Recovery Road (4 page)

H
ey, Maddie,” Stewart says when he sees me getting out of the van. “Hey,” I say casually.

His older guy friend is heading inside, but Stewart hangs back. He waits for me. “I didn’t see you sitting back there.”

“Oh yeah,” I joke. “I’m a back-of-the-van sorta girl.”

He smiles at this. It warms me all over.

We walk along behind the other people. We buy our tickets. Stewart doesn’t say anything but he seems to want to stay near me.

It makes sense. We’re the only ones under thirty in the entire group.

“You want popcorn?” I ask Stewart in the lobby.

“Sure,” he says, and he comes with me. The same pimply local boy scoops us out two bags of popcorn. He smiles up at Stewart respectfully.

We go into the theater and sit with the other people. We’re on the end. We sit right next to each other.

The previews start. I find myself laughing at stuff that’s not even funny. Mostly because I’m so nervous.

The movie plays. It’s a supernatural horror thriller. I hadn’t realized this. Scary movies freak me out.

I get through it by closing my eyes and humming to myself during the worst parts. Stewart doesn’t seem to notice. At least, he doesn’t say anything.

When the lights come up, we all shuffle out. The group of us cross the street to the donut place. I’m trying to stick near Stewart but then his guy friend comes over and grabs him away. I get stuck walking with two women I don’t know.

Which pisses me off.

Inside the donut place, our group takes up two tables. I get stuck in the coffee line, and end up sitting far away from Stewart. There’s nothing I can do. I watch him from afar. He sits there: shy, silent, adorable. Everyone loves him. The older women especially. They want to hold him to their bosoms. It kills me to see this.

The men dominate the conversation. They tell their usual war stories: The time they got arrested. The time they crashed their car.

Whatever.

I try not to stare at Stewart. How can I not? He is beautiful and sad and perfect in some fascinating way. If only it was the two of us. If only we could talk.

The clock is against me. Only nine more minutes until the van comes. I stare into my coffee. He’s forgotten I’m here, so it doesn’t make any difference. I don’t know what I was thinking.

But then at 9:30, when we all gather outside, he comes over to me.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say back.

I try to think of something else to say. “I saw you with the maintenance crew,” I manage.

“You did?”

“You were out in the lawn.”

“Oh yeah. Fixing the sprinklers.”

“What happened to the sprinklers?”

“They break sometimes in the winter.”

“Oh.”

The van comes. Everyone gets in. I sit in the back and slouch down like I do. Other people get in. Stewart gets in. He comes back and sits beside me.

“I guess I’m a back-of-the-van person too,” he says, smiling.

We drive. We’re sitting pretty far apart. But I look over at him and he kind of looks at me and then he laughs.

“What?” I say.

“I don’t know. It’s just funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“That we meet like this,” he says.

“What? In a van?”

“No, just…the whole thing.”

We’re talking quietly, so that the other people won’t hear. They’re all caught up in their own conversations anyway.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about it,” I say.

“Maybe it’s not funny.”

“I’m glad you’re sitting here,” I tell him, my heart pounding as I say it.

“Yeah?”

“I wish we coulda talked more tonight,” I say.

He stares straight ahead. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

I look away. My heart is thudding in my chest. I watch out the window as a farmhouse drifts by.

I turn back to him. I summon every ounce of courage I possess. “Maybe we should meet up somewhere,” I say quietly.

He looks at me, surprised. “I thought boys weren’t supposed to…you know…fraternize with girls.”

“So we won’t. We’ll just hang out.”

He looks at me in the dark. “Where would we do that?”

“How about the Rite Aid, tomorrow at eight.”

He thinks about the Rite Aid. He thinks about it a long time.

“Or not,” I finally say. “If you don’t want to.”

“No,” he says. “That might be okay.”

T
he next day, I am very businesslike as I go about my routine. I get up, get dressed, walk through the rain to my job at the laundry room. I wash sheets for three hours and then go to my group therapy, where I make up some crap about my parents so I can space out and think about meeting Stewart.

After that, I go home and eat dinner and watch
Access Hollywood
with my housemates. At 7:30, I go to my room and change my clothes. Margarita is reading on her bunk. I look at myself in the mirror. I glance down at Margarita, who smiles at me innocently.

