This is the story I wrote for my Creative Writing 2 assignment last semester. Not sure how large of a role this story played in that. Probably not much. It’s probably crap. But yeah.
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My name is Rice. Yes, “Rice.” It’s not your everyday name, that’s for sure, eh? I used to hate my name, I really did. No, I didn’t get teased or bullied because of my incredibly silly name, but I still didn’t like it. Not one bit. I used to go on endless rants about how silly my parents must’ve been to have given me such a name and how, if I was God, I would’ve punished them for bringing such torment upon a child. No-one had anything bad to say about my name, that’s for sure, but I made up for that deficit by continually cursing it during every waking moment.
I often thought about trying to find out who it was that had given me such a name. I was pretty sure, regardless, that it was one of my parents, but I still wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Of course, as with any other easy-living 22-year old, I was hesitant. I didn’t have the guts, didn’t have in me to drop everything I had and go on a potential wild goose chase just to find out who named me. Besides, I was afraid that finding out who’d named me would permanently damage my opinion of said person. But then it’s not like I could have had a worse opinion on either of my parents: dad died when I was four—I was far too young to have formed any sort of opinion about him—and mom, well, she left me at my grandmother’s place a year or so after that, on my fifth birthday, and ran off to live with some guy somewhere down south. She never told me where exactly, and ol’ grandma never told me either. Maybe she was afraid that I’d run off to try and find her or something, I don’t know.
I’ll be honest, I might have done that as soon as I could’ve, if life wasn’t so good back then. Sure, I didn’t have much to do and anywhere really interesting to go but that was a perfect complement to the obscenely lazy slacker that I was (and still am). I spent my days lazing around at home, cycling around town with my headphones on listening to anything from Bob Marley to Megadeth to Sonic Youth, drinking myself senseless at the town’s only pub, writing horribly bad poetry while sitting by the small river that ran just outside town, whipping cat carcasses (like in that movie, Gummo: you can’t imagine how warm and fuzzy I felt during that scene where they were whipping that cat carcass) and, well, with Emily.
Yeah, Emily. That was her name. (Still is, I think, but she’s in the past, so I’m supposed to use the past tense, right? “Was” instead of “is?” Or have I gotten it all wrong? Anyway…) She was, back then, at least, the cutest girl I’d ever known (quite nearly the only girl I’d ever known, to be honest) and was probably the thing I liked most about living where I did, in a town with nothing to do, nowhere to go and really bad taste in alcoholic beverages. None of that mattered as long as she was around. She, with her straight, shoulder-length hair and intoxicating hazel eyes, her long, perfect legs and skinny arms, her perky breasts and perpetually under-sized clothing, she was the overdone cliche girl you always see in stories like this. But, hey, I didn’t mind. Not one single bit.
But no, before you ask: I never did manage to do her. Sure, I was really, really into her, but I was never sure how she felt about me. We were great friends, certainly, and she seemed to be at least somewhat interested in me, but I dunno… I never really managed to gather the guts to say something or make a move or whatever. I don’t think anyone ever managed to do her, at least back then. There were even rumours going around that she was a lesbian or bisexual or whatever and that she was involved with the barkeep’s daughter, no doubt fueled by all the nights the two of them spent out of town, no doubt engaging in “vulgar” and “unnatural” sexual acts. I didn’t believe those rumours for a bit. And even if I did, it wasn’t like I could have gotten over her just like that: she was, for all intents and purposes, that crush. You know, the one you never forget, the one you never get over, the one that clings to you like the stench of cat piss sticks to your unfortunate guitar bag… yeah, that crush.
It wasn’t exceedingly comfortable, no, being such good friends with her and spending so much time with her while harbouring such strong emotions for her, but I used to tell myself that, well, it was certainly a whole lot better than feeling that way about her from afar. Of course, these days I’m not sure which is worse, having experienced both situations repeatedly (and gotten more metaphorical scars than I can shake the proverbial stick at), but back then I was pretty sure that, yeah: it could be worse. Much, much worse.
