A Ticket to Ride (8 page)

“Hey,” said the older of the two boys as the group slowed to a stop. They were still about eight feet away, held in place by an invisible but distinct social force field.

“Hey yourself,” said Fawn. She shifted her weight onto her front leg but didn’t move an inch, a pawn-to-pawn move, giving nothing away. I felt I was in the company of a master. Every move was perfectly choreographed right down to her hair flip, the signature laugh. How could this boy not fall down on his knees?

“I’m Tom Fletcher. This is my sister Claudia,” he said, shrugging in the girl’s direction. He was cute, but cuter from a distance. His hair was long and dark, center-parted and disheveled, easily his best feature. Dark eyes sat smudged-looking in a tan face that was acne-pocked along the cheekbones. His body was long and lean, a bowed plank curled around his belt buckle that featured an enormous and grinning Felix the Cat.

“Oh, and that’s Collin,” he said dismissively. “But you don’t have to talk to him.”

“What if I want to?” Fawn said. She looked past Tom to where Collin stood with his shoulders up and tense, his chin tucked, clearly expecting the worst. Although Collin was of average build for his height, next to Tom he looked downright pudgy. And his clothes were tragic: too-clean khaki pants and a white T-shirt that looked as if it had just come out of the three-pack his mother bought for him at Sears. I felt sorry for him, but under that was another layer of feeling, stronger and survivalist:
I’m nothing like him
.

“So, Collin,” Fawn said. “Why do you hang around with such an asshole?”

Collin smirked and looked at Tom in a challenging way.

“Well, what do you know?” Tom said, to no one in particular. “Collin’s got a girlfriend.”

But even I could see that Fawn had made an impression on Tom. He smiled at her, a smile that began at the center of his face and opened, slow and warm, so utterly winning and legitimate that it transformed his face into something exceptional.

“I’m going to like you,” he said, finally, to Fawn. “I can tell already.”

At Tom’s invitation, Fawn and I followed the small group farther into the park. It was close to one o’clock in the morning, and the place seemed to be crawling with teenagers. In a rectangular parking lot, kids sat in clumps of four and five, in or around their cars. There was the odd cherished Camaro or Trans Am gleaming under fluorescent lights, but most were dumpy sedans obviously borrowed from parents, complete with beaded seat covers and Snoopy air fresheners.

Beyond the parking lot I recognized the large hill where I’d watched Fourth of July fireworks with Fawn and Raymond two weeks before. That night, the hill had seemed tame and suburban, quilted as it was with blankets, bodies, and folding chairs. Little kids rolled down the hill log-style, shrieking, and then climbed back up, grass-stained, to do it again. Parents smoked cigarettes and swatted at gnat-clouds that swirled and shifted against a cantaloupe-colored sky. Now, it seemed to me that the hill had only been posing. What it really was, was a barrier, a veil for the inner park’s true nighttime life, for the couples that writhed at increments along the hill’s base, and the fire pits tucked in among the sandy, pine-needled paths where kids drank Old Style beer and peach schnapps and syrupy Southern Comfort. The pits were treated as garbage cans or giant ashtrays, crushed beer cans inside, pot and cigarette smoke spiraling above. But in one, someone had gotten brave and built a real fire, which glowered and licked around an empty but stoppered Boone’s Farm bottle.

“That’s going to explode,” said Fawn as we approached the fire.

“Right
on
,” said the apparent fire starter, nodding not at Fawn but over her head, at Tom. “What’s happening, guy?” he said.

“Not much,” Tom answered, stepping around the pit to stand near him. Clearly, they knew each other. The kid was taller than Tom and average-looking, maybe seventeen, black. He wore a Ziggy Stardust concert T-shirt and a cap crocheted out of bright yellow yarn and slit, flattened Coors cans.

“Get a load of the
hat
,” Fawn said in a whisper meant for me. Claudia heard it too and snickered lightly, though she didn’t look up. She had a chunk of her long hair pulled over her shoulder and was peering, cross-eyed, at her split ends.

