Ship It(48)

“Rico can play Shredder!” I offer.

“And Forest is April, no, wait…Abe O’Neil!”

“Oh my god, in a little yellow bodysuit, he’d be so cute!” We’re dying laughing now.

Tess stops walking as we cross to a sidewalk, where her old red Toyota Tercel is parked under a streetlight. I hadn’t even realized we’d made it back to her car.

“Well, this is us,” she says. “I’ll give you a ride back to your hotel. This was a nice night.”

“Yeah,” I say. I can’t believe I almost didn’t come tonight. This was more fun than I’ve had in a long time.

On the short drive back to the hotel, I feel a sort of dread, for the end of the night, for the end of this trip… for being alone again. Back to Pine Bluff, back inside my own mind, my only escape the internet and the occasional conversation about horses with Joanie on the school bus. Tess drums her deep purple–painted fingernails on the steering wheel, nodding her head along to the radio, her hair bouncing over her forehead, down her neck. I finally made a friend, and soon we have to say good-bye. What then?

Tess pulls into our hotel parking lot, puts the parking brake on, and turns the car off. She rubs at the ribbon around her dress, worrying the wrinkles out. And I finally have my answer because I can tell from the way it moves that it’s not sewed down, that it’s keeping her dress snug around her middle, that if I reached over and pulled on one end… I blink hard, pushing the mental image away.

“So, ah, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow in Seattle. That’s my last stop.”

“Yeah, mine, too,” I say. We’re flying out of Sea-Tac Airport in two days.

“We should hang out there, though, you know? I heard they’re doing a big screening for the finale. Outdoors in a park, like a thousand Demon Heart fans all watching together. Should be rad.”

“Yeah, definitely! Let’s do it.” I feel a little sick thinking about Demon Heart ending for the season, but it has to happen sometime, and I’d rather watch the finale next to Tess than all alone in my hotel room.

“Cool, cool,” she says.

And it’s time to make my exit. She looks at me with the same look she had back on our walk—casually upturned mouth, intent unblinking eyes, and I wonder, is she thinking about kissing me? Am I thinking about kissing her? I guess I am now….

Her gaze is so intense, I have to look away. Out of my peripheral vision, I can tell she drops her eyes, too.

“I, uh, I better find a place to park for the night,” she says.

“Wait,” I start, putting together what she’s saying with what she told me back in Boise. “Are you really sleeping in your car?”

“Yeah. It’s no big deal,” she says. “My sleeping bag is warm, and I lock the doors.”

“No,” I say. That’s not acceptable.

“Claire, relax, it’s fine.”

“No. Nope. You get a bed. You can sleep in my room.”

She looks at me a moment, as though trying to decide what I mean by the offer. I don’t know what I mean by the offer.

“How many…” she starts, and stumbles, then tries again. “How many beds does your room have?”

“Two,” I say quickly. “You can have your own, I’ll sleep with my mom. She won’t care, I promise. You’re not staying in this car. Can you even stretch out? I mean, jeez!”

“You’re sure?” she asks.

“A hundred percent. Come on.” I open my door and step out, then bend over to look back in at her.

“Okay,” she says, and reaches into the back for her stuff.

What am I doing?


BACK IN THE privacy of my own room, I type heart of lightness into Google, hesitate a moment, then hit ENTER.

It’s time I figured out for myself what the hell Claire’s been writing about me online. Well, she says it’s not about me, but that’s just semantics, right? Because Forest is Smokey, and Smokey is Forest. And all of this, whether she likes it or not, is inextricably tied up in me.

I click a link, which takes me to her page on a fanfiction site, and the first thing I see is she has so many stories.

“Whoa.”

I scroll through the titles but they just keep coming. I don’t know what I’m waiting for, I just click one at random. It says 48,000 views. Jeeeeeesus. She’s not messing around.

Okay, Claire, let’s see what you’ve been up to.


THE FIRST TIME Smokey kissed anyone, he was twelve years old, impressing his friends by surprising Tammy Rose with a peck on the lips as she came out of the movie theater. Immediately after he pulled away, she’d spat on the ground, screwed up her face, and hollered curses after him as he and his friends ran away. Smokey had laughed with his friends all the way back to his house until he closed his front door behind him, and, alone, sighed against it with a feeling he couldn’t name.

The next time he kissed anyone, he was seventeen, pressing that neighborhood boy Tyler against the shingles of his house, their scuffed-up sneakers nudging together. Smokey’s dad moved them three states away the next day. He never saw Tyler again, but he sometimes thought about him, hoping his life was easier than Smokey’s turned out to be.

The first time Smokey went down on a man was three years later, dropping to his knees in a soybean field in front of the son of a farmer whose name he never quite caught. The farmer boy-nearly-a-man leaned his broad, tanned shoulders back against the enormous tire of the family John Deere and urged Smokey on, the lights of the farmhouse just hidden from view behind the tractor in the dimming evening Iowa light. When Smokey finished, the farmer boy buttoned up his Wranglers and practically ran back into his house, leaving Smokey with a hard-on and a hurting heart. Smokey was always living his life outside, never quite welcome indoors.