The Driver
Part One
Trey says it makes him feel like he's a man when he puts a spike into his vein. He draws up the hit and says things aren't quite the same. To Chick he sounds just like Lou Reed, just as strange and lonely and sad. Billy and his girlfriend, Sam, make mild noises of assent, sprawled on the beat-up couch, enveloped in cigarette smoke and the fuzzy aura of their own high.
Chick sits crosslegged next to the stereo, frozen in the act of putting in a new disc. She watches Trey as he lays the needle on the card table, bites his lower lip, and leans his chair back, face half shadowed by the single floor lamp. He sighs, locks eyes with her -- it is this instant of contact, a hot streak that shoots down her spine and spreads across the backs of her thighs, between her legs, that she has waited for, that she would never miss.
"It's my life, and it's my wife," he croons. His eyes roll closed, spring open again, he takes a half step from the table and vomits thinly into the Chock Full O' Nuts can they use as an ashtray.
"Hey," groans Billy, pointing at the can, "Hey, man." Sam rolls on top of him, whispers in his ear, and they dissolve into laughter.
"Chickie chick, where's that music?" Trey draws the back of his hand across his mouth. "You're supposed to take care of these things."
Chick remembers the disc in her hand and places it in the cradle. It's one of her father's Doors CDs; she stole it from a box in the garage, one of many boxes of his belongings that her mother has forbidden her to touch.
"Strange days have found us," he sings, flashing his eyes at her, his face dark with stubble. In her dreams that face hovers above her own; she wakes with aching arms, reaching to draw it closer. "Strange days have tracked us down."
"Turn it down," Billy says. "Shit." He glances through the small window with a view of his house. Fresh snow reflects the moonlight, the outside world infused with silver. This cramped room over the garage won't hold them for long -- soon they'll want air. They'll want the music louder, the feel of the road, they'll want speed. That's why she's here.
Trey flops onto the couch, on top of Billy and Sam. Sam grumbles, slips out from under him, crawls across the room and lays her head in Chick's lap. Arcs of smoke hang in the air like ghosts.
"You're so pretty," Sam's blue eyes skate across Chick's face. "I think you're the prettiest girl ever." Billy and Trey mumble along with the music, heads tilted against the wall.
"I bet all the boys at Eisenhower are after you," Sam says. Chick pushes a strand of hair out of Sam's eyes. Trey's Adam's apple slides up and down. As far as she knows, none of the boys in her high school thinks she's pretty. But she doesn't care -- they're just children. Since her best friend, Susie, left for college in the fall she hasn't wanted to go to any of their dumb parties, to steal from parents' liquor cabinets and smoke cigarettes in cul-de-sacs. She'd rather be with Trey and his friends, even if he only wants her there to drive them from place to place. Racing along icy back roads, sitting in this claustrophobic room, even shivering in the old barn behind Lundgren's Field, she feels different with them, more awake and solid, as though what came before had been only a rehearsal. As though, through Trey, she can see the whole adult world yawning open, offering itself to her.
"I wish you were with us, Chick," Sam murmurs, wiping her nose on Chick's blue jeans. The music has quieted. "I wish you could try it, don't you? You know we'd take care of you."
Trey is on his feet. "Shut the fuck up," he roars. Sam covers her face and giggles. He turns to Billy. "Can't you tell her to keep her mouth shut?"
Billy seems stuck to the couch as though he'd fallen there from a great height. Chick watches Trey's jaw muscles working, his wild stare.
"Chick isn't like that," he says. He pours himself into the chair, picks his cigarette out of the ashtray and stares at it. "She's a little girl. She's pure."
When the next song begins, he raises his eyes to her. "You're lost, little girl," he sings. He leans forward, blows her a kiss. Chick bites the tip of her tongue, her face flushing hot. Everything about her suddenly feels childish -- her clothes, her lip gloss, her short haircut. She reaches for the cigarettes and lights one, blows a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. The ghosts stretch and twist and come apart. Trey closes his eyes and smiles.
"Turn the music back up," he says, far away again. "Fuck Billy's mom."
Of course Chick's not her real name, but if that's what he wants to call her that's fine with her. In the months since she became their driver she's gotten used to the name, even come to like it -- it's something he has given her, something that separates her from the other girls in town. When she hasn't seen him in a few days she misses it, misses the drawn-out way he says it. She sits in her bedroom in the light of the television, adorning her notebooks with swirly, psychedelic graffiti: Chick. Chick. Chick.
Her mother doesn't like it one bit. "It's inappropriate," she says, in the swift voice she reserves for discussions of her daughter's reputation. "Next thing you know this whole rinky-dink town will be calling you that." She doesn't tell her mother that most of the "rinky-dink town" -- her father's expression - already calls her that. Outside of school, in the pizza parlor, the convenience store, the Iron Horse Tavern, she is, simply, Chick.
"What about college interviews?" her mother goes on, painting her nails at the kitchen table while Chick does the dishes. "Who's looking for a student named 'Chick'? 'Hi, I'm Chick,'" she says in a babyish voice. "'I want to study nuclear physics.'"
"I hate physics," she says over the running water.
