The Disenchantments (17 page)

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” Alexa is watching from across the room. “What if we forget it?”

But Bev takes the amp from me, sets it down on the closet floor, and shuts the door.

“I won’t forget,” she says, ripping a strip of paper off a Starlight Motel brochure.
Remember amp
, she writes, and drops the note into her bag.

She looks satisfied, and I decide that this is a good time to bring up the first memory.

“Hey, Bev, remember that time we got caught cheating on the vocab test in seventh grade?”

“Yeah?”

“We told Mr. Hastings that we weren’t cheating, we were collaborating.”

“Yeah?” she says again, giving me this
So what’s your point?
look.

“We were such con artists.”

“Not really,” she says. “That was a pretty lame excuse.”

She walks away from me to the other side of the room, and with her goes all of the good from earlier today. She joins Meg and Alexa, who are getting out pens for round
one thousand of their question game. And I want to say something to Bev, I want to ask what the fuck her problem is, because I know that she remembers us standing in the principal’s office together, when I was still shorter than she was and she was still called Beverly, defending ourselves and one another, believing we were smart and mature and able to talk our way out of anything. I know that girl better than I know this one. I can’t believe she would pretend that who we were then doesn’t matter.

“Who has paper?” Meg asks.

I say, “We don’t need paper. It’s completely obvious who wants to know what, and even if it wasn’t, we all know each other’s handwriting.”

Meg shrugs. “Fine with me. So who wants to start?”

“Bev, tell us the saddest moment of your life.” My words come out loud, forceful, and I walk to their side of the room and look down at her.

Bev turns to the window.

Alexa’s eyebrows furrow in concern. “We asked her that already.”

“She didn’t answer.”

Meg opens her mouth to say something, but thinks better of it. Bev looks up at me. Her eyes are challenging like they used to be when we were kids wrapped up in games. She always cared more about winning than I ever did.

“Okay, Colby. The saddest moment of my life. Do you
remember the science fair at the end of eighth grade, when we did that experiment on magnets and electricity and we left the wire at my place?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember that I ran home to get it before the judges got to our station?”

I nod. She doesn’t look at anyone else, and I understand that this is a story that’s only for me.

“So I got to my house, and I went in the front door, and there was this pair of boots in the living room. They were green, scuffed-up cowboy boots that I had never seen before. Everything was quiet, so at first I was afraid that some man was robbing the house, but then I realized that was stupid—why would the guy take off his shoes?—so I walked through the house, to the end of the hall by my parents’ room, and then I started to hear things.”

“What things?” Meg asks.

And it’s the most awkward feeling, like when a room full of people quiets all at once, and nobody wants to be the person who breaks the silence.

“They were fucking, obviously,” Bev says.

Alexa moves closer to Bev, puts her arm around her shoulders. Bev doesn’t pull away.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“Nothing. I got the wire and then I ran back to school.”

“You never told me that,” I say.

Bev takes a swig of her beer.

“Bev,” I say. “That’s really fucking huge, and you never told me.”

“I never told anyone,” she says, shrugging off Alexa’s arm.

“But I’m not
anyone
,” I say.
“Fuck.”

And my hands fly up to my face and I stand there like a pathetic asshole and say, “I’m your best friend, remember? I’m not
anyone
.”

Alexa starts to say something calm and reasonable, but I don’t want to hear it. Bev’s been keeping things from me for too long.
Since eighth grade?
And then it all starts to come together—the summer we were fourteen. The song she listened to on repeat, about a life that used to seem perfect. The way she started to get quiet and distant, and I mistook it for an affect, or a natural part of growing older. But most of all, the fact that the science fair was near the end of the school year, and only a couple weeks after that was when we watched all of my parents’ Godard films, and Bev said,
Let’s go the second that we’re free
.

It was years ago, but I hear her voice so clearly, can remember exactly how she said it. I repeat it to her now:
“Let’s go the second that we’re free?”
And the truth is so terrible that I have to laugh. “I get it now,” I tell her. “I thought you wanted us to do something great. Together. But really you just wanted to run away.”

