The Disenchantments (4 page)

“Nah, I’ll do it,” I say. I turn the ignition and Melinda’s engine starts to hum, and when I get to the intersection I idle for a moment, because to turn right would put us back on the path to Fort Bragg, which is the plan, which is what they all expect, but to turn left would get me back home and out of this bus with Bev.

Probably thinking that I’m just disoriented, Alexa leans forward from her seat in the middle row and says, “Do you want me to sit with you now? Copilot?”

But I just shake my head and turn right. Like I’m supposed to.

I drive.

Soon Alexa directs me onto 128. The road narrows, the car is silent.

Out the window, delicate trees with leaves so purple they are almost black line the road. I know that we’re passing everything but it feels like everything is passing me.

Rows of mailboxes for out-of-sight houses.

A barn with a sunken roof.

A hitchhiker.

Thousands of yellow wildflowers.

All of this is my kind of thing, and under any other circumstances I’d be pulling over and getting out and sketching, but I can’t enjoy any of it. Instead I’m reliving the last four years of my life.

This morning, which feels like forever ago, when I said we should do the photo thing in Europe, and I imagined all of these people who exist somewhere in the world meeting us, hanging with us, smiling for our camera. Last April and May, when our friends all found out what schools they got into and decided where they would go, and started talking about Boston and Ohio, and dorms and majors and roommates, and Bev and I talked instead about plane tickets and the Eurorail, the Louvre and the eighteen-year-old drinking age. The beginning of the year, when I was writing a research paper on graffiti artists, spending hours looking at
Banksy images on London streets, and added England to our list of destinations. The end of eighth grade, when Bev and I raided my parents’ old movies and watched
Bande à part
one night, and then watched all the rest of Godard’s films over the next two days. And Bev said, “Let’s go to France as soon as we can. Let’s go the second that we’re free. We’ll stay the whole summer.” Sophomore year, when I saw a documentary on tulips, and started dreaming about the Netherlands, and said to Bev, “We should go there, too.” Junior year, when Bev said, “And Stockholm, and Berlin.” I said, “This will take more than the summer.” And she said, “I want to go everywhere. I want to see everything,” so neither of us asked our teachers for recommendation letters, and instead we pored over maps.

So when was it that she changed her mind? It couldn’t have been after December. Which means that all of the planning we did after that, everything we talked about and decided on, every time I said,
Won’t it be great when . . .
and she said,
Yes
—all of that was a lie.

Up ahead to the left sunlight glints over a hand-painted sign for a farm and a street I can turn onto to get off the highway. I turn without notice and drive down the narrow driveway lined with white wildflowers and a wooden fence, and park in front of a barn. No one says anything. No one moves. I unbuckle my seat belt and turn to them. Meg is curious, Alexa concerned, their faces so easy to read. But Bev? She just waits. I don’t trust myself to guess what she’s thinking.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I say.

Alexa widens her eyes and shakes her head in denial, and Bev looks down at her hands, and Meg says, “Let’s talk through this.”

But at this moment I don’t feel capable of talking through anything. All I know is that going on a road trip while my life is falling apart feels crazy. Driving from small town to small town, setting up equipment and tearing it down, making small talk with strangers I’ll never see again—all the while searching for what I’m going to do now and seeing Bev everywhere I look.

“I don’t need to talk it through.”

Alexa checks her watch. She says, “All right. How about this. We’ll stop here for a little bit. This place looks nice. We’ll give you some time to think and then, when you’re ready, we can decide what to do next.”

She waits for an answer, hope flashing across her face, so I say okay, yeah, we can stop here for a while. She nods her thanks and opens the car door. Meg and Bev file out after her. I wait until they are out of sight before leaving the bus.

The air is dusty and warm, not at all like San Francisco. I lean on the bus and look at the scattered rows of apple trees that fade into the distance.

I’ve been waiting for this for so long—something new, life after high school. I head to the orchard, walk between the rows of trees, over and down small slopes, around the
occasional empty ladder stretching up to higher branches. I want an apple, but I don’t think I should pick one, so I search the ground and find one, at a spot that overlooks a river, unbruised and ripe. The river makes me think of the canals in Amsterdam that I now will not boat down, will not sit and overlook with Bev, a pair of beers in our hands. Of all of the islands in the Stockholm Archipelago that I will not discover.

