This One Time With Julia

by David Lampson

  “I’m not going to stand here and argue with some hotel prodigy,” said the manager. “I’ll charge him for a quarter day. That’s more than fair.”

  “That’s so great,” said Julia. “I think that was a really nice compromise.” She gave him a big smile and took the doggie by the collar. “Seem fair to you, Joe?”

  “Seems fair to me.”

  By the time we got back into the office, I’d remembered my signature pretty well. I hadn’t practiced it at all since Alvin left, and so I thought I’d be more rusty, but it really did look quite beautiful and special there on the tiny white hotel bill.

  “So now what?” said Julia. “I’m stuck here for two days. I’ve never traveled alone before, and I don’t think I’m too good at it. I haven’t eaten anything all day but peanuts.”

  “I drank an awful lot of water, but that’s it.”

  “There must be a fun place to have dinner somewhere around here.”

  “I have a car,” I said.

  I never should have said “I have a car” so quickly like that, and with all that confidence, because I’d driven maybe three hours total in my life, and most of it was this one terrible day when Alvin stole Marcus’s car, and I wound up destroying it, along with a couple of street signs. But I wanted to make sure I went wherever Julia was going.

  Outside, it had become nighttime. While I stood there looking at Alvin’s car, trying to remember how to drive, the doggie started licking my hand. I thought he might be hungry after a whole day locked in the hotel, so I got some money from an ATM and bought him some dog food from this little market on the corner, and he ate three cans, and threw up, and ate two more cans, and drank a little puddle of water, and peed with his leg in the air.

  “I think he keeps his keys in the muffler,” said Julia.

  “That sounds familiar.”

  I couldn’t think of any more excuses. I got the keys out of the muffler, threw Julia’s bag in the backseat, and then we both got into the car. As soon as the door was open, Max jumped in and climbed into the back. The whole car smelled like a lawn, and the backseat was covered in doggie bones. Even before I got my door closed, Julia was already fixing her lipgloss in the mirror. She had no idea how nervous I was. I put the key into the ignition and turned it.

  Life is so full of impossible things that I can’t understand. I’ll never be able to explain what happened next. I don’t know if it was because the car reminded me so much of Alvin, or because Julia was there trusting that I knew what I was doing, but for whatever reason driving that car suddenly became something I could do. I was nervous for a block or so, trying to remember how I’d crashed before, so I could try to avoid it this time, when I suddenly got the hang of the whole thing. The wheel, the pedals, even the blinkers, it all made perfect sense to me, all at the same time. I can’t remember anything about the day I learned to walk, but it must have been a very similar feeling. After a mile or so I even started to enjoy it, and I especially liked driving with Julia next me, chatting away like this was the most normal thing in the world.

  “I like Los Angeles,” she said. “I think Cecily would like it too.”

  Later I found out that Cecily was her sister, but I had no idea at the time. This is something I eventually got used to with Julia. She always talked to you as if you’d known her all your life. Suddenly she grabbed my arm.

  “I think I just saw a really fun diner, right across the park. See? There’s a man outside dressed up like a hot dog. I think I could really go for a nice tuna melt right now. Are you as hungry as I am, Joe? Did you know it’s the first day of summer?”

  The diner was full of little children with their parents. All the waiters and waitresses were dressed up like park rangers for some reason. We couldn’t find any empty booths, so we sat on stools at this little round table that was barely big enough for our plates. Underneath the table, I remember that our knees were touching the whole time. We were waiting for my cheeseburger and Julia’s tuna melt when she started talking about Alvin again. “I’m so happy he finally followed through on his sailing idea,” she said. “I think maybe a nice long trip is exactly what he needs. He’s been talking about it for so long. But Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you positive that’s where he went?”

  “He got on a plane this morning.”

  “That’s so great,” she said. “I’m just really proud of him for going. Though I do feel a little stupid now.”

  “Why?”

  “No, I won’t tell you. It’s going to sound so arrogant.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, I’ll tell you. I might as well just tell you. This is so embarrassing.” When she got nervous Julia always talked a little faster. She kept taking ice out of her water and chewing it while she talked. “I thought Alvin might be suicidal,” she said. “Isn’t that ridiculous? When he called from the hotel last night, he kept saying good-bye, like it was the last time we would ever talk. He sounded so strange that I stayed up all night worrying, and he wouldn’t answer his phone anymore, and so in the morning I got on the first plane I could find. Joe, are you positive Alvin went to Miami?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “That’s so great, to follow through on a dream like that,” said Julia. “I must be pretty stuck-up to think a boy would ever be suicidal over me.”

  “You mean because you left him?”

  “Who said I left him?”

  “That’s what Alvin said.”

  “Did he really tell you that? Wow. Amazing how he thinks. I didn’t break up with Alvin. He broke up with me. And all because I wouldn’t blow off college and abandon my whole family to go sailing around the world with him.” Julia’s face had turned a little red. She had finished all the ice cubes in her water, and started in on mine. “When he first told me the idea, I thought he was joking. But he wouldn’t let it go. Finally last week he tells me that it’s now or never. I thought that was really unfair. He acted like I was making him leave. But the ultimatum was his idea, not mine. He’s the one who drove off in the middle of the night. I have no idea why he’d tell you it was my decision.”

