I was getting pretty amped up for the derby and had more or less forgotten about Emily and her pouting at dinner. Besides, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been moody before, and I figured everything would sort itself out later. I went back to the campsite and found G, Tim, and Lyle digging through a duffel bag of costumes that had been stuffed under the seat. The van was like a never-ending Mary Poppins bag of weird items. “Where have you been hiding this stuff?” I asked.
“Special occasions,” G said. She was wearing a dress over her clothes that looked like something a 1950s candy striper in a hospital would wear. Tim had on a paper Burger King crown and a very wrinkled silk smoking jacket. Lyle still had his usual anarchist garb on, but he had added an enormous blue polka-dotted bow tie and a pair of those nose, mustache, and glasses that all go together. G pulled out a shiny navy blue graduation gown and handed it to me. “Here, this is fitting somehow.” She eyed me as I pulled the robe over my head. It was designed for someone much shorter, and my arms and legs stuck out beneath it. “You’re still missing something.” She bent over and rooted around in the bag until she pulled out a neon green trucker-style cap that said, “Virginia is for Lovers” in airbrushed ink. “Perfect,” she said and plunked it down sideways on my head.
The four of us walked over to the bonfire together feeling pretty proud of our outfits. We definitely weren’t the only ones dressed up. It was kind of like a reverse prom, like everyone had dug through their stuff and found the oddest clothes and costume bits to parade around in, but the atmosphere was still the same as a middle school dance with everyone checking each other out. There’s definitely an art to looking weird and cool simultaneously. I looked enviously at one guy who sported a light brown suede suit with a yellow bow tie and no shirt. He had slicked his hair back and wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses that would have matched my hat nicely.
After everyone had milled around for a while Danielle brought out two big vats of punch, one labeled Alchy and the other Non-Alchy. I went for the one without booze; it seemed like the evening was going to get bizarre enough as it was. As I ladled some into my mug I noticed Danielle scanning nervously around the circle. “Did Emily find you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Was she looking for me?”
“Yeah,” Danielle said. I remember she looked like she wanted to say more. I remember she looked worried.
Rippy came out as the Master of Ceremonies, wearing his jester’s hat and a pair of pants made completely of four-inch squares of different fabrics. Instead of a shirt his upper body was painted with streaks and swirls of color. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted into a small orange traffic cone turned megaphone. “Welcome to the fourth annual—”
“Fifth!” a few people in the crowd shouted out.
“Right, sorry. I lose track of time sometimes,” he continued despite a few snickers. “The fifth annual Burdock Bike Derby!” Cheers and shouts went up from the crowd. Some people were beating homemade drums. It had been hard to tell how many people were actually at Burdock. Not everyone showed up for every meal, but everyone had come out for Bike Derby. It looked like a hundred fifty or two hundred people were there.
“All right then!” Rippy shouted into the cone. “Let the wild rumpus begin!”
He put down the cone, picked up a golf club, and straddled a bicycle designed for a kid half his size. It had a white banana seat with turquoise flowers. The U-shaped handle-bars had sparkly rubber turquoise grips, and one of them still had white and blue streamers hanging off the ends. Rippy rode the bike easily, though his knees came up to his nose every time he pedaled. He rode around the circle, one hand on the handlebars and one hand swinging the golf club. Other people on equally ridiculous bikes began to come out of the crowd and join him in the circle. Every time someone joined in a big cheer went up from their friends. The first few laps were clearly just for show. Each biker had some kind of light weapon: either a whiffle ball bat, a golf club like Rippy’s, or just a big stick.
The circle was getting packed with riders when finally Rippy took a whack at someone’s bike with his golf club. The crowd went wild, screaming and cheering. This was clearly also the cue for everyone to begin throwing food scraps at the riders. I winced as a girl with short, bleach-blonde hair took a ketchup-covered nature burger full on in the face.
“They can only hit the bikes with their weapons, not the people,” Jesse explained. “The point is to disable the other rider’s bike. The last person still pedaling wins.” The crowd groaned as a guy with a purple Mohawk took out the blonde girl’s front tire with a swing of his aluminum bat. She fell over and then pulled her bicycle carcass to the side of the ring. The crowd cheered for her as she good-naturedly took a bow. We watched as, one after another, the bikers took each other out, shoving sticks in spokes and whacking away at the metal frames. Rippy was clearly a crowd favorite, although he also took more than his fair share of food-scrap bombs.
After a while there were only three riders left circling each other: Rippy, the purple Mohawk guy, and a girl named Rosie with biceps bigger than my thighs. That’s when Emily showed up and wrapped her arms around my neck, sinking her chin into my shoulder. “Drew, I need to talk to you now,” she said, pressing her breasts into my back in a way that was totally distracting.
“Um, okay,” I said. “What is it?”
“Alone. I need to talk to you alone.”
There was something strange about her voice. It was muddled, almost slurred. I wasn’t that psyched about leaving the derby before seeing the outcome. “Can it wait a minute?”
G was sitting next to me and sniffed sharply in Emily’s direction. “You stink,” she said. “Have you been drinking?”