"And what about boys? What will they think of a girl named Chick?" Her mother fans her fingers under the light, plucked eyebrows arched in a way that makes Chick want to throw a plate at her. It's been nearly three years since Chick's father flew to California to try to be an actor. Her mother insists he's coming back, and often threatens her by saying, "When I tell your father about this..." But it's clear he isn't coming back, just as it's clear that her mother's obsession with Chick's reputation is some weird way of ignoring this fact.
"Maybe they'll think I'm a slut and they'll want to go out with me," she says.
"Don't be a foul-mouth," her mother says, slumping in exhaustion. She squeezes her eyes shut, hands flat on the table, her customary expression of long suffering. Chick turns to hide a smile. "Your father and I aren't raising a foul-mouth. Now go do your homework. You'll be lucky if you ever see those car keys again."
But the next day, Friday, she'll walk to the beauty parlor after school as always. She'll spend an hour sweeping the floor, opening cartons of conditioner; when they lock up, her mother will hand Chick the car keys. After a dinner of frozen pizzas, her mother will fall onto the couch, flip through the TV channels, and when Chick opens the front door she'll call out, drowsily, "Try to be quiet when you come in."
She makes sure the car always smells like smoke, though she herself is not allowed to smoke. Better that than the sour stink they make, cooking in the backseat, pulled off in the woods by the old barn. Better that than the smell of puke, accidents that leave crusty patches on the upholstery, faint stains on the windows. In the trunk, they keep a sack of sawdust from Billy's job at the Home Depot, to soak up the mess.
Trey calls on Saturday, needing a ride to work. When she pulls up to his mother's house, he's standing in the street, only a flannel shirt for a coat, eyes red and downcast. As they pull away, he rolls down his window, shakes his middle finger at the house.
"We have to make a stop," he says, lighting a cigarette. Brown slush hisses under the tires, a sky empty of motion, tire swings and rusted tractors stand close to the road.
"It's almost quarter after," she says. "Your father's going to kill you." Trey works at the Iron Horse, his father's tavern, though he's been fired twice since summer. A run-down building in the center of town, the Iron Horse has been in his family since the Depression; Trey's father lives upstairs with his girlfriend. Most Friday nights involve a stop there -- Trey loves going into the bar when he's high, sometimes setting up scores in the bathroom. He says it serves his father right.
"I've got things to take care of," he says. "Claude will have to wait." Chick, too, is late for work; when she arrives at the salon her mother will look away, scissors snipping furiously.
On the state road, another bright and biting afternoon, Chick holds the wheel tightly, wind knife-sharp through the open window, windshield mapped with a fine lattice of frost. Winter came early this year, the Hudson Valley frozen solid all the way down to New Paltz. Her mother says the cost of heating oil will be the end of them. "You don't understand, Ted," she hears her mother whisper into the phone. "This isn't eff-ing Burbank."
Coming into town, the fields to either side flow sparkling white, black spindled trees in the distance. She drives slowly through the curves, foot light on the gas in case they hit a patch of black ice -- she has nearly mastered the skill of letting the car slide without stabbing the brakes, waiting for the right instant to turn the wheel and glide out of the skid. It feels magical to her -- that suspended moment when your intentions cease to matter, when the firm hand of gravity abandons you to fate. Trey says it feels like dying.
"You're quite the little artiste," he says, examining one of her notebooks, the colorful doodles on the back cover. She tries to grab it, but he holds it beyond her reach. "When we go to Mexico you can sell paintings in the market," he says. "You can be our little sugar mama."
She takes the cigarette from between his fingers. "How do you expect to get to Mexico if you can't even get to work on time?"
He sighs, leans against the door. "Chica, chica, chica. Everything's different down there. None of the hassle. I'll just stay home and drink margaritas and write poetry -- like Burroughs. Like Neil Cassady."
She turns after the gas station, pulls up in front of Pete Cavallaro's trailer. "Things to take care of" means buying his private stash, a new habit since the cold weather set in. The others only shoot up once or twice a week, and always at night, contenting themselves with pot and cheap beer the rest of the time. Chick is the only one who knows about Trey's stash. It's their little secret.
The car idling at the sidewalk, he leans over, whispers in her ear. "Chickie can you help me out?" His voice is low and warm on her skin. Up the street, a young woman carries a baby out of her house, swaying precariously on the slippery sidewalk.
"You still owe me from last week," she says.
He takes a strand of her hair between two fingers, touches it to his lips. "Claude's paying me on Monday," he says, his hand resting next to her leg, veins criss-crossing bone, knuckles chapped red and ragged. "Who loves you, Chick?" he says.
She takes twenty dollars from her purse and he disappears into the trailer. Out the window, the young mother loads her baby into a station wagon, her face stretched and vaguely terrified. As they pull away, the plume of chalk-white exhaust hanging in the air, Chick pictures Trey's face when he's high: something draining out behind his skin, all that sadness fading into the background. Once, he left the needle dangling from his arm; Chick came to his side, trembling as she slid it out of him.
She asked him to describe what it felt like, whether it was really better than anything in the world. "Is it better than sex?" she said, not that she knew what that felt like either. "That's what someone said." They were lying on a mountain of hay bales in the old barn, her hand on his abdomen. He stared at the rafters and chewed a straw.
"You're too smart for that," he said. He pulled his arm from under her and sat up. The barn smelled of damp wood, an explosion of light beyond the door. "One day you'll get the hell out of here. Unlike most of these losers."
