Wanderlove (10 page)

“This is Central America,” Starling says darkly. “Anything can happen. Put your feet down; you’re getting our seat dirty.”

Our bus breaks down in the late afternoon. I have my head tipped against the window, wishing there were enough privacy to draw. After last night, the urge is a bundle of heat in my chest, like a swallow of too-hot tea. But the idea of drawing in front of Rowan and Starling makes me shy. I’m tracing a face on the wall with my finger when the driver slams the brakes.

“What the hell,” I say, rubbing my clunked forehead.

There’s a metallic screech that sounds like an orgy of bats, and the smell of exhaust clouds down the aisle. After a moment, the bus squeals to a stop beside a cliff spray-painted with advertisements: Alka-Seltzer, Fanta,
aspirin rápido
. I could use some of all three. On the other side of the highway, pastureland stretches into the darkening hills.

Without the wind rushing in the windows, the temperature seems to shoot up ninety-nine degrees. Someone curses in Spanish. Starling, who sits across the aisle, curses in English. Rowan, who’s sitting behind me, sleeps through the whole thing.

“What’s happening?” I ask Starling.

She closes the travel journal she’s been skimming. From her volunteer time in Nicaragua, she told me earlier. The most volunteering I’ve ever done was competing in a charity art show at age thirteen. I sold three greeting cards for two dollars each. Pretty weak when compared to spoon-feeding Nicaraguan orphan babies. “You should be thrilled,” she says with a yawn. “It’s a discount tour of the authentic Guatemalan lifestyle.”

Without announcement, the driver cranks open the bus door and heads outside. From my window, I see him dial on his cell. He listens for a second. Then he bangs the phone against the heel of his hand.

“Shit,” I say.

The other passengers slouch in their seats and stare out at the empty pastures. I remember our backpacks on top of the bus and hope they’re safe. “So this is pretty typical?”

“It’s not uncommon.” Starling wedges her knees against the seat in front of her. “Ugh, it’s hot. I wish we had cold drinks.”

And food.
My appetite has forgotten the wormy fruit.

Well, until just now. “How long will it take to get going again?”

“Depends on how quickly a mechanic gets here.” She returns to her journal.

The minutes struggle along like damaged insects. I attempt to read my book from La Casa Azul, a novel called
Bel
Canto,
but I can’t concentrate. The muted light strains my eyes. I flip to the blank last page and draw invisibly with my index finger, loopy, whirly figure-phantoms, until even that gets boring. Out my window, I see the bus driver light a cigarette.

“Just be glad the bus isn’t full. Imagine if we were sitting three to a seat,” Rowan says. I turn to find him stretching, his fingers grazing the overhead racks.

“Or even two,” Starling says, crossing the aisle to sit beside her brother. She pulls the elastic from his ponytail. “You stink.”

“What, you think you smell like roses?”

“Roses? How boring. I smell like jasmine and citrus blossoms.” She turns Rowan’s head to the side, then, using her fingernails as a comb, begins to french-braid his hair. He lets it happen, seemingly unconcerned. I’d laugh, but I don’t think I have enough oxygen.

“Damn it all to hell,” Starling says, patting the top of Rowan’s head. “Let’s play a game.”

I stick my book in my daypack, a little wary but mostly intrigued.

“Let’s tell scary stories. Really scary stories. None of that crap from third-grade scout camp. Never mind, scratch that.” She grins ghoulishly. “We’re not going to tell
scary
stories.

We’re going to tell stories about times we were scared.” I glance at Rowan. He shakes his head, but I can’t tell whether he’s rejecting the game or just amicably disapproving. Starling gives his braid a yank.

“When were we scared?” she asks him. “Think back.”

“Not
we.
This is
your
story.”

“But what about that time in San Pedro Sula? Before you went and lived on Utila? You and Jack tried to convince me to take that puddle jumper to La Ceiba because Jack knew the pilot, even though you knew he was smuggling a few pounds of—”

“Christ, Starling!” Rowan swats her hands from his head.

“What’s the big deal? Nothing happened, in the end.”

“
No.”

I examine my fingernails, pretending not to see the cartoon storm cloud hovering between them. Pounds of what?

Pounds of what?

“What about that time in Puerto Sol?” Starling asks Rowan.

