31
A Case of You
==========MARY==========
It wasn't intentional. The moon was right and the night had settled with a late August chill.
When Danny went running after Max, he didn't come back. The instant the boys had cleared for the woods, the onlookers had shrugged, another day another drama, and then immediately went back to their keg-standing and yapping. I couldn't quite do the same; far too much of my life had just been exposed. Not far from me, I saw Tanner's huddle, all with their backs turned, and heard Fat Jordan mumble something about "the rich bitch," as he turned to jeer at me.
But no matter how drunk or embarrassed I was, I waited for him.
Ashley tried coaxing me into getting a ride home with Tanner, who apparently wasn't drinking and "weed doesn't make a difference," and who, somewhere along the way, had become friends with Cody. But no amount of persuading, even as I continuously drank and smoked, blitzing my mind, would ever tear my pride down that low. I told Ashley I had a ride and waited at the forest's edge. I didn't want to leave without Danny.
By the time the night had dwindled into the single digits of the morning, the bulk of kids cleared out—only a few all-night partiers stayed behind. The fire in the trashcan shrank into a flat glowing light that glared off the inner steel brim.
The last drop of Ashley's vodka drained down my throat. Throughout the rest of the night, I would drift back and forth from the edge of the forest to a huddle of stoners sitting at a picnic bench back in the main clearing. I'd con a shot, a hit of a joint, or two, and then return to the edge, watch for Danny, and then go back. And so on. It was just as the trashcan fire died that Sean approached me.
My head fell into his chest when he staggered up behind me. I had to look up to see his eyes. He asked me if I had a smoke. Together we found one of the party's leftovers, and without any trouble, Sean got cigarettes for us. The flame jumped out of the darkness as he touched the tip of my cigarette to his lighter. An orange ring glowed in his eyes. He called me beautiful and grabbed my hand.
The next thing I knew, I was in Sean's car and he was driving me home. I told him I didn't want to go. He asked me if there was anywhere else I wanted to go. I said no.
We parked on his street, and he led me by the hand through his back door. When we reached the bottom of the basement stairs, he grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me and I locked my hands around his head.
We fell on the bed. Thrusting his hard erection through his pants onto me. Then, God, I couldn't slip my jeans off fast enough, and he was touching me. His fingers were so long. I grabbed his face and pressed my lips into his. Our faces seemed to mash. He snatched the lace of my panties and stripped them from my waist, tearing them off my ankles.
And then I was down on my knees, giving him head, and then we were fucking. The biggest I've had. It was amazing and I was drunk and I needed him. I loved him.
"Can I fuck you in the ass?"
"Sure."
Then it fucking hurt. And I went from feeling like an angel to a whore, and he didn't stop. With my face continuously crashing down into the mattress, my eye exploded with pain. I howled, trying to tell him to stop, but it didn't sound any different than an orgasm. The tears stung where the flesh was still raw, and every time he submitted me into the mattress, the ache burst all over again. I never told him to stop. I never wanted him to stop. He finished when and where he pleased and then crashed into the mattress. Snoring.
My panties had disappeared in the dark. So I slipped on my jeans, pulling the inside-out leg back out, and by the wits of my bygone drunken mind, somehow found my way out of his basement apartment. The pain shooting from my eye throbbed from my temples to my chin.
When I got to the intersection closest to his house, I saw that I was on Penelope Street, just west of the boardwalk. After ten more minutes of walking, the road hit Atlantic Way. I continued past downtown Carraway Beach and The Alley, staggering along the curb closest to the boardwalk. There wasn't a soul in sight. It was weird seeing the Old Abandoned Beach House from the street.
In the end, it turned out Danny was right. The walk to 22 Bayview Avenue from Atlantic Way did take about two hours. By the time I got to Danae's Bay, the blue of the morning was lifting against the night sky, and early birds were chirping as I pushed through the screen door. Coming home.
So, it was the guilt that killed me.
As I leaned against the back of the front door, after slamming it in Danny's face, I hated myself.
I heard grumbling from the kitchen and the limping stagger of Jim's footsteps. Guilt and anxiety stretched and split open my stomach. What was he going to say now? Would I be in trouble because Danny showed up? When he limped around the wall, leaning on his cane with a joint tucked in his lips, he had a self-satisfying look on his face.
"I'm glad'ya told that cuck ta finally leave ya 'lone." He hummed.
