by Robin Reul
“Like you did with me earlier. It’s called profiling. I do it too.”
“In fairness, you gave me lots of material to work with.”
“Well, now you have even more. So, what’s the story in your head about me now?” he asks. I grin. “C’mon, you can’t tell me you don’t have one by this point.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“What is it? Let’s hear it,” he demands, and we both laugh.
“Well, obviously you’re on the lam, afraid of being exposed as a total fraud after being caught not recycling a plastic water bottle despite being president of Earth Club. Unable to live with your crimes, you’ve decided to go underground and make things right by dedicating your life to creating eco-friendly, biodegradable, sustainable packaging. And then you will write a bestselling novel about the whole ordeal that will be turned into an Emmy-award-winning Netflix series starring everyone who is anyone in young Hollywood.”
“Wow, you’re good,” he tells me and raises his eyebrows.
“It’s a gift,” I say as I cut a path with my chip through the remaining pool of semi-coagulated nacho cheese in my plastic cup.
I worry that he might turn it around and press me for more of my story, but he doesn’t. We whiz past a sign saying San Francisco is still another two-hundred-something miles ahead. “Factoring in the strong probability of a bathroom stop or two, that puts us in San Francisco sometime shortly after sunrise,” he announces as he unwraps and takes a bite of his second taco.
There is a very distinct pfffft as someone lets one rip, and then the car suddenly smells like ass. We all sit there awkwardly frozen silent for a minute, unsure what to say but all clearly smelling it when it happens again.
We simultaneously realize that this malodorous scent is coming from Princess.
“Naturally I steal a dog that’s a farter,” Oscar says, cracking up.
Jack and I burst into laughter. “It’s probably the hot dog,” I say as I plug my nose, fanning the air in front of me.
“No, it’s definitely the hot dog,” Jack concurs. Princess toots again and looks at me, tongue wagging happily. “From adorable to biohazard in sixty seconds.”
All windows are rolled down simultaneously at warp speed.
I close my eyes, tilt my face toward the incoming rush of fresh air, and breathe in deeply, laughing to the point of tears. I don’t even care about the heaviness in my chest, because it feels amazing to laugh like this. I can’t even remember the last time I did.
Chapter 12
Jack
Saturday, June 5, 3:30 a.m.
We make an emergency pit stop for Princess to take a bathroom break on the side of the road, which is a good call. Her gastrointestinal issues hopefully remedied, we’re on our way again.
I still need to charge my phone. And I’m dying to text Ajay. This night tops any of his brother’s wild college stories, hands down.
I dig for my charger in my backpack and plug it in before connecting it to my phone. The home screen takes forever to come to life, and the earlier text notification from Natasha pops up on the screen. Amazingly, I’d forgotten all about it. It looks like there have been a couple more since, one as recently as twenty-six minutes ago.
I can’t bring myself to look at her messages. I don’t want to engage. Her push to be friends as if nothing happened feels like a manipulation to assuage her guilt. It’s annoying actually. It will be what it is in its own time; it can’t be forced.
More likely, we’ll keep in touch for a while, but the gaps between talks will naturally grow further apart until at some point they stop. Natasha probably did us both a favor.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” Hallie asks, angling toward me.
Like that poster in my therapist’s waiting room says: you can’t focus on the road ahead if all you’re doing is looking in the rearview mirror. New day. New me. It’s all about forward momentum.
“No.” I should delete them without even reading.
She peers at my phone. “It’s from that girl, right? I could read it for you if you want and tell you if you should read it.”
I think about it for a second and then hand my phone to her. “Why not?” Hallie turns her attention to the phone screen, and I gaze out the window until I can’t stand the silence and have to look at her for a reaction. “It doesn’t even matter. It is what it is.”
“I get it. Caring about someone is a risky proposition. Disappointment and heartbreak are inevitable.” Her eyes stop scrolling, and she suddenly smirks.
Uh-oh. “What? Is it bad?”
She clicks off my phone and places it facedown on the seat between us, sighing dramatically. “She likes emojis.”
“She does. Sometimes she will hold entire conversations in them. So are you going to tell me what she said?”
“If I tell you, my guess is you’ll want to respond right away. I think you should leave it alone for a while. Let her sweat it a little, you know? Otherwise you’ll look desperate.”
It’s sound advice. I think I’ve looked desperate enough for one day.
“Trust me, I know about desperate.” Hallie tells Oscar and me about the guy that made her swear off love as if it were gluten. As soon as she starts to describe him and recount their undoing, I know she’s talking about that guy I saw her with that night at 7-Eleven.
“Ryan Mandry. He was a senior. We’d been together on and off since beginning of my freshman year, but I’d only ever met his family once. They had a ton of money—his dad owned all these car dealerships—and I think they had a certain idea of the sort of girl they would like their son to date. Let’s just say I wasn’t it.”
“But you’re the heir to the Pancake Shack. Not swanky enough for them?”
“Ha! Definitely not.”
“I’m guessing this doesn’t have a happy ending,” I say.
