Josh nodded. He knew I wasn’t talking about my shift at the Paradise. He got what it meant to be tired of life. So tired you felt it in your bones.
“I thought when I graduated, everything would be okay,” I said. “Like getting through Dad dying and making it out of high school was the hard part. It’s not.”
“Nope.”
I turned my head toward him, studied the shadows the dashboard lights were painting on his face. “Why did you come back?”
“Besides the obvious?”
I looked over at his leg, then rolled my eyes. “Doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life in Creek View.”
“What would you do?”
“If I were you?”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t stay in. I’d use my GI Bill and pick a school as far away from here as possible. I wouldn’t look back.”
The yellow arches came into view. He slowed down. “Like you, huh?”
I just shrugged.
We pulled into the drive-thru, and when I only ordered one thing off the dollar menu, he shook his head and changed my Chicken McNuggets to a Super Size Value Meal. He wouldn’t let me pay.
My throat clenched, and I knew I was about to start freaking crying again, which was so stupid, but I hated not knowing if he felt sorry for me or if he was my friend or if he wanted more, and what did it mean that he was buying me food? I stared out the passenger window and tried to keep the tears in, frustrated that the five-dollar meal he’d just bought me was half my net worth.
“See that plastic bag behind you?” he said as he passed me the food and pulled back onto the highway.
I looked in the truck’s tiny back seat. “Yeah.”
“Take a couple bottles out of there.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
I reached into the back and grabbed two empty bottles at random. One Bud, one Heineken.
He pressed the button for his window to go down. “Ready?” he said.
“For what?”
He held out his hand, and I gave him the bottles.
“Hold the wheel.”
“What? No—dammit, Josh!” My hands flew out to the wheel as Josh wiggled his fingers in the air like, Look! No hands! The truck swerved, and Josh laughed when I shrieked and pulled it back into our lane. The highway was mostly empty, but still.
“Hold it steady, Sky!”
“You are such an asshole, you know that?”
“I’ve been called worse.” He slowed the truck down, then put it on cruise control.
In seconds he was half out the window, his knees facing me—even with his prosthesis, he was crazy fast, like he’d done this a million times.
“Joshua Mitchell, I swear to God—”
“Steady, Sky,” he shouted over the wind.
With the windows down, the cab filled with the smell of manure and dew and grass and car exhaust. The wind stung my eyes and pounded against my eardrums. I was too scared to look away from the highway, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dark shape of the station. The broken sign loomed above it, the faded red of the Texaco star just visible in the moonlight. Josh grunted, and I could imagine the empty beer bottles flying over the top of the truck and smashing against the gas station. He slid in and grabbed the wheel as I sat back in the passenger seat.
“That was awesome,” he said. His eyes were bright, and he was grinning, his breath coming out in heavy spurts.
“I’m never driving with you again.”
“Your turn,” he said. He pushed a button, and my window went down. “C’mon.”
“No way.”
“I’d suggest getting wasted, but that’s not your thing. So throw.”
“One: I’m not a low-life hooligan. Two—”
Josh snickered. “I can’t believe you just said hooligan.”
“Shut up or I’m eating all the fries.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I leaned closer to him. “I would.”
His eyes snagged on mine, just for a second, and then he slowed way down and waited for a big rig to pass before he did a U-turn in the middle of the highway. He passed the Texaco, then did one more U-turn, so that it would be on my side of the road.
“I can do this all night, Evans.”
“What if someone’s there and I, like, kill them?”
“No one’s there—that place has been closed for ten years. Can you give me a fry?”
“Don’t try to distract me.”
I stuck my hand into the bag and pulled out a fry. He opened his mouth, and I popped it in—the whole thing felt strangely intimate, as if we’d kissed.
I leaned away from him. Too close. Too comfortable. Too wired from the Joshness of him.
“Thank you,” he mumbled. He pointed out my window. “Any day now.”
I shook my head. “Josh—this is insane. Like, super-redneck status.”
“Do it. I promise you’ll feel better.”
I cursed under my breath and grabbed a bottle. The smell of beer hit me, and I wrinkled my nose.
“There’s still beer in this!”
“Well, then you better get it out of here before a cop pulls me over, huh?”
“You hick bastard.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
I punched him on the arm, which was about as effective as smacking a rock, then I leaned the upper half of my body out of the truck, so that my chest was parallel to the road. The wind was pushing against me, and I closed my eyes for a second, gripping the handhold inside the door. I could hear the tires speeding along the road, the slap of rubber against asphalt. This was so stupid, so dumb, but it felt amazing. Feeling the wind grab at my hair, being five fingers away from death—all I had to do was let go.
I opened my eyes and shouted into the truck as I clutched the bottle. “Don’t stare at my ass.”
“I’m not making any promises.”
I gave him a look, but he pointed up the road. “Just throw as hard as you can.”
Every muscle in my body was tense, ready to spring. The asphalt beneath sparkled as we sped by, like a river of black diamonds. We came up to the gas station, and I let the bottle go, throwing it with all my might toward the building. As we drove by, I thought I heard it crash against the wall. I screamed at the night and laughed at the stars. I heard Josh’s “Hell, yeah!” from inside, and it made me laugh harder, which hurt my empty stomach, but I didn’t care.