She starts to respond but I don’t want to hear her, so I grab my wallet, unlock the door, and head to the motel
office. I ring the little bell on the counter over and over until Melvin stumbles out of the back.

“Something wrong with the room?”

“No. I just need another one.”

He grumbles something incoherent and takes my credit card.

A few minutes later, I’m letting myself into a new room. It smells like cigarettes and stale perfume, but it’s quiet and it’s a corridor away from her. The lamp on the table flickers and buzzes when I switch it on, but eventually it casts light over a grimy carpet and a stained green bedspread. I switch it off again.

I pull down the bedspread and collapse onto the sheets. I lie there for a long time, wishing I could call someone at home. I consider trying Uncle Pete. But what if he’s finally drifted off after hours of infomercials and magazine perusal? All I know is that I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack by calling at 2:00
A.M
. I close my eyes, and then I remember my mother.

It is eleven in the morning in Paris, and she answers with a singsong
“Bonjour!”

“Hey, Ma.”

“Colby,
mon chéri
!
Ça fait tellement plaisir d’entendre ta voix, mon petit aventurier.
”

“Ma,” I say. “It’s the middle of the night. Can we speak English? Please?”

“
Bien sûr
, honey,” she says. “Of course. I might be a
little rusty, though. I speak French all the time now. Two nights ago, I even dreamed in French.”

“What was the dream about?” I ask, but I don’t really care about the dream. I just want to hear her voice.

“I was walking along the Seine, like I do every day, and I looked up and all of my favorite French words were drifting across the sky on kites.”

“That sounds beautiful.”

“Oh, it was. It was so beautiful. I can’t wait to show you everything.”

Just then I hear knocking. I stand up and drag the phone with me to the door. My mother is telling me about the park a block away from her apartment, about the different trees and the vines that climb the wrought-iron gates, and I peer through the peephole to find Bev, rubbing her arms for warmth, small and distorted through the fish-eye glass.

“Hey, Ma?” I say. “I’m sorry. I gotta go now. But it sounds really amazing. I really can’t wait to see you.”

“Okay,
mon chére. Bonne nuit.
”

I open the door as wide as the chain lock will allow, which is not wide at all.

“Hey,” Bev says.

“Hey,” I say.

“Let me in,” she says. “I need to talk to you.”

I shut the door. Lean my forehead against the cracked paint. Slide the chain free.

Let her in.

But she doesn’t talk.

Instead, she locks the door behind her, turns around, and touches my face. Anger dissipates, gratitude rushes over me. I want to say thank you but then her mouth is on mine.

I’m not thinking about the redhead or the guy from Fort Bragg or any of the others. I’m not thinking about the way that she’s lied to me. Maybe those were just moments meant to lead to this one. To touching the skin of Bev’s back beneath her bra clasp, to the clasp unfastening, to the place on her rib cage where my hand rests for a moment as we kiss deeper.

And, okay, the reason I’ve never had sex is not a mystery to me. It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to, it’s just that I’ve been waiting for this:

For Bev to bury her fingers in my hair and pull my face to hers. To kiss her this way: not too hard, but not gently.

Bev takes a step back and lifts her shirt over her head. She lets her bra slip off her shoulders. And even though I’ve imagined her like this a million times, she is so beautiful my chest aches. Not only my heart, but muscles and tendons and bones, even the air in my lungs. Everything hurts but I would hurt this way forever if we could just stay. Bev and me in this dimly lit room in this shitty motel in a town that lies between better destinations. Bev unzipping my jeans and unzipping her own. Bev in nothing but blue-green underwear, and then in nothing at all.

I pull the comforter off the bed. The sheets smell like bleach. A small foil square has appeared in Bev’s hand, something I didn’t have because I wasn’t prepared for this, and she kisses my neck with lips that are softer than I could have imagined in a million more fantasies of her. Before she turns out the light, she looks into my face, eyes clear the way they were when we were years younger and she had nothing to keep from me. Not for long but for long enough that I understand this is what was supposed to happen all this time. It was always supposed to be me and Bev.

