Damaged (19 page)

“No, thank you.”

“Tell me about yourself, Kinsey. What are your hopes and dreams? What are your biggest fears and regrets?”

“Those are big questions, Terry,” Hunter says.

“Small talk is for small people, Hunter. That's what my granny used to say.”

“She sounds like a wise woman.”

“She was. Until her brain got all chewed up.” Terry buries his face in the bulky scarf, closes his eyes and mutters something, then comes back up for air. His big blue eyes bore into me. “Kinsey, why are you so sad?”

“Who said I was sad?”

“I got the sense that—”

“You don't know anything about me,” I snap. “And I don't want to talk about my hopes and dreams with you. I don't want to talk to you at all. I don't even know why you're in this car.”

Terry just blinks. Did I break through his crazy cheerfulness? Did that really shut him up?

“I think you need some candy,” he finally says, presenting me with a bag of M&M's. In that short time, he already inhaled the Skittles. “They're kind of melty, but you can stick your finger in and get a good scoop and lick it off. Here.”

I swat his hand away harder than I mean to.

“Ouch,” he says. Is his bottom lip trembling? Will I get that satisfaction?

“Jesus, Kinsey,” Hunter says. “Stop being such a bitch. He's just trying to be friendly.”

“I don't want to be his friend. I don't need any friends.”

“Everyone needs friends,” Terry says, bubbly once again. What is his problem? Why can't he stay hurt like a normal person? “Friends are the most important—”

“Terry, shut up!” Hunter and I say in unison.

“Sorry,” he says, then makes a motion like zipping up his lips. Why is he so resilient? Can't he feel pain? Why do I want to hurt him so much?

“Kinsey, what is wrong with you?” Hunter says. “I think I like the sad you better than whoever this is.”

“What's wrong with
me
? What's wrong with
you
? You're the one who picked up some crazy hitchhiker at a rest stop.” I don't care that Terry's here. I don't care about hurting his feelings. “What's that about? What, I turned you down, so you like boys now?”

“Whoa, Kinsey, you are fucking out of line.”

“Can you please stop fighting?” Terry pleads, wrapping the hideous scarf tighter around his neck.

“You're upsetting the kid, dear,” Hunter snarls.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“You must really mean a lot to each other if you have to fight so much,” Terry says, sticking his finger in his bag of melted chocolate. “Otherwise, why would you bother? Right?” He inspects his chocolate-covered finger. “You have a very passionate relationship.” He sticks the slimy thing in his mouth. “So that's a positive way to look at things.” I can hear the fragments of candy coating crunching between his teeth. “You guys are great,” Terry says, grinning a rainbow-speckled, brown-toothed grin. “I'm having so much fun already, and we've only gone, like, six miles.”

* * *

Hunter drives in silence and I continue to sulk in the back­seat. Luckily, Terry fell asleep after finishing his fourth bag of candy, which is good for him because I think I might have really hurt him if he kept talking for much longer. With his silence, I feel a little less on edge. But I am slightly nauseous with Hunter's fast driving, the vending machine breakfast, and the alternating waves of anger and sadness rushing through me.

The monotony of Nebraska gives way to the grassy, flat nothingness of South Dakota and I realize I haven't talked to my mother in several days. Never in my life did I think I would
want
to talk to her. But now, I'd settle for anything familiar. “Can I use your phone?” I ask Hunter when we stop at a gas station, breaking nearly three hours of silence.

“Be quick,” he says. “We're just stopping for gas.”

I disconnect his phone from the stereo and switch it off airplane mode. It pings with new voice mails and text messages.

I don't know who I was expecting to find on the other end. Maybe the tired, sad Mom who told me she was proud of me. But that woman didn't last long. She has already been replaced by her more familiar evil twin.

“I hope you're using protection,” is the first thing she says when I tell her it's me.

“No, Mom. It's not like that.”

“Don't lie to me. Don't try to pull your little prissy ­Puritan act. Watch, you're going to end up getting knocked up too young just like me and ruin your life. Stupidest thing I ever did.”

I try to ignore the blades tearing into my heart.

