t e n
*
I’m about to wet myself. I should have gone to the dodgy-looking loo at the petrol station because now my bladder has reached bursting point, after I downed a bottle of water – and then another after, as Arjun predicted, my combination of salty food and a bunch of chocolate induced intolerable thirst.
“Hey, Sam?” I call out.
“Yes, my man! What can I do for ya?” He meets my eye in the rear view mirror, turning Carrie’s music all the way down.
“Any chance there’s a loo nearby?” I ask, then change my tack when I look out of the window and see that we’re still in no man’s land. “Or, like, a big bush?”
He laughs then presses his lips together and shakes his head. “We’re on protected land right now, my friend – can’t have you getting done for public urination, not with the number of state troopers I’ve seen prowling around. Reckon you can hold it another”—he checks his watch—“twenty minutes?"
I honestly don’t know, but I don’t seem to have much choice so I nod and hope that if I stay still enough, my bladder will fall asleep. I need to distract myself, else all I’ll think about is how much I need to pee, but Arjun’s asleep, his head rattling against the window. So I find my earphones from deep at the bottom of my backpack, and I start one of four audiobooks that I remembered to download before the trip.
I grew up surrounded by stories, from my dad’s teetering piles of books around our tiny house in Scotland, to the stacks that doubled in size when he met Mum and we moved in with her only a few months later, but reading is a painfully frustrating task. The words jump around on the page like one of those weird eye worms that moves every time you try to look at it, and it wasn’t until I was in Year Four that Mum realised something wasn’t right. I was ten before I got a dyslexia diagnosis.
I had glasses for a while, but I was forever misplacing them and they didn’t help that much anyway, so now it’s just something I deal with. And to satiate my love for books, I listen to them. Mum got me my first audiobook when I was nine, and it changed my life. It’s like being a kid again, when Dad – and later Mum – would read to me until I fell asleep.
Eyes closed, I set the narration to 1.3x speed and try to sink into the story and focus on anything but how much water I’ve drunk since my last wee.
It works, because twenty minutes later, we pull into the campsite where we’ll be spending the night, and I haven’t wet myself. As soon as Sam comes to a stop, I vault across Arjun and past the twins in the row in front, and I launch myself out of the van towards the rundown building with a dangling restrooms sign.
I make it just in time, skidding to a stop in front of the urinal and battling with the zipper of my shorts for almost too long.
The release is akin to a religious experience, and I let out an audible contented sigh that turns into a groan of release, and ... I’m not alone.
There’s the sound of a flush from one of the stalls and the man who comes out gives me a strange look and a wide berth. Who cares. He’d be giving me a stranger look if I came in here covered in my own piss.
When I make it back to the group, they’re unpacking their bags from the trailer. Arjun already has both of ours out, two backpacks at his feet and his hands on his hips as he looks out at the view.
“Howdy, cowboy,” he says when I stand next to him, tipping an imaginary hat at me. “Did you know that Arizona has more types of rattlesnake than any other state?”
“You know, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear when we’re about to spend the night camping in Arizona.”
“Thought as much,” he says. He rustles in his bag and pulls out a can of Arizona Iced Tea, letting out a happy gasp after his first sip. “When in Arizona, do as the Arizonians do, right?"
"Is that stuff good?"
"Amazing." He holds out the can. "Want a sip?"
I take it and try not to overanalyse the fact that we're sharing a drink, my lips where his have been.
"Not bad," I say.
"I'm going to have to stockpile all the flavours we don't have at home," he says. "Feeling better?”
“Much. Glad to have avoided an unfortunate incident on the back seat.”
Arjun chuckles and says, “Speaking of incidents on the back seat, look at this.” He leans close to me as he opens up his camera roll and shows me a selfie he must have taken while he was DJing earlier. In it, he’s wearing a broad grin that shows off his perfectly white but endearingly crooked teeth – he has these little fangs that, now I’ve seen them, I can’t stop noticing – and everyone who’s awake is grinning right back.
Except Young-mi and me, who are both fast asleep in the back of the photo. Her head’s on my shoulder; my temple is against the top of her head. It’s quite a sweet photo, actually, even if I’m not conscious, and it makes me smile.
“Can you send me that?”
“I can indeed.” He opens Facebook and searches my name, but March Marino yields no results. At least no accurate ones. He hands me his phone. “Find yourself so I can add you as a friend. If that’s ok?" He eyes me.
