Next is the jack; I help her with it, showing her how to loosen it so it expands and I guide her about the best spot to place it, though she seemed to know where without my help. She fumbles at first with the jack handle, but quickly gets the hang of it and she hoists the car up a little. I check her butt out because I’d be an idiot, or gay, not to.
And then out of nowhere, not even a hint of thunder or lightening beforehand, rain literally starts pouring from the sky in buckets.
Camryn starts yelling about getting soaked and it starts to distract her from the tire completely. She shoots up from the ground and starts to run toward the car door, but stops once she realizes she probably shouldn’t try to get in with the car being held up by the jack.
“Andrew!” She’s completely drenched, holding her hands over her head as though it’s actually going to do something to help shield her from the rain.
I laugh my ass off.
“
Andrew
!”
She’s laughably furious.
I take her shoulders into my hands and say with rain pounding on my face, “I’ll finish the tire.” It’s hard to keep a straight face. And I don’t.
In a few minutes, the new tire has been tightened and I chuck the flat one along with the jack and the tire iron back into the trunk.
“Wait!” I say as Camryn starts to get inside the car now that it’s safe.
She stops. She’s shivering in the rain and every part of her is drenched. I slam the trunk closed and step up to her, feeling the water squishing around inside my shoes because I’m not wearing socks and I smile in at her, hoping to make her smile, too.
“It’s just rain.”
She relents a little, searching for more playful encouragement from me, no doubt.
“Come here.” I hold out my hand and she clasps hers around it.
“What?” she asks coyly.
Her braid is heavy with water; the few loose strands that always lay softly about her face are stuck to her forehead and on one side of her neck. I walk her around to the trunk and hop onto it. She just stands there as the rain continually washes over her. I reach out my hand again and hesitantly she takes it and I hoist her onto the back of the car. She climbs to the roof with me, all the while looking at me like I’m some crazy person that she can’t resist.
“Lay down,” I say over the loud, pounding rain as I lay my back against the roof and let my feet dangle over the end and on the windshield.
Without question or objection—although both are kind of written all over her face—she lies down next to me.
“This is crazy,” she shouts. “
You
are crazy.”
She must like crazy because I’m getting the feeling she wants to be up here with me.
Tossing that earlier plan of mine out the window, the one where I needed to control myself around her, I let my left arm lay straight out at my side and instinctively she lays her head on it.
I swallow hard. I really didn’t expect that. But I’m glad she did it.
“Now just open your eyes and look up,” I say, already looking up myself.
A smaller truck zooms past, followed by a few cars, but neither of us notices. Another semi flies by and the wind knocks the car a little, but we don’t care about that, either.
She winces at first as the rain gets in her eyes, but she does it, every now and then squinting and trying to curl her face into my side to shield it from the rain and the whole time, laughing gently. She forces herself to look straight up, but this time closes her eyes and lets her mouth part halfway. I watch her lips, how the rain moves over them in rivulets and how she smiles and flinches when the drops hit her in the back of the throat. How her shoulders push up when she tries to bury her face, smiling and laughing and soaking wet.
I watch her so much that I forget it’s raining at all.
CAMRYN
17
WHEN I COULD HOLD my eyes open long enough, I did stare up at the rain pelting down on me. I’ve never looked at it like that, straight up into the sky, and while I flinched more than I could actually see, when I
could
see it was absolutely beautiful. Like each drop rocketing towards me was separate from the thousands of others and for a suspended moment in time, I could glimpse it and see its delicate facets. I saw the gray clouds churning above me and felt the car shake when the wind from the traffic pushed against it. I shivered even though it’s warm enough to swim. But nothing I saw or felt or heard was as warm and fascinating as Andrew’s closeness.
I scream and laugh as we race to get back inside the car minutes later.
The door slams shut and then his does after mine.
“I’m
freezing
!” I shudder out a laugh, pressing my uplifted arms between my breasts with my fingers tightly interlocked and my chin pressed against them.