Until I hear otherwise, I’m just going to assume she meant pounds of bananas.

“Whatever. You don’t need my permission. As long as the story’s yours.”

She kicks off her sandals and pulls up her knees. She has at least three toe rings on each foot. I wonder if they pinch her skin when she walks.

“So I was living in Puerto Sol. That’s on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Really hard to get to, or at least it was two years ago. I was staying at this volunteer camp in the summer, helping implement renewable energy in the village. Did you know like fifty percent of Nicaragua’s population doesn’t have dependable access to electricity?”

I shake my head.

“It’s a tragedy. Anyway, one day I’m heading back to the dorms in the late afternoon and I turn down a side road. It rained that day, so there are puddles along the gutters. Mud in the street. Right away I get this creepy feeling, even though I’ve passed this way a million times before, and it isn’t even night yet, but the feeling’s impossible to ignore.

“Then this arm comes around in front of my face. And suddenly, I’m on the ground.

“I fight like a wildcat—which is exactly what you’re
not
supposed to do. The majority of injuries during muggings happen when the victim fights back, did you know that? But the kicking, the screaming is involuntary—I can’t stop.” She drops her feet.

“Then, over my mugger’s shoulder, I notice this man standing there with his motorbike. And so I direct my screams for help toward him. But he just stands there, watching. Finally, the man wrenches my bag from my hands. And then—get this—he goes and climbs on the back of the other guy’s motorbike, and they speed away. They were in it together.”

“So all he wanted was your bag?” I ask.

Starling nods animatedly. She’s standing now, leaning over the seat between us. “If I’d known that’s what he was after, I’d have given it to him! Hell, I would have curtsied. I fought because I thought he was going to—well, you know what I thought. A big mistake. I didn’t even know I was bleeding until I stood, and I saw it in the dirt.” She pulls out her bottom lip with two fingers. “I bit all the way through it.

See the scar?”

So it wasn’t from a piercing. “I would have been on the first plane home,” I say.

“Well . . .” Starling seems to realize she’s standing, and sits back down in her own seat. “I thought about it. But I’d moved out of my last apartment. I didn’t have anywhere to go home to, other than my friends’ couches. I hadn’t spoken to my parents for ages, so I didn’t want to call them. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to work. For a week, I just hid in my room.”

“What made you stay?”

“Rowan.”

I glance at him. He’s looking out the window.

“He’d come to visit me twice before, for a week each time,” Starling explains. “The first time, he got his Advanced Open Water certification. The second time, he got his Rescue Diver certification. The third time, he never left. He traveled to other countries, of course. But never home.”
Two years.
I still can’t wrap my brain around it. I wonder what he was like before he left for his perma-vacation. Less than a week into my own, I already feel changed. Although not nearly as changed as I’d like to be.

“Rowan reminded me that those muggers were just two bad people out of millions of good ones. Great ones, like my host family. And that it had happened to me—well, it was just luck of the draw.”

“Having hot-pink streaks in your hair didn’t help, though,” Rowan says.

“Victim-blamer! You should be ashamed of yourself.” Starling nods at me. “Your turn, Bria.”

I take a deep breath. I listened to her story, but at the same time I was deciding what I wanted to tell. “When I was four-teen, I almost drowned,” I begin.

Starling looks disappointed.

I tell them how I woke up underwater with no idea how I got there. I could see the place where the wall met the bottom of the pool. But it didn’t occur to me to kick. I just hung there, unmoving, suspended in silence. Then a pair of hands grabbed my arms, and with a sucking splash, someone lifted me into the world of noises again. I’d learn later that I’d hit my head on the diving board. Blacked out for just an instant.

Drank half the pool into my lungs. I’d slipped, Olivia said.

“Luckily, I didn’t need help breathing,” I add. “I coughed up all the water as soon as they pulled me out. We decided not to tell our parents. My friend Olivia took me home.” Starling wrinkles her nose. “The girl with the spangles.”

“I have a scar, but it’s hidden under my hair.”

“Like that little Antichrist boy in that old movie
The
Omen
? With the 666 tattoo?”

I stick out my tongue at her. “Exactly.”

“So that’s why you don’t swim,” Rowan says quietly.

