The Last Days of California

THURSDAY

When I woke up, a weak gray light was coming in through the slit in the curtains and I knew it was too early to be awake. I checked the clock: 6:24. I’d had bad dreams, a whole series of them, but could only recall the last one. I was at a concert with thousands of people, in some kind of pit, when a structure fell on us. The dream ended like that—we were alive but knew we wouldn’t make it out. The death dreams weren’t that bad, though, because on some level I always knew they were dreams whereas my other bad dreams felt so real, like I was failing a class and was going to have to take it over, or one of my teeth had fallen out. It was always just one tooth, usually a bottom one, and I would search for this lost tooth and find it, attempt to stick it back into my head while blood gushed. Sometimes I glued it. I’d wake up distraught, running a finger over my slick morning teeth, and the upset feeling would hang around long enough for me to forget what it was that had upset me.

My father was usually awake first, but he was still asleep. They were all snoring now, even Elise, though my father was by far the loudest and sometimes he stopped breathing for long stretches. The word “cacophony” came to me—it was a cacophony. I rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom. On the toilet, I recalled the events of last night: Jimmy looking at me through the windshield, Elise’s angel, love one another.

I put on my shorts, grabbed my purse, and closed the door.

It was already hot out. I should have been used to the heat, but every summer it came as a surprise; every summer I wondered if it was hotter than all of the summers that had come before. A bird flew out of a tree, its wings beating so loudly I could hear every flap. I thought about a Diet Coke and what I might eat for breakfast—a bag of sandwich cookies, if they had those, a Honey Bun if they didn’t. Maybe a two-pack of strawberry Pop-Tarts. If there was only a drink machine, I’d go over to the gas station and buy some powdered doughnuts. It was what I liked best about mornings—a Diet Coke and something sweet. Elise and my mother liked the night and my father and I liked the morning.

At the bald man’s room, I stopped to watch the curtains flutter above the air conditioner. And then I was leaning in, trying to hear something. I wanted to hear the woman moan.

The vending machines were next to one of the out-of-order ice machines. I opened the silver flap—yellowed, empty space. I let it slam and considered the offerings. I slid quarters and dimes into the slot and a Honey Bun fell. I had a difficult time getting it out, and when I looked up, the bald man was standing there with his bucket under one arm.

“It doesn’t work,” I said, tilting my purse to one side to gather more change. I picked out the silver, dropped the pennies and gum wrappers back in.

“You need money?” he asked, pulling out his billfold.

“No thanks,” I said.

He held out a dollar. “Here.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s just a dollar,” he said. “Take it.”

I thanked him and slipped it into the machine. The bottle clattered down. It was always the same temperature, not quite cold enough.

He was still standing there with one arm around his ice bucket, looking at me, so I asked what I always asked when I was uncomfortable—if he’d been saved.

“I’m Catholic,” he said.

“My mother grew up Catholic, but she’s not anymore.”

“I’m not anymore, either. Have you been saved?”

“Of course,” I said, gazing out at the parking lot like there was something there.

“Did you get dunked in a lake?”

“No, just at church.”

“I like to imagine you in a lake, in a white dress.”

“I think that’s just on TV,” I said.

“I don’t go to mass anymore, except at Christmas. It gets me in the spirit, kind of like turkey at Thanksgiving. I guess I’m fair-weather, is what I’m saying, like if the Cowboys are losing, I don’t watch.”

I nodded, smiled.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Fifteen.”

More nodding, smiling.

“Thanks for the dollar,” I said.

“Hey, wait. You got any advice for an old sinner?”

I twisted the cap off my Diet Coke. “The world’s going to end,” I said.

“That’s not advice.”

“Prepare yourself for the world to end.”

He reached forward and grabbed my arm. I yanked it away, but he didn’t even have a grip on it; then he took a step back and showed me his palms as if he was innocent.

He looked slowly around the parking lot before turning back to me with cold eyes. “Why are you still standing here?” he asked in a voice that was different from the one he’d used before. I took off running, my purse banging against my leg.

I was breathing heavily and must have looked alarmed, but my father didn’t notice.

“Good morning,” he said, sitting up.

“Good morning.” I crawled in bed next to Elise and closed my eyes. I tried to slow my breathing, but the more I tried, the harder it became. Same as sleeping and everything else, breathing was only easy if you didn’t think about it. I will kill you, I thought. I will rip you limb from limb. I imagined shooting the man and watching him die, hitting him over the head with a hammer. His blood leaking all over the pavement. It made me feel powerful.

I lay there for a long time, thinking about what I would do to the man and how I would enjoy watching him suffer, but I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes my father had made coffee and the cleaning lady was pushing her cart down the bumpy concrete outside.

She stopped in front of our door and banged with a handful of keys. “Housekeeping!” she called. Elise groaned and turned over.

“We’ll be out in an hour,” my father called.

The woman banged again and Elise yelled, “Go away!”

There was a moment of silence and then the cart rattled on. Elise flung the covers off and went to the bathroom. She turned on the shower but didn’t get in, so she must have been on the toilet. It was awful using the bathroom in a space this small. Trying to be quiet, trying not to make any noise. I’d recently found that if I sat forward on the toilet and positioned myself to miss the water, I could avoid making any sound.

I checked my King Jesus t-shirt. It was still slightly damp but I put it on. It would dry as soon as I stepped outside.

After I was dressed, my face washed and teeth brushed, I stood in front of the mirror. No one was paying any attention to me—my parents were watching the news and drinking their coffee, and Elise was still in the bathroom. I only looked at myself when no one was around. There was something embarrassing about it, like I thought I was beautiful. My nose was a little big and my skin was broken out along the jawline. My hair was wavy and hung just past my shoulders. I could never get it exactly right—if I washed it every day, it was dry and frizzy, but if I alternated days, it was greasy. My eyes were nice and my eyelashes were decently long, my teeth straight without braces. Hair, body, skin—these were the three things I had to monitor. It seemed simpler when I broke them down like this, more manageable.

I sat on my bed and turned it to Regis & Kelly. I waited for my father to tell me to change it back but he didn’t. Kelly had been to the latest Pirates of the Caribbean premier and she and Regis were wearing skanky black wigs. Regis was making his usual Gelman jokes, which made me feel bad for Gelman even though it was just Regis’s shtick and Gelman made a lot of money and probably had a lot of friends and a nice family, too. But something about it still made me uncomfortable. I bet in his quietest moments, right before he went to sleep in his nice bed in his nice house, he hated himself.

Elise came out of the bathroom and dug through her suitcase, one towel wrapped around her body and another around her head. She pulled her t-shirt off the hanger and went back into the bathroom.

“Save me some coffee,” she called. Of course the coffee was gone; the machine only made two cups. She came out wearing the same thing she’d had on for days, blue jean shorts and her King Jesus Returns! t-shirt.

“You still stink, Jesus,” she said, lifting a fistful of shirt to her face. She pronounced it Hey-soose. “How’s your Jesus smell?”

“Like hamburgers,” I said. “And it’s wet.”

“They smell like Tide,” our mother said.

After our father took a quick shower and put on another of his no-iron Brooks Brothers shirts, we were back on the road.

He pulled off after a few exits and we got in line at a McDonald’s drive-thru. There were many cars, and our parents had the usual discussion about whether it would be faster to go inside or wait it out. No matter what they decided, they would determine that it had been the wrong decision.

“I could really go for some Restaurant right now,” Elise said. “Some Restaurant sure would be better than another McDonald’s biscuit.”

“You should get that yogurt-granola parfait,” I said. “You’d like that.”

“Granola has a ton of calories.”

“Get the pancakes, then.”

“Just order for me,” she said, getting out of the car. I watched her walk inside, a man in a suit rushing to hold the door for her.

“I’m about done with her attitude,” my father said.

“She hasn’t been feeling well,” I said.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Her stomach’s been upset.”

“Maybe she’s coming down with a bug,” my mother said.

“She needs to eat some meat,” my father said. “She’s not getting enough protein.”

“I don’t think meat has anything to do with it,” I said.

Elise returned as we were pulling up to the second window. My father paid with his credit card, and I thought of him double-checking the Waffle House bill, running his finger down the column.

“Perfect timing,” my mother said cheerily, taking the cups and bag as my father handed them to her.

He pulled over into a parking spot to administer his insulin shot. He took his time, opening the case, lifting his shirt and squeezing hunks of stomach to find the perfect spot. As always, he was dramatic—sighing and grunting—and the process took longer than was necessary. Then he said the prayer and our mother passed the biscuits around, doctoring our father’s with jelly and wrapping a napkin around it before handing it to him. He did his usual back-up-without-looking routine and it made me want him to crash even though it would be a lot of trouble for all of us and I might even get hurt in the ordeal. I still wanted him to crash. It would be his fault. He would try to blame it on us, but we would all know it was on him and he would feel terrible about it.

We were quiet after that, eating our biscuits, not listening to the Christian radio our father liked, or the country our mother preferred. Elise liked NPR, but our father was suspicious of public radio. He called All Things Considered, Some Things Considered, and said the women were all lesbians. I looked at my sister, sitting Indian-style with the big plastic container of pancakes in her lap, hunks of butter melting into the squishy cakes. I hoped she’d offer them to me before they got cold.

