A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (13 page)

“Hey, Gin! Down, Gin!” she said with a voice that sounded of defeat, of an absolutely incorrigible dog.

“Your dog’s name is Gin?” I asked. “Is there a Tonic?”

“Her full name is Virginia Woolf, but that’s just my ex-girlfriend being pretentious, and the dog’s not all that smart. As you can tell. So Gin, or Ginny, or Stupid-head.”

She hauled the dog away from me by the collar and rubbed her on the head, then started up the truck and took off down the highway. It was too warm inside, with the air conditioner whirring ineffectually and spitting out humid, ozone-scented air, and the warm rain had started to fog up the windows. “I was gonna offer you a ride home, but you’re not from around here, are you?”

“I live close to Chicago.”

“That’s what, eight hours?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, you’ll stay at my place for the night, and figure what to do from there once the weather’s past.”

I hesitated. “I can stay at a Motel 6 or something. I’ve got the cash.”

“Not in this weather. The rain’ll wash my truck off the road. We’re going straight home until it clears up.”

“Okay,” I finally said. “I’m Cass, by the way. Cassandra. Do you always pick up people at the side of the road?”

“Not always, but I’m usually right about it. That’s how I got Gin. And I’m Maggie.”

I glanced over at her—one hand on the steering wheel, the other scratching behind Gin’s ears, head silhouetted against the rain-splattered window. There was something about her that seemed so sophisticated and mature and sure of herself—her old bumpy truck, or her literary dog, or just the tired way she smiled as she brushed the hair back from her face. Or maybe it was just that she’d rescued me from a flash flood.

She fumbled absentmindedly among a stack of CDs and put one into the CD player, and guitar music started playing, a twangy whisper almost drowned out by the road noise and the splatters of raindrops.

“So, feel free not to answer, but what’s the deal? You look kind of young to be stranded this far from home. And in weather like this.”

“I’m almost seventeen. And I wasn’t stranded.”

“You’re still young enough to be sticking an
almost
in front of your age. Do your parents know where you are?”

“Roughly,” I said. It had been about fifty miles since I’d last called Mom.

“You’re lucky if this is as bad as things get.”

“I know.”

She glanced over at me, just for the half second she could afford when there was rain splattering so thick on the windows I could hardly see out, even with the wipers swishing back and forth. “Please don’t tell me you’ve got parents who don’t give a damn what happens to you.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “They’re okay with it. I’m calling home every day. Well, almost.”

I had never intended to truly explain myself, because there just wasn’t any way to make myself seem reasonable. (And I kind of liked it that way; when I was five hundred miles away from my parents, why in the world should I have to justify my reasonableness to anyone?)

So I waited, and I waited, and I listened to Merle Haggard, and scritched at Gin.

“There was this girl,” I said. “I mean—” All of a sudden I felt flustered, and added, “We were just friends.”

“No such thing.”

“We were.”

“Look. Despite what you may have heard, people have sex all the time with people they don’t love, or particularly care about, or sometimes can’t even stand. So why in the world do people say that it’s
just
friends, like it doesn’t matter as much, if you’re not having sex? Real friendship is true and forever and with all your heart. It’s not Relationship Lite.”

I nodded slowly. Something inside me went, Oh; it seemed like she’d just put into words something I’d been stumbling and stumbling over for I don’t know how long.

“And you’ve gone through all of Illinois and most of Missouri on account of this girl who’s just a friend. That means something.”

“I should have told Oliver that.” I wondered if he’d have understood. “But people will talk all day about the virtues of friendship until they get into a relationship themselves.”

“Touché.” Maggie smiled ruefully.

We pulled up beside a two-story apartment building with dingy vinyl siding. Me, her, and Virginia Woolf went up a flight of stairs to a big studio apartment fitted out with a bed and futon; the walls were covered with postcards, black-and-white photographs, bumper stickers extolling the virtues of organic food, and a few large sketches and watercolors, which put together seemed to cover almost every square inch of the walls of the living/ dining/bedroom.

