This One Time With Julia (7 page)

“I doubt it.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got to make it another condition of you staying here in my apartment.”

“Okay, Marcus. I promise I won’t ever name anybody Alexander.”

“That’s terrific. I’m so glad that’s out of my way.” He patted my hair again. “Goodnight, Joe. Tomorrow we’ll get all your stuff out of the dumpster.”

It was good to be back in my bed, I’ll admit. Marcus had thrown away my favorite pillow, but I had packed my good pajamas and my bed still smelled like me. I was starting to drift off to sleep when Julia snuck in. Her palm was cooler than my forehead.

“Are you sleeping?”

“No.”

“I don’t like how he talks about you.”

“Like how?”

“Like there’s something wrong with you. I don’t believe half of the things that he says, and I like the way you are. Why does everybody have to grow up so fast? Marcus is one of these people who wants everybody to be the same. I think it’s pretty funny that he’s accusing Alvin of ruining you, when all Alvin wanted to do was let you stay how you were.”

“That’s what Alvin says.”

“He’s right about one thing. You’re pretty good company. What will happen to you here?”

“I guess Marcus is finally going to whip me into shape.” I tried to laugh. Julia was sort of stroking my forehead the whole time we were talking. She would start at my eyebrows and stroke all the way down to the back of my head. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. “Or I could go with you.”

“I had the same idea,” she said. “I could probably get you a job at the hotel. I’ll be working there all summer, up until I leave for college.”

“All my clothes are in the dumpster.”

“I know it’s really bad, but I think you should just leave them. I really think we should just run away.”

She helped me find my shoes, and within two minutes we were sneaking out of the house together. Marcus came out of the apartment building in his bathrobe while we were getting into Alvin’s car. He didn’t seem angry, just very disappointed. I walked over to him to say good-bye.

“Running away again,” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised. But for some reason I am. I thought this time would be different.”

“I know I can’t come back. I’m sorry, Marcus.”

Across the street Julia was starting the car. She waved at Marcus. He huddled in his bathrobe and wrapped it tighter around himself.

“How come nobody likes me, Joe? There are a lot of things to like about me. I handle all my responsibilities. Instead, this girl runs off with you. What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know. Good-bye, Marcus.”

“Goddamn you, Joe. When are you going to learn to act like a man?” Marcus suddenly got really angry. I had the feeling that he was about to punch me. “I’m so tired of you. Get out of here. Just get the hell out of my sight.”

But when I tried to leave he grabbed my arm and pulled me close, and I could feel him spitting on my ear, “One day you’re going to realize your actions have consequences. What will you do then?” Across the street Julia was starting the car. Marcus glared at her. I tried to pull my arm away. “That girl’s too complicated. She knows something she’s not telling you.”

“Good-bye, Marcus,” I said. “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”

He went inside without looking back at me again. I walked across the street and got into the car. Julia smoothed my hair a little bit and said, “Lights, Joe.” I turned on the lights and we drove away from Marcus’s house, past the McDonald’s and onto Ventura Boulevard.

“Do you know how to get there?”

“East,” she said. “We just keep going east.”

Julia helped me find our way onto a wide, fast highway, where driving was even easier than on the city streets, and after a while I couldn’t taste Los Angeles in the air anymore, and we were cruising through an open desert.

“You’ll have to tell me when we reach someplace you’ve never been,” said Julia.

“It’s already happened.”

“You’re so full of surprises. You never mentioned being so good at basketball.”

“That’s because I’m not a show-off.”

“Why don’t you do something with it?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like play in college. Or play on a pro team somewhere.”

“I can’t play with people yelling at me all the time. I always go on tilt.”

“That’s like the fourth time I’ve heard you say that. What does that mean?”

“You play poker. Alvin must have told you what it means.”

“He never taught me that word.”

That one stumped me for a while. I drove through the dark, empty desert for a pretty long time before I thought of a way to explain it.

“Poker is really hard and it’s always impossible to know what you should do,” I said finally. “But sometimes, even when you know exactly what to do, you go ahead and do the wrong thing anyway. You bet when you know that you’ll probably lose.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

“Some people get all drunk, or get angry at the cards, or they start to believe in different kinds of magic. Some people just can’t remember they’re supposed to be trying to win.” This last part was something Marcus was always telling me. “Marcus never goes on tilt.”

“What about Alvin?”

“Sometimes. But in a different way.”

“What about you?”

“I’m usually on tilt.”

“I think I’d like to be on tilt for a while.” She rolled her seat way back so she was basically lying down. “We forgot about Max,” she said.

“That’s okay. Marcus will take care of him, for sure. He loves dogs, and it’s easier than taking care of me.”

“Listen to us, Joe. Listen to the way we’re talking. What would people think if they could hear us? When did my life become totally insane?” Julia bit her arm for a second, like she was trying not to scream. “I just realized I have no idea what I’m doing. Absolutely none.”

She closed her eyes and soon I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I drove all night and it was pretty easy except for this one place, climbing over all these mountains that I’d never realized were so close, when I got suddenly a little sad, because I felt like I was falling off a cliff away from Marcus, instead of just driving away from him. I wasn’t waiting for Alvin to come home anymore. I was off on my own. Even now, remembering that night, it still makes my chest thump to think of riding off like that with Julia in the dark. Alvin and Marcus were the only two people I’d known my whole life, and I had no idea when I’d see either one of them again.

Julia was sleeping and the sun was rising when the car suddenly broke so badly that I couldn’t drive it anymore. I had to pull off the road next to a whole bunch of corn growing next to the highway. Julia woke up pretty quickly.

