Authors: Chris Crutcher
“You’re
way
shiny,” I tell her. “You are.” She shakes her head no and sobs harder. I stroke her hair and rub her back and we sit.
I awake to a sharp
rap
, and my driver’s side window is filled with the torso of a Nevada highway patrolman. “Everything all right in there?” he says as I roll down the window.
“Yes, sir.”
“So why are you parked on the freeway and not at the rest stop two miles down the road?”
“It was kind of an emergency,” I say. Sarah sits up, her scarred face streaked, hair matted.
“I was told on my radio this car’s been here more than two hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
He bends down, peers in. Sarah glances at him, then away. But he sees her and must think he’s looking at some of the most seriously pathetic shit he’s seen all day. He nods. “This is unusual enough for probable cause,” he says. “I could search your car.”
“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
any
thing. 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.’”