Emily ignored her. “No, it can’t wait a minute. I need to talk to you now,” she insisted. Her closeness and the insistence in her voice had an almost hypnotic effect on me.
Where were you all day? I thought to myself as I grudgingly gave up my front-row seat at the derby. I turned back around in time to see Rippy take out the purple Mohawk guy with a swift stroke to the rear tire. Emily took my hand and pulled me away from the derby, back towards the kitchen tent and the trail that led to the hot springs. I let myself be led for a little while, but finally I jerked my hand away and stopped walking. “What?” I said. “What’s so important that it can’t wait?” Maybe if I’d known what she wanted to say, I wouldn’t have been so abrupt. Maybe if the derby hadn’t been so fun, I wouldn’t have cared about going off with her. But I did.
“I want to be with you, Drew,” she said simply.
“Okay. Well, here we are.” I looked back towards the fading light of the bonfire, wondering if anyone had been crowned the winner.
“No, I mean I want to be with you. I want you to make love to me on top of this mountain.” My jaw fell open. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d told me we’d just won a dishwasher on The Price Is Right. I stared at her.
“Have you?” I finally said after a few more awkward moments of silence. “Have you been drinking?”
Her voice turned bitter. “I thought that’s what you wanted. I thought that’s why you were always shoving my hand down there.”
Her description of my lame sexual fumblings sounded out of place after declaring that she wanted to make love to me on a mountain, but that wasn’t the only thing that seemed out of sync. “No,” I said. “I mean yes. I mean I wanted you to touch me.” My face turned bright red. “I wanted you to want to touch me.” I took a deep breath, “The way I wanted to touch you.”
“Well that’s what I’m saying.”
But it wasn’t and I knew it wasn’t. And what I felt wasn’t confusion or lust or even curiosity. What I felt was mad. “You know, ever since this whole thing began, whatever it is, it’s been on your terms. When you wanted me I was there, and when you wanted to be alone I gave you time alone. So, so …” I stuttered, unsure of where I was going with this. “I don’t really think it’s me and my needs that you’re thinking abou
t.”
Emily narrowed her eyes at me. “So I’m the one being selfish? I’m offering you the greatest gift a woman can offer a man, and you think I’m being selfish? You’re really screwed-up, you know that, Drew?”
Oddly enough, the voice that I heard in my head in that moment wasn’t my eighth-grade health teacher warning us about the dangers of teen pregnancy or genital rot. And it wasn’t my mother alluding in a roundabout way to the existence of condoms underneath the bathroom sink or my father telling me to keep it my pants and not mess up my life. It was Lindsay. In that moment Emily reminded me of Lindsay, and I didn’t want to have sex with her any more than I wanted to have sex with Lindsay. “I’d rather wait,” I said. “Until you’re sober and you’re sure that’s really what you want.”
I don’t know how I knew this. I figured I was about to go down in history as the lamest teenage guy ever. I could picture my own freak-show exhibit. He refused sex from not one, but two girls! I even liked Emily. And she liked me, thought I was a good person and supposedly even loved me. But somehow I knew I was right. I thought about Mima and how much I really missed her, because when I was with her I was really there, I was someone worth being and worth being with. I guess I thought Emily made me feel that way too, some of the time. I thought I was doing the right thing for both of us.
Emily’s eyes were blazing, picking up a bit of the bonfire’s glow. I crossed my arms over my chest to suggest that I wasn’t backing down. But then I saw it. I saw it before I could say anything, before I could soften my posture and say something that would allow us both to back down and talk like people who actually cared about each other. I saw fear. Behind her anger, beneath her buzz, Emily was terrified. I opened my mouth to speak, but she spoke first. “Suit yourself,” she said coldly and left me standing there alone in the night.
WHERE THERE WERE WILD THINGS
I stop writing and chew on the end of the pen. I’ve reached the last part of the story that I’m really sure of. I’m nervous about putting anything else down in writing because maybe it’s true and maybe it’s just how I imagine it happened. But once it’s written down it’s sure to have a kind of reality that doesn’t exist when it’s just in my head.
I never really liked the book Where the Wild Things Are, but it was one of my dad’s favorites. I never really liked it because I never really liked Max. I always thought Max had it pretty good, and I couldn’t understand why he felt the need to run off. If he hadn’t been such a pain in the ass in the first place he wouldn’t have been sent to bed without any supper. He wasn’t beaten or abused or even yelled at, and still he stormed around like he was so mistreated and unhappy. I never thought he deserved to be angry.
Now that I’m thinking about Emily and how she treated me, I feel a little bit like Max. I wonder if I deserved to be angry. It’s weird, and I don’t really want to connect the two, but I’m also thinking about Mom and wondering if I deserved to be angry at her. It’s all completely exhausting.
I put the pen back down to the paper, but the words aren’t ready yet. And then, like she can read my mind, G opens her eyes. I sit straight up; the pen and notebook fall off my lap onto the floor. I’m wondering if I should ring for the nurse or something, but instead I wait to see if she’ll stay awake or do anything else. I mean, G hasn’t actually been in a coma for ten years or anything, and opening her eyes, while significant to me, probably doesn’t represent a major medical breakthrough for the nursing staff.