I thought it was strange how Claudia and Collin both hung out with Tom, without being particularly acknowledged or accepted by him. What did they get out of it? Would Claudia really rather spend time with her obnoxious older brother than be out with her own friends? Collin was kind of a dork, so that made more sense, but Claudia was pretty, and in the agreed-upon way. She wore her long blond hair in a ponytail tied with a rainbow ribbon. Her face was square, with a high forehead that made her look open and unworried; her eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible. The most striking thing about Claudia, however, was her roller skates. They were the expensive-looking professional kind with white uppers and a well-seasoned toe stop. She’d had them on the whole night, toeing through wood chips and patches of grass between sidewalks. On the way up the hill, she’d walked sideways, clunkingly, as I had seen skiers do on TV. On the way down, she was a white blur, yelping with pleasure. When we caught up with her at the bottom, she’d said, “Man alive, I’m going to ruin my ball bearings that way.”

“Collin’ll loan you
his
ball bearings,” Tom had said, guffawing. “It’s not like he’s using them.”

Collin glowered but said nothing. Now he circled our group just out of the firelight, like a tame raccoon sniffing scraps.
The rest of us watched the flames twitch and veer around the empty bottle, waiting for the bang that wasn’t happening, not yet anyway. After a long minute, Tom asked the kid—Shipman was his name—about who had beer. When Shipman answered, I noticed his voice was blurry, slurred, which made me wonder if he’d recently drunk all the Coors cans that had gone into his ridiculous hat. But then I saw him pass a lit joint to Tom.

My eyes shot over to Fawn in an alarmed way—I’d never smoked pot before—but Fawn seemed entirely unconcerned. She simply watched the two boys, either waiting for her turn at the joint or for Tom’s attention. He wasn’t sharing either at the moment, not even when she sighed loudly, then flipped one side of her hair back with her hand. Firelight flickered off the strands, but Tom was in a trance, perfectly happy to just stand and watch the fire or stare off into the night. When he spoke to Shipman, his voice was a forty-five record running at thirty-three-and-a-third speed.

“I guess we’ll be seeing you then,” Fawn said. She turned to me with another pointed sigh:
boring.

“No no, hey,” Tom said, seeming to recover his wits slightly. “Stick around for a while. Have a beer.” He trotted over to an open cooler at the next fire pit and back again while we waited. He handed us the cans, flicking ice water off. “You’re lucky, they’re cold tonight,” he said. “Usually they’re warm as pisswater.”

Fawn wrinkled her nose but softened slightly. At least he was speaking to her now.

For the next hour, Fawn and Tom cozied up to each other on a nearby tree stump. Claudia talked to Shipman, taking hits from a second proffered joint. I drank my beer, then another, trying to seem cavalier about it. I’d never been drunk, never been high. I worried that if Fawn knew this, she’d heckle me like Tom heckled Collin, so I drank like I’d be tested on it later, swallowing as fast as I could and hiding the shuddering that
dogged me through my first can, which was bitter and smelled a little like alfalfa silage, a little like vomit. Collin sat near me, but didn’t speak to me or anyone else. Instead, he poked at the fire with a long stick and pitched pebbles into the flames. I watched him, thinking it was something Patrick Fettle would do, at least the Patrick I knew when I was nine.

Apparently Fawn was watching Collin too. “I’ve got a great idea,” she said, leaving Tom and coming up to where Collin crouched next to the fire. She touched her beer can lightly, proprietarily, to the top of Collin’s head then turned to me and said, “What do you say we get you kids really drunk?”

I woke up at seven thirty the next morning feeling like someone had whacked me in the head with a shovel and then shoved dirty socks in my mouth. All in all, I’d had four beers and a few hits off a cigarette Fawn had begged from Tom. He smoked Mores, like Telly Savalas, long and slim, the color of burned toast. They looked exotic and tasted like tar stuck to the bottom of a shoe. When I inhaled, I coughed for a full minute. Fawn had laughed at me before lifting the cigarette from my fingers to blow a pretty legitimate-looking smoke ring toward Tom.

