Hick - Andrea Portes [55]
I trip over myself, trying to look back, but Eddie’s pushing me forward, up the stairs and towards the room. I hear voices yelling behind us, splashing and calling for help. Eddie hurls me into the room, grabs the keys and throws my bag at my chest.
“Get in the truck.”
“But we already paid for the room.”
“I said get in the goddamn truck!”
This is the side that I knew was coming. Drink number eight through ten. This is the side that was the reason I stayed put down by the pool in the first place. Eddie’s got me tight around the arm, making a bruise right above the elbow, finding the last of the cash and the whiskey, hurtling the both of us down the stairs and barreling forward into the truck. Clement and his friends are nowhere in sight, but I can hear the commotion coming round the corner, the boys’ yell echoing across the white plaster walls, crying for help.
The last thing I want to do is get in that truck with Eddie piss drunk and liable to crash into the nearest tree. But he charges across the front bumper and shoves me in, cursing and turning red, mumbling to himself about little sluts and being loyal and you never know who to trust. He darts back over, hops inside, starts the engine and tears away.
I look straight ahead, silent, trying to duck under the radar. In the wing mirror, I’m looking for Clement and his friends and Mr. Comfort or even Horsemouth to appear and save the day. But the hotel is dead quiet, as if none of this ever happened or maybe the world just ended.
Because to me it just did.
Eddie is quiet now, looking out into the darkness with a fake kind of calm.
He ruined my chance. I had one chance at clean sheets and kind words before bedtime. I had this one opportunity. I had this moment where I could say something stupid and laugh and feel something sparkly and look across the table at someone young and awkward like myself. Somehow, from out of nowhere, from out of the blue, I had one second to see what it could be like to be a normal girl with a schoolgirl crush and maybe a future with wingback chairs, willow-wear and Wedgewood. I could have crinkled my forehead and studied for the SAT and had high hopes for heading back East to a school with green rolling hills and gargoyles on the library.
I could have had that.
I say his name to myself. Clement. I think of him curled up into a ball on the pavement, knocked out cold. Clement. Clemency. Clement. I make a pact with myself. I make a point of it. I make a date down deep, past my skin and my bones and deep into my blood, into my soul.
See you in 2090. See you in 2090, when flying cars are whizzing by and you can get from here to China and back in the blink of an eye. See you in 3060, when people are made of metal and you don’t even need a flying car anyways and you can look up fighting in the history books. See you in 4070, when there’s smoke billowing up from the red-crater horizon and it’s hotter than Mexico with dust and dirt and a few scavengers holding on, scraping by. And on and on till the moon gives way and the sun kills itself and the stars fall from the sky.
I guess I’ll see you then.
TWENTY–SEVEN
Cheapest motherfuckers in the world. Rich people.”
We’re barreling west on I-70, cutting a swath through the night, with rocks popping up at our sides, red and mysterious, like somewhere in the night we landed on Mars and just kept going.
“They count their pennies, Luli. Don’t think that they don’t. I know. I used to work as a busboy back at Kirby’s in Omaha. You’d never get a good tip from a rich person. Never. They’d stiff ya every time. Hell, they’d skip out on the check if they didn’t think they’d get