So what did I do with her, you ask, since I didn’t do her? Well, we did what your average twentysomethings would do in a boring town like ours: we hung out. We watched movies, sang songs for far-away boys and girls and rode our bikes all night under the streetlights. But what I liked most was the times when we’d cycle to the hill outside of town and lie down, side-by-side and talk about life, our dreams, our passions and our feelings. We talked about how we felt about my grandmother, her mom and dad, the town’s mayor and so on, but we never talked about how we felt about each other. I quickly lost count of the times I’d wanted to ask her how she felt about me, about what she thought of me. I never did manage to ask her, I didn’t have the guts. What use are heart-to-heart conversations if you never talk about each other, man? Really?
She was the only person that ever understood how I felt about my name, even if she felt differently than I did about my… ah, “situation.” She wanted me to get over my name, to stop obsessing about it and accept it as part of who I was, because she could see that it was getting to me far too much. I tried to, I really did, even if only for her sake, but I couldn’t. I was Captain Ahab and my name, it was Moby Dick. And soon she began to realise this fact and seemingly decided that if she couldn’t get me to change she’d at least listen, perhaps in the hope that I’d eventually get over it through endless whinging. What I never told her, though, was that I liked it when she held my hand, looked into my eyes and said those things, trying to calm me down: it made me feel… special. It made me feel like there was something between us, more than just your regular friendship, more than just the bond of two bored twentysomethings in a boredom-inducing town.
Things were like that for quite a long while. How long? I don’t know, you tend to lose track of time after a while. Waking up to the same smells each morning, seeing the same people when you take your morning walk, waving at the same old men as you cycled down the main street trying to get some wind in your hair on the days when the wind decided it didn’t want to blow, ordering the same thing at the same pub as you park your posterior on the same chair facing the same bottles of expensive liquor and hearing the same response from the bartender, it all gets really old really quick and after a while you just lose track of time. Monday turns into Friday and Friday turns back into Monday and you realise that you haven’t written that song you wanted to write or kill that cat you wanted to kill and then, just when you tell yourself that you’re going to do it, it turns into Friday again and your grandmother tells you that she needs you to help her with her garden. And then it turns into Tuesday. Just like that.
And then, one night, one fateful night, just like in all of those movies and fantasy novels, something happened. Something indeed. Except slighlty more mundane than a dragon attack or a really bad acid trip. I was at the pub (where else?) with Emily (who else?), and we were drinking (what else?) and talking crap about the pub’s other patrons, most of which we knew decently well, when someone changed the channel on the TV that hung in the corner nearest to where we were sitting. I guess sports was getting boring or something. We turned to watch for a while, but quickly lost interest in the balding reporter talking about old folks’ homes (how that was more interesting than sports I will never, ever be able to figure out). But then the channel was changed agan, and, like a pervert overhearing a girl saying that she forgot to put on a bra, I couldn’t help but turn and look. Emily was too busy staring at the third pint she’d downed that night to care, but after a while of watching what was on I felt compelled to tug on her skirt and point her in the direction of the TV screen.
Why? Well, why not? In all seriousness, though, it was because on the TV was a show about reuniting long-lost family members, complete with the requisite melodramatic crying, dramatic music and concerned-looking host. If I was sober I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it, but I wasn’t, and the drama unfolding out on the screen, with a balding middle-aged man embracing his long-lost mother who was dying of cancer, started tugging at my heartstrings. Something ate away at me from the inside while watching, but I didn’t know what. And then I started to imagine myself as that balding, middle-aged man, except a bit more handsome, and started to tear up at the thought of being in such a situaiton. I wasn’t proud of it, but I didn’t care: I felt like crying, and that’s what I did. I didn’t break down and start wailing, of course, but it was probably painfully obvious that I was crying. So much so that Emily decided she’d pay for the drinks and then proceeded to drag me out of the bar. The cold night wind hit me in the face like a bucket of water, and I slowly began to realise that deep down inside, I did want to find my mother. I really did. I realised that I wanted to see my mother, talk to her, find out how she’d been and, obviously, find out who was it that actually came up with my name. And why the other didn’t object.
