by Adam Selzer
So I changed course and headed south down Merle Hay Road, and turned onto University Avenue. Paige smiled and took my right hand and played with my pinky finger while I steered with the left one. Ishmael rambled on, as usual. We only had a few CDs to go by now. Most of the time I didn’t pay much attention to him.
We wound up near Waukee, and as we sat at a red light, it happened. The guy on the audiobook said the most famous line from the book: “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”
“Holy shit,” I said. “They really do say that!”
“Go back, let’s listen again,” said Paige.
I scanned back a few seconds.
“Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”
The sky split open wide, golden beams rained down from the Heavens, and a gathering of angels appeared above our heads, singing songs of hope. That’s what it felt like, anyway.
I rolled down the windows and Paige shouted, “Woooo!”
I honked the horn and flashed the headlights.
When we got to the next traffic light, Paige leaned over and hugged me. We kissed until the light turned green, and I felt like I was the King of the Audiobook Listeners. Like I had truly done something great. Something I could be proud of. I guess it’s not the same as curing a disease or putting out a fire or getting into Harvard, but finally making it all the way to the most famous line in Moby-Dick really feels like a magnificent accomplishment. I’d had to listen to a whole lot of Ishmael rambling on and not making any sense to get there. But we’d made it to “Thar she blows, a hump like a snow hill, it is Moby Dick,” and now the end of the book was in sight. And Paige and I had done it together, more or less.
“This calls for a Slushee,” I said. “Any Slushee. Have we been to this gas station up ahead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s go. Maybe they’ll at least have that Purple Vanilla one again.”
She smiled. “You want me to turn you purple before we go to the party?”
“I’ll turn you purple, baby.”
“Now that’s what a girl wants to hear.”
A Kum and Go loomed ahead of us like Camelot. The Promised Land. Mecca. The Emerald City. Whatever.
“We should get some candy bars too,” she said as we stepped in. “This calls for a celebration.”
“Candy bars, hot dogs . . . everything they have on sale. Nothing in the gas station is too good for my baby.”
I looked over to the counter and realized that the clerk was that same pirate-looking one who had been at the store on Hickman, the one who seemed like a time-traveling version of myself. I was about to go say hello to him when Paige grabbed my arm and said, “Uh, baby?”
She pointed over to the Slushee machine, and there it was.
Three flavors. Cherry limeade, blue Mountain Dew, and white grape.
I fell to my knees on the dirty ground. Our quest was at an end.
We kissed again, filled two cups, and took them to the counter.
“So it was real after all,” I said to the guy.
“Yeah,” he said as he took my money. “Thought of you guys when I saw it. Shit.”
I threw all of the change into the “take a penny leave a penny” tray, as a sort of offering, and we took the fabled Slushees out to my car. They were delicious. The fact that white grapes may not have been an actual fruit didn’t matter—no grape-flavored product tastes like anything that occurs in nature.
I felt like we could have driven all the way to Chicago and harpooned a whale at the aquarium that night.
But we hardly talked as we sat in my car. We just looked at each other and smiled and slurped at our straws.
Neither of us had forgotten what we’d planned to do the night we found the Great White Grape Slushee. I finally broke the silence by saying something stupid.
“Too bad we’re not wearing white,” I said. “Then if anyone saw us doing it, they could call it a hump like a snow hill.”
“If you keep saying things like that, I won’t want to do it anymore.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I assume your parents are home?”
She nodded. “And Autumn’s having a slumber party, too, so going there is totally out, unless you want to give them a lesson.”
I didn’t seem to me like there was a lot Autumn didn’t already know.
“Would someone rent us a hotel room, or do you need a credit card?”
“I have my dad’s, but I don’t want to have to explain the charge,” she said. “We could just use the nook at Earthways, though.”
“You really want to do it in the car?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” she said as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “I just want to do it tonight. A car’s better than Stan’s laundry room, at least. We can do it better some other time.”
I took another sip of my Slushee, then went back into the Kum and Go to buy a thing of condoms (which, by the way, struck me as a hilarious thing to do).
Paige put her hand on my knee as we drove back through the west suburbs to Cornersville Trace. The sun was down now, and the pavement stretching out before us glowed like gold under the orange haze of the street lights. The sky was the color of a purple vanilla Slushee above us, and it complimented Paige’s eyes when I looked over at her, which I did whenever we came to a stop sign. By the time we got to Earthways, it was dusk.
Everything seemed beautiful. It was a new-made night.
But I don’t mind saying I was still nervous as hell. Part of the reason I’d agreed to do it when we found the white grape Slushee was that I wasn’t sure we ever actually would. Paige probably wasn’t going to want to pretend to be Nurse Paige the first time we did it—she’d want it to be just the two of us, Leon and Paige, our souls touching, and all of that shit.
I still wasn’t sure I could live up to what she wanted.
But a deal was a deal, and I felt like I was ready to give it a try.
