Air (20 page)

Seb dropped off his sister at their parents' apartment in Brickell, which was a relief, as she hadn't said a single word except “hi.” She was so shy, she was starting to make me feel nervous, and squashed together in the front of Seb's truck, I could feel that she was actually trembling.

“Nice to meet you!” I called after her, as she clambered out of the truck, but she murmured something I couldn't make out and dashed toward the entrance to a grand apartment block.

“I was hoping you'd live in a house with an alligator lounging by the pool,” Lily said to Seb, disappointed. “I can't go home from Florida without seeing an alligator. It's practically my life's dream.”

“You never seen the Everglades?” Seb said.

“Never.”

“We could go now. It's nearly four already, and it's not far. We'll be there for sun-up.”

“Definitely,” Lily said. “That sounds like just what my sister needs.”

“Yeah, but the contest.”

“The contest is Saturday. We'll be back by early afternoon.”

“Zeke will wonder where I am.” I thought about texting him, just in case he was looking for me, or waiting for me to come and find him.

“Screw that guy,” Seb said, gritting his teeth.

“You don't like Zeke?” Lily asked.

“The dude who pushed me into a wall so I had to punch him in the face? Sure, great guy.”

“He was having a really bad night,” I said, although it hadn't been that great for me either, and I hadn't assaulted anyone.

“Just tell him you're going with your sister to the Everglades and you'll see him later.”

Because Zeke would be so cool with that. But then, Zeke had always encouraged me to embrace opportunities, and he'd probably be glad to have a few hours of peace and quiet.

I took out my phone, started a message to Zeke and tapped the words “I'm with Lily. Need some space. Talk tomorrow.”

But it didn't feel right. “I really shouldn't go off on a night road trip without telling him. Maybe you should drop us back at Lily's hotel?”

“Iris, if you lived in a prison your whole life and could only pick one thing to see, it'd be an Everglades sunrise.”

How could I turn that down?

“Could we take a ride on one of those airboats with the giant fans on the back that are so noisy you have to wear ear defenders? Actually,” I said, looking through my wallet, “I have a business card here for mates' rates.”

“So then we have to go,” Lily said, squeezing my hand.

I wasn't entirely sure that I understood what was happening. It felt like I was about to experience one of those once-in-a-lifetime adventures that old people tell you you'll always regret turning down. And it wasn't like I was cheating on Zeke. I just wanted to see the sights.

“We'll spend the morning there, and I can have you back in South Beach by two. Seriously, like your sister says, you can't come to Florida without seeing an alligator.”

I really, really wanted to see the Everglades.

Seb's Ford pick-up truck was ancient, but he'd given it a paint job and decent alloys, which made it look kind of awesome. I told him as much and he said, “What kind of car do you have back in England, Iris?”

“A van,” Lily said, “and before that, she had a very nice skateboard with some very nice stickers on it.”

“Yeah, the van was a birthday present. I'll have to book in for driving lessons when I'm home.”

Seb looked taken aback at this.

“You don't have your driver's permit? You're sixteen, right?”

“Yeah, but you can't get your provisional in the UK until you're seventeen, and I just turned seventeen today . . . err, yesterday.”

“Oh, man, it's your birthday? Why didn't you say? Happy birthday!”

“Uh, why did you think I was sixteen?”

“That's what it said on the Billabong website.”

Seb had checked me out? I absorbed this information and tried not to read too much into it. Everyone googled everyone.

“Surfers need to drive, Iris. You can't not drive. That's straight-up crazy.”

“So people keep telling me.”

Seb took a moment to think about something and then said, “Do you wanna drive my truck? I could teach you how.”

“You have to do that,” Lily said. “No question.”

“Seriously? You'd let me, a total stranger, drive your truck?”

“Yeah. I can't think of a reason why not. It's not like you've been drinking, right?”

I could think of a lot of reasons why not, the same reasons that had led me to say no to Zeke's offer of the same, reasons like the fact that it was probably illegal to teach some foreign girl to drive.

“No, I haven't been drinking. I stay off alcohol for at least twenty-four hours before a contest.” A personal rule of Zeke's that I'd picked up. “But, I mean, what if I crash it?”

“You won't.” He braked as some enormous lorry pulled out of a junction directly in front of us.

“Jackass,” he yelled, and pulled a face.

“Maybe I'll skip that driving lesson,” I said, envisaging our fiery deaths.

“The Everglades road is real quiet. We'll do it there.”

“I can't believe we're actually going to the Everglades,” Lily said, cracking her knuckles and blowing on them.

“Is it creepy down there?” I asked, thinking about a TV drama I'd once seen, where aliens were hiding in the Everglades mangrove swamps.

