The Spaces Between Us

by Stacia Tolman

  “How many cows are there on this farm, again?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know. Five hundred?”

  “Did she really break up with Junior yesterday?”

  Angel just looks at me and shakes her head, like there is so much I don’t know, why bother starting to explain.

  I go back into the milking parlor. I get an udder folded in half in one of the suction cups and the cow does try to kick me. So I stop thinking about my feet and my back and my hands and the drip on the end of my nose. The rest of the world goes away. I am left with steam rising off the black and white backs, their sweet, grassy breath, the humming of the generator, the rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk of the machines, the milk pulsing through the clear plastic tubing on its way to the bulk tank, the aluminum clang of the gates, and the swish of Grimshaw feeding out grain. I’m unhooking a cow when she lifts her tail and lets loose with a prodigious stream of liquid manure. It hits the cement floor and splashes up all over me. I’ve just wiped off my face when the one next to her lifts her tail and does the same thing. I look up at Grimshaw, and she’s laughing at me. She doesn’t have a speck on her. And then another one does it. She jumps back, but I’m too slow and I get covered. We both double over laughing. I wipe off my face with my sleeve. Then those cows leave and twelve more cows file in.

  We get the milking done, and the tank truck comes. We watch the guy hook up, and then Angel and Grimshaw and I go up to the haymow to throw down hay for the heifers. When that’s done, we lie on bales and look at the cobwebs up in the rafters.

  “Wow,” I sigh. “I can’t believe her dad does that every day.”

  “Twice a day,” says Angel. She takes off her leather work gloves and studies the damage to her fingernails. “We have to do it again later on.”

  At that moment, the big sliding doors to the outside open. Rack creeps into view and sits carefully on a bale of hay next to us. I’ve never seen anyone look so bad. Her face is gray and creased. Her eyes are puffy, and it looks like she burst a blood vessel in one of them. She’s carrying a big bag of pretzels. She tries to open the bag, but it’s like she’s too weak. She gives up, and she hands it to me.

  “I do it, too, you know,” she says. “Out here at a quarter to five in the morning.”

  I open the bag and hand her back the pretzels. “Even on school days?”

  “Yup, before I come to get you guys. But my brothers really want my dad to sell.”

  “They don’t want to come back and farm?”

  “Hell, no. Allen wants to make a million bucks by the time he’s twenty-five so he can retire and focus on his guitar. You don’t do that farming.”

  We crunch pretzels in silence. The haymow is peaceful. Above us, the pigeons flutter and coo. It doesn’t take us long to eat the whole bag. Angel leaves and comes back with a big jug of warm Coke, which we pass around and drink out of the bottle. We hear a car pull up outside. The Mizeraks’ collie dog starts barking. A car door slams.

  “Oh, please God.” Rack stands up and puts her hand over her mouth. “Tell me it’s not my parents. This place is so trashed.”

  “You should see it inside,” Angel whispers to us. “It looks like a bomb went off. There’s frozen clothes outside stuck to the patio.” Then more vehicles pull up and we hear more car doors slamming, and voices. Angel and Grimshaw clamber up a wall of hay bales and rub a clear spot in the glass of a small, dusty window.

  “It’s the football team!” they call down.

  Rack looks happy. “Junior probably told them to come and clean up.”

  Is he there? Eagerness is all over her face, but she doesn’t ask the question. And they don’t tell her.

  ten

  AFTER HOMECOMING, EVERYTHING CHANGES.

