I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach. “Jesus,” I say when I get my breath back. “I didn’t even use the first one. We didn’t do that.” I dig the condom she gave me out of my pants pocket. “Here. You can have this one back if you want it.”
“Do you have any pride?” she asks. “Any? Any at all?” She’s almost spitting at me. “Where is he, anyway? I want to go. He better drive us home now.”
“Pride? I can’t believe who I’m hearing this from.”
“At least I didn’t drag you around behind every little thing that stuck to the bottom of my shoe.”
“Your boyfriend”—I lean over the table and speak slowly—“is scum. I wouldn’t have him on the bottom of my shoe.” Grimshaw, who has never lost a staring match, looks away.
“And he thought you were so innocent,” she says finally.
“He did not think I was so innocent.”
Something about the way I say that snaps her attention back to me. Grimshaw looks at me very closely for a minute and narrows her eyes. Her lips get very thin. This time I look away.
“I think we’re getting a ride the rest of the way,” I say quickly. “So that’s good news. We just have to drop this load of potatoes. Bo’s calling his dispatcher now and—”
“What did you tell him?”
“Who?”
“You know who I mean.”
“Mike? Nothing!”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she says.
“No!” I protest.
Grimshaw gets up and walks out of the restaurant. “I didn’t tell him anything!” I call after her. My voice is high and squeaky and guilty as hell. I follow her to the door and watch her walk to Bo’s truck. A waitress comes and leaves a coffeepot on our table, so I sit back down to wait for Bo. My hands are shaking so bad it’s hard to open the little creamers. I put six of them in my coffee, until I run out of room in the cup. A few minutes later, Grimshaw comes back, and she’s carrying those stupid rose flannel sheets, and she dumps them on the table in front of me. My coffee spills down the front of Bo’s T-shirt.
“I was making money,” she says. “Real money, my own money. I was about to start taking dancing lessons. Real dance. For the first time in my life. Not that shit you saw, but the real thing. In a studio. Nobody cared that I was a Grimshaw. Nobody knew the church paid for me to see the dentist. For about three months, I had a life. And then you came.”
“I didn’t know the stupid church—what does it matter?”
“I’m leaving.” She jabs her finger in my face. “You can sleep with anyone you want—go back and do Mike if that’s what you did, but don’t you dare follow me.” She stalks out as I sit there gasping for air. I grab my backpack with one hand, the sheets with the other, and run out into the parking lot, dragging the sheets through the cigarette butts and the oil spills. She’s climbing into the cab of the worst-looking rusted wreck of a Mack truck I’ve ever seen. The motor’s running. The truck driver gets in, grinning. When he sees me standing on the running board, the grin disappears. He pushes his hat up and scratches his forehead.
“You didn’t tell me you had a friend,” he says.
“I don’t,” she says.
I push the sheets through the window, open the door, and climb in. Bo’s truck is next to us, engine running. But he’s nowhere in sight. So we ride into the eastern third of the US in silence. Although we’re wedged together in the front seat, Grimshaw makes sure she doesn’t look at me, speak to me, or touch me. I ball up her sheets and stuff them under my feet. In the pocket of Bo’s jacket, I find a jackknife and a comb. When I woke up this morning, less than an hour ago, I was lashed to his side like a lifeboat with those long, skinny arms. My body feels different than it’s ever felt. It’s like he woke it up. So now I’m the one who’s sighing and sniffling, and Grimshaw is stiff and silent. The truck we’re in is so old it has a CB radio. For hours across Illinois, the driver whistles tunelessly, plays sentimental hits on the radio, and makes wretchedly sexist comments about us to other drivers on the road. Just when you think you’ve met the all-time loser of the universe, another contender comes along. His CB name seems to be Two by Four.
“Hey, buddy,” comes through the static. “Can ya handle it?”
“I figure I’ll just watch first.”
He uses this line on several different passing trucks, and it always gets a laugh.
“They don’t talk much,” he says to one trucker.
“Jesus, that’s beautiful.”
“Don’t brag, now.”
