100 Sideways Miles (10 page)

“Why?” Julia laughed. “Are you gay or something?”

She was beautifully exasperating.

I turned away from her and walked toward the front yard.

I said, “No.”

Julia followed after me.

“Hey, wait. I'm sorry, Finn. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I'm fine, Julia.”

She grabbed my hand as I rounded the corner, heading toward her car. Cade was in the front seat of Julia's Mustang, fumbling around to find the trunk release, no doubt to get to his locked-up beer.

I stopped, and Julia Bishop kissed me on the lips.

I smelled flowers. It was only her hair.

It was a short kiss, and to be honest my first reaction was to pull away from her. I had never kissed anyone on the mouth before. It startled and amazed me. Maybe that
did
make me gay or something. But my atoms were so confused. I felt like I could vaporize on the spot.

“What was that about?” I said.

“I'm sorry you're having such a sucky night, Finn.”

“Nights like this come around only once every sixty billion miles,” I said.

And it wasn't so bad after all.

“I'm not feeling so good,” Cade said.

I wouldn't have expected anything to the contrary. Cade Hernandez had finished off at least ten beers that night, and as soon as we got to Blake Grunwald's ridiculously bad party, he started drinking gin, too.

Cade's skin, which was unblemished and usually glowed a radiant, healthy pink-peach, looked like slowly boiled pork fat.

I had a feeling there was a simmering stew of atoms inside Cade Hernandez's digestive tract that needed to be freed.

And as it later turned out, I was correct.

“I'm going to go find somewhere to lay down,” Cade said.

“Maybe we should just leave,” I offered.

“I don't think I should ride in Julia's car, dude.”

Cade stood up, wobbling like a tightrope walker in a hurricane.

We had been sitting on a couch in Blake Grunwald's parents' living room—Cade, Monica, me, and Julia. The party was terrible. In the living room, about half of the baseball team were taking drunken turns at playing an NFL video game on Blake's
parents' wide-screen television. A few girls were in there too, but most of them looked to be in junior high school, so between football plays the boys kept leering at Monica and Julia, and fidgeting conspicuously with their penises.

Most of the party took place outside, in Blake's parents' backyard, where scores of boys from Burnt Mill Creek gathered around gleaming kegs of beer, whooping and hollering over the dumbest and most inane masculine challenges, touching each other—which is something drunk boys at parties tend to do a bit too much—and smoking lots and lots of marijuana.

And every last boy at the party, even the seventh- and eighth-graders, somehow managed to stroll past our place on the couch, raise an eyebrow, and say the exact same thing, which was this: “Hey, Monica.”

Monica Fassbinder's ambidextrous generosity was legendary in Burnt Mill Creek, but as far as I knew, it began and ended at Cade Hernandez.

“I better help you, dude.”

I got up and put my arm around Cade's shoulders.

Blake Grunwald's parents' home was what real estate agents in California called seventies ranch style—which meant it was long and narrow, dark on the interior, and built on one level. I led Cade down a hallway behind the living room, assuming we'd find someplace where a boy could pass out and not be noticed.

It wouldn't be too much of a challenge, I thought. After seeing the mix of kids who'd come out to Blake Grunwald's crappy party, I was confident this would be a no-sex event.

Across from a bathroom done entirely in the same shade of pale green you'd expect to see inside the examining room at a
fertility clinic, the last doorway in the hall opened onto a darkened bedroom. I didn't even need to turn on the light to know this was Blake's room.

Catchers' gear emits a particular damp-crotch boy smell. In the case of Blake Grunwald's catchers' gear, the scent produced a counteracting effect to how fertile I felt after glancing into the pastel green bathroom across the hall.

“Here,” I said. “Lie down on Blake's bed. There's a bathroom just outside the door.”

“Okay.”

I deposited Cade Hernandez onto our backup catcher's nicely made bed. I picked up Cade's legs and put them on top of Blake's bedspread.

“Do you want some water or anything?” I asked.

“No. I'll be okay in a few minutes. Thanks, dude.”

“Do you want me to take off your shoes?”

“Why the fuck are you wearing my shoes?”

“Uh . . .”

I pulled Cade's shoes from his feet. He was burning hot. I could feel the soggy heat rising from his body like he was a wet tea bag that had just been lifted from boiling water. So I pulled his damp socks off, tucked them into his shoes, which I placed on the floor at the foot of Blake's bed, and shut the door very quietly.

• • •

When I got back to the couch in Blake Grunwald's parents' living room, Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop were gone.

I realized too that Blake Grunwald had just come inside the house from his parents' backyard and stood glaring at me with
his flabby chest puffed out and his arms bent back like a gunslinger in an old Western.

This was definitely not a good time or place for me and Blake to rekindle our fistfight.

So I attempted to defuse the situation with a sober and sincere-sounding lie.

“Hey, Blake. Great party, man.”

“Who told you you you could come and be here, Easton?”

Blake Grunwald was exceedingly drunk, stoned, chewing tobacco, and hurling an excess of pronouns too.

“Oh, uh, Cade said it it it was okay as long as we brought some girls.”

