I was able to drag myself to the guest room. The décor was exactly what I would have expected: a king-size bed with an ornamental wooden headboard, mint green curtains to match the striped bedspread, unburned incense on the bedside table. The guest room was so incredibly Jeanine, just like Snake’s room was so incredibly Snake.
My tiredness didn’t register until I fell on the bed and felt the foam against my spine, melting my body against the mattress. I clicked off the lamp and lay on my back beneath the covers, gazing up at the empty ceiling.
Light filtered through the blinds. No color, just figments. No color, except one. A shade.
A streak of violet.
I closed my eyes for the last time that night, and I swear I could still hear his heartbeat.
Chapter Eighteen
ROAD TRIPS WERE AMONG THE FEW pleasures in life I hadn’t learned to hate. Whether it was being free, riding seventy miles an hour with the windows down and the bass pounding to the same rock song on repeat until that band got buried in my never-listen-again pile, or the sense of escape, from leaving a town that only held me down and from people who couldn’t have cared less where I ran to or even why I ran. I didn’t know what it was about running that drew me so much. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stop.
That’s where I was that Saturday morning, somewhere between carefree rock bands and sweet escape. Snake sat beside me in the back seat of the Prius, controlling the radio from his iPod that was hooked into the cigarette lighter. I’d made him swear before we left the house that he wouldn’t play anything remotely resembling the Renegade Dystopia. He was doing a decent job so far.
Jeanine was driving, her silky jet-black hair braided in a fishtail down her back. Snake’s other mom, Meg, rode shotgun. She had a frizzy blond afro and virgin skin, virgin because she didn’t wear a speck of makeup, yet somehow managed to still be pretty in that organic, borderline-hippie, au naturel kind of way. She’d packed us a cooler brimming with “healthy snacks” (see: vegetables) and that Jeanine had stuffed with chocolate and Cheetos the moment Meg turned her back. Snake had hidden money in his pocket for edible food once we got to the park.
The morning had gone more smoothly than anticipated. I received all of six voicemails from Karen—as opposed to the estimated twenty. Naturally, I didn’t listen to any of them.
Snake’s moms called him down for breakfast at eight, completely unaware of the fugitive crumpling the sheets in their guest room. Snake came to get me, and we confronted his moms together in the kitchen. He said my parents had gone out of town and were okay with me staying over. Once his moms’ maternal instinct questionnaire (see: “Are you sure your parents are okay with this?”) had been answered, the Cedar Point trip was a go.
Snake was right about his moms being cool with guy/girl sleepovers. The only disapproval I got from Jeanine was when I failed to finish a third pancake and she scolded me for not making myself at home. Jeanine had liked me from the first time we met, though my douchelord speech about her only son should have sent me right over the edge of parental approval. Meg seemed to like me, too, but it was harder to read her, considering she rarely spoke and was studying a nature magazine for the majority of breakfast.
I caught my eyes wandering multiple times that morning, glancing from Jeanine to Snake to Meg and wondering how life would have been different if I’d been raised like Snake. If my parents had been willing to try to understand me. If I could have gotten away with harboring runaways in my guest room. But the more I wondered, the more I realized, Snake still swallowed his Prozac every night. Snake still blew his nose into lubricated tissues while his therapist pulled out every weapon in the arsenal to make him spill his depression-filled guts. Snake was still a symptom of himself. I guess none of us was perfect.
“Snake, turn it up!” Jeanine called from the front seat. “I love this song!”
“Mom, it’s Ultra Drain. How do you even know about them? They aren’t on your old-people CDs.”
She glared at him in the rearview mirror, the yellow lines of the road streaking her eyes. “Dana plays their songs in cardio, thank you,” she replied with a huff. “Now, stop talking, I’ll miss the chorus.”
Snake shot me an embarrassed glance and clicked the volume up.
She began to sing (see: yelp).
And I’d thought Snake’s vocal efforts were agony.
“I see where you get your horrid singing voice from,” I called to Snake over the music.
“Hey!” Jeanine protested. Meg glanced at me over her shoulder and winked. I felt immediate pity for Meg, the most patient woman I’d ever known, who had to live with the two worst singers the good Lord ever created.
Snake spun the volume to the max decibel and held his head back proudly, leaning toward Jeanine. He opened his mouth and joined his mom on the chorus, squawking like the seagull from The Little Mermaid. I thought the windows were going to shatter.
And that was the two hour car ride to Cedar Point. Jeanine trying to sing. Snake trying to harmonize. Meg, who I had concluded was a genius, tuning out the wailing with earplugs. And me, mocking their attempts and secretly enjoying the music. Despite their horrible voices and pitiful duet endeavors, their singing was everything they were.
Bearable.
It was the best road trip I’d ever taken.
We made it to the park by eleven. Given the Snoopy dog statue dancing on the sign, I took it this park was a little below us. That assumption was proven true when a nearby middle school showed up hosting a Saturday at the Park event, and we were fortunate enough to stumble upon the rousing extravaganza of preteens (see: people worse than the worst kinds of people).
