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“Let’s go somewhere,” he says. “Where do you want to go?”
Again, I think there has to be a right answer to this question, and that if I get it wrong, I will ruin everything. He wants something from me, but I’m not sure what.
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
He takes his hand off my arm and I think, okay, wrong answer. But then he takes my hand.
“Come on,” he says.
There’s an electricity in his eyes. Power. Light.
He closes the locker and pulls me forward. I don’t understand. We’re walking hand in hand through the almost-empty halls. We never do this. He gets this grin on his face and we go faster. It’s like we’re little kids at recess. Running, actually running down the halls. People look at us like we’re insane. It’s so ridiculous. He swings us by my locker and tells me to leave my books here, too. I don’t understand, but I go along with it—he’s in a great mood, and I don’t want to do anything that will break it.
Once my locker’s closed, we keep going. Right out the door. Simple as that. Escape. We’re always talking about how we want to leave, and this time we’re doing it. I figure he’ll take me out for pizza or something. Maybe be late to fifth period. We get to his car and I don’t even want to ask him what we’re doing. I just want to let him do it.
He turns and asks, “Where do you want to go? Tell me, truly, where you’d love to go.”
Strange. He’s asking me as if I’m the one who knows the right answer.
I really hope this isn’t a trick. I really hope I won’t regret this.
I say the first thing that comes to my mind.
“I want to go to the ocean. I want you to take me to the ocean.”
I figure he’ll laugh and say what he really meant was that we should go to his house while his parents are gone and spend the afternoon having sex and watching TV. Or that he’s trying to prove a point about not making plans, to prove that I like being spontaneous better. Or he’ll tell me to go have fun at the ocean while he gets lunch. All of these are possibilities, and they all play at the same time in my head.
The only thing I’m not expecting is for him to think it’s a good idea.
“Okay,” he says, pulling out of the parking lot. I still assume he’s joking, but then he’s asking me the best way to get there. I tell him which highways we should take—there’s a beach my family used to go to a lot in the summer, and if we’re going to the ocean, we might as well go there.
As he steers, I can tell he’s enjoying himself. It should put me at ease, but it’s making me nervous. It would be just like Justin to take me somewhere really special in order to dump me. Make a big production of it. Maybe leave me stranded there. I don’t actually think this is going to happen—but it’s possible. As a way of proving to me that he’s able to make plans. As a way of showing he’s not as afraid of the future as I said he was.
You’re being crazy, Rhiannon, I tell myself. It’s something he says to me all the time. A lot of the time, he’s right.
Just enjoy it, I think. Because we’re not in school. We’re together.
He turns on the radio and tells me to take over. What? My car, my radio—how many times have I heard him say that? But it seems like his offer is real, so I slip from station to station, trying to find something he’ll be into. When I pause too long on a son
g I like, he says, “Why not that one?” And I’m thinking, Because you hate it. But I don’t say that out loud. I let the song play. I wait for him to make a joke about it, say the singer sounds like she’s having her period.
Instead, he starts to sing along.
Disbelief. Justin never sings along. He will yell at the radio. He will talk back to whatever the talk radio people are saying. Every now and then he might beat along on his steering wheel. But he does not sing.
I wonder if he’s on drugs. But I’ve seen him on drugs before, and it’s never been like this.
“What’s gotten into you?” I ask.
“Music,” he says.
“Ha.”
“No, really.”
He’s not joking. He’s not laughing at me somewhere inside. I am looking at him and I can see that. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not that.
I decide to see how far I can push it. Because that’s what a needy girl does.
