100 Sideways Miles (19 page)

“How are the teeth marks?”

I didn't answer. How would I know?

Besides, I was being very mean, and I never let anyone off the hook when I felt this way.

So Dad said, “I want to see how you look.”

Here is what happened:

The curtain opens on a darkened bedroom. It is the evening of a California summer day.
FINN,
a teenage boy, is lying with his face turned to the wall, undressed but wrapped in sheets on the upper of two bunk beds. His father,
MIKE EASTON,
leans over the boy, concerned for him. As the curtain rises,
MIKE
reaches across his son and switches on a goose-necked reading lamp clipped to the rail of
FINN's
bunk bed, uncovers his son's bare shoulders and back, leans over him, and rubs the boy's skin where he had been severely bitten by ants.

MIKE: Looks like the bites are pretty much gone.

FINN: That's good.

MIKE: So. Nobody ate yet. We were waiting on the barbecue to see if you'd make it down. Cade's here. Um. Please tell me you're not going to make me sit down to dinner with Cade Hernandez as the only other male in the house, son.

FINN: Is Julia here?

MIKE: Yes.

FINN: Ask her how I get out of the book. I need to know.

MIKE:
(Puts his palm on the boy's forehead. He thinks his son is
delirious from the seizure and the ant bites)
: You feel a little hot. Maybe you should just stay in bed.

FINN
(Shakes his head and sits up)
: I wouldn't do that to you. Let me get dressed. And fix my hair or maybe shave or whatever, since you think I need to start doing that, and I'll be down in a few minutes.

MIKE
(Pats the boy's shoulder)
: Happy birthday, Finn.

FINN: Yeah. Happy birthday, Dad.
(Pauses)
Dad, I didn't actually come through a Lazarus Door, did I?

MIKE
(Exhales a long breath)
: I'm sorry you have to put up with the things you go through, Finn. I wish I could make it all go away. If I could give you one present, it would be that.

FINN: I feel like I'm in the book and I can't get out of it. I feel like everything I've ever done and everything in all those miles ahead of me have already been determined and there's nothing I can do that will change anything.

MIKE: It's not you, Finn. Everyone feels trapped sometimes. Everyone feels unsure of where they came from, how they got here. But none of that really matters, does it? Don't you know that right here, right now, you are the most important person to me in the world?

FINN
(Shakes his head)
: I wish I could be sure.

MIKE: Everyone wants to be sure, son.

FINN: Did you ever feel this way?

MIKE
(Laughs)
: I always feel this way.

FINN: Do you think I'm normal?

MIKE
(Nods)
: I think you're perfect.

FINN: I'm sorry, Dad. I'll straighten up. Just give me a few minutes. Like, four thousand miles or so.

MIKE: Okay. Happy birthday.

FINN: Sure thing.

MIKE
leans over and kisses the top of
FINN
's head.
FINN
lies down, rolls over, and faces the wall again.
MIKE
shuts the door as he leaves the bedroom.

(
Curtain
.)

It was ridiculous.

• • •

For my birthday, Cade Hernandez gave me a belt made from an old fire hose, and a brass statue of a bullfighter.

He'd had the base of the statue engraved with the following:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LITTLE BITCH

Mom and Dad didn't get it. They had horrified looks on their faces. They were appropriately embarrassed at the likelihood of my little sister, Nadia, seeing the inscription.

This was Cade Hernandez in perfect form.

“How thoughtful of you to remember my bullfighter name,” I said.

Cade Hernandez, who'd given me the socks with the sharks on them—the ones I wore the day Julia Bishop first noticed me at Burnt Mill Creek High School—had a knack for choosing the coolest gifts.

And throughout the evening of my birthday, Cade kept looking from me to Julia with the eye of an interrogating detective, no doubt trying to determine what might have happened between us the night before.

Eventually, I did tell my friend the entire embarrassing truth.

The Perseid Meteor shower commonly peaks in early August. The spectacle, created by the slow disintegration of the comet Swift-Tuttle, is named for the constellation Perseus, the Greek hero who killed Medusa.

Just a bit more than two weeks, around twenty-four million miles, after my seventeenth birthday, the Perseids scattered brilliant torrents of blazing dust all across the nighttime sky.

The knackery put on a real show.

Although I'd asked her a number of times, Julia continued to insist she did not know how her shadow story might end, and that we would have to see what happened in the miles ahead of us.

I was desperately in love with Julia Bishop.

I suppose love, which makes atoms sticky, is also in many ways a prison.

• • •

Mom and Dad were less than enthusiastic about allowing their epileptic son to leave for an overnight campout adventure in the desert with Cade Hernandez and Julia Bishop. But in the end
they decided to loosen the grip they had on their seventeen-year-old boy.

Cade and I were road-tripping for our visit to Dunston University the following week, so I suppose I was testing my limits with my parents and trying to spend as much time as possible with Julia before going away.

I promised to take Laika along as chaperone to restrain any potential recklessness on our part.

Mysteriously, as was so frequently the case with her, Julia Bishop said she wanted to tell me something. I supposed I knew what it was—that she would tell me the end of the shadow story, if the boy was ever able to get away from the book—but I also recognized my very poor record at guessing what Julia Bishop actually had in mind. So I tried to push all those assumptions about escape and sex and stars and planets out of my head.

We were going out for a night, just to have fun, to watch the Perseids from a place where there was no pollution from the light that escaped furnaces like Burnt Mill Creek and Los Angeles.

After the awkward but inevitable argument with Cade Hernandez, it was decided before we left Julia Bishop's house that I had to sit in the backseat with Laika and that Julia would ride up front with our driver.