Once we were able to worm our way through the excessively perfumed and braces-faced crowd, we were inside and ready to ride whatever roller coaster didn’t have a line of screeching almost teenagers. The GateKeeper it was, a twisty blue coaster with an aggression level of 5. I had no idea what an aggression level was, but aggression was my favorite hobby, and 5 was higher than all the 4s I was seeing. I wasn’t stoked about how tall the coaster looked, but the line was only ten minutes long. Hopefully, the ride was short too.
Jeanine and Meg waited on a bench outside of the pavilion. Meg claimed the velocity of roller coasters made her stomach sick, and Jeanine had brought a book to read until we got to the family section of the park so she could ride the swings. They even took Dramamine to sit on a bench. Typical nonadventurous, blaming-their-boringness-on-motion-sickness parents.
While Snake and I waited under the pavilion, I spotted a guy in front of us with his young son. There was no way that kid was getting on the ride, considering the top of his spiked hair struggled to reach his dad’s thigh, but at least he was willing. His dad wore a GUNS N’ ROSES T-shirt with faded jeans, filming his son’s excitement through a silver portable camera.
“That’s you and your kid in the future,” I said to Snake, nodding in their direction.
He looked at the man and scrunched his nose. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Polaroid. Worst digital brand they make.”
“Not the camera, stupid. The filming your kid’s every uneventful move.”
“Oh, that.” He watched the man and the boy, his focus shifty. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You film me every time I breathe.”
“I feel like it will be different with him.”
“Why?”
Bringing up the inexorable truth that Snake would, in fact, be a dad in less than a month tore at something deep beneath the surface. Something so far-reaching, the mere mention of “your kid” dove headfirst into his complexities. A complexity he didn’t want me to know about. A complexity he might not have recognized himself.
“I think he’s going to resent me in a lot of ways,” he said. “For the way things happened.”
“Because you and Carla are so young?”
“That.” He dropped his head, knowing his hair would hide his eyes from me. “And because we w
on’t be together.”
“You don’t know you won’t be together. And even if you aren’t, what matters most is that you both take care of him. And don’t get in a nasty custody battle like those teenage parents on MTV, because that’s just embarrassing.”
“That’s incentive to not film our lives post-baby right there.” He grinned.
“All I’m saying is, don’t do that thing where you make idiotic mistakes and try to fix them by making more idiotic mistakes. Be in his life and don’t be a deadbeat, and you’ll be golden.”
He nodded, but I could still see him doubting. Silently mistrusting himself. Plotting how he would try to keep his son from hating him. Wondering if he was doing anything right at all.
“How did Carla tell you she was pregnant?” I asked, interrupting his self-evaluation. I was pretty sure he was failing it, anyway. “I’m sure it’s an entertaining story.”
He shook away his thoughts, beginning to smile again as we moved up in line. “She called me after school and asked me to meet her at the pond. We’d been hanging out since the party. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, but kept getting nervous.”
“Why? She obviously wasn’t going to say no.”
“Well, because I . . .”
He trailed off, and I could finish the sentence for him.
Because I really liked her.
“Anyway, when I got there, her eyes were all red like she’d been crying. I thought she was going to say she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I started mentally preparing my breakup playlist for later. Pretty much everything by the Renegade Dystopia.” I rolled my eyes. “Then she told me she was pregnant. I took the news about as heroically as you’d expect . . . I threw up under a tree.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Swear. I vomited three times that night. I told my moms I had food poisoning.”
“You’re so pathetic.” I laughed. “What did you say to Carla?”
“I asked her if she was sure over and over until she threatened to push me in the pond if I asked again. When she said she was keeping it, I promised I would be there for her as much as she would let me.”
We moved farther up in line. The boy and his dad were getting strapped in, and the kid could barely see over the harness.
“And your moms?” I asked.
“They cried for at least a few days straight. Which I get, you know? I hadn’t even turned seventeen yet. I was still a kid to them. They asked if I wanted to marry her or anything, and I said no. I wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.”
“That’s brutal.”
“It was a big mess for a few months there. Hats off to Prozac for dragging me through it.”
“You could be a testimonial for their commercials,” I joked. “Snake Eliot the Prozac poster kid.”
“I never needed it as much as I did then, I can tell you that. At least I wasn’t entirely alone.”
He wasn’t entirely alone because he had Carla. I could picture it like I’d seen it on the big screen, Snake and Carla running from their problems when things with their parents became too much, when the only two people they had were each other. I wondered if Carla ever called Snake from the side of the road at one in the morning. I wondered if he sped to her rescue. I wondered if she slept in his guest room. I wondered if it was on those nights, when no one understood them but them, that Snake told Carla that he loved her. I wondered if in the darkness of their loneliness, he really meant it.
“What about now?” I asked. He raised his brows at me. “How do your moms feel about Carla now?”
I thought about how strange Jeanine acted whenever Carla was mentioned. How no one ever talked about her except for me. It seemed like they wanted to pretend she didn’t exist.
“They like her for who she is. They just don’t like her for me.”
“Why not?”
His eyes found mine instantly. “Because they like what makes me feel good.”
I held back a smile. “That’s a slim list.”