  The picture of Mike Lyle hitting the water was well documented, and everybody has seen it and has an opinion about how it happened. Mike can’t swim, so it took both football teams to get him out of the deep end of the pool without anyone else getting drowned. The event went viral, and every shot seems to have a picture of me in it, too, still in hot pink, leaving the scene of the crime. So Rack and Angel have once again decided I’m a rich snob, poor Mike being my victim, and they’ve spread it all over town that I think I can get away with anything because my mother’s the principal. Apparently, he caught a sniffle that night, like it’s my fault he can’t swim. He should have watched where he was going. No matter how I logic it out, I still can’t figure out how anybody thinks I even could have pushed him in, but it doesn’t matter. Everybody is mad at me anyway, and reason would just be wasted on them. Rack tells everybody that Grimshaw told her that Mike said if he sees me, he’ll kill me, even though it wasn’t my fault he fell in her swimming pool. Maybe everybody just got tired of me, since all I do is study, anyway. Grimshaw takes no position one way or the other. She now has a full-time job named Mike, and he hardly lets her out of his sight. The gold Corvette is in front of the high school in the morning and again in the afternoon. I have fewer friends than ever, and a lot more enemies, but it’s not like I have time for them anyway. It turns out the beginning of the year was just a joke academically, and now in order to stay abreast of my schoolwork, I have to learn everything I was too smart to learn during my first three years of high school. After homecoming, I turn in my cheerleading sweater, and so weekends come and go, bringing with them only deadlines for more tests and more papers, which rise up and get beaten back like the tide.

  After the football season ends, Scot finds himself without anything to talk about at our weekly dinners, so he makes himself the expert on cell phones and colleges, but I’m too busy to think about college, and I don’t need a phone to remind me that I am the worst person in the school and that I will never have any friends again. But I humor him. Since Mom is busy with her career, Scot takes on the job of finding a college that will accept a bad bet like me. He never had a chance to go, he says, so he doesn’t mind. I say I’m willing to go to the same college as Allegra, but Guidance thinks that someone with my GPA should aim low, prove myself, and then consider applying to a place like that. So Scot takes a couple of weekends to drive me deep into the puckerbrush to tour campuses that are very far from civilization and still too close to Colchis. I try to be nice about it. One morning at breakfast, he’s looking through a catalog, sees the tuition, and almost chokes on a donut. I pound him on the back and ask him if he needs me to perform the Heimlich maneuver.

  “No, I’m all set,” he says. “I just—I had no idea.”

  “Allegra got a scholarship,” I said.

  “It’s okay, we’ll figure it out.” But that’s the last college visit we go on.

  * * *

  Weeks are going by, and I still have no friends. I get used to it. Winter starts and the snow comes and stays this time, and Allegra comes home for Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and I work my way straight through both vacations. On a cold day in January, I’m sitting on our bench in front of the high school, just like the old days, waiting for the bus. Suddenly there is Grimshaw walking toward me, and guess what she’s dragging along behind her.

  “That damn suitcase,” I comment.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I haven’t used it in a while.”

  She sits down, lights two cigarettes, and hands me one. We haven’t talked to each other since the day after homecoming.

  “Mike’s picking me up here,” she says. “He has a job for me.”

  “Is he going to kill me?”

  “Not today,” she says.

  “Nobody was in Western Civ today but me.”

  “Rack had a doctor’s appointment,” she says.

  “Angel wasn’t there, either.”

  “She’s switching to evening classes, remember, because she’s starting that program for a nursing certificate.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

  “I saw your name on the honor roll,” she says.

  “The high honor roll,” I correct her.

  She laughs. “I know. I ju
st said that so you’d correct me. Otherwise, you’d pretend you didn’t care.”

  I shrug. “Foundations was more fun.”

  “The job is in Los Angeles,” she says. “California,” she adds.

  “Scot says Mike is wanted in about twenty-five states. Did you know that?”

  “He hasn’t even been in twenty-five states.”

  “He acts like he’s been everywhere.”

  “I’ll be a dancer there. You know I can dance.”

  “Believe me, I know you can dance. That’s not the point.”

  “What do you want me to do, Serena, stay in the Valley and be a Grimshaw for the rest of my life?”

  “What are you going to be if you don’t even graduate from high school?”

  “What am I going to be if I do?” she counters. “It’s not like you graduate from high school and suddenly all these opportunities start flying at you. At least not for me. Be serious. Anyway, he’s going to pick me up here. I told him I wasn’t going to go without saying good-bye to you.”

