Billy Bilko was the name of the car lot owner. Since we’d spent no time haggling over the sticker price, he was more than happy to accept Julian’s rather unorthodox method of payment. Twice, he’d said, more to assure himself than us, ‘if all the numbers match up, then it’s got to be all right because I don’t know another person this side of the Rockies who has memorized their dang credit card number’.
And so, the road trip continued with me behind the wheel of a ‘95 Chevy Cavalier convertible with an odometer that had already turned over once and was about to turn again, a body with three different colors of gray paint and tires that were so bald I could nearly see my reflection in them. The top was down when we bought it, and we had no idea if it worked or not. Fortunately, the sky was blue and there wasn’t a rain cloud in sight. In front of us was more endless highway and fields of green and brown, broken up occasionally by a farmhouse or the skeleton of a barn or building that had gone to ruin.
Julian soon discovered that keeping his beloved hat on his head in the back of a convertible wasn’t easy. He held onto it with one hand and onto his computer with the other. Not that the latter had much chance of blowing out of the car.
Sugar’s hair flew wildly in every direction until she tied it up in knot at the back of her head. She lifted her face to the sky and closed her eyes, giving me a perfect view of her smooth throat, a throat I’d left a hicky on the night before. I had a hard time keeping my focus on the road.
“I think we should travel like this forever,” she sighed. “We could just go from town to town, stopping at greasy diners and sleeping in cheesy motels and never having to answer to anyone else again. Just the three of us, discovering the joys of small town America and nomadic living.” She smiled over at me and discretely reached across and ran her hand along my thigh. “What do you think?”
“Sounds good. But let’s leave off the part about being wanted by the police and the real killer. Which reminds me, I better keep to the speed limit. If we get pulled over, it’ll put a quick, ugly end to this little adventure.”
“Do you feel that electricity?” Julian asked suddenly.
I smiled over at Sugar. “I certainly do, Jules.”
“So, it’s not just me.” He hadn’t grasped the suggestive meaning of my remark at all.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The air is filled with static electricity.” He leaned forward and pointed ahead. “We’re heading toward a thunderstorm.”
Heavy, dark clouds loomed in the distance, and they definitely looked as if they could drop some precipitation. I pulled over. “We better give this top a try. Otherwise, we’re in trouble.”
Sugar reached forward to press the switch for lifting the top.
“Wait.” I got out. “There might be some hooks or something holding it down.”
Julian twisted around in his seat, and together, we worked loose the clasp that was holding the top down flat. It was frozen into position as if it hadn’t been used in years. We loosened the other side as well.
“All right, flip the switch and fingers crossed that it’s not full of holes.” With some unhealthy sounding squeaks and rusty complaints, the top unfolded and drifted up over the car. It was faded and there were a few rips but it looked water tight. Hooking it back to the front windshield took another round of grunting and tugging, but eventually, we were sealed shut in our jalopy. I’d barely pulled back out onto the road when tiny spots of water pelted the windshield. The top had worked, but the tattered windshield wipers were almost useless.
Sugar leaned over, kissed my face and climbed into the backseat. I badly wanted to follow her.
“Hey, Jules, what do you think about taking over the wheel for awhile?” I asked.
Julian looked up at the rearview. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea, Tommy.”
“Yeah, why is that? Still feeling crappy?”
“Well, yes, that, but I never learned to drive.”
I stared at him in the mirror. “You’re kidding?”
“Why would I kid about that? Sometimes, Tommy, it’s as if you were friends with me in that place, but you never really saw me.” There was a lot of anger in his tone. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d embarrassed him by making him admit that he’d never learned to drive, or if, like he’d implied, I’d been too dense to see that driving would have been a major thing to a guy who worried about the softness of his toothbrush and the order of sugar packets.
