Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [58]
“Sorry! Sorry!”
“You’re doing fine. What flavor do you want?”
“Chocolate almond.”
“Keep count of how many boys try to pick you up while I’m inside.”
“Uncle Eddie!”
“Just keep count. I’m telling you.”
“I’m fifteen!”
“You’re in a Mustang, baby. Count the boys.”
Instead she cranks up the radio again and closes her eyes. Driving is almost as good as running, she thinks. Maybe she could just get in a car and drive forever. She could drive from park to park and run at every lake and beach and woods from here to . . . Maine, she thinks. From here to Maine.
She remembers how she would stay awake to keep her dad company on the drive to the campground at Small Point, along the two-lane road that bisects the Phippsburg peninsula, the woods reaching to the sky, the moon shining like a flirtatious girl running in and out of the trees, in and out of sight, making stripes of white on the road ahead of them. She remembers opening the windows, gulping the piney air, breathing in the first hint of salt water. You can almost taste it: the salt and the pine and the cold air exhaling from the woods. She doesn’t look behind. There is no need, yet, to look behind, to watch over her shoulder, to shore up moments and memories against future loss. There is only her dad and the car and the road and the turn off to Small Point at the far end of the peninsula. Here it is, the narrow bit of sand that passes for a road at low tide. Mom and Ellie asleep in the back. Alice and Matt awake, the first ones to see the Kelp Shed, the first ones to see the new speed bump, to take the sharp left turning up to the dirt roads and the campsites. Ocean side. They are ocean side, not bay side campers. Number 39. On the bluffs. Over the rocks. Set apart, but not too far to the showers.
There’s a knock on her window and Alice nearly jumps out of her skin. There are four teenage boys and two older guys clustered around the Mustang. Wanting to touch it, to run their hands over the bright red curves, pushing each other and their bodies closer and closer. This one guy leans right in her window after she opens her eyes.
“Hey, beautiful.”
They jostle each other to get close to the window.
“Goin’ my way, honey?”
“Where’d you get this gorgeous car?”
“What’s your name, baby?”
Uncle Eddie appears with an ice cream cone in each hand.
“Back off, boys. She’s my niece. She’s fifteen.”
“Just admiring your car.”
“No harm meant.”
“She’s a beauty.”
The men and boys disperse as Uncle Eddie hands her the ice cream.
“Six,” he says, “I counted six.”
“It’s the car.”
“Of course it’s the car. It’s also, I’m telling you, every man’s fantasy: a beautiful girl in a beautiful car.”
They change places so Uncle Eddie can drive them out to the lake. Driving plus eating ice cream is a lesson for another day, apparently, or another car. He parks where they can watch the water and the birds.
“You want to talk?” he asks.
The cooling engine ticks away like a clock running down.
“I don’t know.”
“How’s your mom doing?”
“She’s kind of wrapped in cellophane or something.”
“What about Ellie?”
“I’m not sure she gets how serious it is.”
“Maybe that’s good.”
“Maybe it is. But she wet the bed last night. And she’s sucking her thumb again.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could press rewind and go backward a couple of years. What about you?”
“I might be suspended.”
“Really?”
“I shoved some dimwit girl and she fell over like a . . . she fell over and got a bloody nose.”
The ice cream is freezing inside her chest.
“Why’d you hit her?”
“She was talking some dumb shit about hating her father and wishing he were dead. Because he grounded her.”
“Wow.”
“And then the principal was trying to be decent and wanted to give me a chance, wanted to hear my side of the story, only I couldn’t talk, so he just sat there getting madder and madder, because it probably seemed like I was doing it on purpose, and then he got so mad he decided to call Mom and suspend me. Which is when I walked out.”
“You walked out?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Go, Alice!”
“Probably not an appropriate