There was just one minor complication: When we got to the back of Earthways, a car—Leslie’s, according to Paige—was in the nook, rocking enough that the edges bumped into the brick walls now and then.
We sat there and sort of laughed for a second at the general absurdity of the whole night.
“I wish we had one of those lovers’ lanes, like they always do on TV,” Paige said. “Every town like this on TV has some place where you can park on a cliff and look out over the whole city.”
I nodded, then took a sip of my Slushee and had a minor epiphany. “Hey,” I said. “I’ve been thinking white grapes weren’t a real thing, but if they aren’t, what do they make white wine out of?”
“Huh,” she said. “Maybe it’s just another name for green grapes.”
“So this is, like, a chardonnay Slushee,” I said. “Class and a half.”
“A nonalcoholic wine cooler.”
We toasted with our Slushees and thought about driving around the block, but if we did, some other car might come and snatch up the nook the second Leslie left. We ended up waiting until her car backed out and pulled away.
It was a tight enough spot that we couldn’t open the doors, so we clumsily climbed over the front seats to get to the back, got as comfortable as we could, and started making out. Our mouths were cold from the Slushees, and so was her left hand, the one she’d been using to hold her cup and was now using to touch me. But then we rotated a bit; her right hand, the one that had been by the heat vent in the car, was warm.
And pretty soon, the rest of her had warmed up too.
The windows fogged up, we took off our shirts, and then, for the first time, all the rest of our clothes. We’d shoved them out of the way before, but never taken everything off. Undressing in a crowded car required some regular acrobatics, and took a couple of tries, but at least laughing at our own inability to get undressed without elbowing each other in the head kept the mood light.
When we were naked, I held her against me as she sat facing me on my
lap. Her skin felt fantastic against mine. There’s no feeling in the world like feeling someone’s skin against yours.
She looked into my eyes while she moved her hands up and down my bare sides.
“I love you, Leon,” she said.
For a second I panicked, but then I heard myself saying, “I love you, too.”
She kissed me hard on the mouth and I moved my hands up to her breasts, then slid them down her body, and we slowly progressed from there.
I did my job about as well as anyone probably could, under the circumstances. The actual sex was awkward, sweaty, a little painful, and hampered a bit by the added pressure of knowing that another car had pulled into the back of Earthways and was waiting its turn to use the nook.
But we took our time.
And it isn’t saying much, but whatever might have been wrong with it, it was the best I had ever had.
I think she was lying, but she told me it was the best she’d had too. Even if she was lying, it was a lot better than saying, “Well, it’s not what I’m used to.” There are some times when you just don’t want the other person to be completely honest with you.
As we drove off, I felt . . . accomplished. I’d made it clear to “Thar she blows,” found the mysterious white grape Slushee (which turned out to be the ideal precoital iced novelty beverage), and managed to hold up my end of the deal sexually, even without her pretending to be a nurse or anything. Just knowing I was capable of having sex at all made me feel like a huge burden had been lifted off of my back and was now floating away towards the stars that shone down in the central Iowa skies.
It was only late that night, when I got home, that I turned my phone on and saw that there was a voice mail from a UK phone number.
20. MIDNIGHT
The fact that I’d first had sex with Paige about fifty feet away from the spot where Anna and I kissed in the snow had not escaped me. I wished it had, but it hadn’t.
Neither had the fact that Anna probably would have liked my “hump like a snow hill” joke, or at least pretended to, even though it was pretty awful. Or the fact that Paige’s remark about the “nonalcoholic wine cooler” might have symbolized me becoming more like the kind of people she normally hung out with and less like I fit in with all the old gifted pool hooligans who circulated among the Ice Cave and went to parties in Stan’s basement.
I had made a point of not programming Anna’s new number into my phone, but I knew that the voice mail had to be from her. My instinct was to delete it without listening to it. What good could come of it? I was with Paige now. I was in love.
But at two in the morning, as I lay awake in bed, I couldn’t shake the voice in my head saying that the kiss with Anna had been way better than the sex with Paige.
That wasn’t fair. All of the conditions were right for that kiss. It was an event that I’d prayed would happen, and never quite believed would, and everything in the environment had made it seem more romantic and monumental. There’s no reason that a first proper kiss in conditions like that shouldn’t seem more earth-shattering than sex in a car parked in a place that was designed to hold a Dumpster. Especially with someone in another car behind you, waiting for you to finish and flashing their lights like assholes.
And it’s not like Anna and I really changed the weather that night. The snow would have kept falling and shut the schools down whether the two of us had kissed or not. If she had said, “So, anyway,” and pulled back, it just would have seemed like a storm had come to bury all my hopes and dreams under the thick blanket of snow.
I thought of going back to Paige’s house and trying to sneak into her bedroom, where we might be able to do it better.
I thought about going to Stan’s. I had almost forgotten that there was a party going on.
I thought about getting some bottles from the cabinet and using them to help me get to sleep.
Then I gave in and pushed the button on my phone to listen to the voice mail.
