Sam turns to me. “You have to show them the city paintings, Zac. I didn’t put those ones in the book. Are they still in the storage space?”
“I don’t know if this is — ”
“They’re brilliant,” Sam tells my parents. “All these creepy buildings. You’ve got to see them.”
“Another time,” Dad says.
Sam falls silent.
“More bread, anyone?” Mom asks.
When no one answers, the silence feels stretched and sticky, like paint left too long on a palette. I get up from the table and start the dishes. As I wash, I try not to listen too closely to Sam talking about drama, and her theater school plans, and — God help us all — her father’s job.
It’s Dad’s fault. He asks.
“He’s a watch commander at the detachment,” she says easily. “It’s a lot of shift work.”
“Does he….” Dad has to stop to clear his throat. “Does he enjoy the work?”
I’ve stopped washing. I stand with a sudsy plate in my hand, watching the table from the corner of my eye.
“I guess so,” Sam says.
“Well, that was delicious,” Mom says. “I wonder if Judith’s left dessert in the fridge.”
But Dad stands. “Think I’ve had enough for one night.”
He gives me a long, searching look as if I might be someone he doesn’t know.
Then the door swings firmly closed behind him.
Sam, wide-eyed, looks from me to Mom and back again.
“I suppose it’s time,” Mom says. She gives me a kiss on the cheek.
“Wonderful to meet you,” she tells Sam.
Then she’s gone, too. I can feel Sam’s eyes on me, and I’m as twisted up as a wrung-out dishcloth.
“Wow,” she says.
I stack the plates carefully in the drying rack.
“He’s not exactly a barrel of laughs, is he?”
There’s almost a repeat of the grilled cheese incident. A plate almost hits the floor. I’m so wound up that I’m not even sure who to be angry with. But the book saves me. Because when I turn to look at Sam, I spot the book on the tablecloth and I see the time she took to make this day special.
“Forget them,” I tell her, forcing my lungs to expand and my fists to unclench. “Let’s go to this dance of yours.”
She smiles.
When she goes into the bathroom to freshen up, I twist the cap from Judith’s unopened bottle of wine and take a giant swig.
Sam emerges with cherry red on her lips and glitter in her hair. “Ready?”
“We’d better walk. I’m taking this for the road,” I say, my hand around the neck of the bottle.
“Perfect.” Sam laughs.
Which for some reason makes me want to cry. But I squeeze my eyes tight one more time, take another swallow and pull her out the door. Because according to my sister, there’s only one graduation night in my whole life. And I may as well get it over with.
•
We wade into a sea of guys in suits and girls wearing shiny dresses. I ditched the empty wine bottle along the way, so now we drink the chemical-scented mix that Sam smuggled into the gym in her hairspray bottle. We dance (or Sam dances while I attempt to sway in some sort of acceptable rhythm). When we escape outside for air, we find Lucas sitting on the gravel staring at the stars.
“Lost your date?” I ask him. He’s supposed to be here with one of Sam’s friends.
“I…uh…hit a raccoon on the way here, and she’s not speaking to me.”
It seems as good a time as any to break out the bud. After all, this is my once-only graduation. Isn’t that what everyone’s been telling me?
I pull a joint from the breath mint case in the inside pocket of my suit jacket and, after a quick glance to either side, I light up, suck deeply and pass it along.
“It’s better than that crap you smoked with the druid,” I tell Sam.
Draft Dodger Dark is like a slow expansion of reality. And this is the very best of last year’s crop.
Soon all three of us are lying on our backs, staring into the sky.
“Speaking of the druid,” Lucas says, ten minutes after I actually mentioned him. “I fixed Amir’s van.”
“How did that happen?”
“I saw him driving through town with this girl, but his van was squealing like a dying animal.”
“And you fixed it? Nice work,” Sam says.
“Fan belt.”
“I saw him a couple days ago. He’s leaving soon,” I muse.
“Gone,” Lucas says. “He’s skipped town with Destiny.”
Which makes all three of us crack up, until at last Sam pulls herself together with a long breath, tilts her head to the sky and says, “I had no idea there were so many stars in the universe.”
I could float into those stars and drift there forever. Sam’s fingers rest lightly on the back of my hand. I can feel Lucas on my other side. I wish I had a cell number for the druid. I could tell him I’ve found a good place.
Inside, an old Mötley Crüe song says something about a rocket ship to outer space.
“This is it for you two,” Sam says, still staring up. “You can go anywhere now.”
“There’s this story my dad tells,” I say, “about three servants, and their boss gives them a bunch of money. Two of them invest their shares, and their boss is really happy when he comes home. The third buries it, and his boss is pissed.”
“Dude,” Lucas says eventually. “What does that have do with stars?”
“Sam said we could go anywhere. The story means we can’t bury our gifts. We have to go out and take risks.”
Sam begins vibrating beside me. After a minute, she breaks into giggles again.
“What?”
“You’re the least risk-taking person I know,” she says.
On my other side, Lucas begins vibrating, too.
“That’s not true!”
