by Jeff Zentner
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“How’d it go?”
I shake my head, trying not to start crying again. “Sucky. How’d it go with you guys?”
“I’m so out of it. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
I can tell from her tone that she doesn’t want to tell me tonight, and if it were good news, she’d want to tell me, because I’m sure she can sense that I’m having one of the worst nights of my life and I want it to be over more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
* * *
•••
All night I have dreams where my encounter with my dad ends differently. The worst dreams are the ones where it ends up well, and then I wake up for a few seconds and realize it was just a dream.
We finally stir around 11:30. We basically have time to roll out of bed and brush our teeth before checkout.
Outside, we squint against the howling sun; the air feels like stepping into a hot mouth. I still have a headache from crying. Or maybe it’s a fun new headache. Whichever it is, my head pounds as if someone bonked me repeatedly with a comically large cartoon sledgehammer. I can feel leftover tear tracks on my face that escaped my hurried preparation to leave.
My stomach growls. I can hear everyone else’s doing likewise—a gastrointestinal symphony. But we’ve made an unspoken agreement to just hit the road. Get the hell out of here.
The worst part is the silence in the car. It’s got the same quality as the silence when you’re gossiping about someone and they walk up and go, Hey, guys, what’re you talking about? and you’re like, Uhhhh…youuuunicorns? Nothing! What?
Josie drives, her left elbow propped on her open window, her head resting on her palm. I slump to the right, my head against the window. The palpable stench of defeat hangs yellow-green in the air, like an open container of baked beans, forgotten in the back of the fridge, that now smell like they’ve already made their way through someone.
It’s forty-five minutes before anyone speaks. It’s me: “So. Jack Divine?”
“Jack Divine,” Josie mutters, shaking her head.
“Didn’t go well?”
Josie chuckles sourly. “No ho ho ho. Yeah, no, it went poorly, I daresay.”
“It did not go great,” Lawson murmurs.
“He’s—”
Josie finishes for me. “A delusional narcissistic psychopath who would probably get us all murdered if we worked with him? Yes.”
“So he’s not—”
“Nope. He’s not gonna help us. He’s not gonna make us better. He’s not gonna give us any opportunities. He’s interested in bleeding us dry to pay off the Russian mob. Long story.”
“Well. That sucks. Would it have made a difference if I were there?”
Josie sighs. “Yeah. It does suck. It really does. And no, no difference.”
“We traveled a long way.”
“That we did.”
I feel like a giant wad of toilet paper being flushed. I thought I might be able to at least go one for two on this trip. What a silly thing to think. I don’t win. I’m not lucky. Life is gonna dick me around time and again.
We drive several more miles without speaking.
“So. Your dad?” Josie asks.
“My dad.”
“Didn’t go great?”
“No, I daresay it went rather poorly.”
“I’m so sorry, DeeDee.”
“Me too.”
“You feel like talking about it?”
“Not really.”
More driving. More demoralized quiet.
“Well,” I say finally. “We made our show without Jack Divine, and we can go on without him. We’ll take ourselves to the next level. We can always—”
Josie just nods in this oddly tentative way.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
She shakes her head and raises her hand. “DeeDee, just—”
“Why are you being weird?”
“I’m not.”
“No, yeah, you really are.”
“Yeah, no, I’m super tired.”
“I’m not stupid. I know you, like, very well.”
“I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“We can make our show great without him,” I murmur. I look to see Josie’s reaction.
She has a pained look. “Yeah,” she says faintly.
“Okay, seriously? Spill. We’re in this car for like ten more hours. Let’s hash out whatever this is.”
“That’s exactly why I don’t want to talk about this now. Also, I don’t want to make Lawson uncomfortable.”
“Oh, what, scared to fight in front of Lawson…the professional fighter?”
Lawson does a hey, leave me out of this slump into his seat.
“No, DeeDee, I legitimately don’t want drama,” Josie says.
“Well, I’m currently experiencing the most devastating twenty-four hours of my life, so why not put it all out on the table?”
Josie takes both hands off the steering wheel for a second and holds them in front of her face like she’s gripping an invisible box—one containing whatever she’s not telling me. She breathes in deep, holds it, and releases it in a rush. “I can’t do the show anymore. Okay? I can’t do it anymore. There. Happy?”
I suddenly feel like a giant, ice-cold steel claw is opening under my stomach. Going down in flames with my dad was one thing. That was my past. But this show? This show is my present and future. It’s all I have. It’s what gets me out of bed. “What are you talking about?” I ask weakly.
Josie blinks fast, like she’s clearing away tears.
“What, Josie? What is it?” My voice rises.
Her voice is pinched and taut. “I promised my parents. If this didn’t work out. This whole thing. With Jack Divine. If he couldn’t help us. I told them. They made me promise.”
“Promise what?”
“That I’d take the internship in Knoxville.”
The claw opens more. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am.”
“So tell them you can’t.”
“I promised.”
