* * *
I wake up to Adam leaning on his elbow, watching me sleep, and it makes me smile. I’m all of a sudden a person who gets to be loved so much that even when I’m sleeping someone is interested in me. He brushes the hair out of my face and says, “Hey there,” and gives me a kiss I feel all the way to my toes. The fact that we have to get up and go to work seems cruel.
We do pre-coffee coffee, get dressed, and shuffle out of the apartment. It feels like everything is fake, but in a good way. Like better than real. Happily ever after and kind of like a dream and then I get to work and Adam stands in line for his post-coffee coffee and I’m behind the counter and I feel this longing for him. I want everyone else to fade to black so it can just be me and Adam in his apartment and that’s all there is in the world.
When Adam gets his coffee and has to leave, I miss him. Like actually feel that tug in my chest, even though I know I’ll see him tonight. It’s Wednesday, so we’re ordering pizza from The Nines and watching 90210. I love the way we have different days for different things. But even knowing what I’m looking forward to doesn’t stop the tightness in my chest when I watch him walk out the door.
— Chapter 23 —
I remember Mark Conrad telling Matty how to chalk his license. I didn’t listen too carefully, because it was Mark Conrad, and he always had plans for ways to get booze, or get into a nightclub in Buffalo, or score weed from some guy who knows some guy who knows his cousin, but none of it ever actually happened. Mark always wussed out and blamed it on circumstance, like his cousin was scared straight, or they don’t sell the right colored pencils to chalk a license in Little River, or that nightclub was lame anyway. But I remember the basics of what he said—how you had to have white, black, and red colored pencils, and use a twisted-up piece of paper towel to blend things. Thankfully, since I’m only trying to be nineteen, I don’t have to worry about the UNDER 21 label on my license. For that, Mark claimed to have some cut and splice trick with special tape and melting the outside plastic, but I doubt it was something he’d actually tried.
When Bodie is outside smoking, I call out, “Break!” to Carly, swipe Bodie’s leather pencil case from the messenger bag he leaves on a hook in the kitchen, and run upstairs to the storage room.
The light sucks. I have to lean over a box of coffee stirrers to work on a shelf by the window and it puts me at this weird angle where it’s hard to keep my hand steady. But I don’t have to change much—just shape the eight in 1978 to a five on the birthday and issued dates, white out the J for junior license, and then I’m nineteen. When I start working on it, the stuff about the blending and the paper towel makes sense. I focus really small, the way I do when I’m putting on eyeliner, thinking about where I want the pencil to go, and then my hand just does it, one tiny speck at a time. I feel so lucky that as sloppy as Bodie is, he’s kind of anal about his art supplies. All his pencils are perfectly sharpened.
Bodie is in the kitchen when I get back. I’m not expecting him to be. He usually takes the world’s longest smoke breaks. He sees me holding his pencil case.
Sometimes my brain thinks faster than I even know it can, because I say, “Bodie, you must have dropped this. I found it on the floor under one of the tables.”
“Shit, Pilgrim,” he says, “you’re a lifesaver. That’s like my soul right there.” And then I feel awful, because the way Bodie feels about his pencils is totally the way I felt about my guitar.
“Favor?” I ask. I can’t stop now just because I feel bad.
“Anything,” he says, so stupid grateful that I saved his pencils.
“Can you cover for me for like ten minutes? Girl trouble,” I say, knowing Bodie is squeamish about those things. He blushes for hours after Carly makes him restock the tampon machine in the bathroom. And as much as it embarrasses me to embarrass him, my desperation makes me brave.
* * *
I run to the art supply store, buy a can of something called fixative, spray my license in the alley, and dump the can in the dumpster. Mark Conrad says the fixative is what separates the pros from the amateurs, because it makes it really hard to rub the fake numbers off.
— Chapter 24 —
Carly is in a mood today. She’s always in some kind of mood. I’ve never worked a day with her where the way she was feeling didn’t change the air around her one way or another, but this mood is especially bad.
At first I worry it’s because I took a really long break to get the fixative, because maybe Bodie didn’t cover for me well. But Carly’s eyes are lined with super thick black liner and dark shadow. I’ve pulled that trick before, so I know it’s not always a fashion statement so much as a way to cover up dark circles and puffy lids. When I don’t let myself get distracted by all that black, I can see how red her eyes are.