Miss Misery (28 page)

“Come on,” said Ashleigh. “Don't be so, like, full of yourself!”

“I'm not,” I said, though I didn't believe it.

“Well don't be so paranoid, then. Come on—let's get something else to eat!”

We stayed at Coney Island until just past noon, strolling the midways, playing Skee-Ball, and even taking a turn on the strange Matterhorn-themed ride that spins riders past spray-painted images of the Swiss Alps and giant rest-in-peace portraits of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, while blasting hip-hop from Hot 97 at eardrum-exploding volume. Ashleigh managed to put away a tub of popcorn, a stick of cotton candy, and a twisty rainbow-colored lollipop that was longer than my forearm. A few times as we walked Ashleigh tried to hold my hand, but I managed to slip away from her grasp. There was no sign of the doppelgänger, and after a while I forgot to keep looking for him. I felt the hint of a sunburn on the bridge of my nose and the memory of the Cyclone wind on my brow. It had turned out to be a pretty good morning.

But on the F back to my apartment, I told Ashleigh that she had to go home.

“OK,” she said.

I was stunned. “Really? ‘OK'? That's it?”

She kicked at the peeling linoleum floor. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I hate it there. But it wouldn't really work with me here. You don't have enough room in your apartment.”

“Uh, no. No, I don't.”

“We can still be friends, though, right? I mean…” She blushed. “We are, like, friends, right? In real life?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “You're a good friend, Ashleigh.”

She blushed more deeply. “And I can still write to you and complain about stuff, right? Because I'm serious. I'm going to have a life just like yours. I'm going to do it.”

I laughed. “I don't think my life is one to shoot for, Ashleigh. Aim higher.”

“Ok, I promise.” She sat silently for a time, staring out through the glare at the streets passing below us, her body leaning gently on my side. “I feel better,” she said suddenly. “I guess it just helps knowing that all of this is out there.”

“I'm glad,” I said. “Sometimes it's hard to get outside of yourself, or to imagine anything outside of your daily routine.”

“Yeah. That's why you've gotta shake it up sometimes, right?”

“That's right,” I said. “That's exactly right.”

 

Back at my apartment Ashleigh took a shower while I searched the Internet for flight information. There was a plane leaving JFK for Salt Lake at 5:15 p.m., and for a little over eight hundred dollars it was possible to buy a one-way ticket. Ashleigh, of course, had no money left, so I typed in my emergency credit card number on the purchase screen. My parents hadn't specified
whose
emergency the card was for. And it was better than getting hauled in for aiding and abetting.

I heard Ashleigh rustling around in the living room, so I called out to her. “OK, you're all set. I'll get you a car service, but you'll have to head to the airport pretty soon.”

She came through the door wearing a sky blue T-shirt that said
INSIDE WE ARE ALL BROKEN
on it and holding the mix CD I had made for Cath Kennedy. “What's this?” she asked.

“Oh…it's just a CD I made.”

“Can I take it for the plane? I don't have anything new to listen to.”

“Sure,” I said, pushing back from my desk. “Be my guest.”

“Just one more thing,” she said, lightly resting her hand on my shoulder. “I don't want to go alone. Would you please just come with me?”

I sighed. “OK, Ashleigh. I'll come with you to the airport. But you have to get right on the plane.”

“Who's this?” Her hand left my shoulder and darted underneath the stack of papers where I had partially hidden the photo of Amy sipping a cup of coffee. She grabbed the photo and held it up to the light. “Is this your girlfriend? She's pretty.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling the constriction in the back of my throat. “Not that I can take any credit for that.”

But Ashleigh was still staring at the photo. “She looks…she looks like a real grown-up.”

Gently, I took the picture from her. “She is, Ashleigh. That's exactly what she is.”

 

An hour or so later the car service pulled up out front, and Ashleigh and I hurried down the stairs. Waiting for us at the bottom was Mrs. Armando.

“David!” she yelled, even though I was less than three feet away from her. “You gotta get that bucket off the window!”

“Bucket?” I tried to hurry Ashleigh out the door. “What bucket?”

“You got a bucket of dirt and birds on the fire escape and it's a-spilling into my garden. You gotta get rid of it!”

The herb garden. Of course. “OK, Mrs. Armando, I will. I promise. As soon as I get back.”

The old lady nodded but didn't move out of our way. She just stared at Ashleigh, who was nervously shuffling her feet and twirling her hair in her fingers. “And who are you?” Mrs. Armando said with trademark bluntness.