Sugar hated seeing him upset. She wrapped her hands around his arm and rested her head against it. “That’s all right, Jules. I never drive on freeways. The one time I got on a freeway, I was too afraid to get off. I ended up driving a hundred miles past the exit. The car finally ran out of gas. I coasted to the side of the freeway, got out and walked down the nearest off-ramp.”
Julian’s grin reflected off the mirror.
“This is technically a highway, so your freeway excuse is flimsy.” I didn’t push the point though because having Sugar drive wouldn’t have helped me achieve my goal of sitting in the backseat with her. “Looks like I’m the chauffeur for this whole trip then.” I lifted my eyes to the mirror and caught Sugar’s attention. “I guess you can wipe your dreams of an endless road trip out of your head. Road trips require more than one driver.”
I twisted the radio knob. “Wonder if this thing has the capacity to find any tunes flitting about in the radio atmosphere.” I spun the dial a few times and landed on a country music station. I stopped there, deciding I probably wouldn’t find much more. The speakers were just terrible enough to make the country music sound more gritty. It was an improvement. I glanced up into the mirror again. Sugar seemed fine with the music choice. She wiggled her body some to the beat. Damn Julian for not learning to drive.
She rested her chin on Julian’s shoulder. Like always, the close contact made him tense up, but like always, he eventually relaxed. It was Sugar, after all.
“Hey, Jules, do you have a sweetheart back home?” she asked.
He blushed. I’d never seen him blush before. “Me? No. I didn’t really have any friends, so I hardly had the social skills for a girlfriend.”
Sugar lifted her head. “Nonsense. You’ve got great social skills. Any girl would be lucky to have you.”
I listened half-heartedly to their conversation behind me, but, mostly, my mind drifted back to the night before with Sugar. Nothing had ever felt right or solid in my life before Sugar. Even though sometimes it seemed there was nothing solid about the girl, as if making good on her name, she could dissolve out of my life with one good rainstorm, I knew that I would do anything to keep her in my life. Anything.
“There is this one girl— her name is Charlotte. We call her Charlie, for short.” Julian’s voice was low and barely audible over the crummy speakers. I glanced in the mirror. A hint of a smile crept up on his face.
He had Sugar’s attention. “Ooh, good. Tell me about her.” I could see little gears working in her head about how she was going help Julian win this girl.
Julian shook his head. “Not much to tell. She’s the daughter of my dad’s business associate. We’ve known each other since we were teens. She is beautiful and confident and funny. Everything that I’m not.”
“Stop saying stuff like that, Jules. You’re beautiful and funny and, well, let’s work on confident.” Sugar turned to face him. “Have you ever kissed her? With your attention to detail, I’ll bet you’re a great kisser.”
Julian didn’t answer at first. I was watching the road in between checking out just what my beautiful southern flirt was up to in the backseat.
“Considering I’ve never kissed a girl before, I’m fairly certain I can say that I’m not a great kisser. And Charlie, she’s so far out of my league, I’m lucky when I just get to stand in the same room with her.”
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Sugar put her hand on his shoulder. “I won’t hear that anymore. Tell me— what do you like about her?”
The transformation of Julian was pretty astounding. Within the hospital walls, he’d rarely opened up about anything. There were days when he shut us out completely. But, while he seemed a little less stable in some aspects, like with the toothbrush fixation, he seemed to have drawn back the shades some. He was more human and less cerebral.
“She has blonde wavy hair and eyes that are blue, like yours. And she has this laugh that just—”
“That touches you here?” Sugar asked. I looked up at the mirror. Sugar had her hand pressed against his chest. Julian nodded.
Sugar sat back with a romantic sigh. Raindrops had begun pelting the top of the car, drumming a beat to go along with the sandy sounding base coming from the speakers. With nothing but wide open space on both sides of us, we had an unimpeded view of the cluttered sky ahead. The gray clouds were sagging heavy as if someone had filled them with marbles. Streaks of lightning shredded the dark sky every few seconds. The view through the windshield sucked, and the crummy tires hydroplaned every few moments. I was thankful that the road was straight and flat.