“Man, it's another world. It's basically a million acres of flooded jungle what's not to like? You know, they eat bullfrogs down there. They're kinda a delicacy.”

“Oh,” Lily said. “That seems . . . unnecessary.”

“It's a cultural thing. Guys go out at night. Frogging. And they just spear those suckers behind the eyes. Then they skin them, cover them in batter and fry them up. You see them on menus everywhere down in those parts.”

“What do they taste like?” Lily asked. “Don't tell me: chicken.”

“Like heaven on earth. And it's not just frogs: there's wild pigs, panthers, black bears, turtles, rattlesnakes and these crazy cottonmouth snakes that'll kill you in under an hour.”

He gave me a wink and that's when I realized: he reminded me of someone. Daniel. Except with none of the psycho.

“Um,” Lily said, “perhaps we should go to the Florida Keys instead. Find Flipper.”

“Naw, you're gonna dig it so hard. There's a million alligators. Find them in every ditch, swamp and backyard. The big lazy road gators? My pop calls those welfare alligators.”

“
Welfare
alligators?”

“Yeah, like on state benefits. Cos they just hang around all day doing nothin'.”

I bristled a bit. There'd been a time, not long after my dad had left, when my family had relied on benefits to keep a roof over our heads. I didn't remember any sitting around doing nothing. We were always doing something, and it was never anything fun like watching TV or playing computer games. Cleaning people's houses for cash was generally the order of the day, and the people who owned the houses were often arsey about paying us, which just made the whole thing even more unpleasant.

Seb stopped at traffic lights and, with an enormous roar, a freight train crossed the road behind us. I hadn't even seen a sign for a train crossing.

“Exciting,” Lily said, watching the train roll into the distance.

“How can you even drive here?” I said, feeling my heart banging in my chest.

“It's not so bad. Beats some of the places I've traveled.”

“You've been abroad? I read that, like, only five percent of Americans have passports.”

Seb didn't seem to know how to take this remark. “More like forty. I backpacked through Europe after high school.”

“Wait, how old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

I looked at Lily, who didn't seem bothered by this information. He was way older than I'd thought. I'd assumed he was around eighteen.

“So what do you think of Florida?”

I looked around. At night, with the roads empty and lit by artificial light, it looked like the places had been planned out in a potato stamp, which had just been printed and printed to infinity. Red Lobster. McDonald's. KFC. Ruby Tuesday, Wendy's. Subway. Burger King. Mall. Red Lobster. McDonald's. KFC. Ruby Tuesday. Wendy's . . .

“It's pretty,” I said, and Lily made a slight coughing sound.

The fast-food outlet pattern went on for miles and miles until we reached the edges of suburbia, where the sleazy strip clubs started appearing. I didn't mention them and neither did Lily or Seb.

Eventually the roads started to look more rural, and in another hour or so we were deep in Everglades territory. He pulled over at the side of the road and said, “Switch places?”

“Really? Now?”

“Be bold, Iris. You can drive this thing,” Lily said. “It's easy. Believe in yourself.”

I sat in the driver's side, Seb rode in the middle, with Lily shotgun, and we belted up.

“This is going to be weird, especially since you guys drive on the wrong side of the road.”

“Hey, it's you Brits that drive on the wrong side of the road. Most of the world drives on the right,” Seb pointed out, “and anyway, the basics are the same, so you'll pick it up easy.”

It still seemed dodgy to me.

“I don't want to wrap it around a tree, Seb.”

Seb laughed. “You have me as a teacher. I'm right here with you. You'll be great.”

“Iris,” Lily said, “get a move on, before we're carjacked.”

I put my hands on the steering wheel, and Seb said, “OK, so easy off the brake and gently touch the gas.”

At least it was an automatic, so I didn't have to worry about stalling.

I did what he said, then pulled out into the road, completely forgetting to signal.

“You need to look a little further up the road so you can steer better.”

“Yes, Iris, you've been looking about two feet ahead of the bonnet and your steering is shit,” Lily said helpfully.

I stopped at a red light and Seb said, “Right turn. Don't forget the blinker.”

When the lights changed to green, I put my foot down and was suddenly in the next lane across. I hadn't realized how powerful the engine was. I steered back into the first lane, and looked at Seb, waiting for him to tell me off, but he didn't seem at all fazed, as if me potentially causing a fatal road-traffic accident was nothing to worry about.

I drove for about five minutes without seeing another car, and then some guy in an old Ford appeared in my rearview and started honking his horn. I was doing fifty and the road signs said fifty-five.

“Jeepers creepers!” Lily said, obviously finding it all very amusing.

“What's his problem?” I said.

“Guess the dude wants you to go faster.”

“He can go around me if he's in such a hurry.”

