“So not everything leaves,” he said, his hands sliding away. And then his chest wasn’t so close to my cheek. And his cologne smell was vaporizing. And I didn’t know what the tingling against my skin meant. He glanced down the hallway and back at me. “Good night.”
I was able to drag myself to the guest room. The décor was exactly what I would have expected: a king-size bed with an ornamental wooden headboard, mint green curtains to match the striped bedspread, unburned incense on the bedside table. The guest room was so incredibly Jeanine, just like Snake’s room was so incredibly Snake.
My tiredness didn’t register until I fell on the bed and felt the foam against my spine, melting my body against the mattress. I clicked off the lamp and lay on my back beneath the covers, gazing up at the empty ceiling.
Light filtered through the blinds. No color, just figments. No color, except one. A shade.
A streak of violet.
I closed my eyes for the last time that night, and I swear I could still hear his heartbeat.
Chapter Eighteen
ROAD TRIPS WERE AMONG THE FEW pleasures in life I hadn’t learned to hate. Whether it was being free, riding seventy miles an hour with the windows down and the bass pounding to the same rock song on repeat until that band got buried in my never-listen-again pile, or the sense of escape, from leaving a town that only held me down and from people who couldn’t have cared less where I ran to or even why I ran. I didn’t know what it was about running that drew me so much. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stop.
That’s where I was that Saturday morning, somewhere between carefree rock bands and sweet escape. Snake sat beside me in the back seat of the Prius, controlling the radio from his iPod that was hooked into the cigarette lighter. I’d made him swear before we left the house that he wouldn’t play anything remotely resembling the Renegade Dystopia. He was doing a decent job so far.
Jeanine was driving, her silky jet-black hair braided in a fishtail down her back. Snake’s other mom, Meg, rode shotgun. She had a frizzy blond afro and virgin skin, virgin because she didn’t wear a speck of makeup, yet somehow managed to still be pretty in that organic, borderline-hippie, au naturel kind of way. She’d packed us a cooler brimming with “healthy snacks” (see: vegetables) and that Jeanine had stuffed with chocolate and Cheetos the moment Meg turned her back. Snake had hidden money in his pocket for edible food once we got to the park.
The morning had gone more smoothly than anticipated. I received all of six voicemails from Karen—?as opposed to the estimated twenty. Naturally, I didn’t listen to any of them.
Snake’s moms called him down for breakfast at eight, completely unaware of the fugitive crumpling the sheets in their guest room. Snake came to get me, and we confronted his moms together in the kitchen. He said my parents had gone out of town and were okay with me staying over. Once his moms’ maternal instinct questionnaire (see: “Are you sure your parents are okay with this?”) had been answered, the Cedar Point trip was a go.
Snake was right about his moms being cool with guy/girl sleepovers. The only disapproval I got from Jeanine was when I failed to finish a third pancake and she scolded me for not making myself at home. Jeanine had liked me from the first time we met, though my douchelord speech about her only son should have sent me right over the edge of parental approval. Meg seemed to like me, too, but it was harder to read her, considering she rarely spoke and was studying a nature magazine for the majority of breakfast.
I caught my eyes wandering multiple times that morning, glancing from Jeanine to Snake to Meg and wondering how life would have been different if I’d been raised like Snake. If my parents had been willing to try to understand me. If I could have gotten away with harboring runaways in my guest room. But the more I wondered, the more I realized, Snake still swallowed his Prozac every night. Snake still blew his nose into lubricated tissues while his therapist pulled out every weapon in the arsenal to make him spill his depression-filled guts. Snake was still a symptom of himself. I guess none of us was perfect.
“Snake, turn it up!” Jeanine called from the front seat. “I love this song!”
“Mom, it’s Ultra Drain. How do you even know about them? They aren’t on your old-people CDs.”
She glared at him in the rearview mirror, the yellow lines of the road streaking her eyes. “Dana plays their songs in cardio, thank you,” she replied with a huff. “Now, stop talking, I’ll miss the chorus.”
Snake shot me an embarrassed glance and clicked the volume up.
She began to sing (see: yelp).
And I’d thought Snake’s vocal efforts were agony.
“I see where you get your horrid singing voice from,” I called to Snake over the music.
“Hey!” Jeanine protested. Meg glanced at me over her shoulder and winked. I felt immediate pity for Meg, the most patient woman I’d ever known, who had to live with the two worst singers the good Lord ever created.
Snake spun the volume to the max decibel and held his head back proudly, leaning toward Jeanine. He opened his mouth and joined his mom on the chorus, squawking like the seagull from The Little Mermaid. I thought the windows were going to shatter.
And that was the two hour car ride to Cedar Point. Jeanine trying to sing. Snake trying to harmonize. Meg, who I had concluded was a genius, tuning out the wailing with earplugs. And me, mocking their attempts and secretly enjoying the music. Despite their horrible voices and pitiful duet endeavors, their singing was everything they were.
Bearable.
It was the best road trip I’d ever taken.
We made it to the park by eleven. Given the Snoopy dog statue dancing on the sign, I took it this park was a little below us. That assumption was proven true when a nearby middle school showed up hosting a Saturday at the Park event, and we were fortunate enough to stumble upon the rousing extravaganza of preteens (see: people worse than the worst kinds of people).
Once we were able to worm our way through the excessively perfumed and braces-faced crowd, we were inside and ready to ride whatever roller coaster didn’t have a line of screeching almost teenagers. The GateKeeper it was, a twisty blue coaster with an aggression level of 5. I had no idea what an aggression level was, but aggression was my favorite hobby, and 5 was higher than all the 4s I was seeing. I wasn’t stoked about how tall the coaster looked, but the line was only ten minutes long. Hopefully, the ride was short too.