Something in the way Darla shifted her head made me turn and look, and I saw tears in her eyes. Oh, shit. Of course she was upset. Trevor was that kind of guy that you got upset over. At least, the chicks did. He had this way about him that made people feel bigger, and better, and smarter, and wilder than they really were. Which is exactly why I had to be careful around him – because if I wasn’t careful I’d find myself driving six hundred miles through the night to pick him up from one of his crazy schemes.
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly what had just happened to me.
Instinct made me want to reach out and say the right thing, to comfort her, but what are you supposed to say? “Hey, it was nice meeting the girl Trevor banged last night and uhh…see you…never?” There wasn’t a script for this. No professional development class offered by the on-campus career center taught you what to do when your band mate takes too much of your stolen peyote and winds up in a state you’ve barely heard of with a girl who lives in a potting shed. Or, if there was, my mom and my academic advisor had never signed me up for it.
Speaking of moms, Trevor’s was probably ripping him a new asshole right now. Man, that bitch could scream. Everybody had wondered what happened to Trevor. I still didn’t remember. I just woke up passed out in the basement of his house and he was gone. All that was left were his clothes, and thank God he had called me, finally, because lying to his mom had been getting harder and harder.
Judy had been the one to figure out that he really was gone. His shoes were still there, his clothes, his phone, his wallet, everything, and all that was missing was his acoustic guitar. And Trevor. He and I had eleven hours of driving ahead of us, and I supposed that I would learn the story. It would probably be another Trevor story, some half-assed, half-fiction, half-real yarn that he would spin to make everyone come out looking good and to make his own folly seem amusing.
He was half Tucker Max and half Jack Kerouac all tied up in a Gordon Gekko bow. Of all the guys I knew and had gone to school with over the years, each one of us groomed for med school, law school, an MBA, and in rare cases a Ph.D., Trevor was the one who had the whole package – but he was also the one with the biggest rebellious streak. Seeing what that looked like now, as we were about to launch fully into our trajectories, was kind of scary.
Trevor
Walking out of Darla’s little place, I stepped out into the sunlight, feeling the warmth on my skin, making me realize just how crazy the past who the hell knows had been. Had it really only been thirty-six hours since I’d been in my own basement back in Sudborough? Two thirds of that time I had no memory of, and of the rest I remembered every second of. The past twelve hours with Darla like an entire lifetime lived in half a day.
How could I walk away from that? I felt my gut tighten, my chest swell, muscles in me coming alive that needed to be there, and exercised, and moved, and pushed to some sort of limit. I wanted to go and run a hundred miles, or ride a bike around the country, to swim across a great lake, to do anything but walk away from her.
A fleeting image of going home with Darla in tow made me laugh, a little too maniacally on the inside. My mom would fall over in a dead faint if I brought someone like her home, and my dad would probably give me an atta boy and then purse his lips with disapproval and pour himself another Seven and Seven when he realized I was serious.
Besides, she had a life here. Opening up to me last night, cradled in my arms, she’d told me all about what had happened to her and damn, did I feel like a fucking fool. But her life was not mine and mine wasn’t hers, so this had to end. I had to leave, right?
Walking outside, I punched my mother’s phone number into my phone and she picked up on the second ring. “That better be you, Trevor,” her sharp voice cut through the glass of the iPhone.
“No Mom, it’s Whitey Bulger.”
“Ha ha, very funny. If that’s your way of telling me that you’re a criminal on the run then we have a big problem here, mister.”
I closed my eyes and felt my balls crawl up into my groin again. “No. No crime, Mom. Other than the crime of not being under your thumb all the time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped back.
“It means whatever you want it to mean, Mom.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m just hanging with Joe.” In Ohio.
A snort came through the phone. It sounds like a fart. “Joe Ross has been lying thorough his teeth to me. I’ve been talking with his mother and – ”
“And what?” I countered. “She’s going to put him to bed early tonight? Ban him from playing with his Nintendo for a week? C’mon, Mom. We’re men. With lives.”
The sharp inhale of a shocked gasp was all I heard for a long moment. “Just come home,” she finally said. Never one to be wishy-washy, the steel in her voice made me grit my teeth. If Mom said jump, I was supposed to say How high? Not Fuck off.
“I’ll get home eventually.”
“Get home as soon as possible,” she said. “Your dad’s really worried about you and so am I.”
“I know you are.”
I was supposed to feel some sort of genuine affection and gratitude for the fact that she was worried about me, but right now I was pissed and didn’t give a shit what she thought. She always wanted to know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was a twenty-two-year-old man who was about to go into law school. When did I get to do what I wanted when I wanted and how I wanted?
I heard whispering and then two voices arguing in the background, Mom popping back in a little louder than she should have been. “OK, honey, so I’ll see you. Be home within an hour.”