“What’s happening?”

“The car’s broken.”

She rubbed her face and looked around.

“Do we have a flat?”

“I don’t know. It just stopped working.”

She leaned over and looked at the dashboard. “The car’s not broken. You just ran out of gas.”

“What?”

“You didn’t see the light?”

“What light?”

“Are you really not familiar with the gas light?”

I started to go on a very nervous kind of tilt. I felt like I was back at school, and that some teacher was asking me to read something impossible. I had never driven a car long enough to run out of gas before.

“I guess I just missed it.”

“You don’t know about the gas light?”

Julia squeezed up against the car door like she wanted to be as far away from me as possible. From the way she looked at me, and the way she kept shaking her head out the window, I got this very strong feeling that she didn’t want me to come with her to Tennessee anymore, that I’d have to spend the rest of my life in this cornfield, or else go back to Los Angeles and beg Marcus to let me back in his apartment one last time. But then slowly her expression changed. I could see her whole body relax, and now she seemed more curious than anything else.

“How do you do that?” she asked me.

“What?”

“You’re so calm. Alvin was never this calm. Were you just born this way?”

“I can’t remember.”

“The strangest part is that I feel it’s actually contagious. It’s a nice way to live. You just drive the car until it stops working. You don’t even care why. Then you just sit and wait for the next thing to happen.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not. I’m really not. In fact, I want you to teach me. And you must have a pretty calming effect on me too, because the old Julia would be totally freaking out right now. I can see why people like you, like Marcus says. You just float along. No matter what happens, you take everything in stride. We’re in the middle of a cornfield, totally out of gas, and it barely affects you at all. How do you manage not to stress out about this?”

“I don’t even have to think about it.”

“I always worry about everything. So what’s your secret? How do you handle this situation, for example? Do you start walking to a gas station? Do we wait to get randomly rescued by a stranger? Do we just sit here until we starve to death? Am I asking all the wrong questions?”

“I guess we should start walking,” I said.

We got out of the car and walked along the grassy shoulder of the road. About an hour later we finally found a gas station, and I took out some money from an ATM, and bought this little can of gas, and also a Skor bar, and some milk. While we were walking back, Julia asked me, “Is it true what Marcus said? Can you really not read?”

“I could read if I wanted to.”

“I promise it doesn’t bother me at all. I just want to know. Actually I think it’s interesting. I never met anyone our age who couldn’t read.”

“You should see my signature,” I said. “The handwriting is really very good.”

“You can’t, then.”

“Not yet.”

“This is so unbelievable. I just have no idea what I’m doing. What on earth is happening to me?” She balled up her fists and screamed silently up at the sky. “I’m getting a crush on a boy who can’t read.”

It took me a few seconds to realize what Julia had just said. I’d had crushes on other people before, but this crush was on me, and I could feel it washing through my whole body. I can remember how nervous and excited my stomach was, like I was constantly about to burst out laughing. Most of all I felt lucky, like I’d hit an impossible shot, or drawn an impossible card. Everything was different between us from that moment on. For the rest of the day, we switched drivers every few hours, and I watched the gas light carefully at all times. Julia would sort of lean into me once in a while, and it started to feel like we’d been doing this forever.

I found out the country doesn’t really change too much as you are driving through it in a car, at least not as much as I thought it would. The restaurants we saw at the end were mostly the same as the ones we saw at the beginning, and I was happy to find out there was going to be a McDonald’s every fifteen miles the whole way. At the first one we stopped at, I asked the manager if she knew Francisco. I just wanted to know if he’d finally kissed Carmen, but I saw that I’d only confused her.

“You’re ridiculous,” said Julia afterward. “How is she supposed to know who any of those people are? But on the other hand—” She frowned, and started rubbing her temples. “What do I know? I’m no expert. Who am I to judge? Who am I to say McDonald’s employees don’t all know each other? Maybe there’s a huge retreat every year, with bonding activities. There’s probably a community online. Do you ever feel like you have two voices in your head, constantly arguing with each other?”

I wasn’t sure I even had one voice, but I didn’t want Julia to feel like she was going crazy. “Once in a while,” I said.

We drove the whole second day without getting to Tennessee. I had no idea it could take so long to drive somewhere. We stopped for gas as it was starting to get dark, and Julia saw a sign for a place called the C’mon Inn, which she thought was a really good name, so we decided to stop there for the night.

I was starting to find out that every motel in the world was different. The C’mon Inn felt more like a house than either of the motels that I’d seen in Los Angeles. It had a bathtub and a flat-screen TV and little toaster oven, too. We walked to this grocery store about a block away and got a bag of pepperoni and some bagels and some shredded cheese, and then Julia made these little bagel pizzas in the toaster oven. We didn’t have any plates in the room, so we ate off one of the bathroom towels while we shared the other as a napkin.

I can remember almost everything about that night. After dinner Julia beat me at poker for a while, and we watched a little TV, an exciting show about some different people who all wanted to be famous chefs, and then we unfolded the sofa bed for me. While Julia went into the bathroom to wash her face, I lay down and tested the bed. I could still feel pieces of metal under the mattress, but it was more comfortable than the last one I’d slept on, or maybe I was just more tired. It took me a few minutes to find my pillows hidden in the closet, and I was fluffing them when Julia came out of the bathroom. She had on the same white shorts as she’d worn the night before, but this time her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing this very shiny lipgloss that smelled like cherry candy. I was pretty sure she had just brushed her teeth in there, but I can remember that she was also chewing gum.