With the sun’s morning mug comes reality. We’re two flip birds to daybreak’s one stone and dread circles high like gulls over a sinking ship.
We traipse back to our campsite mitt in mitt, salty beach dew clinging to our skin in crumbling white dust, our bedding slung in soggy heaps over our shoulders. We dismantle our campsite and pack our junk into my banger.
Rain falls in fat drops as we cut a wheel across the towering, fog-bound bridge and find chow in a crank little seaside café. I’m massive in-n-out, moping through breakfast and Eve says, “Let’s see that happyface,” and I scrunch my nose and show my teeth and we laugh and smile sad over a shared plate of grease, hash browns, and fried eggs. We take hot tea to go.
Back in my banger, we pass the steaming cup back and forth and slowly unwrap the hard facts of our sad state. Evil hit-Jacks, crossing enemy lines, small-town cogs jiving massive smack, ex-heart-Jacks. The vast unknowable future. College. We both leave in three weeks.
I laugh and say, “If we ever start a band, we can call ourselves A Rock and a Hard Place.”
“Or, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?”
“Word,” I say. “Or how ’bout Piss and Vinegar—but I call being Vinegar.” She laughs and her voice is cool aloe on my scorched heart.
But we’re no badrats. We’re true-blue betties wheeling it home in a banger speeding in two directions at once, and as I catch her smiling eyes over the steaming tea, I know she’ll always be my Misty Ginger Haze.
We pull back onto the main road and my speak buzzes in. It’s Dad.
“Oh,” I say when Marta’s voice is on the other line. “Word.”
She laughs. “Word to you, too, flap-Jack.”
“Oma?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Yeah. Miles all right?”
“He’s my human tissue.” I smile, glad she’s home. “So,” she says after a beat. “Rumor is you’re like some big lez-Jack now.”
“Um.”
“With Eve Brooks, nonetheless,” Marta says. “Such an ace.” And then we’re both cracking up. “That’s beat, Jack,” she says. “I gotta heel. Dad just wanted me to let you know. And check you’re still alive.”
“Still kicking.” I pause. “Thanks, Sister.”
“Word.”
We hang up and I look at Eve and I see in her eyes she understands Oma’s gone. She runs a palm up and down my arm and I surrender the helm. I’m speak, not think.
“Hey, Thumbs. Whaddya say?”
“Whaddya say what?”
“Let’s just jump in. See if we can’t make this thing work.” She looks back out her window and I plow on. “Long-distance phone calls, plane tickets, massive expensive speak bills. We gotta at least try.” But Eve’s gone hush. She sighs deep, hot steam billowing from her cup. “A Jack’s gotta think about her future every once in a while, y’know.”
Her lips curl into a small smile but her eyes are still down. I watch the road, my heart cage pounding away with the swish-swosh-swish of the windshield wipers. I tell myself I tried.
I’m getting good and sweaty-palmed and my crank heart’s a sinking ship as the dashed white lines whip under the hood of my wheeling banger. But then Eve’s nodding her head. Slow and then more quick, and she’s a massive smile out of the corner of my eye. I’m pulling off the road and P is for Park and she’s crying and pulling my earlobes, her eyes crossing just a tiny bit as she presses her beatstreet nose into mine. She’s kissing me, saying, “Yes. Yes, you.”
And then we’re hush again, nose to nose, and her eyes are big saucers and her mouth is moving miles a minute. She sits back in her seat and rattles off plans all ponies ’n’ pigtails about summer fun, Christmas breaks to come, traveling the globe. Us—Bug ’n’ Thumbs. I smile, watching her, and start back up my banger and D is for Drive and we accelerate and we’re cutting a wheel forward.
“I love you,” I say, so softly she can’t hear over the crank hum of the engine, and I take her hand and it’s soft and warm, like dawn.
I take a massive deep breath.
I am anew.