Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(7)
I pictured her with a cigarette dangling out of the left side of her mouth as she gushed. “So proud of you, Say. I sent you a Target gift card.”
“Oh god, Target. I love Target,” I had told her, trying to sound not at all bitchy. “They undoubtedly have the best toilet paper selection.”
If you had an ounce of enterprise in you, then Emblem, Arizona wasn’t a place you wanted to stay. As long as I could remember, my desire to leave the bowels of my desert hometown approached zealotry. Of my peers, a third would end up working at the nearby state prison complex and perhaps live stilted, unhappy lives like my parents. Statistically, another third would succumb to the pull of drugs and other turmoil, perhaps winding up incarcerated themselves and poignantly guarded by former classmates. The final third would move on to college and something resembling brighter futures. But even most of them would choose to remain in the state. Brayden was enrolling at ASU. My whole life had been spent in that scorching prison town seventy miles south of Phoenix. I wanted out, way out. Years of diligent, single-minded work vaulted me to the top of my class and the scholarship to attend Occidental College was the sum of my dreams. I didn’t even offer Emblem one final, affectionate backwards glance the day I left.
The landscape of California was an improvement over the landscape of central Arizona. I felt immediately liberated from the oppressive heat and from the cast of tiredly familiar characters who had populated my world from birth. I didn’t like to be reminded where I came from. My new peers all appeared to live breezy lives atop pairs of three hundred dollar shoes. I spent summers immersed in work study and piloted my sputtering vehicle to the beach every time I could scrape together ten dollars for the gas.
As for my parents, they seemed to grow immediately accustomed to a child free existence. My mother dated more than any free spirited twenty year old. I visited them in Emblem a few awkward times a year. We talked on the phone sometimes. It was enough.
The only sore spot was Brayden. I missed him. I missed him a lot. Over the last few years I felt like distance had cost us some of the closeness we’d always shared. He had a girlfriend he seemed serious about and one more year left at ASU to complete a graduate program in mechanical engineering. I still thought of him as my best friend.
Another sad surprise was that boys on the coast were still boys. Dating was a routinely disappointing endeavor punctuated by the occasional orgasm. When I met Devin the spring semester of my junior year he seemed too good to be true. He was too good to be true.
Somewhere in Riverside County I considered pulling over and giving Brayden another try, perhaps messaging him through Facebook. After all it wasn’t really fair to descend on the guy’s game with no warning. I was a bruised bag of ruin with no plan. Bray had a life of his own out there in Tempe. He had, what’s-her-name…Millie. I’d seen her pictures on Facebook; a pretty Asian girl with long black hair and a dazzling smile. She wore white dresses a lot and majored in one of those high concept disciplines, like Anthropological Social Economics or some shit.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I crossed the border from California back to the state of my birth. It was nearly midnight and I should have been exhausted but I wasn’t. I felt as if I had spent years in the bleak oblivion of a nightmare and I was finally awake.
I shifted and focused on the blackness ahead. I swear the loneliest stretch of road in the United States has to be the I-10 between the California border and the fringes of western Phoenix. Academically I knew that wasn’t true. There were whole swaths of empty country in those vast states of the far north. But just then, beaten and quietly praying to something I didn’t think existed past the glittering stars, it seemed there was no other surface of the earth quite as bleak.
About fifty miles outside of Quartzsite I discovered I had to urinate pretty desperately. I passed two desolate rest stops which had been boarded up for whatever reason and I cursed the whims of local bureaucrats who evidently cared nothing for the bladders of distressed women.
Finally, the tiny lights of the west valley were near enough to touch. I pulled over at a QT station within sight of the nuclear power plant. When I breezed through the doors, hunting for the bathroom, the counter attendant gawked at me. At first I thought it had to be because of my swollen face but when I sat on the toilet and glanced down I saw my left nipple playing peek-a-boo with the low neckline of my tee shirt.
“Hot mess,” I grumbled, shoving it back where it belonged, reflecting on how helpful it would be if I had a bra on.
Once my bladder was empty I inspected myself in the mirror, wincing as my eyes shrank under the piercing ceiling lights. It seemed whoever had decided on those industrially illuminated bulbs was either hoping to inflict mass blindness or else root out a few covert vampires.
So my jaw was swollen and yes, it would be bruised. I pushed my hair behind my ears and filled the sink with cold water. As I bent over and bathed my face I remembered the disgusting feeling of Devin’s violation. I wondered if it counted as rape if the guy couldn’t finish because someone hit him with a table. As I blotted my face with a paper towel I decided that it did.
“Fucker,” I muttered, startling an elderly Hispanic lady who was just coming through the door. She smiled at me nervously and it occurred to me that with my damaged face, mismatched clothes and wild hair I could be taken for a prostitute. Or one of those meth heads whose PSA posters serve as cautionary tales in public transit stations.