Is it wrong to meet Stewart?
I wonder. I hadn’t really thought about that.

When I’m ready, I find an old umbrella in the main closet. It’s broken of course, but it’ll work. I go outside and open it, and then stand for a moment on the porch. A strange feeling comes over me then, as I stare into the dark street. It’s not fear exactly. It’s more like a sense of the mystery of the world.

But whatever. I’ve got a cute boy to meet. I hop down the porch steps and set out through the rainy night.

The Rite Aid is bright and clean inside. I shake the water from my umbrella. I walk around in my wet Converse. I cruise around once really fast, but I’m early, and I see that Stewart’s not here yet. I try to relax then. I read some greeting cards.

Eight o’clock comes. I walk through the aisles again, looking at the candy and the holiday stuff. A Christmas song is playing:
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…

Where is he?
I wonder. But I’m not mad. Not like I used to get.

Now I’m just numb.

He doesn’t come. It gets to be 8:20. 8:30. 8:40. I am sitting on the floor by the magazines when the manager finds me and tells me they close at 9:00. He is remarkably nice, considering I’ve been sitting on his floor for an hour, ruining his magazines.

At 8:50, I pick out some gum to buy. I don’t know where Stewart is. I tell myself it’s okay. He probably freaked out. Who wouldn’t, having some sixteen-year-old throwing herself at you? He probably thinks I’m out of my mind.

I finally walk up to the counter, and there, to my surprise, is Stewart, red-faced and wet.

“Hey,” he says, out of breath. “Sorry I’m late.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

I buy my gum. Stewart waits for me. He’s wearing the same skinny jeans, the hoodie, the military coat.

“I couldn’t get away,” he says. “That guy from the movie cornered me.”

“Did he not want you to come?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

I give him a piece of gum. “People here are kind of crazy,” I say. “Have you noticed that?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Outside, we chew our gum. We stand by the door of the Rite Aid and stare into the dripping darkness. We look at each other and kind of just…look at each other.

W
e decide to walk to an Exxon station on Highway 19. It’s pretty far away. It takes about thirty minutes to walk there.

We’re definitely not supposed to be that far from Spring Meadow, but neither of us mentions that.

We have my one umbrella and I wouldn’t mind squeezing together under it but it’s not raining hard so Stewart pulls his hoodie over his head.

There’s no streetlights out here in the country so it’s really dark, but our eyes get used to it enough to see the road. It’s kind of cool actually: walking through the misty darkness, surrounded by the towering evergreen trees.

Thirty minutes later the Exxon station appears like an oasis in the gloom. It has a little Handy Mart, which we are in need of. I follow Stewart inside, where we find a hot-chocolate machine. We dig through our pockets for change. Then Stewart turns and walks right into a beer refrigerator. It’s like an entire wall of beer. There’s everything: six-packs, tall boys, forties, short cases, mini-kegs. You can smell that sour beer smell. You can feel the carbonation in your bones.

For a moment, both of us freeze in place. The guy working there is in a little booth, reading his newspaper. We could totally steal anything we want.

I see Stewart’s whole body tighten up. Then he turns to me. Our eyes meet. We’re both like,
Holy shit
.

Stewart hurriedly turns back to the hot-chocolate machine. I go to the counter and quickly pay for two hot chocolates.

A second later we’re out of there.

Outside, there’s no place to go, no place to sit. So we sit on the ground, huddled together, our backs against the side of the Handy Mart.

I can tell Stewart’s a little shaken up.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“You looked like you saw a ghost in there.”

“I kinda did.”

We sip our hot chocolates. He lets his head rest back against the wall.

“Where are you from?” I ask him, changing the subject.

“Centralia.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s okay. Small town. How about you?”

“West Linn,” I say. “I live with my parents.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s the suburbs. Nice houses. Nice cars. Kids on Ritalin.”

“Sounds like fun.”

I drink my hot chocolate. I look at the small silver ring on his pinkie.

“Nice ring,” I say.

He looks at it, touches it. “It’s my grandmother’s.”

“Huh,” I say, secretly relieved.