"Yeah."
Only later did it occur to me that he'd been listening in on our entire conversation. I could just see him sitting there—grinning at Danny's desperation. Finding some sort of amusement in our drama, like our feelings were just a part of a game meant to entertain him.
"See, I toldj'ya, Mare, that he was no good. Right?" He straightened his hunched spine in order to start preaching. "You know, they come in all sortsa shapes and sizes. The terrorists, right? Young kids ya wouldn't 'spect are trying to enforce the Islam, spread the Sharie Law. Startin' up revolts 'gainst our government, trying t' shut down free speech. Calling President Trump, Hitler. Can ya believe that? Hitler?" Jim recited what any conspiracy vlogger would say. "It's a scary, scary world."
I just kept rocking.
"See. I know ya think I'm the bad guy, but I'm just tryin' to protect you. You can't trust no one, right? If there's one thing I've learned—it's that," he said with the pointing of his finger.
Jim kept looming around, just waiting to get some reaction from me that I was not going to give.
" 'Kay. I get it. Be mad at me because I shooed your boyfriend 'way." The tremor of Jim's voice picked up with a steady incline of fanaticism that seemed tied to the staccato snapping of his open hand. "Jus' don't come cryin' ta me after you two've been t'gether for a while, and you're both sicka each other and start bangin' other people and he ends up leavin' ya 'cause he knocked up some broad."
The long muscle of his forearm popped out as he drove his weight into the cane.
"Mare, it's just—it's a nasty world. A nasty, nasty, nasty world. I've seen that happen too many times, right? Ya know, Mare, itta happened to your Mum, right?"
"What? What happened to my mom?"
Jim then stopped. Taking his time to look inward, inward on the past. "Come outside," he said, taking a step in the direction of the door.
Settling down into his favorite lawn chair on the porch, he rolled the leg of his shorts over his right knee, revealing several scars, and began extending the joint as best he could.
"Physician told me today that what's been actin' my knee up is a wearin' down of the cartlidge. Said it's most likely the osto-thritis caused by tearin' my ACL when I was a kid. Y'know I blew it playin' all that football, right? So ya see, Mare," Jim kicked his knee out. "I only gotta 'bout a fifteen to twenty degree extension in the knee. Gonna try t' get one of those medical marijuana cards. Lawyer says I might get outta jail time if I present it in court. Six fuckin' months for havin' a roach in the cup'older. Retarded, right?"
"Yeah. That is pretty retarded." Genuinely agreeing with him. "But, um, Dad, you were saying something about... my mom."
His smoker's yellow fingernails dug into the worn plastic mesh of the lawn chair. Clicking away at the plastic flakes.
"Dad?"
"Yeah?" His eyes down at the chair.
"Wendy... she is my mom, right?"
"Yeah." He sighed. "Yes, Mary. Wendy is your mum."
"Okay. Then what happened to my mom? Why did she leave?"
Jim scraped out a large plastic flake from the arm of the chair that fell to the ground.
"Dunno. Guess she liked the dope more than us."
"No, Dad. No. Tell me everything. I need to know"
"Well," he said, then looked up to the street. "When she got pregnant with you, her mother, the Snake Lady, kicked her out. So bein' my girlfriend and all, I couldn't jus' leave 'er on the streets or somethin'. Ya know? Good-lookin' girl, right? Woulda been dangerous. So I told Wend, your mum, just t' move in with me. Told 'er to quit workin', that I would provide. But that's a lot for a young guy, right? Movin' in with a girl, providing for a family. So, ya know how young guys are, right? I started sleeping with an old flame a mine. Nothin' serious, right? I was just young and dumb. Leavin' Wend alone lot in the house.
"Your mum after findin' out was pissed off and started hangin' 'round with this jerk, Chuck McGilvery, and he started 'er on the dope. I was upset, right? That your mother, pregnant with you, was doing dope. Came in 'er room one night an' saw syringes and burnt spoons and tubes and shit all hidden in the closet."
Jim started shaking his head.
"Fuck. I was so fuckin' pissed. I struggled 'lot to get her off the shit. Tried gettin' her to go t' rehab and get help, but she was hooked. And then, when Chuck found out I was tryin' to get her straight, he started filling her head with all these crazy ideas, tellin' her that he would marry 'er and adopt the baby. You.
