The Disenchantments (22 page)

It makes sense, now, why Bev decided against photographing the girl in the Bianchi Market, or Melvin, or the man at the River Bar and Grill. Why Meg would ask to borrow the camera when she saw how pretty Alexa looked standing by the ocean. Why one of the sisters would find a rare moment of Bev and me, together in the way we’re supposed to be, and take our picture.

We have photographed the trip we were supposed to have. The one where all any of us felt was happy, and the world was only beautiful, and all of the colors were the brightest versions of themselves.

“They’re kind of like your sculptures,” I say.

“Yes,” Alexa says. “All these perfect little worlds.”

“Bev,” Meg says. “Thank you.” She doesn’t go on and on about how amazing her room looks, but there’s enough gratitude in the way she says it to put Bev at ease.

“You’re welcome.”

“Now all I need is my duffel,” Meg says, “and we can head to the hotel.”

“Your aren’t staying here tonight?” I ask her.

“Fuck no.” She play-punches my shoulder. “I’m gonna stay with you guys until you pry me from the fender as you drive away.”

We park in the lot of the Kennedy School, where they’ll be playing their last show tomorrow night, and make our way out to the sidewalk to round the building. I hadn’t realized that this place used to be an actual school, but here it is, taking up an entire city block, yellow and white with columns and a lot of windows.

Meg walks ahead of the rest of us, her bass case over her shoulder, plucking flowers from the vines that line the street. Pink flowers with shiny green leaves.

“The flowers match your hair,” I say. But she’s talking to Bev and doesn’t hear me. She leaves a trail of decapitated blossoms behind her. I watch the sidewalk as I walk, careful not to crush them.

We enter through the heavy front doors to an open room with polished wood floors and all of these choices of where to go next: straight through to a restaurant in back, down the hall on the right or the hall on the left, or through the door that says P
RINCIPAL’S
O
FFICE
. It’s like we’re little kids and starting school all over again, but this time around we’re not afraid to ask for directions when we need them, so Alexa walks into the office, comes back out with a map to our room and to the theater, where we can drop off the instruments for the show.

She leads us down the hallway to the right. We pass a room labeled D
ETENTION
. Its door is ajar, revealing the tiniest bar I’ve ever seen, with dark green walls and red velvet bar stools. Soon we reach the theater. I drop my part of Alexa’s drum kit off on the stage, and go back out to wander the halls while they talk to a man about logistics for tomorrow night. I find a colorful bathing pool, a couple of restaurants, a cavernous bar that used to be the school’s boiler room.

But what really interests me are the halls themselves, because they are covered with paintings and photographs, and all of the images are of little kids. A lot of them are painted in a folk art style, with school-themed borders and smiling children in the center. Others are pure Americana: perfect
houses and farm buildings and girls in skirts and boys with book bags. Scattered among the paintings are black-and-white photographs of the real teachers and kids who went to school here. In one, girls stand in the front of the school, dressed in long skirts and black tights, each one of them holding a wooden birdhouse. Another is a class photo. Kids sit at their desks in a crowded classroom, looking up at the camera. Some of them hold books open in their hands; others just smile. A boy in the front row wears round glasses and a striped shirt, suspenders, and a stiff, serious smile.

A plaque under the photo explains that the photograph was taken in 1915, two years after the school opened. I look at the kids’ faces. They’ve all died by now; I can understand that. They were born decades before my grandparents. But even though I can comprehend the fact that they’ve all died, it’s hard for me to imagine that they lived their lives. They must have gotten through school and done some good things and other things they might have regretted. This tiny, pale girl with barrettes and pursed lips, this round-faced boy who forgot to look at the camera, this curly-haired blond girl, peeking out from the back row and grinning—somehow, they all figured out how to grow up.

My phone buzzes.

“All right,” Jasper says. “I know you’re gonna say that Seattle isn’t exactly next door, but it’s only three hours away, and I got it all worked out for you.”