She considers it and shrugs. “Depends on how you look at it. Sometimes it takes something awful happening to see someone’s true character.”
I huff a laugh. I can relate. “Yep.”
She goes on, “Ryan was spineless and cared too much about pleasing his parents, and nothing proved that more or showed everyone’s true colors like a good old-fashioned cancer diagnosis.”
Oscar’s eyebrows knit together. “Don’t tell me he bailed. I will turn this car around and find him.”
“Oh, he bailed all right—but not before his parents offered me five hundred dollars to break it off with him and leave him alone. He was leaving for college, and it wasn’t as if they liked me, so they didn’t want his focus to get caught up on me. They even tried to convince me that if I really cared about him, I would want what was best for Ryan.”
“That’s pretty messed up,” I tell her. “So, what did you do?”
A lock of violet hair falls forward. She tucks it behind her ear and continues. “Naturally, I told them I wanted at least a thousand.”
I can’t help but laugh. “For real?”
“No, I told them to go screw themselves. But then I told Ryan what happened and expected him to be outraged. Instead, two days later he broke it off—said I was too much for him. My dad literally threatened to break both his legs if he saw Ryan anywhere near me again.”
“So—you’re too much, and apparently I’m not enough,” I tell her. “We’re yin and yang. We balance each other out.”
She laughs. “Right? So happy endings are subjective. We didn’t end up together, but that’s a good thing.”
Oscar slams his hand against the steering wheel in disbelief. “Jesus. What the hell is wrong with people? Who breaks up with someone right after they tell them they have cancer? I know I’m totally pushing all the driver/client boundaries here saying so, but that gets my blood boiling.”
“I’m pretty sure we broke the driver/client boundaries a while back when we hitched a rid
e from a stranger, repo’d your car, and stole a dog,” I assure him.
“Karma has her way in the end, don’t you worry,” Hallie says. “When word got around that we’d broken up and that I had cancer, people thought he was a total jerk for breaking up with me.”
“Which, of course, he was,” I inject. Princess whimpers a little in her sleep, and we all silently pray this will not lead to another episode of flatulence. I hover my finger above the electric window button as a precaution.
“Obviously. But get this: one night he calls me and begs me to meet him at 7-Eleven. He has to talk to me. I don’t even know why I went. I thought maybe he wanted to apologize. I still hate the part of me that hoped, despite everything, that he might even want to get back together. And then…wait for it…”
“How could it get any worse?” I ask.
“He was worried about what people were saying, so he wanted me to tell everyone that we mutually agreed to break up and that we were still friends, that everything was cool. He even asked if we could take a selfie together to show we were all good and post it on social media so the rumor mill would die down. Because if it’s online, it must be true.” She rolls her eyes.
I saw her knock his phone violently out of his hand that night. It’s what drew my attention to her in the first place—the noise of it falling and cracking against the asphalt and how the guy didn’t even flinch, like he knew he deserved it. Now everything about that night resonates differently with me.
“A selfie?” Oscar says, his mouth hanging open.
“A selfie,” she affirms and then turns to look at me, casually adding, “You know what’s weird? I swear I saw you there that night.”
My stomach lurches. If I recognized her that night, it makes perfect sense she recognized me too. I should explain myself. “I—”
Princess cuts me off by loudly ripping another one, and the noise startles her awake. She yawns, lets out a single bark, and then sits up, tail wagging, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, panting and ready for adventure.
“Here we go again,” I say as we depress the window buttons with lightning speed.
“She might be thirsty,” Hallie says, reaching down for the bottle of water and a small paper bowl the clerk gave us at the mini-mart.
Oscar cracks his window again. “Well, good god, whatever you do, don’t give her anything else to eat.”
Good point. All we need is Princess getting the runs in the back of the car.
Princess furiously laps at the water in the bowl, and Hallie gently strokes her bony back. I’m ashamed that she knows I saw her visibly upset and that I left like a total coward.
“If I’d known what was going on, I would have kicked his ass,” I say, although I think we both know that ass kicking is not my strong suit.
“But somebody might have filmed it, and then it would have ended up on YouTube, gone viral, and you might not have gotten into Columbia,” she says. She puts Princess’s water bottle on the floor, pulls the one I’d bought her earlier out of her purse, and takes a sip.
“And thus, the course of history would have been changed. Because if I hadn’t gotten into Columbia, I wouldn’t be here right now having an existential crisis, and therefore the entire course of all three of our lives would have been completely altered,” I counter. “And we might not have ever met up again.”
I take another swig of my soda, but it’s near the bottom, so it’s mostly crushed ice and air. It goes down the wrong way, and I end up coughing. Smooth.
Hallie hands me her water bottle. “Here, no carbonation. It’ll help.”
I make the mistake of pausing and looking at the bottle instead of just accepting it from her. I don’t even know why I did it. It’s only a split second, but I can tell by the flicker of sadness in her eyes that she notices my hesitation. It was an involuntary subconscious reflex, a human response to putting oneself at risk. But it’s ludicrous—there is no risk. I don’t even need to be premed to know you can’t catch cancer from sharing a bottle.