Fawn slept until noon, but I went on with our morning routine anyway. I ate a cold peach then read
’Teen
while I softened my cuticles in a dish of vegetable oil. I washed the smoke out of my hair and shaved my legs twice and buffed my feet with a pumice stone. By the time Fawn finally woke up, I was on the lawn, tanning.

“You’ve got some nice color already,” Fawn said, walking up with her towel and a glass of tea.

“Really? Thanks,” I said, flushing with pride.

When Fawn stretched out, she groaned. “Man, am I hungover. You?”

“I feel terrible,” I said.

“Then you did everything right.”

We drowsed for the better part of an hour before Skinny Man’s garage door rolled up with a grinding whir. Standing just inside the door, he held a long spray nozzle in one hand, a squat silver canister in the other, and wore an all-white jumpsuit and white sneakers. He looked like a beekeeper.

Fawn sat up straighter and adjusted her bathing-suit straps. “What the fuck is he up to now?” she said.

He waddled down the drive toward the curb, his elbows and knees jutting through the white suit fabric. When he got there, he put the canister down, to peer, hunchbacked, at we knew not what. Sidewalk cracks? Dead leaves?

Fawn stood up. “I’m going to go talk to him,” she said. “You wait here.”

“You’re going over there?”

“Sure, it’ll be fun.” Tugging at her suit bottom once, as if for luck, she sauntered right across the street and up to him as if this were a thing that happened all the time.

As Fawn approached, he shot straight up as though spring-loaded, dropping his canister on his foot. It was pathetic, a move right out of vaudeville. He and Fawn started talking, and after a minute, he picked up his canister and proceeded to walk Fawn around the perimeter of his yard, pointing occasionally. Was he giving her a guided tour of the lawn? Identifying the flora?

When Fawn came back she flopped down on her towel, looking entirely satisfied. “Earwigs,” she said.

“Earwigs?”

“Apparently he’s got an infestation.”

“Gross. So what’s he like?”

“Weirder than weird. He says he’s got a pool in back and that we can come over anytime we want and swim.”

“Really?”

“It’s probably one of those aboveground jobs or worse, he’s
got a little paddling pool. You know, plastic with little swimming goldfish and octopuses.” She gathered her hair up into a handheld ponytail then released it again. “He acts all nice and everything, but he’s totally perverted. He’s been dying to see our tits for a month. What do you say, should we show him?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I’m not serious, ditzoid. But it would be funny, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, though inwardly I was revolted.

“Speaking of tits, Tom tried to get up my shirt last night.”

I had actually witnessed this the night before as a kind of extended wrestling match: Fawn fending Tom’s hands off as he retreated, then tried again, then attempted to go up the back of her shirt and around the side. “Wow,” I said, not wanting Fawn to think I was spying on her. “That’s pretty forward of him.”

“I guess so. He’s cute though, don’t you think? I seriously considered giving in, but it’s more fun to see them work for it.”

“Mm hmmm,” I said vaguely. Fawn would soon know or guess just how limited I was in the romance department, but I was trying to stall for as long as possible. “So, are you two a couple now?”

“I just met the guy. It’s not like we’re engaged because he tried to feel me up. Geez.”

“But you like him, right?”

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes with a sigh. “Maybe. We’re going out again tonight, so ask me tomorrow.”

For a split second, the sun seemed to pulse. I squinted and shook my head to clear it. “Oh? Where are you going?”

“You’re invited too, stupid. What? Did you think I was ditching you already?”

“No, of course not,” I said, relief sinking all the way through me.

W
hen we arrived at Turner Park to meet Tom, he and the others were waiting next to an Econoline panel van in the main parking lot. “This is it,” Tom said. “My new ride.”

“Wow, it’s really nice,” Fawn cooed, but it wasn’t nice at all. It was stark white with two bucket seats up front. The back was unfinished, not even carpet laid down, but Tom insisted he had big plans for it, curtains, a platform bed, a custom paint job, and a mural, though he was torn between the black horsemen of the apocalypse and a rising phoenix, with flames licking across the hood.