"You're smart, too," she said, pulling him back. "You can go anywhere you want." She thought of the places they could go together, imagined them in her mother's car with all the windows down. "What about Mexico?" When she touched the side of his face he drew away.
After fifteen minutes, he has not come out of Pete's trailer. She blows the horn several times, dreading her mother's silent reprimand. Finally the door opens and Trey stands on the step, talking to someone inside. He saunters slowly toward her, eyes bright, a familiar, dreamy smile.
"Don't worry about me," he says when she rolls down the window. "I'll walk." His words slip around one another, sliding over his grin.
"You're late, Trey. It's almost one o'clock." He squints, bites his lip. "I've been sitting here waiting," she says. "It's not fair."
He swats the air in her direction. "I've already got a mother," he says, taking a few steps back toward the trailer.
She guns the engine and U-turns in the street, watching him grow smaller in the rearview. She vows to stay angry at him this time, make him try to win her back. But she can never stay mad for long. She knows this isn't really him, this selfish kid who acts like he doesn't need anyone. Behind all the mystery and cigarette smoke and anger, she knows he's just lonely and sad. Stopping at the corner, she looks for him in the mirror, hoping to see him running after her. But he's just a small patch of color, standing against a monochrome world. That's him, she thinks, that's the boy she wants: the sad one.
Part Two
She inherited them from Susie, whose older sister had graduated with Sam. Susie had lost her virginity to Trey -- an event she'd described, enigmatically, as "really intense" -- then spent her senior year driving them all around until she left for college. They were semi-legends in the high school, older kids who'd never left town, the kind that Chick's mother referred to as "hoodlums." Trey's was a name whispered among smokers and jocks alike, one that required a brief, respectful silence after it. When Susie invited her to meet them, Chick hesitated; the idea of meeting them felt strangely threatening, the allure too strong.
On a hot night early in summer, they'd all hung out in Susie's backyard and drunk beer, Chick sitting quietly on a lawn chair, smoking cigarettes until her scalp tingled. Trey and the others talked excitedly about saving up money to go live in Mexico. Someone had told them you could live on the beach for just a few dollars a day. They would take a bus to the border, then hitchhike south until they found the right place. They'd know it when they got there, they said.
"Do you speak Spanish?" Chick asked, piping up from her lounge chair.
They stared at her as though she'd appeared out of thin air. "Hola, señorita!" Billy leered. His girlfriend elbowed him and he pretended to fall off the picnic table.
"How can you live there if you don't speak Spanish?" she said. "How will you get jobs?" The plan sounded outlandish, the kind of thing people only did in movies. How could a bunch of kids from Upstate just move to Mexico?
"Who is this kid?" Billy said. "What the hell is she talking about?"
Trey turned to her and she felt his eyes move across her face. They tugged on her skin, like the tiny lead weights her father used when he used to take her fishing.
"Do you speak Spanish?" he said.
"She's in Mitchell's honors class," Susie said. "She's totally his little pet."
Trey was still watching her. "He says I have a good accent," she shrugged. He leaned closer, as though he had pulled a cloak over the two of them. When he smiled something warm stirred under her skin.
"You should come with us," he said.
Amid the insect sounds of summer, and the lemony smell of candles, all she could think to say was, "Okay."
She dreamed about him that night, and for days she couldn't get his face out of her mind, his deep eyes and plump lower lip, thin shoulders, the vulnerable way he ran his hand through his hair. On the last day of school, she had to recite Keats' "When I Have Fears" to her English class; it was Trey's face she envisioned while memorizing the lines, Trey standing alone on the shore of the wide world.
The next weekend, the five of them drove from party to party in Susie's station wagon, then walked through the woods to the old train trestle and smoked a joint. They stared into the trees while Trey walked across the trestle, arms out for balance, blending with the shadows on the other side. The tracks were out of service now, but Chick could remember when she was little, how the freight trains rumbled and clattered through town in the dead of night. Her father would sit on her bed when she couldn't sleep, describing the far-off places those trains were going. It gave her an odd feeling to realize how long ago that must have been.
She watched the spot where Trey had vanished, until his shape filled in the darkness again. He crouched next to Susie and whispered, "Is she cool?"
Susie shrugged. "Do whatever you want. I don't care."
While Chick watched, he pulled off his belt and cinched it around his arm. There was the flick of a lighter, Billy burning the bottom of a soda can -- their movements were so practiced and easy, but until she saw the syringe Chick refused to admit that she knew what was happening. Susie kept her back to them, legs dangling over the trestle, arms braced at her sides as though she might push off and fly away.
Billy took the needle and nodded in her direction. "Does she want any?"
Now Susie turned. "Are you fucking nuts? What are you, fucking stupid, Billy?"
"Alright, forget it," he muttered. He handed the can to Sam and pulled a length of rubber from his back pocket. Chick caught a whiff of something pungent, almost familiar. "You don't have to be a complete bitch."
Trey sat back on the gravel. "None for the new chick," he hummed. He lowered himself until he was lying across the old railroad ties. Chick felt herself leaning forward, not wanting to let go of his gaze. "She's just a little baby," he sang, improvising the tune, the words drifting into the night and the tracks speeding into darkness beyond him.