My father took his hands off the wheel to adjust his napkin and the car drifted off the road. He jerked the wheel back into place, making me spill orange juice on myself.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “You just made me spill orange juice everywhere.”

Elise socked me in the arm. “There’s another one,” she said. It was her favorite Jesus billboard, the one that asked IS HE IN YOU? in bold black letters on a white background. She had a standard response, which she whispered in my ear, “If he is, I can’t feel him yet.”

“You know Marshall hasn’t given away any of his money,” Elise said as our car began to veer off the road again.

“Dad,” I said. He yanked it so hard we went into the other lane.

“It would be a nice gesture, don’t you think?” she asked.

“It would be a nice gesture,” I agreed. “A lot of people gave their money away—the Ultcheys and the Smiths.”

“And the Sellers,” Elise said. Dan was a Sellers. If the rapture didn’t happen, Dan was going to be poor and wouldn’t be able to help her raise the baby, or even pay for an abortion.

“Hopefully they didn’t give it all away,” I said.

“All of it,” she said. “What’s the point otherwise? To show people that you half-believe? That you one-quarter believe?”

“They’ll be taken care of,” our father said.

“But, seriously. Don’t you think he should give his money away? Prove he believes what he says he does?”

“He’s not required to prove anything,” our father said.

“But he’s convinced all these other people to do something he’s not willing to do.”

“Do you think all of this is free?” he asked, waving his biscuit around. “All the caravans and billboards? He’s spent millions of dollars of his own money. They’re all over the world, from Abu Dhabi to Katmandu.”

I had no idea where those places were, but I recalled an episode of Garfield when he put Nermal in a box and addressed it to Abu Dhabi. I thought it was a made-up place.

“There’s nothing here,” Elise said quietly.

“I can always count on you to ask the tough questions,” he said.

“I could come up with some tougher ones if you like.” She popped the lid off her pancakes and smeared the butter around with a finger. I passed my wrapper up to my mother and she handed me another biscuit. I’d only asked for one, but I took it and unwrapped it. While I ate, I watched out the window: the grass was brittle and yellow; shreds of tire lined the side of the road. In the span of a minute, I saw two dead dogs and one dead armadillo. I didn’t care about the armadillos, but the dogs about killed me. I mentioned it and my mother told the story of the time she ran over a turtle. I’d heard this story a dozen times—how loud the crack of its shell had been, the sick feeling that followed.

I rested my head against the window and waited for the vibration to give me a headache.

“The mileage is posted every two miles here,” Elise said. “It makes me feel like we’re not getting anywhere.”

Our mother turned on the radio. She stopped at a station our father wouldn’t like, but he didn’t say anything. We listened to Kelly Clarkson and Maroon 5 and Billy Joel and he even hummed along to “Piano Man.” The station was the kind that was popular now—they played what they wanted and would give you money if you could tell them how much they were giving away. The jackpot was at $2,200 when my father changed the station and I repeated this to myself, but then I remembered that they wouldn’t dial our area code and maybe they only called landlines, anyway.

My father pressed SCAN and found a Christian program. The man had the pleasant, confident voice of all pastors, awful and fake, but I wanted to trust it, regardless. He told a story of a child who’d been attacked by an alligator. The boy’s mother kept a tight grip on him during the struggle, which was a metaphor for parents keeping a tight grip of protection on their children as they faced life’s challenges. The child had no visible scars except three little half-moons from his mother’s fingernails, pulling him back from certain death. Elise rolled her eyes and I made a face even though I liked the story. There had been alligators in a dream I’d had recently, but I couldn’t remember what happened. I knew why I’d dreamed of them, though—in Louisiana we’d gone to a restaurant that served fried alligator tail and my father had ordered a basket. Little nuggets he dipped into different sauces. I thought I should start writing my dreams down, taking notes; it was another part of the mission I could undertake.

“Lake Amistad,” our father said, tapping the window. “Some good fishin’ there, I bet.” He kept glancing over, jerking the wheel. “Oh man,” he said. “Look at all those boats.” My father had had a boat once, but my mother put it on Craigslist without telling him. I’d stood in the carport and watched a man with a handful of cash talk him down. I rarely felt sorry for my father, but that day I’d loved him more than I’d ever loved anybody.

After that, the land grew more barren. I attempted a game of solitaire on my lap while Elise scrolled through peoples’ status updates on Facebook. She told me about our cousin, one of our father’s sister’s kids we didn’t know very well, and how he was a psychic now. Our father overheard us and asked if he was still four hundred pounds.

“I don’t know,” Elise said. “How would I know?”

“Because you’re Facebook friends with him,” I said.

“He doesn’t have that many photos up—you know how ugly people use a baby picture as their profile picture? That’s what he does. Wait, hold on a sec, there are testimonials. ‘There’s just something about Cam McKnight you can’t help but gravitate towards. From Day One, I knew this was a person who was firmly grounded and yet wholly spiritual and connected to the Universe in a way few people truly are. My reading was not only spot-on but incredibly moving. You can’t help but think that wherever Cam’s guides are speaking to him from, it’s coming straight through his heart, a heart which is immeasurable in strength and boundless in love for those who come to him seeking direction in their lives.’ Wow,” she said. “Do you think he wrote that himself?”

“It sounds like he cut and pasted it out of a testimonials handbook,” I said.

“Totally. It’s fifty dollars for a half-hour reading. Should we make an appointment?”

“That would be weird.”

“You’re not doing that,” our mother said. “What’s wrong with that kid?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” our father said, and then he brought up a few of my mother’s nieces and nephews—a gay man with an apartment full of empty fish tanks, an anorexic who’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin and driven herself to the hospital.

“I’m making an appointment,” Elise whispered.

My mother flipped down her visor to look at us, asked what we were doing.

“We’re making our psychic reading appointments,” Elise said.

“You’d better not be,” she said. “Hand me your phones.”

“I’m kidding.”

“Hand them to me.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Well then turn ’em off and put ’em away,” she said.

“Mine’s been away,” I said. Elise muted hers so it would stop dinging but didn’t turn it off. She set it on her leg, where it continued to buzz and light up and nobody said anything.

Our father stopped at Wendy’s without consulting us. He didn’t want to go into a diner full of oddball locals any more than we did, take his chances on the chicken fried steak when he could have the square beef patty he’d come to know and love. We all liked Wendy’s, except for Elise, who only liked Burger King because they had a veggie burger, but their fries were bad. Their onion rings were decent but the portions meager, even if you got a large.

Elise and I went to the bathroom. There was a line bunched up in the small space, and I kept having to move because I was blocking the hand dryer. A mother had her little girl in the handicapped stall, coaching her in a high voice: “Now wipe, now pull up your panties, now your pants, are they zipped? They’re not zipped. No, you can do it yourself—you’re a big girl now.” Somehow, it felt like it was all for our benefit.

Elise tried to call Dan but he didn’t answer.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“He always answers my calls, even at the movie. He could be in a ditch somewhere.”

“He’s not in a ditch—he either lost his phone or he’s avoiding you.”

“How do you know?” she asked. “You’ve never even had a boyfriend.”

“I have a cell phone.” “I know how cell phones work—people pick up if they want to talk to you, or they see you called and call you back.”

She looked like she was going to cry, so I told her I was sure it was nothing, his phone was broken or he’d lost it. Dan was supposed to love her. He told everyone he loved her. Once he’d even told me. The two of us had been sitting together in the den, waiting for Elise to finish getting ready, and I’d stopped eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch to listen to him tell me how great she was, how she was “his person.” He had found “his person” in life early and he was one of the lucky ones. He must have been drunk. By the time he finished, my cereal was soggy and I took the bowl into the kitchen and dumped it out.

Our parents were halfway through with their hamburgers when we returned. My father handed me fifteen dollars and we got in line behind a pair of guys in work clothes, their names in cursive on their shirt pockets. They stared at Elise.

“What?” she asked, and one of them mumbled, “Nothing.” The other said, “Dang.” They inched forward, discussing secret menu items.

“You know what’s funny?” I said.

“What?”

“If those guys were cute, you wouldn’t be like, ‘What?’ You’d be glad they were looking at you.”

“You’re a deep thinker,” she said. “One of the best thinkers of our time.”

“Fuck you.” The counter lady heard me and looked horrified.

I ordered a combo: cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla Frosty—which was even better than the original—and Elise ordered a side salad and a baked potato with butter, sour cream, and chives.

“Why can’t we ever go to Burger King?” she asked, taking everything off of our tray.

“Because their fries are awful,” I said, unwrapping my burger. “It’s like they were fried and then sat for a while and then fried again.” I looked out at the parking lot, packed with cars and trucks and boats.

“Bow your heads,” our father said, and we stopped eating and looked at the table. Somebody had spilled salt everywhere. My father grasped my hand so tightly I didn’t have to hold his at all. My sister’s hand was cool and dry.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” he said.

“Why do we always have to pray in public?” Elise asked, cutting him off. “People are staring at us.”

“People are always staring at you,” I said. Nobody was looking at us except for a well-dressed older lady sitting by herself. She was smiling, but it was a sad smile, like she’d had a family once, too.