  I just sit there and smoke like I hardly even hear what she’s saying. “You’re headed in the wrong direction,” I inform her. “I thought you wanted New York.”

  “I do, but … everyone’s gotta start somewhere—” She keeps talking, but at that moment all the buses let out their air brakes and the noise drowns out what she says. All I get is the last part.

  “—and you’ll be going to college,” is all I hear.

  I don’t wait for the Corvette. He won. I grind out my cigarette and get on the bus.

  * * *

  With Grimshaw gone for real, my life shrinks still further, which is fine: without Grimshaw, I have even less in common with Rack or Angel, or anyone else, except maybe for Mr. C. He’s not letting me give up on my upward mobility project, he says. He assigns me people to talk to, and I get good at listening and asking questions and writing down what they say. I even get a tour of the Arms, which is vast and silent and amazing and depressing at the same time. Kids have already started to break the windows. I go in after school and tell Mr. C. the stories, and he gets excited, and we have arguments about upward mobility and capitalism and if there’s any hope for the Valley now that there’s no industry.

  About midway through the winter, my mother notices that I’m getting too isolated, so she brings me to the pastor of her church, who must have a certificate in talking to teenagers, because he thinks he’s really good at it. I come in at the appointed time and see that Pastor Don has set up a chessboard. I float a problem or two just to nip this therapy thing in the bud. I don’t tell him about the sucking sinkhole in my chest that, despite being empty, weighs more than I do. I don’t tell him that my best and only friend has gone to start her future without me and this winter has felt like ten years in solitary confinement, which I probably deserve, although I have no idea what I’m guilty of. Instead, I lie to him about panic attacks I get before math tests, and then I move some pawns around the board and listen earnestly while he tells me about relaxation techniques and the health benefits of a daily meditation practice.

  When my mother comes to pick me up, he’s ready with a diagnosis. “I recommend a strong dose of college,” he says, smiling broadly at me.

  “Yes!” she says. “Good advice.”

  * * *

  The winter stretches into spring. As predicted, Scot stops talking about college, and they forget about the cell phone. I get ahead of the learning curve, and school gets easier. I get my driver’s license. Junior Davis wins the wrestling championship for his weight class and has started to drink alcohol. He’s still failing math. Everybody knows that Rack is pregnant and that Junior is having nothing to do with it. One day, Rack calls me up and asks me if I want to go shopping for baby clothes with her. She says she’s finishing high school online. We spend an awkward Saturday afternoon in Walmart, looking at pink onesies and talking about names. It’s going to be a girl. She shows me an app for baby names. She can’t decide between Olivia Hope and Hannah Rose. And Penelope. “I know it’s weird,” she says about Penelope, “but it’s coming back.” The real reason she wants to see me is for news about Junior. She knows he won All-State, and she heard he started to drink, but she doesn’t know if that’s a good sign or not. Who is he seeing? What are people saying about her? Who’s flirting with him? What have I heard? Angel’s not talking to her, she says. I tell her she probably knows more about what happens at the high school than I do. She says I’m probably right. After that, she doesn’t call me again.

  * * *

  In Western Civ on the last day before spring vacation starts, Mr. C. walks to the back of the classroom and hands me a postcard.

  “It came to the school,” he says. “Addressed to you. Your mother asked me to give it to you.”

  The postcard isn’t really a postcard. It is a photograph of a bar at sunset. In neon letters, the sign on the roof says OVER EASY. On either side of the sign there’s a neon silhouette of a naked woman, in red lines against a purple sky. The bar is a plain, flat-roofed one-story building made out of cinder block painted green. No windows. A single palm tree sticks up over the roof. I look at it for a long time before I turn it over. On the back, in Grimshaw’s handwriting, is a single line. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. She’s written her address along the bottom. That’s it.

  Mr. C. has launched the day’s lecture. We’re leaving the nineteenth century now, with its labor wars and socialist unrest in the middle of the country. He talks about Marx, Engels, and the crude theory they concocted called communism, and how it came over from Europe with ships of immigrants, along with smallpox and Norway rats, while I try to figure out what the line on her postcard means.

