Twelve Years Earlier
Elena
Elena was annoyed the guys were hogging the driving. Ever since Chad had taught her, she loved to drive. Her mother saw no reason for her to start driving at what she called below the age of reason, but Chad had brought her in for her learner’s permit. The guys would tire eventually and let her take over. They had borrowed Chad’s father’s BMW, which was hardly inconspicuous but made good time on the night interstate west. They had left in the morning at the time they were all supposed to be going to school, to give them a full day’s head start before any of them were missed. Now it was 1:30
A.M.
, and they were just
crossing from Ohio into Indiana with Judas Priest shouting that song they kept playing over and over, “Rock Hard, Ride Free.”
She wakened curled in the backseat to find that Chad was checking them into a motel. They all fell into the bed and more or less slept until it got noisy in the morning. Then they all took turns in the shower and Chad shaved.
“How come you aren’t shaving?” she asked Evan.
“I’m going to grow a beard. Great disguise. I look older with five o’clock shadow.”
She made a disgusted grimace. “Just don’t expect me to kiss you!”
He grabbed her and rubbed his cheek against hers. “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”
They were both giggling as they fell on the bed. Chad came in whistling. “Leave you guys alone for five minutes, and you’re at it. In permanent heat, that’s what you are.”
Elena said, “I think we should all do something to change our appearance.”
Chad shrugged. “Who’s looking for three kids? Runaways are a dime a dozen.”
“Your father’s going to want his car back.”
Chad waved that away with an airy gesture. “We’ll have to ditch it at some point and get another.”
“Oh, sure. We can trade,” Evan said. “Hi, want to trade your old Ford Escort for a nice BMW, no questions asked?”
“For the time being, let’s get as far as we can in it.”
“I’ve never been to California,” Elena said, curled up again in the backseat with a bag of potato chips that would do for breakfast.
“I have,” Chad repeated. “We lived in Sacramento for two years when my parents were still together. Mom and I used to go for picnics on the American River. My mom taught me how to paddle a canoe. We would pretend to be Indians.”
“Your mother used to, like, play with you?” Evan asked in surprise.
“Yeah. She had a wild imagination. We always played together. Now I’ll never see her again, ever.”
“That’s silly,” Elena said. “She wouldn’t tell your dad where you are. She wouldn’t rat on you.”
Chad didn’t answer. Elena tried to imagine her mother playing with her. Actually she remembered Suzanne crawling around the floor with
her when she was little. They were bears under the dining-room table. She could hardly believe Suzanne had done that. Growled and eaten berries. Yes, they had eaten blueberries out of their hands under the table, her mother’s face stained with purple. In the memory, Suzanne was young and almost radiant. She remembered the same table as a tent and her mother and herself under it—were they Indians? Bedouins? That was fun. They ate under the table from a can of tuna fish. The cat Big Boy had come and eaten some of it too and made Elena giggle. Big Boy was a huge brown tabby from the street who slept with Elena, always, his big grizzled head on her thigh. She wondered if he was missing her. He was an old cat now and set in his ways. Would he start sleeping in Rachel’s bed? Would he cry for her, looking around the house and in the closets? She felt almost angry at these long buried memories of childhood. How could Suzanne have been that way and now be the way she was? Now she never understood a thing but kept pushing Elena to be somebody else, an older version of the perfect Rachel. Her mother just did not love her. She was trying to train her like a recalcitrant dog.
After weeks of making idle plans for running away together, Elena herself precipitated their leaving. She received a midsemester grade of D in physics, which she had taken just to avoid chemistry and its bad smells. Physics seemed cleaner. But she hated it. Everything had to be so diddly-shit precise. She had expected it to be exciting, like time and space and warp engines and stars exploding. But it was all boring. It was measuring things nobody needed to measure, displacements, specific gravities. All this crap was because her mother insisted Elena go to college, which was pointless. It was pointless like school and adulthood and every meaningless thing people filled their time with: 6:45 watch the news; 7:30 get married; 8:05 talk to investment broker; 9:00 watch TV. They would all be dead soon, like some terrorist would set off the big one and they would combust or else die hideously with awful sores and their hair falling out. Or some other terrorist would drop a plague virus in the reservoir. There was nothing to look forward to anyhow except growing up and getting a boring job and paying taxes and having babies you could force to act the way you wanted them to, so they too would grow up doing what they found just as boring as you had. As Chad was always saying, it was better to give them the slip. Head out. Get off the bus. If you followed their plan, all you got every day was older.
