“Well you can’t just say hmm, and then say it’s nothing. A hmm is something. You have to tell me.”
He chews his straw in I-don’t-know-what . . . knee-wobbling sensuality. “So. You just gonna go camp out at this PO Box and hope your mom stumbles in from the hospital to check her mail?”
I smile-slash-glare at him, and—bloody hell, there’s my cute face again. Strangely, I’m not as frustrated as I want to be. What I want to be is Beck’s straw for two minutes. I swallow my last bite of burger (hoping he doesn’t notice it took all of twenty seconds to inhale), then say, “I have a plan, and it is this. Step one, get to Cleveland. Step two, figure shit out. This is my plan.”
“Flawless, if I may say so.”
“You may.”
Walt interrupts with a colossal snore. It tapers off a little, but still, how he fell asleep in that position is beyond me.
“What’s his story?” asks Beck.
I give him a brief rundown of what little I know of Walt: dead mom, likes “the shiny,” New Chicago, et cetera. Honestly, I’m stalling a little, buying time to consider Beck’s offer to drive us the rest of the way. It’s attractive for a few reasons, the main one being—well, I’ve never driven on the highway. I haven’t driven much at all, for that matter. With only one good eye, it makes for quite the Evel-Knievel-motocross-ass-grabbing-death-defying experience. The stuff of YouTube legends, really.
Beck clears his throat. “So there’s probably something you should know.”
Here we go. Without meaning to, I reposition myself in the seat. My curiosity about Beck is suffocating, and it’s just—I want so badly for him to be real, to be good, to be a person of major fucking substance and despair.
He looks me directly in the eye, leans in, and says, “Uncle Phil is a perv.”
At this, my brain splits into two very distinct factions: the first encourages me to gasp, to throw my hand over my mouth, to say No, not Uncle Phil! Beck, darling, say it ain’t so!; the second sits in silence, unmoving, thoroughly disappointed.
“Total degenerate,” he continues. “At the last family reunion, he told everyone his bald spot was a solar panel for his sex machine.”
I sit in silence. Unmoving. Thoroughly disappointed. (The second faction appears to be winning out.) “What?” he says, noticing my less-than-enthusiastic response. “I’m kidding. I mean, I’m not, Uncle Phil is a perv, but—”
“Beck.” I sigh, and it’s heavy, because even though I don’t know anything about this guy, I’d bet all the cash in the can he’s on Team Pizzazz. So what then? What’s holding me back from going with my gut?
Walt’s Rubik’s Cube falls from his lap. I pick it up and reach to turn off the radio.
“. . . and year out, the Cubs seem to get these great young prospects, only to watch them fizzle out, or never really reach their potential.”
I pull my hand back, leaving the radio on.
In my entire life, I’ve never once felt anything akin to a maternal instinct. On the baby fever scale, I check in from the tundra. Pretty typical for a sixteen-year-old, probably. But something about Walt has stirred me up, brought out a protective side I never knew existed. More wolfish than motherly perhaps, but still. Something. The same something that’s holding me back from going with my gut. And while I don’t think Beck would harm us, or even hinder us . . .
“You okay?” says Beck, watching me work things out.
I look at the Rubik’s Cube in my hands and wonder when me became us. “We don’t need you to get us anywhere,” I say.
Beck doesn’t respond, and for just a moment, I am reminded of my odyssey’s opening scene—Mim of the Past, alone on an empty Greyhound, marveling at the madness of the world, listening to the rain stampede across the metal roof like a herd of buffalo. Opening scenes are funny, because you never know which elements will change over time and which will stay the same. The world was, and is, mad. The rain was, and is, pouring. Looking at Walt, and yes, even Beck, I know one of my elements has definitely changed.
I’ve gone from me to us.
“I’m a junior at LSU.” Beck leans his head against the back of the seat. “Or—I would’ve been.”
How old is a college junior? This is immediately followed by Holy hell, what’s wrong with me? I suppose the first faction of my brain won’t go down without a fight.
“Long story or short?” he says, closing his eyes.
“Long.”