“The one is pretty cute, but the other one looks like she’s been fed rat poison.”
“Let her sit on the gearshift. That’ll perk her up.”
“I’ll let her sit on my gearshift,” Two by Four giggles. He catches me looking at him and waggles his tongue at me. Grimshaw sits between us and stares straight ahead of her.
Midwestern towns and Midwestern fields roll by, looking even flatter and dingier than they did from the bus. At a rest stop in Indiana, I put the sheets in a dumpster. At four in the morning, we pull in to a warehouse in Toledo. I spend an hour unloading boxes of champagne glasses and giving them to guys with hand trucks, while Two by Four watches and treats us all to a monologue on life and race and politics in America. Grimshaw stays in the cab. We spend half a day’s agony in a truck stop near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, waiting for him to get another trailer. He locked all our stuff in his cab so we can’t look for another ride.
During this whole time, I say one sentence to my friend: “Once we get going, we should be there soon.” They’re the first words that have passed between us since Illinois, and she ignores them. When we do get underway again, Grimshaw falls asleep. Two by Four sits so he can look down her shirt while she sleeps. His left hand is down the front of his pants. I take off Bo’s coat and flex my muscles while I slick back my hair with Bo’s comb. I tuck the comb into the pocket of Bo’s blue jeans. Then I take out Bo’s jackknife and push my cuticles back. It’s alpha male behavior. I’m hoping it’ll register subconsciously, I don’t want to have to actually knife him. He’s wasted enough of our time already. For most of the night, I fight off sleep—unsuccessfully, because I wake up just as we’re driving past a large brown sign that says DELAWARE WATER GAP. I look up at leafy cliffs silhouetted in blue mist and backlit by the first pink rays of dawn. I’m still holding the open jackknife. By the time Grimshaw wakes up, we’re puttering through suburban side streets, which are slowly filling up with weekday morning commuters.
“Where the—”
“You ladies get some beauty sleep?” the driver asks.
“Hell?” she asks.
“New Jersey,” I tell her. “The license plates.”
She blinks at me. “New Jersey?”
“You know,” our hero says as the truck shudders up a hill, “I took a big risk taking you ladies on. It’s ee-legal for you to even be sitting in this truck. So I figure I’m about due for a little, ah”—he grins and winks—“compensation.”
“You know,” I observe, “if you’d try downshifting, your truck might not stall.” His grin disappears.
“You telling me how to drive?” he asks.
“No.” I study my fingernails. “It was just a thought.” As we crawl forward, the truck starts to shimmy and clack.
“Damn load’s too heavy,” the driver mutters. We hear a horrible grinding noise, and then a huge crack underneath us. “Jesus,” he says. “I hope that wasn’t the u-joint.” The truck stands still for a minute and then it starts to move backward. Behind us, about twenty cars start honking their horns. I look out the side-view mirror, and a long hill stretches behind us, heading into a busy intersection. I grab the door handle with one hand and Grimshaw’s sleeve with the other.
“Grimshaw, jump!” I shout.
The driver cranks the steering wheel, hard, and the truck jackknifes, swerves, tips up on a curb, and stops.
“You wait here!” he barks at us. “Close that door!”
I’m standing on the running board, pulling on Grimshaw’s arm. “Grimshaw, get out.”
“But he said—”
“Come on!” I yank her out of the cab. The wheels of the trailer are on the sidewalk and the back end of the truck is about two feet from the front door of a little white church. Grimshaw looks dazed. I get her suitcase out from behind the seat. It’s a lot lighter without the sheets. I hoist my backpack and take her by the hand. On the other side of the street, a line of commuters in trench coats and sneakers are holding up their phones. We run across the street and get in line behind them just as a bus pulls up.
“Where are we again?” Grimshaw asks. I point at downtown Manhattan, pale blue in the early morning haze.
“That’s New York City,” I tell her. “You made it.” Her eyes open wide. Just as we’re about to board, Two by Four boils out from behind the bus.
“Did you steal my wrenches?” he yells. “Let me look in that suitcase!”