Her eyelids flutter a little bit like Mima’s used to do when she was falling asleep during Jeopardy. She hated to get caught falling asleep while watching TV. She said it made her feel like a real old person. So whenever she did, she would shout a random answer out at the TV as soon as her eyes opened again. It was pretty funny. The clue would be something like “gas that makes up 70 percent of the earth’s atmosphere” and Mima would scream out, “What is Andrew Jackson!” “I thought I had that one,” she would say. And I would nod, and we would keep on watching.
G is definitely waking up, though. Her eyes are open now and she’s taking in the surroundings of her room, the blinking machines and the new daylight coming in through the long hanging blinds. I pick my notebook and pen up off the floor without taking my eyes from her face. She slowly licks her lips and makes a face like the taste in her mouth is pretty bad. There’s a cup of ice water next to her bed that I grab and maneuver the straw towards her face so she can drink. She takes a small sip and licks her lips again. “Thanks for staying with me,” she says. Her voice is a little scratchy. She lifts her head to look down at her leg suspended in the air and surrounded by white plaster. “Hmm, that doesn’t look good.”
“Compound fracture,” I tell her. “The bone came through your leg.”
She turns a little pale and waves off the details with one hand. “Did they call your mom?”
“Not yet. At least I don’t think so.”
“They will. And they’ll probably send a cop in too. Have you thought about what you’re going to tell them?”
“Kind of,” I say, and I pick up the notebook from the floor.
“That’s good,” G says. “I’m glad you’re getting it all down, but that’s not what you want to tell the cop when he shows up.”
“Okay, what should I say?”
G is quiet for a minute. She looks out the window thoughtfully. “We were hiking. Just you and me. Let them think we’re boyfriend-girlfriend or whatever. I mean, you don’t have to come out and say it. They’ll just assume it, and don’t tell them otherwise. But it was just the two of us; that’s the important part. I fell and hurt my leg and some people gave us a ride to the hospital.”
“Why can’t we tell them the truth?”
“They’ll go straight to Burdock,” G says. “As long as they fly under the radar, the cops around here don’t really care what goes on there in the off-season. But we don’t want to give them a reason to go sniffing around. I’m sure you noticed that not everything there was completely legal. Plus, you’re underage. I don’t want to get Jesse or Tim in trouble for transporting a minor across state lines.”
“Okay, but how did you and I meet in the first place?”
“The same way we actually met; a bus station. We hit it off and decided to travel together for a while. A runaway story. The cops won’t look too closely at that. They don’t really care that much as long as everything has a tidy ending.”
“What about when my mom shows up? I don’t know if she’s going to go along with our story.”
“Nancy might surprise you,” G says.
“Hey, when did I tell you my mom’s name?”
G shrugs and looks out the window again. “Will you see if there’s a nurse around? I could use some more of whatever painkiller they’re giving me.”
I walk out in hall, dazed, thinking about the story G fed me and wondering if the police officer will buy it coming from me. I’ve never been a particularly good liar when it comes to massive deviations from the truth. Little things are easier, like calling a C-plus a B-minus or telling my mom I was studying with friends at the library when really I was sitting by myself.
The nurse sitting at the desk goes quickly down the hall to G’s room with some pills in a paper cup. I take my time walking back. G hasn’t asked me what happened yet—how she fell and broke her leg. I wonder if she knows the truth. I wonder if I know the truth.
When we pulled up to the hospital I didn’t hesitate for a second. I knew what would happen. I knew that unless I gave a fake name, they would track me down and call my mom and I would be heading back on the first plane to Glens Falls. I knew all this, the same way I knew that Jesse and Tim weren’t going to park the van and follow us in. They looked sad and they looked sorry, but they pulled away all the same. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. I guess I’ll worry about that later. Tim at least is still in school. I could probably track him down someday if I really wanted to.
The point is, I chose it. I chose to care abou
t G and even Mom. I chose to think about the kind of attention that really matters, and I decided to let Emily go, for now. Because if I’ve learned anything in the last few weeks it’s that sometimes you do have to choose. After what happened, it seems like the right decision.
Back in the hospital room, the medicine is kicking in and G’s eyelids are already beginning to quiver. Pretty soon she’s out cold again. I take my notebook and my pen and pull a chair into the hall. What I have to write, I don’t want to write with her lying right there next to me.
THE CARNIVAL
After my fight with Emily I went back to the Bike Derby, but it was over and people were drifting away from the fire. It was like I was in one of those teen movies where the main character races to get to the prom and arrives just as the janitor is sweeping up the last of the confetti.
Emily didn’t make it back to the tent that night either, and when I woke up her backpack and her sleeping bag were gone. She wasn’t at breakfast, but she turned up at lunch hanging all over one of the squinty-eyed anarchist guys. She sat sideways on the picnic table, rubbing his shoulders and picking little bites of food off his plate. I tried not to stare. She was laughing a lot and tossing her head around. The guy she was with looked more annoyed that she was eating his food than like he was enjoying his backrub.
G assessed the scene and gave a one-word opinion, “Classy.” I didn’t respond. In spite of the way she’d been acting, jealousy still burned like acid in the back of my throat.
The Other Way Around Page 20