“We're in Wyoming,” I lie. “It's pretty.”

“Don't bother coming back,” she says. “I won't be here. I'm going to Italy.”

“With who?”

“Steve.”

“Who's Steve?”

“None of your business.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“I'll leave your stuff in the house if you want it.”

“When are you going to Italy?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Do you already have tickets?”

“The mosquitoes are homicidal this summer. Fucking bastards.”

“Mom, when are you leaving?”

“God, I can't wait to get out of here.”

“When?”

“I'm never looking back.”

“Mom,
when
?”

“Jesus, you're annoying. Like a mosquito going ‘buzz buzz buzz' in my ear when I'm trying to sleep.”

“I just want to know when you're leaving.”

“I swat and swat at you but you never go away.”

Something small and round hits me in the shoulder. Terry is standing by the car with a new bag of candy. “I got snacks!” he says. He throws another piece and it hits me in the heart. Such a stupid little gesture, but he has no idea how much it hurts.

“Mom?” I say, but the line is dead. She is not there. She hung up.

I swallow the lump in my throat and walk to the car. My only choice right now is to be numb, to push this feeling down so deep I won't feel it. I don't know if I can survive anything else. My only choice is to just let go of any foolish hope I'm still hanging on to, any expectation that she could be someone different. This is the mother I have. This is the mother I will always have.

“I'll keep driving, but we're switching at the next stop,” Hunter says as I walk toward the car. He does not know my heart is broken. He does not know I have finally accepted that I am an orphan, that I am truly on my own. When we get to San Francisco, I won't even have him. We will part ways and I will be a lost country girl in a big city and no one will even know when it eats me alive.

As we drive through the endless grasslands of South Dakota, I feel more and more disgusted with myself. Every thought that goes through my head is some version of “Poor me,” and I'm so sick of it, but I can't stop the litany of self-pity. Hunter's sitting next to me, yet he's so far away, locked into his own prison of self-loathing. Terry's in the backseat, looking out the window and dreaming his strange dreams. What a bunch of miserable, lonely creatures we are.

* * *

“Fuck!”

I wake to the sound of Hunter cursing and kicking the car. We are on the side of the freeway. I have never been hotter in my entire life. I slip in my own sweat on the leather seats as I crawl to the door. I can't get out of the car fast enough. But it's even worse outside with the sun beating down on my skin.

“I can see why these are called the Badlands,” Terry says. He has his scarf wrapped loosely around his head now, like some desert nomad.

“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” Hunter screams.

“What? What happened?”

“The air conditioner died,” he says. “It's a hundred and seven degrees outside and the air conditioner just fucking died.”

“Can you fix it?” I say, already feeling faint from the heat.

“No, I can't fix it. I'm not a mechanic. Are you? Terry, are you a mechanic?”

“No, but I worked on a farm last summer. I know how to pick tomatoes really fast. ”

“We have to get out of here,” I say. There's nothing but brown-red rock as far as the eye can see. Nothing living except us. Not even a cactus. Not even dead grass. This could be hell. This is hell.

“Hunter, we have to move. I'll drive. We'll roll the windows down. That's all we can do. The sun will set soon and it'll cool off. We can stop at the first town we get to.”

“Wall!” Terry exclaims. How he manages to stay so enthusiastic in this heat is beyond me. “That's the first town after the Badlands. That's where Wall Drug is. America's Favorite Roadside Attraction! Seventy-six thousand square feet of retail wonderland. They give you a free bumper sticker even if you don't buy anything. I looked it up.”

I get in the driver's seat and drive as fast as I can, but we keep getting stuck behind tourists going slow, taking pictures of the desolate scenery out of their rolled-up windows, comfortable inside with their AC blaring. Terry's panting out the window like a dog and Hunter's groaning in the backseat. We're in purgatory. Our sins are getting sweated from us. Hell is driving through the Badlands in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner, stuck behind slow vehicles, too weak to speak, too sick to protest Terry's ongoing commentary. His voice adds to the surreal landscape, the unearthly heat, the smell of dust and creosote caking my nostrils.

