B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (27 page)

We would laze out in the grass of the tiny park, really a rest stop for travelers from the nearby freeway, sometimes tossing a ball between us or climbing the old oak tree which provided the only available shade. We would hang out for a few minutes at the Red Ball gas station, watching the cars pull in and out and talking with Mr. McCoy, the greasy-looking young man working there in the afternoons who would always invite us to his house. “Got hot dogs and soda,” he would say, squinting as he looked at us, grinning, scratching his stomach. “Got games in the basement, too. You girls like ping-pong? How about pool, you like to shoot pool?”

“Ping-pong’s okay,” Lucy would say casually, chewing on the licorice sticks he always gave us for free from the station’s tiny selection of candy. “Never played pool.”

“Oughta try. Bet you’d be good at it, big girl like you.”

“Maybe sometime, Mr. McCoy.”

We would jump on her bike, pedal away.

“I like him,” Lucy would say. “He’s nice. Kinda weird, though. Looks at me funny.”

“Me too,” I said.

Naturally Mrs. Sparrow liked me. I was a “good influence,” she said. But Aunt Louise, chain-smoking Marlboros and drinking whiskey at three in the afternoon as she watched her game shows, showed nothing but disdain for Lucy. “The Sparrows are trash,” she told me one day after school, staring at the TV screen:
Match Game,
Gene Rayburn laughing at some witticism just uttered by Richard Dawson. “Fran, those people are goddamn hicks, just off the tomato truck. Look at all the garbage in their yard. Look at the jalopy that woman drives. I wish we could get them out of the neighborhood somehow. Do they even have indoor plumbing?”

“Yes,” I said, looking down, aware of her biting sarcasm but unable to think of any other response. “It’s not their house. They rent it.”

“I’ll bet.” She took a drag on her latest cigarette. “You know, Fran, people judge people by the company they keep. I want you to stop hanging around with that Sparrow girl so much. People’ll start to think we’re the same as them.”

“I like her, Aunt Louise. She’s my friend.”

“There’s all kinds of girls to be your friend at that school.”

“Not like Lucy.”

“Crap. Big butch tomboy, that’s all she is. And I got a call from your teacher, Mrs.—what’s her name? Stansfield?”

“Stensland.”

“Stensland, yeah. She says you’re passing notes in class with that girl.”

“It was just one note, Aunt Louise,” I said, lying.

“Well, cut it out. I don’t like the way you’re changing, Fran. Ever since you’ve been friends with that Sparrow girl…”

“It’s not Lucy’s fault. Don’t blame her.”

“…you’ve been staying out late, your grades are dropping…”

“I’m only across the
street,
Aunt Louise. And it was just
one
test I did bad on.”

“…and now this, with the notes. I want you to stop hanging around her. No more visits after school. You come straight home.”

“That’s not fair.”

“And stay away from her at school, if you know what’s good for you. Don’t let somebody like that
drag you down
, Fran.”

“She’s not dragging me down! You don’t understand!”

“Come straight home after school from now on.”

“That’s
not fair
.”
Breath heavy, pulse pounding behind my eyes. “Who are you, anyway? You’re not my mother!”

Running to my room, slamming the door, collapsing onto the bed. Weeping: my life, I was sure, all but over.

Thus it was that I became a rebel.

A mild-mannered rebel, to be sure; a quiet rebel. But a rebel all the same. For the first time in my life I realized that I did not necessarily have to follow every edict that came down from these anonymous mother- and father-surrogates; I even questioned the authority of my own parents. Who had they been, to send me here? Was it really my fault? Or—and this was an astonishing, a revolutionary thought—was it theirs? Was there, in fact, nothing wrong with me at all? Was it
them
?

I took less care with my appearance, let my room grow sloppy—at least, sloppy by my own standards; it remained rather tidy in comparison with Lucy’s. I began to let some homework assignments slide, not enough to get me in any real trouble, but enough to let the teacher and Aunt Louise and the world know that I would no longer blindly kowtow to their every whim—that I was myself, a
person
. In any event, the anti-Lucy edict had relatively little practical effect. We were still together in school all day, and on Saturday morning it was easy enough to tell my aunt and uncle, absolutely honestly, that I was going to the library—and then meet Lucy there. I knew they would never bother to check up on me; they rarely went anywhere but the local bar, from which Lucy and I would keep our distance. We even went to her house at times, when her mother wasn’t home, simply by coming around the back way, out of the view of our house, climbing the rear fence and coming in through their back door. The seven p.m.
Radio Mystery Theater
was never more delicious than in those fugitive days, the two of us hunkered under a blanket, giggling, an unstoppable force aligned against a world that was aligned against us.

And then it ended.

I woke to a knocking on my bedroom window. Though it had never happened before, I felt no fear at all: I instantly knew it had to be Lucy, as indeed it was. I pulled open the curtain and lifted the window, the screen dividing us. I glanced at my clock: just past two in the morning. Lucy was crying, something I had never seen her do.

“We’re moving,” she said, without preamble. “My mom and me.”

I looked at her, a horrified sinking sensation in my heart. For a long time I just looked at her, at the tears glistening on her face.

“I’ll come out,” I whispered.

I slipped on jeans and a T-shirt—in fact it was one of Lucy’s, we had quietly traded a few—and crept quietly out in my bare feet. My aunt and uncle were long asleep. The night was warm, nearly humid, with dark clouds obliterating all but a few stars overhead. I had never seen her like this, had always felt that she was
my
rock,
my
support, and yet as we stood there in the darkness I felt stronger than I ever had. I felt important. I felt loved. After all, she had come to
me.

“Why?” I whispered. “Shh, Lucy, why? Why are you moving?”