Neither of us felt like going back into the pub or going back home, so we walked over to my house, grabbed our bicycles and pedalled out to that hill I mentioned a handful of paragraphs back, laughing and talking to each other as we went past dead, sleepy streets, our shadows shrinking and growing as we passed under streetlights and past dimly-lit storefronts. After a whole night spent in a stuffy bar having to listen to drunken students whinge about crappy lecturers and the girls they’d had sex with, having the wind in my hair and whoosh past my ears was a welcome change. Emily seemed to be having a good time too, something made evident by the large smile on her face as she weaved across the empty streets, shouting at me to keep up. Even her voice, as strange as it may seem, was smiling. Not only did she look happy, she sounded happy. And if that’s not a mark of happiness, I don’t know what is.
We stopped at the bottom of the small hill, left our bikes in the bush and made our way to the top. There were no lights nearby at all, but we could see quite clearly; the moonlight made sure of that. I reached the top before Emily, who’d stopped to answer a phone call, and as I waited for her I looked out to the south, where my mother supposedly was, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away, and I again felt something eating away at me from inside and pulling at my heartstrings. It felt like I was missing some sort of home, even though I knew home was just a couple of kilometres behind me. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I still don’t, but I wasn’t imagining things. I knew that I had to stop being in denial, had to stop drowning my sorrows and desires in cheap beer and silly musical obsessions, had to stop pretending that I was mad about my name and not mad about wanting to get to know my mother. All those facades, all those surrogates, all those drugs, they had to go. And go they would, I told myself, as I let myself drop onto the soft, wet grass below my feet.
After a minute or two spent just staring at the night sky, I felt Emily coming up behind me, and before I could turn around to see if it was really her, she made her way to me and lay down beside me. I told her that I wanted to find my mother. I told her that I wanted to get out of this silly town, get on the road and find her. Find out about her. Know her. I told her about all my insecurities, all the denial, all the lies I told myself, all the effort I put into erecting a facade of not really caring about my mother and only caring about my name and so on and so forth. I spilled my guts to her, and, bless her soul, she didn’t say a word. She just listened. And when I was done, she turned to me and she smiled and she told me that if I was going away then she wanted to come along too. She told me that she wanted to be with me.
Words can’t express how that made me feel, and I couldn’t help but smile in return. Her hand was right next to mine, and I wanted to hold it so, so much, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin the moment due to a silly assumption that her words indicated her feelings for me. I knew better. After all, “seems” is never, ever good enough, eh?
I didn’t have a car, and I told her that, but she told me to not worry because that was something she’d take care of. I wondered why she was so keen on my course of action and whether it had something to do with any sort of feelings she had for me. It certainly seemed like it, but, yeah, seems is never enough, as I said just now. She said she’d meet me at my place the next morning, with a vehicle, and told me to go back home, pack and get some rest. Not that I needed to be told anything of the sort, mind you. I was dead tired and not even being with her could stop me from wanting to sleep. So we went back down the hill, got onto our bikes and cycled back into town. We hugged at the crossroads near the pub and went our separate ways.
I arrived home, left my bicycle by the door and went inside. To my surprise, my grandmother was still awake and sat down in front of the TV, watching some silly soap opera. The light from the TV emphasising the wrinkles on her age-worn face, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the old woman dying of cancer on TV earlier that night. I wanted to sneak past her and into bed, but then I realised that I had no clue at all where to look for my mother, so I decided to ask my grandmother if she could give me anything: an address, any hints, a city, the name of her husband, a phone number. Anything. So I sat down beside her and asked. Asked if she could help.
Now, if this was a fantasy story or something I’m sure you’d be expecting my grandmother to say that she was expecting me, give me some cryptic clues and tell me to find my own way or something like that, but this isn’t fantasy, this is reality, and my grandmother was honestly surprised at what I was asking. Or, at least, she seemed to be. And then she told me to wait while she went in her room to grab something. And that’s what I did. I tried my hardest to not fall asleep on the couch but the combination of my sleepiness and a particularly monotonous performance by one of the actresses in the soap opera was making life difficult for me.