But she knew her mother was just going to kill her for getting the D. As if it mattered. She could hear it already, the speeches about living up to her potential, the speeches about how important it was for a girl to do as well as she possibly could—like she was some kind of super Girl Scout leading a charge of females up a hill against a guard of macho men. Her best friends were boys. Her mother didn’t understand guys. She was always going on about discrimination and quotas and affirmative action and self-esteem. Elena’s self-esteem was just fine. She didn’t need some stupid grade in a class she hated to prop it up. Her mother didn’t care about her anyhow, only about performance. Suzanne just couldn’t endure to wait until Elena grew up. She wanted her to act a certain way, to dress a certain way. The first time Suzanne saw her new bathing suit, she was ripshit. “You have to shave your pubic hair to wear that.”
So what? Like did her mother think she was going to slip with the razor and perform a clitoridectomy? When Suzanne saw her tattoo—her gorgeous rose with the thorn and the drop of blood—she just went ballistic. She spent a whole evening investigating law governing tattoos on minors in Rhode Island before Elena persuaded her to cool it. Then Elena heard her on the phone to her friend Marta asking about how one got tattoos removed. Elena just couldn’t stand the fuss that was going to happen when her mother saw her report card. All that guilt, all that screaming and moaning. So she said to the guys, “If we’re ever hitting the road, it better be now. Chad’s facing military school and I’m facing the electric chair.”
Now here they were, driving across endless expanses of nothing in particular. They could hardly find a place to pee, it was so vacant. It felt like high school in the form of a landscape. Nothing at all for a hundred miles and then a fucking Hardee or a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a gas station. They didn’t even have Burger Kings. They were playing Mötley Crüe’s
Shout at the Devil
. Every time they sang “Bastard,” she felt they were singing to her. When Chad changed the music to Iron Maiden, they all shouted with the tape on “Runnin Free.” They were running free. The other song the guys kept playing was Scorpions, which was not her favorite group, “Bad Boys Running Wild.” She was just as wild as them.
They were past Iowa and into Nebraska at a service plaza. They always tried to sit by the window because it was more interesting, and they
could keep an eye on the car and stuff. They saw the state troopers stop and one of them walking all around the car. He looked at something and he was reading the license plate.
“Come on,” Evan said. “The Greyhound is loading. We can get on and pay for our tickets on board. Just get on. We can say we were hitchhiking and got stranded. The driver won’t throw us off in the middle of nowhere.”
They boarded the bus with the other passengers. They couldn’t sit together, but they got it straightened out and went as far as Denver, where the bus was going. Chad paid for all their tickets. He had cleaned out a money stash at his house. The main things she missed were her clothes and the tape player. She still had her Walkman and most of her tapes that were in her backpack, but a lot of the tapes had been in the BMW, including the Iron Maiden tape with “Wrathchild” on it.
Denver was kind of cool. They could see the mountains the next morning, after they walked around during what remained of the night. Soon it was too smoggy to see, but they knew the mountains were there. They had no luggage, because when they had left the car, they had left everything. She had only the clothes she was standing in, jeans and a T-shirt and her leather jacket and sneakers, plus the few things in her backpack.
“What are we going to do?” They were sitting in a café that had opened for breakfast. They were eating a big breakfast because they hadn’t eaten much the day before. They had been scared in Nebraska and they were still nervous. Before they left the café, Elena washed her hair in the basin in the women’s room, with the weird liquid soap. She patted it with paper towels. It would dry as they walked around.
“We should cut your hair off and pretend you’re a boy,” Chad said.
“Nobody’s going to think I’m a boy and keep your hands off my hair.”
“What are we going to do now? Keep taking buses?”
“That is distinctly not cool,” Chad said. “We need wheels.”