“My goddamn fucking dad,” she said, her voice shaking wildly.

“What? Lucy, where is your dad? You’ve never told me.”

“I’m supposed to be with him,” she said, looking out at the darkness. “That’s what the court said when they got the divorce. But my mom took me. We ran off together.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a pervert, that’s why.”

I was twelve; I knew nothing of such things. “What? What’s that?”

“A pervert. He—touches me.”

“What do you mean, touches you?”

She flashed angry eyes. “In my privates, stupid.”

“He…? Why would he do that?”

“Oh, my God!” She turned away. I knew that in some manner I could not fathom I was failing her. “The court didn’t believe me. We’ve been running from him ever since. We make it a year here, six months there. Nothing ever lasts. My mom somehow gets wind that he’s catching up and then we run again. She’s talking about us going to Mexico.”

I was utterly unmoored. “I don’t get it. Why does he touch you?”

“Jesus Christ!”
She ran off around the side of the house, toward the street. I followed quickly, my feet tingling with the feel of the spiky grass.

She looked back at me, her eyes hurt, bewildered; and finally it clicked, fell into place in my mind. I understood what she meant, saw shadowy men in my mind looming over young girls, their fingers stroking, probing. I had heard of such things, but only vaguely, impersonally.

“Lucy, I’m sorry…I’m sorry I’m such an idiot. I get it now. What you mean. It’s dirty.”

“Yeah, well.” She inhaled, bringing herself under some control. “I don’t want to go to Mexico,” she said quietly, intensely. “I don’t want to run anymore. I want to be on my own. Fuck Mom
and
Dad. Just go…somewhere.”

“All by yourself?” I said, loss draining my voice to a murmur.

She looked out into the night, at nothing. “You could come.”

And instantly my heart rushed and flowed with joy. “I want to come, Lucy. I want to. I will. I’ll come.”

We looked at each other in the darkness.

“C’mon,” she said finally.

We rushed up the street. I thought we were running away, simply running, but no: I suddenly realized we were heading straight for Mr. Silva’s van. I thought of protesting, but no: I’d put my life in her hands, there was no turning back.

“Can you really drive it?” I asked.

“Shut up and get in.”

The doors were unlocked. It was an ancient, decrepit vehicle, perhaps fifteen or twenty years old. Cheap wood paneling was stuck up all over its interior; there were some tools in the back, a few homemade shelves, some blankets, a case of Coca-Cola and a box of crackers. And the key was in the ignition.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Away,” she answered.

She turned the key and the engine fired into shockingly noisy life. I was certain every light in every house would suddenly come on, that every neighbor would rush out onto their front lawns crying
Thieves! Thieves!
But nothing happened. Lucy pulled on the gearshift and we began to move forward, jerking lightly. My heart was smashing almost through my chest; I was shaking all over.
We’re criminals, we’re criminals, I’m a criminal,
I kept thinking, a low moan escaping my throat, too soft for Lucy to hear over the engine. And yet for all my terror there was nowhere on earth I would rather have been.

After we were some distance from Mr. Silva’s house she switched on the headlights and maneuvered the vehicle with surprising smoothness through two stop signs and we rumbled very slowly into the town, which was entirely dark but for a few streetlamps. Absolutely nothing was open; there was no sign of a single human being anywhere. It was as if we were broken off from the world, gliding along on some distant uninhabited planet, empty yet with all the signs of habitation: buildings, roads. At each moment I believed a police car would suddenly pull in front of us, lights flashing, sirens screaming, and men in blue uniforms would jump out with their guns drawn, firing at the windshield. But, again, nothing happened. We passed the grocery store, the library, the bar at which my aunt and uncle drank, the Red Ball gas station. I had never seen any of this at two in the morning, never seen how ghostly the world is at that hour, how forlorn, how hopeless.

Lucy scowled with concentration as she headed toward the freeway onramp.

I did not protest. Part of me was desperate to cry out,
Lucy, no, let me out, we’ll be killed!
But I was silent. I would not let her down. I was with her, would always be with her, now and forever. That was what a friend did. A friend stayed. A friend stayed and listened and didn’t send you away, didn’t suddenly decide you weren’t good enough, didn’t touch you where you weren’t supposed to be touched, didn’t make you feel worthless and dirty. A friend loved you, loved you all the way, never stopped loving you.

We slid onto the onramp and Lucy started to merge onto the freeway. Traffic was sparse, but the fact that there were any cars at all made me hold my breath, clench my eyes shut, keep my fists balled tight against my cheeks. I was going to die, I knew, but I would die with Lucy and so it was all right.

We did not move fast. In fact, we were nowhere near freeway speed, and cars rushed past us on our left. The van’s engine sounded labored.

“Is there something wrong with the van?” I managed to ask.

“No, um…Actually I’ve never shifted it past second gear. Well, here goes nothing.” She tried, the gears grinding with a nasty sound. “Shit!
Shit!”
She tried again, but the result was the same. “Goddamn it! Where the fuck is third?”

But despite repeated attempts she never found it, and as a result we moved along at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. Cars passed us, their headlights playing through the van’s interior, passing across our faces. One car honked at us. As the lights from another passed over us I looked at Lucy and realized that she was as scared as I was. And yet as time passed and there were no accidents, no police chases, I felt a strange calm come over me. It was all right. We were all right.

We were heading south, toward the ocean, and soon I could see it on the horizon, black and glittering. “Maybe we better stop,” Lucy said. “We could stop, figure out what we want to do. I can’t just keep driving like this.
Fuck.” 
The van began to swerve in the lane, crossing the white line, and a car just passing us blared its horn. Lucy yanked the wheel. “We have to stop,” she said. “Oh, goddamn it, Fran, we have to stop.”