“Oh my God, there’s a pink heart on my locker, everyone’s going to see it,” Lucas says in falsetto.
“Shut up.”
“I can’t go to the party tonight. I have to help my grandpa brush his teeth,” Sam says.
Soon they’re both in hysterics. Every time they’re close to regaining control, one of them pipes up again.
“You’re the only seventeen-year-old in history who drives under the speed limit,” Sam says.
Lucas has rolled onto his side. One hand pounds the ground.
“Your shirts, even your new ones, are all gray.” Sam can barely manage words. “Did you know they were all gray?”
Okay, I hadn’t realized this. Still…
“Just because I’m not some spotlight personality doesn’t mean I can’t take risks.” I say “spotlight personality” with air quotes and a hefty dose of sarcasm, but Sam is immune at the moment.
“Hey, I jumped in the river that day!” Finally, I come up with proof.
“That was highly dangerous,” Lucas agrees. Apparently, I’m not the only master of sarcasm.
“C’mon,” Sam says, pulling herself up and tugging at Lucas and me. “Let’s go back inside. Show me some dance floor risk-taking.”
That almost sends both her and Lucas back to the ground, but they manage — barely — to hold it together until we’re dancing again.
That’s when Sam stiffens.
“Good fucking grief,” she says in an entirely different tone of voice.
I follow her gaze to the door of the gym, where her dad stands scanning the crowd, looking wide and solid as an old-growth stump in his uniform and brush cut.
Lucas disappears into the gyrating mass. Sam grabs my hips and grinds against me, throwing her head back and whooping above the music. My sway becomes a stagger as I fight to keep my balance, hold her and keep an eye on her dad at the sam
e time.
“What are you doing?” My words disappear into the bass.
Corporal Ko saunters toward a chaperoning teacher. He stops to ask a few questions at a table full of girls drinking punch that I’m sure is spiked. When he finds one kid half-cut with his forehead on a table, he beckons another chaperone over.
Sam puts a hand on my chin and draws my head close to hers. She kisses me. With tongue.
As soon as she stops, I glance back toward her dad. He’s staring above our heads, over the sea of dancers.
“That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” Sam says.
Which of course is what I’ve wanted to do since before we arrived. We slip out the side doors of the gym and make a run for it.
•
We’re half a block from the school, walking between the far-apart streetlight circles, when Lucas catches up to us.
“Where are you guys going?”
I can still hear the sounds of the dance behind us.
“Just walking,” I tell him.
“I’m done with grad,” Lucas says. Then he stretches his arms into the sky. “Done with all of it. Done!”
“Let’s do something crazy.” Sam smiles up at us, waving her own jazz hands in the air and looking a little off-kilter. “You in?”
There’s an especially wild spark in her eyes that I haven’t seen before.
“Hell, yeah,” Lucas says.
Where Canyon Street turns toward the highway, Summer Motors glows in neon blue and green. Helium balloons rise like multicolored UFOs from new and used cars. Sam hops the ditch into the lot and starts shopping.
“You’d buy this one,” she tells Lucas, standing in front of a black pickup with chrome roll bars. “Opposites attract.”
Lucas laughs.
“This one’s yours,” she calls to me over the roof of a cherry-red Corvette. She’s trying the handles of every car she passes.
“If I were a pimp.”
“Or a drug dealer,” Lucas says.
I shoot him a quick glare, but he’s checking out the mags on another sports car.
Suddenly, Sam squeals. “This one’s mine!”
She’s found an unlocked door. Already she’s behind the wheel. It’s a butt-ugly blue pickup with orange pulses painted down the sides. A remnant of the nineties.
The engine roars to life.
“What the hell?” Lucas says.
“Get in!”
“Duck!” Lucas says at the same time.
I drop automatically, the way I might when a helicopter passes overhead. Sam cuts the engine. From behind the truck, peering over the edge of the metal, I can see a police cruiser sliding by on the highway. It seems to slow as it passes the car lot. I hold my breath.
Then it’s gone, and Sam is muttering curses as she turns the key again. Lucas slides in beside her and I follow, as if we’re waterfowl and there’s safety in squeezing together.
“What are you doing?” Lucas says.
Sam rolls down all the windows.
“Keys were in the ignition,” she crows. “It was meant to be mine!”
Damn small towns and their lack of security measures.
She throws it in reverse, barely missing the Corvette behind her. Then she does her own NASCAR circuit of the lot. I have to admit, she drives well in tight confines. She might have a future in the sport.
She brakes at the edge of the highway and revs the engine.
14
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you? What if you assumed they were just going to stand at the edge of the cliff and enjoy the view?
Sam and Lucas laugh like maniacs.
“All right. Can we park this thing now?” I ask.
Sam yells, “Test drive! This is risk-taking, baby!”
She peels out of the lot and down Canyon Street toward town.
At first Lucas keeps laughing about the ass-whipping some sales guy will get tomorrow morning when the boss finds out the keys were left in this truck. We’re all still running on the fumes of the pot and the booze, I suppose. I have to grip the dash to stay upright while Sam swerves into the opposing lane and passes a slow-moving car.
