First Love

by Patterson, James

  “Which reminds me—”

  “—that you’re hungry.”

  “Exactly.” He stood up a little straighter, and I could see the way he shook off his moment of worry. “Do you know what else I want?”

  “No,” I said, but the word caught in my throat, because I did know, of course. I just wanted to make him show me the answer.

  Robinson backed me up against the wall and pressed his lips to mine. My arms circled his waist and I arched myself against him. This was what I was hungry for…

  A group of kids in Camp Treetop T-shirts filed into the room, so we ducked into the tomb to make out in secret. We hardly even cared when a few giggling kids spied us and called some of their friends over.

  But we pulled apart and, exchanging some giggles ourselves, quickly made our exit.

  42

  OUR FINAL NEW YORK DESTINATION: Nathan’s Famous. It was all the way out on Coney Island—which is not actually an island but is so far away from Manhattan on the lurching, sluggish F train that it felt like an entirely different world.

  When we finally got there, the beach was as wide and flat as a parking lot, the waves small and distant. There were a lot of people, and some of them were actually swimming, which no one in Oregon did without a wet suit. The Pacific is cold.

  Though Robinson seemed drained, we strolled along the boardwalk past bumper cars and an arcade popping with digital gunfire. People were flying kites and skateboarding and jogging and hawking cheap souvenirs, like huge foam sunglasses and T-shirts that said KEEP CONEY ISLAND FREAKY.

  “You want to ride the Cylone?” I asked, pointing to the roller coaster in the distance. “Or the Wonder Wheel?”

  Robinson shook his head. “Let’s just get the hot dogs.”

  Because he seemed so tired all of a sudden, I suggested, ever so delicately, the idea of going back to the hostel. But Robinson wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I need my daily dose of nitrates,” he said. “Plus, we’re tourists, and it’s our job to be touristy.”

  So we turned up Surf Avenue, where the enormous green sign for Nathan’s loomed above the street. There was a big outdoor seating area, with seagulls perched near the plastic tables waiting for scraps. The air smelled like the sea and beer and grease. Not that appetizing, in my opinion, but Robinson’s whole demeanor had changed. He looked like a kid on Christmas morning.

  “How many should I get?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, scanning the menu. “Two?” I was going to have to order the Caesar salad, since this wasn’t exactly the place to get a tofu dog.

  Robinson scoffed at two. “Sonya ‘the Black Widow’ Thomas ate more than forty. Says right there on the sign.”

  “But that was a hot dog–eating contest,” I said. “This is just a meal.”

  Robinson considered the statement. “True. I’ll settle for… four. One with chili, one with sauerkraut, and two plain.”

  “You’re taking your life in your hands,” I said disapprovingly.

  “Only my gastrointestinal tract,” Robinson countered, and I grimaced.

  Instead of eating with the rest of the crowd, we took our food back to the beach and sat on the warm, gritty sand. It was littered with cigarette butts and half-buried beer cans. But still! The ocean was a gorgeous blue-green, and the weather was perfect, and we were together.

  “Can you believe that two weeks ago we were on a beach in California?” Robinson asked.

  “Crazy,” I said, taking a stab at a limp piece of lettuce. “We’ve done so much.”

  Robinson waggled his eyebrows at me. “Not enough, if you know what I mean.”

  “Pervert,” I said, nudging him with my bare toe.

  He bit into his second—or was it third?—hot dog and nudged me back.

  I decided to abandon my wilted, greasy salad and lay back in the sand, watching the kites swoop and dive above me. I must have fallen asleep for a little while, because when I woke, Robinson wasn’t next to me anymore.

  I looked around for a moment, and when I didn’t see him, I got up and began walking toward the boardwalk. Maybe he’d gone off to find the Headless Woman or Insectavora, the tattooed fire-eater. Maybe he was buying me a Coney Island shot glass to go with my Cedar Point snow globe.

  But he wasn’t doing either of those things. Instead, I found him leaning against a fence, shaking.

  And vomiting.