“We’re praying because we’re about to eat,” our father said. “To thank Him for providing this food for us.”

“You always do it so loud.”

My father bowed his head and continued.

We ate in silence until Elise asked if anyone wanted her potato.

“I don’t eat vegetarian food,” our father said, in the nastiest voice he could muster.

“It’s a potato,” Elise said. “You’re eating potatoes right now. You also eat eggs and grits and bread and ice cream and about a million other things that are vegetarian.” She got up and threw her food away. I was worried that the baby wasn’t getting enough nutrients. At home, she mixed chocolate protein powder with vanilla almond milk, took multivitamins.

She went to the bathroom again and I listened to a conversation at a nearby table—a white girl with cornrows telling her friend she didn’t eat chicken. Her friend said it was un-American. “What do you eat?” she asked.

“Hog, cow,” the girl with cornrows said. I’d never heard anyone say “hog” or “cow” to refer to meat before.

I finished my burger and fries, saved my Frosty for later.

In the parking lot, a man approached my father with a story about a dead body he had to pick up in Oklahoma, and the gas money he needed to get there. My father said he didn’t have much and the man told him his older brother had been in an automobile accident and there was no one else to claim him. The body had been in the morgue for three days. Elise walked over to the car. My father repeated that he didn’t have much money and then asked how much he needed and the man went over the mileage there and back and said he guessed about eighty dollars. When my father hesitated, the man told him he had a check for that exact amount but didn’t have time to cash it. He promised to take our address and pay us back, swore he’d have the money by Monday and could put it in the mail.

We left our father with the man, who wasn’t poorly dressed or dirty. He was just a regular man, a little overweight, in worn but clean clothes. I wouldn’t have given him anything, but he wasn’t looking at me like that, with those eyes full of need and an answer for everything.

My mother and I got in the car. She played with the radio while Elise and I watched.

“I can’t believe he’s giving him money,” Elise said.

“It’s okay,” our mother said.

“But we don’t have any money.”

“We have money.”

“We know he lost his job.”

“It’s not your business what your father does,” our mother said. “He wouldn’t give it if we didn’t have it to give.”

“Is that true? He lost his job?” I asked, stirring my Frosty, which tasted better when it was half-melted, like a cold delicious soup.

“And now he’s giving him some more!” Elise said. “Oh my God. Anybody could tell that was a story—he’s been rehearsing it all day.” My mother turned the air conditioner up and adjusted all the vents so they pointed at her. “If he gives that man our address, he’s a bigger idiot than I thought.”

Our father got back in the car, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

“How much did you give him?” Elise asked.

There was a long pause before he said, “Eighty dollars,” like he couldn’t believe it himself.

“Eighty dollars!” Elise said.

“He needed it more than we do.”

“Did you even give him a tract?” I asked.

“He was in a bad fix,” he said.

My father knew he’d been taken but stuck with his story—that he believed the man—the man wasn’t on drugs or alcohol, and was clearly in a bad fix. It made me a little sick to think about his wallet minus eighty dollars. I imagined the man at the liquor store, buying steaks for a cookout. How he’d tell the story of the sucker who gave him eighty bucks and laugh.

“Did you give him our address?” I asked.

“It’s bad practice to lend money, it creates resentment. Money should be given with no expectation of repayment,” he said, trying to turn it into a teaching moment.

“I’m going to be sick,” Elise said. “Pull over.”

Our father pulled onto the big shoulder, cutting off a truck in the right-hand lane. The person in the truck laid on the horn; he honked so long we could hear it fade out. Elise toppled out of the car making retching sounds, but there was only a string of spit.

After several more hours—during which time the radio was silent and everyone slept or pretended to sleep—our father pulled off at an exit. I hadn’t seen a sign advertising gas and he was taking his chances. He’d waited nearly too long. The car told him exactly how many miles it had to go until it was empty and we were down to eight, which was the lowest he’d gotten while traveling, though not in Montgomery. In Montgomery, he’d made it to two.

“You ran out of gas once,” our mother said.

Elise and I didn’t remember him running out of gas, but he didn’t deny it. And then we were at seven miles and the car dinged again—ding, ding, ding! Elise raised her eyebrows at me and elbowed me for good measure.

At the top of the hill, we looked left and right and saw no sign of a gas station, no sign of anything in either direction.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Left or right?”

“Why didn’t we get gas when we stopped for lunch?” my mother asked.

“That question isn’t relevant or helpful, Barbara,” he said. He never called her Barbara. It was funny hearing her name.

“It might not be helpful but it’s certainly relevant, John,” she said.

“Take a right,” I said.

“That means left,” Elise said. “Jess has a one hundred percent inaccuracy rate.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I do.”

He took a left and drove a ways and then a ways farther. He was searching for a place to turn around when we saw it. The gas station sat by itself, weeds growing up through chunks of concrete. There were bars on the windows and the advertisements were all in Spanish. It was hard to believe that there was any need for a gas station out here.

“I bet the bathroom’s on the outside,” Elise said. “I hate when it’s on the outside.”

“I like those enormous keys,” I said.

Our father went inside to pay—the pumps didn’t take credit cards—and the three of us followed him. Two men stood in front of a fireplace, smoking and drinking coffee. It was like we’d walked into their living room. They stopped talking and one of them pointed to the right back corner.

Elise tried the knob and it opened, felt around for the light. She shut the door, but then she opened it and pulled me inside with her.

“I think it’s a front,” she said. “There wasn’t much for sale.”

“Gas is for sale,” I said.

“It’s a front,” she said, “trust me. I know one when I see one.”

The bottle of soap had been diluted to a thin pink liquid. I pumped some into my hands and held them under the water while Elise squatted over the toilet. There wasn’t a mirror. There wasn’t even the outline of a place a mirror had been.

“I hate traveling,” she said. “People think it’s so fun to be uncomfortable but it’s not fun. I’m not feeling challenged. I’m not learning anything.”

“Who thinks it’s fun to be uncomfortable?”

“Oh you know, traveler types. On the upside, at least my period won’t be making a surprise appearance.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all. Hand me a paper towel, this toilet paper is wet.”

Our mother and father were waiting when we opened the door.

“Use the paper towels,” I said.

Elise told the men that the bathroom needed toilet paper and they nodded slowly. We debated over popsicles, deciding coconut would make us feel like we were on vacation. We opened the wrappers and placed them on the counter, ate them while checking out the bricks of beige candy, bags of chips with crazy fonts. I picked up a thick bar with almonds on top and Elise took it out of my hand and put it back.

“Mexican candy isn’t any good,” she said. “It just tastes like sugar.”

“I like sugar.”

“It tastes like stale old sugar. Let’s look at the shirts.”

We flipped through a rack of oversized t-shirts in thick, scratchy cotton until Elise noticed a stack of cowboy boots in a corner.

“Dude,” she said. “I can feel it. It’s my lucky day.”

She sorted through the boxes until she found a pair of bright blue boots in her size. She held her popsicle between her teeth as she slipped one on. “A little big,” she said, turning her foot this way and that. She put her hands on her hips. “What do you think?”

“They make your legs look good.”

“They do, don’t they?” she said, kicking a Styrofoam cooler.

Our father came out of the bathroom and I waved. When I saw him in public, even at an empty gas station in the middle of nowhere, I liked him better. I thought about these men treating him unkindly or laughing at him and it hurt my feelings.

Elise put her flip-flops in the box and placed it next to our popsicle wrappers, and our father paid without comment. Once we were in the car, I wished I’d gotten a pair so we would be wearing the same thing, but I hadn’t even checked to see if they’d had my size.

Our mother wanted to stop at a flea market in a dusty town full of cactuses and oversized aloe vera plants. “It’s one of the top-ten flea markets in the country,” she said. “And it’s on the highway we’re already on so we won’t even have to go out of our way.”

“We could pass out tracts,” Elise said.

“Like you would ever pass out tracts,” I said.

“I’ve passed out tracts before.”

“When?”

“You know, that time,” she said. “At that thing.”

From the highway, it didn’t look like much—a wide gravel lot and some makeshift buildings attached to other makeshift buildings, a few tents scattered around the edges. Our father parked and we all got out, our eyes adjusting to the brightness.

“Take some tracts,” he said, and I put a few in my purse.

At home the flea market our mother frequented was full of old people selling junk from their attics: stamps and clothes and Christmas decorations, porcelain dolls in yellowed dresses—the same things week after week that nobody seemed to buy, or else they had an unlimited supply. But this was a Mexican flea market, full of Mexicans, my father pointed out, but he got excited when we passed the first concession stand selling turkey legs and funnel cakes for two dollars apiece.

He bought a huge Coke and a funnel cake and we strolled the aisles, looking back and forth between the booths of refurbished washing machines, VHS tapes and serving dishes, cowboy boots and cowboy hats, and so many baby things: baby clothes and baby toys and baby strollers and baby bassinets. I watched Elise to see if her eyes lingered on any of it. Maybe she would pick up a tiny pale pink dress and it would change everything.