Wrong. Sure, almost drowning was scary and all, but I’ve swum dozens and dozens of times since, maybe even hundreds of times. But if I told Rowan the truth—that swimming has made me sad ever since I stupidly gave my virginity to my jackass ex-boyfriend at my favorite beach, the beach where I used to draw and swim, and he totally didn’t get the importance of it, of any of it—he would think I was pathetic. And probably also a little insane. At least the swimming pool story makes a good excuse. “Your turn,” I say in lieu of agreement.

“Pass.”

“Pass?” I repeat. “You can’t pass.” I glance at Starling, waiting for her to object, but she doesn’t. I turn back to Rowan. “Rowan, you must have been scared before.”

“Sure. But I choose not to share it.”

“Then . . . I don’t know, tell about a time you were mildly apprehensive.”

Rowan just shakes his head.

“Rowan . . . ,” Starling begins. “Never mind. Forget it.

There’s no arguing when he gets like this. I’m taking a nap.” She slips her hands into her sandals and curls up on her side, her bare feet sticking into the aisle. “Wake me when we’re moving. Better yet, when we arrive in Río Dulce.”

“This is crap,” I say, louder than I meant to.

“Just go to sleep, Bria. It was a stupid game.”
Fine
. I avoid looking at Rowan as I take out
Bel Canto
and pretend to read, like I don’t mind in the slightest. I know mine wasn’t too outrageous of a memory. I’ve got worse ones, and better ones. And Starling’s story probably beats them all.

It’s Rowan’s refusal to participate I find frustrating. Like his memories are too precious to share with the likes of me.

I’ve scanned the same paragraph sixty times when Rowan touches my shoulder. “It’s too dark to read,” he says. “Want to go stretch our legs?”

I glance at Starling, who’s sleeping. Since I have nothing better to do, I follow Rowan outside.

We jog across the highway to the pasture. In the midst of the long grass and roadside junk, there’s a solitary cement pillar tipped over on its side. Vines grow up all around it like alien tentacles. I tap it with my sandal. “What do you think it held up?”

“Probably an ancient Mayan coliseum,” Rowan replies.

“The Mayans had coliseums? Wasn’t that the Romans, or the Greeks or whoever?”

“Sure, but the Mayans built them too. Or tried to, at least.

See, they made them too big—they thought they could hold up the sky. It’s in all the history books.” He says this with a straight face. I don’t know him well enough to know whether he’s joking. But then one corner of his mouth twitches.

“You are one hundred percent full of shit,” I say.

Smiling, Rowan sits on the pillar, facing the dark expanse of farmland. I sit beside him, facing the highway. I think I can make out my backpack on the roof of the bus.

And then . . . silence.

And more silence, until his unvoiced thoughts start making me nervous. Which is annoying, because he was the one who ruined Starling’s game, not me. I wait for him to speak.

Thirty seconds. Forty. One minute. I’m actually counting.

“Have you ever seen
Easy Rider
?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“The 1969 movie by Dennis Hopper? You know, the road movie? It’s about a couple of bikers thundering all over the U.S. They end up in some kind of hippie commune. No?” I shake my head.

“I saw it as a kid.” He pauses. “Probably wasn’t the most age-appropriate film—I was seven or so—but my dad hardly monitored that kind of thing. It was just me and him most of the time. I remember watching it on my stomach, in the living room of our shitty apartment, and promising myself I’d never be like that. My dad moved us around all the time: chasing work projects, running away from one-night stands. I
hated
it. And wouldn’t you know it . . .”

“Your life became a road movie?”

“Kind of. But this time around, it’s me calling the shots. It makes all the difference—being the one in control.” I think about how liberating it felt choosing La Ruta Maya from the Global Vagabonds pamphlet. But it was a momen-tary thing. I could have chosen differently. I could be sitting in Thailand right now. Maybe that’s where my caravan of beautiful people from the pamphlet went.

“Isn’t that what your memory was about, Bria? Losing control?”

I pause. “I never knew memories were
about
anything. Besides the obvious. You make them sound like dreams—subject to interpretation.”

“I think the two are more related than we realize. It’s all in how our minds frame them. How we decide what—and how—we remember.”

A phantom insect pricks my shoulder. I slap, but I’m too late. On the other side of the highway, a man climbs off our bus. As I watch, he unzips his pants and begins to pee against the cliffside. “I don’t know if I can handle this,” I say.