“You’re stinking up my car,” Jake complains as I start on the middle finger of my left hand.
I roll my eyes. “I’m almost done.” I finish the last two fingers, topping off the pinkie with a flourish. “So, you’ve decided we’re good enough to speak to again?” I raise my eyebrows at him.
“Keep up the attitude and I might change my mind.”
“Your silence would be a gift, Jake.” Laney shakes out her hand and examines her freshly painted nails. “You know, if it was up to me, we would extend this road trip to last all summer. When I get home, my mother is going to ground me just as an excuse to make me study for the SATs twenty-four seven.”
“Is she still pushing for U of M?” I ask. The University of Michigan is her mother’s alma mater.
“Of course. I’d so rather go to NYU, or USC. Somewhere where things are happening,” she says. “My dad thinks I should go to Dartmouth. Like I could even get in to Dartmouth if I wanted to! My GPA is not that stellar. I don’t know if it’ll even get me into any of my top choices.”
“That must be hard,” Jake says flatly. “Let me guess, Daddy is the one who will be footing the bill for this dream school of yours?”
“What’s your point?”
“Do you even listen to yourself?” he asks, voice rising with a mix of disgust and incredulity. “You might not get into your number-one college. Poor you! Let me pass you a tissue so you can cry over it some more while the rest of us deal with real problems.”
“What crawled up your ass and died, Jake?” Laney bristles. “You don’t know me. You don’t know what my life is like.”
“I know exactly what you’re like,” he retorts. “You’re one of those types—‘Oh, let me constantly whine about my privileged, perfect existence and whore it up around town because Daddy doesn’t love me enough.’”
Laney recoils like she’s been slapped. I twist around to stare at him, shocked. “What the hell did you just say?”
Jake clenches his jaw. “I don’t know why I bother with spoiled brats. The both of you.”
“Apologize,” I demand in a low voice. “Apologize, right now, or I am getting out of this car and walking to California if I have to. Do you hear me?” He slides his eyes over at me wordlessly, so I know he’s listening. “Do you hear me?” I yell it so loud that he flinches, hands jerking on the steering wheel.
Suddenly there’s a loud popping sound, and Laney screams. I brace my hands hard against the dashboard as the van swerves to one side, the seat belt cutting into my collarbone hard enough to break skin. Jake curses loudly, slams on the brakes and pulls over onto the shoulder of the road.
For a few seconds we all sit there, no one breathing a word, and then Jake says, “Is everyone okay?” He sounds out of breath.
“What—what was that?” Laney asks shakily.
“I think we’ve got a flat.” He looks over at me, but I just stare straight ahead. “Harper? Are you okay?”
I don’t answer. I undo my belt with trembling hands and climb out of the van, slam the door and then kick it as hard as I can. My big toe throbs and it’s so fucking hot and dry out here but I don’t care. I can’t be here right now. I turn toward the desert and start walking. I hear the back door open, and Laney’s voice as she calls my name, but I don’t stop, not until I’ve reached a massive gray rock a couple yards away. It’s weird to see a random, big-ass rock in the middle of nowhere. I put my hands on the granite, scramble for a foothold and clamber on top of it.
There’s nothing in front of me but miles and miles of flat desert, yellow and gold and orange, stretching out until the sky meets the horizon, the deepest, clearest blue I’ve ever seen. I stand there and look out at it, the blazing sun stinging my eyes until my vision goes liquid fuzzy, and I wonder how far it goes before it hits anything. How far you’d have to walk before finding civilization.
God, I hate everything. I hate Jake and I hate his stupid van and I hate that people can be so horrible to Laney and she just takes it, because—because why? Because she likes the attention? Because she thinks she deserves it? I’ve always thought of her as this totally fearless person, but then she just lets herself get walked all over like she’s a freaking doormat.
And I hate that I expected better from Jake. I should’ve known. He’s no different from anyone else.
A scream bubbles up in my chest, rips out of my throat from somewhere in the depths of my gut and reverberates into nothing. Even after I’ve stopped I can hear the echoes ringing in my ears. And then I’m just standing there, breathing raggedly, everything in me empty and aching.