“A-Ashleigh.”

“This is my cousin, Mrs. Armando. She stayed me with me for a night. She's heading home now.”

“Uh-huh.”

I saw her eyes looking from the bright blond hair to my own dark tangle. “We're cousins by marriage.”

“Whatever,” said Mrs. Armando. “As long as you not catting around!” She pointed at me as she turned back to her own apartment. “No catting, David!”

“No, Mrs. Armando, I promise. No catting.” And with that we rushed out into the waiting town car.

 

Traffic was light on the way out to JFK. Even so, the driver stuck to the back roads, taking Atlantic Avenue through the rough-and-tumble intersections of East New York and eventually paralleling the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens. Ashleigh didn't say much along the way; she just stared at the window and listened to her Discman. Just before we pulled up to the gate, she hit
STOP
and took her headphones off. “This mix you made,” she said.

“Yes?” I smiled expectantly.

“It's kinda boring.”

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head.

When we pulled up to Departures, I told the driver to wait for me, and I carried Ashleigh's backpack into the terminal. There weren't many people standing around at that time of day, so it was a relative snap to retrieve her e-ticket from a self-serve kiosk and then find our way to the security line.

“OK,” I said. “This is the end of the road. You take care, OK?”

I made a half move to hug her, but she just stared at me.

“What?” I said. “Do you have enough money for a snack? For magazines?”

She kept staring, a mottled pink flush on her cheeks.

“Ashleigh, you've got to go. The car is waiting for me. Your parents are waiting for you. If you go now, there's a chance they might never know you were gone.”

“B-but…”

“But what, Ashleigh? This is serious!”

She balled her fists. “But I
told
you. I said I'd go, but only if you came with me.”

“Come on, Ashleigh.” I started to laugh and then spied the steely resolve in her blue eyes. “I came to the airport with you! You didn't mean…”

She cocked an eyebrow.

“You didn't mean I had to come with you to Utah, did you?”

But that's exactly what she meant.

Oh, boy.

THE WOMAN WAS WEARING far too much eye makeup and seemed to hold me personally responisble for her having to work on such a beautiful day. I glanced at her name tag. It read
MARY-BETH
and was decorated with two smiley-face stickers that in no way resembled the grim look on her actual face. Her long, palm-tree-decorated fingernails danced on the keyboard in front of her mysteriously. I leaned my elbows on the counter, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was occurring on the other side.

“Yes, sir,” Mary-beth said eventually, her voice a monotone. “It is possible to return the same night.”

“It is? Great. That's a relief.”

“Well,” she said.
Type-type-type.
“Not
technically
the same night, sir. There is a red-eye from Salt Lake City back to JFK that departs at eleven p.m. mountain time. It lands at JFK at seven thirty-one a.m. tomorrow.”

“OK.” I glanced over my shoulder to where Ashleigh was standing, arms crossed, backpack at her feet. Her face was draped in a truly Oscar-worthy pout, the kind that would cause a bankrupt father to purchase ponies if she so much as looked his way. I turned back to Mary-beth, whose lips were now puckering as if she had taken a secret suck on a lemon. “How much?”

“For the entire trip?”
Type-type-type.
“Due to the last-minute nature of your purchase, there are no discounts.”
Type-type-type.
“The total is $1,273. Will that be cash or charge?”

My heart sank, but I handed her the emergency credit card and my driver's license. In for a penny, in for twelve thousand pennies, that's what I always say. As Mary-beth extracted the money from the plastic, I looked around the terminal. There was a pigeon swooping around the antiseptic white columns above our heads, and to my left a lonely Pakistani man pushed a cart with approximately seventeen pieces of overstuffed luggage strapped to it. He walked under a sign that said
INTERNATIONAL GATES
and disappeared. International gates. I drummed my fingers on the counter and turned back to Mary-beth.

“By the way, how much is a ticket to The Hague?”

Type-type-type—PAUSE.
Her eyes slowly rolled up to meet mine. “Sir? I thought you said Salt Lake City.”

“I did, I did. I was just…wondering. How much would a ticket be to The Hague?”

Mary-beth sighed theatrically, then resumed typing. “Sir, this airline does not fly to The Hague.”

“Oh,” I said, unsure how to feel.

“We fly to Amsterdam, and then you can connect to The Hague through one of our One Planet Alliance partner carriers.”