I stopped in front of a big-butted mannequin wearing an off-the-shoulder dress. They waited as I sorted through the rack and chose a shirt with Our Lady of Guadalupe on the front. It was gaudy, something I’d never wear at home. I paid for it and put it on over my King Jesus t-shirt, and we continued walking, pulling pieces off of our father’s funnel cake until he passed me the plate and bought himself a turkey leg. He was so happy with his turkey leg, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

I watched an older woman in a tight black jumpsuit put on mascara, her mouth an O and her eyes wide. She was looking in a mirror and didn’t care who stopped, mid-aisle, to gape at her. Her booth was selling miscellaneous electronics, VCRs and cassette players, things that had become obsolete.

Our mother detoured into a pottery booth and our father stopped. Elise and I kept walking, men forming a loose circle around us, talking to each other in rapid Spanish. A teenager swept the pavement in front of us while we pretended not to notice. I dared her to say something to him, thought it would scare him if she actually spoke.

“I wonder if they’ll sell us a margarita,” she said, digging around in her purse. “Give me some money.”

“You have money.”

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“You can’t drink here, anyway.”

“The drinking age is eighteen in Mexico.”

“We’re in Texas.”

“I know we’re in Texas but do you see any white people?” she asked, but then she became distracted by a man drawing a caricature of two teenage girls. Next to the man, a sad woman in full-on tiger face sat at a card table. Her sign said, SMALL DESIGN $4 WHOLE FACE $9. She had a boy haircut and was wearing regular clothes. I wondered why someone would paint her face like a tiger and drive all the way out here to sit at a card table, looking so miserable that no one would ever go near her.

“Maybe we should get our faces painted,” I said, nodding at the woman. “Or just go over there and talk to her. Drum up interest.”

“She’s so sad,” Elise said.

“I know. It’s making me sad.”

“Don’t ask her if she’s been saved.”

“I’m not going to ask her that,” I said. “I don’t ask people that anymore.”

“Since when?”

“Since now.”

The woman’s head turned toward me, so slowly that I had time to look back at the drawing of the two girls without getting caught. In real life, one of the girls was fat and the other was thin, but in the drawing they were the same size. The thin girl, however, was given sexy eyes with long eyelashes.

Our mother and father shuffled past. Our father was still working on his turkey leg, and our mother was smiling and looking about excitedly.

Elise approached the tiger woman, who didn’t acknowledge her until she sat across from her in the blue plastic chair. I went over and stood next to my sister.

“We both want full face,” Elise said.

“I was thinking smaller,” I said.

“Full face. What can you do besides tigers?”

“Zebras, lions—” the woman said.

“I’m not feeling very safari animal today,” Elise interrupted.

“Elf, mermaid, Smurf, cow, snake, chimpanzee,” the woman continued.

They decided on a snake, its mouth open wide above one eye.

“See, you do like snakes,” I said.

Her snake was awful, a coral snake or the snake that looks like a coral snake but isn’t poisonous. When it was finished, the woman held up a mirror and Elise said it was amazing.

“I want the tiger,” I said, sitting down in the seat Elise had warmed for me. The woman stared at me with no expression whatsoever—it didn’t seem to please her like I’d imagined it would—and picked out the colors.

Her fingers were cool, papery. I liked the feel of them on my cheek.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“Awhile,” she said.

“Do you get much business?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “It’s been slow lately.”

“The recession,” I said, like I knew what I was talking about. I had heard talk of this recession for years. I must have been born in a recession.

There was something about the face-painting woman that made me achy. It felt a little like love, though I’d never been in love and couldn’t say for sure what it was. I wondered if it would always feel like pain.

Elise wandered off and I watched the men gather.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked.

“Not far,” she said. “A few miles.”

She didn’t have a ring on her finger. I could nearly always predict who would have a ring on their finger. If they were young, they were usually pretty and had positive attitudes. The ones I would want to marry myself if I had to marry a woman. They would drag you out of bed in the morning and say what a nice day it was, even if you were sick or sad or it was raining and you’d get up and do things and feel better. They’d make lunch and dinner, put clean sheets on the bed.

I concentrated on her fingertips pressing into my cheek. Just feel this. There is only now. I kept telling myself to be in the present, which kept me from being in the present. I wanted her fingers on my face forever, or at least a very long time.

She handed me the mirror, and I hesitated long enough for her to know that whatever I said next wouldn’t be the truth. “I love it,” I said. I had the urge to wash it off immediately. I paid her and then took out my phone and snapped a picture of her next to her sign.

“You didn’t ask if you could take her picture,” Elise said. “Maybe she didn’t want her picture taken.”

“What?”

“You should always ask first.”

“It’s not like this is a third-world country and she’s naked and covered with flies.”

“You should always ask.”

“Back off,” I said. I saw our parents turn a corner, and we ran to catch up with them.

“What’d you buy?” I asked my mother.

“What’s all this?” our father said. He had another funnel cake, a fresh hot one. Powdered sugar caked at the corners of his lips. Elise told him about the woman we’d met, a sad woman whose spirits we’d lifted by having our faces painted.

“Was she saved?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I gave her a tract anyway.”

My mother showed me her purchases—two soap dishes and a delicate gold bracelet. My father stopped at a covered pavilion with a lot of tables. He sat at one and I sat across from him. My mother and Elise kept walking.

A band was setting up, a Mexican band in Mexican costumes. I looked at my shirt, felt the paint on my face. I was in disguise.

“How are you?” he asked after a while.

“Good,” I said, stealing glances at his cake.

“Are you having fun?”

“Yeah, I’m having a good time.” I had a friend at school, more of an acquaintance really, who was always asking everybody how they were feeling. “How are you feeling?” she’d ask, because someone had labeled her the caring friend. I always told her I was fine, but what would she do if I said I wasn’t fine? Next time she asked, I was going to tell her I was terrible and see what happened.

The band began to play a traditional Mexican song, the kind of song that sounded like every other song, but maybe it didn’t to the Mexican ear. Maybe it was like the faces of a different race, how it was harder to tell them apart. I wondered if they’d play “La Bamba” but figured they only played it for white people. Once I’d decided they weren’t going to, I really wanted to hear it.

“I need a picture of you in that getup,” my father said.

I got out my phone and tapped the camera button. “Just press here,” I said, passing it across the table. I noticed the number 2 on his hand over yesterday’s faded 3. He took my picture, shook his head a little, and smiled.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No, I’m good,” I said. He was trying so hard and I wanted to give him something but couldn’t. I felt totally incapable of it.

“Your mother’s worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been mighty quiet.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “We’ve all been pretty quiet.”

“Not Elise.”

“She doesn’t know how to be quiet,” I said.

I reassured him that everything was fine as the band played the first few notes of “La Bamba.” What did he want me to say? He always asked such big questions, questions that there was no way for me to answer.

“Why don’t you go tell them we’re ready?” he said, wiping his hands on a crumpled napkin.

I went. My mother had made a few more purchases, her hands full of bags. I took them from her and we met my father at the car.

We drove for hundreds of miles with nothing to see but a bunch of low, craggy mountains. Mostly they were in the distance, and didn’t seem to be getting any closer, but then I’d look up and we’d be driving through slices of smooth stone.

“Is there a map of Alabama somewhere?” Elise asked.

My father pulled the stack of maps from his car door and sorted through them, his other hand moving back and forth on the wheel like somebody driving on TV. Our mother reached out to steady it and he waved her hand away.

He found the map and passed it back, and Elise looked up the elevations of our mountains so we could compare them to the ones in Texas, but there was no comparison—the mountains in Texas were six times the size of ours.

We drove through a series of small towns, one of them an actual ghost town. Sanderson was by far the most desolate place I’d ever seen: dirt and power lines and signs advertising propane, a Kountry Kitchen restaurant. There were a few two- and three-story buildings right next to the highway, buildings that could have held a lot of people, but none of them appeared to be open and there were few cars in the lots. Elise got out her phone and started filming. She tried to talk our father into stopping so we could walk around, but he said we were done stopping. We were behind schedule.

“What schedule?” she asked.

“You know what schedule,” I said. “California.”

“I’m still not sure why we’re going there,” Elise said. “Why are we going there?”

“You know why,” I said.

“Remind me.”

“Because that’s where Marshall is,” I said.

“It’s not like we’re going to meet him.”

“We might,” I said.

“That’s not the reason we’re going to California,” our father said.

“Then why are we going?” Elise asked.

“Because it’s in Pacific Time,” I said.

“I’m not asking you. I’m asking Dad.”

“We’re preparing,” I said.

“Shut up, Jessica,” she said. Nobody called me Jessica. I didn’t like the sound of it. It had too many syllables. “Dad?”

“We’re on a pilgrimage,” he said calmly, but his ears and neck were red and he was shaking.

I watched him fade back to his normal color and thought about how he’d sold the trip to us in the first place. We were at home, eating my mother’s meatloaf and my father’s cornbread, when he’d pitched the idea: a pilgrimage to California. We didn’t need a caravan—we could be our own caravan. And hadn’t we always wanted to see the country? I’d wanted to go to Disney World as a kid, and I’d wanted to see some caves once, after watching a program about Mammoth Cave, but we only went to Destin year after year because one of my mother’s sisters had a condo there.

