Amy & Roger's Epic Detour (21 page)

“Yes,” Roger said. “He lived on my floor last year, and was always crashing in my room because he kept getting locked out of his. He lost his key more than anyone in the dorm’s history. The RA finally stopped charging him for replacements, because she was starting to feel bad about taking all his money.” Roger pressed a number, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “Voice mail,” he said to me. “Hey, Cheeks,” he said into the phone. “Listen, dude, I’m with a friend in Kansas, and I was wondering if you wanted to meet up. Call me if you get this, it’s almost eight.” He then hung up without saying good-bye, which I was getting more used to now, and placed the phone back on top of his empty M&M bag.

“Cheeks?” I asked.

“Oh,” Roger said, laughing, “it’s just a stupid nickname thing. All the guys on our floor had them.”

“What was yours?” Roger didn’t appear to hear me but looked out the window intently. “Roger?” I asked. “What was—” Before I could finish, his phone started vibrating in the cup holder. Roger glanced down at it, but on impulse, surprising myself, I grabbed it and saw that the display read
CHEEKS CALLING
. I ignored Roger’s hand, which was motioning for me to give him the phone, and opened it. “Hello, Roger’s phone,” I said, sliding to the edge of my seat, out of his reach. Roger continued to try and grab for the phone, causing the car to weave slightly in the lane.

“Hey,” a low-pitched voice on the other end said. “Is Magellan there?”

I turned to Roger, who was still trying to get the phone, feeling the smile taking over my face.
“Magellan?”
I repeated gleefully.

Roger sighed, and his hand drooped. Clearly, this was why he’d been trying to intercept the call. “Yeah,” the voice on the phone said. “You know … Roger.”

“Sure,” I said, still smiling. “Just a second.” I handed him the phone. “Magellan,” I said, “you have a call.”

“It’s just a stupid nickname thing,” he hissed at me, before taking the phone. “Cheeks, hey,” he said. “Listen, we’re in your neck of the woods … what?” Roger glanced over at me again. “Oh. No. That’s just a friend. Hadley’s in Kentucky.”

Now it was my turn to feel embarrassed. I looked out the window until Roger waved at me to get my attention and mimed writing. I grabbed a pen and wrote the address and directions Roger dictated to me for the Wichita Country Club on a Sonic napkin.

When Roger hung up with Drew, he didn’t look directly at me but instead stared ahead at the road, as though there was something to see besides endless highway and cloudy skies. “So Drew says it should take us about twenty minutes,” he said. “I guess he’s just finishing up work.”

“Oh, that’s great,” I said. “Magellan?”

“Well, whatever,” he said, and I noticed that he was blushing slightly. “I told you it was just a stupid nickname thing.”

“I think it’s funny,” I said. “Because of your whole explorer thing?”

“Yes,” said Roger. “But it’s really gotten out of hand. I swear, some of the guys on the floor never even knew my real name. Hadley thought it was really stupid.” He had the tone in his voice that came out whenever he said her name. A combination of wistful and resigned.

“I think it’s funny,” I repeated quietly.

Roger shot me a quick smile. “I did too,” he said. “At first. It’s less funny after six months when people are yelling it at you across the quad.” He pointed to the napkin on the console between us. “Ready to navigate, Chekov?”

I picked up the napkin and smoothed it out, trying to decipher my scrawled directions. “Ready.”

Twenty minutes later, as promised, we pulled up in front of the Wichita Country Club. There was a very intimidating guard in a small wooden house checking cars as they drove through, so we drove a little farther down the street and parked. We’d both gotten out of the car and Roger had taken out his phone to call Drew again when I heard a screech of tires. A tiny red car was careening out of the entrance and heading straight toward us.

“And that’ll be Cheeks,” Roger said, smiling. The car swung around and stopped next to the Liberty. The driver’s side opened, and a round-faced, round-headed person emerged. He was wearing a teal polo shirt, pressed khakis, and loafers. “Dude,” Roger said, walking over to the car. “You look like you’re about to sell me insurance. Or trying to get me to rush your frat.”

“Magellan,” said Drew, and he and Roger did a quick guy hug that seemed to mostly consist of hitting each other on the back. “You happen to be looking at the Wichita Golf Club’s newest golfing assistant.”