  When the waitress finally came back with our food, I realized how hungry I was. I dug into my cheeseburger right away. After a few bites I realized that Julia was just sitting there watching me.

  “He never mentioned what a good listener you are,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been jabbering on and on.”

  “What did he mention?”

  “He said you were his favorite person. And he said you never changed.”

  “What else?”

  “He never talked a lot about his family, to be honest. I know he didn’t get along with Marcus, but he wouldn’t talk about it. So you tell me something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me a secret about you. Something most people wouldn’t know.”

  I thought it over for a little while. “I don’t know if it’s a secret. But it’s definitely something I don’t usually mention.”

  “Go ahead. This sounds juicy.”

  “I can’t eat anything except for pizza and cheeseburgers.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Plus a couple of desserts. Candy, cookies, things like that.”

  “But why?”

  “I tried it for a little while when I was a kid. It was basically just a game at first, but then somehow I got stuck with it. My brother Marcus tried to have me hypnotized to make it go away, but it didn’t work. Why are you laughing?”

  It was the first time I’d made her laugh. I really didn’t care why she was laughing. It was the most attention she had paid to anything I’d said so far.

  “It’s just the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “What happens if you eat something else?”

  “It tastes okay, I guess. It’s basically like eating clay. If it’s too spicy, sometimes I throw up. I can eat some other things sometimes, like pasta, if it tastes enough like pizza or a chees
eburger.”

  “It has to have cheese? You can’t eat a regular hamburger?”

  “If I get desperate. But it’s not the same.”

  “That’s such an unusual diet. I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  Julia put a little bit of tuna fish on her fork and held it out to me. “Why don’t you taste this?”

  “I won’t like it.”

  “Try it once.”

  “Why?”

  “Just try it for me, Joe.”

  I opened my mouth. After she fed me with the fork, Julia put her palm under my chin and gently pushed my mouth closed. This was the first time she’d touched my face. I felt like there was a fire underneath the table, where our knees were touching. Since I’d met Julia everything was so exciting I could barely stand it. I was so distracted that the tuna fish didn’t even taste so bad, and for a second I thought I might actually swallow it, but in the end I couldn’t quite do it. I spit the tuna fish out onto my plate.

  “Almost,” I said.

  “It was a good try anyway.”

  “I almost did it,” I said. “That was the closest I’ve come in a while.”

  “We’ll try again sometime. Did you know licorice could be a straw? Here, look.” Julia got out some licorice from her purse and showed me. For the rest of our dinner, we drank through licorice sticks, and it made her smile every single time. She never seemed to get tired of doing it, and so neither did I, and I would have been pretty happy to stay inside that diner all night long, but Julia remembered that we’d left the doggie in the car, so we paid the check and went outside.

  “I need to find a place to stay,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “I thought you lived here.”

  “I lived with Marcus, but he told me if I wasn’t home tonight I was officially kicked out. He might change his mind, but not if I wake him up.”

  This might have been a lie, for all I knew. Even if I did wake Marcus up, he’d probably just yell at me a little bit, and make up a few extra rules, and then everything would go back to the way it was before. But I wanted to stay with Julia, and so I didn’t really care if anything I said was true.

  “I don’t think they’ll take us back at the White Palms Motel,” said Julia.

  “We’ll find another room. It’ll be easy.” Now I was just saying anything that I could think of. “There are probably a million motels in Los Angeles.”

  “Is that too strange?” asked Julia. “Have you ever shared a room with someone you just met?”

  “I’ve never even stayed in a motel before.”

  “It’s cheaper than getting two rooms. So it’s more responsible, in a way. Am I ridiculous, Joe? Would you tell me if you thought I was?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “I’ve felt crazy all day. Like I have no idea what I’m going to do next. Could it be jet lag?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not like I’d normally want to share a room with some boy I just met. But I feel like I’ve known you for more than two hours. And I’m scared to stay alone.”

  “We’ll split it,” I said.

  “We’ll split it right down the middle. I think that’s a really good idea.”

  The first motel we tried wouldn’t take dogs, but at the second place Julia managed to convince the night manager, by talking to her as a fellow hotel employee. While the manager was thinking about it, the doggie started licking her hand, and I think that’s what eventually won her over. That’s probably my favorite memory of Max, and it’s usually what I picture when I think about him.