“Harper, stop it!” Laney’s behind me, screaming too, on the verge of frantic tears. “Stop it! Stop!”
I turn around slowly so I’m standing sentinel over her and Jake. Laney looks panicked, but he is perfectly calm, unmoving.
“It’s okay,” Laney says. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“Stop saying that! It is not okay!” I yell. “It is so not okay! It isn’t okay for a guy to treat you like you’re a piece of crap—” I point to Jake “—and it isn’t okay for you to be a raging asshole for no reason, and we have to stop pretending things are okay. Nothing is okay.”
I can see the road from here. A pickup truck rolls by, slows as it approaches the van but doesn’t stop. None of us speak until it’s out of sight.
“I’m sorry,” Jake says. He turns to Laney. “I didn’t mean it.”
She lifts a shoulder and drops it. “Yeah, you did,” she says, very pointedly avoiding eye contact. “Whatever. It’s fine. I mean. It’s not fine, but I forgive you or whatever.” She looks to me. “Will you get down now?”
“All right.” I sit and shimmy off the rock, land on the dusty ground. “Let’s go fix the damn tire.”
“Shit.” Jake stares into the back of the van with one hand slapped over his face. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “A spare but no jack? You are such. An. Idiot.”
“Eli must’ve borrowed it and not put it back,” he says. He’s still moving around bags and blankets, searching for the jack even though we’ve torn the van apart five times already. “Shit. Shit.”
I look at Laney, sitting on the side of the road, squinting down at her cell phone. She’s been texting Seth for the last fifteen minutes. “What does Seth say?” I ask.
“Seth says, and I quote, ‘Jake is an idiot,’” she says. Seth is a good study of human character.
Jake curses a few more times and stalks off around the van, jumping up and sitting on the hood. I follow and watch as he paws his pockets madly, until he eventually fumbles out a cigarette. I walk around so I’m standing in front of him.
“What should we do?” I ask.
He doesn’t look at me as he shakes his lighter and tries to flick up a flame. “Do I look like I have an answer to that?” I really could just punch him in the mouth, I swear.
“What is wrong with you?” I snatch the lighter out of his hands and throw it on the ground. “Why are you being such a dick?”
He stares at me with the unlit cigarette hanging on his lower lip and says, “We’re not friends, Harper. Don’t act like we are.”
I’m wrong—Jake isn’t the idiot, I am. Because somehow these words sting, even though I know they’re true. We aren’t friends. After California, this’ll all be over, and I’ll go back to never thinking about Jacob Tolan and his stupid unkempt hair and his sucky attitude, and my life will be better for it.
Probably.
Maybe.
I can’t quite look him in the eye when I say, “Fine. I’ll have Laney call for a towing service.”
“Wait, don’t. Not yet. Give me a minute to think.”
“We have to do something. We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“If someone comes out, sees the two of you and starts asking questions—”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“That’s easy for you to sa
y! It’s not your ass on the line here, Scott.”
“You chose to come,” I remind him. “Nobody put a gun to your head. If it’s really that bad, why are you even here?”
Jake looks uneasy again, but before I can question him further, his eyes shift to some point over my shoulder. I turn to see a beat-up station wagon painted with black-and-white stripes rumbling up the road in our direction. It passes, then skids to an abrupt halt and zooms back in Reverse, tires squealing. The dust hasn’t yet settled when the engine cuts and the driver’s door opens.
A boy with dyed pink hair sticks out his head. “What up, motherfuckers? Got some car trouble?”
“Um…” Jake hops off the van hood and brushes off his jeans. “Yeah, actually. Flat tire. I’ve got a spare but I’m missing my jack.”
“Oh, we can fix that,” the boy says easily, and Jake and I share a glance. We?