I give him the finger and push Grimshaw onto the bus.
“Lezzies!” he screams.
The bus is warm and humid, and the motor makes a soothing grumble. The last thing I remember telling Grimshaw is that the daffodils are out in New Jersey already. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she needs to shake me awake. We get in line to purchase two tickets to Colchis. Having to backtrack like this gives me a strange feeling of completion. If we had stopped at Buffalo without going all the way to the East Coast, I would have felt like I had written a long, long sentence and then never punctuated it. The problem is, we only have Grimshaw’s winnings from Winnemucca to pay for two bus tickets, and eighty-five dollars only buys a ticket and a quarter. She pulls a fifty-dollar bill out of her shoe and passes it through the window.
“My last tip,” she says.
After a long wait, a change in Albany, another long layover, and another night spent traveling, the bus pulls in behind Al’s Superette. The obvious thing for me to do is walk over to the school. Grimshaw picks up her suitcase and walks straight-backed from the bus to Ruby’s pickup truck, which is waiting for her with its motor running. She must have borrowed a phone and called home while I was asleep. I have enough pride, barely, not to stand on the sidewalk and watch the back of her head and Ruby’s taillights disappear.
thirteen
IN THE WEEK THAT I was gone, Colchis has changed utterly. It now looks like an abandoned movie set with the facades propped up by sticks. It’s shrunk to about half the size it was before I left. When I climb the steps of the school and open the front door, I’m surprised to find the lobby on the other side. But it seems to be real. There are the closed doors of the auditorium, the junior high corridor to the left, with handpainted signs for upcoming dances and fund-raisers, the stairs leading to the administration offices to the right. I climb the stairs and walk into math class a minute after the bell rings.
“You’re late,” Mr. Rallis barks at me.
I look up at the clock. My classmates are sitting motionless with their textbooks open in front of them. It’s my turn to say something.
My usual chair waits for me in its usual spot. I walk to it and sit down to the same graffiti on the desk. Mr. Rallis stays focused on me. I look up into his small, glittering eyes.
“Did you bring your textbook to class, Serena?” he asks.
“Um…” I zip open my backpack, and sure enough, there is my calculus textbook, which has just traveled to Los Angeles and back. I take it out and put it on my desk, and we all stare at it, an artifact from a bygone era. I haven’t washed my hair since East St. Louis, haven’t brushed it since the bathroom in Albany, and there’s a big three-day-old coffee stain all over my T-shirt, which is Bo’s. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m also wearing Bo’s jacket, I could be easily persuaded that I made the whole thing up.
“Take out your homework,” Mr. Rallis directs.
“Homework,” I repeat. I can see that everyone else has their homework out, just like they do at the beginning of every class.
“Miss Velasco, did you do the problems that were assigned to you over spring break?”
While Mr. Rallis stares at me, I spool through my spring break. It flows through my mind in no particular order, the long miles of America through the dirty windows of the bus, the club in LA where Grimshaw worked, the guy at the bus station in Chicago who told me that people in St. Louis murdered each other for twenty bucks.
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t get to it, Mr. Rallis.”
“Nine days of vacation, and you couldn’t manage sixteen math problems?”
“Um, no, I didn’t get to it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me, miss,” he yells, clumping up and down aisles. “I’m not the one getting a zero. You’re not off to a particularly good start, here. You don’t want to get knocked off your perch, do you?”
“I can get it to you tomorrow,” I offer.
“Ah.” Mr. Rallis stops and puts his finger in the air. “Aha. Tomorrow, she says. Mañana. So. Ten days is the magic number, is it? X equals ten. Not nine, but ten. Ah yes, the precision, the exactitude, of math. If only vacation were ten days long instead of nine, there would be no problem. Is that it?” His sarcasm washes over me and sinks in like the next wave on the beach.
“Mr. Rallis, I don’t think I’m the one with the problem.”
He spins on his heel and stares at me. He points at the door. “Get out!”