It was our turn to board. A redheaded kid with a pale face shrouded in acne ushered us onto the ride, helping us lock the buckles on our harnesses. His quivering fingers were hardly comforting to someone who was deathly afraid of doing anything not involving having both feet planted firmly on the ground. I looked at Snake, who was sitting beside me already strapped in. Apparently, he’d been staring at me the entire time I was getting locked.
“Stop staring!” I yelled over the machine noises. “You know I hate it!”
“You said no heights!” he yelled back, a sly smirk parading on his face.
“I meant heights where we’re hanging for a long period of time!”
“Technically, we will be! You’re contradicting yourself!”
“No, I’m not! We drop fast!”
“You say one thing and mean another!”
“So do you!”
“No, I don’t!”
“You said you loved her!”
The words flew off my tongue so fast it was like we were already riding. His whole expression shifted from lightheartedness to confusion. I’d succeeded in shocking him again, but it didn’t feel like a victory that time. It felt like a loss.
The recording began to play, welcoming us to the GateKeeper and instructing us to keep hands, arms, and legs inside the ride at all times (and a bunch of other safety nonsense no one cared about). Some kid behind me was crying. The couple in front of me was taking a picture on a cell phone they were going to lose in ten seconds. And Snake was still staring, not at all in the good way.
We took off.
The remainder of the ride was a haze of track, sky, and terrified screaming. I even swallowed my gum on one of the coaster loops. That was pretty memorable. Memorable because I was choking for the last few seconds of the ride and prayed my mother’s infamous Jesus-take-the-wheel plea before I realized that I would, in fact, live.
Snake didn’t ask about my outburst after that. By the time we hopped off the GateKeeper, he was so ready to surge his adrenaline on the next ride, he all but forgot about it. Jeanine and Meg patiently waited on every parent-ridden bench in every neck of the park until dinnertime, when we forced down Meg’s homemade gluten-free tuna sandwiches at the picnic tables. Afterward, Snake bought us hot dogs when Meg was in the bathroom, and we scarfed them down so fast we could have given the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest winners a run for their money.
At eight, we made our way to the family side of the park where the middle-aged parkgoers (see: Jeanine & Meg) took their inner daredevils for a spin around the carousels. Snake, unenthused by the concept of sitting on a plastic unicorn while a harmonica track crooned a slow and torturous tune, led me a little ways down the hill toward the far end of the family section. The sun had almost fully set by then.
Twinkling multicolored lights strung by ropes glimmered against the sky. A classical song was drifting through the noise. Snake retained bits and pieces of the melody and hummed it quietly.
As we trekked down the hill, I knew exactly where he was leading me. Straight ahead, prismatic and rotating against the sky, was the dreaded Ferris wheel. A line was backed up to the bathrooms, a bunch of crazies waiting to dangle from faulty cords above asphalt demises. Okay, maybe I was overhyping the likeliness of imminent death. Regardless, it was still the scariest thing I would have ever done if I agreed to it. Second to jumping out of a window, of course.
“Aren’t you slick?” I taunted once we reached the line. “Butter me up like you’re taking me somewhere special, and we end up at the wheel of peril.”
“Taking your aversion to a beloved theme park attraction into account, I still concluded that it would be romantic.” The yellow, blue, and pink lights from the wheel cast colorful dots across his face, enhancing his usually dull eyes.
“Because I would be scared, and you’d have to hold me? Get some new material, dude. That method is tired.”
“You mock it now, but once we’re up there, you’ll be in my lap. Gu
aranteed. And I may have used a cheap and worn-out method, but I’d still be winning.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you’ll need me and have to painfully admit it.”
“Ha.” I laughed. He never failed to wow me with his expertise in being a presumptuous dick. “Once we get up there, we’ll see who needs whom.”
He smiled as a dash of pink flicked on the wheel, glowing against his teeth. The line moved faster than expected, five-year-olds putting me to shame with their smiley anticipation. And in spite of the fact that I grew closer to peeing my pants with each step we took toward boarding, I held a smug grin on my lips so Snake knew just how much I didn’t need him.
Gluten-free tuna sandwich almost found its way back out of my mouth when my phone buzzed in my pocket, stunning me out of my terrified observation of the wheel freezing at the tiptop. I was going to die up there for sure.
I checked the phone screen. A text from Carla.
Hey, Reggie. I was just making sure you were okay because your parents came by my house this afternoon looking for you. They said you didn’t come home today. Are you with Snake? Let me know if you need anything. Not like I care, obviously ;)
Great, my parents were scouring the town for me. Who knew how many people my crazy mother had harassed? My dad was probably being towed around on his leash all day, while my mom stapled flyers to telephone poles and plastered my face on milk cartons. The wheel of peril wasn’t looking so bad after all.
“Is that Carla?” Snake asked, reading over my shoulder.
“Nosy much? And yes.”
“Did she say anything about me?”
“I’m genuinely curious how your head fits on your body.”
“I’m not being arrogant. I’m just wondering, jeez.”
“She was informing me that my parents went to her house looking for me this afternoon. Which proves that Karen doesn’t know me at all, because one, I would never have a sleepover with Carla Banks. And two, I would never have a sleepover with Carla Banks while the dam around her uterus could burst at any moment.”
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