“For what?”
“Drugs, whatever.”
“Man, if you search this car and find some drugs, I’ll split them with you sixty-forty. If there were drugs in this car, I can assure you you’d have to do stomach surgery to find them. This has been one perfectly shitty day.”
I guess the truth has a ring of truth to it, because instead of making me pop the trunk, he says, “Well, maybe tomorrow will be a better one. You can make mine better by moving down to the rest stop.”
In Winnemucca, we stop for food. Neither of us is hungry, but we’ve been in this car long enough that if I don’t get out my fat ass will melt into the upholstery. Plus, the last thing in the world I have to be is hungry, to want to eat. Sarah orders orange juice and coffee and an English muffin. I’m tempted to get the Infinite Burger. The menu says if you eat it all, it’s free; if not, you pay double. I usually warm up to that kind of challenge real quick, but it would not be impressive in the way I currently want to be impressive. “I’ll take the club sandwich,” I tell the waiter.
“Good choice,” she says.
“And I’d like the club tenderized.”
That gets a little smile out of Sarah, though the waitress looks at me like I’m out of my big fat mind. Guess they don’t do puns in Winnemucca.
“What in the world am I gonna do now?” Sarah says as the waitress leaves to put in our order.
“Probably best to sit with it awhile,” I say. “Sometimes if you do that, an answer comes that you wouldn’t expect.
She slouches. “Maybe. I don’t guess I have a choice. It’s not like I have a plan.”
“I’ve got a plan,” I tell her. “Maybe not a plan; maybe an idea.”
She shrugs. “Let’s hear it.”
“You ever had a boyfriend?”
“Do I look like I’ve ever had a boyfriend? Jesus, Angus.”
“Well, I’ve never had a girlfriend, so I’m seeing a starting place.”
“A starting place.” Man, Sarah can be major-league sarcastic when she wants to be. If I were the kind of guy to get intimidated, that might do it. Come to think of it, I am the kind of guy to get intimidated. But I have a history of overcoming that.
“Why don’t we be in love?”
“Why don’t we be in love?” Again, it sounded better when I said it. “How do you just be in love?”
“You just do it, I think. You hold hands and tell each other shit you don’t tell anyone else. You go cool places. You do…what we did last night.”
The waitress delivers our food just in time to hear, “What we did last night.” Sarah blushes and looks down, but the waitress doesn’t skip a beat. I bet what we did last night gets done a lot in Winnemucca. Unless you’re a card shark, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot else to do.
Sarah eats quietly while I look between bread slices to see why they call it a club sandwich. “What do you have to lose?”
Her head snaps up. Fire burns in her eyes. “I have everything to lose, Angus Bethune. Everything. You want to know how I’ve stayed alive so far? By never wanting anything. I’ve never asked for a Christmas present or a birthday present or even dessert. I take what is given to me. When you don’t have anything, you can’t lose anything. Shit, I’m scared to death ’cause Ms. Lemry and her husband want to adopt me. I’m eighteen. Legally it doesn’t even mean anything and I’m still afraid of it. My other fat friend, Moby? He’s going off to school on the coast. You know what happens to people who go their separate ways? They go their separate ways. I’m terrified he’ll just sink into time. He’s not even gone and I’ve told myself he is. What do I have to lose? Shit, Angus.”
“Listen…”
“No, you listen. I held on to my mother my whole life. I dreamed that she was scheming to come get me. I have every one of those postcards she sent from Reno. She didn’t sign them, didn’t write on them. But I looked at those casinos and called them castles. They quit coming, and I stared at the old ones until I wore them out. Shit, somewhere back there that bitch of a mother of mine must have at least thought about coming for me. Then Ms. Lemry and I found her, and she was weak and scared. I got it in my head that I didn’t really want her; not the real her, anyway. I had only wanted the idea of her.
“But when you said let’s go find her, I realized it wasn’t over. What if she didn’t come back because she was scared of my dad? I thought. What if I could have her after all? And we go and she not only doesn’t want me, she’s replaced me.”