I tried to picture Mary-beth's personal partner carrier, shuddered, then tried to imagine myself in Amsterdam. It was a hard fit. “Does that flight leave daily?”

Exaggerated sigh. “Yes, sir. In fact, our flight to Amsterdam leaves in just three hours' time. Would you like me to book you on
that
flight, sir?”

It would be so easy. So, so easy. But I felt Ashleigh's beady, resolute stare on my back, and I knew what I had to do. “Ah, no. No thank you, Mary-beth. Please book the Salt Lake City flight.”

Mary-beth looked as if her head were about to explode into a thousand tiny, furious pieces.
“Sir.”
She typed some more, handed me my cards and some papers, and it was done.

 

Ashleigh watched me warily as I turned away from the counter and walked over to her.

“Well,” I said. “I hope you're happy.” And I waved my ticket in front of her nose.

She responded by throwing her arms around me and squealing, so I took that to mean she was, indeed, happy. When I managed to extricate myself from her viselike embrace, I walked out to the drop-off area, where huddled clumps of smokers were taking their last, pathos-soaked puffs, and I told the waiting driver that his trip was a one-way after all. I signed the receipt and gave him a generous tip. If I was going to go in the red, I figured I might as well do it in style.

Ashleigh and I made it through security with no real trouble, though I was forced to remove my shoes twice even though no alarm had sounded. I brushed it off with the thought that there were few things more suspicious than someone flying across the country in the middle of the day with no luggage. We still had half an hour to kill before the flight boarded, so while Ashleigh decamped to a pay phone to try and finagle a ride home from the Salt Lake City airport, I wandered past the cookie-cutter Sbarros and Cinnabons and into the terminal's flimsy bookstore. There was an impressive wall of self-help books—the one called
Getting to Know the Real You In Six Easy Steps
caught my eye for obvious reasons, but at this point I was already on step fourteen and nowhere near the promised land, so I kept browsing. Tucked in the travel section, I found a yellowed paperback called, simply,
Utah!
and written by one Rulon Barber. I liked—and envied—the simple-hearted enthusiasm of the title, so I scraped together my pocket change and bought it, along with a pack of cards and some sugarless gum. With Ashleigh nowhere in sight, I walked to the golf-themed sports bar, took a seat at a two-top on the “putting green,” and ordered a draft lager. I didn't want my body to go into alcohol-deprived shock at thirty-five thousand feet—and certainly not in an infamously dry state like Utah.

I paid for the $8.99 disposable cup of Sam Adams with the emergency plastic and sipped it slowly, watching the glum-faced janitors power-clean the terminal's white, shiny floors. The row of TVs behind me showed a college football game from sometime in the mid-eighties. So I was going to Utah—home of John Stockton, Robert Redford, and polygamy. A place I'd never twice thought of and never once thought I'd visit. And I was going for approximately two hours to escort a seventeen-year-old runaway back to her Mike-and-Carol-Brady prison-warden parents. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. I took another long sip of beer and chased it with a handful of snack mix that tasted vaguely of sawdust. As entertaining and unpredictable as the past week had been, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was still half-assing it. I was caught up in drama and momentum all right, but it was still borrowed. It wasn't earned. I was becoming adept at maneuvering the pitfalls and eddies of other people's lives; to Ashleigh I seemed downright impetuous! But to Ashleigh I probably seemed like all sorts of things: competent, successful, together, happy. It was nice to catch some of the reflected glow from her exalted image of me—hell, it was nice to be needed. But it also made me feel like a charlatan, an imposter in my own life. This roller coaster had been a fun ride. But I had to be prepared for it to end. Rides always do.

“Are you, like, an alcoholic?” Ashleigh hopped into the seat across from me, a stack of newly purchased music magazines in her hand.

“Possibly. But don't worry. I'm not flying the plane.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “So I had a hard time reaching anybody. But Krystal said she'll probably be able to sneak out with the car around seven and pick us up.”

“Pick
you
up.”

“Right, that's what I said!”

“And what's this ‘probably'?”

Ashleigh shrugged. “She's my best friend. She should be able to do it.”

“Did she ask why you would be at the airport?”

“Duh. Yeah.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I didn't. I said I'd tell her later. She was talking about herself, mostly anyway. Boy drama.”

I rolled my eyes. “Isn't it always.”

“What'd you buy?” Ashleigh picked up my book and started flipping through it.