Just when I felt my consciousness fading away, my grandmother returned. I bolted up straight, which probably surprised her even more, judging by the look on her face. She sat down beside me and handed me a small piece of paper with an address written on it in a shaky hand that I immediately recognised as my grandmother’s. I don’t know why she had to go into her room to write it down, and in hindsight I guess she must’ve known a lot more about my mother than she’d ever let on, but it didn’t really matter. I had an address! I knew where to go, now it was all up to Emily in figuring out how we were going to get there. I went up to my room with a lilt in my step and texted Emily, telling her the good news. I didn’t bother waiting for her response, though: I took off my shirt and jumped into bed, falling asleep instantly.
I would write about the dreams I had that night, but they’re of the X-rated variety and I’m pretty sure no-one wants to read about those kinds of dreams, right? At least not in this sort of context. I wouldn’t.
The next morning I was awoken by the honking of a fairly loud car horn from outside. I thought it was another dream at first, and then I remembered what Emily had told me the night before about how she’d be taking care of the transportation, and I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. Sure enough, there she was, pretty as always, standing beside a beat-up camper van that looked like it’d done twenty-seven tours of Woodstock and just about lived to tell the tale. I opened the window and shouted at her, telling her to come on in and that I’d be downstairs in a while. I didn’t hear her reply, but she killed the engine and started making her way inside, so I guessed that she got what I said. I turned away from the window and started packing, since I’d forgotten to do that the night before. And, yes, by “packing” I do mean “grabbing anything I saw and throwing it in the first bag I picked up.” It’s not like I planned to be away for long, anyway.
I was debating whether to take a shower or not when she knocked on my door and opened it. Thankfully I’d managed to put on a pair of pants, and when she told me that it looked like it was going to rain soon and that the quicker we made a move the better, I decided that, no, I wasn’t going to shower. So I pulled on a t-shirt and made my way downstairs. My grandmother was in the kitchen having breakfast, and I decided that it would be better if I said goodbye before I went off. She looked so much better than the night before: where the harsh light from the TV didn’t do her wrinkles any good, the soft light coming in from the window made her look a handful of years younger. It was a much better sight to leave her by, even if it was only for a while. I told her, as gently as I could, that I was leaving to find my mother and that I’d be back as soon as I could. She took it surprisingly well, and told me to take all the time I needed, because she knew that this was something I had to do. And indeed it was.
With that out of the way, headed out to where Emily was waiting, and to the camper van that she had somehow procured. She was quite vague when I asked her where she’d gotten it, which I took as meaning that there was a bit more shade than light involved, if you get what I mean (and if you don’t, figure it out yourselves). It didn’t look too bad inside, all the carpeting and upholstery was still intact and everything seemed to work fine, although there were a few burn marks here and there and everything reeked of cigarette smoke (doesn’t every car, these days?). But, well, beggars can’t be choosers (and, besides, it’s not like I didn’t like it), so I dumped my bag in the back, got in the front with Emily and off we went. Not before the engine died while she was making a u-turn, of course. Comedy moment right there, ladies and gentlemen. At least we hadn’t shouted “go!” or something silly like that. Oh wait, maybe we did. Hm.
Pretty soon, we were out of the town and had driven past that hill of “ours” and were well and truly on our way to finding my mother, who was some 800-or-so kilometres away, down at the far end of the peninsula. I was greatly looking forward to the trip, and while would’ve loved to have been on a road trip to a totally unknown location all by myself regadless, the fact that I was with Emily made it all the more enjoyable. Not only did I have someone to talk to (aside from myself), but, well, you know, I liked her, and I’m sure everyone can attest to the fact that spending time with someone you have feelings for is one of the greatest ways to spend time. Ever. I was over the moon, really, at the fact that I was out on the road in a beat-up camper van with the girl of my dreams, talking and laughing with the Ramones blaring over the crummy stereo, which surprisingly still worked… somewhat. It was an incredible feeling, I tell you.