“She died.” He holds it closer to his face. “She used to look out for me. A lot more than my own parents.”

He holds his hand toward me, so I can see the ring better. I take his cold fingers in mine. He has thick knuckles, dirty fingernails.

“She was the last thing holding me down,” he says, taking his hand back. “After that I sorta lost it.”

“It’s a nice ring,” I say. I drink my hot chocolate. We sit quietly for a while.

“So is this your first time in one of these places?” he asks, gesturing back toward Spring Meadow.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think of it?”

“I dunno. I mostly complain.”

“Do you believe all that stuff they say?” he asks. “You gotta change your whole life? Get new friends? Do everything different?”

“I guess,” I say. I pick at my paper cup. “I didn’t have that many friends to start with.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

A slow winter wind sways the treetops beyond the Exxon station. A low swooshing sound fills the air. I snuggle a little closer to Stewart.

A pickup truck pulls into the gas station. A man in a yellow rain slicker gets out and starts pumping his gas. Stewart watches the man. I watch Stewart. He has the most interesting face. It is beautiful, young, almost childlike, and yet with a power and authority in his features. In another time, he would have been a young warrior, or a Lost Prince exiled from his kingdom. But he’s from this time, this place, so he’s just some “at-risk” kid who can’t find a place for himself in the straight world.

We get up. We stand, stretch our legs, brush off our butts. We throw our empty cups in the trash, bumping into each other, our shoulders touching for a moment. We stay like that, touching.

Two of my fingers find their way into his coat pocket. His hand touches my shoulder. We pretend that it’s the cold, we just need to get warm for a second. We move close and hug in an odd, “friends” way. But then we don’t let go.

And then it changes to something else. A kind of exploration. Could we…? Would we…? We linger inside the question, holding each other, shifting our grips, trying it out. There is no rush, no hurry. There is no sense of time at all.

And then it changes again. To something more powerful. Something unstoppable. Like a wave in the ocean, pushing us, taking us somewhere. His face searches for me. His lips glance off my forehead, off my cheek. My whole body begins to tingle. He eases down farther, finds my mouth, kisses it.

He tastes like hot chocolate. His mouth is warm and silvery and milky and soft. It’s just a kiss at first, but then slowly I let myself go, I lose myself in his face, his breath, the contours of his mouth.

When we finally separate, we are both overwhelmed and embarrassed. We retreat back under the shelter of the awning. But now I stay close to him, burrowing into that army coat, pressing against him for warmth.

We kiss again, this time with more force. We mash up against the glass window of the Handy Mart. His hands slip inside my coat and find the curves of my waist.

We kiss until we are out of breath, and then he breaks it off and laughs and without completely releasing me, steers us both into the rain.

We run, arm in arm, across the cement, through the gas pumps, and onto the empty road. We sprint, racing for a moment down the wet asphalt. Then we laugh and slow down, finally stopping to hold each other and make out some more under the gray, misting sky.

In this way, we return home. It takes forever but we are not cold anymore. We don’t mind the rain. We laugh, skip, chase each other, nearly knock each other down. It’s like we’ve entered a separate reality. Like now it’s just the two of us, nothing else matters, no one else exists.

W
hen I finally get home, the lights are off. I creep quietly up the steps, unlock the door, go inside. A single lamp is on in the front room. The bedrooms are all dark, everyone is in their bunks, asleep.

I go into the bathroom and strip out of my wet clothes. I towel off and then sneak quietly into my room, where I slip on some dry underwear and a T-shirt. Margarita stirs in the next bunk. I crawl into my own bed and burrow into my comforter.

This is where I want to be now, alone with myself. Because I know that something has happened to me tonight, something that I’m not going to understand at first, something I need to just absorb and think about and get used to.

This is going to be hard for me. I can’t control this. I can’t stop what it will do to me.

But I want it. I want to be inside it, to feel it, forever.

I turn to the wall. I hear the other people breathing around
me, the creaking of the beds, the sound of the rain, falling harder now, outside on the window.

And then I feel something else. Something that’s totally new. I feel the tiniest sensation of hope.

Maybe my life isn’t over. Maybe my life has just begun.