“What girls?” Blake demanded.

“Uh. They were here just a minute ago,” I said. “Maybe they're outside. Getting high. Smoking the weed. Man.”

I only hoped that Julia wasn't like that. I had the idea she wasn't, but it's always so hard to tell these things about kids.

Blake said, “Huh?” and glanced over his shoulder, out the sliding, postmodern seventies-style glass door through which he'd entered. And as soon as he did, I spun around and headed for the front exit.

Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop stood on the curb beside Julia's Mustang. Monica smoked a cigarette, taking big, dramatic, disaffected drags.

“You guys can't take off,” I said. “Blake Grunwald wants to
kill me
.”

“Why does he want to do that?” Julia asked.

Monica Fassbinder, being a sort of mascot to Cade Hernandez, knew all about our issues.

“We just hate each other,” I said.

“Oh,” Julia said with a tone that implied she understood perfectly well that sometimes boys just hated each other for insignificant reasons.

“Well, Monica asked if I would take her home,” she said. “I was going to come back to get you.”

“You can't leave me here,” I said. “I'll ride with you.”

I realized this meant I would be the solitary boy riding with Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop inside a brand-new Ford Mustang, and it made my atoms feel very fertile.

Monica exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and said, “What about Cade?”

“Uh, he needs to sleep for a while. He'll be okay. Julia and I will come back for him. We'll keep him safe for you, Monica.”

• • •

So that's how I ended up alone with Julia Bishop, driving twenty miles per second through the deserted streets of Burnt Mill Creek after midnight, and under the second brightest moon in more than a century.

Sixty billion miles.

“What about you?” I said. “Won't your boyfriend want to kick my ass for getting you to drive me and my wasted friends to a shitty party?”

We'd dropped Monica Fassbinder off at her host family's house, which happened to be across the street from the left-field fence at Burnt Mill Creek High School's baseball diamond. Monica's host “mother,” Mrs. Shoemaker, was a substitute teacher at our school.

I'll admit my question was a rather obvious way of asking
what I didn't have the nerve to say directly to Julia Bishop.

She said, “Finn Easton, Right Field.”

“How did you know what position I play?”

Julia kept her eyes fixed forward. We stopped at a red light on Old Mill Boulevard, at an intersection across from Flat Face Pizza.

“Because I'm a stalker and I ruin boys' lives,” Julia said blankly.

“Oh.”

Then she laughed.

“I'm in the yearbook class. I looked you up,” she said.

I remembered seeing “Yearbook” on her class schedule the day I showed her around the school, and I wondered if she'd been as interested in finding out about me as I was about her.

That couldn't possibly be the case, I thought.

“Oh,” I said. To be honest, I was relieved that she was only messing with me and that she wasn't actually a stalker who ruined boys' lives.

Then she said, “I wasn't stalking you or anything. It's just that I didn't know anyone here at all. You were the first nonadult person I met, so I remembered your name. And I looked at your pictures.”

“Oh,” I repeated.

“You say that a lot.”

“Uh.”

“But my boyfriend wouldn't kick your ass, anyway. He's in Illinois.”

“That would be a long way to come just to kick someone's ass,” I said.

I knew I was stupid for feeling it, but when Julia Bishop
admitted she had a boyfriend, I kind of sank lower in my seat and thought about what a loser I was.

“It wouldn't be too long for him,” Julia said. “He's an airline pilot.”

“Oh.”

Somehow, I didn't think it was overly strange for Julia Bishop to have a boyfriend who was probably in his forties, even if it was really creepy. My throat knotted up when I thought about how, if Julia Bishop's boyfriend actually was an airline pilot in his forties, then they most likely had sex all the time.

That's what forty-year-old airline pilots are going to do, after all: have sex. What other things could possibly happen between them? Conversations about prevailing headwinds or what happened today in high school yearbook fucking class?

I worked myself up into an angry storm rather quickly; another Finn Easton patented wild mood swing.

Then Julia laughed. “I'm just messing with you.”

“Uh, I knew that,” I said, but I didn't really.

“Would you smile?” Julia asked.

“I
am
smiling,” I said.

“No, you're not.”

“This is how I smile,” I said. “I smile with my atoms on the inside.”

“Try getting some of the outside ones to show it.”

“I can't.”

Julia Bishop moved to San Francisquito Canyon, which is the site of the worst human-caused engineering disaster in California
history, from Chicago, which is the site of one of the tallest buildings in the United States.

Somebody in Illinois must have studied engineering at a regular school.

Imagine that.

• • •

Julia Bishop was nothing if not mysterious.

She told me very little about her life, and why she'd come to move two thousand miles during the last months of her eleventh-grade year.

Julia Bishop was beautiful and evasive.

“The earth moves two thousand miles, the distance from Chicago to Burnt Mill Creek, in one minute and forty seconds,” I said.

“It only took my parents about that long to decide to send me away from home,” Julia Bishop said.

“I wish you'd quit doing that—messing with me,” I said.

“I'm not,” Julia said. “I'm really not messing with you. I needed to get away from there for a while, so they moved me out here to live with my aunt and uncle.”