The back doors of the station wagon fly open, and out tumble five more kids: four boys and one girl. The boys are dressed in ratty T-shirts and baggy pants with silver chains, their hair dyed every color of the rainbow (and then some), with all kinds of piercings from noses to eyebrows to lips to ears. The sole girl has tightly coiled red curls and bright eyes and is wearing a pair of knee-high leather boots and a barely there miniskirt. It’s the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen—a bunch of punk kids in a zebra-striped station wagon in the middle of the desert.
“Am I hallucinating?” I mutter to Jake under my breath as the kids walk toward us. “Is this some mirage brought on by severe dehydration?”
Jake tilts his head to one side as the pink-haired boy pops his trunk. “I’m…really not sure.”
The boy comes back with a car jack and wrench in hand, and he and Jake walk over to the busted rear tire. The rest of the kids crowd around Laney and me and rattle off their names—I don’t remember any of them because it’s too hot to focus, so I decide to call them by what they look like. There’s Redhead Girl, and Goonies T-Shirt Boy, and Boy With So Many Piercings You Can Hardly See His Face, and so on and so on.
Goonies Boy joins the pink-haired boy and Jake, and I follow, standing back to watch them work.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, dude,” Pink-haired Boy says to Jake. “My dad makes me keep the tools, but I am so not mechanically inclined.”
Jake seems like he’s done this before; with the other boy’s help, he loosens the nuts with the wrench, jacks up the car and sets to replacing the tire. In a few minutes the spare is snugly in place.
Pink-haired Boy looks at Jake and says, “Holy shit!”
“It wasn’t that hard,” Jake says modestly as he wipes off his hands on his jeans.
“No, not the tire. Your shirt. Holy shit, that is one sick design!”
I look at Jake. His black shirt has the words Robot Suicide Squad splashed across the front in white, and below that a stencil of a square robot holding a gun to its head.
“Classy,” I tell him. “Is that a band?”
“Yeah. They’re heavy grunge, slash numetal, slash hardcore, depending on the album.” He glances down at his shirt and back up at Pink-haired Boy. “So you must be a fan, I take it?”
“Hell yes!” Pink-haired Boy exclaims. “So, you guys are on your way to their show, right?”
“Show? What show?”
“Dude. They’re playing in Flagstaff. We’re all road tripping just for the occasion, man. Seriously, you should come. It’s going to be legendary.”
Jake hesitates. “I don’t know—”
“We should,” I cut in. “I mean, if you want to, we should. We’re not exactly on a tight schedule here.”
I don’t know why I’m being so nice; Jake’s acting like a jerk, but maybe he needs a break from the driving and the monotony. Yes, he chose to come, but he can’t be having the time of his life carting Laney and me around, and we’ve driven this far, so what’s a few more hours? We could all use the opportunity to blow off some steam before we implode.
“Well…” Jake purses his mouth as he considers. “I guess—”
“So that seals the deal,” Pink-haired Boy crows, pumping one fist in the air. “Next stop, Flagstaff, baby!”
Three and a half hours later and I’m in the middle of a mosh pit.
Being in a mosh pit is what I imagine being packed in a tin of sardines must be like. I’m squeezed in at the very front of the stage, crammed in with the other people crowded there, and as soon as the music starts, it’s basically a free-for-all—dancing, jumping, elbowing, pushing, knocking people down…nothing is sacred. Doing things that would normally get you an aggravated assault charge in real life is not only acceptable, but encouraged.
I’ve never moshed before. I never had the opportunity—the best you can get in Grand Lake is a lame group of white boys playing crap guitar in their parents’ basements on Saturday nights, thinking they’re hot shit, with a few underclassmen jumping around like a bunch of morons and pretending to be drunker than they actually are.
The venue in Flagstaff is totally different. Sure, it’s in a basement, but in the refurbished basement of a nightclub. Also, there are ten times more people present than any local “show” I’ve attended in the past. Even with the crowd, Jake, Laney and I manage to sneak to the front with the help of Pink-haired Boy and his posse.
“R.S.S. are kickass!” Redhead Girl shouts in my ear to be heard over the din. I still don’t know her name, which makes it a little weird since she’s practically on top of me. “You’re going to love them, for fucking serious!”