“I know. We shouldn’t have gone. It was a bad idea.”
“Hell if it was,” she says. “It was a fucking great idea. This is how you find out what’s real, Angus. You look it in the eye.”
“Okay,” I say, “it’s real. That doesn’t tell me why we can’t be in love.”
“Because right now you feel sorry for me. You like to help people, and you just watched me take one in the gut. But you know what? You’re forgetting that I’m ugly. And six months from now, I’ll still be ugly, and a year after that and a year after that. And you won’t feel sorry for me anymore, and you’ll notice like crazy. And I’ll be stuck losing something I can’t afford to lose.”
Man, I hate it when somebody thinks they know what I’m thinking. Even if they do. “You’re not ugly to me.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit back. You’re not. Hell, with my glasses off I can barely see you. And even if you were ugly, you’re no uglier than me. You ever see those aliens on Star Wars or Star Trek? Dog noses, cookie-cutter fork things all down their cheeks, some of ’em. Pointy ears. How do you think they keep their generations going? I look at ’em and say, ‘Hey, Movie Genius, what were you thinking when you created that?’ But to them, they’re not ugly, they just look like each other. If the world was made up of mostly fat people and burned people, we’d be fuckin’ magazine models. And if that’s true, then we are.”
“Those aren’t real things, Angus. They’re either digital or created in a makeup place.”
“Maybe, but you get the point.” I reach across the table and grab her hand, and only get a little bit of mayonnaise on it. “This last year one of the studs on the football team paid a bunch of guys to vote for me to be our high school Winter Ball king. It must have cost him a fortune, but he’s a rich kid. His girlfriend was the Winter Ball queen, and he had some sick shit going on where he wanted to teach us both a lesson. I’d messed him up pretty good on the football field, and who knows what he thought she did. Anyway, I’d been in love with this girl, like, forever, so even though I was embarrassed out of my mind, I wanted to go through with it, just so I could have my moment with her. You know, something to hold on to. Something to remember. She wasn’t my date; she was showing up with him. I just had that one dance; that one little five-minute…thing.”
Sarah nods. She does know that.
“So he gets drunk at the dance and embarrasses me and her, and she gets majorly pissed and leaves the dance with me. My five-minute thing turns into maybe an hour-and-a-half thing, because I get to buy her a milkshake and drive her home and sit in the car and talk for a little while. When it’s done, I got way more than I expected. I got extra time and the satisfaction of knowing she dropped him like a molten turd. Then she went and got with some other asshole.”
Sarah softens a little. “Welcome to Planet Earth, huh?”
“Yeah. It was over and I had the memory, the thing I was after in the first place. But you know what? Fuck that. There’s no difference between a five-minute memory and an hour-and-a-half memory. I’m tired of living for memories. They’re great, but they don’t sustain you. They fade. They aren’t shiny.”
She looks away at my use of her word.
“It’s the perfect word, Sarah Byrnes. You’re shiny to me.”
“I won’t stay that way.”
“Do you know a guy named Kyle Maynard?”
“No. Is Kyle Maynard shiny?” She can bounce back to sarcastic like a Super Ball.
“Fuckin’ A,
he’s shiny. Kid was a high-school wrestler in Georgia. Went on to wrestle in college. Wanna know what’s shiny about Kyle Maynard?”
“Lay it on me.”
“Kyle Maynard was born with no arms below the elbow and no legs below the knee. He lost the first bazillion of his wrestling matches, but by the time he was a senior in high school, he was headed for state. You have any idea what his parents thought when they first saw him? No warning anywhere in the pregnancy, then BAM! We get a torso.”
That gets her attention. Kyle Maynard gets everyone’s attention.
“I don’t know what his parents were thinking—like, how they did it—but they must have just told him to do things as if everyone had no arms and legs. He types fifty words a minute with no prosthetics. He has better handwriting than I have. Only it ain’t handwriting, it’s stub writing. The guy just acts like the rest of the world’s like him.”