Like this.

Together.

The sheets are cooler than they should be. When I open my eyes, I see Bev smoking at the foot of the bed, in my white T-shirt and her underwear.

I sit up, reaching for her.

“Good morning,” I say, and when I think of her last night, moving above me, it’s as if we’re floating for a moment, weightless, alone in a place where gravity doesn’t apply.

She sucks in. Exhales a cloud of smoke. She doesn’t turn around, and I plunge back to earth. There is a tightening in my stomach, a message there: something has changed.

“Was last night what you wanted?” she asks.

Her smoke hovers in the air between us.

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, it was part of it.”

She stands, her back to me. A girl in a dingy motel room, almost naked with sunlight glinting above shabby curtains.

She checks the watch I gave her. “We need to leave,” she says.

“Bev,” I say.

“What?”

Then I say, “Beverly.”

All three syllables.

It is only her name but what I mean is,
Come back to me.

Still facing away, she opens the curtains and lets in light. She is surrounded by brightness. Her hip bones, her long legs. The outline of her back and shoulders through the thin white cotton.

I try again: “Beverly.”

Come back as the girl I used to know, the one who did math problems in her head and laughed hard and rode her bike faster than anyone.

She turns and stubs her cigarette on the bedside tabletop, already scarred by dozens of cigarettes. She pulls my shirt over her head and stands in front of me, and even though only a few hours ago I wanted to thank her, now I look away. She might as well be wearing a coat of armor. My shirt lands by my foot.

“Five minutes, okay?” she says, and then she disappears into the bathroom.

Everyone’s quiet in the van. Meg was in the driver’s seat when I got out there, but I told her I felt like driving so she moved to the back. Bev was ready a few minutes before I was, and I don’t know what she told them. It could have been everything. It could have been nothing. I don’t know.

Yesterday’s forests have given way to a straight, wide expanse of highway. No shade, no wildflowers, just concrete and hot sun and the occasional billboard. At one point, to compensate for the absence of anything good out the window and inspired by last night’s performance, Meg puts on The Runaways. She sings and Alexa sings along but the enthusiasm is lost by the end of the first verse, and after they stop singing, Joan and Cherie just sound loud and stupid, and Meg turns the volume down, little by little, until we can barely hear them.

Through all of this, Bev listens to her Walkman. Every time I catch her reflection I feel as though I’ve been shocked: first the electricity, then the emptiness. The presence, then the absence, of light. I want to pull over and hold her. I want her to look at me the way she did last night.

Later, at a gas station, when I am standing at the pump and Bev is smoking around the back of the building, Meg climbs out and stands with me.

“The tension in there is almost unbearable,” she says. “But considering that Bev didn’t come back to our room last night, I think a high five might be in order.”

She holds up her hand. She smiles a little, but her eyes are concerned. I raise my hand. It meets hers with the quietest of slaps. Neither of us lowers our arms, so we stand still, together, hands touching above our heads.

A little later, we pull off the highway in Weed to use the bathrooms and stretch our legs. Alexa calls her aunt to let her know where we are and when she thinks we’ll arrive. Soon Meg prances out of the gas station store wearing a trucker hat. As she gets closer, I can make out the design. It’s one of those sexy girl silhouettes that semis have on their mud flaps or license plates. In red script above the girl:
God Bless American Women
.

“Dare you to wear this,” she says to me.

“You
dare
me?”

“Yeah.”

I grab the cap off her head and put it on mine, skewing it to the side. No big deal. Alexa and Meg are smiling at me. Bev is looking at the concrete.

“So?” I ask.

“I’d date you,” Meg says.

Alexa giggles. “You have to take that off before we get to our aunt and uncle’s.”

“I thought I’d class it up a little,” I say, faking incredulity. “I want to make a good impression. I just can’t believe I left my Confederate flag shirt at home.”

The sisters laugh and Bev forces a smile, and then we all just lean against the bus for a minute, watching the semi trucks pass in a row, an orange truck followed by a blue one followed by one with silver dolphin decals and chipped gold paint.