Nobody but Us (17 page)

“See what you want yet?”

“No. No, I’m waiting for someone.”

I mumble the words, look around the waitress at the video footage. It’s black-and-white and fuzzy, but you can see what’s going on. You can see a dark-haired girl, smaller and thinner than the cashier, her eyes blank. You can see a guy, coming up the aisle with something clutched in his fist. I hear the sound even though the video don’t play it. It’s sick. Sicker than when I heard it in person.

The oldies, the waitress. They watch the video, the oldies’ forks stopped halfway to their mouths, the waitress’s hand sitting on her hip.

Then they give information on the car.

I know there’s more than one old-school black Camaro on the road, but suddenly I’m fumbling for my wallet and pulling out a bill and setting it back down and there’s Zoe coming, I see her out of the corner of my eye. I swear and toss some money on the table and fall outta the stool. In three steps I’ve got Zoe by the elbow and haul her to the front door.

She protests, but I don’t look at her or no one in the restaurant. I just walk. Walk to the car, open the door for Zoe, close it.

The waitress comes out and hollers from the porch.

“Hey! You forgot your wallet!”

Zoe looks at me like she don’t know what the hell’s going on and puts her fingers on the door handle.

“Will, your wallet.”

“Get your seat belt on.”

I squeeze my hands into fists and sprint to my side of the car. The waitress is coming down the first step. I catch her eye and she’s waving fake black leather in the air. My heart pounds ’cause we got forty feet in between her and me and a lot can happen in forty feet. One of the old-timers comes up behind the waitress and stares over at us. He points and says something, but I ain’t hanging around to hear what. I get in the car and start it and I see the waitress’s face change when she sees what I’m driving.

“Will!”

“Leave it!” I shout over the spinning of the tires on loose gravel.

Zoe says something more, but I ignore her until the road opens into nothing again.

I CROSS MY ARMS OVER MY CHEST AND GLARE AT HIM.

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Be quiet, Zoe.”

“I won’t. I won’t be quiet anymore! What’s wrong with you?”

“Leave it alone, Zoe!” His fingers dance along the wheel at uncontrollable speeds.

“No! Tell me what’s going on!”

“Everyone else can beat you around and you take it, but you gotta choose now to be a nagging bi—pain?”

A hole opens in my chest and the air in the car is sucked through it.

I know what he was going to say.

“Fuck you, Will!”

He takes his eyes off the road long enough to see my hand just before it connects with his face. My breath is coming at me in black-hole gasps. There is shock, shock that I just hit him. Shock that he called me a name. He’s never called me a name. I’ve never cussed at him before.

I’ve never hit anyone before.

The anger is overwhelming and uncontainable and it streams through my veins like poison until I have no control over my trembling limb. My eyes fill with tears and the tears spill over a face that I know is contorted with pain. There’s no room for air; it feels like I’ve swallowed chunks of asphalt and they can’t get past my throat.

We’re going so fast. Flying and I’m full of this burning and this need to hurt him more and me more and do something more to make him as angry as I am. I roll down my window. Grab the bag of stolen money from the floor, money that’s not ours. Will’s face turns to me in slow motion. I throw the bag hard as I can, into rock and crevice and dirt. The car swerves and Will swears.

I’m immediately sorry I did it but too scared to tell him so.

He takes it well. I can’t understand how he’s taking it so well. His eyes are forward, his jaw clenched, his hands kneading the steering wheel. I worry that he’ll hit me, and I expect it, deserve it—want it—but he’s got himself under control and I’m melting on my side of the car from rage and sorrow and pity for myself.

“We need that,” is all he says.

Then why does he keep going? Why doesn’t he stop, why doesn’t he turn around? We can find the bag, pick up any bills that fell out.

The tension hisses and sputters between us like an angry snake, but he won’t look at me. Just the road. The road, and the speedometer as the needle climbs well above ninety. He’s thinking, I can tell, and above everything else, I want to know what he’s thinking about. I want to understand what just happened between us, what happened at the restaurant. Why he doesn’t stop to get the money. But he’s acting like I’m not here, so I bury my head in my arms and let go of the frustration. I scream. Then I start to cry.

His hand is in my hair, covering my head.

“Zoe.”

I’m not capable of responding to him. My tears are the Missouri River during heavy snowmelt. They choke my speech and suffocate my lungs. The car slows.

“Zoe. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Zoe. Please. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m an asshole.” He pulls off the road and yanks the key from the ignition. He reaches for my face. “No one calls you names anymore.
No one
. Especially me.” His eyes dart back and forth between mine. His voice is husky. “I’m sorry. I’m—Say something.”

I put my hand over his, over his arm that is creating a bridge between us, and open my mouth to say something, to make some noise that would fix everything, though I don’t know what. A rhythm of shuddering hiccups takes over and I shake my head.

“Zoe.” He pulls me to him, but it’s awkward, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to bring me close. “I’m sorry.” There’s anguish in his voice, and part of me wants it to be there, wants him to suffer, but a bigger part doesn’t. And he’s not alone in being wrong. I hit him.

I want to crawl into his lap, soak in the comfort of his apology, radiate my own until it’s all better.

“Will. I’m sorry, too.”

He moves his hand around to my shoulder and pulls me in close, just like I wanted. I’m the bad person and yet I still got what I wanted. My father understood that when I was a bad person, I couldn’t have what I wanted. He knew the punishment would atone for whatever I’d done wrong. Will kisses my head, and it’s a bandage on my bruised heart, but the guilt lingers.

“Ain’t nothing for you to be sorry about. I deserved that.”