Andrew, smiling so hugely that it stretches his entire face, shivers once and flips on the heat.
Instinctively, I try to forget that I had lain against his arm, or that he put it out there for me to begin with. I think he tries to forget, too, or at least not to make it obvious.
He rubs his hands together, trying to get warm as the heat blasts from the vents. My teeth are chattering.
“Wearing wet clothes sucks,” I say with shivering jaws.
“Yeah, I’m with you on that one,” he says, stretching his seatbelt around and clicking it in place.
I do the same, though like always, after being in the car so long I’ll end up slipping out of it so that I can find another comfortable seating position.
“My toes feel slimy,” he says, looking toward his feet.
My whole face crumples. He laughs and then reaches down and pulls his shoes off, tossing them in the back floorboard.
I decide to do the same because even though I won’t say it, my feet feel slimy, too.
“We need to find a place a change,” I say.
He puts the car in drive and looks at me. “There’s a backseat,” he says, grinning. “I won’t look, I swear.” He puts his hands up for assurance and then grips the steering wheel again, pulling back onto the freeway when he has an opening between traffic.
I scoff. “Nah, I think I’ll wait until we find a place.”
“Suit yourself.”
I know he would totally look. And, well, it wouldn’t bother me much….
The windshield wipers are swishing back and forth full blast and it’s raining so hard that it’s still difficult to see the road out ahead. Andrew leaves the heat on until it starts to feel like a sauna and he turns it down after checking first to see if I’m good with it.
“So,
Hotel California
, huh?” he asks, grinning over at me with deep dimples. He reaches out and presses the button to choose another CD and then keeps pressing until he finds the song. “Let’s see how much you know.”
His hand drops back on the wheel.
The song begins like I always remembered with that eerie guitar, slow and haunting. We look at each other back and forth, letting the music move through and between us, waiting for the lyrics to begin. Then at the same time, we raise our hands as if knocking on the air
one
,
two
,
three
with the beat and we start to sing with Don Henley.
We get fully into it, line after line and sometimes we switch off, him letting me sing a line and then he sings one. And when the first chorus comes, we sing together at the top of our lungs, practically shouting the lyrics at the windshield. We squint our eyes and bob our heads and I pretend I’m not mortified by my singing. Then the second verse comes and our taking-turns starts to get a little tangled, but we totally have fun with it and only trip-up a couple of times. And we say
1969!
loudly together. Then we lose a little of the passion to sing and just let the music funnel through the car instead. But when the iconic second chorus comes around and the song slows and becomes more haunting, we get serious again and sing every single word together, looking right at each other. Andrew hits ‘
alibis!
’ so flawlessly that it sends shivers up my arms. And we both ‘stabbed the beast’ together, pumping our fists at our sides and getting into it.
And that was how the drive was to wherever for the next several hours.
I sang so much with him that my throat became sore.
Of course, all of it was classic rock with the occasional early nineties: Alice in Chains and Aerosmith mostly, and none of it bothered me one bit. I actually loved it all and the memory it was creating in my mind. A memory with Andrew.
We find a rest stop off the freeway in Jackson, Tennessee, and take full advantage of it. We slip inside the restrooms to change out of our wet clothes, which we’ve been in for longer than either of us realized. I guess our fun together in the car with my less-than-stellar singing and him pretending he loves it distracted us from everything else.
He’s dressed before me and already waiting inside the car when I stroll out wearing the only thing I had left in my bag that was clean: the white cotton shorts and varsity tee I like to sleep in. I only brought one bra and I happened to be wearing it when I was being rained on so it’s completely wet still. But I’m wearing it anyway because there’s no way I’m getting in that car with him bra-less.
“I am
not
wearing these shorts for
your
benefit,” I say, pointing sternly at him as I crawl back inside the car. “For the record.”
The corner of his mouth lifts into a grin.
