Nobody but Us (2 page)

She figures I stole it. No, I ain’t gonna let that bother me. She’s right. I got a grand burning a hole in a paper bag under the seat to prove it.

“We had extras,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about it. There’s a whole closet full of these things. Brand-new stuff. All bought with your tax dollars. Don’t worry about it.”

Zoe laughs at me. It’s gotta hurt to laugh, her head’s gotta ache and her lip, too, but her smile is amazing. It lifts everything. Even me.

“I’ve never paid taxes. Never allowed to work, remember?”

I downshift as we approach a stop sign. Roll through. There ain’t no time to stop. Who knows what’s chasing us.

“I remember. And you’re not gonna have to, understand? I’ll take care of that when we get to Vegas. I’ll find work. I can do anything. And I’ll take care of the bills. Your job is to finish school, get your diploma or get your GED or something and go to college. You’re too smart to end up like me. Like, stupid.”

She wants to be a nurse, she’d told me a bunch of times. The kind that delivers babies. I can’t remember what she called them. Some word that didn’t have nothing to do with babies. I feel her hand over mine as I shift up again.

“You’re not stupid,” she tells me. Her voice is soft. She soothes me. And I believe, for this split second, that I could have a future worth something, too. That’s what she does to me. It’s the most amazing thing.

“Oh! I almost forgot.”

Zoe unbuckles her seat belt and twists around to the back of the car. I tell her to be careful, peek over my shoulder. She rummages around in her makeup case, then comes forward again and settles into her seat. She’s got a lump under a napkin in her right hand and a lighter in her left. I look back to the road while she flicks the lighter.

“What’s that?” I ask her.

“Hang on a sec.” The vapor of the lighter fluid fills the car. “Okay, here you go.” I look again. And grin. Can’t keep cool ’cause she holds out a cupcake to me, with one candle in the center. The cupcake has a swirl of some ugly-ass blue frosting and a handful of sprinkles on top. “Happy birthday,” she says.

It’s nice hearing her say it. Last Friday, she snuck out and met me at the beginning of her street. We drove to the quarry. Charlie and everyone from the home—even Shelly, ’cause she likes a party even though she’s supposed to keep us straight—sat around drinking cheap beer in my honor. When Charlie saw us coming, he raised his can and sang the usual too-old-for-the-system birthday song: “Happy Getting Kicked Off the State to You.”

I wanted to deck him. Wasn’t something Zoe needed to hear.

Zoe squeezed my hand and shook her head when Charlie offered her a beer.

Later, Shelly’s all yammering to Zoe about all this money she’s got saved up to buy a house, and Charlie grabs me, nodding in their direction.

“So, Torres. What are you gonna tell Zo’ when you go?” He laughs. “That rhymes. Zo’, go.”

I shake my head and toss my empty can in the quarry. He’s an idiot.

“Damn, you just gonna leave? I didn’t think even you’d be that cold.”

I raise my fist and he flinches. I’ve beaten him up for less than this before. “Screw you, man. It ain’t like that.” Shelly’s still going on about her savings.

“It’s not like she can go with you. You can’t even take care of yourself.”

“Shut up.”

He rubs his face on his sleeve. “Jesus, man. You gonna try and take her? She ain’t even legal.” I don’t say nothing. His girlfriend’s barely out of diapers. “Fuck, man, you learn anything? You can’t save girls like that.”

“She’s not like us.” I clench my teeth.

“What? ’Cause she don’t live in the home?”

“Shut up, Charlie.”

“Cause she’s smart? Pretty? She’s as fucked-up as anyone else. Hey, you banged her yet? Better do it before you go.”

I leap to my feet and kick Charlie in the ribs. He falls over with that drunken mix of coughing and laughter. I grab his shirt and lift him to his feet.

“Shit, man,” he slurs.

Shelly runs over and grabs my arm. Zoe stands back, staring at me. She should look disgusted, but it ain’t like that. She looks patient. I don’t get that. ’Cause she’s seen this stuff a million times before? I drop Charlie on the gravel. Go to Zoe. Her eyes dart from me to Charlie. He’ll be fine. I take her hands.

