If we can get through tonight, everything will go back to normal. We will be us. He will stop ditching me for Dewey most weekends and I will stop moping in my stupid new house every night. I will drag him into the night, every night. We won’t have to worry about going to college and growing apart and forgetting each other in favor of bland significant others, because this is real and always and forever.
He turns away and gets into the driver’s seat, and I glare at him for a solid ten seconds before I stomp to the other side. Pick the battles, win the war.
We don’t back out of the driveway, we tear. His engine shreds the sky. We’re going to get caught before we start. “Oh my god, we’re going to wake your dad. Micah. I just started my Common App. I don’t want to write that I have a felony.”
This is a little bit of a lie, which I feel a little bit terrible about. Micah and I swore in fourth grade never to lie to each other about the important things, and maybe lying about starting the Common App is a small thing, but not planning to go to college right away is a much bigger one. I did start an application, just less one for college and more one to volunteer in Nepal for women’s rights. I want to rebuild orphanages and teach English and sex ed. Not that I know much about rebuilding orphanages or teaching, but I’ll figure it out, and I’ll hike and take pictures and draw and buy souvenirs in open markets. I’ll fill my journal so full of paint and gesso and charcoal and color and Skarpie and words and stories that it won’t close. I want to explore. I want to go far, far away.
“Felony?” He sounds annoyed, which makes me annoyed. “Janie, you said this would be fast.”
“It will be,” I say. “Felony was hyperbolic. If anything, it’ll be a misdemeanor, and only if we’re caught. I can’t believe you’re done with college apps. That’s ridiculous. They’re not due for months. And—turn turn, MICAH, TURN,” I scream and the wheels scream and I think the mailbox was already on the ground, I don’t think we knocked it over, but we don’t stick around to figure it out. “Okay, next left, second house on your right. Got it?”
“I get it, I’m not an idiot.”
“No, left, MICAH. Left! LEFT!”
Update: we are not dead, and Micah still doesn’t know left from right.
He finally pulls to a stop on the wrong side of the road, and I’m laughing and I can’t stop, because, God—
“I miss you,” I say, accidentally/not accidentally out loud. Miss, present tense. I’m sitting here and I can still feel distance between us, just folded and crumpled and tangled. Our soul has stretch marks.
Wanted: stretch mark cream for the soul. The stuff that actually works, not the telemarketing crap.
Micah gets all blushy and awkward, but I don’t say anything about it because we don’t have time. We have a mission tonight. Eyes on the prize. I half kick open the car door—badassery—and jump onto the sidewalk.
Micah gets out too and squints at the house. “Where are we?”
“Carrie Lang’s. Come on. I put the helium tank in your trunk already.”
“But—how did you get into my car? I finally got the lock fixed.”
Oh, please. What a silly question. I pull my lockpick from my back pocket and flash it at him. It was two bucks on Amazon, so of course I got one. I think there’s a criminal streak in me. I think it’s wide.
But I’m using it for good, see? I’m doing—something. Anything. I’m tired of watching, and waiting, and expecting things to work out. It never works out. It never works unless you demand.
So here I am, demanding.
“Hurry, Micah!”
He’s chewing on his lip all uncertain-like, and I tap my foot on the curb until he sighs and comes to stand next to me.
“Ready?” I ask him.
We pop open the trunk, and I hop in and struggle with the helium tank. Thank god for Party City. Micah sighs, and then he climbs in with me and opens the package of balloons, and when our eyes meet, my smile lights up the entire world.
Carrie Lang is one of my best friends, I think. She called me both times she lost her virginity and if that doesn’t constitute a place on the best friend tier, I don’t know what does. She is blond and tall and pretty and cartoonishly in love with Caleb Matthers, or at least she will be until she finds out that he cheated on her with Suey Park.
She likes rain and British actors and balloons, and though I can’t get her the first two, I am going to fill her yard with the third.
So that’s what we do, Micah and I. We sit in the back of his car and fill balloons, and I see us as a photograph, snapped through the back window, zoomed out, long exposure. I don’t tell him that Caleb Matthers is the real reason we are really here, that he is cheating on Carrie and I know because Suey Park was wearing his boxers and I saw them while we were changing for gym.
Caleb is allergic to latex—not, like, deathly, but he’ll definitely break out in hives. Everywhere. Mwahahaha.