I nod. "It's ok."
"I’ll send you any pictures you want.”
I still use Facebook but I never bothered to update my name when I legally changed it to match my siblings, so my profile is still under the name Marcello Mehta. My mother may not have given me her time, but she gave me her last name.
Arjun adds me as a friend and sends me the photo, and then a few more that he took at Joshua Tree National Park. There are a few selfies of the two of us, and some that he took of the scenery that I happen to be in. In one, I’m standing slightly sideways on, one hand up to shade my eyes and the other in my pocket, no idea that my photo is being taken.
“I like that one,” I say. Arjun shrugs one shoulder, gives me half a smile.
“You looked photogenic; figured I might as well snap a pic.”
“Cheers.”
“Anytime. What are tent buddies for if not to be your personal cameraman to take candids for Instagram?”
As soon as the start of a smile meets my lips, Arjun proves himself by opening his camera app and snapping a photo of me. He manages to capture that moment between my genuine expression and the flicker in my eyes when I’m caught off guard, and ... it’s a good picture. I look happy and slightly dazed, the sun making my skin glow and sending a halo of light through my curls.
He sends it to me and I think that as soon as I feel up to turning airplane mode off, I might make it my new profile picture.
“Have you seen this?” he asks as he tucks his phone back into his pocket.
When he hauls his bag onto his shoulder, I copy him and follow him over to the rest of the group, and I have to catch my breath. Out of awe, this time, rather than my shoddy fitness.
“This is where we’re sleeping tonight?”
We’re right on the river. As in, the railing I’m standing against slopes down to the Colorado River just a few metres from me, a sandy bank disappearing into the water. On the other side, rocky hills stretch up to the sky and the sun beats down on the water, sending golden light skipping across the surface.
“This is us for tonight!” Sam says when he’s got everyone’s attention. “Now, as I’m sure you’re all aware, it’s pretty hot.”
Just a bit. I’m used to highs of maybe twenty-five degrees Celsius back home, usually with a decent wind to accompany the heat, but that’s not the case here. It’s thirty-five at the moment, and while it’s not humid, the heat is dry and stuffy, scorching my skin.
After the odd chuckle and murmurs of agreement, Sam continues. “Now, as you all know by now, I’m a bit of a trek vet, and I’ve camped here enough to know that it is preferable – and plenty safe enough – to camp outside. If you’re up to it, I highly recommend that tonight, you grab a sleeping mat and a pillow, and sleep under the stars.
The thought alone is intoxicating. Why bundle up into a tent, which will probably only serve to trap the heat and roast us in our sleep, when we could lie beneath the sky with nothing separating us from the night?
“Just a suggestion,” Sam says, holding up his hands. “We’re gonna chill here for about fifteen minutes, have some time away from the van, and then we’re gonna head to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for tonight. When we’re back, we’ll eat and chat and get some music going, and there isn’t much better in life than floating in the Colorado River with a beer.”
He looks at Arjun and me and, in a voice that suggests he doesn’t intend to lay down the law with us, he says, “Or a soda.”
Arjun and I share a look. I don’t know about him, but I had my first drink at fourteen and in the four years since, I’ve learnt my tastes and my tolerance pretty well. I may be underage – in this country at least, which is ridiculous considering kids here can, like, buy a fucking gun before they can drink – but the sound of a cold one in the river is too appealing for that to stop me.
I sidle over to Young-mi. She may look fifteen, but she has a legal ID that proves she’s twenty-one, and she seems to know exactly why I’ve singled her out.
She laughs and says, “You too young to buy drinks here.”
“Correct. But you’re not,” I say, and I give her my cheesiest grin, batting my eyelashes. “If I give you money, could you buy me some beer?”
Acting like it’s an inconvenience, she rolls her eyes dramatically and after a moment, she shrugs. “Of course.” Then, looking over my shoulder, she says, “You too?”
I look over. Arjun’s behind me, attempting the same expression that forces a laugh out of me. I wonder if I looked that ridiculous.
“America just needs to get with the times,” Arjun says. “I’ve made a lot of big, life-changing decisions in my time on this green earth: if the government can get teenagers to take out loans that they’ll likely never pay back, it can let them decide to have a beer.”
“You pay me, I get you drinks,” Young-mi says. “Not a problem.”
