1
Dave Olshaker had been waiting on the stairs, and when he saw Griff run out to the showers, he knew he had his chance. He slammed the door shut behind him. Reached back, and twisted the bolt.
He was a big guy, maybe 240, six five, like L’il Abner in overalls and a white T-shirt, a townie who had a scholarship to Jackson College. He looked, to Tammy Detweiler, as pissed as anyone could be. He turned his back to her for a second, fiddling with the lock on the door.
“Dave? What the hell are you doing in here?”
“You slept with that idiot,” Olshaker said, turning around to face her. “You told me you loved me.”
“That was last year. Dave? Get the hell out of here. I’ll scream.”
“You won’t. You can’t do this to me. You whore. You know I gave you my heart. And now you’re just stomping all over it. Look, look, I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you for your transgression, baby. I do. I love you that much.”
“You aren’t gonna forgive me for anything. Now get the hell out of here, right now.”
Tammy leapt out of bed, forgetting that she was bare-ass naked. She felt like trying to find the gun Griff kept. She was pretty sure it was in the top drawer of his dresser. He wasn’t supposed to have it, but then in college you weren’t supposed to have a lot of things you ended up having.
Olshaker rushed her, grabbing her by the wrists. “Just come back to me. Just tell me.”
She was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “Let go of me, damn it!”
His face turned bright red. He was angry. She knew the look—it was half the reason they’d broken up before midterms. He had slapped her a little too hard, and she had seen that red face. He was scary sometimes.
Her wrists hurt where he gripped her. “Let me go. Please,” she said more calmly, looking down at his hands. “Please. You’re hurting me, David.”
“I just want you,” he said. His breath was all sour beer. Right then and there, he began blubbering like a baby. He released her wrists. She shoved him backward, and he fell, ass-first, on Griff’s bed. “You don’t know what it’s like. To love someone so much. To love them, to want them, you just don’t know. Honey, honey, I love you. I love you like no man is ever gonna love you.” His tears came in hiccups and heaves. She began to feel bad for him, despite everything. Once she was dressed, she went over to the bed, and sat beside him. She put her arm around his back.
“Look. You’re a good man,” she said, but felt as if she were telling the biggest lie on the planet. “You’ll find a girl who loves you because you’re wonderful. I’m no good. I really am not right for you. Maybe I’m not right for anyone. But you, you have a lot going for you.”
“I know,” he said, weeping bitterly. “I know. But I can save you from your sinful life, Tammy. I can make you a good woman.”
“Poor baby,” Tammy said, hugging him to her. “Poor, poor baby.”
“I love you,” he said.
He looked up at her with his tear-stained face. He looked like a puppy dog that had just been hit by a car and lived to whimper about it. He leaned in to kiss her, and she felt badly enough for him that she let him.
And that’s when he grabbed her and drew her in to him, and thrust his tongue between her lips. She pushed him away, but his grip snaked around her arms and waist like a straitjacket. He maneuvered to the side, and brought her down on the bed, turning her around so that her face pressed into the blanket. “You know I love you,” he said, slobbering. “You know you’re my woman.”
She tried to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with the blanket.
She felt him grind against her.
2
In what was called the Persian Room, in the basement of the frat house—a small room full of a haze of blue smoke—Ziggy sucked on a bong while clouds of sweet smoke billowed around him. Somebody said, “You look like a fire-breathing dragon, Zigster.”
Ziggy laughed and felt his face go all red. He wondered whether he’d ever been this high before. He looked at his hands to make sure they weren’t sprouting leaves. For a second, he thought he was turning into a tree.
“What’s up with that?” he asked his partner-inhigh, Joe Metheny.
“With what?”
“My hands? It’s like they’re ripping out of my arms.”
“Holy shit.”
Both of them laughed at once. Then stopped. Then laughed again.
There were others in the haze of smoke, but Ziggy only noticed Joe, who had the most hilarious look on his face—a red smile and a sparkling around his eyes.
“You know what I like about you?”
“What’s that?”
“You’re always happy,” Ziggy said. Then he took another hit from the Monster Bong.
3
“Where the hell is Josh?” Bronywn picked her way through the rabble of the party—students passed out on the floor, others leaning into their girlfriend’s face in the corners of rooms, still others managed to keep dancing to music that had stopped ten minutes before. All the while the stench of beer and vomit, up and down the stairs—and just as she got to the top of the stairs, coming out of the bathroom, naked, in full swing, Griff.
She felt as if she’d been shot with a ray gun and couldn’t move.
She tried not to look at him. He was a golden Apollo. His hair was slicked back on his scalp, and it emphasized his high cheekbones and his pool-blue eyes and the way his nose was the slightest of ski-slopes. She couldn’t help herself—she looked down at his chest, developed from football and wrestling, and then along his abs, the striation of muscle prominent, his pale skin slick with water.
The millisecond passed. He didn’t notice her watching, and passed by the stairs, heading back to his room.
Bronwyn caught her breath and sat down on the stairs. Another cigarette, this time for several long, drawn-out puffs.
The doorway at the top of the stairs went to one of the upperclassman’s rooms. It was open, and she got up and walked through it to the balcony. She went out to the edge of the balcony and looked up at the stars that were just fading as morning came up along the horizon in a new day that was still too distant from the night.
When she glanced down at the murky front lawn, she saw a guy she was pretty sure was Josh.
4
“You’re drunk,” she said. She crouched down in the dew-wet grass beside his prone body. “I hate drunks.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m star-gazing.”
“You didn’t touch any booze?” She kicked at the empty bottle of Jack Daniels at his side.
“Okay. Busted. Just a little.”