“He’s there?”

“Yeah, and he wants to meet you. My brother said he cracked up when he told him the story. He can see you anytime tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I say.

Alexa and Meg planned for us to explore the city during the day, not worry about getting anywhere on time. We’re going to have to say good-bye to Meg and leave the next morning.

I guess he hears hesitation in my voice because Jasper reminds me, “The tattoo is dope. My brother is straight talented, but this is a level all on its own. You’ll be missing out if you don’t go, man.”

“I’m gonna figure it out,” I tell him. “I just have to talk it over.”

“Don’t let them talk you out of it. I’m texting you his number as soon as we hang up. Peace.”

We slip our keycard into the door and enter an old classroom. Chalkboards line the length of the wall, scrawled over by the previous guests. The first thing Meg does is erase everyone’s messages and write The Disenchantments in huge block letters.

This time there’s one bed, a cot, and a sofa. I just set my stuff on the floor and decide not to worry about where I’ll end up.

“I’m gonna get the rest of my stuff,” I say.

Bev left some things in the bus, too, so we walk outside together.

“Jasper called,” I tell her. “I think I’m going to drive to Seattle in the morning.”

“It’s our last day, though.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But it’s just a three-hour drive. I’ll make it back before the show.”

I unlock the bus and we collect what we came for.

“But we found the tattoo,” Bev says. “We found Drew and Melanie and they were great.”

She’s right, but I know that Drew and Melanie aren’t enough. If there’s something else out there for me, I want to discover it.

“It’s important to me to see this through,” I say.

“But what’s so great about it? Driving all the way to Seattle to meet some random guy? So his tattoo’s cool. So what?”

I shut the bus and walk out to the street. And then I realize something.

“We always talk about everything but we never
do
anything,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean everything,” I say. I shouldn’t have to say more than that. Bev should know.

“We’re just talking,” Bev says, her voice higher pitched than usual, almost shrill. “It’s not a bad thing. Not everything we plan has to be about real life. You don’t actually
believe that we were going to graffiti that building with The Disenchantments picture, or go live on that apple farm next summer, or take pictures of every single person we meet. All of that stuff, it’s just something to talk about. None of it is anything that people actually do.”

We’re on the sidewalk now, next to the street. The cars pass us, one by one, and years’ worth of conversations come back to me like flashes of light, all of these plans we made, all of the things we swore we would do but never did.

“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that we’ve failed at anything, it’s just that we’re people like everyone else. There isn’t some exception for us just because we feel different.”

Another car comes. The wind rushing by is enough to make me lose my breath.

“I just want a normal life,” she says. She’s looking at me with these wide, plaintive eyes, and when I look away she grabs my elbow so I’ll face her again.
A normal life.

“What does that even mean?” I ask.

She’s looking at me like I’m supposed to understand something.

“It means that I want to go to college.”

She says this and everything around us fades. The trees in the distance become just black shapes on the horizon. The music from the school becomes the faintest murmur. The cars on the road vanish and all that is left is Bev and me in
the dark, and after so many days of wondering why, all I can think or say is, “Oh.”

“It sounds like you figured it out already, back at the motel. It was right after I found out about my mom, and all I wanted was to get away. And we kept watching those movies and Paris looked so incredibly far away and I knew that if I said it, you would say yes. At first it was just something we were talking about, like almost everything else. It was a fantasy. Whenever I couldn’t handle real life, I could call you up and you would be ready to plan with me. And yeah, it was more elaborate than anything else we had ever talked about doing, but even when we were sitting at the computer for hours looking at trains and cities and drawing maps and researching hostels, there was always a part of me that knew I was just doing it to escape. And I know how that must sound to you and all this time I’ve been trying to come up with a way to explain it that doesn’t make it seem like I thought it was stupid or trivial because it never felt that way. It just felt . . .” She looks up the sky, and I follow her gaze to more stars than I knew could exist, stars you can’t see back home because of all the other lights.