I swallowed another sip of beer. “I figured I should know something about the place I'm going to.”

“Great.” Ashleigh stuck her finger in her mouth and pretended to gag. “I don't see a chapter on boring, fake, religious, hypocrite people and their love of shallow, stupid things like fashion and skiing.”

I took the book back from her. “You probably just didn't look in the index.”

She stuck her tongue out at me again, then buried her nose in
Rolling Stone.

 

The plane boarded on time and was only half full. Our seats were just behind the right wing. Ashleigh took the window; I took the aisle.

“You know,” I said, looking around, “since it's not that crowded, we could probably spread out, take a whole row.”

Ashleigh looked at me as if I had suggested rubbing two sticks together to better ignite the bomb in my shoe. “No way! We're flying
together
!”

“OK, OK. No problem. It was just a suggestion.”

“Is everything all right over here?” A stewardess with exhausted eyes loomed large over our row.

“Yes,” I said. “Everything's fine.” But the stewardess lingered a moment, noticing Ashleigh's age, my five-hours-past-five o'clock shadow. “She's my—”

“Fiancée!” Ashleigh bounced in her seat and hooked her arm through mine. “We're engaged!”

My heart sank. I looked up at the stewardess, waiting for her to call the authorities, ground the plane, have me carted away. But she didn't do any of those things. Instead, she beamed. “Well, congratulations! That's just wonderful. I love having young lovebirds on my flights!” And she wandered off completely reenergized, nattering to herself about the majesty of romance.

When she was safely out of sight, I yanked my arm back. “What the hell did you do that for? That was crazy!”

Ashleigh looked hurt. “I was just having fun!”

“This isn't about fun, Ashleigh! This is all way too serious to be fun!” My voice was harsher than I had intended. I took a few deep breaths and stared at the cover of the in-flight magazine, which was awkwardly jammed in the seatback in front of me. “101 Things to Do in Phoenix.” I'd never been there, but I couldn't think of
one.

“I'm sorry.”

“I mean, how old are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Mormon women are supposed to get married young.”

“Oh yeah?” I gave in, smiled. “I must not have gotten to that chapter yet.”

 

As I watched the little computer airplane make its path over the foldout screen's digitized United States, I tried to remember the last time I had been on a plane. It had been with Amy, of course—visiting her cousins in San Francisco almost two years before. I shook my head. Flying always made me feel strange; the idea of waking up in one place and casually flying thousands of miles away to fall asleep in another still didn't make sense to me. So the idea of doing so with no preparation—no buildup time to get used to the idea of winging your body across the continent—was even more unfathomable. The entire day had been about doing things—as opposed to most days that summer, which had concerned themselves with the opposite. The little plane was making its way away from the East Coast now. Soon the big blue smear that was the Atlantic Ocean wouldn't even be visible on the map. All I could think was that once again I was traveling in the wrong direction.

 

“What are you listening to?” Ashleigh was clutching her headphones tightly to her ears, rocking back and forth and mouthing along with all her adolescent might. It took three tries to get her to notice I was asking a question; she finally hit
PAUSE
and heard me on the fourth.

“What? Oh.” She lifted her headphones off her ears, cradled them in her fingers. “It's a mix.”

“Not mine; I know that.” I smiled.

“No, one I made for myself.”

“What was the song?”

Ashleigh blushed. “Could you hear it? I always play these things too loudly.”

“I couldn't hear it. You just seemed to be enjoying it. A lot.”

“It was Jimmy Eat World.” She gave me a shy look. “Do you like them?”

“Um,” I said truthfully. “They're OK.” I rifled through the audio reference library in my head until I came up with a match: giant soaring guitars, plaintive sensitive lyrics. Emo, basically.

Ashleigh shook her head. “They're a lot better than OK.”

“And why is that?”

“Because they, like,
get it.
You know? There aren't that many bands that do.”

I thought about that for a while, about the bands I loved and whether I would ever give “getting it” as a reason for allowing their songs to jam themselves in my head as the soundtrack for my increasingly convoluted life. I didn't think that I would. I tended to let my life dictate my music, not the other way around. And ever since I had started writing about records professionally, I tended to listen exclusively to new releases. Despite the giant bookshelves of CDs in my apartment, the only ones that had gotten play in the last few desperate months had been recent discoveries, advance copies, and pirated downloads. I craved the freshness more than the message. The songs I had on my iPod kept me company, but they didn't keep me going.