5
Stuck in the Middle With You
===========DANNY===========
Ever been on a date with a mute? Me neither. But I am sure it would be something very similar to being stuck in the car with Mary. A black dome lowered over the sky to enter the world into the obverse and oversee the activities of the night. The sun had been swapped for the moon, and on the streets, the drivers behind the passing windshields lost their identities to the shape and shine of their headlights.
Nothing on the radio seemed to impress Mary. And making conversation through the radio was my backup plan, hoping that a song I landed on would be one that she liked and we could talk about—a girl's taste in music can reveal a lot of her heart. But Mary's radical indifference to all the amazing tunes I stopped for a second on revealed that she was clearly heartless. Or deaf.
I forgave her though. Something on her phone must have been very pressing in that it demanded all of her attention. The light cast from her phone was really distracting to my driving, and so was the annoyance of her being on her phone, but I used it as a good excuse to check her out.
Mary's face shone pale blue in its glow. And when I looked down at her phone, sitting atop the shredded denim strings on her thighs—thighs—I wanted to do everything from crash the car to make out with her.
"What band were you at Mansion to see?" I eventually asked her.
Mary grumbled, her body turned away from me, her eyes now fixated on the suburbs that sprawled over the streets the further north we drove.
"None of them."
And asking her about The Broken Lyre proved just as pointless, as in seeing she had "never heard of them."
Despite "Let's Live For Today" by The Grass Roots on the '60s on 6, I didn't dare suggest she stop rolling through the stations. Yes, she seized the dial without asking. The speaker grilles rattled with a hard pounding bass beat when Mary landed on a song that's lyrics had something to do with: cutting your head off, and your mom's too.
The digital green writing on the audio deck read: "Dirty Ridin' Niggas" by a fellow named Nukka. I wondered who I would be if I lived my life through Nukka lyrics.
My mind was taken off the radio for a second as I slowed the car for a red light. Baffled that Mary liked that sort of music—as, you know, she did not flip it off like the other hundred more bearable song choices—I looked over at her.
"This is Tanner's favorite rapper," she said, eyes glued to the dashboard.
Before I answered, I asked which way to turn at the intersection of Lockport Road and Ocean Avenue. "Right," she said, just as the light blinked green.
"Tanner?" I asked, resuming the topic, knowing damn well who he was, remembering her shouting at him in Wright Bros, but for the sake of creating something like conversation between us, I asked anyways.
"The guy from the grocery store," she said.
"Oh, ex-boyfriend, Tanner."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mary shoot up an eyebrow. "Yeah, the ex-boyfriend who almost broke your arm, Tanner." She went back to her phone.
Over the speakers, Nukka was informing me that I was having a far lesser amount of sex than he was.
Then, while we were caught at the next red light, my eyes drifted back over to her and unfortunately had to notice the clear distinction the seatbelt made strapped between her breasts. I caught a whiff of her perfume and immediately stiffened in my seat.
"That's a nice smelling perfume," I said, eyes chain-locked to the road. Realizing stupidity cannot be unspoken, I followed it up with, "What's its scent?"
"Its scent? Uh, some shit I get called Beach Baby."
"Ah. Cool."
The light blinked green, and I raced through the intersection. Hoping to leave my embarrassment on the road behind.
At first, I wasn't quite sure where Mary was leading me. My first guess was that she lived further west by the Winston Woods park, but she told me to keep straight, and then hang another left into what locals argued was not Gilmore Park, but in fact Danae's Bay. Very much like Carraway Beach, it was another tiny coastal-township that demanded its own identity despite not being much larger than a suburb of old Dockworker's houses and half-renovated mansions, which was, to a greater or lesser extent, the dichotomy of New Jersey.
Cruising down the narrow streets connected by telephone wires draped from wooden-posts, latched and connected to each home as if fired from a harpoon, I glided to a halt for a stop sign on a street called Fisherman's Alley.
"Stop here," she said.
"Well, no duh. It's a stop sign."
Now, Mary had this look that can only be best described—in what she later told me was a genetic mutation at birth—as The Bitch Face. Mary gave me The Bitch Face, popped out the door of the Porsche, and ran off down Fisherman's Alley. From out the windshield, I watched Mary scurry down the road, look back to see if I was watching, although I'm sure I was invisible behind the tinted glass, and then spin to the left and saunter down another street. While contemplating whether I'd been ditched or not—in an attempt to understand Mary a little better—I tried to make out what sort of neighborhood Danae's Bay was. Fisherman's wasn't a terrible street. Other than the shack with the baby blue roof on a slant and the outhouse with the same blue trim, it at least looked like a South End street.