“Horsemen,” said Fawn. “Definitely.” She hopped in, claiming the front seat without waiting for an invitation from Tom, playing the girlfriend to the hilt. “So where are we going?”

The rest of us climbed into the back, sitting where we could as Tom slammed the doors closed with a clang. Claudia crawled over to crouch on one of the wheel wells, her skates off for once, and I followed suit. We had spent every night for a week straight with Tom and his crew, and I was beginning to really like Clau
dia in particular. She was my age, fifteen, and had been in my grade at Keaton the year before, but in another homeroom. The next year we would both be sophomores at Warren Wilson, which was enough of a bonding factor for me. I didn’t like to think about the year to come, about what would follow the end of summer and Fawn’s inevitable return to Phoenix, but when I did, it was a relief to know I would have at least one friend there. Claudia was easy to talk to and sunnier, more untroubled than anyone I had ever met. She seemed to think the best of everyone, unlike Fawn, who kept a mental checklist of everyone’s faults. In private, Fawn had told me she thought Claudia had too many freckles to be seriously pretty. “And what’s with those roller skates?” she had added. “Are they glued onto her feet or something?”

I had laughed in agreement, but was inwardly happy to have Claudia around—skates, freckles, and all—now that Tom was eclipsing Fawn’s attention.

After we left the parking lot, we just drove around town for a while, listening to the throbbing radio. No one talked or moved except to take the joint that was making its way around the van. I knew enough to pinch it, now, and even how to inhale—though there was still an embarrassing amount of coughing.

“If you don’t cough, you don’t get off,” Shipman said, lifting the joint from my fingers to take it, in one prolonged inhalation, down to the red-rimmed nub.

Shipman was clearly his last name, but no one was offering his first, and I didn’t ask. He was impossibly tall, with a three-inch Afro that he groomed obsessively with a metal pick he kept tucked in his back pocket. Although Shipman wasn’t much of a talker, I didn’t take it personally. When I crawled into the back of the van, my skirt hiking up a bit too high, my breasts threatening to slide out of the halter I had borrowed from Fawn, he had nodded at me appreciatively. It was a welcoming look he gave
me, and I knew it was more than all right with him if I wanted to stick around. Tom was a tougher nut to crack. More distant and unreadable. Sometimes he seemed not to notice I was alive. Sometimes I felt his eyes connect with mine in a way that set my bones melting. Just then, however, I doubted I could have gotten his attention or Fawn’s if I’d stripped down to nothing. The two were focused only on each other and the radio. Their bodies leaned toward each other magnetically as Fawn flipped through the tuner and Tom thumped on the steering wheel, the dash, anytime she found something good.

When “Bennie and the Jets” came on, Fawn turned the volume knob hard. The song had recently been released as a single and had become, overnight, our absolute favorite. It was nothing like anything on
Honky Chateau
, an album we loved, like everyone did. While the songs on that record jangled and careened, “Bennie and the Jets” panted and hissed. Singing along, Fawn and I hissed back as convincingly as we could. Elton John understood us. Or we understood ourselves through him. And the lyrics were irrelevant.
Plug into the faithless
? Yes. Absolutely.

At the first notes, I began to move my shoulders, pivoting from the waist, and Claudia joined in. I was certain Fawn would turn around any second and say something to acknowledge our song, but she didn’t. She just sat next to Tom, swaying, finger-combing her hair, then shifted closer to him so that the edges of their thighs touched.

I wasn’t jealous of Tom, exactly. Or maybe I was. Maybe I was jealous of them both. Although Fawn was obviously happier than she had been before Tom arrived on the scene, I missed the time before, when it was just us; when we would spend our evenings walking the neighborhood barefoot, singing. Now, as soon as dusk fell, the fireflies waking up to begin their hula dance of love, Fawn began her own dance, stepping into clean “date”
panties, brushing her hair a billion times, stalking the mirror on pimple patrol, and splashing Love’s Baby Soft behind her knees. I was on my own, trying to get even a few seconds of mirror time so I could tame my duckling hair with water and hair spray and a little luck from the hair gods.