As the trip had been over a month away, I agreed easily. It was easy to agree to things when nothing was required of me at the moment, or in the very near future. I regretted it later, of course, when getting out of the thing I had agreed to was much more difficult than not having agreed to it in the first place, but I knew this wasn’t like that. If my father wanted to go to California, we would go. If he wanted a pilgrimage, we would be his pilgrims. Our mother reminisced about a cross-country trip she had taken as a child. It was a story I’d heard many times, all centering around one bathroom stop in which her father had embarrassed them, and the geysers at Yellowtsone. It was like she had no memory at all, like she’d taken photographs so there’d be no need to recall the actual event. Elise was the only one to resist, saying she had cheerleading practice and might need to retake a class. When that didn’t persuade him, she said, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last,” but this seemed to strengthen his argument. We would wait our turns, he said.

I looked out the window. There was no grass, no trees. My father drove faster and faster, the land so barren it was easy to imagine the world had already ended and we hadn’t heard.

“These are some of the least populated counties in the country,” our father said, breaking the silence.

Elise’s phone beeped and she smiled at it. Then she leaned over and said, “Dan dropped his phone in the lake. He had to get a new one.”

“I told you,” I said, though it didn’t explain why he hadn’t emailed her, or why he hadn’t borrowed someone else’s phone to call her. Any one of his friends would have had her number.

She touched her hair, as if to remind herself she was beautiful.

“I told you he wasn’t in a ditch.” I scratched at my tiger face, getting yellow paint in my fingernails. “Which lake?”

“I don’t know which lake,” she said, and stopped typing to give me a dirty look.

They spent the next half-hour texting. I wanted to text someone but no one was expecting to hear from me. I had friends but they were mostly school or church friends. We didn’t play with each other’s hair or tell each other our deepest secrets. It wasn’t at all what I’d thought junior high friends would be like—I thought we’d be sleeping in the same bed, shopping for clothes. I thought we’d tell each other everything. I knew it was my own fault. When someone lightly touched my arm or leg while we were talking, I flinched. I didn’t know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.

In Valentine, we insisted on stopping so we could get a snack.

I went to the bathroom—my tiger was all smeared and there were little trails of flesh peeking out. I washed it off, the paint leaving behind a sticky yellow film.

I bought a package of gummy bears—250 calories, no fat—and Elise bought a bag of popcorn, a giant pickle, and a Sprite. She never drank Sprite because it had a lot of calories, and I took it as a sign that she was starting to think about the baby.

“A little old for face-painting, aren’t you?” the man behind the register asked Elise.

“I still trick-or-treat, too,” she said.

I thought about Elise’s Halloween costumes: she was always a dead slutty something, same as her friends. She seemed too cool to be a dead slutty something but she wasn’t.

Back in the car, I ate all of the red gummy bears first, followed by the orange and yellow, and then the white and green. I poked my mother and dropped my empty wrapper into her lap. She opened her eyes and turned to me.

“Do you have a headache?” I asked. She liked to call them cluster headaches because it made them sound more ominous. She said they were very serious and that more than 20 percent of the people who got them killed themselves.

“I’m just resting,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Me either.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing my hand.

We usually stopped by four o’clock, but my father drove past four o’clock and past five o’clock. We grew antsy, counting down the miles to towns that quickly came and went. Finally, he took an exit for a rest station.

We got out and stretched, looked around. The vending machines were protected by bars.

“Not even the vending machines are safe here,” I said, but no one laughed. The rest stop was pretty nice, actually—the lawn was freshly mowed and there was a fountain. People walked their dogs.

My mother, Elise, and I went into the bathroom.

“Men have sex in rest-stop bathrooms,” Elise said. “I read an article. They call them something—I forget what they call them.”

“You’re always filling your mind with trash,” our mother said. “If you fill your mind with trash, that’s what you’ll think about.”

“You mean if you fill your mind with trash, you’ll be trash,” I said. I was in the middle stall, could see their feet on either side.

“That’s not what I mean,” my mother said.

“That’s exactly what you mean,” said Elise. “You think we’re trash.”

“Don’t bring me into it,” I said. “I’m not trash.”

Our mother got her feelings hurt, said we were always assuming things, putting words into her mouth.

Elise and I bought Cokes at the vending machines and sat beside the fountain, tapping our flip-flops on the water. First she’d tap, making ripples, and then I’d tap. When we grew tired of that, we made wishes. We tossed in our pennies first, one at a time, and then our nickels, dimes, and quarters.

“Van Horn’s coming up,” our father said, walking up behind us. “We’ll stop there.”

“That sounds like a good place,” I said for something to say. So much of what he said required no response, but if no one said anything, his words just hung there. He gave us the coins from his pockets and we threw those in, too, but after a while I realized I’d stopped wishing and was just throwing.

Van Horn, Texas, was a tiny dot on the map.

Our father pulled into the crappiest motel we’d stayed in yet, sprawling and one-story, painted in hospital blues and greens.

“Things are steadily going downhill for this family,” Elise said. This struck us as funny and we laughed.

“We’re on a budget,” our father said. “How about I get you your own room? How about that?”

“That would be nice,” Elise said.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” our mother said.

“It’ll be fine,” Elise said. “I won’t let Jess out of my sight.”

Our father got out of the car looking beaten, and I started to get that crushing feeling again, like my whole body was welling up, but then it went away and I was just irritated and hot.

While we got our luggage, a man on a bicycle cruised around us in wide circles. His pants were so short his skinny brown calves showed. One of his irises was whitish, terrifying. He rang his bell, nearly losing his balance, and my father pulled a tract out of the trunk. We must have had a thousand of them, stashed all over.

“Hey,” he called, flapping it back and forth at him. The man looked alarmed and circled wider before pedaling off.

“I bet this place is full of hookers,” Elise said.

“I don’t see any hookers,” our mother said.

“That’s because they’re all busy.”

My father handed me some tracts. Then he took the cooler out and opened the plug to let the water drain.

“I feel like I haven’t handed out tracts in forever,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I handed out dozens yesterday.”

“I can’t remember yesterday,” I said. “I’m losing track of my days—what day is it?”

“Thursday,” Elise said.

Our father gave us each a key and said he loved us and we said we loved him, too. Then we kissed our mother and told her we loved her.

I slipped tracts under windshield wipers as we went.

“People are going to hate you,” Elise said.

“Maybe somebody’ll read it,” I said.

“No one’s going to read it, it’s just going to piss them off.”

I inserted my key and pulled it out; the light blinked red. I tried again and got the same thing.

“You never do it right—there’s a technique. You have to put it in real slow and hold it there a second before pulling it out.” She winked at me and opened the door. We set our keys and purses on the table.

“This is the kind of place people kill themselves in,” she said, and I thought about our wholesome-looking cousin—she hadn’t killed herself, she’d been murdered. It seemed impossible. In all of the pictures and videos I’d seen of her, she’d looked normal, just a regular girl, like me but prettier.

“Maybe we’re out of money,” I said.

“Well, yeah, but we have credit cards and that’s what they’re for, so we don’t have to stay in motels with bike thieves and hookers,” she said. “I think he’s trying to teach us a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”

“Maybe they’re maxed out,” I said, unwrapping the thin bar of soap.

“He’s been using them,” she said.

“Maybe they’re almost maxed out.” I brought the bar to my nose—it smelled spicy. I washed my face again, trying to get the yellow tint off. Then I sat in bed while she plucked her eyebrows. She told me I ought to start plucking mine, that they were getting out of control.

“Are you gonna wash that thing off your face?” I asked, digging around in my ear. I scraped out something that felt like a bug but was just the crust of a tiny scab I hadn’t known was there.

“I like it.”

“It makes you look insane.”

“Take a picture first,” she said, tossing her phone onto my bed. I took a picture of her posed against the wall, making some sort of gang sign.

While she washed her face, I turned on the weak light and went through the contents of my bag. I refolded a couple of tank tops, counted the number of clean panties I had left. I was going to have to start washing them in the sink.

Elise stripped down to her bra and panties.

“Put your clothes back on,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to see you.” She seemed hurt, so I said, “You’re too pretty—it makes me feel bad.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like when people compliment my looks.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” she said. And then, “Because it reminds me that I’m going to die. If someone says I have nice teeth, I think, One day they’ll rot. If they say I have nice hair, I think about it falling out by the fistful.”

“I’d love it if people told me I was pretty. I’d trade it for smart or talented or anything else.”

“That’s stupid,” she said.

“You would, too.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t know,” I said. “You have no idea.”

“Let’s go to the pool.” She unhooked her bra and I turned my head. There was a baby in her flat, tan stomach. I pictured it fully formed, a perfect little girl that looked exactly like her except for one thing—the eyes or nose of someone else. “You see this triangle here?” she asked, sticking a finger in the empty space below her vagina. Her pubic hair was shaved nearly to nothing. “Factory air. It’s Dan’s favorite part of me.”

“Who calls it that?”

“I don’t know, boys.”

“Where’d it come from?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Look it up on Urban Dictionary.”

She picked up her phone and typed while I waited. “‘The space created between a woman’s thighs when she’s standing with her legs parallel to each other, and perpendicular to the floor. As in, Dude, that chick had some nice factory air. I bet she doesn’t ever get any duck butter.’”

“What’s duck butter?”

“It just occurred to me—his favorite part of me is a part that doesn’t exist.”

