Wandering Wild

by Jessica Taylor

  Ella slaps at Marcus’s arm. “Don’t be rude. The poor thing is trying, at least.” She tilts toward me again. “Anyway, Mr. Swanson found the girl’s mother”—I bite back the word guardian; it was Rona—“and he started screaming that the kid was trampling his daughter’s artwork. At the same time, some Wanderers were picking the pockets of people standing at the sidelines, and a full-blown riot broke out on Main Street.”

  The beautiful story of that day—the one Spencer and I crafted in our minds—is something dirty and sordid.

  Embarrassment washes over me, and I stare at the napkin folded in my lap. “That’s quite a tale.”

  “Marcus had Spencer there,” says Ella, “and it was an absolute clusterfuck.” She glances at Margaret and covers her mouth.

  Marcus laughs and scoots the wine bottle a few inches from Ella’s placemat. “All right, honey, that’s enough.”

  This isn’t how I imagined his mother, his father, their roots, and this house. This glimpse leaves me with a longing I can’t tame.

  We finish eating, and Marcus collects our plates and silverware and carries them to the sink.

  Ella shuffles through the mail. “Hey, Spence.” She tosses an envelope at him and winks. “I bet I know what that is.”

  Spencer stares at it unopened. I peek around him, at the tremor in his hands that nobody’s mentioning. The top left corner reads Stonewall Jackson University.

  Marcus turns off the water and rests his elbows on the kitchen island. “Well, open it.”

  The envelope rips, and Spencer pulls out a thin white sheet. He swallows. “My interview’s November fifteenth.”

  Marcus wraps an arm around Ella’s waist, pulling her into a sideways hug, before turning back to Spencer. “We’re proud of you.”

  Ella untangles herself from Marcus. “That’s the week before Thanksgiving break.” She uncaps a Sharpie and writes on the calendar beside the fridge. “You’ll have to miss school. Do you think you’ll have tests that close to the holiday?”

  “Nope,” says Spencer. “Everything’s going according to plan.” He tosses the paper onto the counter and takes my hand. Leading me toward the stairs, he calls back, “I’m giving Tal a tour of the house.”

  From the kitchen, Ella yells, “Door open in your room, okay?”

  In the shadows of the upstairs hallway, his hands are still shaking. I press my weight against Spencer, bringing my mouth to his ear. “She seriously underestimates what I could do to you with the door wide open.”

  We pass through, and he leaves it cracked, six inches of space between the door and the jamb, buying us some privacy.

  He falls back into the downy-soft mattress, pressing the backs of his hands over his eyes.

  The bed lurches as I sink in beside him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I—I’m not sure I thought I’d actually get an interview.”

  “Tell them you’re not going.”

  We’re not so different—Spencer Sway and me—expectations have become our prisons. His has a built-in escape hatch. All he has to do is say the word.

  He lifts up on his elbows. “To the interview or to SJU?”

  “Both. Your parents are nice people—they’re good people. They’ll listen.”

  “That only makes it harder. If they were assholes about it, I could tell them to go to hell and be done with it. To them, there’s nothing in this world that could make me any happier than security. A solid, dependable future.” He blows out a breath. “Besides, going to SJU is one thing. Having no plan at all, that’s scary as hell.”

  We lie there on top of his plaid comforter, the sounds of the house whirring beneath us, and I close my eyes and slip into that place between dreaming and awake. There, I imagine ending up here in Cedar Falls, and I wonder if Spencer’s wrong about small-town life.

  His voice is husky, cutting through my thoughts. “You ever been in love before, Tal?”

  The room whirls, and I sit straight up, blood rushing to my head as what I’ve started comes into focus. This little charade has gotten out of control.

  “Don’t throw around words you don’t understand.”

  “I understand it fine.” One of his hands squeezes the tense muscles in my shoulders. “The question is: do you?”

  “You remember that list of things I told you I don’t believe in?” I look over my shoulder and wait for his nod. “You can go ahead and add love.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Rona’s Mazda gives off a high-pitched whine as I guide it into its spot beneath the drooping branches of a sycamore tree. Sounds from camp—hollers and cheers—trickle through the rolled-down window.