I slump onto the grass and pull my sketchbook and pencil out of my backpack because drawing is the only way I’ll survive this detour before going back home to start my life over, or at least try to figure out a next step. I rough out the landscape, but I don’t get far before Meg and Alexa are here, hovering above me.

“Time to talk,” Meg says. She plops next to me, and Alexa sits gracefully, tucking her legs beneath her.

Meg takes a giant breath. “Colby, the thing is, you have to come on the trip.” Alexa nods and the bells on her headband chime, and she keeps chiming and nodding all through Meg’s speech. “I know you’re going to say we can just cancel the first show and, like, rent a van or something, and make up the time tomorrow. But we can’t rent a van.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have to be twenty-five to rent a car. Or else it costs a million dollars.”

“So you want me to stay with you because you need the bus.”

“Yes,” she says. “True. But that’s only part of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Because we need you,” Meg says. “Because there wouldn’t be a band without you. And it’s good to have a boy with us. And because . . .”

Alexa stops nodding and fixes her dark eyes on me. “Because you’re Colby,” she says. “You’ve been with us since the beginning. You know how much this trip means to Meg and Bev and me, and I think it means the same thing to you. It’s the last time we’ll all be together. Also,” she says, choking up a little, “these are probably the last nights I’ll spend with my sister.”

“Well, there’s always summer vacations,” Meg says.

“But by then we’ll be different. We will have lived apart. It will be good, but it won’t be the same.”

“You guys,” I say. But I don’t know what to say next. They’re sitting here next to me in this beautiful place, two sisters, my friends, who look nothing alike because they aren’t related by blood, and they’re telling me that they need me and I know that they do.

“I just don’t know,” I say. And I feel actually, physically injured when I tell them, “I don’t know if I can.”

Meg leans closer to me and says, “Just so you know, we’re in shock. We can’t believe this either. She never said
anything
to us.”

Alexa says, “Things happen for a reason. It doesn’t make sense now, but eventually it will.”

I don’t mean to be an asshole, but I can’t help laughing. “I’m screwed,” I tell her. “If things happen for a reason, I was meant to get fucked over.”

She looks hurt but she nods and says, “I would probably feel that way, too.”

“So will you come?” Meg asks. “You’re screwed either way. At least this way you’ll have fun instead of moping around your house.”

“I don’t plan to mope,” I say. “I plan to figure something out.”

“But we can help you,” Alexa says. “We can brainstorm when you’re ready. There are so many things you could do. I’ll help you plan it.”

I pull a fistful of grass from the earth.

“Without you there would only be us,” Alexa says.

Just then, Bev appears in the distance, walking toward us, and I stand up and say, “There’s a river over there. I’m going to check it out.”

I leave them before Bev gets too close to us, and walk past the parked bus and over a short bridge. I hike down to the water, apple in one pocket, music in the other. A few people are down here—two women in bathing suits and wide-brimmed hats, a man with a dog. I put in my headphones, pull up the bottoms of my jeans, and kick off my shoes, wade out over smooth stones into the cold water.

Soon I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s a little kid, gesturing for me to take out my headphones.

“Can you step a little that way?” he asks.

I step to the right. He bends down and picks up a stone from where I had been standing.

“I’m collecting the red ones,” he says, and reaches into his pocket for a fistful to show me.

Then his dad is here, telling me as they pass, “It takes a lot of years for these stones to get this smooth, friend. A lot of years and a lot of water.”

They speak with an accent, Scottish or Irish, maybe. They walk a few steps downriver, and then the dad turns around.

“Hey,” he calls across the water. “I noticed you up in the orchard. You and those girls.” He squints into the sun, lifts a tan, rough hand to shield his eyes. “I have to ask. Is it just you and them? Traveling together?”

“Yeah,” I shout back.

He laughs and shakes his head as if this is something terrifically funny and hard to believe. Maybe it is.

“Good luck.” He chuckles again, turns around. His son has become a small figure in the distance, still searching.