“Break your promise.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Won’t do that, you mean.”
“Fine. Won’t.”
“So that’s it?” I say, laughing astringently. “You won’t fight for the show?”
“I fought, DeeDee. My parents have been on me for months. They wouldn’t have let me come at all if I didn’t promise. I rolled the dice and lost.”
“You’re eighteen. You could have told them to suck it.”
“No, I couldn’t. They’re my parents. I love them.”
I look out the window and shake my head. Every part of my body hurts, like my emotions are spilling over and being turned into pain chemicals or whatever.
“And honestly,” she continues, “I don’t know if this is the kind of show I want to be on for the rest of my life.”
“Nice,” I say.
“I’m not roasting our show. It’s that being at that convention, I realized this isn’t the world I belong in for my whole life. Like, I can be at the periphery and dabble in it, the way I’ve done, and that’s fine. But I can’t invest my whole life in it. If it weren’t for you and how much I care about you and love you and love making the show with you, I wouldn’t choose this world.”
“So you’re going to just walk away from everything we made?”
“No, I’m not going to just walk away. I thought I might drive twenty-four hours round-trip to Orlando to spend the evening hanging out with a legitimately unhinged person who, I might add, cleaned me out. Our little evening with Jack Divine cost me almost every penny I have.”
“What?”
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“Yeah. That’s a terrific story, by the way. But anyway, I tried, okay? I didn’t just walk away. I did my damnedest to make it work so I could have my dream and we could keep doing the show.”
“You just want to be famous.” I can’t hide the acidity in my voice. I’m being super unchill and I know it, but…
“Seriously? You’re going there?”
“Oh, I bought the first-class ticket there.”
“Y’all,” Lawson says. “Maybe—”
“We’ve got this,” I snap.
He raises his hands like I trained a pistol on him. “Okay. Cool. Sorry.”
“Please don’t be rude to him,” Josie says.
“Please don’t both of you gang up on me,” I say.
“I’m butting out,” Lawson says.
“Anyway, yeah, Delia, I want to be super famous. I want to have three-point-seven million followers on the current hot social media platform. I want to post pictures of myself wearing billowy white pants and drinking a big glass of red wine with some insufferable platitude like Caring for yourself…starts with you. I want to eat expensive seaweed and drink water in which all the molecules have been lined up facing the same direction. I want to tell people who love Chili’s and save twenty-percent-off Bed Bath and Beyond coupons that no wardrobe is complete without my favorite pair of twelve-hundred-dollar flats and seven-hundred-fifty-dollar jeans. I want to take trips to a private island for six months to ‘center myself.’ This is all I want.”
“You do.”
“Really? Really? No. Sorry. That’s like accusing anyone who wants to write a book or record an album of just wanting to be famous. Maybe they want to connect with people. So unfair.”
I roll my eyes.
It pisses her off. I can hear it. “The only reason we’re even friends in the first place is because of my dream. It brought us together. You’ve known what I wanted in life for as long as you’ve known me.”
“What about me, huh?” I ask. “Do I get dreams too?”
“Of course. And I support you in them however I can.”
“Well, here’s my dream: to keep working at and improving our show together, until it was something we both did for a living. Like we talked about.”
“I tried to make that happen. I did. I tried to support you.”
“You tried a little bit.”
“DeeDee, I genuinely understand how bummed out you are, and you can’t believe how bummed out I am.”
“Oh, really? You understand growing up without a dad and all the rollicking fun that entails and having one good thing and then having that thing snatched away? That’s something you genuinely understand?”
“DeeDee.”
“No. Do you? Do you understand that? Is that your life?”
“No,” Josie says softly after a long pause.
“You’re so bummed out to be leaving me behind so you can go on to bigger and better things?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever.”
“DeeDee, you came up with the idea for the show. How we would do it. You made all the calls to arrange for the studio and get Arliss on board. You handled the merch sales. You had all the movies. Replace me. It’s your show.”
“It’s our show.”
“The show can exist without me. It could never exist without you.”
“That’s flattering, but…”
“I could come home on breaks, and we could record a bunch of episodes in a row,” Josie says.
“No. First off, Arliss won’t go for that. Second, we need to be producing new material more regularly than that or we’ll lose our slot and maybe our syndicates.” And third, this is what I look forward to every week. It’s all I look forward to.
“Get another person to help you or do the show by yourself like SkeleTonya used to. Maybe I can be a guest.”
“No way. If you leave, you’re gone. You’re not being a guest on my show. I’m sick of people who half-ass being in my life.” Saying this is anguish, like running myself through with a fireplace poker. My brain is such a maelstrom of hurt, anger, sadness, exhaustion, and something I might call disappointment (but a million times deeper), my mouth is sorta doing its own thing.
“Okay, then,” Josie murmurs, barely audible.
I feel like a sack of wet skunk feces. Maybe this is why everyone leaves me.