I wanted Fawn to like Tom a little less, but I also understood why that couldn’t happen. For all of Tom’s aloofness, his bad skin, his skinny-as-a-rail boy hips, he had something my
’Teen
magazines described without daring to define it: charisma. I found myself drawn to watch him no matter what he was doing, no matter what demeaning thing he was saying to Collin, even against my own good sense. He was clearly earmarked for Fawn and mostly acted as if he didn’t know I existed. But when he
did
look at me, his eyes, which were a pale yellow-green, a rare and disturbing color, seemed to issue a dare.

I was the one who suggested, finally, that we drive out to Interstate 80 and check out the rest stop Raymond and his crew had been demolishing for months. We’d driven by it once—Raymond, myself, and Fawn, on the way to Davenport on an errand—and it had looked cool, the earth-moving equipment glowing yellow-orange in the rubble, dwarfed by I-beams, steel girders, and mountains of dirt. Fawn seconded the motion and go we did, though later I felt a little guilty and disloyal. Raymond would have had kittens if he’d known we were there, tossing empty beer cans into the shovel of the backhoe he drove every day, clambering up onto the head of the steamroller and daring each other to jump. But it was an amazing place, a postapocalyptic moonscape. Chewed concrete lay in mountainous piles. Unearthed water pipes loomed, backlit, like remnants of an abandoned colony.

I was having such a good time, and had become so pleasantly hazed over by the beer, “warm as pisswater” though it was, that
I barely noticed when the pairing off happened. Tom and Fawn tottered off to “explore.” Her idea. Shipman and Claudia went to the van for more beer, but then didn’t come back. Collin and I sat alone for five minutes or more before either of us spoke.

“How’d that rug ever turn out?” he asked finally.

“What?” I shook my head a little, trying to clear the beer fuzz from my brain.

“The rug you were working on in Home Ec. It was a horned owl, with big yellow eyes.”

“I never finished it,” I said. I peered at him through the dark, trying to place him at one of the low tables in Mrs. Forge’s classroom, making a macramé plant hanger, or behind one of the Singer sewing machines. “Were you in that class?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I sat right behind you, but we never talked or anything. I don’t think you talked to anyone, come to think of it. You were pretty shy.”

“I guess I was. I was new, you know.”

“Yeah, that’s always hard. You came when we were still in the cooking section of the class, when we were making haystack cookies. Remember those cookies?”

I did. They were awful—little mounds of coconut covered with condensed milk and melted chocolate bar, all of it congealing on waxed paper. “Refrigerator cookies” Mrs. Forge had called them, “for those days when it’s just too hot to cook.”

“How do you remember this stuff?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I just do.”

I looked over at Collin, his face a pleasant blob ten feet from me, where he sat up against a tower of orange pylons. He didn’t look away.

“You wore a windbreaker to school,” he said. “It was January. You must have been freezing.”

“I thought I was going to die, it was so cold. I had just moved here from California, and my uncle didn’t take me shopping for a while.”

“Yeah, California. That’s what I heard.”

“Heard where? From who?”

“I don’t know. Around.”

And that’s when something clicked, one abacus bead in my brain coming down against another solidly to deliver this simple math: Collin remembered me, noticed me. He was noticing me now and it felt good, felt like a kind of power. I gazed steadily at Collin in the dark and tried to see him too, to remember and then revise what I had seen before and criticized. He was tragically buttoned-up and sort of helpless, true, but for all that wasn’t bad to look at. When Tom wasn’t around for comparison, Collin didn’t look pudgy in the least. The hair was good: dark brown, soft-looking, curly. His eyes were a warm toffee color, and he had clear skin that flushed easily. All in all, he wasn’t bad, and could even be said to have a Bobby Fisher quality—a little too smart and a little too quiet, maybe, but cute enough.