Another Friday night at the Iron Horse, they take a table near the back and wait for Pete Cavallaro. He says he has great stuff for them, and they've managed to scrape together five hundred dollars, raiding the Mexico fund for the last hundred. If the dope is as good as he says, it might last them a month. Still, they would have missed the appointment entirely if Chick hadn't dragged them out of the garage. She knows their habits better than they do, can tell them at any given moment how much shit they have, how long it will last, who to call to get more. Where they put the number.
The restaurant is mostly full, families sharing burgers and baskets of fries, the bar lined with men in their twenties and thirties, t-shirts stretched tight over strong shoulders. Black and white photos hang on the walls, railroad workers leaning on sledgehammers, hobos waving from departing trains. The old freight yards are next door to the tavern, derelict boxcars and dead machinery glinting dully in winter light.
"That's what I call living," Trey says, pointing at an old photo, leaning his chair against the wall. "They'd just go from one end of the country to the other, like Jack Kerouac. They didn't even know where they'd end up."
"That's how we could get to Mexico," Billy says. "We'll just jump on trains and save all that money for weed."
"There are no trains anymore, dumbshit," Sam says.
"There are trains somewhere, dumbshit," he says.
"What about food?" Chick asks, taking her own cigarette from the pack. "How are we going to eat?"
"We've been through this," Trey says. He rolls his eyes at her in mock condescension. "That's your department. You're the sugar mama."
"Chick's not your sugar mama," Sam says. She puts an arm over Chick's shoulders. "She's a woman. Besides, she's not coming to Mexico. She's got better things to do than hang out with a bunch of losers."
"Who are you calling a loser?" Billy says.
"I could go to Mexico," Chick says, avoiding Trey's stare. "Why not?"
Before she met Trey, she'd only ever been in the Iron Horse with her parents, for birthday hamburgers or other small extravagances. The night before her father left for L.A., he brought her here, just the two of them. It was the first time she'd drunk beer in front of him -- he poured it into her glass when no one was looking, winking as he held the bottle under the table. When they got home, her mother was hurrying from room to room with a bottle of cleanser, scrubbing light fixtures and windowsills with violent strokes, polishing picture frames and mirrors until they squeaked.
Trey's father comes out from behind the bar, wiping his hands on his apron. He's a big man, tall and fleshy, with thinning white hair. He has the same sad eyes as his son -- heavy lids, irises dark and glassy as hot coffee.
"I thought you were going to work tonight," he says.
"I'll work tomorrow," Trey says, blowing smoke at the ceiling. Chick secretly likes Trey's father. She likes the sureness of his hands when he's working the beer taps and the way he sometimes gives her a free Coke and says, "A cocktail for the lady."
"When you say you'll work tonight, I expect you to work tonight," he says, straightening a photo over Trey's head. "Tomorrow I don't need you."
Trey smirks. "What a nice thing to say to your son, Claude."
"Trey," he frowns, "your mother and I have talked about this--"
"Don't talk about my mother," Trey says. His father crosses his arms. A few of the men at the bar are watching them; one of them catches Chick's eye and smiles. The front door opens, Pete Cavallaro shakes snow off his coat and heads their way.
"It was my fault!" she blurts out, half rising from the chair, spilling her soda glass across the table. Trey's father squints. "I thought he was supposed to work tomorrow. I'm sorry. I swear it won't happen again."
"He doesn't need you to tell him when to go to work, Chick."
Trey spots Pete across the room and gets out of his chair, drops his cigarette to the floor and steps on it. "I don't need anybody to tell me anything."
"Obviously you do," his father says. "Where do you think you're going?"
"I have to go puke. This conversation is making me sick." His father puts a hand on his shoulder, but Trey shrugs it off and heads to the bathroom, throwing open the door so it smacks against the wall. Pete follows him inside and they all watch the door shut. Ice cubes and soda drizzle onto the floor.
For a long moment, no one says anything. One ice cube glides across the table. When Trey and Pete come out of the bathroom, slapping each other on the back, Billy and Sam quickly mutter goodbyes and follow them to the door. Chick puts on her coat slowly, avoiding Trey's father's eyes.
"You ought to be careful," he says, turning to watch them leave. The snow has started again, glittering orange and silver in the streetlights out the door. "You seem like a smart girl. Too smart for a kid like Trey."
Chick fingers the keys in her pocket. "Trey's smart," she shrugs.
"You know, I didn't know your dad too well," he says. "But if I were him, I wouldn't want you hanging around a fuckup like my son."
She can feel the men at the bar watching. She knows how quickly Trey will grow impatient, waiting outside in the cold, the little bags in his pocket waiting to be opened. An hour from now, the three of them will be rolling around like kittens, a soft, loose affection she can only watch, wondering what it would be like to be inside of it.
"My dad doesn't live here anymore," she says. She hurries past the stares and out the door. As it closes behind her, she gets a last look at Trey's father, stooped over the table, wiping up their mess with a rag.
Part Three
Her mother says the salon has saved their lives; since her father left, Chick has had to work after school and weekends, sweeping wet hair clippings and taking inventory while her mother and Betty, her mother's partner, gab over their clients' heads. "So you can learn responsibility," her mother says. "So you'll never have to depend on a man."