My phone signaled the arrival of a text message and I dug it out of my purse. Nobody had called or texted me in days. One time my cell phone rang and Elise said, ‘That’s what your ringtone sounds like?’ as if I hadn’t had the same one for a year. The text was from an unknown number in our area code. Bitch, it said. It made my heart drop and I looked around the room as if the person could see me. I thought about who might have a reason to call me a bitch and came up with no one. It was the wrong number but I couldn’t help taking it personally. Bitch, I thought. I’m a bitch. I deleted it without telling Elise, who was down on the floor doing pushups, asking me how her form was.

We put on our swimsuits and the too-short dresses we only wore to the pool, and walked around to the fenced-in area. We claimed a couple of chairs, draped the tiny motel towels over the backs of them. I stepped out of my flip-flops, nearly losing my balance. Elise looked natural out of her clothes but I didn’t; it was my attempt to look natural more than anything that made me so awkward. I felt like my limbs had been taken off and reattached in different positions.

Once we were settled, we turned our attention to the three boys drinking beer at a table. They were listening to the radio. The station played Nirvana and The Doors and Elise started naming all of the rock stars she could think of who had killed themselves or OD’d at twenty-seven.

“That guy from Sublime,” she said. “What was his name?”

“I’ve never heard of Sublime,” I said.

“But maybe he wasn’t twenty-seven, I’m not sure. Do you know Blind Melon? You know Blind Melon, right?”

“No.”

“That song about the rain, with the bee? How’s it go?”

“I don’t know it,” I said, watching a father and son in the pool—the boy was learning how to swim. “Let’s just do it one more time,” the father kept saying, and the boy was trying everything—he was tired, he had a stomachache—and then he was bawling. I looked over at the table of guys and the blond caught my eye. It forged some kind of bond between us. And then the blond and his friend were out of their chairs, walking over to us.

Elise lifted her sunglasses and said, “Hi, y’all,” in a ridiculous accent.

“You guys aren’t from here,” said the blond.

“That’s right,” she said.

“We’re from Montgomery,” I said. “Alabama. We don’t really talk like that.” I smiled and he smiled back. It was crooked and made his eyes disappear. Unlike nearly everyone, he was more attractive when he wasn’t smiling. They introduced themselves as Erik and Gabe, and said they had a cooler full of beer if we wanted to join them.

“Maybe in a minute,” Elise said, her voice normal again.

They went back to their table and their other friend laughed and tossed a can at them. It went into the pool and the father threw it back.

“We don’t have to go over there,” she said. “They’re clearly assholes.”

“I kind of liked the blond.”

“Just listen to them,” she said. They were laughing, probably at nothing. No matter how smart boys were, they always seemed so dumb.

“We don’t have anything better to do, and the blond’s cute.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you don’t have to drink.”

“I know.”

“Drinking doesn’t make you cool.”

“Am I in a public service announcement right now?”

“That’s funny, a public service announcement.”

I stood and slipped on my dress. “Weren’t you the one feeding me straight whiskey last night?” I asked.

“There was ice in it.” She kept lying there, her ribs and pelvic bones on display, the baby hidden neatly inside. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—how no one knew, no one could see. If I hadn’t found the box, if she hadn’t wanted me to find it, I wouldn’t know.

She waited a minute before following me over to their table.

“Hey, girl,” the blond said to me—Gabe. His hair was so pale it was nearly white, his chest smooth and muscular. The popular boys in my class were scrawny; it wasn’t cool to go to the gym. It wasn’t cool to appear to be trying to be anything.

The boy we hadn’t met introduced himself as Charlie and got up to grab another chair while Erik passed around beers. They were so cold and everybody was so good-looking I felt like I was in a commercial. I pretended to take an interest in the father and son. The father was swimming laps while his kid sat on a step. I wondered if his mother was waiting in one of the rooms, but more than likely his parents were divorced and the man only had his son a few weeks every summer. To make things exactly even, they drove the same number of miles and exchanged him in the middle, which happened to be this shitty little West Texas town. It would explain why they were so disappointed in each other.

Elise took a Marlboro out of somebody’s pack and lit it with her bedazzled lighter before any of the boys could reach for their Zippos. I pressed my finger into a tiny flower on the table. It stuck and I thought about making a wish, but I’d been making a lot of wishes lately and they were the same generic wishes I always made. I was going to have to start being more specific. Gabe, I thought, blowing it off. I want Gabe.

“What are you guys doing here?” Charlie asked.

“We’re going to California where we’re going to witness the Second Coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In Pacific Time,” Elise said. She told them we were the chosen ones, that they were going to suffer through terrible fires and earthquakes before the earth exploded into nothingness.

“Stop,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re making a joke out of us.”

“I’m not making us a joke,” she said. “I’m making them a joke.”

“But we’re here, too.”

“We’re kids,” she said. “All we can do is act like jerks.”

“You do a good job of that,” I said.

She blew smoke past my face, rolled her eyes.

“She believes in it,” Elise said, and the boys looked at me with half-smiles.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “I might be agnostic.” I liked the way it sounded. I took a sip of beer, which tasted a little less awful than it usually did because it was so cold. Like Elise, I sat in church and felt nothing. I memorized Bible verses same as I did Robert Frost poems in school. But I wanted to believe. I really wanted to. If the rapture was coming, I hoped our parents’ belief would be enough to get us into heaven, like Noah, whose family had been saved because he was a good man.

Charlie opened another beer, placing his empty on the stack. “Every group has its own eschatology,” he said.

“Its own what?” I asked.

He took off his sunglasses so we could see his eyes. “It’s how we deal with death,” he said. “It’s human nature to want the world to end when we end.”

“Hey, girl,” Gabe said, “you want another?”

“Keep ’em coming,” I said, though my beer was still half-full. I liked how he called me girl, as if there were too many girls to remember, as if the names of girls would take up too much space in his head. If he liked me, maybe I could become pretty girl or even my girl. But for this to happen, we’d have to fast-forward past all of this getting-to-know-you business. We’d have to pretend we already knew each other. People were so similar once you got to know them.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his body in constant motion—an ankle bouncing on a knee, his hand lifting a can to his mouth. I wanted to feel his body move over mine. Before leaving home, Elise and I had watched a religious documentary that was streaming on Netflix. In it, all of the girls said that they very much wanted the rapture to come, but would prefer if it waited until they had husbands. They didn’t say sex. They said marriage, husband. They said their parents had gotten to marry and have children and they only wanted the same opportunity.

“He should take that kid home,” Gabe said, gesturing to the man, who was holding onto the side of the pool and kicking, telling the boy how easy it was.

“I know, right?”

“I didn’t learn how to swim until I was fourteen,” he said.

“Really?” I took a larger swallow than I’d intended, and it sat there, pooled at the back of my throat, before I could make myself choke it down.

“My dad died in a boating accident when I was two and my mom was afraid of water after that. She thought I’d drown if I went anywhere near it.” This story made me think he could love me. He wasn’t just a cute boy—he had problems.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged and said it was okay. “Do you know how to swim?”

“I was on the swim team at the country club for years,” I said. It was actually only two years because my grandfather stopped paying our dues and we couldn’t afford it after that.

“The country club,” he said, “how fancy.”

“Not really. It was the old people country club. My grandparents golfed there and made us eat Sunday dinner with them every week.”

“You any good?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “I only got pink and purple ribbons.”

“I didn’t even know they had those.”

“I was a little better at relay. I swam so hard because I didn’t want to let anybody down.”

Elise opened another beer, lit one cigarette off another. She was unhappier than I’d seen her since the trip began, which was saying something. I wondered if she didn’t like seeing me have fun, if she didn’t want to see me happy.

“Come on,” Gabe said.

I took off my dress and we walked over to the deep end. There was a NO DIVING sign, a shadow man hitting his head with an X over it, but Gabe dove in anyway and came up, flinging the hair off his forehead with a flick of his neck. Boys made everything look easy; it made me love them and hate them at the same time. I jumped in straight so I wouldn’t make too much of a splash, touched the bottom, and pushed up hard. The father switched to breaststroke and swam around us.

I wanted Gabe to know I could take him or leave him, so I swam to the shallow end and floated on my back, watching a big gray military plane fly low overhead; low-flying planes always made me think a bomb was about to be dropped, though I’d seen hundreds if not thousands of planes and a bomb had never been dropped. It was awful being a girl. All I could think about was whether he thought I was pretty, and if he thought I was pretty, how pretty. I’d only kissed one boy, a guy I’d met at church camp who hadn’t known that boys at school didn’t like me. That more than a mouthful’s a waste. He’d written me emails for months after, but they hadn’t said anything: the places he’d gone; the things he’d eaten; what song he was learning to play on the guitar. I’d wanted to like him but couldn’t, even though he was the only boy who’d ever taken an interest in me.

“Hi,” I said to the kid. He picked up his head and blinked. He was only seven or eight and already had dark circles under his eyes like an insomniac. He was so sad and ugly, I didn’t feel sorry for him any more.

“It looks like your kickboard got attacked by a shark,” Gabe said.

The kid’s father stopped swimming and looked at us like we might try something crazy. Then he took the boy’s hand and hauled him out of the pool. I felt sorry for the kid again. He couldn’t help being ugly—no one wanted to be ugly. Sometimes I had to remind myself.