The night felt suddenly large and empty. The first, maybe thirty seconds, didn't feel that obscure. But as my fun little game of listening to a song from each decade-dedicated radio station got to the eighties, I felt that nervous lump in my chest. Mary had played me like the lust-struck fool I was and ditched me.
I imagined Mary had gotten me to drop her off at the house of some guy who listened to Nukka and somehow knew the magical words that got her talking. Clearly a talent lost on me. My mind fell into its familiar habit of over-thinking and over-imagining what happened. I even considered that maybe she'd gotten kidnapped. Alien Abduction was a solid runner-up theory, but when I didn't see a flying saucer, or the ray of a tractor-beam shooting out from the sky, I ignited my car, preparing to leave. Because the most realistic conclusion I could come up with was that I was simply some stupid boy, not worth a girl like Mary.
Then out of the black came three knocks on my window. Mary was back.
"What's up?" I asked as I began to roll down the window.
"Do you want to take me on a date?"
"Um. What?"
"Come on. Let's go on a date. Impress me. Who were they? The Brokers?"
"The Broken Lyre," I corrected her, surrendering to the indisputable.
Okay, I began thinking to myself as we drove in Morning Mass-like silence back down south to Carraway Beach. Someway, somehow, I've managed to be out on a date with Mary. Wait—was she serious when she called it a date? Or is this a 'hangout'? Does a 'hangout' mean I've been definitely Friend Zoned? Why was she all of a sudden interested in going out with me? Does she think I'm attractive? She's really attractive. Her personality sucks so far, though.
Like majorly sucks.
All those "10 Ways To Ace Your Date" Men's Lifestyle articles I'd read seemed to have been totally pointless. They never explained what to do if she wasn't talking to you at all. I hadn't even had a chance, as per expert suggestion, to "say her name often."
When nearing Carraway Beach, where the gas stations and plazas lit up the night, the traffic light in front of us jumped from green to yellow. The temptation to run it ran hard, but I'd already tempted fate one too many times that night, so responsibly, I slammed on the brakes. The seatbelt struck against my chest, and when the bop shot Mary back into her seat, with a long strand of hair coiled up around her fingers, she reckoned, "You could have made that."
"Yeah?"
Mary rolled her eyes from the windshield to me. Stared. And mouthed, "Yeah."
A hot-orange neon sign advertising Drive-Thru 24 Hrs. glowed through the window behind her. And out on the Broadway stage of the sidewalk, a brigade of lost boys shuffled a cigarette back and forth as the leader strutted ahead with his arm wrapped around his girl's waist and walking a mile apart.
Then not more than a second later, a current of cars from the Friday night rat race rushed up all around us. Left. Right. Behind. In the silver Porsche, we were gridlocked front and center.
The entrancing beat of a pop song, high with bright yellow and hot pink notes, came soaring in from the right, accompanied with the singing-along of teenagers in an overpacked, red, doorless Jeep. Behind it, a souped-up, emblem-stripped, 1970-something Challenger cruised in with a guttural roar. Its diesel stinking the street. And piercing blue headlights appeared with a low black Cadillac that crept up from behind. The air thumped loudly with a reverberating pattern. The night grew thick with exhaust and steaming engine heat. Our common desire to put away the pavement was all but temporarily put on hold by a yellow box with a condescending red orb.
"Okay," I began saying, all too aware of the rumbling engine dying to explode with speed. "You drive someone's expensive car and see what you do, Mary."
Stopping mid-hair twirl, she asked, "Is this not your car?"
Beside us to the left, an engine revved a triad. "N-no," I answered, reaching for the radio dial. "I mean, no, it is my car."
The engine revved three more times.
"Cool." The twirling continued. Someone from next door made a sound. I turned the radio up. Nukka again.
A muddle of shouting sprang up over the next series of revs, so I looked over and saw the illest squad you've ever seen in a Blue Rimmed Honda taunting me to race. I believe I overheard something about the dimensions of my penis and something about a "bitch's car!"
Rob was not a bitch, thank you. I rolled the window up and flipped to another song.
"You're just gonna let them talk about your car like that?"
I kept flipping through the radio, passed the sixties—ha, forget Classic Vinyl, no matter how great listening to "Baba O'Riley" would've been right then.
Then landing on the same trendy Pop Girl's hit single that the red, roofless Jeep was blaring, just at a different time in the song, I said, "This song's kinda overplayed, huh?"
It was following a comment from the Blue Rimmed Heroes next door about the status of my virginity when Mary asked, "How old are you?"
I was naturally offended.
"No," she said. "Like, don't give me that look. I'm seriously curious."
"Seventeen."
"So you're still in high school?"
"My birthday's August. So, like, yeah. I mean, I graduated, but I'm not eighteen yet."