"So one night, after getting home from drinkin' with my buddies at Cat's, I found out that Wend had packed her bags and ran away. I tried searchin' for her. Shit. Tried everything. But she wasn't anywhere. Found out later she birthed you without tellin' me. Somehow the hospital got 'holda my number and called Johnston Construction, where I was workin' at the time, right? And, and—God. God I was so excited, so relieved. I was so excited that I ran off the jobsite hollerin' at the foreman 'I gotta go see my kid!' and jumped in my Trans Am and raced to the hospital."
Jim swatted his hand and caught a mosquito that was whining about. The crumpled body of the insect lay in the middle of his palm when he opened his hand. He flicked his wrist, throwing the mosquito away.
"But, well, when—when I got there, the nurses told me she had the post-partum and had run away. Sayin' that it was very normal. That a lot of women with the post-partum run off, right? Sayin' they've seen it 'fore, and that the mothers always return. Tol' me that either I could leave you in the care of the 'aternity ward, or I could take ya home. And, well, I thought that Wend would return. She was in love with the idea of havin' a baby, right? I knew she oughta come back. She had too."
"Did you le-leave me there?" I asked.
Jim leaned back in his seat and scowled. "Are you kidding me? Of course I didn't leave ya there. I mean, I had no freakin' clue what t'do, but of course I wouldn't leave ya?" Jim looked away and shook his head, dismissing the ridiculousness of my question.
"Like my mum, I thought Wend would do all the baby and girly stuff. Can you believe it? I bought all this boy stuff, a lil football, and Lester gave me some his kids' old trucks and toys, thinkin' that you were gonna be a boy!
"Back home, I rocked you t' sleep and read my dad's Bible. I pulled outta highlighter, tryin' to find a good name, but my mum stopped and told me that if I marked up the Bible it would affend the Lord. So I picked out the first name I read. Mary. So, I sang 'Mare-ee had a lit-tle lamb' to lullaby you. Since you didn't have little girl things, I used t' try to play trucks with you. That was stupid of me. I was in my twenties, right? I was still doing the video games. The PlayStation, right? I didn't want to look gay buying dolls and shit. My dad never did that kid shit, y'know, buyin' toys, right? But for you, Mary, guess I should've."
"It's okay, Dad."
"I never stopped looking for your mum. Every day since, I've tried t' track 'er down. Sometimes at work, right? I would get thinkin' 'bout it, all pissed off and shit, and just leave to go check the streets. The bars. Try to see 'er old friends. Thought maybe she was dead. So I'd go by the cemeteries and read the stones. Took fuckin' years, but finally the city got back t' me, and well, that's when they woulda mailed that letter you read, right? So that's why, Mary, that's why I coulda never told ya that your mum was dead, because I—I didn't know.
"And who knows, Mare. What did that fuckin' letter say? Health complications? Drug overdose. Suicide. I don't know. She ran away from me and t' this day I'll never understan' why. I made mistakes, sure. But I was good to her?"
His memories and the circumstances didn't make sense to him. "I was good to her." He reassured himself. "I was."
Jim's eyes automatically went to where the ocean was visible from our porch. But by then in the evening the streetlights masqueraded the sight.
"I'm gonna start bein' a better dad," Jim said. "I'm sorry for everything. Wish I woulda played dolls with you when ya asked. But I was waiting for your mum to come home and do that. Want to go down to that Toys R Us? Buy you Barbies or somethin'? We can play?"
When Jim turned to look at me, I now looked out for the ocean. The streetlights were aglow in a long necklace down the road. But above, the colors of dusk caught my attention. The feathery undersides of the clouds facing the west radiated in a vermillion flare against their larger, dark blue bodies. I turned back to Jim.
"It's okay, Dad."
He nodded.
Just then, Jim's stupid, dizzy-sounding ringtone went off, and he started blabbing away.
I went to my room. His loud obnoxious voice only muted when I closed my bedroom door. Mt. Pile-Of-Neglect stared at me. I stared back. I wanted to kick it. But I didn't. Not long after, I heard what sounded like a baseball bat break the living room lamp.
The last of the evening light entered my room when I made my first attempt to sleep. But since my body refuses to do shit-all for itself, for the life of me, sleeping was impossible. Desperate to forget the day and just deal with tomorrow, I tried it all. Lying on my back. Lying on my stomach. Lying in fetal position. Cuddling a pillow. Sheets off. Sheets on. The cold side of the pillow. The other pillow. The cold side of the other pillow. I even tried counting sheep. But let's be honest, that shit never worked. When I decided that I was just wasting my time with my eyes closed, I rolled over and looked at my clock. Total darkness encased the night but it was not very late. So instead, I lay awake. Engulfed in a mystery, plagued with the biggest question of them all:
What was I going to do with my life?