She says, “It felt like preparations for an imaginary life.”

We’re quiet for a minute, and then someone walks past us and the trance is broken.

She takes a breath. “After a while I started to realize that you were completely serious. Everyone was thinking about
college and weighing options and every afternoon when we got to your house I watched you throw your college brochures into the recycling. And then we told a few people and everyone at school started talking about it, and soon it was real. It was happening. And I know that it’s horrible of me, but I never actually wanted it to happen.”

She reaches out, touches my elbow again. I guess the darkness doesn’t matter: she doesn’t need to see my face to know how much this hurts.

“I love making plans with you because it feels like we can do anything. Like our lives are these amazing adventures where anything can happen and we’ll never be limited by stupid shit like jobs and student loans and, like,
jury duty
. Like we can just be spontaneous forever. And free.”

“But I think that
can
be true,” I say. “At least parts of it.”

We stand a couple steps from one another with our arms wrapped around our own bodies, trying to get warm, and I remember looking at ourselves in the mirror on the last morning of school and seeing how alike we looked. And now, it’s become clear, we couldn’t be more different.

“It might be true,” she says. “For some people. For
you
. But I need to know that I’m making the right decision.”

She’s crying now, shivering, headlights and starlight cast over her bare shoulders and arms.

“I almost told you a million times. Every morning, I woke up and told myself that
that
day would be the day. That I wouldn’t let another hour pass without telling you.
But over and over I would start to tell you, and then not say it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how I could have done this. I knew that going to college was what was right for me, but this is so fucking scary, Colby, because up until now the rightest I’ve ever felt is when I’m with you.”

So here is her reason, what I’ve been waiting to know for the last five days and eight hundred miles. It isn’t complicated, it isn’t surprising. It is simple and sad. She told me thousands of lies, so many that it could take forever to forgive her, and there are so many things I could say back to her right now. About being cowardly. About being deceitful. About being reckless with someone else.

But I don’t want to say any of that. Instead, I step toward her and she drops her arms from over her chest. I hold her close and she holds me.

And it doesn’t take forever, all it takes is this.

Early in the morning, I climb into the bus alone.

I drive for what feels like a long time, listening to music and watching out the window as the road takes me out of the city, past cranes and water towers, a huge silver sign with a yellow outline of Oregon, letters spelling M
ADE IN
P
ORTLAND
with a deer silhouette leaping below it. Outside of Seattle, I hit morning traffic for a while. A family in another VW bus waves as I inch past them.

Halfway across a green metal bridge is the sign that tells me I’m entering Washington. I drive farther. Out the window, I discover a field of small planes parked in dry grass. A huge granary. Casinos, a body of water to the left, ships,
lumberyards. An RV dealership in a patch of wildflowers. Everywhere I look is blue sky, evergreens, metal.

And then, Seattle.

I follow my directions into a neighborhood overlooking freeway underpasses. I find the café where René told me to meet him when we texted last night. It’s narrow and long, set between a store with electric guitars hanging in the window and a trendy barbershop.

I take a parking spot on a side street. I’m an hour early, so I decide to walk around, but I don’t go far because an art store appears on the corner, and as soon as I duck inside I feel a little bit home. Here is my favorite brand of paintbrushes and the best colored pencils, a blank sketchbook that’s exactly like my almost-full one, the paint smell that reminds me of starting something new, of how it feels to mix colors until they are right, of the moment before I touch the canvas with the tip of the brush, when there is still a chance that what I create will match whatever image I’ve dreamed up.

I grab a basket and wander the narrow aisles until I have found what I want: a tube of silver acrylic paint, two paintbrushes, a new black pen, a sketchbook to replace my current one, and a roll of black butcher paper. I pay with what’s left of my road trip money and try not to worry about how little is left. I have a whole account full of money that was supposed to last a year in Europe. So when I hand the guy behind the counter most of what’s left in my wallet, I remind
myself that cash is not the problem; the problem is the not knowing.