And then we hit the highway, and we really got rolling. I’d forgotten about the wideness and the straightness of it, having never seen a road more than two lanes wide in quite a while, but I soon got into the rhythm of it, buoyed by childhood memories of fantasising that I was an “adult” driving down the highway, with the miles rolling away underneath. I must’ve heard that in a movie or something, that “miles rolling away underneath” thing, but I can’t recall where exactly for the life of me. It doesn’t matter, anyway. All that matters is that we were on the highway and that it was time for me to settle in for a bit of a nap before it was my turn to drive. So I clambered into the back of the van and, using my bag as a pillow, tried to get some sleep above the rumble of tires and the sounds of multiple worn metal parts squeaking and grinding against each other.
(Hey, just because both of us really only rode bikes doesn’t mean we didn’t have driving licences!)
I was fast asleep when we came to a sudden halt which, unfortunately, also threw me against the back of Emily’s seat, which in turn elicited a swear word or two from her. It was always so cute when she swore. So adorable. Anyway, after I struggled onto my knees, I looked out front and saw what it was that had made her stop so suddenly: a large number of paint cans had fallen out of a trailer and had coated the road in an oddly appealing mixture of green, red, blue, beige and purple. There were a few other cars that had stopped when faced with the psychedelic abomination on the middle of the highway, but we didn’t feel like stopping for long, so I told Emily to just drive on, and to hell with getting paint on the body or anything like that. So she did, and we left a trail of multi-coloured psychedelic goodness behind us for, oh, about twenty feet? Something like that.
Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get any sort of sleep after being so rudely awakened, I asked Emily if she wanted me to take over. She said that it’d be nice and pulled over to let me climb into the driver’s seat, and she then clambered into the back and rummaged around her bag for a book to read. Kerouac, I think. Incredibly fitting, I think you’ll agree. We were soon on our way again, with me behind the wheel, and I soon started getting into the groove of, well, doing nothing in particular except keeping my foot on the pedal and making sure I didn’t steer us into a ditch. So I piped up and asked Emily how she was back there, but got no response. I turned and saw that she was, bummer of all bummers, asleep. So I popped in a Misfits tape, turned it up and stared straight ahead down the arrow-straight strip of concrete that we were on. I was on a mission, and I was going to make sure I reached my goal. Where it was, I had no clue. Somewhere over the horizon, somewhere over the rainbow, somewhere past that really small speck up ahead that’s probably a broken-down van, you get my drift.
It was only while I was driving that I began to really look at the interior of the road-worn camper van Emily had somehow procured which I had spent just about a hundred kilometres in. The dials didn’t really work, save for the fuel gauge and trip meter, and there were what looked like deep knife marks on the top surface of the dashboard. They cut neatly through a Pink Floyd sticker that was just about barely identifiable, having been subjected to years and years of sunlight and faded to almost unrecognisability. At least to your average on-looker, and I certainly wasn’t an average on-looker. Pink Floyd was one of the bands I was obsessed with, and I’d probably have killed myself if I hadn’t been able to spot that it was a Floyd sticker the first time around. Yeah, I was that sort of fan back then.
The seats weren’t exactly comfortable, either, having sunken, it seemed, quite a number of years prior to Emily’s acquisition of the vehicle. It wasn’t really a problem for her, with her svelte frame and all that, but it certainly was a bit of an issue for me, being somewhat rotund and all. My bottom was starting to hurt already and I’d only been in the driver’s seat for, what, fourty minutes, if that? Things were not looking good. But, hey, I told myself, I was on a road trip with the girl who’d kept me awake so many nights thinking of her and we had all the time in the world and enough cassettes to last us for months and we were travelling to a part of the country neither of us had ever been to, no doubt filled with places to see and people to bump into and On the Road-like adventures to be committed to writing (you’ll see, eventually, why that was a totally inaccurate assumption) and, come on, a bad seat wasn’t going to ruin the fun, was it? No, no it wasn’t. Definitely not. I don’t know where I’d gotten the idea from. Besides, I told myself, I could always make a stop at some petrol station and go look for a cusion of some sort. Something like that would surely be easy to find, I thought.