“It’s a tight fit,” Maggie said, “but the futon’s fine to sleep on.”

“I’ll sleep anywhere. Beats the side of the road, anyway.”

She looked at me again with puzzlement that changed almost into admiration. “So, which is it, courage or insanity?”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t brave at first. I just didn’t care about anything enough to be frightened. And then I started caring, but I kept going anyway because that’s the best thing I can think to do. I’m different in real life.”

“Since when is this not real life?”

She flicked on the TV, while I went downstairs for my bike. I slid the wheels back on, spent a moment thinking about whether to drag it up the metal stairs along the outside of the building, then locked it underneath them instead, out of the rain. I piled my panniers into my arms and started up the stairs.

Maggie watched dispassionately as I dropped my stuff on the end of the futon, letting it overflow to the floor; I tried to arrange it in some kind of order, but settled for tossing my rolled-up sleeping bag at one end as a pillow.

“Mind if I use your shower?” I was still greasy and smelly and wet and totally unfit for socializing, and it had been bothering me more and more since she’d picked me up.

She nodded absently—so I showered and changed and came back feeling a lot more human, and flopped down next to her on the futon.

“Looks like the worst of it’s past, anyway.”

Big drops of water were still splattering against the roof and windows, against a sky the color of charcoal.

I nodded. “I just need to get to a bike shop and get a new chain, and then I can be on my way again. But I wouldn’t say no to a night out of the rain. If you’re sure that’s okay.”

“Like I’m going to kick you out in this weather just because you’re not in mortal danger.”

“I go out in the rain all the time.” Which wasn’t strictly true. I usually tried to catch a ride to school when it rained, and out here I tried to duck into a library or a Walmart or at least into my tent. But I knew what Real Cyclists thought about people who didn’t like riding in the rain, and if you were going to be stopped by snow or sleet or dark of night, you at least shouldn’t admit it when you were with a much more sophisticated almost-stranger.

“And we have already established that you’re not too great at risk-assessment.”

“Whatever,” I muttered, but I didn’t really mind. I liked how it made me feel brave and foolish. “Bikes are safer than cars most ways you look at the statistics.”

“Most ways I look at the statistics, the best thing you can do on a day like this is watch TV and drink beer.”

“There are statistics on that?”

“Of course. It’s empirically provable.”

She went over to the fridge, and I watched her with silent interest: an inch of dark roots in her dusty-light hair, a square face set in an expression that could read as annoyance or determination, jeans slung low on her hips.

She returned with two dark bottles, but I waved off the one she held out to me.

“I don’t really . . .” I tried to smile. I felt embarrassed and childish all at once, felt that I was in the presence of someone so much cooler and more mature than I would ever be. “Seriously, when I’m at home, I’m the most straitlaced kid you could hope to meet.”

And it wasn’t that I had never shared when we were over at Ollie’s place and someone brought out some grape schnapps, just to taste how awful it was, not because we wanted to get drunk. We had all sampled from Ollie’s parents’ wine cellar, for a taste of what it was like to be an adult, what it was like to be allowed to do things. Back then it seemed like it was all of a piece with Lissa deciding that she was going to throw a dinner party. Pretending that adulthood was something adorable and hilarious that you could try on for a few hours at a time, not an uncertainty looming closer on the horizon. But this was different, because it was the real thing and not some nervous laugh pointing vaguely at the real thing. I was all on edge. I didn’t mistrust her, exactly, but I had started to mistrust myself. However unwise it might have been to set off from home in the first place, going home with a complete stranger was probably the most unwise thing I’d done so far. And I really, really wanted her to like me, because the three or four years she had on me seemed like forever, a future I could hardly conceive of for myself, and everything about her was so much cooler than I could aspire to. So there was the more reasonable part of my brain, the part that could quote safety statistics, telling me stop it. Be suspicious. Be square.

“Suit yourself.”

