100 Sideways Miles (11 page)

“So. Um. Why did you need to get away?” I asked.

“It doesn't matter anymore. And I kind of don't want to talk about it.”

I felt my face redden. I suppose I got somewhat angry at her game playing. Julia Bishop had seen my most embarrassing and hidden truths, and I knew almost nothing about her. I turned my face and looked out the passenger-side window.

“It's going to be a left turn up there,” I said.

“Are you mad or something?”

“No.”

“You
sound
mad,” she said.

“This is how my atoms sound when I'm happy,” I answered.

“You're full of shit, Finn Easton.”

Julia let the car drift slowly toward the curb. We were on the street where Blake Grunwald lived, but the house was halfway down the block.

Julia Bishop parked there.

She said, “I don't really like to say what happened. Is that okay?”

“It's your story,” I said. “It's okay for you to tell it or not tell it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I agreed.

Julia stared down the street as though she were looking to see who was still hanging out in front of Blake Grunwald's shitty party, but I could tell she was really trying to figure out how to talk to me, how to
crack
me.

She said, “I
did
have a boyfriend there.”

“Oh.”

“It's not like that,” Julia said. “Well, it kind of got out of control with him and he started doing things that scared me, scared the shit out of my parents.”

“Like, was he dangerous?” I asked.

“Totally.”

“Do you want me to go to Chicago and kick his ass?” I asked.

Julia smiled and shook her head.

“So, then—just checking—he doesn't really fly airplanes, does he?”

“No. He played on my school's hockey team.”

I calculated probabilities. “Oh. Baseball players generally don't fare so well in matchups against hockey players.”

Julia laughed.

She said, “You never even kissed a girl before, did you?”

“Where did
that
come from?” I asked.

Julia nodded up at the sky. “Out there.”

“Is it so obvious?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you're right. I haven't ever kissed a girl. Um. Before. . . .”

“It's all behind you now.”

I thought about how long ago it had been—since Julia Bishop grabbed my arm, spun me around, and kissed me.

“It was about a hundred thousand miles, I guess, since the last time I kissed a girl.”

“I like how you do that.”

I didn't know what she could possibly be talking about. She certainly couldn't have been referring to my abilities as a kisser.

“You like how I do
what
?” I said.

“The way you think about how far we go in space. I never thought about that stuff at all before I talked to you tonight. To me, it all just seems empty and nowhere—like we never really get anywhere at all. I mean, when you—when most people—look up there, nobody ever really thinks those are actual places that we're moving toward. You make everything seem so big, like it really matters. I think it's something remarkable that you made me think about how far we actually move.”

I shifted in my seat. I was unbearably hot; I needed some air.
“I can't help it. It's what I do. Kind of like you messing with me is what you do.”

“I'm not messing with you, Finn. I really think you're an okay guy.”

“Oh. Okay.”

When Julia Bishop said I was an “okay guy,” my atoms began to swirl and vibrate. I felt very aroused and daring.

I said, “Tell me something. It's hard for me to figure out if I'm normal and shit with a best friend like Cade Hernandez. And I don't know anything about kids in Chicago, or hockey players, or girls who look like you. So. Did you and your old boyfriend—you know, did you guys have sex?”

Julia laughed. “Where'd
that
come from?”

“A Lazarus Door,” I said.

Julia said, “Oh. Well. You know what? We shouldn't have.”

I said, “Oh. Um. Sorry. I shouldn't have asked you that.”

“It's okay.”

I wasn't looking at her when I apologized for asking my question. I was too flustered to because all I could think about at that exact moment was Julia Bishop having sex with some hockey-playing beast from Chicago, and what it would be like if she ever had sex with me.

She put her hand on mine, and I swallowed the knot in my throat.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Then I leaned across the gearshift and kissed Julia Bishop.

Inside the swirling calamity of our kiss, as we parted our lips and explored each other's tongues, I turned completely inside out.

