by Deb Caletti
“Okay.”
“Just say, I don’t know. Tired. Determined. I’m not really all the way determined, but that’s what people will want to hear.”
“Probably,” Ashley Naches says.
There are more questions. How long it will take. What she did to train. What she hopes to accomplish once she gets to DC.
Ashley Naches does not ask about The Taker. She doesn’t ask the thing everyone really wants to know: How did it feel?
“Can I take your picture?” Ashley asks.
Oh, God. Annabelle hadn’t anticipated this part. She’s not wearing makeup. She’s gotten thin already from the run. Her cheekbones sink in like old couch cushions. Her hair still looks like she cut it with her eyes shut. “Okay. I guess, okay.”
Ashley stands. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a glitter butterfly on it. She is overweight but confident, wearing her T-shirt tight enough to hug her curves. Go, Ashley! Way to love your body! Annabelle thinks. Ashley backs up until she’s under the “Great Books for Spring” poster. She hunches, snaps a few photos of Annabelle, who isn’t sure whether she should smile or not. Smiling seems disrespectful.
Ashley Naches gathers her backpack and her notebook. The interview is over. The librarian locks the door behind them the second they leave.
“I have to stop at my locker, so . . .”
“Sure. Well, good-bye,” Annabelle says. “Thank you.”
Now, Ashley Naches looks at her hard. Ashley Naches has warm, dark eyes, and they stare kindly into Annabelle’s. “Are you, um, okay?”
How to answer this? There’s an awkward moment of silence, when Annabelle searches for a response. “Not really.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
Annabelle shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Ashley Naches does a surprising thing, then. She hugs Annabelle. She grips Annabelle to her big chest. When they separate, Annabelle sees that Ashley’s eyes are wet with tears.
“Bye,” Ashley Naches says.
“Bye.”
Annabelle watches Ashley go. There are rhinestones in a V on the back pockets of her jeans, too. Annabelle wonders what it’s like to be Ashley Naches, a girl hopeful enough for sparkles. Ashley will head home now, to her mother and father, or just a mother, or just a father, or a grandma, or two mothers, or some configuration of family. There will be problems under that roof, because there are problems under every roof. But she will not carry the guilt Annabelle carries. Seth Greggory is not in her future, and for that reason, Annabelle is hit with a longing, a bad, bad longing, to be Ashley Naches in her sparkling jeans, heading home to whatever her problems are. Ashley Naches, who walks home feeling sorry for the girl she just interviewed back there.
Annabelle needs to get the hell out of Wenatchee High. She pushes through the doors, and outside it is spring again, and there is Grandpa and the RV, waiting in the lot. She is so relieved to see that her new life—where she’s both running and on the run—is still there. She still has many, many miles to go before Seth Greggory, thank God. She does the math. She has more than 2,500 miles between her and what’s coming.
And then she sees them. A group of guys on a patch of lawn with an iron panther statue at its center. One of the boys has his hand on the panther’s back, like they’re pals who’ve discovered the real meaning of friendship. Three other guys stand nearby, laughing and talking. One of them has a denim jacket like The Taker’s. His shoulders turn inward with shyness and he watches the others carefully, as if he’s gauging what his own response should be.
Just like that, he’s here.
• • •
He’s here. The Taker, wearing that coat, walking home with those same hunched shoulders. Annabelle is driving. She’s got her music on, and she’s filled with the boldness from a good song. It’s a few days after that card, and she’s trying to be friendly. They’ve talked in class. He told her how he’s trying to teach himself to play guitar, and about his dog named Marty, who can get into every locked cupboard. She’s told him about the Almond Croissant Crisis at Essential Baking Company last weekend, and how Mrs. Chen fled from Sunnyside Eldercare and they had to call the police. He’s surprisingly funny. And he knows all these cool cultural references that make her feel kind of stupid. Like the iconic dance scene in Pulp Fiction, he’ll say, and she won’t have any idea what he means.