“Do you know how to hot-wire a car?” Evan asked. “I don’t.”
Reluctantly after a couple of minutes, Chad admitted, “No. I don’t either.”
“I don’t see charities ringing their bells on street corners to give away
used cars,” Evan continued. Maybe he felt the other two had dragged him into this mess. Evan had swiped his old man’s American Express card, but soon his old man would put a halt on it. Plus if they used it, it would be like a big sign to the cops as to exactly where they were. They had already gone close to the limit on Chad’s Visa, and that too would leave a paper trail. They had to buy a few clothes, and all three got matching nose studs. It was like a wedding ring, but cooler. It said they were one another’s people, a family. This was all the family she would ever want or need.
“There’s worse places to be,” Elena said in a conciliatory tone. “It’s nothing like Boston or New York or Washington. I like the Spanish I hear in the streets.” That was the only class she missed from high school, except English. She wanted to be smooth in Spanish so that if she ever met her father, she could impress him. “Maybe we could like go up into the mountains. They’re so fucking awesome. Why not? There’s a lot of ghost towns here. We could just find some old deserted cabin and move in.”
“We could go to Mexico,” Evan said. “I was there once with my parents in Acapulco, but I barely remember it. I think I got sick and threw up.”
“Well, then, we don’t want to be going there,” Chad said sarcastically. “Poor little Evan. Besides, if we don’t get wheels, we aren’t going anyplace.”
“I just said, I don’t see why we can’t stay here for a while…. I think it’s cool.”
“We said we were going to California. I have friends in California. They can help us.”
“Oh sure, they can give us their allowance. Loan us ten bucks. I can hardly wait,” Evan said.
“Guys, we’re getting cross. I think we all need sleep. We got to find a place to crash,” she said. It was real important to her that they all get along, not carp like married people. Mostly they all did get along, because they loved one another, but when things were hard, then the two guys would start sniping.
They walked around for a couple more hours, getting crankier and more and more silent together, until finally they found a cheap hotel
that did not give a damn that there were three of them sharing a room. In motels, it was easier, because just one of them checked in. It all came down to Chad’s being right: they had to have a car.
Around eight that night they woke up and went out to eat. Elena got them to try a Mexican place. She hardly ever had Mexican food. Her grandma had taken her out for it a couple of times in New York, but Suzanne didn’t like hot food. But at least, thanks to Beverly, she could pretend to having eaten it all her life. It was greasy but good and definitely cheap, which helped a lot because none of them had much cash.
They walked around and looked at people and stared into store windows. They bought a couple of T-shirts and some underwear and socks and the Rising Force tape. Chad tried to buy beer, but they wouldn’t sell it to him. Evan said, “When my beard grows out, I’ll look much older, and they won’t ask for ID.”
Chad said, “We can always pimp for Elena. That should support us.”
“Fuck you, Chad. I don’t think that’s funny. I won’t do that. You go sell your ass.”
“Nah,” Evan said. “Nobody’d pay for her. We’d have to pay them.”
They were both grinning now, bonded over teasing her. She pretended to be upset, but she was glad they stopped being cranky.
Back in the hotel room it was stuffy and dim. Chad stood in the middle of the floor looking at both of them where they sprawled on the bed, Evan’s head on her breasts. “I have the solution to our problems right here. Never pays to doubt the Chad.”
“Your credit card.” Evan threw up his hands. “We can use it maybe twice more and then they’ll be down on us.”
“No. This.” Chad reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
She remembered it. It was from his father’s bedroom. The Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, he had called it. It lay there in his hand, large and deadly.
“What’s that for?” she asked, not wanting to hear.
“Freedom. If they corner us, I’m not going back.” He raised the pistol to his temple and mimicked firing. “Fast death, sure and sweet.”
Evan hefted it dubiously. “Exit? Bang bang, an emergency measure? Is that why you brought the damned thing?”
“No, man, it gives us a chance. That’s our ticket to California.”
Elena hated guns, but she didn’t speak. She would sound like a wimp.
Elena and the boys spent a week in Denver, arguing about what they should do. The money was going. “We could always rob a gas station or a convenience store,” Chad said. “People do that all the time.”