by Lindy Zart
“You can use the shower first,” she tells me, glancing over her shoulder.
“Are you sure?”
Hannah nods, riffling through her red duffle bag. “I’m sure.”
“I’ll be quick,” I promise, heat rising up my neck to my face at the way that sounds. Everything, spoken however innocently, has taken on a sexual edge.
Seeing the look on my face, she laughs. “Don’t hurry on my account.”
I make a beeline for the bathroom, Hannah’s throaty toned response causing goose bumps to break out on my skin. Enclosed in the tiny room, I strip out of my boxers and hop into the shower before the water is warm. Thankful for the cold shower, I hurriedly wash and get out. I dry off, putting on my clothes while my skin is damp. Teeth brushed, I use the black comb on the sink and leave.
Walking as fast as I can without looking bizarre, I head for the door, not even noticing Catherine until she gives a halfhearted wave in greeting. I nod and keep going, careful to keep my gaze from Hannah. Once I reach the other room, I toss my clothes into my bag and zip it up, needing to move, and keep moving. I can’t think. Thinking will make me realize things I’m not ready for.
Dickie and Jessie are near the car, and after I deposit my bag in the back of it, I snag a doughnut from the box on the hood and stop by Dickie. I lick the melting frosting as it trails down the sweet bread. It’s going to be another scorcher of a day, and I’ll be glad to spend most of it in a vehicle instead of under direct sunlight. My skin needs shade. Dickie, Hannah, and I still all have our battle wounds from last night, although the itchy feeling has lessened.
The sunlight glints off Dickie’s glasses, obscuring his eyes from me, but I don’t need to see his eyes to know he’s upset.
“What’s going on?” I demand, shoving half of the white-frosted pastry into my mouth and chewing.
Jessie points to the anterior of the car.
Swallowing the food, I make my way in the direction he silently specified. I look at the front of the car and laugh at the busted headlight and smashed left side. “Still think it was a good idea having Catherine take the car?”
A scowl darkens his features. “She says she didn’t hit anything.”
I finish off the doughnut. “Maybe she didn’t.”
“She doesn’t seem the type to lie. Someone could have hit her while she was inside the bakery and driven off without letting her know,” Dickie says.
Jessie closes the space from him to Dickie and looks into the shorter boy’s eyes. “You sure stick up for my girl a lot. There a reason for it?”
Dickie shoves his glasses up his nose. “Someone needs to.”
Jessie’s mouth slants down and he bumps his chest intimidatingly to Dickie’s. “And that someone is you?”
“You—you don’t…even like h-her,” Dickie stammers. “You’re just using her.”
I cringe and move for them. “Come on, guys—”
“What are you trying to say, that I don’t treat my girlfriends right?”
Dickie’s throat bobs as he swallows, but he straightens his shoulders, somehow looking more imposing than Jessie. “No. You don’t. You don’t treat anyone right. You manipulate people. You play with them—like…like you have been with Hannah, and Sam.”
“You don’t know anything,” Jessie hisses, his neck bulging.
“I know…I know you think you can say mean things to people, that—that you don’t respect Catherine. I heard you talking to her when she got back. You implied that she is dumb. She isn’t dumb. You shouldn’t have talked to her like that.”
“You know that, huh? Aren’t you just an ocean of knowledge?”
Dickie’s chin lifts. “I also know that Catherine can do a lot better than you.”
“What, like you?” He slaps the back of his hand to Dickie’s protruding stomach. It makes an unpleasant smacking sound. “You’re a real stud muffin, aren’t you?”
“Knock it off, Jessie,” I groan, regretting this trip more and more. Any substantial time around Jessie gets to be too much, and it’s past that by now.
“You’re asking for it, Dickie.”
“Can we all please just get in the car and try to play nice?” I put an arm through the space between their chests and try to pry them apart.
Dickie pushes me away with more strength than I was aware he had, and with an animalistic cry, he punches Jessie in the face. My mouth drops opens, Jessie and Dickie wearing shocked expressions that I am positive my face reflects. Blood trickles from Jessie’s nose.
