I started talking it up to Dori, which was just cruel. Of course she’d want to go, the beach would amaze her because everything amazed her. It wasn’t so long ago she’d been this whole fun, popular girl at school, before her dad and his five-hour doctor drives ate her life. Now she was hard pressed to talk her neighbor into watching Vester so the two of us could go out parking. But she saw how bad I wanted it, and begged me to go without her. Take pictures, she said. This was before camera phones were in everybody’s pockets. I borrowed a Polaroid from Angus.
Without Dori I would need transportation. Fast Forward wouldn’t have been first choice, but he had wheels, and was generally up for adventure if the booze was adequate. On the phone he said he was covered up at the farm, tied up with his horses, which I’d been told were not his horses, but kept that to myself. I asked him to think about it. He said maybe. Next I brought it up to Maggot, knowing he’d be game for anything that got him out of the house. June was two inches from kicking him out, setting certain conditions he was not able to live with. She was pretty tolerant of his grooming, so it had to be more than that, and I didn’t ask. Even a minor weed incident could really blow up over there, she was on some drug warpath ever since World War Kent, to the extent of Maggot coming over to Dori’s just to roll a reefer.
In less than a minute, Emmy found out from Maggot and announced she was coming too. Which then got Fast Forward on board. I was never sure about the chicken or the egg on that one, but understood we were getting into some kind of love-hate triangle with June Peggot involved, which is not a geometry problem you want to be in. But damn. All that mattered to me was the ocean. I was going to Virginia Beach, Virginia. A town we chose solely for its name, having no idea where we would rest our heads after planting our asses on its grass. Or hopefully, sand. We had no money, no game plan, not enough supplies to get us five miles down the road, let alone the five hundred it was. Fast Forward had connections in a city he said was on the way, somebody that could hook him up with easy cash, and that was enough for four people high on youth and extreme inexperience.
I have to admit, another thing factored in. Some kids at school were peacocking around with their plan to hit the beach over spring break. This is the Bettina Cook crowd with their Abercrombies and Daddy Express cards and sixteenth-birthday cars with the big yellow bows from CarMax. Kids that only need to say the words, “Hey! Let’s all get shitfaced at Myrtle Beach,” and presto it happens. Half of them probably didn’t care about the ocean, and the other half wouldn’t notice it if they passed out tits-up on the fucking dunes. Not bitter or anything, me.
But to lose my mind that way, thinking I was in the league of those kids, wanting and getting? Dori had never been over a state line except to take her dad to heart-lung specialists, and lately was lucky to see the back side of Walmart. I was an asshole to dangle this trip in front of her, and then go, knowing she couldn’t. I have no good excuse. Maybe all kids are like this, wanting too much. Like Maggot, working every angle too far, to blow the gaskets of his poor grandparents that married at fifteen with no bigger hope in the world than to have kids and not watch them die. Us though, give us the fucking world. We pretended we were as good as the Bettina Cook kids, while Bettina pretended to be a Kardashian. We’d all cut our teeth on TV shows where parents had jobs, and kids lived out big-city dreams in their wardrobe choices and rivers of cash. Even doing drugs, these forgivable schoolboys, and it’s a comedy because they’re not poor. In their universe, nobody shuts you down for being different and wanting the moon.
In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you’re lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by. Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness. Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee’s or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day. There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too high on your neck, the tall weed gets cut. So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.
The first night we made it as far as a place called Hungry Mother. Not kidding. We’d got off to a woefully messy start with everybody excited, needing their calm-down of choice. Then needing to sleep that off. And leaving Dori called for I’m-sorry-baby sex, which takes more time than the regular. So now we were only a few counties down the road, it was getting dark, and here was this highway sign. Hungry Mother turned out to be not a restaurant or sad female human but a park, with picnic tables and such. A lake. It was February, we didn’t wait for spring break, being way out ahead of those rich kids plus more willing to ditch school. The park was empty, its picnic area and lake all ours. At the water’s edge, a big patch of sand.