After her initial avoidance of Will, he and Annabelle completed the breakup dance: There were a handful of upset phone calls, the long-minutes-of-silence calls, the maybe-we-shouldn’t, yes-we-should ones. Recently, the days of no contact have been stringing together into permanence. Her life is sort of like it was, just without Will in it—school, work, family, friends, running. So now, Annabelle is trying to be larger and fuller. She’s training for her second marathon in November, doing extra-long runs on the weekends, and she’s attempting to be open to all new experiences. Being open and new experiences are awesome, because they make her feel like she’s moving on, while also serving as a Fuck you, Will and a Look at all the stuff you don’t know about me now, Will.
She turns down her music, pulls up beside The Taker, and lowers her window. “Hey. Where you headed?”
“Home. Missed my bus.”
“Shoot. Want a ride?”
“That’d be great.”
His head almost hits the roof of her car. His legs fold in like a grasshopper’s. The small space between them is suddenly filled with heat; his cheeks are flushed and there’s the wet-wool smell of boy sweat and that tang of something again, maybe weed.
Also rapidly filling the car: awkwardness. Now that he’s in there, Annabelle has no clue what to say to him, and she can practically hear the gears of conversational effort turning in his own head. He shifts around a lot, looks for something in his jacket pockets as if he’s occupied with important business. She’s filled with instant regret at having stopped. See what happens when you’re impulsive? she lectures herself. She often lectures herself. It’s like living with a cruel boarding school teacher inside your own mind.
“So, where to?”
“Ravenna Park?”
“Got it.”
Whenever anyone gets in the car with her, Annabelle starts driving like an idiot. She’s fine when she drives alone, but now she almost runs a stop sign, and speeds past a lady waiting at a crosswalk. He’s not the only one who’s nervous.
She turns her music back up to cover the uncomfortable silence. “Can I look at your library?” He gestures to her phone.
“Oh, God. Go ahead. But disregard any Raffi.”
“Hey, childhood nostalgia, I get it.” He scrolls, comments. One thing she’s learned—he knows a lot about music. “I like, I like, I don’t know, I never heard of . . .” he says. “Hey, the Clash! ‘The only band that matters.’ ”
He’s making a cultural reference that she’s ignorant of again, she’s sure. “Stole it from my mom.”
“Hey, old people have some good music! It’s not all ‘Lady in Red.’ ”
“Hmm. I’ve never heard that one.”
“You’re kidding! What’s wrong, you’re not into sappy shit from the eighties? Can I play the Clash?”
“Sure.”
It’s “Police and Thieves.” “Junior Murvin’s lyrics—so awesome,” he says. He sings along, stuff about fighting nations, and guns, and ammunition. She thinks he might have a thing for guns, which in her world is as rare as saying he has a thing for medieval weapons of war. Once, he dropped his backpack and a firearm catalogue spilled out, and there was also that photo at the shooting range. Who has guns in Seattle? No one she knows. Guns seem foreign and weirdly aggressive. Here, people say they’re sorry when they bump into someone on the street.
The Taker rocks his head to the beat, and she plays drums against the steering wheel. When they get to the chorus, they Oh, yeah together. She’s having fun.
“That one,” he says. “The gray one with the Volvo.”
“Wow, nice house.” It’s a b
ig, old Craftsman, right by the park. There are three stories at least, and it’s got one of those curved cupolas that would be perfect to do your homework in. One of his parents must be a serious gardener. There’s the kind of mishmash of flowers that look unplanned but are oh-so-carefully planned.
She turns the music down.
“Hey, thanks. I appreciate the ride,” he says.
“No problem.”
He’s looking right into her eyes, and she’s looking into his, and he’s not being shy and maybe he doesn’t even like her anymore. Of course, this makes him more interesting, and he’s . . . how to explain it? Different. Odd. He’s maybe like a door to somewhere she’s never been. Maybe weird would be interesting. Weird is definitely not Will. Maybe weird means troubled or some kind of history that isn’t parents like Robert and Tracie, even though there’s a Volvo.
She could kiss him. She could see what it was like and then never do it again. She thinks he might kiss her. But he doesn’t. He just unfolds himself from the car and gives a little wave.