So I go to the girls’ room to wait out math class. I sit on the windowsill and close my eyes. I’m trying hard to hang on to what Bo’s face looked like, but it’s already fading. Another bell rings. I walk down the hall to my mother’s office instead. She’s in there with the chairman of the school board. I watch them through the plate glass door to her office. Before Mrs. Kmiec can stop me, I open the door and walk in.
“Hi, Mom.”
The chairman frowns at me. “Can you excuse us, please?”
“Serena!” My mom comes around her desk and runs toward me. She hugs me—not a stiff hug, not a conditional hug, but a real hug. Both of her arms get involved. “Oh, Serena. Thank God you’re back. What an odyssey.” She holds me at arm’s length. “Look at you.” Tears are in her eyes. “It changed you.”
“It’s the jacket,” I tell her. “It makes me look tough. Were you worried about me?”
She smiles. “Well … yes and no. I knew God was watching, and He’s pretty tough Himself. I prayed a lot. What else could I do? But I am glad you’re back.” She keeps an arm around me as she turns back to the chairman. “Dick, thanks for coming by. I need to take my daughter out to eat. She looks like she hasn’t had a square meal in a week.”
It takes her so long to arrange to leave the office for breakfast that it’s lunchtime when we pull up in front of the diner. She orders each of us a Reuben sandwich.
“So what did the chairman want?” I ask.
“Oh, the chairman,” she scoffs. “His digestion is off because…” She sighs. “He’s actually in a very fragile position these days. He’s running for state assembly this fall, but he’s got this young guy to his right—telegenic, handsome, full of zeal—creating problems for him in the primary. The chairman’s trying to stick to the issues, but he needs the school to be a platform.”
While she talks, I squint at her. She’s been snarled up in school board politics for so long she thinks it’s reality. There’s something different about her, though. I can’t exactly identify it. The suit’s the same, the earrings, the hair color, the wrinkles are in the same place, but there’s some—nervousness—around her eyes that seems new. Our Reubens come. We both take big bites.
“Oh!” She spits her first bite out into her napkin. “Grace.” She reaches across the table, seizes me by both my hands, switches into her prayer voice, and thanks the Lord for bringing me home safely. That done, she talks school board politics straight through lunch. When the Reubens are done, she’s ready to listen. She orders a cup of coffee, and I have another Reuben.
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br /> “Now tell me about your trip,” she says. “How’s Melody?”
So I sketch in the basics—the postcard, the bus trip, LA, how we got home.
“And she’s in a relationship with Mike Lyle, I understand? How is that going?”
“Well, he’s actually really crude and—”
She takes a sip of coffee and holds up her hand. “I just think we should be really careful not to project your own cultural expectations. Mike, and also Melody, haven’t been exposed to—well, let’s call it the finer things in life. They do the best they can with what they have.”
So I leave out the Mike Lyle part. I leave out Bo. I don’t mention Two by Four. I tell it like it was a big, inconsequential adventure, and by the end of the story, that’s what it is. I might as well have gone to Disney World. “Except that halfway across the country, Grimshaw got mad at me, and now she won’t speak to me,” I finish.
“Oh, that won’t last,” Mom says.
She tells me a story about her best friend Judy, whom I’ve never heard of, about how they were roommates in grad school and then had a falling-out over a misunderstanding and how devastated she was. And how she spent years trying to patch things up and then finally Judy had a baby and ever since then they’ve exchanged Christmas cards.
“So things have a way of working themselves out for the best, honey.” She squeezes my hand. “Never underestimate the healing power of time.”
Honey? Since when have I been “honey”? I look at her closely. She’s on something. She starts telling me that when she was young she had no role models, and so she learned to have faith in life, that life itself was her greatest teacher, and to learn from it sometimes you just have to live in the world on the world’s terms, and that’s what I was doing, and while I was gone, she kept having to decide to live in faith rather than fear, and she thanked me for that opportunity to reaffirm the power of prayer.
“Well,” she says brightly. “I have an appointment at three with the superintendent. Oh—Allegra’s home! For a week. It was a total surprise.” She tells me the school year ended early and she came home with a friend.
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