At least Trey gets paid, Chick thinks, glumly sorting through months of fashion magazines, staring out at the parking lot and the crisp February sky, the veterinarian's office across the street. It's been warmer the last few days, a weak Indian summer, storm drains rushing with water, dead grass poking through the snowpack. Trey says the weather is a sign. He stands outside Billy's garage in a t-shirt, says he can feel the warm Mexican winds calling him.
Between clients, her mother sits next to her in the waiting area. She picks up a magazine and flips through the pages. She stares at Chick's hands, rough bitten nails, touches her daughter's hair with a pained look.
"What are we going to do about you?" she says. "You're too old for this tomboy stuff."
"Please," she says, bringing the magazine closer to her face.
"How do you expect to find a boyfriend? You think the boys at college are interested in tomboys from the boonies?"
"I'm not a tomboy," she says.
"You don't have a boyfriend, honey?" Betty says, unwrapping foil strips from a client's hair. Betty is overweight, unmarried, and nosy, and has a different hair color each week. "What about that boy from the Iron Horse, Claude's kid?"
"Bite your tongue," Chick's mother says. "I wouldn't let her date that one in a million years."
Chick looks up. "I can go out with whoever I want," she says. She turns back to the magazine, flips the page nonchalantly.
"He is cute..." Betty says.
"I heard he's into drugs," says the woman in Betty's chair. Chick can't see her face. Betty considers this, comb and scissors held motionless.
"My daughter's smarter than that," her mother says, tossing the magazine on the table. "She's waiting for a boy with some ambition. That's how Ted and I have raised her."
Betty and her client exchange looks. "Maybe he is my boyfriend," Chick says. Her mother narrows her eyes. "Maybe he is," she says.
Betty goes back to snipping. "Well is he or isn't he?" Chick can feel her mother's temperature rising. She flips another page. "Is he or isn't he," Betty says again.
"Yes dear," her mother enunciates dangerously. "Is he, or isn't he?" Chick studies a perfume ad. Let her mother sweat it out, she thinks. She's 17 years old -- she can date anyone she wants. She doesn't have to tell her mother every last little thing.
Betty takes off her client's cape and flings hair onto the floor. "Well just be sure you're not giving him the milk until he buys the cow," she laughs.
Her mother glares.
Out in the woods on a Sunday afternoon, just the two of them. His father has fired him again, thrown him out in the middle of a shift and said not to come back until he's ready to take some responsibility. Trey says he might just leave for Mexico, hitch a ride with a trucker in the middle of the night. Chick says his father will change his mind. If not he can get another job, she says, maybe there's something he can do at the beauty parlor. The thought of him leaving feels like looking into a deep well, dropping a pebble and never hearing a splash.
"You should come with me," he says. "We should just take your car and go."
She sits on a stump by the frozen stream, ice that has loosened in the warm weather creaking behind her. The sun is a dull smear in the drab sky and the trees shed fat, heavy drops that tap lightly in the snow. "It's not my car," she says.
He turns in place, squinting up into the branches. The stuff Pete sold them was the best they'd ever had, they all agreed. This morning Trey snuck another dose from their stash; Chick let him use her scarf to tie off.
"We could leave it at the border and mail back the keys," he says, opens his mouth to catch melting snow on his tongue. "Just you and me, Chickie. Think how much fun we'd have." It's a scene from one of her dreams: the two of them speeding through the desert, or lying on a beach, palm trees waving overhead -- his head in her lap, she eases the lines from his forehead, makes room for his sweet, sad smile.
"What about Susie?" she says, squeezing wet snow into a ball. "Don't you want to take her instead?"
"Susie, Susie Q," he says. "Man, she used to be so great."
"Is she still your girlfriend?"
He closes his eyes and smiles. "We had lots of fun, me and her. Back in the day."
She'd been teasing, but his vagueness sets her on alert. "What does that mean?"
When he doesn't answer she throws the snowball at him; it makes a dull thump splatting against his coat. He looks down with a surprised, almost comic expression, clasps his hands over his heart.
"What does it mean? Is she your girlfriend or isn't she?" she says, scooping another snowball. She suddenly wants to hit him hard, really hard, to smash that shell he keeps around him.
"Is she or isn't she!" Chick shouts, chasing him around the clearing, mashing wet snow into his hair. "Tell me!"
He sticks his tongue out and dodges another snowball, takes two steps onto the frozen stream and stops. He looks down at his shoes, up at Chick, then breaks through the crust with a loud plunk and waving arms.
"Oh my god," she says, half laughing. He stands shin-deep in the stream, darkness spreading up his jeans as the whoosh of freezing water flows around him. "Get out of there!" she says. "You'll get hypothermia."
When he doesn't move, she comes up behind him and slides gingerly onto the ice, grasping his sleeve for balance. The ice ticks and groans under her shoes.
"It's cold," he whispers. She takes his elbow, wraps an arm around his body, cautiously leans toward shore. "I can't feel my feet," he says.
Water seeping up around her footsteps, she leads him out of the stream and they stumble to the bank. Trey lands on top of her, snow in their sleeves, their shoes, both of them panting clouds of vapor.
"Are you okay?" she gasps. Where his forehead rests on her collarbone, she can feel her heart beating hot and fast. She can smell his skin, the odor of cigarettes in his hair; he is shaking like a small animal in her arms. Before she knows she's going to do it, she leans forward and touches her lips to his ear.