My future felt imminent. The beginning of the rest of my life would begin tomorrow. Why, I don't know, but whatever was left of my teenage life would be gone by dawn.
My wide and awake eyes scanned the matted midnight-blue spectrum of my room. Searching for a clue. I had completely given up on righting the wrong that was the impossible mess of the place. My jeans draped over my sad excuse for a desk chair looked inaccurately large for my waist. Maybe I was fatter than I thought. I don't know. Whatever. But that was when I spotted it. And it bothered me. A lot.
My Saint Maria Goretti grad hoodie flung on my dresser and wrapped around itself in a sloppy mess.
I ceased to be a bystander of such atrocious disorganization. Whipping off the pale pink sheet, I propelled myself out of bed and began folding my old grad hoodie. Funny word choice, Mary.
Old.
It felt old. A measly two months ago, I was still in high school. And now, a measly two months later, like ceasing to be a bystander of disorganization, high school ceased to matter. Any of it. None of it. All of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly (regrettable colors of hair, acne, raccoon eyeliner, etc.,).
After folding the sleeves in half and flattening the fabric with my palms, I flipped the folded square over and looked down at the embroidered letters: SMG written right-smack-dab in the sweater's chest. Underneath the acronym, written in a smaller-cased font: SAINT MARIA GORETTI CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL; complete with my last name and graduating year written bad-assily on the hood
My mind replayed and raced through the memories of the day I received my grad hoodie.
It was early in October (a lil audacious of Saint Maria Goretti's to assume I would graduate), Tanner picked me up at lunch and I skipped the rest of the afternoon. And truthfully, it was one of those rare occasions in which Tanner could actually be pretty sweet, most likely in an attempt to make silent amends for cheating on me.
We got high by Lake Heeley, sat on one of the concrete ledges surrounding the dock, dangling our legs above the water, and talked about life. Making a promise that if he and I were ever to break up, that we would remain friends. That if we ever saw each other somewhere, such as the grocery store, when we were forty, we could say Hi, and catch each other up on the outcome of our lives.
After smoking by the lake, we took advantage of the all-day breakfast at Betty's Diner. Tanner proved his masculinity by finishing their Hungry Man's challenge; the munchies aiding in the accomplishment.
That night, getting in late from being out with Tanner, it took Jim only to hear the rusted hinges of the screen door to start yelling at me for "breaching my curfew." And then once he saw me in my grad hoodie, he made fun of me for it. Telling me I was too stupid to graduate high school. The battle led all the way to my room, where he ended up smacking the lid of my laptop down hard enough that the screen shattered. Leaving me to type out my assignments for the rest of senior year on my phone.
And then I met Danny.
And, well, Danny was always pretty sweet. And, on a rare occasion, he got impatient and angry. And then him and I swore to each other in the Old Abandoned Beach House forever friends, even if he were living out in California. And then my dad hit me and kicked me out of the house.
And then a haunting stillness occupied my room. And then my thumbs caressed the fabric of the sweater as I stared at my name. Mary.
And then, that was to be the endless cycle of Mary's life. The wheel of fate that would forever spin until I am old and die. And such as it were to be with everyone else I knew. Nothing but the places, the faces, and the reasons would ever change; the causes and results would relentlessly remain the same. It astonished me that most of humanity was so blind to the patterns that dominate their lives. How miserably we all fail to see the operations at work that command our personal laws of attraction.
The thread connecting Jim, Tanner, and Danny became so crystal clear.
Just because of who I am, just because of how I think, how I feel; because of the biases and judgments I pertain to, because of how my broken past shattered the lens in which I saw the world, subconsciously, I would forever engender similar men into my life. Men who could be so giving and so kind. And men who could be so ruthless and so cruel.
Jim will die missing the past and aggressively standing in the way of that which suggests the future.
And my next boyfriend, well, he'll be a boy better than the rest. Whether it be his affiliation for weed and souping up the Impala, or for rock 'n roll and unrealistic dreams, his individuality will impress me. He'll know how to outwit me, pretending to be smarter than he really is. And when I start giving him too much of my shit, he won't take it. And that will regrettably turn me on, making me fall harder in love with him.
