100 Sideways Miles (20 page)

Julia Bishop was like an undressing, sleeping-bag ninja.

And I'll admit this: I was so turned on thinking about lying in my underwear next to Julia Bishop, even if Cade Hernandez was bound to ruin it—which he did in about two hundred miles, ten seconds. Still, he didn't seem to notice when Julia slipped over and snuggled against me inside my sleeping bag.

We kissed.

It was the most perfect sensation I had ever felt—Julia Bishop's long, smooth legs tangled with mine while we kissed. I put my arms around her, and she held on to me.

If my heart jumped out of my chest, it would take off through space faster than the earth itself. Of course Julia had to have been aware of exactly how aroused I was. There was nothing I could do to hide it, and I was embarrassed, but only a little.

Everything about the moment felt too good.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Then Cade sat up and said, “Have you two ever had sex yet?”

I groaned.

“Shut up, Cade,” I said. “I told you already. No. I am too young and too stupid for something like that.”

Cade took a long drink. He sat in his briefs, cross-legged on top of his sleeping bag, watching us. He turned away and spit a big blob of tobacco.

Splat!

“Well, I have,” Cade announced. “I'm no virgin.”

“I know,” I said. “You told me. You're drunk. Remember? Iris Boskovitch.”

Julia whispered to me, “The girl with the
round head 
?”

I nodded a confirmation.

Cade took another drink. He crawled on his hands and knees toward the coolers. At first, he attempted to get a beer from Laika's
Sputnik 2
, then he laughed and said, “Shit.”

Pfft!

Cade Hernandez opened a beer.

Wobbling, he stood over us. “Not just with Iris Boskovitch. I also . . . Hey! Are you two
in bed
together?”

“Shut up, Cade. We're just lying down. I promise we are not going to have sex,” I said. “Why don't you go back to bed and watch the meteors?”

“Shit, Finn. That kind of gives me a boner.”

“Um.”

Cade sighed and went back to his sleeping bag. He sat down heavily and took another drink.

He said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to a sperm bank to try and sell my sperm?”

I cleared my throat and shifted nervously. I was getting hot and was afraid I would sweat on Julia, which was kind of disgusting—getting all that moisture on her.

I said, “Uh. No.”

“Well, I did. You know how much a guy can make selling sperm? You can make, like, three hundred bucks a week. Dude. I have an endless supply. I could break that fucking bank. I'd never have to work a day in my life.”

Cade Hernandez tilted his head back and guzzled beer. His eyes gleamed with pride and horniness.

“But they told me I had to wait until I was eighteen. Dude, do you realize how much money's worth of sperm I'm going to be wasting between now and next April?”

Cade Hernandez was an Aries.

“I imagine less than you suspect, now that Monica Fassbinder is about six thousand miles away,” I theorized.

Cade went on. “Shit. I can't stop it. Who can? I'm a fucking fountain of expensive sperm. But anyway, I didn't only have sex with Iris Boskovitch. You know who else I had sex with? Just try and guess.”

I didn't need to say anything. When Cade Hernandez was in this particular form, I knew he was certainly going to answer his own question.

So he did.

Cade Hernandez said, “Mrs. Shoemaker.”

Julia laughed—a gasping, startled kind of giggle.

I said, “You had
sex
with our
substitute teacher
? What is
wrong
with you, Cade?”

Like a lot of boys I knew, I often wished that some of Cade Hernandez's wrong magic would rub off on me. But Mrs. Shoemaker wasn't only a substitute teacher, the one who'd taken over for Mr. Nossik after his unfortunate aneurysm, she'd also been Monica Fassbinder's host mother.

“Well,” Cade explained, “it wasn't at school or anything weird like that. Um. In fact, it was during summer vacation, so that makes her technically not a substitute.”

“I guess you're off the hook, then,” I said.

Cade said, “It happened on the day we drove Monica to the airport to go back to Germany. After we dropped her off. When we got home, Mr. Shoemaker volunteered to go out to get us hamburgers. Mr. Shoemaker is such a nice guy, isn't he? As soon as he left, Mrs. Shoemaker grabbed my hand and led me into her bedroom. She was looking at me weird the whole day. I kind of knew what she was thinking. You know how you can tell, it's so obvious when someone's looking at you like they want to have sex with you?”

I will admit it: I did not know what someone looked like when they wanted to have sex with you.

I said, “Um. No, Cade. What does it look like?”

And Cade said, “Look at me.”

I looked at Cade Hernandez. He was staring into my eyes and had a very contented, almost half-smiling expression. It creeped me out, and I had to look away.

“Uh,” I said.

“It looks like that, dumbass. Anyway, I felt guilty about having sex with Mrs. Shoemaker. And the hamburgers were really good. I'm probably going to go to hell for that shit, aren't I?”

Julia laughed. “No doubt you're going to hell, Cade.”

“Or you are going to get an infection inside your urethra that will spread like a slow-burning fire into your testicles, and then your penis is going to fall off,” I added.

Cade thought for a while and said, “That would be way worse than going to hell.”

I had to agree.

It would be worse than going to hell.

“Well, I hope you had the good sense to use a condom,” I said.

Cade took another drink. “I did. Uh. But they were expired. Remember those ones I had in my glove box that day at the driving range? When you asked if you could borrow some condoms from me and then you saw they were a couple months out of date? Well, it was one of those I had in my wallet that day with Mrs. Shoemaker. Well, two of them, actually. We did it twice before Mr. Shoe came back with the hamburgers.”

Cade Hernandez was obviously not a good student in health class. Here was the trifecta of condom errors: glove compartment, wallet, expired.