When they were gone, Gabe held up his hand and I slapped it, a nice solid connection as opposed to the half-misses I usually managed. He dove under and pulled my legs, the water giving him courage he wouldn’t have had on land. I came up laughing and then went under again to smooth back my hair. I wondered what his friends thought of me, if they thought I was fat. But when I glanced over at the table, they weren’t paying any attention to us. They were trying to engage Elise in conversation, trying to make her laugh.

All Gabe knew about Alabama was “Sweet Home Alabama,” a song that Elise and I hated because we’d had to hear it every day for our whole lives and we would continue hearing it unless we moved far away and never went back. “‘In Birmingham, they love the govna,’” he sang.

“Please stop.”

“That’s your state song,” he said. “You should have some state pride.”

“Like y’all have in Texas?” I said, throwing my arms around him.

“That’s right,” he said.

I was having a great time until I caught my sister’s eye, and then I was embarrassed. And then I was angry for being embarrassed, for always having to be the person she knew.

Elise and the other boys got into the pool with us. After less than a minute, Erik suggested we take off our tops and Gabe told him to go fuck himself and pointed out that I had on a one-piece and Charlie said I could take the whole thing off. Elise got out and put her dress on, lit another cigarette. They insisted they were kidding, only joking.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“You can go,” I said, wrapping my legs around Gabe’s waist. No wonder people liked to drink—you didn’t have to be who you were, you could change who you were. I ran my fingers through his wet, clumpy hair. There was a pimple on his neck and I made note of its location so I wouldn’t look at it again. “If I don’t get raptured, will you come for me?” I asked.

“What? Like if you’re left behind?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were agnostic,” he said.

“Exactly. I haven’t ruled anything out.”

“Well, it’s a lot to ask, but okay.”

“You promise?”

He placed his hand over his heart with a smack. “I’ll cross the Mojave.”

“What else?”

“I’ll ford the Mississippi,” he said. “And the Nile. The Nile, too.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I know, I’m pretty amazing.”

“Did you know that the Nile is the longest river in the world? It runs through ten African countries,” I said. These were the kind of useless facts I retained. Whenever I demonstrated my knowledge, I did it like this, without weaving it into the conversation at all. I pushed off of him and floated on my back, staring up at the huge cloud blocking the sun. The rays shot out in straight thick lines like a child’s drawing.

“Jess,” Elise said.

I swam over to the side and held on to the ladder. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. It was nearly dark and she was far enough away that I couldn’t differentiate her pupils from her irises.

“Do I need to go get Dad?” she said.

I swam back to Gabe, held onto him, and put my wet cheek against his.

“You better go,” he said.

“She won’t get my dad,” I said. “She’s just being a bitch.”

He whispered “room 212” in my ear and got out. I treaded water and read the POOL RULES. No cutoffs. No glass containers, food, or drinks. No smoking. No running. There were always so many rules, most of them unnecessary. I noticed a cricket and scooped it out. I looked around—there were a bunch of them. I scooped out another and another but they seemed to be multiplying, or else launching themselves right back in. I scooped out a fourth one and waited to see what it would do—it watched me watch it, still and patient.

I swam over to the ladder and climbed out.

On the way out, I said goodbye to Gabe, who was laughing and drinking with his friends as if he’d never met me.

Almost to our room, I hit my head on the low branch of a tree. The boys were still laughing—not at me, they hadn’t seen me—but I felt it in my throat, my chest. Boys would always laugh at me. They’d never want me.

Elise parted my hair to take a look. “You’re fine,” she said.

She opened the door, and we immediately peeled off our swimsuits and soaked them in the sink like our mother taught us. I put on a clean pair of panties and a tank top, left a pair of shorts on top of my bag. Elise sat on her bed and cleaned out her purse; it was full of trash: wrappers and receipts, a pebble she launched across the room.

“Do you want anything from the vending machine?” she asked.

“A Kit Kat,” I said, “And some Lay’s—no barbeque.”

“I’ll be right back,” she said, closing the door behind her.

I drank a mug of water and then another. I’d be up all night peeing. I was always doing stuff that I immediately regretted. I checked my head in the mirror but couldn’t see anything. When I pressed, though, I could feel my pulse, a strange alien thing. Then I backed up until I had a view of my body. If I kept my legs slightly apart, there was a tiny triangle of light that peeked through. I wanted to starve myself until the space grew larger and larger, until I was the skinniest, most beautiful girl in the world.

Elise came back with two bags of Lay’s, a Kit Kat, and some Famous Amos cookies. We sat on her bed and ate everything, fast, and then I got in my own bed and watched her brush her hair. She could have been in a hair commercial, trying to convince me that Suave or some other cheap shampoo was responsible. I hated those commercials; there was no shampoo in the world that could make my hair look like that.

When she was finished, she picked up the remote and changed the channels until she came to a documentary on the Appalachian Trail, the camera panning over the mountains. It was over 2,100 miles long and went from Georgia all the way to Maine. From above, it looked treacherous, just a little path running over the mountains. We decided that one day we’d hike it together. We’d hike the entire thing, and we’d have trail names that started with “Moon” and “Rain,” like the girls in the documentary.

“I smoked too much,” Elise said. “My heart’s beating so fast.”

“You should stop smoking.”

“Maybe I will, but not for the baby.” She turned away from me and said, “I’m not going to ever be a mother. I’d be a terrible mother.”

“You’d be a good mother,” I said, but I didn’t know if she’d be a good mother or not. She liked to go to parties and drive around with her friends.

When Elise was asleep, I got out of bed and put on my shorts as quietly as possible, took a key off the table, and slipped out.

All of the lights were on and the curtains were open in room 212. I wanted to be a curtains-open kind of person, a person who smiled at strangers on the street—not just dogs and babies but beautiful people, too. Sometimes I could be this type of person. I’d feel so good and happy and it was like I’d never felt any other way, but the next day I’d be afraid again.

Charlie saw me and opened the door before I could knock.

Their room was exactly like ours except backward, the same dull landscape pictures on the wall.

“Hey, girl,” Gabe said. He scooted over and I sat next to him in bed. He handed me his beer.

“Your sister asleep?” Erik asked.

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t like us much,” Charlie said.

“Not really,” I said.

I knew it was coming and then Erik said she was a knockout and I agreed. My heart was beating fast. I moved a hand to my neck and tried to make it seem like I wasn’t checking my pulse.

The door opened and four people came in—three girls and a guy. Gabe stood and led me to the bathroom. “You aren’t going to like these people,” he said, locking us in. “The girls are loud and everybody gets so fucked up they puke and shit themselves.” He sat on the edge of the tub and I pressed my back to the door and slid down.

“They shit themselves?”

“Sometimes, but mostly they just puke.” He dropped the toilet lid and said it was our table. “We’ve got everything we need here—beer, a toilet, drinking water. I think we could be very happy.” He smiled. He was a lot better-looking when he didn’t smile but it was nice to be smiled at. And you couldn’t tell someone not to smile. It would be like saying, Don’t be happy. I don’t like it when you’re happy.

“I hit my head earlier. Do you see a bump?”

He lowered himself to the floor and parted my hair, searched my scalp. “I don’t see anything,” he said, putting his hands above my knees.

“I’m a good girl.”

His hand moved to my thigh. “I know.”

“I don’t even date.”

“That’s because you’re a fundamentalist,” he said, squeezing.

I thought about telling him I’d spent my whole life believing everything everyone had ever told me, but I didn’t want him to think I was stupid. And I was changing all of that—I was going to start becoming my own person, figuring out who I was and what I believed in.

“I like this t-shirt,” I said, rubbing the thin cotton between my fingers. It had a picture of Jeff Bridges on it.

“The muse of the age,” he said, examining the ring on my necklace. He slipped it on up to his knuckle.

“It’s a purity ring.”

“Your parents give it to you?”

“My dad. Elise and I both have them. We took pledges to stay virgins until marriage but they don’t work.”

“They don’t work, huh?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Elise is pregnant.”

“Shit,” he said. “Damn.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and the problem didn’t feel like it belonged to me at all after that. It was just a story I could tell him. I told him about the ball where we’d pledged our virginity, how it was held in a school gymnasium, my father on one knee. All the white flowers and white balloons, grape juice for toasting.

“I didn’t know things like that existed,” he said.

“Some black family in the country organized it. They had four daughters. One of them was like seven.”

He touched my face and I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate—I had to enjoy it. I had to be fully in the moment so I could remember it forever. And then his hand was on my thigh again and my own hand moved instinctively to my other thigh, trying to feel what he felt. I put my face in his neck. He didn’t smell like soap or cologne or food or alcohol or cigarettes or plants. He didn’t smell like earth or salt or pickles or rain or honey or anything I could name. I wanted to be able to name it. How could I remember if I couldn’t name it?

“We just met but I feel like I know you,” I said. I’d always wanted to say that to someone. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true, either. There was something about him that I recognized.

“You’re easy to talk to,” he said, leaning forward. “And I like the way you look at me.”

“How do I look at you?”

“Like that,” he said.