Eyes on Dickie, Jessie wipes a hand across his face, smearing it with red, and looks down at his hand. When he returns his gaze to Dickie, something shifts. His eyes shine with disbelief, and then something else, something more. Grudging respect takes up residence in Jessie’s eyes. The roles change, and a new balance is formed. I feel it. The air is alive with possibilities.
“You punched me in the nose,” Jessie muses.
Dickie looks ready to puke, but he nods and stays where he is. “I’d do it again too.”
I hear a gasp and turn to see the girls approaching. Catherine’s hands cover her mouth and Hannah looks surprised, but there is a bounce to her stroll. I inhale sharply as I take in her face and hair and clothes. She’s different. Her unruly locks are tamed into waves that becomingly frame her face. Hannah’s eyes seem more pronounced, the lashes endless. Her mouth is enhanced with shiny plum-colored lip stuff.
She’s wearing makeup.
And she has on a dress.
A pale yellow contraption that seems to highlight every part of her body in a positive way. Her feet are bare, and I don’t know how they aren’t burning with the heat of the sun reflecting off the blacktop. She looks pretty, but I don’t understand why she felt like she had to do this. Her refusal to conform to the general view of women and how they should look has always been part of Hannah’s uniqueness that makes her sparkle. She’s perfect as she is.
“Cat.” Jessie outstretches a hand.
Catherine looks at his hand, and then she raises her eyes to Dickie. Her voice is naturally soft, but it is unbendable as she answers, “No.”
“What? No, what?” His bewildered and unhappy expression says he is finally seeing the real Catherine and he doesn’t know what’s he’s looking at, or if he likes it. His mouth lowers in a frown. “What’s your deal?”
She watches Dickie, waiting for something, but Dickie’s all out of bravado. Catherine’s shoulders lower. “Nothing. I don’t have a deal. I just—I’m fine. Here, where I am. Without holding your hand.”
“Your loss,” he mutters, but his voice lacks its usual bluster.
I look from Dickie and Catherine to Jessie. I probably never really had a chance with her, but Dickie? Jessie will blame it on Dickie’s extra-large package, but I know if anything happens between Catherine and Dickie, it’ll be because of his hidden warrior, the one Dickie doesn’t know he has. I tilt my head, stupefied, and also unable to keep from smiling.
“Who’s driving?” When no one answers, I point to Jessie. “Your turn.”
“With a headlight busted out?”
“We’ll get it fixed at our next stop.”
After our bags are deposited in the back of the car and the doughnuts are finished off, we get situated in the car. It is thick with tension, but it isn’t completely negative. Change is coming, and whether welcome or not, it’ll stay. In a life of uncertainties, change is always a constant.
Hannah fixes the skirt of the dress around her knees. “Catherine gave me some beauty pointers,” she tells me shyly.
I lean close, careful not to look down at her chest. “You don’t need all this, you know.”
Hannah looks forward. “Apparently, I do. Girls don’t get noticed unless they make themselves noticeable.”
“All I mean is, you’re pretty enough without it. And you’re noticeable all on your own.”
She looks at me, a furrow between her eyebrows. “You mean that?”
I nod, unable
to talk around the thickness of my throat.
Hannah grins, planting a quick kiss on the stubble of my jaw.
* * *
Dickie, Hannah, and I are in back, and my long legs are uncomfortably cramped in the tight space. The three of us look pretty absurd with the significant amount of bug bites we have on our faces and bodies, but at least the itching has subsided. Unfortunately for me, my skin will be nice and fried from the sun for a few more days. The windows are down in the car, hot air swooping in and out, blowing Hannah’s hair in my face. I’ve spit it out of my mouth multiple times.
“Why are we going to Indiana again? Seems like a totally bad time,” Jessie says over his shoulder.