“Damn it. We go in three hours. Why do you boys get so drunk? What was so awful in your cushy little lives that you have to screw it up by becoming instant alcoholics once you leave Mommy and Daddy behind?”
He opened his mouth, about to answer, but she said, “No, I don’t want to know. Really. Drunk or stoned, it’s like all of you are getting anaesthetized to the pain of being upper-middle class.”
“I’m on scholarship.”
“That doesn’t make you poor. You own a car. None of you lives in the real world. Good God,” she said, shaking her head. “Good God.” She glanced at her watch. “We’re never getting on the road at this rate.”
“I’m ready.”
“We’re never getting to L.A.”
“We’ll get there. I drove from Chicago to Atlanta in one night once. We can get to L.A. in three days. At the most, four. I promise. How many people are coming?”
“Total, five. I think. You, me, Griff, Tammy, and maybe Ziggy if he doesn’t get too messed up tonight. Everybody chips in, so it’s a free trip for you. You’re the scholarship boy. Packed in like sardines in that junk-heap you call a car.”
“That’ll be cozy,” he said, laughing.
“You need to sleep this off before we go. Damn it,” she said. “God, drinking is stupid.”
“Hey, you smoke.”
She nodded, and as if this had reminded her, reached over and opened the small leather pouch that served as her purse, and drew out a fresh pack of cigarettes. When she finally tapped one out, lighting it, she said, “Smoking is different.”
“It’s a nasty habit.”
“Maybe,” she said, seriously considering this as she took a long drag off the cigarette. “You may be on to something there.”
“You want to see Orion?” he asked. He pointed to a group of white specks in the dark sky. “Come on. Lie down. Here, use my jacket. There. Now, look.”
“That’s not Orion.”
“Okay, it’s something else. It’s the unnamed star. Let’s connect the dots and make them into somebody.”
“Like who?”
“There’s Ziggy,” Josh said, drawing an invisible line with his finger, swooping it in the air from a cluster of stars to a single bright one. “See, he’s got his bong.”
“I see it,” she said. “And there’s Tammy. See the boobs?”
5
Josh made a wish on the last star, just before it extinguished.
Bronywn drifted to sleep beside him, her last cigarette falling on the wet grass as morning arrived.
They both woke up at the same time, hours later, in the afternoon on Saturday with Josh’s arm slipped beneath Bronwyn’s neck. He opened his eyes and knew, instinctively, that she had also just woken. She sat up, drawing away from him. Glanced at her watch. “We’re already late. Please tell me the Pimpmobile is running okay.”
6
Ziggy had an acid-flashback tripticular dream, and in it something small and nasty with eyes like green stones on fire and claws like shiny black hooks leapt for him like it was a jaguar from hell.
He awoke and drank an entire pot of coffee before going off in search of the others about to leave on the road trip that would get him away from the drugs for awhile.
He hoped.
But all he could think about, wired on coffee, were the nasty eyes of that little bastard he saw in his dreams.
7
The Pimpmobile was more than its name could ever suggest. Not just a car but a boat on wheels. A big fat honkin’ Lincoln Town Car sedan. Given to Josh by his grandmother when he went to college. She drove her cars hard and put them up cracked and dried out, and often was in accidents, so something always went wrong—a headlight that blinked, a strange push on the brakes, something about the shotgun seat that didn’t feel entirely comfortable. Small problems that could be worked around. His grandmother was named Alfreda, and she used to fart in the car so much that Josh was sure it still had her stink. She had died soon after giving him the car—her smoking and drinking got the better of her—and he missed her. He kept the car, even though it was held together by duct tape and got about ten miles to the gallon. Even though it had some issues—it was a little low in the trunk, and the backseat was covered with tape and smelled permanently like cigarette ash, and there was this noise the car made every few miles that sounded like the squeal of a cat getting hit. Josh took care of the Pimpmobile. He had spent all of Thursday, not studying for his Early American History final, but washing and waxing and tuning up the boat for the big trip.
Here’s how the trip evolved: back in February, Bronwyn’s dad and his new wife moved to L.A. from Chicago. Bronwyn hated the new wife but loved her dad, and even though her dad didn’t want to see her, she told him she was coming for spring break come hell or high water.
Josh’s Pimpmobile was the only ride she could get.
“I can pay all gas,” she told him. “And two nights in a motel.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Josh said.
She looked at him strangely. “Yeah—I do. It’ll take four nights at the most. But I know we can make it in under three if we take turns driving. Plus, I’ve got a radar detector. We can go 100 on some of the desert roads. They’re straight lines with no traffic at four in the morning, and I love drinking a pot of coffee and driving through them before the sun comes up. Plus, we can get other people to pitch in on gas.”
Because Griff and Tammy and Ziggy were going to go too the car would be packed, but Bronwyn claimed the shotgun seat three weeks before the trip. The day of the trip—which turned into Saturday evening—the only person who hadn’t shown up at the designated spot was Ziggy, and they had to drive around for forty minutes before they found him in the college library, asleep on one of the leather couches.
He opened his eyes to see all four of them standing over him.
“What the hell?” he asked.
“I don’t love druggies,” Bronwyn said as she took a long, last drag off a dying cigarette. “I just don’t like it.” She pointed down at him. “No weed goes on this trip. Understood? Beer’s fine, although no drinking and driving. No drugs.”
“Beer’s a drug,” Ziggy moaned, scratching himself under the arms like a dog after fleas.
Bronwyn squinted and pursed her lips. “I think you know what I mean.”
The road trip began about an hour later, and for a while nobody said a word—as if none of them was sure they’d get along for the entire drive to the West Coast.
By nine they were on the main highway toward Tennessee.