I would give anything to be too good for people to discard. Why am I not better? Why am I never enough? If I can’t keep you, Josie, then who? In fact, maybe it would save me a lot of heartache in the future to not give anyone the chance to abandon me in the first place. That’ll be my new plan. I’m done loving people.
I watch Josie out of the corner of my eye as she gazes at the road. She quickly wipes away a tear. And another with the other hand. And another. She finally gives up and lets them flow. One hangs on her jawline for an improbably long time, catching the radiant Florida sunshine like a prism.
I guess everything dies eventually, even the sun someday. My life feels like a star collapsing into itself. And it was never that bright to begin with.
It randomly occurs to me while I’m crying how grateful I am that tears don’t smell like pee, and I almost want to tell Delia, because I know she’d laugh under normal circumstances, but she has her eyes closed and is leaning her head on the window, away from me. She doesn’t even appear to be sleeping; she seems to have just shut down, circuits overwhelmed. Honestly, if I were in her position, I would.
I feel something at my left hip. Lawson’s snuck his hand between the door and my seat. I reach down and hold the ends of his fingers with the ends of mine. It brings me a little comfort. Right until I remember that I’m leaving him—this—behind too, and I continue weeping.
I keep trying to stop, but the sheer weight of exhaustion, guilt, and grief for the life I’m outgrowing keeps squeezing tears out of me like stepping on a sponge.
I put on the Dearly mix that Jesmyn made us. She said she got super into him after her boyfriend died, and I can see why. He sings like a fellow traveler in sorrow. The hurt and longing in his voice are all I can stand to listen to for the next few hours. Lawson’s hand checks in on me periodically.
We stop a lot less on the way home than we did on the way there. We’re not driving in the middle of the night, so we don’t need to wake ourselves up as much. Plus, we all want to be done.
We pull in at a little gas station outside Ringgold, Georgia. One of those Mom’s Country Cookin’/tchotchke-shop places. While I’m inside buying a Coke, I see something I need. I shouldn’t be spending even a penny more than absolutely necessary after the way Divine shook me down, but this is absolutely necessary. I pay for it and take it outside, wrapped in white butcher paper for safekeeping.
Lawson is still inside using the restroom when I get to the car, so I wait.
When he comes out, our eyes meet and he gives me a sad smile and says, “Are we there yet?” (His jokes could still use work.)
When he gets close, I pull my purchase from behind my back and hand it to him.
He grins and starts to unwrap the package. “What’s—” A small porcelain cat falls from the paper into his hands. His grin fades, as if he were a little boy seeing a present under the Christmas tree that he had completely abandoned any hope of receiving, and his brain’s pleasure center is too overwhelmed by joy even to keep telling his mouth to smile.
He looks at me quickly, looks back down. Up. Down. Up.
His eyes look like firelight on polished oak when the sun catches them. I didn’t notice that before. How has a face that struck me as so ordinary the first few times I saw it become the most beautiful face in the world to me?
His brow furrows. He clenches his fist around the cat and comes for me. I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead, he grabs me up in a powerful embrace, almost squeezing th
e wind from me.
“Okay, tiger, don’t Yuri me.” I gasp and giggle.
He lets me go. He attempts to say something and stops. He tries once more and stops. He hugs me again, more gently this time, so I can breathe. Then he puts his hand on my cheek, presses his body against mine, and kisses me like he’s on fire and I’m water.
Sometimes you know you’re getting a fever way before you do. Days. A week. It’s there, ticking away in the back of your mind. You still feel fine, but your body tells you something’s waiting to overcome you. It’s a premonition. Falling in love is like that. Like the most welcome sort of fever, a perfect delirium descending on you. You feel it coming long before it reaches you. Long before it knocks you flat.
“All right, later,” I say, not meeting Josie’s eyes as she drops me off.
“DeeDee?” she says in an imploring voice.
But I ignore her, grab my bag from her trunk, and walk quickly into my trailer. I know I’m acting like a dick to one of the people I love most in this world, but I can’t help it.
Mom meets me inside the front door, dressed for bed. “How’d it go, sweetie?” she asks.
I shake my head and try not to look at her, but then she hugs me and I unravel, sobbing. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, DeeDee. Wanna talk?”
I shake my head again.
“Did someone hurt you?” Mom raises my chin to meet my eyes.
“Not in the way you’re asking.”
She looks at me for a second before dragging me gently by the hand over to our couch. She sits and pulls my head onto her lap and strokes my hair and tear-sodden face.
She knows. I can sense it. I never truly believed in her gift the way she does, but there’s not a doubt in my mind that she knows and hurts with me.
It’s almost one a.m. when I slip inside my house after dropping off Lawson. I sneak into the kitchen without turning on any lights and pull a carton of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from the freezer. I grab a spoon, sit at the table, and settle in for a good stress-eat. Buford shuffles into the kitchen and gives me a reproachful woof.
I shush him and scratch him behind the ears. “Someday I’m going to try to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies using only the cookie dough from chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream,” I whisper.