He drives like a maniac, weaving in and out of tight spaces and switching lines without using his blinkers. He also likes to go way above the speed limit. I don’t say anything, feeling like an old granny for thinking what I am. Catherine is not enjoying herself up front, if the sounds of worry and yelps that leave her every so often are to be trusted. I practically feel Dickie sending invisible beams of comfort from behind. He tries to read, but every time Catherine voices her unease, his head shoots up.
“Everything, other than drinking beer, seems like a totally bad time to you,” Hannah tosses back.
“And why wouldn’t it?”
“Johnny Appleseed,” is all I say.
“Johnny Appleseed,” Jessie repeats, shaking his head. “Johnny Appleseed is a wastoid.”
I slap him upside the head, much like he did to me on the first day of our trip. I admit, it feels good.
“You’re dead meat, Kent!”
The car develops a sputter sometime between Wisconsin and Indiana. It jerks every so often as it cruises the freeways, like it wants to buck us from the car. I tell Jessie we should get it looked at, but he waves away my concern, in normal Jessie Keller fashion. He says it happens all the time, but I’ve ridden in this car every week since his brother got it over a year ago, and it’s never done that before.
“Don’t be a nag,” he tells me when I mention this.
Hannah pats my knee and I jerk from her touch. I mutter an apology, my skin flushing at my reaction to her touch.
Pretending not to notice, she says, “If the car breaks down, we’ll leave Jessie with the car and hitchhike or something to wherever we want to go. We can meet up with him on the way back. Problem solved. We’ll have more fun without him anyway.”
“I heard that.”
“I know,” she says with saccharine thickening her voice.
We make it to Fort Wayne, Indiana a little after three in the afternoon, and I’m once again starving, same as yesterday when we made it to our destination for the day. The bananas, tuna fish sandwiches, and chips we got from a store only worked for so long. I need real food, like a steak, or a burger, or lasagna. Maybe some pizza. Or all of it—that really sounds like the best idea and I feel like we should work toward doing that.
“I think I’m going to wither away on this trip,” I declare, rubbing my grumbling stomach.
“Where does it all go? It’s scary how much you can eat, especially with how skinny you stay,” Hannah comments.
“It goes to my mega-sized brain, duh,” I tell her.
Catherine sighs from up front. “That would be nice to eat as much as I wanted without having to worry about it ending up on my body.”
“Because she’s so fat,” Hannah mumbles under her breath.
I attempt to shrug, but there isn’t enough space to move my shoulders without hurting myself or Hannah. “I have good metabolism, I guess.”
“What if there was a way for our bodies to know what we’re eating and drinking, and when we’ve ingested all we should within a day, anytime we tried to eat or drink something after that, we rejected it? A computer chip of some kind, microscopic. It could work. But where would be the best place for it in the body, and the least harmful?” Dickie ponders from his side of the car, his eyebrows dipping low.
Catherine twists around in her seat to consider him, her blonde head tilted and her blue eyes quizzical. The hot air doesn’t even seem to touch her, her face fresh and unmarred. Not a single wrinkle is visible on her paisley blue top or the tan skirt-shorts thing she’s wearing. A small smile curves her mouth, lightens her eyes. Dickie smiles back, his features transforming with it. I watch them with narrowed eyes, Hannah’s elbow in my arm jostling me from my thoughts.
I turn my head and angle my eyes down to meet hers. Hannah’s eyebrows are arched, her expression telling me to stop thinking whatever I’m thinking. My resulting expression says I wasn’t think anything bad.
“Sure, Sam. Sure,” she murmurs.
Hannah isn’t untouched by the heat, a fine layer of dampness covering her skin like dew. The hollow of her neck glistens, the side of my body aligned with hers on fire from the furnace that is her. Everything that I find attractive about Catherine, the opposite of it in Hannah calls out to me. I quickly look away, finding it hard to breathe.
Silence follows her words, until I ask Dickie, “How would you reject the foods and drinks?”
He puckers his lips. “I imagine you would have to vomit, or possibly become nauseous if the food or drink got too close to your mouth. There would need to be a sensor of some kind.”
“But what if you don’t eat or drink enough? What then?” Hannah asks.