"When in August?" Mary asked. I told her—the twenty-eighth—and asked her about herself. "Yeah," Mary uttered, gazing towards the car full of bros who were now enthusiastically telling Mary about their penises. She looked back at me. "I'm a December baby, so yeah, seventeen still. Oh my God, will those dickholes shut up already?"
I jolted my head back towards the car full of guys all sporting similar haircuts, all of who were getting a real bang out of each other's jokes. To be honest, I was far more taken aback by Mary's rather dramatic noun than by anything the Blue Rimmed Bros had to say.
(I think the word pussy was used about two and a half dozen times. I really am not a cat. I know it may be hard to believe, due to my giant whiskers, but I really am not. Thank you.) If this were The Wild West, I would have shot each one dead.
"Just ignore them," I said.
Mary made a sound as if she were about to rant, but held her breath in. According to our friends, I was now: a female dog, a cat, and a committed Catholic.
To distract myself from pulling out my Smith & Wesson and galloping off to the nearest saloon, I asked Mary some more stupid small-talk questions. Turns out she went to Saint Maria Goretti's; I told her I went to Thomas Jefferson High, answering her similar inquiry back. I asked if she knew a guy I knew, Nick Savignano, who went to Saint Maria Goretti's.
"Yeah, I know him. It was, like, super weird. He was in my English class, like, every year up until last year. How do you know him?"
"Oh. I met him at the mall once, like back in eighth grade." Nick Savignano was one of the guys a part of the few groups Max and I would frequently run into and tag along with for our exploits on those Carraway Beach nights.
Mary made an approving sound. And my conversation with Mary began and ended with Nick Savignano. I should call him up and thank him, I thought, hiccupping a laugh. Mary looked over at me like I was weird. With these clowns to the left of me, and Mary, a real joker, to my right, I thought of Stealers Wheel, you know, those poor guys whose song everyone mistakes for being Bob Dylan's.
Then, with the flash of the traffic light, all of our hoods turned green and the Blue Rimmed Boys screeched off, making sure to call me a female dog one more time on their way out. The light at the next intersection ahead flashed red. And so to avoid another confrontation, I signaled my way right, opposite of where I wanted to go, which was back to the concert, and went down the residential streets. Maybe the boardwalk wasn't the best idea. When I suggested Oceanside Park instead—maybe I could get this girl some ice cream there or something—Mary didn't put up a fight.
============MARY===========
Earlier, Squeegee Boy was strapped like the tar on my black lungs about seeing The Brokers, and then suddenly, after we were on our way, he drove randomly to Oceanside Park. Kinda weird. I mean, I wasn't like, marching in the streets against the idea. I didn't really care what I did to waste time, but still, it was kinda weird.
But Squeegee Boy was like a puppy. Puppies don't rape. Speaking of the R-word, Jim told me that no matter what them leftists were saying, he was gonna buy me a gun so I can shoot any rapist in the ballsack.
Oceanside Park was Gilmore Park's wretched hive of stoners and nightcrawlers. Back in, like, the 1800s, there was a concert hall and a mini-put course and a rollercoaster that touched the sky, but now all that was left was one dinky little carousel that even kids found rather sad. And now in place of all those rides that provided entertainment for the pre-technology age was just a big empty field wrapped inside a sidewalk that led to the beach. During the day, families who wanted away from the tourist scene of Carraway still came to enjoy the beach, and old people still came to limp on the sidewalk. But at night, Oceanside Park was for drunk teenagers and drug deals. Which conveniently worked in my favor, because when we got there, I smelled pot, and like the police dog I am, followed my nose to the stoners and borrowed their lighter, which worked. Thank God.
After I lit my smoke and we began walking, out of nowhere, Danny said, "I don't want to smell."
Rather pretentiously, in my opinion, but anywho, when I looked up from my phone, I saw that he was walking on the opposite side of the sidewalk, right on the edge of the beach, away from me. Must suck to get sand in your shoes. We continued walking in awkward silence as I smoked my precious, making myself smell. After a while, curiosity got the best of me. My eyes glided from the light of my phone to him, to see, you know, what was up (like if Squeegee Boy was getting sand in his shoes) and noticed that he was too wearing white Converse.
God, we were matching.
Our cute little elderly stroll led us past the old pavilion, which, if you thought too long and hard about the size of the spiders in the corners, it would give you nightmares for years, and then we heard the dramatization of drunk ninth graders. Danny walked by fast.
Further down the sidewalk, right about the same time the cheap Indian Reserve cigarette started canoeing due to the inconsistent ocean wind, we approached the carousel spinning around red and alive. Some kids rode on it, making the ancient old crapper look like a cheery delight while their bored parents watched. Most likely with the regret that they didn't take the contraceptive lesson in Sex-Ed a little more seriously, or wishing that they would have just bought their dumb kids iPads instead. Squeegee Boy proposed that he wanted to sit down cuz he was short of breath or something. So without agreeing or disagreeing (as I didn't really care), I took a seat on the park bench he gestured to. Squeegee Boy blinked as he stared down at me, and then took a cushion on a lumpy rock, again, on the opposite side of the sidewalk.