I slid back inside. My blood was carbonated, and I was awake and young and alive, and screw everything because this moment was mine.
“I’m warning you, it’s addictive,” Josh said. “You’re gonna be begging me to take you out again, just you wait.”
I covered my face with my hands and shook my head. “You’re right. This is the dumbest thing ever, but damn.” I wanted to throw another one, but this time at Billy Easton’s truck. Or Aunt Celia’s house … wherever it was.
“I kinda get why you were such a hell-raiser before you left,” I said. It was silly, but throwing that bottle made me feel a little more in control of my life. I couldn’t sit around and wait for Mom to magically get better. I had to take everything into my own hands.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Thank you for kicking my ass into gear. I’ve felt like a total wimp these past few weeks.”
“You are anything but wimpy, Sky.” His lips turned up. “But if you really want to get your ass kicked, you could always join the Marines. You’d look good in uniform.”
“Oorah!” I pumped my fist in the air, and he laughed. “I saw a movie where the Marines were always saying that. What does it mean?”
“It can be loosely translated as fuck, yeah. One of my buddies says it’s Jarhead for let’s do this.” He smiled. “You used it right.”
Oorah. I needed some of that in my life.
Josh did another U-turn, then went down the dirt road beside the gas station.
“Are we the kind of delinquents who pick
up after ourselves?” I asked.
“Hell, no. Takes the fun out of it.” He slowed down as we drove past the station. “I’m taking you to my favorite restaurant in town.”
The gas pumps were eerie in the moonlight, like forgotten toys. Graffiti covered the boards on the windows, and the ground was littered with beer cans and probably cigarette butts. I couldn’t see them from the truck, but it seemed like that kind of place.
Josh parked behind the station and turned off the ignition. The instant silence was almost loud. Other than the occasional car on the highway, the only sound was the breeze and a few crickets.
“If I didn’t know you, I’d be pretty freaked out right now,” I said. It felt like we were the only people in the world. There weren’t any houses or buildings around for miles. Just fields and the jagged outline of the mountains in the distance.
“Well, at least you know that if I try anything, you can outrun me.”
“True. That’s comforting.”
He laughed and we got out of the truck.
“Wow,” I said. The moon hung low in the sky like an overripe fruit, rusty orange with swirls of yellow. Starry Night come to life.
“Kinda creepy, huh?” Josh said as he pulled down the tailgate.
“No. I like it. I feel like I’m watching a movie right now, you know?”
I gazed at the vineyard in front of me, the vines dark tendrils in the moonlight. I longed to slip off my shoes and run through them. I wanted cool earth under my feet. I wanted to pull grapes off the vines and taste their sweetness and let the juice drip down my chin and onto my shirt. Didn’t matter if they were ripe or not. I wanted to feed one to Josh and feel his lips against my fingertips. The echo of the bottle throwing pulsed in my skin. If I had the guts, I would howl at the moon.
“Can you grab the blankets in the back seat?” he asked.
I handed him the bags of food, grateful to step away from his side for a second. When I came back, we spread the blankets on the tailgate, then hopped up. He grunted a little, rubbing his stump while he leaned over to adjust his shorts over his prosthesis.
“You okay?”
“Just a little sore today. It’s nothing.”
I doubted it was nothing, but in Creek View, it seemed like there were two schools of thought on expressing how shitty life could be. Some people bitched and moaned all the time—that was almost everyone. But a few tried to be stoic, to play off their personal tragedies as though they were minor inconveniences. I liked that he was the latter. I supposed you’d have to be that kind of person to be a Marine.
We both put our hands in the bag, searching for fries, and this time we laughed when our fingers touched. There was lightning in our skin. God, what was happening to me?
“Ladies first,” he said.
I pulled out my fries and let him take the bag. I ate with my head bent over the carton, my hair hiding my face. Boiled, overpriced pasta felt so much safer than this.
“Thanks for dinner.”
Josh took a bite of his burger and nodded. “Thanks for giving me something to do.”
“Like you couldn’t make a few phone calls and have twenty people begging you to hang out with them.”
“Maybe.” Then his lips curled up in a smile, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I like this better, though.”
“Don’t even think about hitting on me,” I said. I dunked a chicken nugget in barbecue sauce and shoved it into my mouth, glad it was nighttime and he couldn’t see how pink my cheeks had gotten.
He gave me a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. I hadn’t realized the depth of my hunger until the ache in my stomach disappeared. Josh stared at the rows and rows of grapes. He chewed his burger slowly, then brought his soda to his lips and took a long sip.
“One night, I was out with my squad, and there was a moon just like this,” he said, his voice quiet. “Our commander had gotten a tip from some village elder that there were dudes building IEDs in a factory out in the middle of nowhere. Which is saying a lot, because everywhere you go in Afghanistan feels like the middle of nowhere. Anyway, we get to this factory, and there’s nothing around. Just some broken shit and trash. Like this place. But we had orders to secure the location, so we had to spend the night there, see if any Taliban came poking around. We couldn’t really check the place out until daylight, so we just shot the shit all night, playing cards, talking. Smoking. One of the guys—Sharpe—he died a few days later. Firefight on a patrol. Sniper wasted him. Good guy.”