He makes a small sound, shivering in her arms. She covers his ear with her mouth and exhales warm breath; she kisses the side of his face, his jaw, then twists from under him and presses her lips to his, rolls him on his back and covers him with her body.
"What are you doing?" he mutters, arms flailed to the sides. She kisses his eyelids, his neck, works her arms into his coat and squeezes. He tries to turn his face away but she takes his lower lip in her mouth and bites hard.
"Come on, stop" he says. She holds him as long as she can, arms tangled in his clothes, until he pushes her off into the snow. "What the fuck, Chick?"
"Why don't you like me?" she yells. She smacks her hands against the cold ground. "I just want you to like me." She hates the sound of her voice, high and petulant.
He struggles to his knees, legs dark and waterlogged. "Jesus," he says, spreading his arms. "Of course I like you. You're my little friend. You're my Chickie."
"Stop calling me that," she says.
Now he takes her chin in his hand, his voice hiding a laugh. She can see the pulse at his temple, the blue cast of his lips. "Chickie Chickadee," he sings, and when she tries to turn away he holds her fast. "I like her, and she likes me..."
"I don't want to be your little friend," she says. She shoves him, hard enough that he falls back and sinks into the snow. She grinds her teeth to keep from crying, but she can already feel the first drop snaking down the side of her nose.
"I'd be a really good girlfriend," she sniffles, her voice so pathetic it only makes her cry harder. "I'd be better than Susie. I'd be the best girlfriend you ever had."
From far away she can hear voices, Sam and Billy calling for them, frail notes in the cold dusk. Trey crosses his arms behind his head, his hair peppered with snow. A wolfish grin slides over his face, the transparent shell closing around him again. "You and Susie, man," he says. "It's hard to keep up with you, you're both so busy leaving."
Part Four
That time in the barn, he'd said it felt like something rising inside you, the way warm bread rises and expands, filling empty spaces you didn't know you had. Chick lies awake with the pillow to her chest, wedged between her knees -- her own empty spaces are not secret to her. She knows what would fill them up. Three days, then four, she does not hear from him. Billy and Sam haven't seen him, no one answers at his mother's house.
"Tell him I'd like the apron back," his father says when she calls the bar. "And do yourself a favor, Chick -- find a new boyfriend. That kid's going nowhere fast."
Friday night she watches reruns in the dark, listening to the wind gusting outside the window, the mumble of her mother's voice through the wall, talking to Chick's father in California. She twists the bedsheets in her hands, replaying the moment again and again: the cool, dry feel of his lips, the wet snow, the way his body felt under hers. She would never leave him, she tells him in her mind. Never ever ever.
The next day she says she's too sick to work, drops her mother at the salon and drives straight to Billy's. The temperature has plummeted again, icy winds freezing all that had begun to thaw. The fields are stretched smooth with ice, blue and dull and sculpted, a world of polished bone. Each turn of the steering wheel is a gamble, the roads full of secret pitfalls. If he couldn't understand she would show him, she would make him believe. She would get underneath that surface and stay there - and one day he'd wonder why he'd tried to keep her out.
Billy and Sam are lying by the stereo, studying a record jacket. Chick tosses her coat onto the couch and rolls up her sleeves, lights a cigarette with shaking hands.
"I want to try it," she says. Her words hang in a cloud of smoke, suspended in the windowlight. Billy passes her the joint and she takes a long hit while Sam eyes her curiously. The old Dylan record ends, needle lifting off the vinyl, returning to its carriage.
She reaches under the couch, sweeping her arm until she finds what she's looking for. "You said you'd help me," she says, opening the pouch and taking out three bags. "I do all this stuff for you. I drive you everywhere."
Billy looks at Sam, who says, "Chick, wait--"
"I don't want to wait. I'll do it myself. I know how just as well as you do," she says. "I just thought you were my friends."
Sam and Billy whisper to each other while Chick turns the packet between her fingers. Her stomach and her heart are doing little drumrolls. The room is as bright as she's ever seen it.
Finally, Billy looks up. "You sure about this?"
When the needle breaks her skin she hiccups once and tears spring to her eyes. She watches a wisp of her blood snake into the tube, then the warm thread travels up her arm, up and inside of her. She realizes she is biting her bottom lip just like Trey. "I wish it were my first time," Sam says, hugging her from behind, stroking her hair -- and when Chick exhales all the anxiety travels out of her body, flows from her temples and her fingertips and her navel and convects into the air. The windowglare softens, and with the next breath she is crying freely, though it doesn't hurt, she can't smile enough to let out the warmth in her chest, her throat, her fingertips.
"Oh Chick," Sam whispers. She can hear her heart, someone's heart. "Oh, oh baby."
She doesn't know she's going to vomit until it's rolling over her chin, onto her sweater -- there's no pain, only a little smooth, sour belch, she spits the rest into the can and stretches on the floor, head in Billy's lap. Sam disappears to put something on the stereo -- in a moment there's a tinkle of bells, a beautiful guitar, a voice that enters all of her body at once.
"Please," she hears herself say, lying on her back, two moon faces appearing above her. "Please make it louder." And they do.
