NEBRASKA HAS NOTHING TO OFFER

Man, did it piss down during the night. Simon and I had been playing our usual game of musical doorways, moved from one to the next by shop owners, the police and the doorways’ regular tenants. We ended up under some dense bushes in Dolores Park, in a little vestibule hollowed out by someone now either dead or with a job. The foliage did pretty much nothing to keep out the rain, so we huddled under a square of tarpaulin Simon had found out the back of a Home Depot.

When Simon pulled the maps out of their Ziploc bags the next morning, they were perfectly dry.

‘Well, that’s good news anyway!’ he said, watching me wring water from the tail of my sleeping bag. He ignored my expression. ‘Do you want some breakfast first, or shall we try to get up to Bernal done and then stop for morning tea?’

‘We might as well get on with it.’

Three years of this, plus infinity; I’ve been doing this since I was three. Since my parents and Simon’s dad got together over dinner one night, dinner and a slide show (I think it was my parents’ honeymoon trip to Tahoe, the slide show) and decided it would be a great idea if our families went on a little trip and, you know, saw the country. Someone pulled out the Rand McNally road atlas, and they all started poring over it. Drunk as hell, I’m sure they were.

‘Let’s see the country,’ I bet someone suggested.

‘Yeah’, someone else would have chimed in. ‘Our kids should really see the country. This great country of ours, our kids should really see it.’

‘Yeah, really see it.’

‘All of it.’

‘Really see all of it.’

‘You mean all of it?’

‘All of it. They should really see the country. All of it.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yeah, all of it,’ I think someone else would have piped up right about now. ‘I mean, if we say we’re going to see the country, well, who are we to pick and choose between this state and that state, this national park and that national park, this scenic highway and that scenic highway? Who do we think we are, saying any part of this great country is any better than any other part of this great country? What, what’s that look for? You think Nebraska has nothing to offer? Really, you think Nebraska has nothing to offer?’

By the time they’d finished, they’d all sworn some insane pact that we were actually going to see the whole country. Simon’s dad, who was the finicky type – I mean, the dude loved orienteering – had already marked up his maps of Texas and Oklahoma into 25 foot squares and had planned our route through both states. He’d had my mom ordering topographic maps of the rest of the country at ridiculously detailed scales so he could mark those up too. The next day two out of the three of them would have been nursing hangovers and laughing at their ridiculous plans, but by then Simon’s dad had already been up for four hours: he’d scoped out a minivan he was going to buy, he’d quit his job and pulled all his savings out of the bank. I still don’t know how he convinced my parents to join in, but those guys were always up for a lark. I guess that’s why we never really had a house and why I ended up named after a rat.

So anyway, yeah: from the time I was three we were traveling the country, sometimes with Simon and his dad, sometimes just our family out on our own. It had its highlights, of course; no school, for example. But then mom and dad fell out with Simon’s dad, and a bit after that they had their accident, and that’s how I ended up with Simon. A few years later his dad died too and since then it’s just been the two of us. Just me and him for three years now, since I was eleven and he was thirteen. If I’d been the older one we’d have moved to the country by now, got a pony and a freakin’ British bulldog, worked in a canning factory or bussing tables in some diner to pay the rent on our shotgun shack. But Simon’s the older one. Good old Simon. I guess he inherited more than his shocking looks from his dad because it never even crossed his mind that we should give up on this whole square-standing business. I know, it makes no sense.

So anyway – oh wait, I already said that. Oh, what the hell: so anyway, here we are in San Francisco, holed up under a bush in Dolores Park, arguing about whether to grab a coffee and a pastry from the Dolores Park Café or whether to start checking off the squares between 21st and Cesar Chavez, Dolores and Mission.

San Francisco you say little girl? Does that mean you’ve made it all the way from your home town of Stillwater, Oklahoma, clear across the country to the Great Bear State?

Why yes, dear listener, it means just that. Oklahoma: check. Texas: check. New Mexico: check. Arizona: check. California: hold your horses! We’ve done everything south of the City by the Bay. From here we head north (Yosemite! That bit I’m excited about. God, I hope we get there before it snows) and then we start back east again: Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas … Did you see that movie, Forrest Gump, where the retarded guy keeps going backwards and forwards across the country and no one has any idea why someone would do something like that? Yeah, well, nuff said.