“Do you think there's cowboys out here?” Terry says.

“Do you see any cows, Terry?” Hunter says. “There's no grass or water or cows or cowboys. There's nothing. This whole place is dead.”

“But I bet cowboys could survive out here. They'd know how. Cowboys can survive just about anywhere. They're really quite versatile.”

“Will you both please stop talking?” I say. “I have a really bad headache.”

“You two sure are negative,” Terry says. “The negative vibes in the car are suffocating. I know a lot about vibes, which may surprise you since I'm from Hazeldon, Nebraska, population eight hundred and seventy-three, which is not really a hotbed of alternative thinking. But there was this girl at my school, Sadie, and she was from Seattle, like the
city
Seattle in Washington State, where grunge music and coffee were invented, and she lived on this farm outside of town—in Hazeldon, not Seattle—with all these people with long hair who taught me all about chakras and auras and stuff, and also how to pick tomatoes really fast, and that's where I'm going, Seattle. Have you ever been there? Sadie says there's a market where they throw fish at you.”

Neither Hunter nor I answer. I am light-headed from the heat. I am too weak to even say something mean.

“Hey, cheer up!” Terry says. “Your best friend may have just died but at least you still have each other.”

I almost swerve off the road. “What did you say?”

“Huh?” Terry says.

“Hunter, did you just hear what Terry said?”

“I stopped listening to Terry several miles ago.”

“Terry, what did you just say?”

He looks at me, perplexed. “I don't remember. If you haven't noticed, I just sort of talk all the time. I don't really pay attention to what I'm saying.”

Sweat pours down my face, and my legs stick to the black leather seat. My brain is probably boiling inside my skull, becoming a mushy stew. It is so hot I'm hallucinating.

“Terry,” Hunter says from the backseat. “Why the hell are you wearing that scarf?”

“My granny made it.”

“It's over a hundred degrees. Don't you think your granny would want you to take it off? Just looking at you is making me ill.”

“She's dead.”

“Oh shit,” Hunter says. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. You didn't kill her. Or at least I don't think you did. You don't seem like the killing type to me. She had old-timers' disease. The one where you forget stuff and then you die. I took care of her for a long time. Then the hospital did because I'm no doctor, in case you didn't notice. Then she died. But she never forgot how to knit, even after she forgot who I was. So even when she couldn't talk anymore and was peeing her pants all the time, she still kept knitting. It's not the prettiest thing, I'll admit. I didn't say she could knit well. I mean, how well can a person possibly knit when they're busy peeing their pants? It still smells like her. Not like pee, like her skin. Without pee on it.”

“What about your parents?” I say. Maybe it's the heat and I don't have the energy for blind hatred, or maybe it's his sad story, but I feel a sudden warmth toward Terry, like maybe I don't want to leave him on the side of the road anymore.

“Oh, they were already dead. Meth lab explosion when I was five. I'm not even kidding. Cross my heart and pinkie swear. There should be a reality show about me!”

“I'd watch it,” Hunter says.

“The worst part was cutting her toenails. Old people feet are gross. No offense, Granny, may you rest in peace. The nails just keep growing and growing, all thick and yellow-­like. Did you know that nails keep growing after you die? So my granny's in the ground with some long ­fingernails and toes. But not my mom and dad or your friend because they burned up.”

“You did it again!” I say. “You said something about Camille!”

“Kinsey, you're tripping,” Hunter says.

“I don't know anyone named Camille. Pretty name though. If I was a girl, I'd like my name to be Camille. Sometimes I wish I was a girl. After Granny forgot who I was, she kept thinking I was a girl. The nurses thought it was funny. I liked it when she called me ‘she.' Do you think you get manicures in heaven? I hope so. Like there's angels there that go around with their little lunch boxes full of colors, and you're sitting on a vibrating cloud chair? That would be great. I never got one before. I tried but Cathy, the lady in town who cuts hair out of her trailer, she wouldn't do it since I'm a boy and all. Oh well. Hey, did you know that I have a lot of money now? Because of my granny's life insurance policy?”