Click.
An hour. Yeah, right. My tongue rolled along the inside of my jawline and I could feel the muscles in my neck tightening, a familiar flash and heat of anger making the back of my skull go cold and hot, the alternating chill a flag for doing something ridiculously inappropriate.
That was her phrase: “That’s ridiculously inappropriate,” she would say all the time when I was a child. Ridiculously inappropriate. She used it so much I almost named our band Ridiculously Inappropriate. If she’d have allowed us to have a dog it would have been called ‘RI’.
A few deep breaths didn’t calm me down. Looking at the outside of Darla’s little hovel did. In stark daylight it all looked worse. There was no real grass to speak of on the side of her house and the trailer was actually three or four different tones of a dull gray on the outside, with sections of the aluminum siding dented as if someone had kicked it all around the side, the holes about two feet off the ground, divots in the metal.
A chicken, a little scrawny creature with red and brown feathers, cackled by. Probably the same one that was chased by a three-legged kitten earlier. Just standing here, letting the breeze float across my angry skin, my hair heavy against my scalp, the trailer park coming to life with people walking by and peering at me in confusion – I took it all in.
My life on the iPhone – all the contacts, the phone calls, the text messages, the data plan where I downloaded and uploaded an electronic existence – that wasn’t real. It had seemed real for so long, back home and at school, that I found myself surprised by how little I cared about all the electronic messages.
What was real right now was in front of my face, some sort of existential creation that I had conjured in a peyote haze. Whatever had gotten me from Massachusetts to Ohio, buck naked with a guitar and a hat, was more powerful than any edict my mother could hand down, stronger than any song I could sing at some college bar in some fake, plastic suburb of the fake, plastic region of the fake, plastic life that had been carved out for me.
A deep wellspring of hunger for more, for dirt, for Guinea hens and dented siding, and sunlight, and wind and self possession built up in me like bile stuck in the back of my throat. As I walked back to the shed I saw Joe’s car. The car I was supposed to get in in a few minutes and be carried back to my mother, back to finals week, back to my summer internship, and back to that basement sanctuary where, thirty-six hours ago, something deep in me had stripped down to the marrow and functioned on a completely different level, escape my only goal.
Going back right now would be admitting defeat, to say that the impulse that had brought me here was irrational, that it was the outlier, that it was abnormal. What if that was wrong? What if everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been told, everything that I had been was abnormal and this…this turned out to be the truth?
I made my way carefully into the trailer, needing a two-minute shower to cleanse my body and my thoughts. Cathy wasn’t at the table, which was a relief. Gingerly, I walked down the little hallway into the bathroom, where a quick shower got me back to baseline, even if it didn’t really diffuse my anger. Walking out into the door yard, the blinding light of the sun reflected my inner blinding rage.
As if my hands were possessed by the same spirit that made me find my way here, something outside of me and yet deeply guided by an inner core that knew exactly what it was doing, I popped Joe’s hood and started to randomly pull little tubes and wires, yanking not with abandon but with a precision that belied my ignorance about cars. I carefully tucked the little tubes and wires in so that it wouldn’t be obvious what I’d just done and then gently closed the latch.
If I was right, I had just bought myself a few more hours here, my hands doing the dirty work of my inner soul. That I needed to steal a few hours by destroying the one method home pinged through my mind like a bullet ricocheting in an echo chamber.
Joe shouted, “Hey, Trevor! Come on!”
A grin tickled my lips but I bit it back. My hands flexed into deep fists that made the small muscles around my knuckles ache. I’m coming alright, I thought, but on my terms.
Joe
Trevor saved me from my own thoughts by bounding into this whatever-you-call-it…this purple shed…and saying, “That was unpleasant.”
“What was that?” Darla said, wiping one tear out of her right eye.
He ignored her, which I thought was a little brutal, and just looked at me. “I just talked to my mom. She hates me.”
“No surprise.”
“She hates you, too.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. She says you were lying to her all night.”
“I was lying to her all night.” Darla blinked hard, over and over, the way you do when you’re struggling to contain emotions that are so strong you don’t want to display them and be vulnerable. She might consider me a pretentious asshole from Massachusetts but that didn’t mean I couldn’t understand how hard it was to put up a good front when your heart told you to do anything but.
“Yeah, she figured that out.”
“No shit, of course they figured it out, Trevor. They always figure it out and we just lie because that’s what we do and they scream at us because that’s what they do.”
“Thanks for taking the heat.”
“You’re welcome. Now get your ass in the car and let’s go home.” A sympathetic part of me wanted to reach out and pat Darla’s hand or assure her she would be OK after we left. Another part didn’t care, and was more worried about our pissed off parents. Finals week was far too close and this rip in the fabric of our lives needed to end. Now.
