The Disenchantments (27 page)

When I kiss her back, it feels important. It feels like life.

Bev turns over again, reaches for my hand.

And lying here right now, after everything, I fall in love with her again.

We find our way back to the diner and Melinda. Our note is untouched. We lean the bikes against the pole, and decide to leave the note where it is, make one more mark on the world.

When we get back to the motel I offer to stand outside with Bev while she has her cigarette, but she tells me that it’s something she wants to do by herself.

“Tour ended tonight,” she says. “So this is the last one.” She flips the lid, pulls one out. It looks skinny and long resting between her fingers. “Feel lucky you won’t be with me on the ride home tomorrow.”

She presses the box, a third full of cigarettes, into my palm. At the end of the block, a trash can waits under a streetlamp. I jog over and throw away the pack. When I get back to Bev, she is lighting up. The flame from her lighter illuminates her face and then goes dark. She takes a long drag.

“Good night,” I say.

“Good night.”

Once again, it’s late at night and I’ve given up on sleep.

Instead, I’m lying on the scratchy motel sheets with Alexa’s emergency flashlight propped up on a pillow beside
me, drawing the scenes from tonight from memory. The diner with its vinyl booths and our cups of coffee. The bicycles propped against the pole. Bev and me, in the grass, under stars.

I turn over onto my back, so exhausted that I feel like I’m floating. I close my eyes and see Bev’s face. Open them and see the dark, shadowed ceiling. Close them and see an airplane in its moment of ascent.

All of the girls are asleep. I can hear them breathing. I listen close, try to determine which breaths belong to whom. After a little while, I give up.

My phone is next to me in bed. I reach for it and move as quietly as I can, off the sheets, across the carpet, out the door into the night. I find the name that I want and press call even though it’s 4:49
A.M.

“Hey, bro,” Jasper says.

“What’s up,” I say. “Were you sleeping?”

“No, no,” he says, but his words sound heavy. “So how was René?”

“He was cool,” I say, but René isn’t why I called. I lean against the balcony, above the row of parked cars. The streetlights are lit; the sidewalks are empty.

“So listen,” I say. “I was thinking. Do you have a passport?”

I want to write Bev a letter on tiny scraps of paper and slip them in her purse for her to find later, mixed in with her own notes to herself. One sentence at a time with no order. Not a puzzle, just fragments. Or yes a puzzle, but a puzzle she could piece together in any way she wanted.

i remember when we were kids.

i wanted to say thank you.

it is what i wanted and it is not what i wanted.

i am afraid of losing you forever.

But I don’t do anything like that. Instead, I hug Alexa tightly before she climbs into the passenger seat. And then I stand, empty-handed by the driver’s-side door, as Bev gets ready to climb in.

“This is really happening,” she says. “You aren’t coming back with me.”

I take the keys out of my pocket and put them in her hand.

“It’s up to you to get Melinda home safe.”

She closes her hand around the keys.

Too much time passes while we stand here, not saying anything, while Alexa waits inside.

Finally, I say, “Hey, you know what?”

“What?”

“I forgot to tell you. You guys sounded good last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like
good
good.”

“Just in time for the last show,” she says. “Too little too late, maybe.”

She smiles: her nose crinkles, her crooked tooth shows. The cut in her lip is already almost healed, but her eyes are sad.

And then she is hugging me, and then she is pressing her mouth to my mouth, and then she is in the bus with the door shut and the engine running.

Jasper shows up late at night with a duffel bag and backpack, wearing a backward cap and a tank top that shows off the wings and arrows and leaves on his chest and shoulders.

He grabs my hand and we bro hug and he smiles wide and says, “Shit, man, we’re really doing this.”

“I still can’t believe you have a passport.”

“Yeah, well, I told you guys I had everything I needed to get out of town. For years I’ve kept my passport pinned up on the wall of my room, just as a reminder that I’d get out someday. I didn’t think I’d actually use it, though. I figured I’d start smaller than this.”

He drops all his stuff on Meg’s floor and collapses onto her roommate’s mattress.

“God, I hope Julia doesn’t arrive till tomorrow,” Meg laughs.