She pulls off Canyon Street to circle the high school, waving an arm out the window and yelling, “See you on the other side, suckers!”
A few stragglers holler back from outside the gym doors.
Only when Sam decides to reverse down the main drag at full speed do I really start to panic. My foot pushes frantically on a phantom brake petal.
“Okay, I get your point. I’m not a risk-taker,” I say through gritted teeth.
But this isn’t about risk-taking. Looking at her face, I can see that. Her jaw is set in grim determination now.
It’s like she wants to be caught.
How did I not see this before I climbed in? She’s going to get her dad’s attention tonight — and ruin her potential policing career — through any means possible. Corporal Ko won’t be able to gaze at the wall above her head once we’ve all been busted.
Sam throws the truck into Drive, tears through town a third time, blows a red light in front of Burger Barn, and skids onto 25th.
Lucas seems frozen in place, his smile still plastered across his cheeks but his eyes wide.
As Sam takes another corner so fast that the back tilts and slides behind us, I tell her to stop. To slow down. To pull over.
“You can talk to your dad a different way!”
“Screw that.” Cranking the classic rock station, the one that’s been playing since she turned the key, she heads downhill. It’s as if Lucas and I are debris swept along in a mudslide.
When I yell at her again, she starts singing along to the radio.
“You’re trying to get caught,” I shout. “That’s not risk-taking. That’s just stupid.”
For a brief moment, when the siren wails behind us, it seems imaginary, as if we’re in a movie scene and of course this is what happens next. But even as I’m thinking that, I’m also flipping through possible consequences.
This is no movie. This is my entire family about to pay for the bad decisions I made tonight.
She speeds up.
“Sam!”
She burns along another residential street, takes the corner hard and floors the pedal.
“It’s a high-speed chase. Don’t worry, they’re not supposed to keep coming. They might endanger civilians.” She leans over the steering wheel, focused on the road. We take another corner, fast enough that Lucas loses his grip on the dash and crushes me against the door.
The cops apparently don’t interpret the rules the same way Sam does. They’re still coming. The interior of the truck flashes red, then blue.
Yelling isn’t helping. I shove Lucas off me.
“Sam, maybe your dad can get you out of this, but mine can’t.” I’m still yelling. She’s still staring straight ahead. I flick the music off and force myself to lower my voice. “We need to stop.”
But what good is that going to do? Getting arrested isn’t an option.
Another patrol car joins the first. The siren volume doubles. Sam turns the music back on.
“Okay,” Lucas shouts. He seems to have regained mental control. “I have a plan. Sam, after the next corner, you brake fast. We all dive out, and we run. If they can’t catch us, they’ll have no proof we were here.”
She whips around the next corner. She fails to stop.
“Sam, I can’t get arrested.” I lean across Lucas to grab her arm. “Not just for normal reasons. It’s different for me. If you and I care about each other at all, I need to get out of this truck.”
Her eyes shift toward me, then back to the road. On the steering wheel, her hands are like claws.
“Sam?”
My head bashes Lucas’s chest when she hits
the gas again.
“What the hell?”
Then she squeals to a stop. “Go! Now!”
Before my brain has rebounded, I yank open the door and sprint across a stranger’s lawn. When I look back, I see Lucas streaking in the opposite direction. The siren seems deafening and the lights like strobes as the cop cars round the corner. An officer leaps from the first car and races after Lucas.
Just as the second patrol car pulls in behind her truck, Sam roars away from the curb.
She didn’t run.
I scramble up a backyard fence and down the other side, narrowly missing a wagon and a trike. Then I’m across yet another fence and through a garden, and out the space between houses on the other side.
Why didn’t she run?
I know the answer before I finish forming the question.
All of this — the car chase, the bump and grind, the mixed booze — it was all about getting caught.
I have to lean on my knees for a second to catch my breath as another thought strikes me. Maybe our whole relationship was about getting caught. Why else would a girl like Sam date a shitrat like me?
There are no lights on in the house, or in the neighboring houses. There’s only the glow of the streetlight from the end of the block and the faraway fading siren.
No one’s followed me. Maybe there was only one cop in that car and he chose to chase Sam. Maybe he rounded the corner too late to see me. Maybe God’s watching over me.
My lungs feel as if I’ve seared the lining from them.
Slowly, I walk to the end of the block and figure out where I am, approximately. Then I start toward the south side of town. Toward the orchard.
•
It’s a long walk, dark and silent. I have plenty of time to recognize what a mess I’ve made.
In the past month, I’ve turned my entire life into one of Big Bugger’s shit piles. I’ve disappointed Dad, blown my chance at art school and discovered my girlfriend is a lunatic. Possibly a lying lunatic.
I’m every word that Walt has ever thrown at me.
Part of me — a big part — wants to crawl into the ditch alongside the orchard and stay there. Because there’s no way to fix this. The only solution I can think of is to leave, immediately, for the grow. Stay close to the cabin until I’m sure all of this has blown over. Possibly until Sam’s dad is transferred to another detachment.
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