  I reached out to touch his shoulder, but he waved me away. I took a step back. “You need to see a doctor, Robinson,” I pleaded.

  After a moment he looked up, his face pale and his eyes red and watering. “Before you go all drama on me,” he said, “it was the hot dogs. Not the you-know-what.”

  “And how do you know that?” I asked.

  “I’m fine now. And actually, this is totally awesome,” he said, wiping his face and trying to smile at me. “I could so beat that Black Widow lady—I’ll just eat and barf, eat and barf, and that way I can consume an unlimited number of hot dogs.”

  I sighed. “You are sick, Robinson. In a lot of ways.”

  “But you love me,” he said, reaching for my hands.

  “I do,” I said. So much.

  Robinson fell asleep on the train home, and I practically had to carry him up to our cell in the hostel. He seemed feverish, but I told myself it was just sunburn. Windburn. Whatever it needed to be, as long as it wasn’t another infection.

  I sat for a long time, listening to the sounds of the city all around us, but mostly just watching him sleep. Were his cheeks less full? His eyes deeper, more sunken? It could be happening so slowly, so subtly, that I hadn’t been able to see it…

  I lay down beside Robinson and curled my body around his, remembering how I’d refused to tell him a bedtime story back in Las Vegas. I pressed my check against his beating heart and vowed I would never say no to him again.

  43

  “WE HAVE TO GO TO PHILLY,” ROBINSON announced.

  “We do?”

  He nodded. “I’m not saying this trip is a bucket list or anything, but it is extremely important that I eat a Philly cheesesteak.”

  I handed our room key to the stoned front-desk clerk, and we stepped into the sunshine. “Tell me you’re joking,” I said, thinking, He can’t keep a hot dog down, so why on earth is he talking about cheesesteaks?

  Robinson shook his head. “Today I want to do everything, Axi. Every silly thing I can think of.”

  I put my hand on his waist, slipped my fingers under the edge of his shirt to feel his skin. I could feel him shiver at my touch. “As opposed to yesterday, or the day before, when you were a good boy and did only what others told you to do?”

  He laughed and wrapped his arms around me. “Okay, you have a point.”

  I didn’t want to spoil the mood, but I had to say what I was thinking. “We’ve had a lot of fun, and we can definitely keep on having it. But I think you should see a doctor, just to be sure.”

  Robinson shook his head again, this time more emphatically. “No can do, Aximoron. Places to go, people to see…”

  I looked at him carefully, weighing his stubbornness against mine. If I fought hard now, maybe I could get him to go. Just a minor checkup, I’d say, a quick ear to the lungs and heart, maybe a tiny little X-ray and reading of his LDH levels. I’d sit in the waiting room, staring at stale magazines and waiting for good news.

  Because maybe it would work out. Who was to say it couldn’t?

  On the other hand, if Robinson went to the hospital, he would resent me for it. Intensely, and possibly eternally.

  Whose trip is it, Axi? I asked myself. Yours? Or his? Because in the end, someone had to make the call.

  “It’s less than two hours away,” Robinson said, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s not like I’m asking you to drive me to Daytona.”

  “You’re not going to do that next, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. Scout’s honor.”

  I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “You win.”


  He smiled his beautiful smile. “I love it when you roll your eyes like that,” he said. “It’s adorable.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “And when you sort of wrinkle up your nose, like you smell something funny, but it’s really that you’re trying to decide whether to laugh or be annoyed.”

  “Oh, really. What else do you love about me?” I was annoyed, but it was at myself rather than at Robinson. Or not annoyed, exactly—more like… scared.

  We were at the car now, and I was climbing into the driver’s seat. “Let’s hear it,” I said. I pulled into the street and pointed us toward the Holland Tunnel. You’d almost think I had a license to drive.

  “Well, everything,” Robinson said. “But specifically? The list is kind of long.”

  “You are such a flatterer,” I said.

  Robinson didn’t say anything for a while after that. In fact, we were on the other side of the river before he spoke, and I thought he’d fallen asleep.