“Hey, don’t. He’s wasted.” I smile, trying to shove down this feeling like I gotta hit something. I tilt her chin to me and look her in the eye. “I got to thinking. You should come with me.”

She looks surprised. “You’re not going to stay and finish school? It’s only a few months until you graduate.”

“You’re the only one who thinks I could do that.” She don’t know how good it feels that she thinks that. Even if it ain’t true. I’d have to do summer school to redo the stuff I messed up.

“I can’t just leave.” She says it like it’s a question. Suddenly, this idea I just started to have is the best I’ve ever had.

“You can. Don’t you want to get outta here? Don’t you want to get away from your dad? People who don’t care about you? I care about you.” She licks her lips. “We could go anywhere, do anything. I’m gonna get—I got money and you got brains. We could go anywhere,” I repeat.

“It’s too crazy.” Her voice is quiet.

“What’ve you got here? What’s here you can’t leave?” I start to walk away from everyone else, pulling her with me.

“Go right now?”

I laugh. “Just walk with me.”

We walk around the quarry and I talk and can’t shut up like … this idea keeps coming ’cause it’s too good to stop. I can see us driving away. I can almost feel the freedom. She gets excited, too.

“Like, Vegas? We could go there. See the Strip, all the lights in the middle of the desert. Do anything we want.” I stop walking. “I’ll take care of you. You know that?”

Her eyes flicker in the moonlight. She wants this. She wants someone, finally, to take care of her. Make her the best thing in their life. I cup her face and kiss her before she can think too hard about why she shouldn’t do this.

I kissed her a hundred times before taking her back to him that night. She blushed and hid her eyes every time I touched her lips. I didn’t take her home until she said she would come. But she never said happy birthday then. It’s nice to hear it now.

“Hey, that’s so sweet. Here, let me—” I lean over and blow out the candle.

“Did you make a wish?”

“I didn’t have to. Look at us. My wishes are coming true.”

I can’t see it in the dark car, but I know she’s blushing. She’s the type who’s gonna blush at everything.

We pause at a stoplight. I check the rearview mirror. Empty roads. Keep my hand on the stick, never let the wheels stop all the way. Go.

“Hey, you ran that red light!”

“We got places to be.”

She laughs like it’s a game and peels away the wrapper around the bottom of the cupcake, then passes it to me. The frosting tastes much better than it looks. But she’s cooked for herself and her dad all her life. She knows her way around a kitchen. She even tells me what to do to my ramen dinners to make them taste like real food. Add chicken and vegetables and healthy stuff. ’Cause she cares that I got good food. It’s nice.

I pull off onto the shoulder of the road and let the engine idle so I can finish my cupcake. I’ll give a minute for Zoe’s cupcake. But my eyes are on the side mirrors the whole time.

“Want a bite?” I offer her the last piece, but she shakes her head. I shove it in my mouth and kiss her before I’ve swallowed it all. She don’t mind when I get frosting on her lips. She licks it off. “Thank you,” I say, brushing her hair away from her face.

“You’re welcome.”

I kiss her again and accelerate back onto the highway.

I don’t know what time I was born. It’s on my birth certificate, in that folder I was given on my way out. I might be eighteen by now. It’s after eleven. I probably am eighteen. But birthdays don’t matter much to me. All I’ve gotten today was a reminder not to take anything that don’t belong to me and a chorus of “good lucks” from the rest of the cases back at the home.

And a cupcake. That’s the best thing. Maybe my birthdays will be getting better from now on.

I look over at Zoe, flexing and unflexing my knuckles. They’re not too sore. They calloused over a long time ago. She’s nodding off on the pillow, but I’m wondering if I should keep her awake. I gave her my own pillow, so she could get used to the smell of me or something. So she can get used to sleeping near me. To sleeping with me. Her neck’s exposed and I want to kiss it. There’s things I want to do to Zoe. I wonder if she thinks about that like I do. If there’s stuff she wants to do to me.