And what happened after that, well, this is what she really thinks about when she sees that boy by the panther statue. Because after that day, he started hanging out with Annabelle and her friends. It was her approval of him that let him into their circle, which is horrible right there—the “let” and “allow” by superior people. She was one of them, the superior people. She floated around in the privilege of her popularity without giving it a thought. It was wrong.
After the day she drove him home, he sat with them at lunch. Geoff Graham invited him to play guitar when his band, Shred, appeared at Café Hombre on Wednesday nights when no one was there. Kat helped The Taker with a paper on The Scarlet Letter. Everyone could tell he liked Annabelle. She liked being liked. It wasn’t a big deal, the liking, until it was.
Even after he joined their group, though, The Taker hung back in a way that’s hard to explain. Annabelle would catch him watching her and her friends, same as that boy on the grass is doing now, making sure he doesn’t do anything to shame himself from the circle.
Annabelle flings the door of the RV open, slams it shut behind her. “Get me outta here,” she says.
Grandpa Ed sits in the driver’s seat, window down, listening to NPR and whittling.
“Looks like you survived the paparazzi.”
“The librarian made everyone leave.” Okay, this is an exaggeration. Everyone was one lonely kid reading Dune. “She locked the doors. She couldn’t wait until I was out of there.”
“Bella Luna. Did you ever think that maybe she was trying to help you? She booted everyone out for your own privacy. To make you comfortable, capisce?”
She scowls. He’s saying the same things as Dr. Mann. That her perceptions skew reality. That her guilt does.
“Floor it,” she says to Grandpa Ed.
He does. His little wooden raccoon turd slides from the console and rolls under his seat. It clatters every time he makes a turn or the slightest swerve. Roll, clang. Roll, clang.
The noise in her head is worse. There are a thousand wooden raccoon turds rolling and clanging. All she wants is to get back where she now belongs: the trail. Where the only sounds she hears are her own steps, and Loretta’s calm voice, and streams gushing and birds tweeting, and trees creaking and crashing, and the occasional creepy animal sound.
She hears her own heart on the trail, too—its guilty beating. Out there, though, she can trick herself. It is not evidence of her going forward. It is not the sound of her own clock, moving her to the horror of what’s coming. It’s the base thrum of a trucker’s radio. It is the purposeful thump of hooves. It is an ancient drumbeat, old as time.
12
Annabelle has just turned left onto East Morris Road, very near the Washington State border, when everything turns to shit. Pardon the expression, but there is only one good way to put this. The much-anticipated marker ahead does not bring her the joy she thought it would. No. Instead, after three and a half weeks of this, her first month, she’s suddenly despondent. Beyond exhausted. Disgusted and fed up and aching with the madness of it all.
For God’s sake, look around. What does she see? That’s right! Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip. Nothing but a flat road and dry grass. What about over there and there and there? Same, same, same! It is an entire continent of dry yellow grass. Hey, wait—there is a RAILROAD CROSSING sign, falling halfway over like it can’t stand to be upright any longer, either. There are also the exciting thin metal posts with the flashers on top, so drivers don’t veer off into ditches because of pitch-blackness or sheer boredom. Oh, wait. Look! Wow, awesome! There is a thrilling orange bush. Also, the smallest scrub of trees, whoopee, way, way off in the distance, though you have to squinch your eyes to see them.
Add some heat. Add suffocating heat that drenches your back in sweat and makes you stink like a caveman. Put a mean burn in your calves that’s been there since last week. Set a curl of doom in your stomach. Add the fact that this—this exact picture, the yellow, the dry—has been what you’ve been looking at for days and days and days. Twenty-seven days, to be exact, where every day feels pretty much like the last. One month, which is only the first of four and a half more like it. The good news: This pretty much is the hell you deserve.
But, now, here are more reasons why it all falls to shit in this spot. There’s a crossroads. Puh-leaze—she can’t even count all the times in the last few weeks when nature or weather or some animal provided some annoying double meaning. She is irritated and peeved and just plain over it, over every metaphor from storm clouds to raging rivers, and she used to love metaphors. Nonetheless, there it is. The road curves. It is a decision. WA 27 is painted on the street like a quiet but firm invitation. It is only five miles (and she has no idea when five miles became an only) to the state line. It would be so easy to finish and then come back here, where WA 27 loops right back to home. All she has to do is make a call to Grandpa Ed to tell him she’s done.