  “I love how you touch the tip of your nose when you’re thinking hard about something,” he said, turning to fix his gaze on me. “I love how you tuck your hair behind your ears but it always slips right back down immediately. I love your eyes and your perfect lips. I love that your nail polish, when you bother to wear it, is always chipped. I love how you use fancy words that I have to look up at home. I love the tiny little crescent moon of a birthmark on the tip of your left pinkie. I love the way—”

  I didn’t need to hear any more. I needed to kiss him. So I pulled over to the side of the road, and there, with the New York City skyline behind us, I did.

  “It’s going to take a lot longer to get to Philly this way,” Robinson said, talking and kissing and smiling all at once.

  “We have time,” I said. “We have so much time.”

  44

  “SO, SCALAWAG, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO Pat’s King of Steaks or Geno’s?” I asked, poking Robinson awake—gently, of course. We’d made it to Philly in under two hours, and now I was parked between the two cheesesteak institutions, which stood a block away from each other like captains of opposing teams.

  Robinson yawned and stretched. “You know,” he said, frowning slightly, “I’m not actually that hungry right now.” For a moment he placed his hand over his stomach—a strange kind of gesture for him. “What I’d like is a nice warm drink.”

  I looked at him sharply. It was eighty degrees out, and I was sweating against the truck seat. “You’re not cold, are you?”

  Being cold meant that Robinson might have a fever, and if he had a fever, that meant he might have an infection, and if he had an infection, then he needed to get to a hospital. Stat. Because infections in what doctors like to call an immunocompromised person—a person like Robinson, who’d had high-dose chemo, radiation therapy, and a stem cell transplant—could be deadly.

  I reached toward his forehead to feel it, but he brushed my hand away. “No!” he said, a little too loudly. “I just thought some tea sounded nice. Then we go get the cheesesteak.”

  He got out of the truck and started walking. I stayed where I was, staring at him through the windshield, feeling both mad and worried. What was I supposed to do? Drag him to the ER so they could take his temperature? He wouldn’t let me.

  So I got out and caught up to him—easily, because he was walking at an old man’s pace. Like every step took concentration and effort.

  “A little caffeine and I’ll be good to go,” he said, pointing to a coffee shop at the end of the block.

  Please be right about that, I thought. I took his hand.

  In the café we found a window table and sank into the worn but comfortable seats. Then a salesman type burst in and commandeered the table next to us, talking on his cell phone and at the same time waving the waitress over, as if it were a matter of life and death that he got served before we did. “… QR codes are going to increase the conversion rate of your sales funnel—” he was saying. When the waitress walked by he shouted, “Large Earl Grey with soy milk on the side and raw sugar, two lumps.”

  Robinson glared at him for a moment. “This is the City of Brotherly Love, jerk,” he muttered. Then he rested his head on the table. “Man. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

  I wanted to scream, Because you have cancer?

  Instead, I reached out and ran my fingers through his thick, dark hair. I’d almost forgotten what he looked like without it. It took a while to grow back after the chemo, but when it did, he grew it longer.

  “That feels good,” he said, his voice muffled.

  I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what I had to say. “Robinson, we need to get you back to a hospital—actually, our hospital. I’ll use my credit card and we’ll fly home. We can be there in ten hours.”

  “I don’t like planes,” Robinson said to the tabletop.

  “You have to see Dr. Suzuki. Now. She’ll know what to do.”

  “Every time I hear her name, I think about violin lessons. Have you heard of the Suzuki method of teaching music?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Robinson lifted his head from the table. His tired eyes met mine. “You say she’ll know what to do. But what if there’s nothing to be done?”

  “There’s always something to be done,” I said, my voice rising. I didn’t like this new fatalistic tone of his at all.

  “You’ve planned everything so perfectly, Axi. Please don’t get all freaked out now.”

  I reached for his hands and gripped them hard. “But when does it end, Robinson? We can’t run like this forever.”

  “We’re not going to,” he assured me. “We just have one more stop to make. It’s the last one.”