*
We may be in the middle of paradise, but apparently that’s no match for Walmart, which looms out of the desert as soon as the roads are a little more populated. We’re barely fifteen minutes from the campsite, but here we’re firmly grounded in everyday reality rather than the magic of the river.
Using the money from the food kitty we all contributed to at the start of the trek, we buy salads and corn and chicken and rice, everything we want to cook up over a fire tonight. Young-mi fills a basket with Budweiser while Arjun and I stay well away, loading up on American snacks instead, and I watch with amusement as a sceptical cashier checks her ID.
Apparently she has never come across a Chinese passport before, and she makes a big deal of checking the date and holding it up to Young-mi’s face, and she looks as though she’s on the verge of calling over her manager before she gives in and hands back the passport.
Once we’re back in the van, Young-mi passes me the bag of beer and harrumphs.
“She didn’t believe me! She think my passport is fake,” she says, her eyebrows arched in surprise and exasperation.
“To be fair,” Arjun says, “most Americans don’t have a passport and seeing as we’re in the absolute middle of nowhere, Arizona, I’d bet a Chinese passport is a rarity.”
“They don’t have passports?” She tilts her head. “How do they travel?”
He shrugs. “They don’t. I guess they’ve got everything they need, from Florida to Alaska.”
Young-mi ponders this for a moment, and she lets me take her passport when I hold out my hand. It’s a few years old and she looks so young. Beneath Chinese characters, her Korean name is written in English: Park Young-mi. She sees me checking it out and says, “I am joseonjok.”
“What does that mean?” Arjun asks before I can.
“I am Korean, my ethnicity,” she says, “but I live in China. Joseonjok is word for that.”
“Wow. That’s so cool. Very specific,” I say, and she gives me a proud smile.
“It is cool. Confusing as well, sometimes. I like it.”
“So do you speak Korean and Chinese?”
She nods and says, “Korean and Mandarin, and Chengdu-Chongqing, and English.”
“Holy shit. That’s amazing. Wow, and I can just about speak English,” I say with a laugh. I wish I knew another language, but my attempts at French at school were suboptimal, my brain refusing to cooperate when I could barely read my own language, let alone figure out a second.
“I like language and words,” she says with a modest shrug. “What’s yours like?” she asks as she puts away her dark maroon passport.
I dig out my passport from the safely zipped pocket inside my bag and she flips through until she lands on my photo page, which has her holding back a laugh. My photo is only a couple of years old, but I look like a twelve-year-old, all awkward and gangly and baby-faced.
“Oh, you’re so cute!” she cries.
Arjun peers at the glossy page and lets out a quiet chuckle. “Adorable,” he says, and then his expression changes to one of surprise. “Wow. That’s one hell of a name. You kept that quiet.” He shifts his eyes to me and I almost shiver when my full name rolls off his tongue. “Marcello Bodhi Mehta Marino-Flores.”
My name may be a jumble of Italian and Indian and Filipino but his pronunciation is flawless and goose pimples prick my arms at the sound of his accent caressing every syllable. When my parents got married and I changed my name, part of me was tempted to get rid of Mehta, but it was a part of me by then. More of a part of me than my mother. So I bumped it to the middle and at last took on my parents’ last names.
“That’s me,” I say. “Bit of a mouthful. March is fine.”
“It sure is,” Arjun says.
His eyes are bright, his lips tugging into a smile. He shows his passport, no more to his name than I already know. Arjun Sharma. The photo looks recent, and it’s about as good as a passport photo can be. There’s the slightest dimple in his cheek, as though he’s thinking about smiling, and his hair is a little long, swept off his face.
It’s hard to hold back some kind of inappropriately honest comment about how hot he looks in his picture, so I leave it to Young-mi to gush about how his photo is unfairly good – it really is – and I decide instead to tell him that his name is short and sweet.
“Just like you!” Young-mi says, and she turns around and sinks back into her seat, leaving us with an embarrassed silence on my behalf – Arjun seems amused – and a box of beer. Splitting the cost three ways, it was only a few bucks, and I can’t wait to change into my trunks and lie in the river, and hopefully not come across any local police.
*
welcome to the start of week 4's updates! I have planned the overarching plot and what happens and all that jazz, and it currently looks as though this story will have 40 chapters (maybe as many as 50, as I'm a chronic overwriter) so we're only 1/4 of the way done! I can't wait to share the rest with you!