“You mean golfing assistant as in … caddy?” Roger asked.

“It’s much more than that,” Drew insisted. “There’s an art to it. I have to choose the clubs. I have to read the greens….” He gestured expansively and must have noticed me as he did so. “Well,
hello
,” he said to me, giving me a big smile, and I noticed that his voice was suddenly deeper.

I registered all of this with surprise, and a growing sense of anxiety. He thought I was pretty. I knew it was probably because of Bronwyn’s clothes, and I felt a flash of anger at her for doing this to me. I liked being invisible. Things were easier that way. I felt my heart pounding as I looked at him, smiling expectantly at me, hating how awkward even the simplest interaction now felt. Old me would have smiled back, and even flirted a little, just for fun. But I just stuck my hands in the pockets of my jeans and stared at the ground, wishing I was still in an oversize T-shirt. “Hi,” I murmured. “I’m Amy.”

“Andrew O’Neal,” he said. “Pleasure.” He looked over at Roger and raised his eyebrows, but Roger frowned and shook his head, and Drew sighed. “Nice to meet you,” he said a little resignedly, his voice back to his normal register. I looked back and forth between the two of them, trying to figure out what had just occurred.

“Now that we’ve been properly introduced,” said Drew, “let’s move on to more important matters. Such as food.”

I hadn’t realized it until he’d said the word, but I was starving. Which was ridiculous, because we’d been eating and snacking all day and hadn’t been doing anything except sitting in a car. Roger looked at me, and I nodded. “Sounds good,” he said to Drew.

“Excellent,” Drew said, heading back toward his car. He motioned for us to join him. “The foursome that I was assisting forgot, for some reason, to extend an invitation to the clubhouse for dinner. So I’m famished. And you probably need a break from driving, Magellan. I think New Way is really the only way to go.”

“New Way?” asked Roger, as Drew opened the driver’s door and Roger opened the passenger door.

“New Way,” Drew agreed, pushing his seat forward so that I could climb into the back. “You’ll see.”

There’s no place like home.
—The Wizard of Oz

New Way, we soon discovered, actually meant NuWay burgers, and was, according to Drew, a Wichita landmark. Wichita itself seemed kind of confusing, with a highway running across the city, dividing it in two. Drew pulled up in front of NuWay Café, the name spelled out in white on a red and yellow awning. We suddenly seemed a long way from the yellow and red arrows of In-N-Out, with palm trees on the cups.
CRUMBLY
is
GOOD
! a sign on the window of the restaurant proclaimed.

We followed Drew into the restaurant, which was decorated with framed black-and-white pictures of NuWay and its customers through the years. It seemed Drew was telling the truth about the landmark thing. He took over the ordering for us and insisted on treating, and we emerged five minutes later with two brown paper bags that smelled delicious and were immediately dotted with faint translucent grease spots. We all got back in the car, and Drew drove us down the highway to Freddy’s Frozen Custard.

“Frozen custard?” I asked. Unable to find a spot, Drew had double-parked and headed inside to get us dessert. I pulled on my seat belt to give it some slack and leaned forward into the space between the front seats.

“It’s a midwestern thing,” Roger said, turning his head to the left to talk to me. When he did, I sat back a little—I hadn’t realized how close together our faces would be if he did that. “I discovered it this year. It’s like ice cream, but a little thicker. It’s good.”

“I bet it’s no Twenty-one Choices, though,” I said, referring to the frozen yogurt place in Pasadena, taking a chance that Roger would know it too.

He smiled at the name. “Love that place,” he said. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I was thinking about home, about California, and how it seemed very far away at the moment. Roger leaned forward a little and turned around more toward me. “Frozen yogurt,” he said, looking at me with a smile. “Such a California girl.”

I smiled back, and silence fell between us. I took a breath to say something, when the driver’s door opened again.

“And I’m back,” Drew said, dropping into the car and handing three plastic Freddy’s cups, red spoons sticking out of the top, to Roger. “Prepare to experience a Concrete,” he said. “Nirvana contained in a frozen treat.” He pulled out of the parking lot with a screech of tires and sped out into the intersection, throwing me back against the seat, causing Roger to slam against the passenger-side window, and prompting a cacophony of honking from all around us.