  Camp is usually completely dark by now, every lantern long ago dimmed, but tonight—I now remember—is Boss’s birthday, so the games are still in full swing.

  I shouldn’t have missed tonight.

  As I kill the engine, the words Spencer said in his bedroom come rushing back to me. My breath gets away from me, and my cheeks burn with regret, with desire, with the embarrassment of forgetting who I was for a whole night.

  I lock the truck, wishing away the word Spencer threw around so carelessly.

  Someone’s set up a basketball hoop in the dirt road between trailers. With his dress shirt untucked and his sleeves rolled to his elbows, Lando dribbles a ball at Emil’s feet. Emil’s skinny hips are set wide, and his face is gleaming with sweat as he plays defense.

  Most of our games came from a southwest-roving caravan known for putting up twenty-four-hour carnivals in parking lots. Hoops bent into ovals make it a lot harder to sink a shot, and bouncy plywood backboards will send that basketball right back to you. It takes more than a killer slam-dunk to win—it takes a con man.

  Lando shoots, and the basketball floats through the net with a perfect swish, missing the backboard entirely. From the looks of Lando’s grin and Emil’s scowl, Lando’s winning the game.

  Since Boss’s health worsened and it looked like Lando might be heading up camp soon, nobody’s seen him horsing around with the rest of us lately, only exercising his power.

  This glimpse of Lando reminds me of a time when camp was a civilized place to live. He catches me staring and tips his chin at me. I look away and turn down the road toward my trailer.

  No lights are glowing through our tarp walls, so I take a spin around the outside and peek through the netting. Wen isn’t stretched out in his bed.

  Laughter slips between the trees. Laughter unmistakably belonging to Wen.

  Deeper into the forest, my breath fogging the air in front of me, I follow the glow of lantern light and the strangest flickering shadows. A little closer, and I find a great big paper target swinging from a low-hanging branch.

  Sitting on a blanket spread across the mossy ground, Wen’s grinning at someone beside him. I round a tree trunk and see Sonia.

  She pours half a sleeve of peanuts into a bottle of Coke and gives it to Wen before emptying the rest into her own bottle. He laughs at something she said. As he’s drinking his peanuts and Coke, he turns his eyes to the clearing.

  He spots me and hangs his head in shame.

  My brother shouldn’t feel guilty for being with Sonia. We were all inseparable not too long ago, and Wen’s never been good at holding grudges. On the other hand, if I’m not feeling charitable, I can hold a grudge so long the thing will grow legs and live independent of me.

  My feet crunch through the pine needles. Felix cranes his neck around a tree that had been blocking him from my view—Sonia isn’t the reason Wen looks so damn guilty.

  My name forms on Felix’s lips like he’s figuring out if it’s really me. As I move under the lanterns, he beams and lowers a BB rifle to his side. “Well, it must be my lucky night. Are we finally going to spend some time together?”

  He lurches forward, but I meet his eyes and he rocks right on back. He’s the one who’s armed, but my stone-cold stare’s intimidated him.

  Wen’s eyes tell me he’s sorry as I crawl down b
eside him. I hug his fleece-covered arm between my hands and rest my cheek on his shoulder.

  “Tal, you’re just in time.” Sonia’s got a game in her voice. She gives me a wink Felix can’t see. It almost cuts through the tension. “We’re waging a little bet. Wen agreed to be our moneyman. Keeping things fair and square, aren’t you, Wen?”

  Three paper targets hang like ghosts in the forest. It’s another carnival game. The winner shoots the shape of a star out of the paper before all the ammo runs out of the gun. It sounds simple enough, but nothing’s simple about these contests.

  “You can join us, Tal, if you want to,” says Felix. “I’ll even load for you.”

  “Not really in the mood. If I was, I’d load for myself.”

  “Well, have you ever shot a BB gun?” he asks. “It’s not that hard.”

  “Oh, I think I can hold my own.”

  Wen outright hiccups with laughter.

  “Who’s winning?” I say.

