And Other Stories (24 page)

Inside my head I was flailing and
screaming, but my body wasn’t doing anything. I think I was either
passed out or close to it. It was like having a bad dream—you want
it to go away, but it doesn’t occur to you that you can do anything
about it.

It bent over as if it was trying to
look into my face. I guess I must have been sitting or lying down.
Maybe. It had to bend practically in half. Then it picked up a rock
and cut its hand open.

That sounds nasty, but it was just
interesting at the time. It cut a long gash in the bark of its
palm. Water, or maybe sap, oozed up out of the cut and filled its
cupped hand. It stuck its hand out under my nose.

Now I understand about animals
being able to sniff out water. The water smelled like being alive.
Everything else in the world was dying, in different ways and at
different speeds, but that water was alive forever.

So I drank it. I was so thirsty I’d
stopped feeling it, but all of a sudden I couldn’t get enough to
drink. (So much for Miss I’m-careful-what-I-swallow. But since it
couldn’t have happened, does that time count?)

And that’s it. I don’t remember
anything else, even in little confetti bits like I remember the
rest. There’s just nothing between that and when I woke up in the
morning at the edge of the park where the all-terrain vehicle
freaks go to play. Some vroom-vroomer saw me sit up on my sand dune
and nine-one-oned.

I have a hideous sunburn (blisters
in places) and I’m massively dehydrated. But I overheard the doctor
tell the nurse he thought I was lying about being out there for two
nights and a day. I wasn’t messed up enough. And for sure I was
lying either about where I started or about being on foot, because
it was twenty miles from there to the place I was found.

Sure, whatever. I’m lying. That
works for me.

•

Our dog died when I was
eleven/twelve. Oh, boo hoo, right? Well, yeah—he was a great dog,
and I’d grown up with him. But what was important, because I hadn’t
expected it, was the way it changed things between Mom and me. We
did a lot of talking in between the crying, about important stuff.
I don’t know why grief made us feel as if it was safe to take the
lids off. But it turned a crappy experience into a pretty good one,
and for a while, we were closer than we’d been since I was
tiny.

My point is, sometimes truly crappy
experiences have a crowbar effect on the rest of your life.
Everything shakes loose. Then you can let it go back to the way it
was, or you can step in and make something happen, something that
might be permanent.

Janelle, Nina, and Barb came over
yesterday after school. You’d think I had cancer. Lots of hushed
voices and sentences trailing off. Of course, me being lost in the
desert is about the most interesting thing that’s happened to any
of us for years, so I understand that they’d want to get some
mileage out of it. It made me feel like a museum
exhibit.

Then Barb and Nina had to go
babysit Nina’s brothers. So I told Janelle about Bob at the
rave.

“So did you do it?”
Janelle asked.

“Do what?”

“Blow him.
You
didn’t
?” She squeaked that last bit. “Beth, I thought you were
into him!”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
No joke, no verbal shrug, no cover story, nothing.

“Oh, god.” Janelle
looked disgusted. “He was supposed to say, ‘I love you. I’ve always
loved you.’ Right?”

“Of course not!”
Well, yes. Was that wrong? If it wasn’t wrong, why had I denied
it?

“Hel-lo! Guys have to
know there’s something in it for them. It’s just, you know,
biology. You love them before the blow job, and they love you
after.”

“Don’t you ever both
love each other at the same time?”

Blank stare from
Janelle.

It was worse than not speaking the
same language. At least with languages there’s a chance you’ll have
a word for the concept.

I told her I was tired. Actually I
was kind of sick to my stomach. She suddenly remembered to talk as
if I was dying. And brain damaged. “You take care of yourself, hon.
Okay?” Then she left.

That was when I
had my big revelation. I didn’t want to be just like Janelle
anymore. I
couldn’t
be. I wasn’t built with the right parts or
something. I guess I’d hoped that, if I stuck with her, she’d want
to be more like me. But what was there about me that screamed “role
model”?

Being like Janelle wouldn’t save me
from my life. And being like me wouldn’t save Janelle. The people
from the Titanic might have found some floating debris to hang
onto, but they were still in the middle of the North
Atlantic.

I said it was a revelation. I
didn’t say it made me insanely happy.

After dinner (frozen pizza—I’m the
cook, after all), Mom came to my bedroom door and said, “There’s a
girl who says she’s in your English class and has your homework
assignment.” She was half-frowning—not angry, just trying to figure
out how she felt about this. “Alice somebody?”

Oh, god. Alice New Girl, witness to
my shame, calling to find out if I had committed seppuku like a
smart person. Well, I had to face the world eventually. Make like a
rock, I told myself. “Sure. Where’s the phone?”

“She’s not on the
phone,” said Mom. “She’s here.”

I had only seconds to get my ducks
in a row. All I could do was tug the sheet up straight and make my
face blank. In that last moment I saw my bedroom as others see it:
the matching furniture bought during my ten-minute girlie phase in
fifth grade, now with the white laminate chipped off the corners.
The dark blue mini-blinds with the puffy valance (Wal-Mart!) that
grotesquely needed dusting. Clothes tossed everywhere. Invalid crap
on the nightstand.

Alice came in. She wore black capri
pants and a red bowling shirt with “Stan” embroidered over the
pocket, and had the giant purse over her shoulder. Her face was
world-class blank. “Hi,” she said.

My mom took that
as some kind of signal, because she left. Alice instantly closed
the door and plopped down on the floor beside the bed. “Oh, jeez,
Tab, you look
awful
! I’m so sorry. I tried to
follow you at the rave, but I lost you in the dancers. Then I went
back and tried to get that idiot guy to help me find you, but he
was so full of Happy-Shiny he couldn’t find his own head. How do
you feel?”

