There’s a pause before I hear her quiet voice next to me.
“Tacos,” she says.
“As you wish,” and I get the laugh I knew the movie reference would win me. When she lifts her head, I roll down the windows to let in the night air the way she likes. Autumn puts her hand out the window and rides the currents. The wind whips her hair around, and I gorge myself on her scent, filling my lungs to capacity.
There have been nights with her this summer when I only turned the car toward home because I was afraid I would be too tired to drive safely if we didn’t head back. I love her next to me. I love hearing her react to the random madness of local radio stations. I love holding her hands beneath mine on the steering wheel, showing her that she will be able to drive if she trusts herself.
“And then what?” Jack asked me. “Then what?”
Eventually, I’ll have to tell her that it can’t always be like it’s been this summer or how it will probably be this fall if I’m being realistic. I don’t want to be like all the asshole guys who can’t see past her body, but I can’t only be her friend. Not if I am this close to her. Not if my feelings are so much more than a friend’s. I’ll have to tell her by Christmas though, or I’ll go mad.
But tonight, she needs me. For a while, I have this excuse: her current fragility, the coming adjustment of us both going to college, and then, and then, and then—
I can’t think about it right now.
“Care if I put on music?” I ask.
“Yeah, sure,” she mumbles, and I reach with one hand for a CD in the glove box. There’s this song from a band I discovered that I want her to hear because, well, to be honest, there’re a few songs on this album that make me think of her. The opening song reminds me of this summer with her, the nervous energy of us being out at night in my car, even if we aren’t together in quite the same way. It’s safe to put on this CD and pretend it isn’t a message to her, because I’m filling the silence and she’s still in her head.
I shouldn’t be enjoying this moment so much. I’ve done nothing to earn it. Autumn is trusting me to be the friend she needs, yet here I am, whispering the lyrics, pretending I’m singing them to her.
Sometimes love is heavy, but tonight it is making me light and free. I’m grateful to have this time with her. It’s almost enough.
“I really liked that,” Autumn says when the song ends.
I blush, even though I know she didn’t get the message. The next song starts.
“You missed the exit,” she says.
“Oh, whoops,” I say, because I missed it on purpose.
“Don’t forget you promised me candy.”
She’s starting to sound a bit more like herself.
“I wouldn’t think of it. First, tacos, and then all the high-fructose sludge and powder you desire. And theeen”—I turn to look at her—“we go home so I. Can. Read. It.”
She groans. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her put her face in her hands. She makes another noise and looks up and away. We’re turning around and getting back on the highway after the exit I “missed,” and I glance at her while at the stop light before the on-ramp.
Autumn stares stoically out the window like someone nobly facing execution. I stifle my laugh and decide to stop teasing her. Well, about her writing.
This is what Jamie never understood. Autumn needs her friends to tease her and stop her from taking herself too seriously. Otherwise, she gets lost inside her mind. But that doesn’t mean not taking her seriously. She’s in agony over letting me read her work—I won’t let her go back on saying I can read it—but she doesn’t need me to needle her about it.
“You know, someday, when all your teeth are gone, you’ll regret being such a sugar goblin,” I tell her as we speed down the ramp, back onto the dark highway.
She laughs in the way I hoped. “I’m not a sugar goblin,” she insists, but she knows it’s true. “I’m not going to lose my teeth,” she adds.
“Eh.” I shrug.
She huffs next to me, and I let myself smile but I do not laugh.
“Oh, so now you’re going to dental school?” she asks.
“I might have to if you maintain your rate of sugar consumption,” I say, and I receive another playful whack.
The glowing lights of the taco place greet us.
“Okay, but—” Autumn says suddenly, as if we hadn’t been silent for the past minute.
I pull the car into the drive-through.
“You’re majoring in premed,” she says, “and you’ve been eating greasy fast food with me nearly every night all summer. Admit that we’re both terrible and wasting our youthful bodies on trash food.”
Keeping my foot firmly on the brake, I turn to her in my seat.
“I admit it,” I say. “But I go running three or four times a week. You’re naturally thin, but—” I lean in so I can meet her eyes in the dark. “You are lazy, Autumn.”
“That is true,” she says primly, happily, and I have to laugh.
Damn, she is cute.
We look at each other.
The car behind us blares its horn. We’re holding up the line.
“Oops!” she says and laughs, then uncurls in her seat and stretches.
I pretend that navigating the car two yards forward takes my full concentration. We’ve hit a late rush. We aren’t even to the menu yet. “Do you want what you always get?” I ask, still staring straight ahead.
“Yup.”
I hear her settling back into the seat. That’s the thing about being in this car that makes me want to make every trip last as long as possible—it’s close, intimate, but I’m safe from losing my mind. It’s like driving takes up enough of my frontal lobe activity that I can keep perspective.
I release the brake, and the car inches forward.
“It’ll catch up with me someday,” Autumn says.
Involuntarily, I look at her, then look forward again as I hit the brake softly.
“What will?” I ask.
“My diet or lack thereof? Right now, I can eat whatever I want. I won’t gain an ounce. After I’ve been pregnant or am older or whatever, I bet I’ll have to think about calories or even exercise on purpose, like you.”
It’s always fascinated me that girls can be so comfortable with the idea of constructing an entirely new human inside their bodies. I guess if it were something my body was capable of, it would be easier to imagine, let alone be casual about. My point is her train of thought would have surprised me anyway, but her confidence that someday she would be pregnant, that made me pause.
Someday, someone would get her pregnant.
“Maybe, but that won’t be for a while, right?” We’re finally approaching the box to order.
She laughs. “Yeah, I’m not immaculately conceiving.”
The employee asks for our order, and I’m saved from the urge to make a joke about helping her raise a little Jesus II.
Because I would help, stupid as that sounds.
With our tacos in tow, our mission is half complete. I turn us back toward the highway and the odd little gas station that sells Autumn’s arcane candies.
She finished her novel.
We’re eighteen, almost nineteen; our birthdays are coming up.
She is as extraordinary as she is beautiful.
“Do you want the windows back down?” I ask. I’m so proud of you, I think.
“I need to finish at least one taco first,” she says, chewing. “I’m really hungry.”
“What did you eat at home?”
“Um.”
“Autumn?”
“I was writing!” she cries.
“It’s eight o’clock at night!” I glance at her. “All you’ve had to eat were those two pieces of toast and that taco?”
“But I have six more tacos right here,” she says. She finishes the first and unwraps another.
After a minute, I ask, “Would you have eaten if I hadn’t come by when you didn’t answer my text?”
“What text?”
She shifts in her seat, and there’s light from her phone as she opens it.
“Oh!” she says. I’m glad she’s surprised that she didn’t notice. “Sorry.”
“Not a big deal. It’s good I came by before you passed out and hit your head on something.”