  Sonia’s grin is a white flash in the forest. “You don’t have more faith in me than that? Pity.” She passes Wen her peanuts and Coke and plucks the gun from Felix. Shots whistle through the air as she shoots a clean ring around the star. She isn’t even out of BBs as the star flutters to the ground.

  “Wen? Ten me, good sir.” Sonia collects a ten-dollar bill.

  “You know, Sonia,” he says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything as backwoods as a pregnant girl with a BB rifle.”

  She rubs a hand through his short hair. “Oh, I am backwoods, baby. All the way.”

  For one fleeting moment, there’s a glimpse of the old Sonia, the girl who would clasp her hands over my eyes when I was doing sixty-five on the freeway and whisper in my ear, “Trust me?”

  “Care to go again, or are you running out of money?” she asks Felix.

  He yanks a billfold out of his pocket. It’s not that Sonia’s taking advantage of him. He’s one of us; he should know better. He whips out two fives and hands them to Wen.

  As Wen pockets the money, he says to Felix, “You run many cons for your camp?”

  “I’m not too familiar with it. No. My uncle is our Boss, you see? So I’m more in charge of managing stuff.”

  As Felix looks through his sights, Wen rolls his eyes. That explains so much: Felix’s fancy RV, his naïveté, and his desire to take me home like a prize and make his folks proud.

  He fires at the target haphazardly, peppering the paper with tiny holes and not doing a bit of damage to the star.

  A small laugh passes between my lips. He looks my way but keeps on firing. This time, he shoots the clip clear off the paper and sends the sheet flapping against the trees.

  “Son of a—” he mutters.

  I’m laughing hard now and not even trying to hide it.

  “If you think you can do better, Talia, be my guest.” He holds the rifle out flat like an offering.

  “Ten dollars doesn’t entice me. You can’t afford to play me.”

  He fumbles with his money and produces a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Tal,” says Wen. “We don’t have that much to spare—”

  “No,” says Felix. “She wins, and the money’s hers.” He meets my eyes. “You don’t win, then you don’t owe me anything.”

  “Other than a marriage?”

  He sighs. “Other than that.”

  “Pass it over, then.”

  Sonia gets me all geared up with a fresh target and a newly loaded gun. Nothing’s ever felt more right than taking Felix’s money. Handing him his balls might be my ticket to proving that marrying me won’t make him more of a man.

  I look through the sights. My finger is light on the trigger, careful to not release too many BBs at once. I fire a single shot into the middle of the star.

  “Harder than it looks, huh?” says Felix.

  Over the top of the sights, I see I nicked the target a few inches too high and a little to the right.

  “Here’s a free lesson for you, Felix: the barrels are bent. You take a couple of shots to figure out how off your sights are, and only then do you start firing.” I raise the gun, adjust my aim for the bent barrels, and shoot an almost-perfect ring of BBs around the star until it flutters to the ground. “Simple as that.”

  “Simple as that,” Felix repeats as he watches me collect his fifty from Wen.

  Once my laughter starts, it’s contagious. Traveling from me, to Wen, to Sonia. Even Felix joins in.

  The moment isn’t even strange when it’s happening. Only minutes later, when we’ve all moved on, and Sonia has challenged Felix to a real fair-and-square game.

  We feed a bonfire, empty an ice chest of beers, and, after a few hours, Sonia and Felix are nearly tied. My small, calloused hands even move over Felix’s smooth ones once, showing him how to keep his trigger finger from getting away from itself. As the night wears on, I can’t hate him. I don’t love him or even like him—not really. But he isn’t terrible like I thought.

  Night breezes whistle through the trees by the time we run out of ammo. Sonia and Felix yank down all the targets before the wind can take off with them.

  I shiver and run my hands over my arms.

  Wen’s got a blanket wrapped over his shoulders like a cape. I sidle in beside him, and he drapes a corner over me. The blanket smells exactly like expired sunscreen.

  We used it last spring when we slept on the beach in Florida. Before Lando got control, it was our ritual to spend one night each season sleeping under the stars. Now we’re forbidden to sleep too far from camp. Safety, says Lando. But what he really means is control.