It still amazes me sometimes that she’s here. But she sticks by my side, thinks I can do something with myself. I ain’t never had a good birthday, until this one.

“Zoe, baby, you shouldn’t sleep yet.”

“Mm-hm,” she replies.

I dart glances at her. Check the rearview mirror. Check the road just long enough to make sure we’re still on it and not heading for some ditch filled with cow shit. I know she’s not gonna be able to stay up all night with me. We’re two different creatures that way: she has the brains and I can stay up all night.

“Stay awake a little longer,” I repeat. I grab her hand and press it to my lips. She smiles all tired like. “Tell me about what kind of nurse you want to be again.”

She talks for a while as I drive. Tells me about wrinkly babies and about dads who pass out in delivery rooms. I laugh at that. I would probably be like that, too, someday, all crazy overwhelmed by becoming a dad and all the blood and stuff.

I figure my own dad didn’t hang around long enough to experience that. I don’t know my dad, but I do know that my mom was on her own when she gave birth to me. After two years she figured it would be better for her to dump me off at her neighbors’ and never come back.

“Wanna know something?” I ask when she stops talking for a minute. “I think a baby that looks just like you would be beautiful.”

Zoe leans across the parking brake and kisses the corner of my mouth.

“Can I sleep now?” She yawns noisily. I check the dash.

“It’s been, like, about an hour. You think that’s long enough?” She should know. She’s the one who wants to be a nurse.

“I think I’ll be fine. I’m not dizzy or anything. I think that’s what you have to look out for. Wake me when we get to the state line, okay?”

She pushes and pulls on the pillow, shaping and testing it three or four times before settling in. I tuck the blanket around her with one hand. It’s hard to keep my eyes on the road. She is so sweet, dozing off in my car, lying on my pillow.

“I’ll wake you when we get there,” I tell her.

IT’S BEAUTIFUL SLEEPING IN HIS CAR. I’VE NEVER SLEPT anywhere but in my own bed in my own room. Unless you count the times I blacked out on the floor. But I don’t think of that as sleeping.

It’s not a deep, constant sleep, because even though my body wants to rest, my brain doesn’t. It wants to be awake with Will, watching what we’re passing, looking back at what we’re leaving behind. Feeling the touch of his hand on my neck, hearing his steady breath next to my ear.

Sometimes my body wins, and I doze. I dream about lying next to Will in ways we never have before, feeling the heat of embarrassment mixed with nervous longing as I sleep; but other times my brain wins and I wake drowsily and ignore the pounding in my head to play with the fairy song of my mom’s chimes or to smile at Will and put my fingers on his cheek. He’s handsome to me, in his rough way. I’ve always thought he was handsome, since the day he transferred to the home and, later, to my school.

Being in the home gave him a ready-made group of people to hang out with. He spent that first day walking the halls with Charlie Harmon, who graduates this year and plans on going into the army, and Lexi Simon. She’s two years younger than Will but dropped out a couple of weeks ago when she found out she was pregnant.

He commented on the bruise on my forehead that day, an unfamiliar voice floating out of a group crowded around a couple of lockers, and I tripped over my own feet.

I suppose everyone else in town was used to seeing them. The dark marks I tried to cover with makeup. I figured I had been doing a really good job, because nobody said anything when I showed up with some new disfigurement. But then this guy I’d never met before walks up and talks to me and he makes me doubt everything I thought I believed.

I guess it was just a case of the old stain on a hidden part of the wallpaper. When you see something often enough, it becomes invisible.

But it’s okay now, because Will saw. He came to visit me after that. At home—but only one time, because my dad told him to get lost—during lunch, after school. Sometimes he snuck me away in the middle of the night under a secret-keeping moon.

In a handful of weeks he’s become my new belief.

This night is the black kind of dark when there is no moon and it’s hard to see the houses we pass only every ten minutes or so. But I can see the stars if I lean forward and look out the top of the windshield. The stars don’t seem to move, even though we’re flying down the highway. There are always lots of stars in this part of North Dakota. They crowd in sympathetically, as though they can’t bear for any place to be completely deserted. As if aloneness scares them, too.