  This motel room was smaller than the other one I’d seen. There was just enough room for one regular bed, and one sofa bed, and a TV. I remember that the freezing cold air pouring out of the vents in the walls smelled like it came out of somebody’s basement. I filled up the ice bucket with water and gave it to the doggie, along with another can of food. I was so nervous that I couldn’t think of anything to say, but luckily for me there was a television, so we lay on the bed for an hour and watched a movie about some people trying to get down from a mountain that’s crawling with ghosts. Julia got really into the movie, and once or twice it stressed her out so much that she jumped up and turned off the TV. But she couldn’t stand not watching either, so she’d always turn it right back on. When the movie was over, we unfolded the couch into this very lumpy bed, and I lay down to see how it felt. The mattress was really thin, and I could feel sharp pieces of metal underneath it, digging right into my back. I think I probably would have slept better on the couch, without unfolding it, but I didn’t really care. I still couldn’t believe that I’d be staying in this room all night with Julia, and nothing else made too much difference to me.

  While I was trying out the mattress, Julia took her suitcase into the bathroom to get dressed for bed. She came out a few minutes later in this huge blue T-shirt and these incredible white shorts, and then just stood there for a while in the doorway watching me try to get comfortable. I think I was under the covers by then, but I was still wearing all my clothes because I was too nervous to even take my socks off.

  “Can we leave the bathroom light on?” she said. “I can’t sleep when it’s completely dark.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Julia stayed there in the doorway for a second longer.

  “I watched you eat today,” she said. “You loved it. It made me so happy to watch you enjoy that cheeseburger so much.” She patted the dog one more time and said, “Goodnight, Max,” and climbed into her bed and pulled the blankets up under her chin. But I guess she really wasn’t ready to sleep yet, because she didn’t even close her eyes. After about a minute she asked me, “Did you ever play poker with Alvin?”

  “It’s the only card game that I know.”

  “He taught me how to play.”

  “Me too.”

  She turned on the light, and I went over to sit on the edge of her bed. We played poker for about an hour, using these M&Ms Julia had as chips. She won every game, and I could tell she’d learned to play from Alvin, because it felt the same as losing to him. I’d always liked playing with Alvin, because even though he always won, it always felt like we were both winning together, and that’s how it was with Julia too. After she won all the M&Ms, we split them up and ate them all. Then I went back to my horrible foldout sofa bed and she turned off the light, but I guess she still wasn’t tired.

  “I remember standing in the parking lot of the hotel, watching Alvin drive away,” she said in the dark. “And I had a feeling I’d never see him again.”

  “He’ll come back eventually. That’s what happened the last time he left.”

  “When it comes to old boyfriends, they say it can go one of two ways. You either stay close to them forever or you never talk to them again.”

  I can still remember how quiet it was in that room. The air conditioner had shut off, and there weren’t any airplanes overhead, or people jabbering outside, or anything. Julia’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but it filled up the whole room.

  “When Alvin left Tennessee, it was like I split off into two different lives,” she said. “In one of those lives, I went with him, and I’m sailing around the tip of Florida right now. In the other life, I didn’t go with him, but will always wonder if I should have, and that’s the life I’m living in right now. I thought about it, Joe. I really did. But an eighteen-year-old girl can’t just drop everything and run away.”

  “I would have gone with him,” I said. “If he had let me.”

  “Last year I spent half a semester in Sweden,” said Julia. “For the first month it was the most exciting place I’d ever been. And the second month I felt like I’d been there all my life. And the third month I got so homesick that I had to come home early. I’m not saying that being with Alvin was exactly like that. But he can be a lot to handle sometimes. I’m sorry that I keep going on about him.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Then I’ll just go on a
little longer. The first time I ever saw him he was reading a book on the beach. He was so focused on his book that he had no idea I was watching him. Then he reacted to something he was reading and spit into his book. Not even in an angry way. But something in the book made him want to spit, and he forgot where he was. Do you think that’s why I went over to talk to him?”

  “Sounds like something he would do.”

  “I think Alvin lived in a dream world most of his life. But anyway, I’m finished rambling about him now, I promise. Goodnight, Joe.”

  “Goodnight, Julia.”

  I never found a way to lie on that mattress that didn’t hurt a lot, but I don’t think that was the reason it took me forever to go to sleep that night. It felt as if more had happened to me that day than in my whole life up to that time, and so instead of sleeping I just lay there trying to remember it all. Sneaking out that morning. The terrible walk through the valley. Trying to drink the fountain, and then seeing Alvin there. The cab. The motel. The little birthday cupcake that the hotel manager had. Then Julia. I knew something about the way she talked about my brother felt familiar, and lying in the dark I finally realized that it reminded me of school, before I stopped going, how they always made us read books and discuss them. I never tried to read any of the books, but I listened to everyone else talk about them. The teacher was always bugging the kids to say important things about the books, and everyone except me eventually learned to do it. And that’s how Julia talked about Alvin. I had never thought so hard about a person in my life, and I felt a little guilty for listening to her do it, and for thinking a little harder about him myself. I think maybe if Julia really loved Alvin, she wouldn’t think about him quite so hard. And trying to understand him clearly wasn’t helping her, because she was frowning as she slept, wrinkling up the whole top of her nose. I thought maybe if I went over and kissed the center of her forehead, it would smooth out her whole face, like shaking out a towel. But while I was deciding whether to actually do it, I finally fell asleep.