“What did your boss say?” I ask him.

“He got all sentimental, said he was losing a damn good tattoo artist.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah. And then he told me to get the fuck out of his shop. Let’s see that tattoo, Meg.”

She walks toward him.

He looks, says, “Goddamn, that’s beautiful.”

I can’t sleep. Again. I think about getting up and wandering the halls for a while but Jasper and I are not supposed to be here and I don’t want to get Meg in trouble.

I try to turn over without rustling the blankets too
much, and then I hear a whisper: “Colby, you awake?”

“Yeah,” I whisper back.

“Me too, bro. Can’t get to sleep. I keep thinking about that girl I used to date. The sort-of vegetarian?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“She let me give her this tattoo when we were sixteen. I told her she could pick whatever she wanted and she found this picture of a unicorn and she wanted it on the side of her hip so her mom wouldn’t ever see it. . . . I ran into her on my way out of town. I told her I was leaving. You should have seen her eyes get all wide when I told her where we were going.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say, and he says yeah, and continues his story.

Someone else who feels like talking in the middle of the night—it’s pitch black so I’m not afraid to smile at this news.

“Hey, Jasper,” I say, “when we get to Amsterdam I want you to do something for me.”

“Sure.”

“I want you to give me a tattoo. Of tulips.”

“Tulips?” he asks. Then he says, “Okay, bro. I guess tulips are cool.”

I smile up at the ceiling. “You’re not into it.”

“No,” he says, “it’s fine. People want all kinds of random shit. Tulips are fine.”

We’re quiet for a minute. Then he says, “Hey, you
should sketch me some tulips, you know? Then I can ink your sketch. That could look good.”

I picture a sketch of tulips, drawn kind of loose in pencil, like I draw pretty much everything.

“Yeah,” I say. “I like that. Maybe we could do some kind of really faint color. Like most of it is just the black ink but there’s a little color there. Like inside some of the petals and the leaves.”

“What colors? I mean obviously green, but maybe red? Like a pinkish red?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” I know the exact shade from the colored pencils I used all through school. I’ll show Jasper at an art store; we can mix the color to match it.

“Maybe yellow, too,” I say.

“Yellow’s tricky. Doesn’t show up that well. We could throw a little orange in there to kick up the tone, though.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can picture it. It looks so fucking good.”

“You’re right. I’m getting into it. These are gonna be some badass tulips.”

“I want it on the inside of my arm, like growing up from my wrist.”

“It’ll show up good there.” Jasper yawns. “But it’ll hurt.”

And I know that Jasper is talking about something specific, about needle puncturing skin, over and over, all the
way up the inside of my arm. Yes, it will hurt. But it won’t hurt the way leaving will hurt.

Everything that’s about to happen, everything that has happened in the last few days—it fills me with an ache so vast it takes me forever to compose myself. After some time, I manage to say, “It’s all right if it hurts.”

I wait for Jasper to respond, but instead I’m met with the quiet of two sleeping bodies breathing, the familiar feeling of being the only one awake.

I wake up on the dorm room carpet, roll over. Meg smiles a sleepy smile off the edge of her mattress.

“Good morning, sunshine,” she says.

At two o’clock the delivery guy comes and with it, my passport. We stand in the downstairs dorm lobby and I rip open the envelope. I show the passport to Jasper and Meg.

“I guess this means we’re ready,” I say.

“Shit,” Jasper says. “This is big. We’re really doing this.”

We go upstairs and pack up until the left side of the room is bare again and everything Jasper and I are going to
carry with us on trains and boats and international flights is on our backs and over our shoulders.

Meg sits cross-legged on her unmade, yellow bed, the photographs from our trip hanging above her. In her closet is the record player from Abbie’s shop, but she hasn’t discovered it yet.

“Don’t forget I was the first girl you saw almost-naked,” she says. “I don’t want to be overshadowed by the following evening’s events.”

“Colby,” Jasper says, “sounds like you have a story to tell me.”

I laugh, but as I’m laughing sadness rises in me. I look at Meg. It feels almost impossible to leave her.