Can you do math? I’m fourteen years old, right. We’ve been doing this since I was three. That makes, hmm, eleven years. In eleven years we’ve covered four and one half states. Admittedly, we had to redo some of them after Simon’s dad took issue with the way my parents were measuring their squares – there was a whole chunk of the Texas Panhandle he insisted on doing over. OK, so let’s say we’re covering around five states every ten years, allowing for that remeasuring. And there’s, what, fifty states in the USA? Yeah, that’s what I heard too. Fifty minus five … forty-five divided by five … that’s nine, times ten years. Yep, that’s ninety more years. Even if I convince Simon that Hawaii and Alaska don’t count (how would we even get to Hawaii, for starters? I mean, we’re teenagers. We have no jobs. We’re not going to swim there), they’ll probably have made Puerto Rico and Australia states by the time we get around to finishing. I guess that’ll be some 104^th birthday party I’ll have to celebrate when we wrap this thing up.

‘Sarah?’

‘Yeah what?’

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yeah, I’m ready. Stop nagging!’

I guess he’s been asking me for ages. I wasn’t listening. ‘Hey Simon, can we get a burrito for morning tea? I saw in that book you got that there’s some great place at 24^th and Mission.’

Simon was always hitting up backpackers for their guidebooks, everywhere we went. He’d give them the whole spiel about how we’d headed off from home with our parents’ blessing to see the country, that our parents were commune dwellers, that we’d been home schooled. Those backpackers loved that shit. So we’d had some Moon guide to the South-West, but a few weeks back Simon had scammed a Lonely Planet California and Nevada guide from some girl waiting to catch the Green Tortoise bus up to San Fran from LA. It was her last stop, she said, San Fran. She’d be flying home from there. She wouldn’t need her guidebook anymore. We both wondered where she’d even been if San Fran was her last stop. Had she seen Chula Vista? Lancaster? Needles? Tulare? We were betting not, but we were also betting she’d fly on home to New Zealand and tell all her friends she’d ‘seen’ California.

This square standing thing was turning us into real snobs.

‘So can we? Huh?’

‘Sure. Do you have enough money left to have a burrito?’

‘Yup. Been saving up for it since I saw that in the book.’

Where do we get our money from? Good question. Mostly we just ask and let the good lord provide. We both make a point of keeping ourselves clean. We don’t wear T-shirts with metal bands on them; we’ve got no piercings or filthy dogs, no sign of any drug habit. Simon’s extreme mental illness and bizarre addiction certainly aren’t visible to the casual onlooker. So we do alright. People feel sorry for us. And so they should; well, for me, anyway. Simon hates asking for money, but the one time we tried working for it (illegal and under the counter of course, in some Mexican restaurant in Phoenix, washing dishes) he was driven crazy by the time it took out of our square standing schedule. So he pretty much has to just bite the bullet. It would be neat if some rich aunty died and left us a mint (not, like, a breath mint, stupid; I mean, a whole pile of cash), but if we even have a rich aunty we’ve never heard of her, and I guess that means she’s probably never heard of us either. Imagine it, though; if we got, like, a thousand dollars we could get that place in the country. Surely if we had a thousand dollars Simon would give up this whole stupid thing. Surely!

‘OK, if you want to get down to 24^th before we starve to death,’ Simon was saying, ‘we’d better get on with it. Are you sure you don’t need anything before we set off?’

‘Nope, I’m fine.’

‘Not even a drink of water?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘How much money do you have left, by the way?’

I pulled out the purse I’d bought back in LA after we got a big haul from some Norwegian couple who not only bought us lunch but gave us all their leftover US dollars before heading for the airport. It was Hello Kitty. I liked it. Simon thought it was a waste of money and wanted to know why I couldn’t keep using the black vinyl wallet he’d found me in a dumpster. Some things he just doesn’t get.

‘I’ve still got twenty-eight dollars and some change.’

‘Great. We can probably go a few more days without a break to raise more then, right?’

‘I reckon so. Do you think we’ll be able to wash somewhere before then, though? Maybe at one of those bathhouses we keep seeing around here?’

Simon gave me a look, but I had no idea what he meant.

‘What?’

‘Those bathhouses aren’t for washing, Sarah.’

‘So what are they for?’

‘Um. Look, never mind.’

Simon liked to act like he knew all kinds of things that I didn’t know about, just because he was seventeen. But he didn’t. Where would he even have found stuff out that I didn’t know? He didn’t have any, like, seventeen-year-old friends. He had no friends, and neither did I, and we never had. For us, Friends was just some TV show we saw advertised on billboards. But it didn’t stop him acting all superior.