I drive past telephone wires and Adopt-a-Highway signs and miles and miles of golden hills, and I think about Bev, lying in the back row, and I wonder if she’s sleeping. I imagine her back there, staring at the diamond-patterned fabric of the bus ceiling, not seeing the billboards or the hills or any of what I’m watching out the window.
I imagine that she’s thinking about me.
I picture her finding the hoodie I left on the seat, bunching it up and using it as a pillow. The hoodie just came out of the laundry last night, so she’s smelling the detergent that fills our kitchen on laundry days, and the clean deodorant smell, and the aftershave I put on this morning. She’s breathing it in and thinking it smells amazing, thinking that it smells like me. And just like me, she can’t wait either. To spend every moment of every day together, traveling from ancient cities to tiny islands. To wake up with me in hostel rooms in unfamiliar countries. She’s imagining waking up and looking at me, still sleeping in the bed next to hers.
She’s realizing that she doesn’t want to be in a bed without me, so she pushes aside her covers and climbs under mine. The bed is so narrow that she has to press against me in order to fit, and I can feel her br**sts against my chest, her leg across my legs, and in my sleep, I reach out to hold her closer. She kisses me below the ear, and then farther down my neck, and her hand travels from my chest to my stomach, and I wake up just in time to feel—
“Colby,” she calls to me from the back row.
I slam on the brakes and I hear Meg yelp and I glance back to see that Bev is not lying down but sitting up, holding her milk shake and leaning over the seat. Our eyes meet for a second. My face gets hot.
“Yeah?” I say, speeding up again.
“I need you to pull off at the next exit.”
“Why?”
“We should stop for gas,” Bev says.
“The tank’s three quarters full.”
“Still.”
“But we could go hundreds of miles on this.”
“Colby,” she says. “I need you to take the next exit.”
“All right,” I say. “Whatever you want. Can someone reach my hoodie? I left it in the back.”
Meg’s hand appears next to me, clutching the gray fabric.
“What do you need that for?” Meg asks. “It’s, like, three hundred degrees out.”
“I just don’t want to lose it,” I say, and I drape it across my lap in a way I hope looks casual, and a few miles later I steer the van off the freeway and pull into a gas station.
I get out and Bev gets out with me. I swipe the credit card, wait for the prompt, and start filling up my already-full tank.
“Are you gonna be like this the whole way?” I ask her. “We’re not going to get very far if you make us pull over every five miles.”
“I can’t go,” she says.
“Where?”
“I can’t go to Europe.”
A car next to us blasts hip-hop, the bass like thunder. I swear I didn’t hear her right.
“I got into RISD,” she says.
Her words don’t register. I don’t know what she means.
“RISD?”
“I’m going to college.”
Neither of us says anything. I turn toward the street, but I know her face by heart, and I can still feel her blue eyes watching me.
“Oh my God.”
“I didn’t think I’d get in.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You really didn’t apply anywhere?” she asks.
It’s hard to breathe. There’s the smell of gasoline and now Bev is taking out a cigarette. She promised me she quit smoking, but here she is with a cigarette and shaking hands, lighting it.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Do you want to blow us all up? And no, I didn’t.”
“Nowhere?” she asks.
“No,” I say. And everything seems unreal: this unfamiliar gas station, the hot air, her questions. “Of course I didn’t apply anywhere. I thought that if we both said, ‘Fuck college, let’s go traveling,’ we both meant we weren’t applying to college and were going traveling.”
“It wasn’t something I was planning,” she says.
“You don’t apply to school by accident.”
“I was writing that paper on Kara and one night I just looked it up and it was so easy. It only took twenty minutes.”
“Kara?”
“Kara Walker. She does those silhouettes?”
She stares at the cigarette, unlit between her fingers.
“Why?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Won’t answer me.
On the gas pump screen, numbers are frozen in time. A car waits behind us. And through the glass of the bus windows, two girls’ curious, concerned faces stare at Bev and me, waiting to know what has gone wrong.
“Do they know?”
“No. No one does. Except my parents.”
“You should tell them now,” I say. “Tell them before I get back in.”
Bev reaches toward me, touches my arm, but I jerk away and she disappears into the van. I can’t move. I have no idea what to do. I watch as the waiting driver passes us and stops at an empty pump. As he fills his tank and washes his windshield and gets back into his car and drives away. He does all of this so casually, as if everything certain about the future hasn’t just been crushed and swept away.