I poured myself into Julia Bishop's warm, delicious mouth. We sailed along, wrapped wholly and firmly together, flying twenty miles, twenty miles, twenty miles, twenty miles. And in that turning, unfolding, opening, I forgot everything about me. It was as if all the words anyone ever dreamed up migrated from my head, through my mouth, and into Julia Bishop, a flooding exodus of everything uncontained, all those nouns, articles, verbs, emptying me completely.

Our kiss lasted only about one hundred sideways miles, but it was the best stretch of distance my fourteen-billion-year-old sexually inflamed teenage atoms had ever covered.

Julia slid her hand up inside my tank top. She rubbed my chest and pinched at my nipples.

It was wild.

I desperately wished to make everything else just stop, so Julia Bishop and I could stay there, wrapped up in each other forever—so we could let everything else on this world slide endlessly past us into the big black knackery of our universe.

I jumped when something slapped against my window.

Cade Hernandez.

He said, “Dudes, you're giving me a total boner.”

That made two of us.

Cade Hernandez looked as though he'd recovered, at least, but he was missing a few articles of clothing. In fact, all he had on were the blue jeans he'd worn earlier when he went to work at Flat Face Pizza. And his fly was half-open. You could see the white of his underwear.

Cade Hernandez was a mess.

Cade stood on the curb barefoot, sockless, and naked from the waist up.

I opened the car door and attempted to stand. I grabbed myself with both hands and pulled my tank top down to cover the embarrassing bulge inside my flimsy shorts.

“Um,” I said, “where's the rest of you?”

“Oh, don't worry about it.” Cade flipped the seat forward and climbed into the back of the Mustang.

“We need to go back to Blake's to get Cade's clothes,” I told Julia.

“Did you guys leave Monica there?” Cade asked.

“I drove her home,” Julia said.

“Then you should just take me and Finner back to his house,” Cade said. “I don't think it would be a good idea to go back to Blake's house for my shit.”

I said, “Um.”

Cade continued. “When I woke up, I couldn't figure out where I was and shit. All I knew was it smelled like a fucking sweaty locker room. It smelled like Blake's balls. And then I just started puking everywhere. All over Blake's fucking bed.”

I found this to be very funny.

Who wouldn't laugh at a guy like Cade Hernandez vomiting in the bed of an asshole like Blake Grunwald?

Cade said, “It was bad, dude. Really. I must have puked a gallon all over his pillows and sheets. I tried to get up, but I just kept puking and puking. Then I finally made it into the hall, and I puked all over the floor there, too.”

“Those carpets were nice,” I said.

“Berber,” Cade affirmed.

He went on. “I tried to make it to the bathroom, and I kept puking and puking all over everything—the door, the wall, the counters, the linen rack. By the time I made it to the toilet, I was pretty much emptied out. But I did puke in the bathtub and on the toilet lid too.”

“What happened to your shirt?” I asked.

Cade shook his head. “I left it under Blake's pillow. It was fucking destroyed, dude. I have no idea what happened to my shoes and socks.”

“Um.”

I heard Cade flipping his can of chewing tobacco.

He announced in a very cheerful voice, “I do feel a hell of a lot better now, though.”

“Nothing like a good puke to make you feel alive again,” I said.

Cade packed a wad of tobacco into his lower lip and added, “But I don't think I should go back for my clothes and shit. Blake's gonna be fucking pissed.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “that's probably not such a good idea.”

Sometimes kids just have to write off lost articles of clothing at the end of a party.

Julia Bishop dropped Cade Hernandez and me off at my house at three o'clock in the morning.

I gave her my phone number.

I wanted so desperately to kiss her again, just like we did when Julia parked her car on Blake Grunwald's street. But I was afraid to do something as bold as that with Cade watching.

What an idiot I was.

It was very frustrating for me—being torn between the need to taste Julia Bishop in my mouth one more time and my unwillingness to risk failure in front of my sexually accomplished best friend.

Now there's a guaranteed formula for extinction.