As I sat looking down at my phone, with the cigarette in my other hand growing warmer as it neared its last breath, I opened the Tumblr app and took a drag at the same time. Though unconscious of how hard I sucked on the filter, unused to smoking such shitty cigarettes, I took in a deep drag of thick and ashy Indian Reserve smoke that scraped my throat, constricted my lungs, and then burst in a harsh cough and a cloud of smoke like an exorcism. Tears bled from my eyes, taking swabs of mascara with them as they rolled down my cheeks.
Squeegee Boy, sitting across from me on the rock, dared ask why I smoked. I told him that I was eager to see what hell was like.
"Well, that's stupid."
"Did I ask for your opinion?" I said, wiping a black tear away with the broad side of my hand. I then untangled my earphones and celebrated the unevent that was Tumblr. There really are only so many cat pictures on the internet.
For what seemed like minutes, or at least a Lana Del Rey song, I sat there on my phone until I heard a grunt, and decided that I hadn't looked at stupid pictures of pugs in a long time. Then I heard another grunt.
When I peeled half the song away with the tug of my earphone, I heard Danny say my name. Which, for the record, is a sin. You never pull out an earphone on a Lana song.
"Hmmm, what's up?"
"Do you want ice-cream?"
"Um, no?"
He looked disappointed. "What are we doing?"
And right as I was about to explain that we were on a date, I saw a picture of a pug in a tutu and laughed, almost half-snorting. Now, I'm not that terrible, I felt one-hundo for S.B. (Squeegee Boy), but clearly, a boy will always assume something else is gonna happen when a girl trotting along a solemn roadside willingly gets in his car. That's called prostitution. I ain't 'bout that life. God, that pug was so freaking cute.
"I don't want to miss The Broken Lyre."
I looked up in surprise at hearing a low voice. It was as if puberty and all its bliss had hit him at once. Somehow, I guess, his statement confused me. Is he asking me or telling me he wants to go?
As I was thinking of something to say, he jammed his fists in his pockets, and something about such an aggressive gesture wiped any interest I might have had away, and just grossed me out. Uncomfortably stirred, disgusted, I shut down Squeegee Boy's entire little fantasy. "Okay, you can go." And then I put back in my earphone.
Believe me, darlings, I know guys like the back of my pale and freckled hand—the freckles being all their bullshit.
It never occurred to me why Squeegee Boy wanted to take me to Oceanside Park if he was so constipated about seeing The Broken Lyre, until the voice over the loudspeaker at the carousel declared they were closing after one more ride.
"I'm gonna ride the carousel," he said and got up from his lumpy rock.
While watching Squeegee Boy saunter across the field, feeling all sorry for himself, hanging his head down, I ashed my smoke and screeched when a cinder burnt my wrist. I flew my stinging hand to my lips, and when I looked up, I saw him from across the field looking back at me. His golden-brown hair was swept up off his forehead, emphasizing the arch of his brow, which, until then, had been concealed by his floppy bangs. So while smothering lipgloss all over my hand like a horny adolescent, I flashed him a peace sign, gangsta style, and returned to the wonderful world of internet pugs.
Then, underneath the volume of Lana's "Video Games," I heard my name blasted over the intercom, followed by a request that I kindly get on the carousel. And then my phone vibrated, clattering all the shit in my bag, with another text from Ashley reminding me that I was a shitty friend.
The intercom gurgled out my name a second time, so I looked over and saw Danny standing beside the ride attendant he was harassing. Poor guy. There he was, dying to get home from his shitty job at the carousel, and Danny starts harassing him to get on the intercom. Out of sympathy for the carousel guy, I quickly checked the selfie-cam, and then got up and went over to the carousel.
=========Author's Note===========
Thank you for reading this chapter of "Some Place Better Than Here"!
Writing this book certainly wasn't easy by any means. It was an honest-to-God from the bottom of my heart labour of love. And so, if the writing has touched you in anyway, please share your thoughts in the comments or vote on a chapter that you particularly liked!
Sharing a little bit of love back really helps me grow my platform as a writer so I can continue to publish great works for you and I both to enjoy !
Also, if you enjoyed SPBTH please check out my latest project "The Roar of Andora," a explorative fantasy that will be told over a three-part anthology.
https://www.wattpad.com/611263651-the-roar-of-andora-book-one-prologue-the-boy-king
Thank you for reading "Some Place Better Than Here"!
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