What else could I do?

Besides, I'd been feeling sorry for Cade's loneliness since the end of the school year and the absence of Monica Fassbinder.

Cade drove us north through San Francisquito Canyon, and then east into the middle of the Mojave Desert, following a grid of arrow-straight two-lane highways to a place where Cade Hernandez would sometimes come to ride dirt bikes. He had
frequently invited me along, but I had no desire to have my back broken again.

Mom and Dad were always completely opposed to the idea of ever allowing me on one of Cade Hernandez's motorcycles. This time, there was no motorcycle in the bed of Cade's truck; only our tent and camping supplies, coolers of food, and undoubtedly plenty of chewing tobacco and beer.

Cade steered with his knee. In one hand, he held a paper cup from Flat Face Pizza. It was his road spittoon. The other hand rested lazily at the twelve o'clock position on the steering wheel, pointing one finger up the road at an old splintered sign.

“This is where we're going,” Cade said. “Aberdeen Lake.”

“Aberdeen Lake” sounds romantic and mysterious, like it might be located somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, as opposed to an abandoned outpost at the edge of Death Valley.

The sign was hardly readable. It leaned badly and was pocked with bullet holes peppering its surface. Cade pulled the truck off the highway, and we all got out to stand there in the blazing heat of the desert while Julia Bishop snapped photographs of us. Cade and I posed like brave explorers beneath the sign.

The billboard said this:

TURN HERE! VISIT BEAUTIFUL ABERDEEN

LAKE—A RESORT OASIS IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT!

MODELS NOW OPEN!

The sign showed a woman in a light blue one-piece bathing suit, apparently grasping a towline from a speeding motorboat.
She was sailing along on a pair of water skis that fanned rooster tails beyond the edge of the sign. The skiing woman, blond and pale skinned, the iconic model of postmodern femininity, was smiling and wearing sunglasses.

I guess the exclamation points said it all.

Excitement.

The turn you would take, if you obeyed the sign, led down a rock-strewn road that transformed into an angry river during desert flash floods. And that was exactly the road Cade Hernandez drove us on to get to his secret camping spot near a forgotten place called Aberdeen Lake.

By evening, we had set up our camp along the edge of an enormous crater—a hollowed-out earthen swimming pool half a mile across that would have been the lake for Aberdeen Lake. It had probably been designed by a self-taught civil engineer, which may have accounted for the absence of all those expected molecules of water.

Our camp consisted primarily of a dome tent that was large enough to stand up in. We all had sleeping bags too. I felt nervous about the sleeping arrangements, though, and doing things such as dressing and undressing, or going to the bathroom.

As usual, the epileptic kid was thinking too much.

At night, we sat outside on folding chairs and watched the light show in the sky above us. Cade was very drunk and chewing tobacco, too. He tried to talk us into joining him, but neither Julia nor I would drink, and we certainly weren't going to chew tobacco. Julia and I sat close enough that we could hold hands as we watched all the stars that tumbled out of and into the black overhead.

“What if every one of those is a Lazarus Door?” Julia asked.

“Then we'll be eaten by the ones that don't end up on shitholes,” I answered.

“Not you. Not if they see your back,” Julia said.

Look: It may spoil the ending, but in my father's book all the incomers except for one—a boy—end up being killed by determined human mobs.

The atoms of the unwelcome visitors were freed.

The boy-alien's name happened to be Finn.

Imagine that.

It could have been true. Who could say otherwise?

And at the end of the book, which is the biggest reason why people had been hounding my father to write more, doors and doors fall like the scatterings of the comet Swift-Tuttle all over the planet of humans and dogs, while Finn—the alien-boy, not me—tries his hardest to simply fit in and become human and eat regular stuff like cheeseburgers and pizza instead of his classmates.

So the book offered a sad ending for Finn—the alien-boy, not me—who only wanted to feel like a regular human teenage boy and do regular human teenage-boy things, like chew tobacco, maybe, or get hand jobs in a custodian's shed from well-funded German foreign exchange students.

You know, stuff like that.

In any event, my father told me throughout my life that he only
named
the incomer boy after me (and the Mark Twain character); that the Finn in his book was never supposed to actually
be
me.

I suppose that sometimes books imitate life.

And sometimes books imitate lives that imitate books.

Maybe that's why Julia Bishop could not tell me if her shadow Finn could escape from her shadow book. Because despite my father's constant assurances, it was me—this Finn and not the incomer one—who just couldn't feel like a regular kid, like I belonged here.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Cade spit and drank, spit and drank.

Laika snored lightly from inside
Sputnik 2
.

Cade Hernandez got up and walked to the edge of the empty crater. He stood there and peed into Aberdeen Lake.

• • •

We dragged our sleeping bags out from the tent so we could lie on our backs and watch the atoms being freed in the knackery above us until we fell asleep.

Cade, predictably, was the first one out of his clothes. He stripped down to his underwear and then lay there on top of his bag with an open beer beside his pillow and a fresh wad of chewing tobacco tucked into his lower lip.

Self-conscious, as always, I sat down on my sleeping bag and slipped off my shoes and socks.

“There's no scorpions or shit like that out here, are there?” I said.

“Mmm. Probably are,” Cade said.

So I put my shoes on top of my camp chair. Then I took off my shorts and T-shirt and wriggled into my sleeping bag.

I was so disappointed. Somehow, I'd managed to miss seeing
Julia Bishop undress. I had no idea what she'd done to prepare herself for sleep. It was like magic. Before I knew it, she had slid into her sleeping bag and was lying right beside me.