  Wen asks quietly, “What’d you do today?”

  If he knew how I’d spent that evening at Spencer’s, he’d ache to hear it described in graphic detail. Telling him would mean dangling a carrot he’s never going to eat.

  It’s wrong not telling him about Felix’s proposition. We’re too far from the money to even think about paying the bride-price back. With Cedar Falls on alert, we can’t hustle another cent. I’m as good as married to Felix but selfish enough to keep hold of my freedom a little longer.

  I’m torn between having a million things to tell Wen and an equal number of secrets to guard. Either decision I make is equally cruel.

  “Same old, same old,” I say. “How about you?”

  Under the blanket, Wen slips me two crinkled-up bills. I take a peek, and the lantern highlights a pair of hundreds.

  “Holy shit,” I whisper. “You must have pissed off someone good.”

  “Nah . . .” He tugs at a loose thread on his shirt. “Wasn’t like that.”

  Emil comes tromping up and puts an end to our conversation. Everyone but Wen and me heads between the trees, in the direction of camp together.

  Over her shoulder, Sonia smiles at me. I almost smile back until she gestures toward Felix and bounces her eyebrows three times.

  I mouth, No way in hell.

  Even if I spent tonight free-falling into the life I used to adore, the life of a Wanderer, nothing’s changed things with Felix. He might not be awful, and he did treat me more like a girl and less like an object, but a few hours of him being an all right guy didn’t stir anything magical within me.

  As the fire dies out, Wen and I collapse onto our backs and stare up through the branches.

  Stars pop out of the sky, a million pinpricks of light that barely shine from the middle of Cedar Falls. Spencer can give me dreams of Africa that may never come true, but he can’t give me the stars.

  What I can have is all this, a place where Wen and I can be kings of the world any night we choose. Sitting still is never going to be the life for me. Even if, for one night, sitting still in Spencer’s house was something I feasted on.

  Wen yawns into his hand. “We should head back.”

  “Let’s sleep out here. Like we used to. Lando’s having too much fun to send a search party after us.”

  The mid-October air is almost too cold, but we curl into the blankets, my arms around We
n’s waist and his around my shoulders. He reaches out and dims the last lantern.

  This night was everything I love about our Wanderer lives. The freedom, the fearlessness, the invincibility. The rush of uncharted wilds. The luscious promise of somewhere else always on the horizon.

  His face pressed into the blanket, Wen murmurs, “Good night, you thief, you vagabond.”

  “Good night, Wen.”

  CHAPTER 27

  As Spencer drives to a restaurant downtown, his hand moves from the place where my knee peeks through the tear in my jeans all the way to my thigh. It’s confusing and delicious.

  I’ve been expecting this since early October—a whole month—his hands to wander, one to creep up my shirt, or elsewhere. Maybe he thinks I’m easy. Not that I could blame him. Easy is exactly what I’m putting out there and not with only Spencer. Mid-con, there’s no limit to what I’ll say to markie boys. The way I look at them, lick my lips, and move my hips—that’s maybe the biggest lie of all.

  “Spencer. Do you want more?”

  He steals a glance at me but looks away fast and takes his hand back. “No. I mean—I mean, of course I want more. But I don’t expect it—I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want.”

  I don’t even know what I want.

  I’m not sure what kind of girl I am. Maybe the kind who says sexy things but stays all-look-and-no-touch. Wanderers aren’t supposed to give ourselves to anyone but our spouses—and not until marriage. That’s a doctrine I’m not sure I agree with, though I haven’t defied tradition yet.

  He clears his throat. “So you know, I haven’t before. There weren’t any girls I cared about before I left for Spain last year, and there haven’t been since.”

  I should tell him I haven’t, but I don’t say anything. That’s never going to be part of my relationship with Spencer, and I don’t want to talk about commitment, not at all.

  “That wasn’t some line.” He dials down the music and faces me at a red light. “I told you so you’d know I’m not the kind of guy who . . . who’d try to pressure anyone.”

  “I’ve never doubted the kind of guy you are.”