I felt myself begin to panic, and my stomach started to churn. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, tried to block out the memory of a screech of tires and the terrible scraping metal sound, the feeling that I no longer had control of the car, the sickening spinning sensation and the way that time had seemed to slow down.

“Drew!” Roger said sharply. I opened my eyes and saw that he was looking at me, worried. “Could you slow down a little?”

“Why?” asked Drew, above the rap that he had cranked up.

“Just do it,” Roger said, an edge I hadn’t heard before still in his voice.

“Fine,” Drew said a little petulantly, but he slowed down and started driving more calmly. I felt my own heart rate begin to decrease and my breath start to come more normally. It wasn’t happening again. I was here, now. And Roger was here with me. I was safe.

You okay?
Roger mouthed to me, and I nodded and tried to give him a smile. I’d thought that I was getting better at reading him, but I hadn’t considered until then that it could be going both ways.

In about twenty minutes, we pulled into the staff entrance of the Wichita Country Club and swung around into the employee parking lot, which was almost totally deserted. It was fully dark out now, and clearer than it had been before. There were still clouds in the sky, but they were moving across the blackness, revealing the moon and stars, then blocking them out again.

“What are we doing back here?” Roger asked. “You putting in some overtime?”

“I promised you the ultimate Wichita experience,” said Drew, putting the car into park. “I’m delivering.” He got out, pushed his seat forward, and offered me his hand to help me out of the backseat. “Milady?”

I looked away from the hand and climbed out on my own. Old me would have smiled and taken his hand and said,
Why, thank you, good sir
and maybe made a
Camelot
reference. I just stared down at the ground while Drew locked the door.

Roger held out his free hand, the one that wasn’t carrying our dessert, to Drew. “Keys,” he said. “It’s for your own good.”

“Good call,” Drew said, handing them over. “Where were you yesterday?” Drew led the way forward, and I fell in step next to Roger. Two of the cups were looking precarious, and I reached over and took them from him. He gave me a quick smile, and we hurried to keep up with Drew, who was a surprisingly fast walker. We crossed the parking lot and passed in front of what must have been the main country club building. It was imposing and white, with columns and bored-looking valets in red jackets, who were hanging out in front, smoking.

“Cheeks!” two of them called to Drew as he passed.

“I’m not here,” he said. “Or on the back nine. You didn’t see me.”

“Got it,” one of the valets called, and Drew gave him a salute as we walked by.

“They call you Cheeks here?” asked Roger.

“Word got out,” he said, glancing back to where Roger and I were power walking behind him. “It caught on.”

We had walked beyond the main building by this point and passed a large swimming pool that reflected the moonlight, a lone water wing bobbing in the shallow end. A little farther on, I could see deserted tennis courts and a practice wall with a white line painted across it to represent the net. The lights above the practice wall were turned on, and as we got closer, I could see that there was a girl there, playing. I slowed for a moment and watched her slamming the ball against the wall, and then returning her own hit as it came back to her, over and over again.

When Charlie had been playing, back when we were younger, when he’d been ranked and the hope of the local tennis coach, my father had painted the same line on the side of our garage, and on most nights, I’d hear the rhythmic smacking of the ball against the wall. When he quit two years ago—or was kicked off the team, I was never sure which—the absence of the sound was the hardest thing to get used to. It was like I kept listening for it, even though I knew it wasn’t going to come back.

The girl missed one of her own shots and walked to pick up her ball, stretching a little as she did so. She saw us and waved with her racket. Then she turned back to the wall and continued playing, switching to her backhand. She was wearing all-white tennis clothes, and under the bright lights, she looked exotic and out of place, a large moth in a spotlight that shone directly down on her.

Drew made a sharp turn to the right, and Roger and I followed, as he led us onto the golf course.

“Dude, can we be here?” Roger asked.

“Of course not,” said Drew, not slowing at all. “Have you a point?”

Roger glanced at me and shrugged, then hurried to keep pace with Drew. On impulse, I kicked off my flip-flops and carried them, walking barefoot. The golf course grass was dense and close-cropped, and it almost felt like I was standing on top of it, not sinking down at all. I dragged my toes back and forth across it for just a moment before running to keep up with the boys.