But until it was indeed time to stop for gas, I had to endure. So I tried to occupy myself, get my mind off of both the uncomfortable chair and the mind-numbing boredom of highway driving. The music helped, sure, but even those immortal first few lines of the Misfits’ “Last Caress” got old after a while. Can you imagine that? Really, come on. Those lines should never get old. Never ever.
Hundreds of kilometres later, I had just about exhausted every possible resource in my posession in the effort to not die of boredom, and I was on the verge of giving up trying to occupy myself and succumb to the sheer boredom of highway driving when, like a deus ex machina (except slightly more believable, after all, how long can you sleep in a creaky, bumpy and smelly camper van?), Emily woke up. You have no idea how much that perked me up, and when she clambered into the passenger seat and rummaged around for a tape to put on, I felt a second wind coursing through my body. Things weren’t so bad after all!
I teasingly asked her what she’d dreamt about while she slept, and, for some reason, she started blushing and acting all coy. I certainly wasn’t expecting that sort of reaction, and I nearly drove us into a ditch because I was paying far too much attention to her and her reaction, engrossed in the sheer oddity of her reaction. I know, looking back it seems a bit silly, but hey, I liked her, yadda yadda yadda. (Maybe I should just copy and paste the same sentences every time I need to justify some sort of odd behavior while in her company?)
I asked her if something was wrong, but she (predictably) said that everything was fine. But then why the blushing and all that, I asked. “Surely there’s got to be a reason for that,” I said, totally serious. It wasn’t like her (or anyone, really) to just suddenly start blushing and acting all coy and hesitant and all that crap when asked a simple question like mine. Well, ok, unless it was a particularly wet dream, but Emily and I were above being ashamed of talking about that sort of stuff. We talked about it all the time, honestly. She didn’t answer my question immediately, instead she pulled out a Billy Bragg tape, the one I’d given her many, many moons ago, and popped it in. As the first strains of his song, “The Milkman of Human Kindness” began playing through the crappy speakers, she looked me in the eye and said, and I quote (I remember what she said exactly, with the exact intonation as well), “I dreamt of you.” (Yeah, I know, not a particularly tough line to remember, right?)
Her words hit me like a punch to the gut, and I remember blurting out something to the effect of “wait what?”, before I realised that I was now the one blushing and that I had probably better stop lest I drive us into the back of a car or into a ditch or up a hill or something of the sort. To hear her, of all people, tell me she’d dreamt of me was certainly unexpected, and inside I was asking myself whether… yes, whether it meant that she actually… you know, had feelings for me too. I was hoping that that was the case. Really, really hoping. And, all the while, our dear Mr. Bragg was singing about being the “milkman of human kindness” and things like that. Somehow I felt like I was at the hour mark of an hour-and-a-half indie film that was complete with a trendy, “un-mainstream” soundtrack, beat-up camper van and silly premise for a road trip that only serves as a platform for some things to happen.
I parked on the hard shoulder, and with the combination of Billy Bragg punctuated with the sounds of a variety of vehicles zooming past us to whatever destinations they were headed to as the soundtrack, I looked in her eyes and I asked her, trying to put on my best poker face, what kind of dream exactly had she dreamt about me. I needn’t have putten on such a serious face, but I was trying to hide the fact that I was just about ready to burst inside in anticipation and hope, and perhaps I over-compensated just a wee bit too much.
Over-compensation or no, though, she didn’t seem to care. She returned my gaze, and for the first time I realised how those eyes of hers were. Her eyes were like an overdone cliche, and I felt myself getting lost in them when she cleared her throat and opened her mouth to talk, to say something. I snapped back to reality, and when she slowly started talking with the requisite “uhms” and “ahh”s and “well”s, I had to restrain myself from literally bursting and telling her to, you know, get on with it. (Yes! Monty Python reference! My life is complete!)