I decide to take her word for it. I look around and realize that aside from Redhead Girl and Laney, there are no other girls in the pit.
“Hey, where are all the girls?” I yell to Redhead Girl.
She scrunches her face at me and yells, “What? You’re going to hurl?”
It doesn’t really matter that she can’t hear because in five minutes I get my answer: the opening band, who call themselves the Big Fear, roars into their first song, and everyone begins to thrash around, all at once. Some burly guy twice my size slams hard into my shoulder, and then another one does on the other side, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I’m smashed out of the pit and into the outer edges of what seems to be a safety zone, which has a far higher ratio of girls.
I’m still gathering my bearings and my equilibrium when Jake brushes past a few people and comes up to me. I’m afraid he’s going to look concerned. I don’t want to be the kind of girl who needs to be checked on and looked after—and as soon as I think it, I realize it’s because I don’t want to be like my mom.
Thankfully, Jake looks more amused than anything else. He leans in close to my ear, his hand on my waist to pull me in closer, and says, “You’re not going to let some assholes chase you off, are you?”
I glance down at where his hand is and try not to blush. When I look back up, his face is only centimeters away from mine. God, why does he have to be so pretty in such close proximity, even when he’s all sweaty? Why do I have to get these fluttery feelings when I look at his face and feel his hand on my hip, even though he’s been an utter dick all day?
It was so much easier when all I felt toward him was annoyance.
“Please,” I scoff. “I’m just strategizing on the best way to get back in.”
“Keep your elbows up and you’ll be fine.”
He’s right. I keep my elbows up and don’t hesitate to shove back, and I’m able to hold my own. By the time Robot Suicide Squad takes the stage, plugging in their leads, my shirt is drenched in sweat. The room is almost too hot to breathe in. I don’t care. There’s something exhilarating about being in the pit—knowing that everyone has fought to be here, that we’re all here for the same reason.
We slam-dance all the way through Robot Suicide Squad’s set. People frantically shove, and I receive a few whacks from those behind, but I avoid getting the crap kicked out of me. The band is equally hardcore as the crowd—the bassist throws himself against the wall, ag
ainst the floor, and the lead singer beats himself over the head with his mike until he gashes open his forehead. The wound bleeds in a sluggish trail down his face. Every time I glance over at Jake, he’s staring at me with this huge grin, and when I yell “What?” over the music, he just shakes his head and turns his attention back to the band.
As soon as the last riff of the last song fades into screeching guitar feedback, the band members all drop their instruments and abandon the stage. The drummer pauses long enough to hurl his drumsticks into the audience, one after the other. Apparently he isn’t concerned with being responsible for any concussions.
Of course, with the moshers already beating the crap out of each other, they probably don’t care much, either.
I’m hanging outside the bathroom, waiting for Jake, when Laney runs up and pulls me into a sideways hug and says, “That was amazing!”
I don’t really like being hugged and she’s pretty sweaty, but then, she’s Laney and so I let her. I lost her halfway into the opening band’s set, so it’s a relief to see she’s all in one piece.
The guy behind her says, “I’ll show you something amazing, babe.” His words come out all slurred. He’s huge and bald and has this crazy spiderweb tattoo on his neck, and there’s this weird piercing in his nose with a silver chain connecting to his ear.
“Don’t bother. I’m sure I’ve seen it before,” she tells him drily.
“Oh, I don’t think you have.” He moves in closer, and I almost gag on the overwhelming stench of liquor. Ew. Someone’s been spending quality time with Jack Daniel’s. “So tell me—your tits. They real?”
“About as real as my interest in you,” she says, turning away.
He laughs too loud, reaches forward and grabs her ass. She gasps and whirls around to face him, and I pull her back so she’s hidden behind me. What the hell? Who does that?
Oh, right. Stupid assholes drunk out of their minds.
I glare at him. “Leave her alone.”
“No one’s talking to you, you dried-up cunt.”
“Is there a problem?” Jake’s suddenly here, stepping between us. Even though he’s taller than me, the other guy still has a few inches on him. Not to mention, like, seventy pounds.