And that next boy will drive me down those same streets of that same small town in a car that emblemizes his personality; all while I try to forget those same drives with his predecessors. Inevitably, the dysfunction of my life will arise. And unknowingly, I'll guilt him into carrying its weight. And no doubt, that just like Danny and Tanner, only in the balance in which sweetness and rage are dealt will differ. Someway, somehow, his hands will find their way on me.
But I'll make him, too, promise to never leave me.
Imperceptibly, each time the wheel of the story comes around, with each new rotation reaching its apex, the stakes and the causes will proliferate. Crashing down in more cataclysmic consequences than before.
Once the pattern of my fate collated in my mind, it was impossible to unsee. Because of my history, because of the way the lives of my family played out before me, I was bound to the vortex. Hell, I was born into it. The wheel of my life will keep on spinning. Maybe next time it's a fiancé; there's a kid involved. Jim dies and leaves with nothing but unfulfilled vows "to change." The vortex will keep on raging. Raging and raging and reeling faster and faster with greater velocity until it becomes an inextricable whirling hurricane of chaos that I can no longer escape.
There will be no salvation in the moments between the relapses. Mary, just another fucking small-town tragedy.
What even is Destiny? Does it even exist? Do the destinies of the damned possess some hidden altruistic purpose that exists only in the celestial plain beyond human reach? Or can I, using all my might, charge a wedge deep in the spokes of fate and stop the predetermined course of my life from consummating?
Through the thinness that was the architecture of my house, I heard an undeniable crackle, the thunderous roar of an engine. A car engine.
No. It's too late for thinking like that.
But the roar grew unforgivably louder.
He's already long gone.
I kept repeating the phrase: He's gone, he's gone, he's gone, but then he grinded the engine outside like a racer anticipating the final run.
You stupid boy, I told you to leave! Leave! Leave! Leave!
I dashed out of my room with my grad hoodie still clenched in my fists. Accepting that the rickety floor would betray the flight of my feet, I threw caution to the wind and ran down the hallway. Then avoiding the shards of broken glass from the destroyed lamp, and plowing through the scattering of shoes on the mat, I snapped and slid back the bolt. Cranked the knob. And with a hard push, palming open the screen door, I skidded to a halt on the porch.
And just like the girl I had drawn who turned out to be a ghost, as was he. No car. No Danny. No intervention of destiny. Just an empty street. That roar came from elsewhere, possibly across the shore. That thunder was meant for someone else.
Resurrecting my long dead imagination, I tried assembling the features of his beautiful face and see him in that roofless Mustang. Sitting, waiting for me out on the road in a halo of streetlight. Scanning through my memories, I replayed all the times his face had stood out in my mind. How handsome he looked with his hair brushed casually off his forehead, like that first night I noticed, wearing his nineties jean jacket on the carousel.
But already Danny was slipping out of my memory. Every time I thought my mind was on the verge of constructing his features just right—a hazy memory plastered on a blank mannequin—his face slipped entirely from me. I struggled to remember. But I couldn't. I couldn't. Oh my God no, no, Danny no.
The screen door then slammed and snapped in place behind me.
"Mary!"
Jim roared my name from deep inside the house. With a loud crash, the porch started sporadically shaking as he attempted to run with his limp. Looking through the mesh at his gray figure getting bigger down the hallway, and then looking back to make sure Danny really wasn't on the street, my eye throbbed, as if anticipating another hit. And in the shock of the realization, the realization of how badly I had been scarred, I dropped my grad hoodie like a rag at my feet.
Jim screamed my name again. The boards of the porch shook with a great force on the pounding of his every step.
And that was when I did it. When I made one of those choices you can't take back; the kind that changes lives forever.
"MARY!"
Jim continued to scream after me, but by then, I was already away, running down the street. Only looking back for a second when I heard the snap and the bang of the screen door breaking off its hinges.
Running above the pools of orange streetlights, passing all the old houses, I heard him from all the way down the road, cursing my name every way he knew. And I felt sorry for Jim. And then in that instant, it felt as though everything I'd held within—the frustration and the anger and the hate buried deep inside—expelled with each smack of my bare heels on the concrete. And from then on, my flight felt loose. Free.
I forgave my dad.