After what seemed like an eternity of humming and hawing and hesitation, she cleared her throat again, and what she said next was the exact thing I’d been longing to hear for so, so long: yes, ladies and gentlemen, she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she did indeed have feelings for me. Yeah, she told me that she’d been grappling with those feelings for quite a while and that she’d never been sure whether to tell me or not since, according to her, she “wasn’t sure if I felt the same way,” and, to add to that, she “didn’t want to ruin a great friendship” either. Man. Somehow she’d never realised that I felt the same way about her. And there I was thinking that I’d been a bit too painfully obvious about how I felt for her a few times and had perhaps even turned her off. Man oh man, I never knew how wrong that assumption of mine was.
I wish I could accurately convey the things going through my mind without resorting to swear words, but I can’t. I really, really can’t. I don’t know about you people, but the moment when the person you like tells you that she has feelings for you—regardless of whether she knows or has noticed the fact that you like her too—is a moment that is really quite undescribable, a moment that one has to imply rather than fully explain. It’s like sex: words can explain it, but they can never do justice to the actual experience. And, when it comes to an abstact experience such as this, even words can’t really explain it. Needless to say, though, in my mind I was swearing at the rate of about one swear word for every three.
What could I do? I smiled, and she smiled back, and there was a palpable look of relief on her face, even if I could tell by the way she kept fidgeting in her seat that she wasn’t entirely comfortable and that something was still bugging her. I was still in a mild state of shock myself, and I didn’t really know what to say, but after a few minutes or so of smiling, slightly-awkward glances and Billy Bragg crooning about “just looking for another girl,” I managed to gather myself well enough to tell her that, well, what else? That I felt the same way about her as she felt about me. And that I’d been feeling that way for “a hell of a lot longer” than she had (even though she never really mentioned how long she’d been feeling that way about me). Now that, I tell you, that was what finally sealed the deal for her: she stopped fidgeting, stopped having that slightly nervous look in her eyes, and that look of relief I thought I saw on her face couldn’t have been one, because the look on her face after I told her, now that was relief. That was joy. That was the look people have on their faces after their hard-as-nails writing lecturer tells them that their short story is “impressive,” the look people have on their faces when the supernatural killer that’s cornered them in the alleyway suddenly dies due to some lame deus ex machina, that sort of stuff.
It was a wonderful moment, it really was, but we had to make a move. The rain had followed us south and the rain clouds were due to overtake us any minute, and over the past hundred kilometres or so I had seriously started to doubt the van’s—oh, did I mention I’d started calling it Oliver?—ability to keep both Emily and I dry. I didn’t want to risk either of us getting wet (cue dirty joke here), so I started the engine.
Or, rather, I tried. And failed. And I tried again. And failed again. And again. And again. Somehow I had a feeling that Oliver didn’t really like his engine being turned off but having the battery kept on: the tape kept playing—funnily enough, “Love Gets Dangerous” was on, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the implication that love, ok, maybe mutual affection, may have adverse effects on old, horribly-worn down vehicles—but the engine just wouldn’t start. In a flash of inspiration, I decided to try the good old “hit it on the dashboard and swear at it” method of automotive repair, but it didn’t work either. Bummer.
So there we were, stuck on the hard shoulder in the middle of nowhere. I turned to Emily, wanting to see if she had any ideas, but she was gone, and the passenger door was open. I leaned over, trying to see out the side door and find out where she’d gone. I couldn’t see her, so I got out of the van, and it was then that I saw her. She was up high, silhouetted by the quickly-darkening sky. She was up on a hill, a hill that I’d oh-so-conveniently parked right beside.
It wasn’t like there was anything else for me to do, anyway: the car wouldn’t start and I was starting to doubt it’d ever start again. So I made my way up the hill, and then, when I reached the top, we did what we used to do so often on back home: we lay down, side by side, and looked up at the sky. Great big, dark clouds were approaching, but I didn’t care, and I was pretty sure she didn’t care either. To hell with the rain. To hell with the thunder, the lightning. We lay down side-by-side, alright. And we looked up at the sky, alright. And we said nothing, alright, and did nothing, alright, except enjoy being close to each other.
But, that time… that time I held her hand. And, as bad as this sounds, my mother didn’t matter anymore. Neither did my name. And when we finally got Oliver back up and running, we turned back and headed home. Together.