“Jules, you need to practice kissing. It’ll give you some confidence next time you see Charlie.”
I drifted over the center lane and pulled the car sharply back. Sugar caught my gaze in the mirror.
“What the hell are you doing, Sugar?” I asked.
She hopped up and hung over the front seat to grab the backpack. She fished in the front pocket and pulled out a box of mints. Her face was right next to mine.
“Sugar,” I said under my breath, hoping that Julian couldn’t hear. “What the hell are you up to?”
“I’m going to teach my friend, Julian, how to kiss so that he can impress Charlie.” She winked at me and dropped into the backseat with her mints. I found Julian’s reflection in the rearview. His posture was rigid and uneasy. There wasn’t any way he would go for this. Sugar was one of the few people who he allowed to touch him, but those were casual, friendly touches. A kiss, even in practice, was far more intimate and definitely went past that impenetrable comfort zone Julian had constructed around himself. Not to mention his phobia of germs.
Yet, my fingers were wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel, my knuckles were white. “This is a crazy storm. Make sure to buckle your seatbelts. These bald tires are no match for all this rain. We could spin out of control at any time.” I glanced up into the mirror to make sure that my scare tactic had shaken Sugar out of her idea. It hadn’t.
Sugar faced Julian. She’d actually talked him into putting his computer on the seat next to him. He faced her but he was staring down as if he couldn’t look directly at her.
I pulled my attention reluctantly from the backseat and back to the road. Water cascaded down the windshield and rain sprayed through the tiny gap between the convertible top and the driver side window. The watery mist did nothing to cool my head.
“We’re just going to keep our lips closed for this first one, Julian. It will be just like kissing your mom.”
Julian laughed nervously. “We didn’t kiss in my family. It won’t be anything like kissing my mom, Sugar.”
She was confident that she was helping him, but I wasn’t completely sure. I tried hard to push down the notion that she was doing this because she was bored on this long drive. She was just messing with me. But when I looked up again, she was taking it all seriously.
Her long white fingers, fingers that were on me last night, pressed against Julian’s face. I pulled my eyes away.
“Tommy,” Julian said suddenly. “You won’t be mad, will you?”
I didn’t answer. It was impossible trying to keep my eyes on the road.
“He’s fine. We’re just practicing. It’s a lesson.” With that, and before Julian could change his mind, she leaned toward him and pressed a chaste kiss against his mouth. Julian went stiff but relaxed by the time she pulled away.
“All right, Jules,” Sugar’s lyrical tone drifted into the front seat. “You’re going to have to relax way more than that. This time I want you to loosen your mouth up some. And be ready for some tongue.”
I reached forward and cranked up the radio. The speakers buzzed with noise.
“I don’t know, Sugar. Tommy seems mad. And I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”
“All right,” Sugar said with disappointment. “If you don’t think this will help you build confidence for when you see Charlie, then maybe you don’t want to win her that badly.”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t help. I’m sure it would be a good skill to have, but Tommy’s hands are gripping that steering wheel tightly. He’s mad.”
Sugar grabbed the back of my seat and leaned forward, her face was right next to mine. “You don’t mind, do you? You don’t mind if I teach Julian how to kiss, right?”
I could feel the muscle in my jaw clench as she asked me. She knew damn well what she was doing. While there was probably a lot of truth behind the idea that she was doing this to help Julian, she was also teasing me mercilessly. And she was enjoying the hell out of it.
“Maybe this little miss helpful act is what got you kicked out of your mom’s house, eh?”
She jammed her hands hard against the front seat and I shot forward for a second. She sat back hard. I caught her gaze in my mirror. I expected it to be filled with rage. Instead, it was heartbreak staring back at me.
I’d gone too far. “I’m sorry, Sugar—”
She twisted toward Julian and curled her hands around the back of his head. Before the guy knew what was happening, her lips covered his mouth for a long, deep kiss.