Up until then—God—I thought he hated me. The epiphany hit as a dusting of loose pebbles crushed into my feet. Some people, maybe, can't love. Can't love us the way we want them to. Dad feared losing me.
The shallow road rushed up into an intersection shaped like a T.
Two houses down to my right, the earth dipped into the sea. And in front of me, the lamppost leaned to the left, so I followed its lead. When I escaped the entangled streets of Danae's Bay, the roads got wider, and the stretches of darkness between the streetlights longer.
Life resurrected on Lockport Road. People were out and cars raced by. In my adrenaline-rushed and hollowed mind, the world spun around me. The bright lights. The shock of every stranger's perplexed gaze. The commotion of the traffic. I was overwhelmed. For a stunned second, I completely forgot about my destination. The gas station.
The gas station. The gas station. The gas station.
It was an improbable gamble, but if I knew Danny at all, I knew he would stay true to his word and begin his drive with our planned rendezvous in mind.
While pitching my sob story to another waiting patron of the midnight bus, hoping to use it in exchange for the fare, I didn't even consider the unlikeliness of catching him in time. But I knew I would catch Danny. I had to. God, it was the ambition fueling my fate.
Was it my fate to be born to Dad? That was noble of him. It really was. A young guy, adopting the baby girl birthed by his deadbeat, drug-addicted girlfriend. He didn't have to, and he tried his best. He loved me, I realized. It broke my heart to think of how differently things could have been if only he'd known how to love me.
The guy I begged two dollars and fifty cents off of might have thought I was strung out, crazy, and homeless—and was probably terrified by the frantically shivering, and barefooted girl, crying about her life. When he fended me off by giving me the money, my eyes welled with tears and I thanked him repeatedly for his benevolence like he was a saint.
The irrevocable consequences of my decision only caught up to me when I had a moment to breathe on the bus. While holding onto the steel railing, feeling the bus shake as it rolled over the bumps in the road, I started bawling.
I'm sorry, Dad.
I remembered what Danny had said to me: it doesn't come for free. For the rest of my life, I would pay the price by knowing I had robbed Dad of the last thing he had. Me. But I was so terribly hurt, and I had tried so hard to love him, but this was my life—and unlike him, I knew that he would never change and that Mom wasn't coming back.
I'm so sorry, Dad. I hope someday you'll forgive me.
The bus wheezed to a halt at its last stop on County Line 55.
Regional Variety & Gas, a million miles away and glowing in the dark, desolate countryside. Danny's red Mustang parked out front.
The bus driver unfolded the doors and I leaped off the steps, almost wiping out on the road. As I started sprinting to the gas station, Max suddenly came to mind.
I wish I could have talked to him. It made me sad to think that I'd never gotten the chance to know him very well. We would have gotten along. Maybe even more than Danny and I. Did he choose to die? If so, when did he just decide that was it? That he was going to end all the insurmountable sadness with one swift click. Bang. What invisible thing needs to break for someone to make that choice, the choice to kill themselves? And why hadn't it broken me?
If Max did kill himself, I'll never be convinced that makes him a terrible person. Choosing to die. Life is hard, and it appears some are born solely to suffer through it. As the Queen sings, we are Born To Die. So why not bring our inevitable oblivion closer, and experience life's antithesis? If Hell is indeed here on Earth, then why chastise those longing to return to Heaven? Why, if I would've grabbed his gun, I might have just shot myself that night.
The gas station got closer with each thudding slap of my feet against the road. My right side started to cramp, I felt winded, but I kept running. The bright luminance of the lone canopy light brought out the red in Danny's car. My thighs begged me to stop. I kept on going. I rehearsed my speech in my head. How I would tell him, I want to run away with you. And I imagined that, as I ran up, chest heaving, out of breath, he would roll down the window and look at me with his dark eyes.
Standing at his window, I would tell him everything. How I felt. How I was sorry for hurting him. How I chose to cower behind the one thing he did wrong and use it as an excuse to turn him away.
"Danny, I don't care where we go. Let's follow our map. I don't care, so as long as we are together. My future isn't so scary when I'm with you."
He would push open the car door and stand over me; his brown eyes, with the rare green shining through, would look into mine. My hand would lower into his palm. His hand feeling so rough as it held and protected mine. I then get in the car. The engine rumbling with life. And his foot will floor the clutch, and then he'll shift into gear, and then we will be driving, following the highlighted route we had made. And finally, we will be free.
