With This Heart(3)

“ I want to go on your road trip,” he said again so confidently that I had to wonder if he’d ever been rejected before.

I cocked my head, and then shook it back and forth. “ My road trip isn’t accepting any new passengers, but I’m sure there are plenty of other road trips occurring throughout the world at the same time that mine is taking place.”

He thought I was funny. He smiled at my comment, but I could see it more in his eyes. They were pinned on me, scrunched at the corners as he contemplated my rejection.

“ I’m sure,” he began, “but something tells me that yours is one I don’t want to miss.”

I rolled my eyes and took a step back for reasons I later realized were my body’s last attempt at staying away from someone like Beck.

“ How long will you be gone?” he asked. Maybe he had short-term memory loss. Either that or he was really good at sports as a kid. No one had beaten the fight out of him yet.

“ Two weeks… but I’m not sure why you’re asking since I would never go on a road trip with a stranger unless I wanted to end up joining a cult and drinking the Kool-Aid.”

He thought my rambling was funny enough for another smirk. “Not everyone drank the Kool-Aid,” he clarified. “Some people were sleeping or deaf, and they missed the call. Besides, it was Flavor Aid.”

My mouth hung open. Then I studied him with narrowed eyes. “You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met.”

He didn’t fight that comment. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out what looked to be a beat-up business card and a pen. With a flick, he flipped it over and wrote something down quickly.

“ Let me know if you change your mind about the additional passenger.” He smiled one last time and handed me the card. I took it even though I knew I wouldn’t be changing my plans.

He didn’t say bye or anything. He turned on his heel and jogged across the street like the last thirty minutes had never happened. I stood there, frozen, long enough to see him walk inside the gas station’s store. When he emerged a minute later, he had a blue slurpee in hand and a pair of wayfarer sunglasses masking his greenish hazel eyes. Maybe he hadn’t been feeding me a line about the slurpee .

His gaze lifted to me, and when I squinted I could see his wide grin across the expanse of suburban asphalt. No amount of sprawl could keep his charm from reaching me. He sidled over to an old blue Ford truck, hopped in, and pulled away without a second glance.





[page]CHAPTER TWO





“ Where are you keeping your spices?” Mom asked.

“ What spices?” I asked, shifting my eyes around my counters.

“ Like rosemary and thyme…those sorts of things.”

“ I have salt and pepper.”

My mother’s tight-lipped smile did a poor job of hiding her worry. As if by not having spices, I could therefore not provide for myself in other areas of life. Did she wonder how I even brushed my teeth on my own?

“ We’ll go grocery shopping again sometime this week and pick up the basics,” she answered while nodding. She was nodding because my answer didn’t matter. She had said a statement and then nodded to herself in agreement.

I ground my molars together, wondering if pieces of the calcium could chip off and get lodged in my throat. What a strange way to go.

“ You don’t have to do that. I can go by myself.” I tried to keep my tone calm and collected.

My father turned away from the stove where he was preparing egg whites and a vegetarian version of bacon. “Pumpkin, why don’t you let your mother help you?” His hard stare told me to pick my battles carefully. What he didn’t realize was that maybe I’d been storing up past battles in my head for too long and soon all the battles were going to break through the surface and turn me into a maniac.

But who was I to deny my mom her thrills in life: keeping me alive, and now apparently making sure my food was flavorful.

“ Sounds fun. I guess I could use some spices,” I relented, feeling a wave of fatigue hit me out of nowhere. I shuffled back toward the table and sat, trying to ignore the worried glances from my parents.

“ I’ve been on my feet all day, decorating the apartment and shopping with you guys. Don’t look at me like that.” My stamina still wasn’t where it should have been for a healthy nineteen-year-old, but I was getting there. Having them look at me like I was a baby bird wasn’t helping.


“ So are you enjoying your apartment?” Mom asked, trying to change the subject.

I had moved into my own place a little over a month ago. It had taken a lot of lobbying, and even a well thought out power-point presentation, before my parents even considered the idea. We ended up compromising. I was allowed to get my own place if it was down the street from their house. So, there I was, sitting in my one bedroom crap-apartment two minutes from my childhood home, and I loved it. It was freedom. That chipping paint was mine; the creaky floorboards were my home.

“ I really like it.”

“ Have you met any of your neighbors?” my dad asked, flipping the eggs.

I considered lying to them, just to put their minds at ease, but instead I decided to withhold the truth. There’s a difference. I didn’t want to tell them I had met my neighbors to the left: an old gay couple, one part blind man, one part disabled veteran. It was quite an interesting amalgam until the blind man hammered drunkenly on my door the other night. Literally hammered, with a hammer. He was demanding that I give him back the thirteen dollars I’d apparently stolen from him. I had no clue what he was talking about. I never answered the door and he had eventually wandered back to his apartment.