• • •

Cade Hernandez and I did not wake up until noon. When we got out of bed, Cade, moaning, walked downstairs and let himself out into the backyard. He stood at the edge of our pool, held his arms out like airplane wings, and then, wearing nothing at all but white cotton briefs, let himself fall into the cool water.

“Don't pee in my pool, Cade,” I warned.

“Dude, I always pee in your pool. Why should today be any different?”

Laika whimpered inside
Sputnik 2
.

I let her out with a warning. “And stay away from me. You stink.”

My dog slunk away to a shaded corner of the backyard. I was neither physically nor mentally prepared to deal with bathing the wretched odor of dead coyote atoms from Laika's oily fur so early in the teenage day.

Cade assumed a faceup dead-man's float in the middle of the pool.

He said, “I am so fucking hungover, dude.”

Here was my friend, floating in his underwear in my pool.

I said, “You'd never know it, Cade.”

Cade added, “Be a pal and toss my can of chew out here. I can't move.”

“Uh.”

Maybe it was our late bedtime, or perhaps the lingering aftereffects of my blanking out the day before, or the sleepless sweaty night I spent fantasizing about having sex with Julia Bishop, but something struck me as being eerily still and quiet that day. It was as though things had changed, that somehow the earth had frozen in its journey and time had finally come to a standstill.

That would be nice.

I thought, even on a Sunday morning there would be plenty of traffic noise through the canyon—obese weekend Harley riders traveling in packs up to the old bikers' bar called the Rock Inn, airplanes flying overhead, the ambient weekend sounds of Southern California in its constant buzz and rumble.

But that morning, everything was still.

Cade couldn't have noticed. He only floated there in his briefs with his eyes shut, grinning peacefully. He might as well have been a billion miles away with his hangover.

I tossed the tin of tobacco out to Cade. He packed some into his lower lip and flipped the can over to the deck at the edge of the deep end.

I went back inside the house and slipped into some trunks.

• • •

When we pulled into the student lot at Burnt Mill Creek High School on Monday morning, the campus had been made over, decorated with California flags and colorful banners. Along the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from the school stretched an enormous painted sign:

WELCOME TO BURNT MILL CREEK HIGH SCHOOL, GOVERNOR ALTVATTER!

The first bell rang. We hurried through the gate so we wouldn't be late to Mr. Nossik's class and fan the flames of hatred for all things Cade Hernandez so early in our week of freedom.

“What do you think
that's
all about?” Cade said.

“I don't know. A friendly reminder, I guess.”

I pointed at the welcome banner. Beneath Governor Altvatter's name, someone—a foot soldier in Cade's Stop Trying to Make Us Stop revolution—had scrawled in black permanent marker:

AND DON'T FORGET TO NOT SAY “FUCK”! THANK YOU!

Cade nodded in agreement. “It's the polite thing to do, after all.”

• • •

For some reason, Burnt Mill Creek had an inordinately large population of Germans—families with last names such as Schwarzkopf, Grunwald, or Shoemaker. The first German residents of this town with no creek and no mill actually settled here during World War I, when Hate the Hun campaigns were heating up in other, more populated regions of America.

And our school always seemed to attract German exchange students, and teachers who enjoyed dressing up as Nazis.

Mr. Nossik was from Canada.

Burnt Mill Creek High School even had a traditional all-boys German Dance Club. They were the most unpopular kids on campus. Although the students of Burnt Mill Creek had largely abandoned what at one time had been considered boys-being-boys typical teenage bullying, the German Dance Club was still fair game.

Look: Who doesn't feel compelled to rough up a knee-slapping kid who's wearing lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat?

Anyway, Blake Grunwald was in the German Dance Club.

And Governor Altvatter was German too.

So we didn't really know what was going on with all the flags and the special visit and so on, but as soon as we got to first period history, Mr. Nossik escorted us to the gym, where the entire eleventh-grade class had gathered in order to hear a special message just for us from Governor Altvatter.