At that moment, I heard and then saw Fawn and Tom coming toward us in the gloaming. The four of us made our way to the van where Claudia and Shipman lay passed out on the floor in back, Claudia’s shirt twisted in a suspicious way, her skirt bunched up around her panties.
Claudia and Shipman?
I thought.
Really?
But then the obvious and immediate answer came to me in Fawn’s voice, in my head:
Everything has sex, retard
.

On the way home, Collin reached for my hand; his fingertips were dry and warm and steady. Squeezing once, he let his hand relax around mine, and we just sat that way, not looking at each other, not talking. The touch buzzed lightly between us, like a string telephone line running between two windows.

Half an hour later, Tom killed the lights a few hundred yards from Raymond’s mailbox. “Last stop,” he said, then leaned over to kiss Fawn good night. The back of the van was a cavern. I peered into the pale smudge of Collin’s face, which bobbed slightly when I blinked. The closest thing to a boyfriend I’d
ever had was Patrick Fettle, and that had begun and ended in an unspectacular way. But somehow I knew that if I wanted Collin as a boyfriend, I could have him. Maybe Fawn’s confidence with boys was starting to rub off on me or maybe, now that I was no longer a hermit, I could read boys’ signals more clearly. I knew that Collin thought I was pretty. I knew that he wanted to kiss me.

“Bye,” I said. “I had fun.”

“Me too.”

I closed my eyes, but nothing happened.

If the world had been a different kind of place and the rules less rigid, less clear, I might have kissed
him
, might have touched him, even, the way I wanted to be touched. As it was, I had no choice but to head for the door, crawling indelicately on my hands and knees around the still-collapsed Claudia. That’s when Collin reached out for me, his fingers pressing closed around my ankle, circling the skin above my sandal.

“Good night,” he said, and it was sort of sweet that he was scared. He liked me, I could tell, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. Up front, Fawn and Tom were panting and moaning. How was I supposed to be satisfied with scared and sweet?

“Night,” I said.

I closed the door and stood next to the van, waiting for Tom and Fawn to stop their wrestling. When Fawn finally did get out, her hair was tousled and her face was damp. We stood together, silently watching Tom’s taillights fade up Twenty-sixth Street until they were the size of gumdrops. Fawn exhaled tiredly, pleasantly. It was three a.m.

It wasn’t until we got right in front of Raymond’s house that we noticed a strange car in the driveway. It was a green sedan with some sort of glitter in the paint so that it sparkled a little, even under the low streetlight. We peered into the driver’s side window. It was clean as a whistle with no identifying trash on
the floorboards, but there was a single tube of lipstick, like a coppery bullet, lying in the passenger seat.

A woman’s car.

Fawn and I shared a meaningful look and then, without speaking, without so much as a nod to each other, walked with unified purpose around the side of the house, past our own window on the screened porch, and toward Raymond’s room. When we rounded the corner at the back, bending to a slinking pose, my heart began to thud, a hockey puck knocking around. What would we see? What, God forbid, would happen if Raymond caught us spying on him? What could we possibly say in our defense?

When we got to his window, there was the slimmest crack where the blinds had not been fully drawn. Fawn stood on tiptoe and strained, her belly touching the siding, to peer in. “You’ve got to see this,” she whispered. “He’s doing her in the
butt
. And he’s
huge
, like a horse. I’ve never
seen
such a big dick. Come here,” she urged in a menacing whisper. “Come look.”

I felt a sick thrill. I didn’t want to see Raymond having sex, and I kind of did too.

Nodding, I belly-crawled along the side of the house as Fawn had done. When I was near enough, Fawn slid over to give me the entire peephole. I almost couldn’t open my eyes, but when I did, my breath held, my chest on the verge of collapse, there was Raymond’s bed, neatly made. A lamp was on, but the room was empty.

When my eyes snapped back, Fawn was grinning widely:
Gotcha.
I had a millisecond to choose whether to get angry at Fawn, and surely be made fun of, or make fun of myself by laughing along with the joke, rolling my eyes at my own gullibility.

There was no choice: I laughed.