“Note taken,” he says, jotting it down on a pretend tablet.
I lift my butt from the seat and grasp the end of my shorts, pulling them just a little so they aren’t crawling up my crotch and to cover a little more skin on my thighs. I start to kick my black flip-flops onto the floorboard until I see how saturated the floor mat is and decide to leave them on. It’s a good thing the seats are leather.
“I’m gonna have to find some more clothes,” I say.
Andrew’s wearing jeans again and his black Doc Marten boots, and another plain gray t-shirt, lighter in color than the last one. Like anything, it looks good on him, but I kind of miss his tanned muscled calves and the black and gray Celtic tattoo on the ball of his ankle.
“Why is that all you brought?” he asks, keeping his eyes on the road. “Not that I’m complaining, of course.”
I smirk over at him. “I guess since I didn’t know where I was going I didn’t want to lug a bunch of crap around.”
“Makes sense.”
The sun is shining in Tennessee and we’re heading south now. The other side of the freeway is grid-locked because of road construction and we both express how glad we are that we’re not on ‘
that
side of the road’. Eventually, the daylight fades behind the landscape and dusk bathes the rice and cotton fields in a purplish haze; there’s always
some
kind of massive field on either side of the freeway, stretching far off in the distance.
We make it to Birmingham, Alabama a little after 7:00p.m.
“Where do you wanna stop for clothes?” he asks, creeping along a city street lined by stop lights and gas stations.
I rise up from the seat and look around, trying to glimpse the lighted signs for someplace suitable.
Andrew points out ahead. “There’s a Walmart.”
“I guess it’s as good any,” I say and he makes a left at the stoplight and we pull into the parking lot.
We get out and the first thing I do is pull my panties out of the crack of my butt.
“Need some help?”
“No!” I laugh.
We walk together through the sea of cars in the parking lot, my flip-flops snapping against my heels. Instantly, I recoil into myself, knowing I look like hell with a dirty, matted braid over my shoulder and dressed in these skimpy shorts that keep crawling up my ass. No makeup anymore, since my becoming-one-with-the-rain washed it all off. I keep my eyes on the bright white floor as we walk through the store and avoid eye contact with anyone.
We head to the women’s clothes first and I grab a few simple things: two more pairs of cotton shorts that are still short but not up-my-crotch short like the ones I’m wearing, and a couple of cute v-neck graphic tees with random stuff on them. I hold out on my desire to visit the panties and bras section. I think for now I’ll make do with what I have.
Then I follow Andrew over to the area by the pharmacy where all of the vitamins and cold medicines and toothpaste and stuff are.
We go straight into the aisle with the razors and shaving cream.
“I haven’t shaved in a week,” he says, rubbing the stubble that has been growing on his face for the past few days.
I think it’s sexy, but with or without it, it’s still sexy so I don’t complain.
Why would I anyway?
I grab a pack of razors, too, as well as some Olay shaving cream in a gold can. Then in the next aisle, I pick up a small bottle of mouthwash because one can never have enough mouthwash. I adjust my purse on the opposite shoulder as the items start to fill up in the other arm. We go into the next aisle and I pluck a set of shampoo and conditioner from the shelf, trying to balance them in my hands with the other stuff, but Andrew takes it from me and carries it instead. He takes the mouthwash, too.
We head over to the medicines and there’s a middle-aged couple standing in front of the cough syrup, reading the labels.
Andrew says casually, without lowering his voice, “Babe, did you find that yeast infection stuff?”
My eyes spring open and I freeze in front of the Tylenol.
He removes a small box of Advil from the shelf.
The couple pretends not to have heard what he said, but I know they heard him.
“I mean are you even sure that’s what’s causing the itch?” he goes on and I’m literally melting from the heat in my face.
The couple does glance over this time, covertly.
Andrew is grinning his ass off at me from the side, pretending to be reading labels.
I want to smack him, but instead, I play him at his own game.