without even knowing it was about to happen. It’s scary, but it’s not so scary because of who the boy was.

  I think of the almost-kiss, and I think of the portobello dream I had earlier, hoping I can return to where it left off.

  The train rolls on into the vast darkness.

  Instead of falling asleep I fall into a memory. It’s a memory that plays in my head all the time, like there’s something I need to learn from it that I haven’t.

  I’m at school in Palm Springs, trying to open my locker.

  These girls who always pick on me come up and form a half circle around me.

  “Where’s your mommy?” the loudest one says. “Is she soaking her dentures?”

  I try to ignore her. I have my back to them, trying to get my algebra book out of my locker, but I can’t seem to get the lock combination right.

  “Maybe she’s playing bingo with the other old people where you live?”

  The other girls laugh.

  “She’s not my mom. She’s my gramma.”

  The girls laugh while I tug on the lock. It won’t open.

  “Then where’s your mommy? Didn’t she want you anymore?”

  I spin around. “Shut up.”

  There’s four of them. My breathing is shallow.

  The loud one pokes me in the chest. “What did you say?” She moves in. She isn’t the beautiful golden-haired mean girl like in the movies. In fact it’s sad how homely she is, and I almost feel sorry for her in this moment. “I asked you a question, freak! What did you say to me?”

  I tell her to shut up again, but I add a word I’d never said before.

  She slams me against my locker and I bounce back at her. I start swinging, punching at her. My unrecognizable fists are sped up like the fast forward on a movie. There is blood coming from her nose, she falls away.

  I don’t want it to happen but the other girls come at me. I see hands and fingernails and faces, and I see my fists.

  It clears quickly. Big arms wrap around me. I hear myself breathing like a saw going back and forth.

  There’s one boy looking at me with surprise. Everyone else is a sea of blurry faces except this one boy whom I don’t recognize, looking speechless.

  I’m pushed along with my hands held behind my back, like I’m arrested.

  The fluorescent lights in the office, the expressions on the faces of the school secretary and the principal. Everyone’s a stranger, and none more than myself.

  Someone holds an inhaler to my mouth. I breathe in.

  I wait with the security guard. I look at my SpongeBob watch and see the glass is broken, and the second hand has stopped moving. The fish in the tank looks worried.

  They move me into Dr. Lola’s office.

  “Honey, what happened?” Dr. Lola cleans the blood from my knuckles with peroxide, revealing teeth marks. Her hands tremble as she wraps mine in gauze. She attends to everywhere else I hurt: the scratches on my face, the kicks to my legs. She gets my blood on her pretty skirt.

  I throw up. I say I’m sorry.

  A train roars by in the opposite direction, opening the shades of my eyes, bringing me back to where I am, in the dark night on the train. I wrap my arms around myself, then lean into Dorothea.

  Those mean girls are far behind me, and so is the girl they picked on, that version of myself. Far behind me too is Dr. Lola, and that’s what makes me shut my eyes against the pain.

  14

  I AWAKE TO Dorothea pushing my shoulder. I feel like I haven’t slept so long in years, but my heart aches for Dr. Lola.

  “Honey, the scouts are getting off in a few minutes. If you’d like to say good-bye to your friend, he’s waiting for you in the observation lounge.”

  I nod, stand up quickly, then grab my bag to brush my hair. I brush my teeth without water, swallowing the toothpaste because there isn’t time to go to the bathroom. Then I put some cherry ChapStick on my lips. My good-bye with Dr. Lola was all wrong. I don’t want it to be wrong with Tenderchunks.

  He waits for me at a table in the observation lounge, sitting next to his backpack. I drop in across from him.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey.”

  “So . . .”

  “Our bus crossed the river downstream and it’s picking us up on some country road. That’s where the train is headed right now.”

  I don’t want to feel this, this losing someone else, or for him to see me feel it. So I do the tough-girl act. “I’m stealing Howl from you. Hopefully you’ll get over it.”

  He opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything. He folds his hands and looks out the window, and then across at me. “Okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  He pauses again, then says, “So, I’ve been wanting to say that I like your dimples.”

  I reach up to touch where they would be if I was smiling. I wonder at what point I’ve smiled and caused them to appear for him to see.

  “Did your mom have dimples?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, and accidentally smile just a little, because I’m nothing like her.

  “There they are,” he says.

  I reach up to them.

  He shakes his head. “They kill me. They’re like arrows to my heart. It isn’t fair.”

  I smile again. “I’ve seen the best boy of my generation destroyed by dimples.” That’s almost a line from Howl. It has the intended effect on Tenderchunks. He looks incredibly happy that I’ve sort of quoted the poem.

  “So, it would be nice to stay in touch with you,” he says. “Are you on Facebook?”