“Hi, Leon, it’s Anna. Can you give me a call when you get this? Sometime when it’s not the middle of the night, preferably. See ya!”
I listened to it five or six times in a row, then calculated that it was about eight in the morning in the UK.
That was probably late enough that she’d be up. I could get this out of the way.
She knew who it was right away when she answered.
“Hi, Leon!”
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Just catching up,” she said. “My dad got an offer for a job at Drake.”
“Yeah?”
“For about five minutes we actually talked about moving back to Des Moines.”
My heart rose and sank all at the same time. It moved sideways, I guess.
“But just for about five minutes?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“So you’re not coming back?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” she said. “He’ll probably go in for a meeting, but that’ll be it. I’m probably going to Oxford, anyway. Are you springing for something out of state, or sticking around Iowa?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to wait a semester or two first, and save money. I didn’t even sign up for the SAT until a few days ago.”
“Really?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she chuckled a bit. “Remember when we did that whole thing with the Gradgrind test in eighth grade?”
“Yeah, that was a kick.”
That was our last truly great gifted pool initiative, the one we referred to in our notes and e-mails as “Operation Take This Test (and Shove It).” We told the school that we’d throw the test—like, fill in random circles on the Scantron sheets—if they wouldn’t cut us in for a chunk of the funding they’d get to reward our high scores. We were the gifted pool, after all. They needed us to get the average scores higher. Of course, they ended up just threatening to expel us all instead of offering to pay us, but it was worth a shot.
“Have you guys pulled any more big pranks like we used to do?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. “Not really.”
“Really?” she asked. “Nothing?”
“I slipped a poem with a Satanic message into the yearbook,” I said. “And the other day I accused Mrs. Smollet of eating the placentas of teen mothers to preserve her youth. But that’s about it. Nothing anyone’s noticed.”
“Huh,” she said. “I kind of imagined you guys being the terror of Des Moines.”
“We mostly just hang around in the back of the Ice Cave these days,” I said. “Remember that place? Right next to Sip?”
“I think I only went once or twice,” she said. “Has it gotten better?”
“No. And there’s a Willy the Whale ice cream cake in the freezer that I’m sure was there before you moved.”
“Huh,” she said. “And you hang out there, not at Sip?”
“Well, Dustin and I work there,” I said. “And the break room is sort of a hangout now. The coffee isn’t as a good as Sip, but it’s free.”
“Huh,” she said again.
I felt as though she was pretty disappointed in me. She probably figured we were out occupying the banks or something.
We talked for a few more minutes, then she had to head off to class. I collapsed onto my bed, still fully dressed and now feeling almost exactly as bad as I had the last time I’d spoken to her.
My head was spinning, though maybe not in the same directions as it had been before.
Anna was going to Oxford, probably. And I was just thinking that maybe I could get into community college.
All at once I was fourteen again, wondering if I could ever possibly be cool enough to be with Anna, or if she was completely out of my league. She sure was now.
But what did it matter? She was gone, she wasn’t coming back, and I had just told Paige I loved her.
Maybe it was time I just broke off ties from everyone from middle school and started hanging around more with Paige’s friends. There was no reason to go on feel
ing sick with myself for not acting like a person who wasn’t even me anymore. Who’s still the same person at eighteen that they were at fourteen? Who the hell should be?
Suddenly, I found myself fretting about what I’d be doing with Paige for the rest of the school year. Our Slushee-hunting career was probably over—even if there was another flavor we hadn’t tried, hiding in some far-flung gas station, I didn’t think Paige would be into the quest anymore.
When they found the great white whale, the sailors in Moby-Dick all went off to die. What would I do after finding the white Slushee?
The one other activity Paige and I tended to agree on was fooling around. The thought that there was probably a lot of sex in my future should have been encouraging, but somehow it wasn’t.
Eventually I gave up on getting to sleep, crawled out of bed, and drove clear back to the gas station in Waukee to get another white grape Slushee. I put it in my cup holder and drove to Stan’s house. With everything else that had happened, I’d almost forgotten that there was a party going on.
Things were well underway by the time I got there. The air was thick with at least three kinds of smoke, music was blasting, and a Dungeons and Dragons game was sitting abandoned on the table next to a large pile of lunch meat packets and a thing of mustard.
In the flickering light of the TV screen I could see that a couple of people I didn’t even recognize were dry humping on the couch, and I watched for a minute to see if I could pick up some pointers or something, but they didn’t really seem like they were having much fun. They were just kind of attacking each other. The kind of sex that any idiot can have if they’ve had a few energy drinks.
Three girls sat around a bong near the TV in the back corner where a couple of guys I didn’t recognize were playing video games. Dustin Eddlebeck was huddled against a wall by the table, talking and laughing with Catherine, who was doing a bad job of trying not to look at Mindy and a naked guy who were dancing across the room. Catherine had survived her game of Permissions, and was now hanging out in Stan’s basement. She and Dustin were eating plain lunch meat out of a bag that they shared. Her journey towards the dark side was complete.