It felt as if I could smash the steering wheel beneath my hands to powder with one good twist. My eyes were spending little time on the road. I glued them to the mirror and watched the backseat. Julian had been stiff as the road signs we were streaming past. But now, his fists uncurled, and he placed his hand against Sugar’s waist. I’d never seen him touch anyone, ever. Not even accidentally. Now he had his hand on her. He pulled away from the kiss first. His face was flushed red and some of the stiffness had returned. He was afraid to look forward, to catch my reflection in the mirror.
Sugar leaned back and rolled her head to the side to smile at him. “See, you kiss just fine. And you touched me, Jules. I know that was hard for you, but you did it.” She took his hand and slipped it under her shirt. I’d hurt her, and now she was fucking with my head. I turned the car sharply, nearly pitching them off their seat. The car careened into a shallow ditch that was slowly filling with rain water. I got out and headed across the field.
“Tommy!” Sugar called. I heard the passenger door slam behind me.
I picked up a run. The wet, cold weather sent a spike of pain through the leg that had been broken, but it didn’t slow me. The field was mostly weeds that had disintegrated beneath the summer sun. The firm ground was soaking up the rain like a sponge, and my shoes were nearly sucked off as my feet pounded the mud. Through the rain that ran into my eyes, I saw an abandoned building in the distance. Its walls were made of cinderblock and its aged roof was coming off in metal strips. An old rusted tractor sat out front. I hopped over the splintery wood fence surrounding the building and ran toward it.
Two green metal doors were sitting ajar at the front of the building. Every window had been busted out, leaving behind deadly looking shards of glass. Water streamed through the thrashed roof, plinking loudly on the cement floor inside. I slid between the doors. Even with the Swiss cheese ceiling, the clouds overhead blocked out most of the light. A steady river of water flowed toward a drain in the center of the cement floor. There were warped metal tables along one wall, and two more rusted tractors sat in one corner.
The metal door creaked. I spun around. Water drip
ped off Sugar’s long hair. She wrapped her arms around herself, but it didn’t stop her from shivering. Her chin trembled with cold, and badly, I wanted to put my arms around her. Even wet, they would provide her with some protection from the cold.
“Julian probably shouldn’t be left alone,” I said, not sure how to start this conversation.
“He’s all right.” Her chin trembled more, but it wasn’t only the cold, wet air. “What if he never meets a girl? What if he never gets to kiss a girl?” she said, holding back a cry.
“Well, that’s not a problem anymore, is it?”
“Right. I kissed him. I fucking kissed him because he is a good friend and I care about him and I wanted to give him some confidence.”
I stood there and stared at her, looking at the girl I loved more than anything, a girl who I wanted more than anything to protect, a girl who I couldn’t keep safe from her own demons. “It was an accident.” My voice thrummed low and rough beneath the staccato beat of the raindrops on what remained of the roof. “That horrible day back when you were just a little girl, a little girl who loved to spin, a habit you never stopped. I fucking love that about you, Sugar. You spin and twirl and defy gravity at every turn, and it makes me dizzy. You make me dizzy.” I stepped closer to her, close enough to see the rise and fall of her chest with each breath and the tiny downward curve of her lips. “It happened. Shit like that, awful tragedies like that, happen every day. It was just the wrong set of circumstances, a heavy toy, a little girl’s vulnerable skull and that damn law of physics that Julian talked about. I love that you want to help everyone. It’s part of what makes you amazing, but sometimes it’s all right not to step in and help.”
Her entire body shook with a sob. “There isn’t one day that goes by—” The words stuck in her throat. “I wish for it every day— I wish I could go back in time and just do that day again. We’d shove that stupid spider out the door and pour our pretend tea and Megan would giggle as she gave my ratty old teddy bear a sip from her cup.” Her shoulders shuddered as she held herself tightly. Her dark lashes were clumped together with rain. Her cheeks were red from running across the field, and, as always, looking at her made the breath stick in my lungs.