I shake my head again.

“No. Nobody—” I clamp my mouth shut, because who am I to say the words I want to say? Who am I to say that nobody deserves to get hit? Didn’t my father punish me because he needed to, because it was all my fault? “There will never be hitting between us. Ever.”

“You do whatever you need to do when I step out of line. Anything. Don’t let me get away with nothing, understand?”

I kiss him hard, once, twice. Throw my arms around him and nod because he expects me to, but I can’t live that life again. How hard will it be to dig out of that dark place that believes people deserve to be treated like punching bags forever?

“Nobody calls you names.”

I nod again. He tucks me in as close as he can. The steering wheel wedges into my side.

He kisses my tears, my nose. “I love you.”

His words, his tone soothe me, and I work on slowing my breathing. Steadying my shaking limbs. The strangely free and powerful feeling from letting myself get angry and fight back scares me. I don’t want to love the slap of my hand on someone else’s face. I can’t be that person.

“I am sorry,” I insist. “No hitting. Let’s make the rule now. Never, to no one we love.”

“Okay.”

“Forgive me?”

He makes a disbelieving sound. “There will never come a day when I got to forgive you for keeping me in line.”

I want to make him say he forgives me, I want him to understand how I can’t become a monster, but I know in his own way he already has.

“We have to go back and get the money.”

“We can’t.”

“I bet it’s right off the road, Will. We can find it!”

“No. It was stolen anyway.”

I don’t understand why that would matter now. Now that his wallet’s gone and we have nothing.

“What happened back there?”

“The menu sucked.”

“No.”

I sit up, away from him, and he looks at me. There is no humor in his eyes. No devilish grin on his face. But there isn’t anger, either. I saw that when I showed up at school with a new bruise. No, this light in his eye is uncontrolled and wild. I’ve never seen it before, but I know what it is. People like me know it on instinct.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

IF I TELL HER SHE’LL FREAK OUT.

If I don’t tell her I’ll be a liar.

I pull onto the road again. Gotta get miles between us and that diner. They’re silent miles. Ugly miles.

She’s waiting for my answer. Waiting like she got time, and she ain’t letting it go until I tell her something. I think about the right thing to do, about what a real man would do in this situation, and all I can come up with is that a real man wouldn’t be in this situation. Just fucked-up failures with too short of a fuse like me.

“It was a news story. It just wasn’t a good one.”

Her look is so intense it’s like she’s touching me. But her hands are in her lap, twisting under the pressure of my mood. She don’t wanna come near me until she knows what the hell’s going on.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Not a good one?”

I roll down the window and stick my arm out to catch the cold. The air is this mixture of sand and weeds and it used to smell like freedom but now I ain’t sure what it smells like. I ain’t sure of anything but Zoe and how I’ll do anything for her and of this road that stretches out in front of us for miles and miles. I just don’t know if the miles are long enough.

“We could go to California now. Don’t stop in Vegas. Meet Misty. Or … you wanted to see Mexico, right? We could do that. Just keep driving. All the way to Mexico. Get tans. Blend in. Drink tequila on the beach. Really be free.”

Zoe’s hands stop fussing.

“What? Will … I don’t care about Mexico. And I don’t have a passport. What does Mexico have to do with anything? Will, stop the car. Stop it!”

I do like she says, ’cause for the first time I can remember, I need someone to tell me what to do. The decisions I make on my own are crap. I need Zoe to lead me now.

We stop in a pit of sandy dirt and she gets out. She’s waiting for me, but if I get out, I gotta tell her the truth. I squeeze the steering wheel and remind myself to stop being a wuss.

She’s staring out over the desert when I reach her. There’s a scorpion a few feet from where we’re standing, but she don’t notice it. I’m fascinated by the curl of its tail, the armor on its back. I feel worse-equipped for this life than an insect I could smash under my heel. I stamp my foot in its direction and it scurries under a shrub.

She reaches for me. “What happened?”

This is better. I just had to get out of the car, out from under the noise of the engine, the noise in my head. The car is silent and so is the desert and I can figure this out. I’m gonna tell Zoe everything, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no secrets and we can handle anything together.

“He’s dead.”

She don’t say nothing for a minute. I hear her swallow.

“Who?”

“The guy. The one at the store.”

All I hope for is that she don’t run and hide under a bush like the scorpion.

“The one you hit with the bottle?”

I don’t nod or nothing, but she knows ’cause she don’t ask no more questions. We stare at the slope of low bush hills in the distance.

“Just tell me. Don’t make me ask how it happened—or what happened.”

So I tell her what I saw on the TV in the diner. About how the guy went home in a bad mood and yelled at his wife and went to bed but never woke up. About how the brain hemorrhage grew and grew until it finally killed him. About the woman who was in the parking lot with her kid when she heard a commotion in the store and saw two teenagers run out. About how much of our profiles was caught on grainy black-and-white film. And about the make, model, and color of car the police were looking for.

But I don’t tell her about how, if I don’t think about what it all means as I’m telling her, I can pretend I ain’t afraid.

I turn around and glare at the car, like it’s all that piece of junk’s fault.

Zoe ain’t looking at the desert no more. Her eyes are closed tight and her arms hug her body in a knot. She never interrupted me when I was talking. Now it’s like she’s trying to figure out what to say, making sure they’re the right things to say.

“That’s why we can’t go back for the money.”

I make a noise.

“What are we going to do?”

“You don’t gotta do nothing. You didn’t do nothing. This is all me.”

She turns toward me, and those arms that were holding her together wrap around me.

“Oh my God.” Her voice is high-pitched. “We have to—”