I had a sudden urge to throw my arms around him and say, You made it. You made it back. But I kept my hands in my lap.
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Damn.”
Josh crushed his empty carton of fries, twisting the cardboard until it fell apart. “Shit happens.”
“Yeah, but it still sucks. It’s okay to think it sucks. I mean, I think about my dad every day. I always will. And sure, he was gonna die somehow, some way, but it’s still shitty that he’s gone and that he died the way he did.”
“Your dad was good people.”
I hadn’t realized Josh would even remember him. “Yeah. He was.”
We stared at the crazy moon for a while.
“Do you ever … talk to your dad?” he asked. “You know, like, in your head?”
“You mean like a prayer?”
“Kind of. Just—we don’t know what happens when we die, right? I mean, maybe we go up to some perfect place in the sky, or maybe we turn to dust, or we’re spirits and can still think and hear and go places. So talking to the person that’s dead isn’t crazy. They could be listening to you. Right?”
I nodded. “Sometimes I think I’m talking to myself—in my head, I mean—and then I realize I’m actually talking to my dad. About my problems or my day or whatever.”
I ate the last of my fries and took a sip of my soda. It felt so good to be full, but there were parts of me that still felt empty and hungry, and I could tell it was the same with Josh. Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever find something to fill those places inside me that never stopped wanting.
“You lost a lot of friends in the war?”
He balled up his hamburger wrapper and threw it in the bag. Then he lay down on the blankets, staring up at the sky. “Yeah.”
I lay down next to him. “I’m glad you’re home,” I whispered.
His hand found mine and held it. Not in a romantic way. He was just telling me he understood.
We stayed like that, hand in hand, our faces pointed to the stars. It wasn’t until the sun came up and the sky had turned the color of a peach that we folded up the blankets and went home.
JOSH
I’m out here watching the pickup football game I used to play in every week and it straight-up sucks. Instead of being out there, I’m sitting on the back of my truck, a fuckin’ spectator, while all these dudes I’ve never been jealous of before in my life screw around on the field. Watching them and feeling fuckin’ helpless. This black thing inside me wants to kick some ass so bad. These are guys whose girlfriends used to climb in my window in the middle of the night and no one would ever know. Guys who’ve never had to kill, haven’t seen their best friend— Haven’t seen any of it. These dudes are running, just … running. Like it’s nothing. Not even thinking about it, like in those dreams where I’m running or walking and it feels so good, so real, to be moving like that again and I wake up and for the tiniest second think maybe all this—being Stateside, the bomb, the fake leg—was the dream. Then I look down and there’s nothing there. Nothing. And now I’m sitting here, watching a shitty-ass football game and feeling a leg that doesn’t exist anymore, a leg that burns like someone just put a hot poker against it. “Phantom pain,” Darren calls it. My physical therapist has a name for fuckin’ everything. And I’m feeling so goddamn tired because I couldn’t sleep again, couldn’t stop seeing that day or thinking about Marge??
?s son. Sitting here like some fuckin’ mascot or something, wondering how the hell did I get back here? After everything I saw, the places I went … how did I end up right back here, drinking cheap beer in a field that smells like cow shit?
* * *
And why don’t I leave?
chapter fourteen
I carried the memory of that night with me all through the next day and clutched it in my pocket like a child with a coin or some small treasure they’d discovered on the ground. I turned it over and over until it shone, and when I’d catch myself thinking of him, I’d shake my head, blushing, my body straining to wherever I imagined Josh to be at that precise moment.
“It’s four,” Chris said. “Just in case you haven’t looked at the clock in the last three minutes.” He gave me a weird look, as if he knew who I’d been thinking about.
My eyes slid away. “I know. I was just sort of hoping the clock would stop at three fifty-nine.”
“That’d be very Twilight Zone. I’m not sure which is worse—possible creepiness from a stopped clock or your aunt Celia.”
“My aunt Celia.”
We were sitting on my couch, flipping through one of Mom’s old People magazines until I could bring myself to pick up the phone. I’d promised myself I would do it at four if she didn’t make the call herself. I’d waited all morning and most of the afternoon, but Mom only left her bedroom to go to the bathroom or stare into the empty fridge.
I tried to summon up the feeling of throwing that beer bottle at the gas station the night before. Oorah.
“I’m just worried she won’t pick up. She won’t recognize my number,” I murmured. Mom’s bedroom door was shut and the TV on, but I didn’t want her to hear us plotting.
“Then leave a voice mail and tell her you’ll keep calling until she picks up.”
“That simple, huh?” I asked.
He tugged on my ponytail. “That simple.”
I took a breath and grabbed my cell phone. “Okay.”
“Dude, it’s gonna be crazy tonight. Check it out.” Chris pointed to the TV, which had footage of a reporter by the coast with huge waves behind her. It was on mute, but you didn’t need sound to see we were in for a serious storm. “It might even hail!”