  “One last stop?” I asked. “Where’s that? Please don’t say you want to go to New Orleans to eat jambalaya or something.”

  He laughed and squeezed my fingers. “No. My stomach is no longer dictating our travels. But it’s… well, it’s a couple of states away.”

  “A couple of states?” I repeated. I doubted Chuck the Truck would make it that far.

  Next to us the salesman had begun shouting. “No, Ed, the goal is to shorten the amount of time it takes the probable purchaser to become a product owner!”

  Both Robinson and I glared at him now. He’d taken a table that could have seated six, and he was treating it like his desk. Scattered across it were his iPad, a BlackBerry, a leather binder, a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, car keys…

  His car keys.

  It was then that I had an idea that would have shocked the old Axi Moore to the depths of her soul. Good thing she no longer existed.

  “Axi?” Robinson said, waving a hand in front of my face. “Aren’t you going to get on my case for not telling you where I want to go?”

  “Yes,” I said distractedly. “Later.” I was staring at the salesman. Get up, I thought. Get up.

  “The numbers don’t add up, Ed,” he yelled.

  And then, as if what I’d just imagined were totally meant to be, the salesman stood. Still yammering into his Bluetooth, he made his way toward the bathrooms.

  I got up and threw a five on the table. “Meet me at the southeast corner of the block,” I said, and I was out the door before Robinson had even opened his mouth to ask me why.

  Outside, I half-jogged down the street, clicking the automatic lock button on the key chain and watching for the answering flicker of headlights. Would it be the blue Acura? The silver Toyota? I had such a mighty sense of purpose that I hardly noticed the racing of my heart. I was taking care of Robinson. If he needed to go somewhere, I was going to see to it that his journey took place in a reliable vehicle.

  I’d crossed onto the next block and was nearing the third without a single chirp of a car. My pulse quickened and my head began to hurt.

  I was stealing a car.

  In broad daylight.

  Fear began to trump my sense of purpose. I started jogging faster. Where are you? Flash your lights, I whispered, like I had magica
l powers or something. Or phenomenal luck. It didn’t matter which.

  Finally, when I was about to give up, I heard the beep of a horn answering its remote key. I turned toward the sound and gasped. It was a midnight-blue Mustang GT. A convertible.

  I started cackling like a crazy person. Robinson was going to freak out.

  Easy as pie, I opened the driver’s-side door and jumped in. The seats were tan leather, and the inside sparkled like that salesman spit-shined it every morning. He was going to seriously miss his ride. A wave of remorse came over me, but I shook it off.

  The Mustang practically leapt into the street. I pulled up to our truck and quickly tossed our bags in at the same time I called to Robinson, who was leaning against a telephone pole as if standing up on his own were too much work. “Hurry, the bus is leaving.”

  He walked toward me and his eyes widened. “Wha—”

  “Just get in.”

  It took him another second to wrap his head around the directive. But then he slid in next to me, and I gunned the engine.

  And we were gone.

  “How—what—I don’t—” Robinson stuttered. “Am I—”

  “Keys, Clyde,” I said, feigning complete nonchalance. “They’re so much easier than a cordless drill.”

  “I just don’t—” He couldn’t even finish a sentence.

  “I borrowed them from the loud guy in the coffee shop.”

  Robinson’s eyes widened even further as he looked around the car. He ran his hand over the dashboard. “Four-point-six-liter V-8 with three-fifteen horsepower and three hundred twenty-five pound-feet of torque. Pure American-made muscle. This thing is a beast, Axi.” He turned to beam at me. “Just when I thought I could not possibly love you more.”

  He began to laugh—a strong laugh like I hadn’t heard in days. “Seriously, thank God,” he finally said, gasping for breath. “For a minute, I really, truly thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  45

  ROBINSON TOLD ME TO DRIVE SOUTH, SO I did. For once, no questions asked. I’d do anything he asked me, and I had to admit, the Mustang was a major step up from the truck. It had power steering, air-conditioning, and, according to Robinson, “an aftermarket Bose speaker system that costs more than a new Kia.” It just ate up the miles.