The whole married-woman thing was a matter for ethics, which they do not teach teenage boys at Burnt Mill Creek High School.

“Um.”

Julia turned onto her side. Her face rested on my bare shoulder, and her hand lay flat on my chest.

She said, “Why did you ask Cade for some condoms?”

“Don't worry,” Cade said, “Finn and I went to 7-Eleven and bought some fresh ones.”

“Uh.” I desperately wanted to change the subject. “Why would you call anyone you had sex with ‘Mrs.'?
Mrs. Shoemaker?
”

“I think it's kind of hot,” Cade said. “ ‘Mrs. Shoemaker.' Don't you think that's hot?”

I was so confused and agitated. My atoms swirled and vibrated at Julia's touch. She pressed against me, waiting for me to tell her the entire dumb story about the day Cade Hernandez and I went shopping for “fresh” condoms together at 7-Eleven.
And I thought about Mrs. Shoemaker, our substitute teacher, so I answered my friend with the following: “No. No, I do not think calling someone you had sex with ‘Mrs. Shoemaker' is hot, Cade.”

“Cade,” Julia said, “tell me about the time you and Finn went to 7-Eleven to buy condoms. That sounds like a good story.”

“It's not,” I grumbled.

It was ridiculous.

And it was too late. While we lay there, watching the fragments of Swift-Tuttle burning and fizzing across the black of the desert night, I had to endure the entire humiliating tale. And then I had to confess to Julia how stupid and immature I had been on those days leading up to my birthday.

To make matters worse, for the second time that evening in front of Cade Hernandez, I had to reassert my belief that I was too young and too stupid to have sex with anyone.

I hoped it would all be forgotten, considering how drunk my friend was, so I urged him to have another beer.

And Cade said, “I'll only have one if you drink one with me, Finn.”

“Uh. Okay.”

Cade got up from his sleeping bag and pulled two beers from the cooler.

Julia leaned to my ear and whispered, “I think you're a good person, Finn. I love you. And it was a funny story.”

She kissed the side of my face and rolled onto her back, watching the sky.

Before I could answer her, I heard the
pop! pop!
as Cade Hernandez opened each beer. Then, wearing nothing but a pair
of white cotton briefs, he sat down in the dirt beside me and Julia.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.”

We tapped cans together.

“You know what's out there?” Cade said.

“A bunch of fourteen-billion-year-old shit and a big fucking knackery,” I said.

I was just a little irritated by my friend.

“No.” Cade spit again and pointed north, past the front end of his truck. “Not up there. Out that way. There's an empty prison. Did you know that? Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. Did you know that? An empty fucking prison.”

In fact, I did not know that.

We sure found out, though.

Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary was shut down in 1981 after a riot that lasted for three weeks. Three weeks is about thirty-six million miles. Dozens of inmates and corrections officers died in the riot. It must have been like a little war, an out-of-control knackery all safely encased within concrete and razor wire.

Cade Hernandez dunked his entire head into the freezing mix of ice cubes, water, and empty beer cans sloshing in the cooler beside Laika's
Sputnik 2
.

He screamed.

It sounded like he was being murdered. I sat up in my sleeping bag. It was morning in the desert, and Julia had already gotten out of bed and was boiling coffee on a propane stove we'd set up on the tailgate of Cade's pickup.

Cade said, “That's how you take a camping bath in the middle of the desert.”

As the water dripped from his hair, he rubbed it into his armpits and over his chest.

Then he said, “You want to take one, Finn?”

“Um. I don't think that's necessary.”

“Dude. You are such a little bitch.”

“I know that. It's my bullfighter name, remember? Also, I need to pee.”

And that was the day Julia Bishop, Cade Hernandez, and I broke in to Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary.

Nobody breaks
in
to a prison.

In the morning light, I could see we'd been camped out in the middle of a prestamped, formatted pattern of concrete slabs—the intended foundations for a stillborn community of never-built homes that would have been named Aberdeen Lake.

If the homes had been built, there would have been a real lake, too, one with water in it instead of a couple of kids' piss and a bunch of trash blown on the wind. The lake had been formed and dug to a uniform depth of nine feet, with small wooden boat docks fingering out from its waterless shores where the most desirable concrete slabs had been poured.

I pulled on my T-shirt and shorts and released Laika from
Sputnik 2
. Then I hid on the other side of Cade's pickup so I could pee into that starved lake.

Julia took more photographs while we sat and had coffee. And Cade announced, “We're going to have fun today. Let's poke around inside that old prison and mess with shit before we go home.”

“You mess with shit every day,” I said.

Cade nodded. He couldn't argue with that.

And Julia said, “I bet that prison's haunted.”

“If there was ever a place more prone than a prison to having sticky atoms hanging around, I wouldn't know what it would be,” I said.

“A collapsed dam, maybe,” Julia said.

Cade stood up suddenly, as though he'd been stung.

“I have an idea,” he said.

Cade dug around in the jumble of gear thrown into the bed of his truck. Eventually, he pulled out a can of fluorescent spray paint he'd lifted from an unattended public-works survey truck a few months before.

Cade said, “Come on,” and took off down the shore of the empty lake.

• • •

Cade Hernandez's idea was this: He wanted to spray paint a message on sixteen of the sun-bleached foundations at the nonexistent resort community of Aberdeen Lake.

On one of the most desirable streets, which was actually not so much a street as a gravelly span of dried weeds that gapped a swath of abandonment between one side and the other, we wrote out on the foundations—eight on each side of what was supposed to have been called Lakeside Drive—the following message:

W-E-L-C-O-M-E,