Like
I’m in the path of Hurricane Alice
, I
wanted to say. “Okay, considering.”

“Considering that you
could still be out there, bleaching like a cow skull?”

“With the ravens
picking out my eyes,” I said, just to see if she’d be grossed
out.

“And the kangaroo
rats stealing away your hair to make their nests,” she said
gleefully.

I tried not to grin. “The search
party would never find me, but I’d be all around them.”

“Part of the desert
forever!” Alice finished. “It sounds like a song.”

“Or an
Outer Limits
episode. You brought my English
homework?”

She made a spitting noise. “That
was just an excuse. I’m grounded. Nothing else would have got me
past the parental units, short of climbing out a window.” She
looked at the wall over my head. “Where’s that?”

When I did my frantic
life-flashes-before-my-eyes view of the bedroom, I’d forgotten the
tree picture over the bed. It’s a blown-up color photo I got at a
church rummage sale, nothing fine art about it. In the picture, a
path climbs a hill in the foreground, around these big oak trees
and a couple of good-sized rocks, then curves out of
sight.

When I first saw
it, I had this
hunger
to get into the picture, to follow that path. I
can still stare into it and imagine walking around those rocks,
into the shade of the trees, and seeing what’s on the other side of
the hill.

“I don’t know where
it is.” Then I amazed myself, because my mouth opened again, and
out came, “It’s a picture about possibilities. About wanting. The
path always goes out of sight.” I didn’t just figure that out, but
I hadn’t planned to tell anyone. Now to see what Alice would do to
my exposed throat...

Alice looked very serious and
intense. “What do you want when you look at it?” she
asked.

I didn’t feel like I could lie. I’d
started this, after all. And the tree picture is one of the few
things I’d grab if the house caught fire. I shrugged (which
reminded me about the sunburn). “I don’t know. I just
want.”

A big grin spread across her face.
“Yes! Just like ‘Malibu’!”

“What?”

“Hole! Courtney
Love! On
Celebrity
Skin
... You haven’t heard
it?”

She grabbed up the giant purse and
pulled out a portable CD player. At first I thought there were
morning glories glued all over it. Then I saw some of them were
scuffed, and I realized they were painted on. Amazing.

Alice handed me the headphones.
“‘Malibu’ makes me feel the same way. Like there’s a road in front
of me, and I have to find a way to get on it and see where it goes,
or I’ll go nuts.” She looked up to make sure I had the phones on
and pushed “play.”

Wistful, jangly,
beautiful guitars in my ears, and a girl singing, talking right to
me. I mean,
spooky
to me—the voice wanted to know how I’d gotten so
screwed up, and how I’d held it together in spite of it. And then
it said, Hey, meet me halfway,
chica
, and the two of us can
maybe save your stupid life, okay?

Even with the sunburn, I got
goosebumps.

When the chorus started, Alice sang
along, as if she knew without listening exactly how long the first
verse was. Then she grabbed the phones off my ears.

“Hey!” I
said.

“I can’t not listen
to it. We need a boombox.”

I pointed to my desk. She jumped
up, found mine (under a pair of jeans), and put the disk in. The
song started over, and Alice bumped the volume up.

“Play it again,” I
said when it stopped.

After a couple more plays, we were
singing along with Courtney as loud as we could. About a place
where the ocean would wash away all the bullshit. A place to live,
not just survive.

“Have you ever been?”
Alice asked.

“What, to Malibu?” I
laughed. “No chance.”

“But it’s only
three hours away! Well, L. A. is. When my dad told me we were
coming to California, I went nuts. But it seems like nobody here
has ever been to L. A....” Alice grabbed her spiky hair and pulled
it. “Three hours away there are great bands and dance clubs and
juice bars and history and art and
the ocean
, and we’re missing it!
There are surfers and pelicans and movie stars!”

“All in the same
place?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“Yes! And you and I
have got to go.”

It wasn’t like with Janelle, when I
knew I was trying to fit my sticking-out pieces into the empty spot
in the puzzle. It was as if I’d had a dream every night that I
couldn’t remember, and Alice had remembered it for me.

I know where that path in the
picture comes out. On the other side of that hill is
Malibu.

Mom must have heard us singing and
shrieking, because she came in and said I had to rest.

“I’ll bring your
homework tomorrow.” Alice winked.

“Don’t forget your
CD.” I really didn’t want to remind her.

“You can borrow it,”
she said.

Mom came back after she shooed
Alice out. I asked, “Have you ever been to the ocean?”

She stared at me for a second.
“No.”

“Alice and I are
going.”

“Oh? When’s that
happening?”

“I don’t know yet.
But we will.”

She gave me such a funny look—as if
I’d surprised her, as if she felt sorry for me. Or for her. But she
just said, “Drink your Gatorade.”

I’ve listened to the whole album
about a dozen times already.

•

Today I told Alice what happened
when I was in the desert. She’s the only person I’ve told. It was
like having to be honest about how I felt about the tree picture:
either I wasn’t going to say anything about what happened after I
ran off, or I had to tell her the whole thing.

I was afraid she would be different
when I came back to school. I had visions of her being tight with
Piper, pretending I’d become See-Through Girl. I know all about
survival tactics, after all.

And, okay, I was
afraid of the way I’d be—that I’d go back to sticking with Janelle
and our posse. Because I
do
know about survival. I didn’t
know if I could resist that yummy, cozy, Supposed to Be hiding
place.