Someone hands her a cigarette and she sucks hungrily, feeling the smoke move through her extremities. When the song ends she asks them to play it again, still louder this time, bass pouring up and around her -- but it can't touch her, the world outside is bright and cold but it can't touch her. Sam's fingers are in her hair, running along her arms; she loves Sam now, loves her so fiercely, her sweet smile and touseled hair, and she loves Billy, too, the way he tries so hard to be tough but is really just a kid, like all of them. When the song ends, the room filled with stillness and light, she looks up to find Trey standing in the doorway.
"We're going to do it!" he says. "We're totally going to do it!" The next song begins and Trey walks to the stereo, clicks it off. "Claude and I had a long talk," he says. "He said if I work full time for six months, he'll buy us bus tickets."
Chick stares at his mouth -- his smile unguarded and hopeful, a small boy with beautiful eyes. She has only seen him smile this way when he's high, but he isn't high now. He looks at each of them in turn, at their cigarettes smoking in the ashtray. "We're going to fucking Mexico," he says, his voice already fading.
Chick decides to stand up and take him in her arms. She will hold onto him, show him that she understands, she's one of them now. The backs of her arms have started to tingle and itch. He looks into her eyes and then quickly -- very quickly -- away.
"What the fuck's with her?" he says.
She tries to sit up, stretch out her arms, but the itch has spread to her armpits, across her belly, the palms of her hands.
"Look, man," Billy starts, but Trey is already moving across the room, lifting him up by his shirt.
"What the fuck did you do?" he says, pushing Billy away so he stumbles against the table and falls onto the couch. "You assholes, you stupid fucking assholes!" he says, throws his pack of cigarettes at Billy's face. Chick rolls herself sitting in time to see him kick the coffee can, wet cigarette butts and brown mucus splattering the wall, watches him flip the card table, empty bottles raining around her, CDs scattering across the floor.
"Wait," she says, standing, trying to take his hands, but he won't let her touch him. The itching is hot down her back, her neck. "Baby listen," she says, but he shakes her off, backs toward the doorway.
"You shouldn't have done that," he barks, eyes burning at Billy and Sam.
She steps in front of him. "Baby," her voice echoes in her head, and finally it's time to tell him, she has to tell him, the thing she's been waiting to say: "I'll never leave you."
He blinks at her, shakes his head. Finally, he laughs, a cruel laugh that twists his mouth and sours the warmth in her belly.
"Grow up, Chick," he says, then turns and storms down the stairs.
It's dark by the time she gets home, pulls slowly into the driveway, her body tingling and exhausted. There's a sweet taste like postage stamps in the back of her throat and her cheekbones ache from crying. The darkness of the garage takes her by surprise, she touches the brakes too hard, releases, slides forward with a dull thud, a crush of glass, the car stalls and dies.
Dazed, she gets out and gropes for the light switch, surveys the damage: her father's boxes, two stacks mashed against the wall, strewn across the hood of the car. CDs and cassettes spilling everywhere, old clothes, one brown shoe, a half-crushed tackle box. A sheaf of glossy black-and-white photos lies scattered on the concrete, his name in large block letters -- her father's headshots. She picks one up and stares at it, his face as she remembers it, dark-haired and handsome, one eye opened wider than the other as though he knew all your private thoughts. She sits on the concrete and holds the photo in her lap, wondering if he looks the same as he did three years ago. She was fifteen when he left. A baby. She wonders if he'd even recognize her now.
"What in God's name..." her mother says, standing in the door to the house. She surveys the garage, the cockeyed car and ruined boxes. "Are you alright?" She bends and touches her hand to Chick's face; Chick reaches up for her mother's arms.
But her mother sees the photo in her hand and backs away. "Are you drunk?" She peers at her daughter. "I can't believe it. You're goddamn drunk!"
"No, Mom--" she says, but her mother is screaming, waving her hands in the air.
"Get inside! Get in the house right now!" Her mother hauls her by the arm, shoves her through the door. "I trusted you," she screams, pushing Chick down the hall. "I treated you like an adult and this is how you repay me? Just wait till your father hears this!"
Chick's mouth is thick with saliva, a salt-hot taste on her lips. "Mommy--" she moans.
"You're never driving again! You're not leaving this eff-ing house again until you go to college." Chick tries to put her arms around her mother, but her mother pushes her away. "And no more hanging out with those goddamned hoodlums. You may think you're going to screw up your life, young lady, but I am not going to let you."
In the doorway to her room Chick stops, miserable at the sight of her single bed, the heart-covered pillowcases, notebooks strewn on the floor: Chick. She steadies herself, catches her breath. "I can do whatever I want," she mumbles.
Her mother stops in the hallway. "What did you say?"
"I can do what I want," she says, her voice getting louder, until she's flinging the words at her mother's face. "I can go out with whoever I want and I can go wherever I want and there's nothing you can do about it! Just because you fucked up your life doesn't mean I have to do what you say. If I want to fuck up my life that's my choice. I get to choose."
Her mother's eyes are enormous. For a moment she thinks her mother is going to slap her face. But instead she crosses her arms and purses her lips into a smile. She looks straight at her daughter and bursts into laughter.
"You get to choose?" she says, with something that sounds strangely like sympathy. "Baby, you don't get to choose. No one does."