  “No. I’ve never really had a computer to use. And I don’t even know what my address will be in Chicago. Somebody in a uniform is going to meet me at the station and take me somewhere else.”

  He cracks his knuckles, then puts his hands under the table.

  “But I can look you up,” I say. “Eventually. I mean, there aren’t many people named Tenderchunks, right?”

  He smiles. “I’ll write it down for you. My real name and address.”

  “No, I could lose it. Whisper it to me.”

  I lean forward and turn my head. He moves in and I feel his breath on my ear. He whispers it to me—name, address with street number, town, and zip code. Then he says something else that gives me goose bumps.

  “You promise you’ll remember it?”

  “It sounds like a lovely dream. I won’t forget it.”

  The train slows down. He looks over my shoulder. I turn and see the scoutmaster at the doorway, giving him the stink eye.

  “Well, it looks like I gotta go.”

  I point to his scout shirt. “What happened to the patches?”

  “The merit badges? I took them
off.”

  “Why?”

  He glances out the window. “What do the troop leaders know about merit?”

  I stare at him. “Can I have it?”

  “My shirt?”

  “Yeah. To remember you by?” It’s a lie, because there’s no way I’m forgetting him, with or without his shirt.

  He looks down and starts unbuttoning his shirt, and puts it on the table in front of me. He’s left wearing a white undershirt.

  I reach for my wrist. “You can have my SpongeBob watch. It’s busted, but it died a hero. It broke when I was fighting off four girls who were picking on me.”

  “Wow.” He puts it on. “This is gonna give me strength.”

  “Nobody can ever make you eat dog food again.” I put on his scout shirt and button it up. “How do I look?”

  “I’d stay in scouting for that.”

  “Are you leaving it, then?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe I can get my dad to go camping with me instead.”

  I clear my throat. I feel my lungs tightening but I’m not gonna let it happen. I’m not gonna let an asthma attack ruin this moment. “I’d kiss you except I don’t really do that. I try not to get my sense of self-worth from boys.”

  He nods. “That’s smart.”

  “But maybe next time I see you.”

  He moves to the aisle and shoulders his backpack.

  I stand and put myself between him and the scoutmaster. “Well, good-bye.” I hold out my hand.

  He shakes it. “Good-bye.”

  I close my eyes for a whole second. Then I lean in and kiss him on the cheek. “I didn’t need to do that,” I say. “I’m feeling pretty good about myself right now, but you looked like you needed a kiss.”

  “You’re right.” His eyes are watery.

  “You should probably dry your eyes before Caleb sees you.”

  He nods and pauses, then leans in and kisses me, right on the lips. Then he moves past me and walks away down the aisle with tears rolling off his face, ignoring my advice. I watch him go, mouthing his name and address to myself, and everything else he whispered, burning it into my memory.

  Then I run through the train to fetch my journal so I can write it down, just in case I lose my mind.

  15

  WE’VE BEEN OUTSIDE Fort Madison, Iowa, since last night. Now it’s afternoon, and I’m tired of looking at the same view, even if it’s a nice view. Outside my window is a field of soybeans, which have a way of moving in the breeze, like endless tiny waves, that’s very pretty to see. Beyond them, wind turbines spin in the distance. But I want the train to go backward, to keep it from getting to Chicago and emptying out all the people I’ve met on board. I want it to bring me back to where Tenderchunks was on the train.

  After the Mississippi River retreats from the tracks, they have to check everything and make sure it’s safe. That’s what Dorothea says.

  When we finally start moving again it will be only a matter of a few hours before the train stops and I get off.

  I stand and look in my hearts-and-flowers bag. I take the deodorant out and put some under my arms. I put on some cherry ChapStick. Nobody cares about my lips but it tastes good.

  I rehearse Tenderchunks’s name and address just in case I lose my journal. Over and over I say it in my head just to make sure it’s still there.

  I think about drawing him but I’m not so good at drawing people. Even if I was, I couldn’t do him justice.

  I sit back down. I fidget with the loose threads where the merit badges had been on the beige scout shirt I’m wearing. I picture myself making him a new set of badges and imagine what they’d be for. This one’s for being true to yourself. This one’s for being a free thinker. His smell is still on the shirt. This one’s for being a good kisser.

  I find myself wishing I could tell my mom about him. Gramma wouldn’t have wanted to know anything about my meeting a princely boy, but Mom would have. And then I think of Mom, and her face. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever forget her face or the sound of her voice, and I wonder if I really care whether I forget. But then I feel bad about thinking that. And I remember that Tenderchunks and everyone else says I look exactly like her, except my dimples, which only show on the rare occasions that I smile. So all I have to do is look in the mirror.

  The shrinks and social workers say she had a disease, that it’s just like cancer, that she didn’t choose to be who she was. That she had a mental thing that she medicated as best she could.