“I’m sure lots of girls look at you like this,” I said. I was attempting to look sexy by copying what I’d seen on TV—a combination of sleepy and hungry. He leaned forward and I turned my head. I wasn’t ready for him to kiss me yet. “What are y’all doing in a motel room if you live here?” I asked.

He reached behind him and turned on the shower. “We just stay here sometimes.”

“How come?”

“Because we can do whatever we want and no one bothers us.”

“Do you tell your mom you’re spending the night with Erik and Erik tells his mom he’s spending the night with you or something?” I asked.

“My mom doesn’t care. If she wants to find me, she’ll call, but she usually doesn’t. I’m trying to create some ambiance,” he said. “What do you think? Is it putting you in the mood?”

“It sounds like a shower,” I said.

“We could take one together.”

“I don’t think so.”

Outside, more people were arriving. There were many different voices now, but one loud girl stood out. We drank our beers and listened; I liked being hidden away with him, separate from the others. “How old are you?” I asked.

“Seventeen. How old are you?”

“Fifteen. Elise is seventeen.”

“You seem older,” he said, staring into my eyes.

I gathered my courage and held his gaze. It felt incredible. There were starbursts in the center of his eyes, little rods of yellow and green shooting out from the pupil like a doll’s. But then there was a knock—it was the loud girl, saying his name.

“We’re busy,” Gabe said.

“I gotta take a piss,” a guy said.

“Me too,” said the girl.

“Piss outside.”

“Fuck you, dude,” the guy said.

“I can’t piss outside,” said the girl, and we sat there quietly until they went away.

“There’s not much privacy here,” he said, touching my hair.

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said.

“I know,” he said but his face changed briefly, like he hadn’t known. He ducked out of the bathroom and grabbed a couple of beers from the sink, shut and locked the door behind him.

“I like you,” I said when he was settled back onto the floor. “Why do you have to be all the way out in West Texas?”

“I like it out in West Texas,” he said. “But then I’ve never really been anywhere else. What’s Alabama like?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “it’s different. The birds sound different. It’s full of deer and paper mills and fat people. That makes it sound really bad, though—Montgomery’s not that bad—I just wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in Alabama. Except maybe Birmingham. Birmingham’s okay, I guess.”

“Are there Rebel Flags everywhere?”

“Sometimes, but it’s good ’cause then you know who to avoid.”

There was another knock and a different girl’s voice—she sounded nice, said please. He stood and pulled me up.

“All right,” he said. “Fuck.”

“Thanks,” the girl said. She was a pretty, bleached blonde with big brown eyes.

Three people were playing quarters at the table while Erik and a girl watched the muted TV. Outside, a group of people stood around, smoking cigarettes and talking.

“Hey,” a guy said.

“I’m Jess,” I said, sticking out my hand. He shook it, said it was nice to meet me. Gabe introduced me to the others. They were all attractive but still had one or two things wrong with them: acne, thick legs, kinky hair, moles that needed to be removed, hook noses, gums that showed too much when they smiled, eyes that were too far apart or close together. I didn’t have to be perfect—hardly anyone was perfect. Why did I think I had to be perfect all the time? And all of these people were having sex. I looked around and thought, You’re having sex, and you, and you.

Gabe said he had to get up at five and I wondered if I was boring him, or if there was some other girl that he wanted. Maybe the pretty, bleached blonde.

“Why do you have to get up so early?”

“I work construction with my dad,” he said. “I’ll probably sleep in my van for a few hours.”

“It’s still early,” I said, though I didn’t know what time it was—eleven o’clock, maybe later. I didn’t want to go back to my room—there was nothing to do there but go to sleep and I didn’t want to sleep. For once in my life, I felt like I was living and I wanted to stretch it out as long as I could.

“You could come with me,” he said. “There’s a bed in the back.”

“You have a bed in your van?”

“It’s my dad’s van.”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“But convenient,” he said. “Wait here.” He went back inside and grabbed a couple of beers, put a can in each pocket. Then we walked down the stairs and across the parking lot.

He opened the passenger-side door and I climbed in. It smelled like gasoline. I ducked into the back and sat on a mattress covered with a burnt-orange blanket. It was quiet for the few moments it took him to walk around and unlock his door, and I wondered what I was doing. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, but this was the kind of situation I had always been taught to avoid. It was risky behavior, how bad things happened. I thought of Acts 18:10: “For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.” I loved that—“I have many people in this city.” The Bible could be so beautiful sometimes, if you could forget it was the Bible.

“It smells like gas,” I said.

“I’ll crack a window.” He let the windows down halfway, and then he sat next to me and opened the beers.

“Is the van going to explode?”

“No,” he said, laughing.

I told him I’d never done anything like this before, that I’d only kissed one boy in my life. I wanted him to know I wasn’t the type to go off with a boy I’d just met even though it was exactly what I was doing and nothing I could say would change that. He stopped me by kissing me. His hands started to wander—they went under my shirt, the waistband of my shorts—and we started kissing more and more aggressively, and then I felt like I was with a stranger.

“Hold on,” I said, pushing him back.

“What?”

“I want to see you.” His pupils were larger now, and he seemed different, changed. “I can’t see you,” I said.

“Do you want me to turn on the light?”

“No—yes.”

He stood and turned the light on, sat back down.

“Is that better?” he asked.

“Yes.” He was the most perfect boy I’d ever seen. He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and I took a long drink, finishing the can. I could feel the alcohol coursing through my veins and it felt good. It felt so good I thought about all of the beers I’d refused, all of the beers poured down the drain, behind bushes. I wanted them back. He touched my hair again and said it was soft and I set the can between my legs and leaned forward to kiss him. His hands stayed on my knees, my waist, places I wouldn’t push them off.

“I liked you right away,” I said, while he kissed my neck. “Right when I saw you.”

“I liked you, too,” he said.

“You weren’t looking at my sister?”

“No.”

“But she’s so pretty.”

“You’re pretty, too,” he said. “And you’re fun and nice and I like the way you look at me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

His face came at me, slowly, and he pressed his lips to mine. I tried to figure out how his mouth worked, his tongue. I wanted him to want me more than he’d ever wanted anyone. But then he pulled away and lit two cigarettes, handed me one. I held it between my fingers.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, getting to his feet. “Don’t go anywhere.” He opened the door and hopped out.

I climbed into the passenger seat and propped my feet on the dash, flicking ash before there was anything to flick. I imagined the van exploding, smoke and fire billowing into the sky. Gabe standing in front of room 212 screaming, and then running. I took another drag and dropped the cigarette out the window.

He returned with four beers and a joint. “Do you mind if I smoke this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Do you mind if I don’t?”

“Of course not.”

We sat on the bed again and he lit the joint and inhaled. As soon as the last of the smoke left his mouth, I leaned forward and kissed him.

“How many people have you had sex with?” I asked.

“Why do all girls want to know that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You could always lie.”

“I’m not going to lie.”

“How many?”

“Seven,” he said. “Is that a lot?”

I told him any number would seem like a lot to somebody who’d never done it. I wanted to know what the girls were like, if he’d loved any of them, but there wasn’t enough time and he probably wouldn’t tell me the truth, anyhow. I leaned forward to kiss him and he took my hand and brushed it against his shorts, the same swim trunks he’d had on earlier. I looked into his eyes as he pulled the string. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

I touched him, letting him guide my hand up and down until I could do it myself. I watched his mouth, his closed eyelids, watched him pretend I could do something to him that no one else could.

Gabe walked me to my room, kissed me one last time.

“Will you think about me?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“And if the rapture comes and I’m not saved, you’ll come for me?”

“Of course,” he said again.

“Wait—how will you know?”

“You’ll text me.”

I told him I doubted cell phones would be working. He said we’d figure it out and kissed me again. When he pulled away, I grabbed his hand.

“I have to go,” he said. “I have to be at work in a few hours.” He kissed my cheek and turned and I watched him walk away. He didn’t look back. I wondered if he thought about looking back.

Elise didn’t stir when I opened the door. I brushed my teeth and got into bed as quietly as I could.

“Did you have sex with him?” she asked, sounding wide awake.

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?” I said.

“No use in having sex with somebody you’ll never see again. It would only hurt your feelings.”

“I told him I wasn’t going to,” I said, holding up my hand in the dark. It had his cell phone number on it. I hoped it wouldn’t smear or fade before I’d had a chance to transfer it to my phone.

“That’s what all girls say before they do it,” she said.

“Nuh-uh.”

“I’ve said it and then gone ahead and done it,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just easier.”

“That’s sad.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me,” I said.

“That’s because you haven’t done it—most of the time it’s like nothing. It’s hard to believe something that’s so much like nothing can mess you up so bad.”

I thought about Gabe’s dick in my hand, how he’d gasped as he’d come and bit his lip. No one’s ever done that to me before, he’d said, using only their hand.

“You’re stronger than I am,” Elise said. It was something she’d said before, something I hated, because she was so obviously stronger than I was. Even if there were ways in which I was stronger, they were small and nobody could see them. Elise asked for things and people gave them to her. She talked and they listened. I thought of all the people I’d met who hadn’t even remembered me, people I’d had to introduce myself to again and again because I occupied so little space in the world.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night,” she said. “I love you.”

I brought my shirt to my nose and inhaled, breathing him in and out, in and out, until I could no longer smell anything.