I reach for it and take a long sip. It’s important to me that she knows I’m not scared of her.
“Thanks,” I say as I dab excess water from my lip with the cuff of my sweatshirt. Her eyes soften as I hand it back. I sense that may have been a test of sorts, and I’d passed.
“Any time.” She lifts the bottle to her mouth in the same spot where my lips had been moments before and takes another drink from it before putting it away to show me she’s not scared of me either. It’s like we’ve kissed but not really.
I don’t even know why my brain goes there.
“You know what’s weird? You’re literally one of the only people who ever read anything I’ve written.”
She scrunches her nose. “How come?”
I shrug. “I’m not great with criticism. I mean—who is, right? If someone tells you that your imagination sucks—where do you go from there? That’s some debilitating stuff, like telling someone their baby is ugly.”
She laughs and covers her mouth with the tips of her fingers. “I don’t recall your writing sucking. Didn’t you write that short story about the old man who hated dogs that dies and accidentally gets routed to dog heaven because it was the new angel’s first day on the job?”
“You actually remember that?”
“Sure. It was hilarious.”
I can’t hold back my smile. I ask her, “Do you ever wish you could look into the future and know what’s going to happen?”
She thinks about it for a moment. “That information would only be useful if I were also given the ability to change the outcome. Which you couldn’t, of course, because if you’re looking into the future, this is de facto what happens, right?”
“So, you wouldn’t want to know if you were about to make some epic life-changing mistake?”
Oscar chimes in, “In my opinion, there are no mistakes. Sometimes something seems like the worst thing but is in fact the best thing. You just can’t see it until down the road. So, it may seem like a mistake, but in fact, it wasn’t.” He raises his index finger at the last part for emphasis.
“Exactly. I think you have to go on faith that everything is exactly as it is supposed to be, or it’s easy to get overwhelmed. We are the sum of our choices.” Hallie curls a tuft of hair behind her ear.
“But what about the things we don’t choose?” I ask.
“I think they happen for a reason, even if we don’t know what it is. The choice is how we choose to react.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Oscar asks. “It’s like my ex Nikki—she’s the sort of person that rips through your life like an F5 tornado and leaves behind as much damage. But who’s to say I’d be any better off if she hadn’t? Maybe Nikki pointed me in the direction I needed to be.”
Hallie nods. “The sum of her choices influenced the sum of your choices.”
“Precisely. Which is why I need to stop this wedding. It’s my fault she ended up with Kevin, so I need to undo it.” He says the name like it’s poison. The conversation quickly morphs from waxing philosophical back to the present.
“What happened?” Hallie asks. She’s unapologetically nosy, but I’m curious now too. Might as well all put our personal crap on the table tonight.
“I was too caught up in myself. I took her for granted. Kevin saw a window and swooped right in, and I practically handed her to him.” He shakes his head. “If I don’t make this right, I have to live my life knowing this person is still walking around on the planet with someone who isn’t me, you know?”
“I hope it works out. So, what are you going to say?” Hallie presses him.
His eyes shift between the road and the rearview mirror. “I figure the right words will come to me in the moment. I don’t want to overthink it.”
“So true. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Like tonight, for example: right befo
re we picked Jack up, I was going back and forth in my head about visiting my friend Owen. I was considering cashing in my ticket and going back home. I literally asked the universe for a sign.” She turns to me. “Then you got in the car, and the fact that we’d seen each other earlier and then here you were again going to the exact same place as me—you felt like a sign. I was supposed to go. So here I am.”
Wait—what? “You decided to go to Medford because of me?”
“What can I say? I’m a believer in signs.”
“Oh, me too, girlfriend,” Oscar says, reaching his hand up for a high five.
Admittedly, it does feel as if there’s a reason our stories entwined.
There’s something freeing in talking to people you know you’re probably never going to see again. There’s no expectation or judgment. No sense of obligation to fix each other or solve each other’s problems. You can be real with each other because there’s no emotional investment in the outcome of things. Everyone accepts each other for who they are, and it’s enough. It seems like all three of us needed that tonight.
At some point the sky transitions from midnight black to a deep violet. We descend upon the outermost fringes of a predawn Silicon Valley. The sides of the highway slowly populate with familiar chain restaurants, quadrangles of office parks and, most importantly, the promise of an open Starbucks. I spy the beautiful, big green-and-white, two-tailed mermaid logo like the siren she is and let out a whoop of joy.
This moment feels damn close to perfect. Not just because coffee is in my immediate future, but also because I have no idea what I’m doing, and for once I don’t care. All I know is, for the first time in a long while, I truly feel happy. I’d forgotten what it felt like.
But perfect can only last so long.
Chapter 13
Hallie
Saturday, June 5, 6:04 a.m.
As we turn in to the Starbucks parking lot, I start coughing again, but this time it escalates, and I can’t stop. I press my hand firmly against my chest and drain the last sip from my water bottle.