And then I feel myself grab the gas nozzle and yank it out of the bus, slam it back onto the pump, and hit the NO button with my fist when the screen asks me if I want a receipt. Then my hands are in my hair and my voice is choking out a long string of obscenities like I’m one of the crazy men waiting in shelter lines South of Market. And then I’m leaving, walking across and behind the station and out of sight from everyone and my sneaker kicks the curb over and over until my foot feels numb and swollen, and then I crumple into this pathetic heap on a nasty patch of weeds that smells like piss and garbage and yell the loudest yell of my life—louder than I yelled when Bev flew off her bike and landed hard on Nineteenth Avenue; louder than I yelled when I was six and got locked in a closet during a hide-and-seek game gone wrong; louder than I yelled when a group of us found ourselves up on Twin Peaks at 1:00 A.M. on a Saturday, drunk and exhausted but refusing to call it a night, and we felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.
Then I pick myself up and go back to the van.
“I can drive if you want me to,” Meg says when I open the driver’s door. I’ve never heard her voice so careful.
“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.