I put my earbuds back in and bite into my apple. It’s probably the best apple of my life, and I try to enjoy it. I watch for a long time as the man gets farther and farther away and catches up to his son. Eventually, they move out of sight.

A few minutes later, in the quiet space between songs, I hear footsteps in water and smell cigarette smoke. Bev
stands next to me but doesn’t say anything. The next song starts and I act for as long as I can like her proximity is nothing significant.

After a while I take out one earbud and say, “I can’t believe you started smoking again.”

Bev runs her free hand over her hair.

“I’ll quit after the tour,” she says, and takes a drag.

She exhales and I step away from her and wave the smoke out of my face.

“What?” I say. “Why are you standing here?”

But I feel like I’m playing the part of an angry person, because here she is: Bev. My best friend. And even though I’m almost trembling with anger all I want is for her to change her mind.

So I just say it: “Just because you got in doesn’t mean you have to go right now. You could defer for a year.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Just think about it,” I say.

“Believe me,” she says, her voice sad, “I’ve already thought about it.”

“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”

“I needed to be sure. I didn’t mean for it to take so long.”

“Was it because of the tour?”

“You would have come anyway.”

“Why would you think that? There are better things I could do than be a roadie for the worst band in history.”

I want to hurt her, but she doesn’t flinch.

She just says, “You should come on with us tonight. Play tambourine or something. You don’t need to be a roadie.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyone can play tambourine. You just hit it on your hand.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t want to be anyone.”

She shakes her head. “That isn’t what I meant.”

We’re quiet for so long. I can hear a song playing in my headphones, distorted and far away. It feels forever ago, that Dad and Pete were standing there waving, and I was pulling onto the road, confident in what was happening next. And now this trip is the beginning of nothing. We’re not going to the Archipelago or the Hilton in Amsterdam where John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in bed for a week to promote peace. We aren’t going to spend days in Paris, drinking coffee with my mom, or see the actual paintings that we’ve spent years studying in books.

“Why?” I ask her. “Why did you pretend that we were going to do this?”

She stays quiet, just like she did at the gas station.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. “Bev. You really aren’t going to answer me?”

She looks down into the water.
“I’m sorry,”
she whispers.

“Well, thanks,” I say.

“Please come with us,” she says. “I need you to come.”

She reaches for my hand. I don’t jerk away like last time, but I don’t hold hers back, either.

“I’ll only come if you explain it to me.”

“Okay,” she says. “I will.”

I wait.

“I can’t do it now,” she says. “But I’ll do it.”

“Before we get back home,” I say.

“All right.”

“It’s the only way,” I say.

“Okay,” she says.

We stand in the water for a few minutes longer, not saying anything, not looking at each another.

“Colby,” she finally says, “you have to find something to love.”

I don’t know how she can say that. I shake my head. Look away.

“Something else,” she says, quietly.

I turn to her but she’s looking at something far away.

So she knows.

Our school didn’t want us to get too comfortable in the areas of art we chose, so we had to take at least one class outside of our focus every semester. Our junior year, Bev and I took theater. All the drama kids wanted to act, so Bev got to be the director. I stood on the stage with the others, and Bev stood in front of us, her clipboard under her arm, looking at us as if we were her tiny sculptures, perfect objects she could pick up and place wherever she wanted.

Bev got to select the play she was going to direct. With the help of the drama teacher, this guy named Drew who was so busy being a rising star of the San Francisco theater community that he got all his sleeping done during rehearsals, she chose a contemporary farce called
Melancholy Play
. I played a therapist named Lorenzo who is in love with his patient, Tilly, who was played by Meg. Lorenzo is supposed to have an Italian accent and feel nothing but happiness until he falls in love with Tilly, which happens very suddenly and for no reason except for the fact that Tilly is sad and does strange things, like open his office window during their therapy session and put her hand out to feel the rain. Like I said, the play’s a farce, so when Lorenzo falls in love and makes these grand statements, I was really going for it, gesturing wildly and accentuating the accent, and grabbing for Meg, who was dodging from chair to chair, trying hard not to laugh so she wouldn’t break character.