  How can she have “nothing left,” when nothing is what she left Colchis with—her parents’ old suitcase from their honeymoon and a set of flannel sheets are pretty close to nothing. Everything else she left with was Mike’s—Mike’s car, Mike’s money, Mike’s plans, connections, and schemes. She did have her dreams, but if she’s turned them over to him for management, no doubt she’s lost those, too. But maybe they were gone before she left Colchis.

  Mr. C. keeps sending me easy pitches, wanting me to engage, claiming how wrong Marx got everything, including his own phone number. I stare out the same window at the same pine tree I’ve been staring at for almost two years. It’s mid-April now, the world is still brown, but you can feel the green coming. Grimshaw is out there with nothing left to lose, while I’m still in here, breathing the stale air of childhood. Suddenly, I feel so restless it’s all I can do not to leave, just stand up and go, just like she did, and not come back.

  So what has she lost, then? The only thing she had that she didn’t take with her was me. Maybe she thinks she’s lost me.

  Mr. C. stops talking.

  Nobody says anything. Everybody’s just waiting for the vacation to start. Mr. C. looks up. Minutes tick by. The only sound is the motor in the wall clock, which seems to get louder and louder with every second. Mr. C. notices the piece of chalk in his hand and walks over and drops it in the trash can by his desk. Then he picks up all the chalk in the chalk tray and drops that in the trash, too. Then he picks up the erasers and dumps them in. Then he puts the Western Civ textbook in the trash. Then he folds up his plan book, where he keeps everybody’s grades. That goes in the trash. He walks to his closet, puts on his coat, and places his hat on his head. He leaves the room, closing the door quietly behind him. More seconds tick by. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Nobody talks. Nobody moves. After twenty minutes, the bell rings. We get up and file toward the door.

  Outside the classroom, the halls are noisy with prevacation euphoria. I make my way down to my mom’s office to see if she’s going to go straight home after school. I can’t face the school bus today. Mrs. Pentz is not there. She must be close by, though, because her purse is open on the chair next to her desk. I take Grimshaw’s postcard out of my upward mobility notebook. Freedom’s just another word f
or nothing left to lose. I find my mother’s wallet, open it, and take out a wad of twenties. I leave school, walk to the bank, and empty out my pitiful savings account.

  There’s no bus station in Colchis, just a window at the Off-Track Betting counter in Al’s Superette. I learn that there’s a daily bus to Buffalo, which will connect me to buses going to Chicago and points west. Without taking his eyes off a racing form, the guy behind the counter sells me a one-way ticket to LA.

  “Bus leaves in forty-five,” he says.

  “How long does it take to get there?”

  “Depends on your ticket.”

  I study the ticket I just bought. Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, Amarillo, Los Angeles. It sounds like the world to me, or at least a good start. A smile spreads across my face, I can’t help it. There are two doors out. One says EASTBOUND and one says WESTBOUND.

  “LA is … west, right?” I joke.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “There’s only one bus.”

  He lets me use his phone. I ask Mrs. Kmiec to patch me through to my mother’s voice mail. I tell Mrs. Pentz that I’ve gone to visit a friend in California, and I’ll be in touch when I get there. I borrowed some money, but I’ll pay her back. There. Now I’m not a teenage runaway.

  I sit in the parking lot of the Superette and look through my backpack. I will certainly not lack for reading. My independent study notebook for Western Civ is in there, my calculus textbook, with homework for over the vacation, a couple of disorganized binders, and a copy of Moby-Dick, which I told my AP English teacher I would look at over the break.

  Before long, the bus pulls in, its headlights shining.

  Although I’ve gone down Main Street many times on a bus, this bus is higher than the school bus, and the windows are bigger. I look down on the brief bit of town—Al’s Superette, the Arms, the used furniture store, the discount liquors, Teresa’s Bridal Shoppe, the Crossways Tavern.