Sarah looks down at her body. “Well,” she says, “I’m not like Kyle Maynard. I have arms and legs.”
“Yeah, but here’s the deal. I didn’t expect to tell you a story about Kyle Maynard and have you forget that your dumb bitch mother left you in the eye of some awful hurricane and then replaced you. The deal is, if everyone had scars on their faces, then we’d add that into pretty. I’m telling you, Sarah Byrnes, I can add that into pretty. I already have. I can’t fuckin’ see anyway, and what happened last night is just in me. I don’t want to ever have to give it up. The difference between you and Kyle Maynard is, he came into the world with his condition and was loved. You came in without yours, but contempt and…indifference, I guess…gave it to you. And you weren’t loved. I can’t go back into your childhood and love you. If I could, I would. I swear to God I would. But I can love you now. And I do.”
She is quiet a long time, then finally, “I don’t know if I can do this, Angus. I feel like I was loved by Moby, my other fat guy, but not in, you know, that way. There was a time, when he fell in love with this really cool girl, that I thought I wouldn’t survive. I mean, I thought I’d kill myself. I had the plan. It scared me so much I took it away from myself, even the possibility. If I stopped wanting, no one could hurt me. I don’t know.”
I’m desperate. “Look, I know nobody can promise anything forever. Shit, my parents promised to love, honor, and whatever when they first got married, and they turned out not to even want the same gender. But I can promise I’ll always tell you the truth. I can promise you no surprises. Hey, I don’t like the way people look at me either.”
“Yeah, but your ‘condition’ is fixable. Like Moby’s.”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to fix it. If you’d seen me in the pool the other day, you’d believe me.”
She grimaces.
“I’m a way bigger dickwad than you are. You’ll get tired of me a long time before I could get tired of you.”
I’m a hell of a debater. I may or may not be smart, but I’ll wear you down.
A fiery sunset explodes on the western horizon as we drive up out of Winnemucca toward home. Maybe fifty miles up the road, Sarah scoots over toward me and lays her hand in my lap. We ride another twenty or thirty miles like that, her hand in my lap and mine over hers.
“We’re not even going to the same college,” she says. “What about that?”
“We change our plans. I’ll go where you go.”
“It’s too late to change.”
“Then I’ll work in McDonald’s for a semester and bulk up. Don’t even think about trying to change my mind.”
Our dilemma is resolved. It’s nearing the middle of August. I contacted the University of Idaho and told them the next nuclear scientist to come out of there would have to be someone other than me; I’d been made a better offer by Burger King. My new idea will depend on Sarah Byrnes’s willingness to do the same.
“You’ve curbed global warming?” she says.
“Close. Look at this.” I hand her two brochures.
“Rather than make me read them, why don’t you just tell me, like you’ll do anyway.”
“As you wish,” I say with a flair. “It’s a place called Mountain Lightning, up out of Bozeman, Montana, way high in the Rockies.”
“Mountain Lightning.”
I ignore her dismissiveness. You have to do that if you’re going to love Sarah Byrnes. She can flat cut you up with a look, or a comment. “It’s like a camp.”
“Oh, I love to camp. Nothing like lying on the hard ground and peeing in a hole and freezing your butt off under a beautiful but arctic sky high in the Rocky fucking Mountains.”
“Yeah, there probably is nothing like that, but this is a camp with cabins and beds and all the amenities. Well, not satellite TV, but no hard ground to sleep on either. Look. It’s for blind kids. It says here their philosophy is kind of like what I thought Kyle Maynard’s parents’ philosophy was. Just pretend everyone’s like you. They have sighted counselors and blind counselors. Without my glasses, I almost cross over. I’m, like, bilingual in their world. And look here. They want counselors with ‘expressive’ language skills, ‘people good at describing the physical world with passion.’ There’s formal writing and informal conversations and all kinds of other stuff. It says right here, ‘There has never been a good employee of Mountain Lightning who didn’t get at least as much as he or she gave.’”