“It would only work for people who overeat. People with weight problems.” Dickie sits up straighter, avoiding our eyes. People like him, goes unsaid.
“Invent it then,” Hannah encourages.
A smile lifts his lips. “Maybe someday.”
As Jessie navigates the car through the afternoon traffic, Hannah and I sing ‘All Out of Love’ by Air Supply along with the radio, off key and loudly. Jessie joins in on the singing, thumping out a beat on the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Dickie reads his book and Catherine sits quietly in the passenger seat. It almost seems like we’re all finally in sync, at least for now.
When the song ends, the newscaster announces that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported there are five homosexual men in Los Angeles, California with a rare form of pneumonia that was previously only seen in patients with weakened immune systems. I go quiet, the broadcast making me apprehensive. If what they’re saying is true, that means there’s a new disease out there, one we don’t know a lot about.
“Who cares about some gay men who got sick?” Jessie switches the station.
“I saw it on the news on the other night,” Hannah says. “It’s a big deal, something that’s never been seen before.”
“Well, as long as it sticks to homos, we’re good,” he replies.
“Jessie,” Catherine gently chastises. “That’s unkind to say.”
He gives her an incredulous look.
“Plus, we don’t know that it will stick to homosexuals,” Hannah points out.
Jessie turns up the volume as ‘Atomic’ by Blondie starts.
Hannah sits back, her shoulder bumping mine. Her mouth is tipped down, and I know she is upset—not only with Jessie, but about the uncertainties of our future. Life wasn’t perfect last year, but it was stable. We knew what we were doing and where we were supposed to be from day to day. We had our jobs, our friends, our schooling. There was a plan. Rules. All of that is changing now. The world is changing. I don’t know what I’ll be doing next year at this time—I don’t even know if I’ll have the same friends.
When Hannah told me what she wanted to do after school, we fought, because all I could think about was how she’ll be gone, flying to who knows where, and I won’t know if she is okay. What if a plane crashes while she’s on board? I’ve researched the likelihood of plane crashes and what it means for the people on them. If a plane goes down, that’s it for those on them more times than not. It terrifies me.
As if knowing my thoughts, or simply needing comfort herself, Hannah slides her hand into mine. I hold it tightly, anchoring her to me now as I will
not be able to weeks from now, when she will go. Her thumb brushes across the back of my hand, sending a chill through me even as I burn up.
“You don’t have to run away,” I whisper, my lips grazing the tip of her shell-shaped ear.
At this proximity, her hair caresses my face. I briefly close my eyes, allow her warmth and scent to wrap around me, just for one extraordinary instant. I straighten, looking out the window at the landscape of greens and browns, hills and grass and trees—blue skies filled with puffy white clouds.
Hannah doesn’t respond, but her grip tautens on my hand.
Following the signs, Jessie maneuvers the car to the memorial park. He parks the Renault in the parking area and turns it off. It shudders before going silent. No one moves right away, the stillness complete. Impenetrable. I finally get out, holding open the door for Hannah. Catherine stands with a content look on her face, her eyes closed.
Dickie watches her like he’s seeing the sun rise for the first time, his gaze moving down when he feels Jessie’s on him. Jessie’s nose is swollen from where Dickie’s fist connected with it, and when Jessie looks at him, it’s with speculation, as if he’s trying to figure out Dickie in a way he hasn’t bothered to before. I think we all are. I didn’t know he knew how to properly hit, or that he would stick up for himself, let alone someone else. I’m impressed.
“It’s pretty here,” Catherine says with her back to us, hugging herself.
The trees are plentiful, blending with the lawn in a mishmash of varying forms of earth. Paths are outlined with trees and rocks. Water gently laps from a body of water in the distance. I remember reading that the St. Joseph River lines the park. Sloping hills of green follow the horizon. The air is drier than in Wisconsin, and it feels soothing when the wind picks up. Catherine is right—it is pretty here. Peaceful. I inhale deeply, nostalgia for a time I’ve never witnessed hitting me.