Part Five
When she sees him again it is almost spring. The winds have stalled and dropped and the thaw has begun. For the last few weeks she's gone from school to the salon to home, her spare time filled with homework and extra chores, browsing the college applications her mother piles on the table. Good to her word, her mother has not let her so much as touch the car keys; Chick takes revenge by smoking in her bedroom, leaving ashes all over the windowsill. After her mother goes to sleep, she steals a glass of wine from the bottle on the counter. She doesn't really like the taste, but she's trying to get used to it.
On this day, the first day of her new driving privileges -- "You come straight from school, no bullcrap," her mother lectured -- she parks in front of the Iron Horse, smiling at how easy it is to flout her mother's rules. You really can do what you want, she thinks. You just have to know what that is. You can spend your whole life following other people's rules, like her mother, held back by childish fear -- or you can set your mind to something and do it, and deal with the consequences later.
Green streamers and shamrocks hang from the ceiling and the tavern smells worse than usual. Trey's father waves. "I think he's out back," he calls to her. A few of the men at the bar turn as she walks past. "Tell him to get his ass in here and bus some tables," his father says when she opens the back door.
She finds Trey out by the tracks, hurling empty bottles against the gravel berm. He doesn't see her at first, and she watches as he picks a cigarette from his apron pocket, struggling to light it in the wind.
"Hey," she says. He looks up, startled, and takes her in. His hair is shorter and he's clean shaven. He looks younger, but more tired, the bags under his eyes darker than ever. "I came by to see how you're doing," she says.
"Hey," he says, blowing smoke into the sky. The trees overhanging the tracks have started to grow small, green buds and the old wood ties are soaked through with rain. In another few weeks, the valley will explode with green, rainstorms and heat erasing all memory of winter.
"How's work going?" she says.
He shrugs. "It's work."
"Yeah. Me too." The car keys feel good in her hand, heavy and cold and sharp. She tosses them in the air and catches them with a jingle. Trey looks up. "It would be a lot nicer in Mexico, huh?"
He leans against the building and smokes; she can see his hand shaking as he brings the cigarette to his lips. "I'm really going to do it," he says. "I know you don't think I will, but I will."
"I think you will," she says.
"I don't care if anyone else comes. I'll go alone if I have to. How hard can it be? It can't be any worse than this." He points behind him to the wall of the bar, the town on the other side in which they've both spent their whole lives.
"My mom says I can go visit my father next month," she says. "She says maybe he'll take me to look at colleges out there."
He nods and looks out at the tracks. "That's cool."
"But maybe that's not what I want to do."
"What do you want to do?" he says.
"What do you think I should do?"
He laughs. "You're not going to listen to me."
"Maybe I will," she says. She stares at the side of his face, remembering how he'd felt beneath her in the snow, a wild creature she'd held for just a moment. "Maybe we should just go," she says.
"Go where?"
She dangles the keys in front of his eyes, shaking them a little, watches a lock of smoke drift from his lips. "Anywhere," she says. "We could just get in the car and go."
"Yeah, right," he says, watching her cautiously.
She takes the cigarette from his fingers, his eyes so wide it almost makes her laugh. She takes a drag, feels it deep in her chest, next to her pounding heart.
"What about Billy and Sam?" he says. "What about gas money, and food, and all that?"
She shrugs, blows the smoke over his head. He stares at her and she wills herself not to look away. Shards of cloud move swiftly across the sky, music drifts from the tavern. Anything could happen from here, she thinks, and something inside her shudders at all the possibilities hanging in the air, some kind of future about to begin.
A moment later, he kicks a spray of gravel, climbs the berm and steps onto one of the rails. Holding his arms out to either side, he balances there, small against the background of trees. He looks down at her and she holds her breath as he starts to sing. But it's the same song she's heard him sing a million times before:
"And I guess that I just don't know... and I guess that I just don't know..."
Back inside, the darkness is close and muggy. "Say, Chick," his father says as she walks past. He leans on the bar and keeps his voice low. "A couple of these guys keep asking me your name. I don't want to say 'Chick' -- it sounds wrong."
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She's decided to grow it out, so maybe it will be long by summer. "It's Gail," she says. "But nobody really calls me that anymore."
"Gail," he says. "That's a beautiful name."
She smiles and turns for the door. "You've always seemed like such a smart girl to me," he says, clearing bottles from the bar. "I just don't understand what you see in a screwup like Trey."
She takes a step back to the counter. "That's not a very nice thing to say," she says. His father straightens, starts to say something in protest. But she leans toward him and looks straight into his eyes. "One day you might miss him," she says.
Back in the car, she rolls the windows down, lets the damp air clear out the stale smell. She starts the engine and puts it in drive, but before she pulls away, she catches a last glimpse of Trey through the open door, a gray tub in his arms heaped with dirty dishes. He shouts something she can't hear, scowling at his father, then moves beyond her line of sight. Her eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them back. She tries to imagine them the way she used to, lying on a beach together, holding hands. But that picture won't come. All she can see is a fuzzy image of herself: off somewhere in the future, sliding along on the black ice, moving erratically but always forward. That's what makes everyone so sad, she thinks -- no matter what happens, you keep going forward. And like it or not, everything you know eventually slides into distance as you skid and wobble and try your best not to fall, trapped forever in the long, graceful twirl of your life.
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