Sarah takes the brochures out of my hand. “Wonder what they mean by that?”
“Probably that they don’t pay much. But we go where nobody sees us before they know us. It’s a year-round residential outfit. This is the perfect time to apply because a lot of the summer employees go back to school now.”
“I don’t know, Angus.”
I sing: “A friend of mine is going blind but through the dimness, he sees so much better than me.” I sing it badly. “We’ll be in the dimness, Sarah. Pleeeze! We can go to college any time. I mean, we know we will. But this is a once in a lifetime. It’s beautiful, I mean, look at these pictures.” I hold open the brochure. “Pleeeze, Sarah, think about it.” I stop and smile. “See, I told you, you’d get tired of me long before the other way around.”
She takes the brochures. “I’ll think about it.”
Dinner’s over. The mess hall is clean; dishes washed, tables scrubbed. Sarah and I sit on the porch outside the main meeting hall, waiting to tutor some of the older kids with their homework. It’s a smaller group in the fall. Many of the summer campers have gone to their homes and back to school. The fall and winter kids are a little more troubled overall; some of them have no place but here. Sarah and I are here as aides. Room and board and seventy-five dollars a week. In my first days I felt anxiety retreat on a daily basis. Nobody looked at me with disapproval as I lumbered over the trails or talked a group through the intricate paths from the cabins to the meeting hall or the school. The considerations I make to accommodate my charges’ lack of sight are nothing compared to the relief of living with people who don’t judge me before they know me.
Sarah is a different person. She works with younger kids than I do, but she is so much better at it than I am. Such a natural. It makes me wonder what she would be by now if she hadn’t spent her life flying under her father’s radar and dodging the slings and arrows of her peers. A monstrous weight has been lifted.
“Tell me this wasn’t a good idea,” I say now, leaning back on the steps and staring at the moon rising through the trees, nearly full.
“It was a good idea, Angus. I’m sorry I doubted you.” She laughs. “I’ll never doubt you again, Angus.” Clearly she’s retained her command of the facetious uppercut. Sarah Byrnes will doubt me on a regular basis.
“I guess you won’t,” I say anyway.
A little girl whose name I don’t know walks onto the porch. She’s maybe six or seven.
“Hey, Amanda,” Sarah says.
“Hey, Sarah.”
“Wanna come sit with us?”
“Uh-huh.”
She feels her way toward us, sits on the far side of Sarah f
rom me.
“This is Angus.”
Amanda says, “Hi, Angus.”
I say hi back.
“Angus works with the bigger kids.”
“Can he see?”
“He can see, but he has everything else wrong with him.”
Amanda turns toward me. “What all’s wrong with you, Angus?”
“I snore. I drool. I eat children.”
“Huh-uh!”
“Sometimes I don’t go to the bathroom for a month.”
Amanda giggles, turns to Sarah. “They said the moon was big tonight.”
“Very big,” she says. “Almost a full moon.”
“What does it look like?”
“Well, it’s round, and very bright. It seems warm. If we were closer, it would be much bigger, but from here it’s about this big—can I show you with your hands?”
“Yes.”
“Point your fingers.”
Amanda extends her fingers. Sarah takes her forearms, points those fingers toward the moon, and draws a perfect circle around it. “It has lots of bumps and lines where the ground is uneven. You know, mountains and valleys and things like that. Like the ground here, only without bushes or trees.” Sarah looks at me and smiles. “It’s shiny,” she says.
Amanda nods.
We sit on the porch awhile. Amanda leans into the crook of Sarah’s arm. After a bit, she says, “Sarah?”
“Yeah?
“Can I touch your face? I forget what you look like.”
“Of course,” Sarah says, and turns toward her. Sarah Byrnes is so fucking brave.
Amanda touches her softly, traces her tiny fingers along Sarah’s scars, cups Sarah’s chin in her palms. She feels around Sarah’s eyes, and Sarah closes them and smiles. Amanda touches her smile and traces her lips. She withdraws her hands and giggles slightly.
“What?” Sarah giggles back.