Seb waved the other driver on. As the guy overtook me, he honked again and gave us the finger.

“Such a gentleman,” Lily said drily.

I looked at the speedometer and saw that our own speed had dropped to about forty, without me even noticing.

We drove past signs advertising alligator tours and one even had a photo of a severed alligator head on it, which was, according to Seb, a classic tourist souvenir.

“Maybe you could give the engine just a little more of a whirl?” Seb said.

I put my foot down and watched the speedometer move past fifty and then sixty. I looked at Seb and he was alert, ready to intervene if he needed to.

Lily's face was turned to the window and I wondered if she was drifting off to sleep. I didn't feel the least bit tired. My body was flooded with endorphins and adrenalin.

Then, we hit the pothole. Not just any pothole. This crater was about six-feet square.

“Easy!” Seb shouted, grabbing the wheel.

The car bounced, and I eased off the accelerator, but it wasn't enough, because walking calmly across the road was a tiny alligator.

I swerved, too hard and too fast, the truck's sensitive steering taking us right off the road before Seb could react to counter my mistake.

Somehow the truck didn't roll, but we bumped our way between trees down toward the edge of a swamp.

“Shit,” Lily said, bracing herself with her legs, and gripping the handle above the door.

“Hold on,” Seb yelled. He'd grabbed the wheel and was doing his best to steer around the trees. I was useless, just gone, paralyzed with fear. Zeke's face kept flashing into my brain. Our last words were said in anger. And how could he possibly be expected to understand why I was with my sister and another guy hundreds of miles away?

He'd hate me, but I'd be dead so he'd feel bad for hating his dead girlfriend and he'd drink or meth his way into an early grave.

We clipped a tree and I swore in pain.

The truck was slowing to a halt, and before the wheels had even stopped turning Lily and Seb had jumped out and Lily was
trying to yank me out of my window, since the door was completely jammed.

It was so, so dark. The moon had been bright, but under the tree canopy I could hardly see my knees.

“Help me out here, Seb,” she shouted, and he hip-checked her out the way and took over.

I wanted to answer but I couldn't stop shaking. I could feel the truck sinking into the mush of the wetlands, but I just sat there clutching the steering wheel, totally unable to move. My feet turned cold and I saw water in the footwell. The truck was listing; the passenger side sinking faster.

“Iris, shift your bloody ass,” Lily was saying to me.

“Come on, girl,” Seb said. “Move.”

I tried to undo my seat belt, but my hands were shaking so hard that I couldn't manage it. Seb leaned over me, flicked on the truck's internal light and unclipped the seat belt himself. Then he got hold of me by the armpits and pulled me through the window.

I tried to get my head together and assess the situation. The truck's headlights were shining two bright beams into the swamp, and I scanned the water for any movement that might be an alligator. Or one of those snakes. The swamp wasn't quiet. The noise of crickets, frogs and the rustle of vegetation unnerved me. This was not a dead place; it was teeming with unseen life.

We sat on the ground a little way from the truck and watched it sink halfway into the mire, where it finally settled, but at least it wasn't fully submerged. It would be tricky to winch it out of there, with the soft ground and the steep bank,
and I had no doubt it wouldn't be cheap. I'd probably caused at least a grand's worth of damage. I looked at Seb's wrist, which he was touching gingerly. Maybe he'd sprained it, yanking me out.

“Nice one, sis,” Lily said, sighing and looking up through a small gap in the trees at the stars. “How are we going to get back? Hitch? Or can you call someone, Seb?”

“I really don't want to call my folks. My dad is gonna go crazy, and it'll be even worse if I have to haul him out of bed.”

“What about your friends?” I said.

“Yeah, they're not gonna drive hours to see us in the middle of the night. I'll call roadside assistance.”

He had no service. None of our phones did.

“It'll be better once we're up on the road. I'll try again then.”

He waded to the truck and retrieved a toolbox, some clothes and his spare tire from the back.

“My dad fixed up that truck for me,” he said. “Took the guy two years. Either of you want my jacket?”

It was uncomfortably humid in the Everglades, even on a spring night, and panic had made me sweat even more. Lily and I both said no to the jacket offer, so Seb put it on the ground, for us to sit on.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “Do you have insurance?”

“Not the kind that will pay for a British chick running it off the road. It's my fault for making you drive.”

“I'll pay for it,” I said. “Just tell me how much.”

“Forget it.”

“Well, at least we're not freezing our asses off,” Lily said, determined to look on the bright side. “I bet it's practically arctic in Cornwall.”

I ignored her and turned to Seb again, touching him on the arm.

“I said I'll pay.”

“Sure you will,” he said, with no conviction whatsoever. “And tomorrow I'll put on a cape and save a girl nose-diving into Niagara Falls.”