But just then a girl in a low-cut shirt and jean shorts, a nose ring, and all these bracelets around both wrists, pushes into the room with her bags.

“Hey, guys,” she says, breathless, dropping her bags to the floor.

She looks from me, to Jasper, to Meg, pushes a strand of brown hair off her face and smiles.

“I’m Julia,” she says.

Meg and Julia exchange the customary greetings, and I remember leaving Walt’s house, wondering if this trip would be characterized by a series of endings. In a way, it has been. But that’s not exactly it. More than that, it’s been a crash-course in living. You get close to people. You get farther from them. You learn how much you love them, and
then you say good-bye, believing that you will be together again, someday, when your lives curve back into one another’s.

Meg wraps her arms around me.

“What color will your hair be next year?” I ask.

“You’ll have to come see me in order to find out.”

“Fair enough,” I tell her, and then Jasper and I are walking down the dorm stairs, and into the sun, and to the bus stop, waiting for the shuttle that will take us to the airport.

Even though Jasper hasn’t flown since he was five years old, he knows exactly what to do when going through security. He has everything sealed and separated and ready to go.

“I’ve done my research,” he says, pulling off his Vans, tossing them along with his cap and his belt into the plastic tray to be X-rayed. “I even printed out a Eurostar map. We can check it out on the plane.”

Portland International Airport is high ceilinged and bright, every surface reflective. As we find our terminal I see us everywhere—in the shop windows, on the silver sides of escalators. We reach our gate and soon after, we’ve walked the long jetway and down the aisle to our seats in the economy section, where we take our seats next to a dark-haired woman in a fuzzy purple sweater, our neighbor for the next nine hours.

Jasper looks pale.

“You okay?” I ask him.

He nods, but then he’s muttering that he’ll be right back, and I watch him as he moves against the current of boarding passengers, on his way to the bathroom.

“He isn’t used to flying,” I explain to the woman, who smiles kindly, reminds me a little of my mother.

I open my backpack and find my calendar. Pull it out, flip to June. I crossed off days as we went, and now the
X
’s look strange. Everything we’ve done, struck through like it’s been accomplished or conquered, when really all we did was drive and talk and eat and kiss and take off our clothes and sing together. I turn to July, and something is written there in Bev’s handwriting.

I have no idea when she would have looked through my calendar, or why she would have tried to find it. I feel sick for a moment, embarrassed that I filled every day with a sentence about her.

But the feeling passes.

There are grooves in the paper from where she pressed so hard with her black pen:
Please draw pictures of everything so I can see all I missed.

I read it over, and then I see something else. Right under where my calendar was, near the top of my backpack, is Bev’s Walkman. It feels bulky in my hand when I lift it, and I have to untangle the headphone cord from the drawstring of my hoodie. This will only be a song—I know that—but it matters to me somehow. I want to know what she chose
to listen to over and over after everything that happened between us. So, with only minutes until takeoff, with people crowding the aisles on either side of me, trying to cram their possessions into the overhead compartments, I put Bev’s headphones over my ears. I press play.

Through the headphones comes a shuffle of fabric or footsteps.

A giggle.

A hushed voice that asks,
Ready?

Something catches in my chest.

It’s us.

Our nine-year-old voices. Singing loudly, in perfect time with one another, with so much confidence it hurts. I lean forward. Close my eyes. Listen.

Near the end of our song, Jasper appears above me. His face is white and he is grinning. I take the headphones off.

“Shit, bro,” he says for the twelfth time since last night, “we’re really doing this.”

And before he’s even made it past the woman and me to his seat, the announcement comes to turn off our electronics. I click stop on the Walkman, tuck it within easy reach, and a flight attendant’s voice informs us that the doors are secured and we are cleared for takeoff.

First and foremost, thank you to my family. My mother reads every single draft and catches the smallest changes and my dad subscribes to my Google Alerts. These are two tiny details that make them officially the best parents in history. Jules, thank you for the French phrases and your musical knowledge and for being such a great brother. You are my definition of fun. Kristyn, every paragraph in this book contains a reason to thank you. I mean that literally, but it also works as a metaphor for everyday life. So thank you x forever.