I got some water from the tap and sat down again, squirming on the futon trying to find a comfortable position. “She’s dead now,” I said.

Maggie blinked at me.

“My friend, the girl I was talking about before.”

“And that’s why a straitlaced girl like you is out playing Lance Armstrong five hundred miles from home.”

“Sort of,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had friends. I thought I did. But it turns out I was just borrowing them from her.”

“And when you’re gone they’ll all realize that they should have been nicer to you?”

“No!” I said quickly. “It’s not like that. I need to find a way to memorialize her, and I have to do it by myself.”

My fingers traced patterns in the futon’s wood grain. I was leaning so far over the side that the frame bit into my waist and my arms and my hips. Like I was trying to get away, almost, but I didn’t want to get away.

“A way to memorialize her,” Maggie repeated. “For that, you had to come all the way out to . . . where are you going anyway?”

“I’m going to California. Santa Monica.”

She laughed, a dry chuckle. I looked up. Her eyebrow arched skeptically, but she smiled with deep gentleness. “It’s been a while since I checked, but I seem to remember some mountains and some desert in the way.”

“I’ll figure out how to deal with those when I get there.” I no longer sat down with maps and a calculator almost every night to try to persuade myself one way or the other—would I get there, would I succeed, would I fail, should I turn back. There wasn’t really a question of turning back now.

And still, I got out my maps, and I got out my calculator. Maggie pointed out just where we were, and I counted 1,692 miles from here to there. Fifty-eight days, so twenty-nine miles a day. I was making good time, except that I should be making better time to make up for how the desert would slow me down. But I would fix my bike, and I would get back on the road, and it would be all right.

The sky lightened slowly, and darkened slowly. Maggie finished most of her beer and poured the rest into the slow cooker for flavor. We ate. We watched ancient sitcoms and talked cautiously over the commercials.

“I’m not in school anymore,” she said, when I asked. “I did that for two years, and then my folks decided that if I was going to get all kinds of weird ideas in my head, that was okay, but I could do it on my own dime. So, here I am fussing over whether you parents know where you are, even though mine sure don’t.” And she laughed it off the same way Jon laughed it off when his parents were on his case, the way you have to pretend it’s something you’re strong enough to laugh off. “Anyway, when I looked at my own dimes I had about three of them. So for the past year I’ve been working here and there and figuring out what to do next. Mostly at the Market. Oh, we should go there tomorrow, definitely. They make these peach scones—and vegan ginger cookies—and you can stock up on supplies, if you need some energy bars, or some fair trade socks.”

“Okay,” I said. I don’t know why I said that. I was supposed to go to the bike shop and put a chain on my bike and get on my way.

I was intrigued by her.

I discovered myself watching her, watching her ragged chewed fingernails and the electric blue polish that was peeling off her toenails, watching her fingers knot in her hair, watching her stretch out leisurely over her half of the futon.

I was intrigued most of all by how I watched her. I didn’t think that I had ever watched somebody like that before. Julia, well—Julia was my friend. I was careful to omit the
just
when I thought it this time. But I could hardly remember discovering her, could hardly remember her being new to me. I’d never needed to scrutinize her like I was scrutinizing Maggie, trying to figure out the vast sea of what I didn’t know from what was right in front of me. This was new—and I didn’t want to stop just yet.

O
n the second day of senior year, I was still trying to figure out where I stood with Heather. I couldn’t really blame her if she wanted to eat lunch with other people, after spending the entire summer with us, but I couldn’t imagine her wanting to spend more than a day with her friends from middle school. And just because she was still friends with them didn’t mean things were going to be like they were before—right?

But after third period I saw Heather a few steps in front of me, going to lunch again with Gwen and Groupies. I could hear snatches of talking, and it was all the same stuff as always. Whose personal life was a complete train wreck, and who had the misfortune of getting asked out by a guy whose only interest seemed to be collecting Magic cards, and how lame everything and everyone was.