Dolly was a 1990 two-tone brown Dodge Ram with a camper shell that was sometimes off, sometimes on. Currently on. The animal was everything you ever wanted a station wagon to be with the height of a truck. The left windshield wiper didn’t work, and the gas cap wouldn’t screw tight. Those were her only deficiencies. Well, and Dolly peaked at sixty-five miles per hour. Not a significant problem in Braxton Springs. But things rattled on the interstate. Becky wrote Dolly’s faults in the dashboard dust: no speed, no radio, no cruise control, one working seat belt, sliding cab window won’t close, smells awful.
“Are you wishing we’d come in the Mustang?”
“No way.” She swiped through the dust. “I like the Titanic even though it sank.”
She’d been dicking around town this morning when I stopped at the ATM to take all the money out of my account. The computer screen had requested my PIN and it went about as well as usual.
1389.
Denied.
1893.
Denied.
3198.
Denied.
The car behind me honked.
9831.
Denied.
I’d screeched away from the machine into a spot so Honky McHonkerson behind me could use the ATM. The car was a Mustang. Electric blue. Becky Cable. She’d parked, straddling the lines, and ventured through the rain to my window. “Tough morning, Jennings?”
“Can’t remember my PIN.”
“Shocking. Were you needing something in particular? I can spot you the cash.”
I don’t know why I said it, but I did. “Not unless you want to spring for a trip to Florida.”
Becky’s dark hair was freshly showered and wet as an otter coming out of the creek. A strand stuck to her cheeks, and her baby-doll shirt hiked toward her belly button. Even more so when she threw her hands in the air and whooped as only Becky could. “Hell, yeah, Jennings, I’ll knick, knack, Kerouac with you any day. Let’s blow this shitbox town.”
“Hop in the cab,” I’d said.
She’d slapped the door paneling triumphantly and hustled to the passenger side. “I’ve had three espressos,” she admitted, one of them still in her hand. Her gray eyes were double their usual size. “Now tell me, who is in Florida? Your secret boyfriend? Secret girlfriend? Some lame second cousin on your mother’s side who once asked you to do seven minutes in heaven? A sexual predator pretending to be your lame second cousin on your mother’s side who you met on the internet the same way I met—”
“Becky.”
Most people would apologize in a moment like that; Becky sipped more ten-dollar coffee, her eyes growing ever wider, ever probing. “Or is it a friend from summer camp? Or maybe, I know, a soldier you sent a Christmas box to who is home from Iraq? There are a ton of army bases in Florida.”
“Becky Cable, you have more sides than a Rubik’s Cube.”
“That’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me. What do they have, nine or six sides? Don’t undershoot me, Jennings. Now, tell me the glorious details.”
How about the glorious details of Rudy Guthrie? V-shaped face. Hollow cheekbones. Punchy jawline. High-arching eyebrows and prettiness you had to look for, but that was definitely there. That description sounded more like a Gap model than a friend. I said, “Another survivor. That’s who’s in Florida.”
“Ooooooo.”
Becky realigned her internal Rubik’s Cube and tamed her eyes. “Were you serious? Like, do you really want to go to Florida? ’Cause I was only screwing around, and now I feel like a royal dick. Like Charles-cheated-on-Diana-level dick. I love the royals; do you love the royals?”
Chandler screamed in my head. Pick someone else to talk to.
“Your nose is bleeding again, Jennings.” Becky opened the glove box and found a napkin. I jammed the wad against the end of my nose. Stress bleeds were a fixture of my post-June life.
“Sorry,” I said of the blood. She shrugged and waited on me to say something substantial. “Becky, I do want to go to Florida. And then, New York.”
Because Becky is an extraordinary human, she had four words: “Your car or mine?”
We were already in Dolly, so that decision made itself. Becky pillaged the necessaries from her house and parked her Mustang at Gran’s, and we hit the pavement at exactly sixty-five miles an hour.
Thank God her espresso high tapered somewhere around the Tennessee state line. I felt solid about including her on this crazy mission. She was now making a playlist she had aptly titled: Becky and Go Go. After a few vetoed songs, she announced, “I’m also making an anti-playlist. We’ll fill it with songs we hate and use it as punishment for all mistakes made. First song? I say ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe.’”
“Do we really need more than that?”
“It’s a list. A list must have more than one item.”
I accidentally revved the engine above sixty-five; Dolly lurched. “I think in this case one will do.”
Our musical tastes were similar. A selection of “oldies” we’d inherited from our parents, a fine collection of P!nk, Bruno, and Ed Sheeran, and then a whole set of songs that made us feel delighted to be driving. (But we couldn’t name those artists without checking iTunes.) Sharing music was like sharing a diary. When you tell someone, “I love this song,” you’re giving a piece of your story to the person.
She said, “Stop at the Rocket, will you? I need to pee.”
My blank expression told her I didn’t know the Rocket.
“Houston, we have a problem. You know? The Alabama welcome center? NASA? The US Space and Rocket Center. There’s a rocket along the interstate. They let you pee there.”
I lifted my left shoulder in a half shrug.
“Jennings, if you spout some junk about how you’ve never liked space, just dump me on the side of the road and I’ll hitch my way home.”
“Becky?”
“Before you ask, the Rocket doesn’t have astronaut ice cream in their vending machines. Major oversight, if you ask me.”
“Becky?”
“Yeah.”
“Why weren’t we closer before now?”
Becky pressed Play on “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and laughed. As I didn’t know what was suddenly hilarious, I didn’t join her.
“Do you want this straight up or on the rocks?” she asked.
“Straight up, I guess.”
When someone puts a question to you like that, whatever they say next has teeth. Becky’s seat belt was the nonworking one, and she turned completely sideways and shoved her toes in my lap. She waited until I glanced sideways before she spoke. “You have two asses.” She said this matter-of-factly.
“Excuse me.”
“Two asses, Jennings. Your camera. Your boyfriend.” She counted them off on her fingers. “You’re always up one or the other. Makes it hard to know you. Add that to your notoriety, and, well, you’re living in ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ Friendship Land. That is to say, everyone knows your song without having any idea what the words mean.”
Ouch. Four hundred peers reduced me to camera, boyfriend, and Bus #21. I’d always thought seeing a person was like seeing a mountain. From a distance, it’s a shape, mostly a triangle. Up close, it’s crawling with moss and trees and animals. I’d never been sure who was responsible for the distance someone observed me from, but it couldn’t all belong to me. I didn’t attack Becky, but I asked my question as firmly as she’d made her statement. “If you think I’m such a shallow well, why are you still here?”
“Oh.” She swapped back to the Becky and Go Go playlist and made a selection; the melodic notes of Simon and Garfunkel emerged. “Because I’m clearly supposed to be. Synchronicity, my darling friend.”