“Okay, Colby,” she said. “You need to channel something.”
She left her perch on the edge of a chair and walked up onto the stage where I was standing. It was a journey: past the chairs to the aisle, from the aisle to the steps, up the steps to the stage, across the stage to me. She looked at my face and then up to the ceiling, searching for the cure to my bad acting.
“You shouldn’t be that funny,” she said. “The play should be funny, but Lorenzo doesn’t know that. Lorenzo’s serious. Lorenzo is in love. So imagine being in love and confessing it.”
She stepped to the edge of the stage.
I started: “Tilly—my mother abandoned me at a sweetshop.”
That part was easy to say convincingly; the rest would be harder. The problem was that while I knew how it felt to be in love, I knew even better how it felt to hide it. Because Bev and I were best friends and that’s the way it had always been. Because every day at our school people broke up and cheated on each other and hooked up at parties and pretended not to remember anything about it the next day. Because I feared the unraveling of everything that we had become to one another from the time we were nine years old.
“Why are you telling me this?” It was Tilly’s line, but as Meg spoke I found myself looking at Bev. Her blond hair falling over her left shoulder, stopping at the curve of one of her perfect small br**sts. She waited for me to continue.
I said, “Because—the heavens have cracked open—I suddenly want to tell you everything.”
The next line caught in my throat, but I turned to Meg, who was feigning Tilly’s alarm but rooting for me with her focused brown eyes, and forced it out, quieter this time, without the armor of overacting.
“I think I’m in love with you, Tilly. They say that’s what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country. Tilly.”
I had always found that last part strange. Her name: not a question but a statement. A one-word sentence. But when I said it right then, it made sense. Not, Tilly? As in, Do you love me, too? But, Tilly. As in, Your name is all I that can manage to say.
Meg pranced across the stage to hug me, and I tried to recover from the feeling that I had just confessed my love for my best friend on the stage of our school theater with the drama teacher napping in the front row and the entire cast and crew watching from the seats.
There was a moment of silence when I thought for sure the world was ending.
Then Bev said, “That’s great. That was so much better.”
And we ran the scene again, from the beginning until the end.
Meg drives.
I sit by myself in the back bench seat and stare out the window. A piece of tape unsticks from the side of one of Meg’s boxes. I push it back down, use her bass case as a pillow, and try to fall asleep. When I close my eyes I picture Bev’s small blue-walled room emptied of all of her stuff. Then I see mine, full of everything but her.
The bus is quiet for a long time, and then Meg’s playlist resumes, and after a while, they start to talk. I hear pages turning and Bev reading, “Voice and movement. Playwriting. Method acting.”
Meg says, “How will I choose!”
“Take playwriting,” Bev says. “I’m taking it first semester. Let’s write plays and produce them over the summer. We can cast each other.”
“Only if you direct me again,” Meg says. “You’re the best director I’ve ever worked with.”
I don’t want to hear Bev talking about this, getting so excited over the things that I thought neither of us were that into. So I sit up, assuming that they’ll move on to other topics of conversation if they don’t think that I’m sleeping.
I see Bev catch my reflection in the rearview mirror and she slips the catalog off her lap. For a while they talk about nothing, and then Meg stops talking altogether and focuses on the road.
Which is a good thing, because the drive gets a little perilous. The Northern California coast has to be the most amazing place I’ve ever seen but it’s also terrifying. One moment, I’m thinking Oh my god: the cliffs, the ocean, the wildflowers, the hills—nothing could be better than this. And then the next, I’m wondering why there isn’t a rail on the side of the road, realizing that if Meg steered us a little too zealously around a curve, we would be plunging over the cliff, into the ocean, and that would be the end of all of us. I close my eyes and almost feel it: the denial and then the dread, falling away from the future I had every intention of reaching.
Eventually, the earth evens out, the road widens. We drive past Mendocino, a perfect postcard town overlooking the ocean, everything neat and colorful. And then, all of a sudden, the trees disappear, everything turns gray, and a sign welcomes us to Fort Bragg.
“Whoa,” Meg says. “What happened?”
Alexa says, “Maybe we’re just in the outskirts or something. I’m sure it will get better.”
Bev’s staring out the window, but in that spaced-out way that means she isn’t really looking at anything.
Maybe she’s changing her mind.
Alexa directs Meg off the main road, past a tattoo parlor and a few bars and an unfortunate number of boarded-up buildings. At the end of a block, we spot the red Bianchi Motel sign rising over the roofs of the surrounding stores and houses.
“This is kind of weird,” she says, “but we don’t actually check in at the motel. We check in at the store across the street.”