And, oh, she is so done. She is done for many, many reasons. She is tired. She and Grandpa Ed have reached a point of togetherness where everything the other person does drives you utterly mad. Of course, she is grateful, so grateful, for everything he has done, but can she discuss for a moment the way he picks his teeth with a toothpick? How about the annoyance of toothpicks in general? Who uses toothpicks anymore? No sane, non-gross person, that’s who. Only old guys. Is there a toothpick factory just in existence for old guys?
And let’s not start about the evening Listerine gargling or the morning throat clearing, which sounds like her neighbor, that dick J.T. Jones, trying to start up his decrepit Mustang. Or, the snoring, which no amount of pillows folded over your head can drown out. Or burps that smell like salami and wine and fill the whole RV with the smell of salami and wine. Or the dry Stella D’oro cookies with their cement frosting, which he raves and raves about and manages to find even in the most remote locations. Or the sheer routine of him. How every night when he pours the juice glass of wine, he says, Vino, good for the heart. We didn’t need no Internet to tell us that.
Wait. She must also address the anchovies. Long, flat anchovies in oval tins, and curled-up anchovies pressed against their glass jars. Anchovies on crackers, anchovies on pasta. Anchovies in salad dressing. Small salty fish with tiny fishy bones every freaking place she looks. He has an entire cupboard of them, she swears. Must stock up for emergencies! In the event of a nuclear war, do not fear: There will be anchovies on Ritz crackers for El Capitano and his loved ones.
And, she is driving him insane, too, she knows. She sees how the muscle in his cheek works when she unwraps the tape from her ankle and it makes the loud scriiitch. She has heard the sigh when he sees her stinky running clothes soaking in the sink. She suspects he takes his hearing aids out on purpose, to get a little needed distance from the sound of her just being and breathing. There is a pillow over his head when she leaves early in the morning. Whenever she talks to Gina on the phone, he slams out the RV door and goe
s for a walk, even if it’s a dark and moonless night. Once, she heard him pissing outside rather than coming back in before they’d hung up. He blows a disgusted sigh through his nose when she seems to be feeling sorry for herself, though, honestly, what does he expect?
She is done, too, because Gina made a good case for it the night before. When Gina makes calm sense, Annabelle often listens to her. Annabelle loves calm plus sense, because in her life, that is like a rare desert flower that blossoms only once a year. Gina is hoping and praying that this will be Annabelle’s last day. Look, Gina said. You ran across the entire state. Can’t you call that the accomplishment? Isn’t that good enough right there?
Annabelle is done because of pain. She is done because of monotony. For the last few days, she’s been in eastern Washington, and sure, there’s the beauty of the Palouse of eastern Washington, until the endless, unchanging, ceaseless, tedious, flat beauty of the Palouse of eastern Washington makes you want to kill yourself.
She is done because Montana is coming, and that will be worse.
She is done because she misses home. At least, she misses her own bed and her clothes and she really misses Bit, their dog; the way he’d be so happy when she’d come back. His tail would wag like a flag in a storm. He didn’t care about anything she did that was wrong or unsightly. She could wear plaid with plaid or tell him the truth or have bad breath, and he would still be just present with his accepting swiveling backside. God, she loves him.
She misses eating what she wants, when she wants. Plain old cereal or drive-through burgers or Skittles arranged by favorite color while studying. She talks to Zach Oh and Olivia practically every day, Malcolm, too, but she still misses playing video games and watching stupid TV instead of hearing how the GoFundMe is doing and who said what on the Facebook page she’s too chicken to look at. She even misses Zach Oh’s mom, who wakes him up every morning though he sets his alarm, who always nags him about getting his homework done though his homework is always done. She is sort of mean and angry-faced, and Annabelle often feels sorry for Zach Oh, but right then, she misses his mother so much that her heart is heavy and hurting with it.