  But not everyone saw it that way. Gramma said bad things about her all the time, and when she did I’d get mad at her and say, How dare you talk about my mom that way. Even if I had been thinking the exact same thing right before Gramma said it.

  When I see someone like Neal, who smokes even though it’s bad for him and it might kill him and his boyfriend begs him to quit, it makes me feel like I understand my mom better, but it doesn’t keep it from hurting.

  I don’t even like saying what it is, or thinking about it. But when I have my thoughts to myself, like at this moment staring at all the soggy fields of soybeans and corn outside Fort Madison, Iowa, waiting for a giant river to exhale, it gets noisy in my head. It gets noisy in my head and I worry that I’m the same as her. Doomed.

  Since before I was born she was that way. She didn’t even mean to have me. I was a mistake. She’d say she loved me but her actions told a different story, and there was no getting around the fact that I was a mistake. I was one of hundreds of mistakes she made, but I was the one that stayed around, looking at her, needing her, reminding her what she was, and how far short of the mark she fell from where she needed to be, and who she wanted to be.

  I was back and forth between my mom and Gramma. Mom would pull herself together and I’d live with her, and then she’d screw up and I’d have to go back to Gramma. I got sick of being disappointed. I felt like I couldn’t feel anything anymore, and I didn’t want to.

  Then she got sick and we thought she would die. That’s when I told her I’d dye my hair green so she could spot me from heaven, even though I don’t believe in heaven and I’m pretty sure that if there was such a place, they wouldn’t let in people who can’t take care of their daughters. Then she sort of got better, she looked better, her liver worked again, and I was dumb enough to think she’d learned her lesson.

  I was the one to find her.

  I can’t even say it.

  I can’t say the words.

  I can’t say needle.

  I can’t say blood.

  I can’t say blue-faced.

  I can’t say dead eyes.

  Even before she died, I was always a motherless child.

  I float through the coach to the stairs. Dorothea is talking to someone. She sees me and smiles as I descend. Down by the bathrooms and the luggage I push the thing that says Don’t Push and the door opens, and I stumble out and fall to the ground below.

  I get up and start running down the crushed rock toward the back of the train, running from it, running from my mom, burned to ashes in the black box above my seat, running the way I ran when I found her body. I run through the diesel smell with the insects singing in my ears, and when I reach the end of the train I keep running.

  I hear a whistle and Dorothea shouting my name. I look over my shoulder and I see her coming after me. She looks very fat when she runs, like her hips get in the way, and I feel bad for making her run, but I can’t stop, and I cut to the right down a gravel road, soggy from the flooding, flanked by corn that is higher than my head. There is nothing in my sight except the gravel road that rises gently, and the walls of corn, the sound of their leaves whispering at me to flee, flee, and the sound of my shoes on the road.

  After I found my mom dead I ran and ran until a policeman caught me from behind. This time I stop after a minute, because I’m tired and I have nowhere to go, and I miss Dorothea and feel bad about making her chase me. And mostly because now I see corn and corn instead of what I saw in my head that made me start runnin
g.

  I wait, staring down the road in the direction of my escape, listening to the corn growing.

  I think of Dr. Lola. I think of how she touched my hair when she said good-bye on my last day at school in Palm Springs.

  I hate remembering that. I hate thinking about it because it makes me feel so strongly about my wish, my stupid fantasy that she was my mother instead of the mom I had. Dr. Lola with her composure, her dry-cleaned clothes, asking me how I’m doing, touching my hair. I hate thinking about it because it’ll never be true and because it makes me feel guilty, like I’m betraying the flawed mother I got.

  I hear Dorothea’s voice calling out to me, but it is Neal’s shoes that reach me first. He slows down and stops a couple of steps behind me. I hear him breathing, catching his breath, and I hear my own breath, and the rest of the world holding its breath.

  Then his voice. “I wish I could say something that would make you feel better.”

  I hang my head. I see my sad old shoes. Pink Converse knockoffs.

  “You came after me.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  I don’t answer, but I think of what a smile looks like, because I’m glad he did.

  “Will you come back with me?” he asks.

  “She did the best she could,” I say, and a big tear falls onto one of my shoes.

  He’s quiet for a second, like he’s thinking about who I mean. “I’m sure she did, Rydr.”

  “She was addicted to drugs.”

  I hear his feet shuffle in the gravel road. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m going to leave her here.”

  He’s silent, and with my back to him I picture him looking around at the stalks of corn.

  I nod, convincing myself of what I have just said, then turn around and see his handsome face. I hold out my hand to him, and he takes it, and we walk back toward the train together. I feel five years old and a hundred years old. I feel a hundred and five years old.

  “You could have caught up to me sooner if you didn’t smoke.”

  “I quit,” he says.

  “Really? When?”

  He looks at his watch. “Fifteen hours and six minutes ago.”