I ran harder, closing the gap. A hundred feet. Fifty, thirty, ten. Five. When I reached the driver's window, the plush blue dice dangling from the rearview mirror confused me. I thought that was a strange aesthetic choice for Danny's road trip. My fingers smudged the glass as I peered in. Then it dawned on me. That wasn't Danny's car.
"There's a better reflection in the pisser," a brusque voice from behind me grumbled, followed by a stiff laugh. I spun around. Some old guy sporting a tucked-in plaid shirt and nursing a styrofoam coffee cup walked up behind me.
"Was there another car just here? Like, this one?" I choked on the words.
"Sorry, girly. Couldn't tell ya," he said, and then mumbled something while inspecting the smudges I made on his window, mentioning something about loading up and out. Before whirling around and dashing into the gas station, I noticed that his car lacked the horsey symbol. That wasn't even a Mustang.
Pulling open the gas station door, I shouted, "Was there another red car here earlier? A red Mustang? Old, like, uh, from the eighties old, with a black racing stripe?"
The attendant behind the counter stroked his beard in thought. "Yes, yes. The young guy. Pump four. He has the brown hair? Yeah?"
"When?" I died.
"Oh, probably... five minutes? He was waiting around all night, yeah?"
"Is there a phone?" I demanded, sprinting up to the counter. "There has to be a phone I could use."
"Payphone in the front."
"Please, please, please can you lend me some change?"
Opening the till, the attendant pulled out three quarters and dropped them in my palm. I darted out the door.
"Shit, shit." I fumbled to deposit the quarters into the change slot. Then unhinging the phone, cradling it between my shoulder and neck, I went to hit Danny's cell number.
"Eight-four-eight." Clicking in the area code. "Six. Eight. Uh. Fuck."
For the life of me, I couldn't remember. Was it 848 687? Or 848 688? And what in God's Name were those last four digits?
I jammed my finger into the 8 button and then typed in a random four digits. My fingers clicked all over the number pad until I started swapping my hand down repeatedly over the buttons. A high-pitched tone blared from the receiver, letting me know that my call could not be complete. About to slap my hand down over the buttons again, the pad of my middle finger hooked onto the ledge of the 2 button. Suspended. I froze. Pulling my finger down until it plucked off.
While staring at the black, worn-out buttons on the number pad, the dial tone droned helplessly in my ear.
I then let the phone fall from my shoulder. It jerked up on its suspension, and then recoiled and spun in aimless circles, dangling by the chord. The receiver shrilled dimly below.
Sauntering back into the gas station, the walls tilting and slowly pulling away from me as I waded into the void, all I could think of was, Five minutes. Five fucking minutes.
"Thanks." I handed the attendant back the lone quarter. He then asked if he could be of any help. Sounding sincere enough. But then a look of wry realization came into his eyes, and he stared at me strangely. Suddenly aware of my cold nipples cutting through my nightie, I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head No.
My feet peeled away from the sticky floor as I walked out.
Five minutes.
The door made a double beep after I pulled and then pushed it open, and then found myself a seat on the curb. While rubbing the bottom of my feet against my ankles, scraping off the pebbles that had tacked themselves into my skin, I got lost in a staring contest with the ground. I eroded from the inside out. Crumbling. I started crying. My tears landing in dark rings beside my dirty feet. Realizing that all I was veiled in from the unsympathetic gas station light was my nightie, I began praying to Saint Maria Goretti for protection.
"You hear that?"
He would've said, acknowledging the singing crickets. "Listen to how they envy the songs in the sky."
I started laughing through my tears.
I never even got the chance to tell Danny I loved him.
My ass felt boney sitting on the curb for so long. So maybe I wasn't as fat as my draped jeans had made me believe. God, I don't know. What did that matter? I started laughing silently again.
After sitting in the dark for a long while, there was one thing I noticed. That the gas station light couldn't outshine the moon. And as I continued to stare up at the black sky, trying to find my faith entangled somewhere in the stars, I realized that all I held my faith in was gone.
But—I didn't need Danny for my dreams.
While sitting there on that cold hard curb. Dispossessed. Examining my chipped nails and muddy feet, with the gas station light throwing my dark shadow in front of me, I remembered what Danny had pointed out what was not inked beside my tits, but in fact, handwritten next to my heart: the heart will break, but broken live on.