The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion Page 2

  When I got to her driveway, she was still crying, her automotive tools scattered near the front wheel of her motorcycle.

  “I…saw you crying,” I said. “Are you okay? Hi, by the way. This is already weird that I’m here, isn’t it? Crap.”

  She looked up at me, face wet, bubbles of spit collecting at the corners of her mouth. Still beautiful.

  “Your house is a quarter mile away,” she said. “How could you possibly see me crying?”

  Should have mentioned: Sophie and I are technically neighbors, but our houses are far apart. A formidable distance. Her family owns a few acres, and my family has a large “lawn” filled with cacti and dirt. It was justifiable for her to point out that there was no way I would have been able, from my house, to see her with my naked eye.

  I came clean.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking at the sky to try and get out of my head for a bit, and I moved my telescope, and I saw you. I wasn’t trying to spy.”

  “So it wasn’t intentional?”

  “I have a sense of personal boundaries, and the only reason I came over here is…”

  I paused.

  “I don’t know why I even came here,” I said. “I didn’t think the decision through.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You’re here. You’re easy to deal with.”

  Hearing Sophie say that stung for some reason. Easy to deal with. Sure, I wouldn’t have wanted her to consider me some sort of Jack the Ripper–esque black angel connoisseur of death, but it was hard to hear there was no aura of danger around me at all. Nobody wants to be considered totally nontoxic.

  “So…,” I said.

  “So, yeah?”

  “I’m here…if you want to talk about…anything. I guess that was what I was thinking.”

  I wanted to shut my eyes and walk backward and reverse time so I had never walked to the Gilkeys’ driveway in the first place. There was no reason for Sophie to tell me anything, ever. We weren’t actual friends, I had no right to be looped into her personal business, and though I thought I was being chivalrous—or something like that, I’m not sure what—I was making a fool of myself.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” I said.

  She wiped her eyes and ran her hands through her hair.

  “You can stay for a second if you want,” she said. “You’re already here.”

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  She sighed.

  “There was a guy I was supposed to go to prom with. Rich.”

  “The linguistics student.”

  She paused and gave me a look of what the hell?

  “How do you know that?” she said.

  “Everyone at school knows your boyfriend’s name,” I said. “It’s common knowledge that you’re dating a college student.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “Everybody in the school knows that?”

  “It’s maybe the only thing anybody knows about you,” I said. “You’re mysterious.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “I can’t stand high school.”

  “What happened with Rich?”

  She shook her head, irritated. “It turned out he was dating a girl from his department at the same time he was seeing me, and now he’s driving with her to Mexico instead of taking me to the prom. Some hotel in Baja. I checked it out online. It’s nice.”

  “Look on the bright side. Maybe they’ll get kidnapped,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t want to prolong things by wishing something like that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’d prefer if they were just sucked out to sea or if a volcano exploded underneath them.”

  “Are there many volcanoes in Mexico?”

  “There’s one called Las Tres Vírgenes halfway down the Baja coast, but I don’t think they’re traveling that far. Plus, it hasn’t erupted since 1746.”

  I did not know that.

  “So…that means you broke up,” I said.

  “Yes, we broke up,” she said. “Do you think that I’m going to stay with someone who takes another girl to Mexico?”

  Sophie was single. My heart leaped, though there was no reason it should matter to me that Sophie was back on the market. She had already technically opened up her dating life to the adult world, which was filled with guys with jobs and money and limbs that were proportional to their bodies. There was no way I could compete.

  Sophie picked her socket wrench up off the ground and anxiously rapped the pavement with it, looking down, lost in her head.

  “It’s so stupid,” said Sophie. “I know I shouldn’t care about prom, but I feel like it’s something that’s going to come up in conversations for the rest of my life. Neither my mom nor my grandmother went, and they both regret it. I don’t want to be telling my grandchildren about how I stayed at home that night watching Pretty in Pink.”

  “Good movie, though.”

  “Great movie,” she said. “I don’t know. I just want to go. It’s as simple as that.”

  I wanted to go too. No matter how socially disastrous my high school career had been, I was still part of my class, and I felt like attending would provide some sort of cap to the four years I had spent rotting in a concrete building. I looked at prom like an open-casket funeral—I wanted to take one last glance at what I was leaving behind so I never had to see it again, and I figured it would be a more tolerable memory if all the people I couldn’t stand were at least well dressed.

  “Is there…anything I can do to help?” I said.

  “How would you help?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I had an instinct that was the sort of thing you’re supposed to ask a girl who is crying two feet away from you.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  She wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her jacket. Then she stared at me for a moment, working something out in her brain.

  “I do need help with one thing,” she said.

  “Name it.”

  “I need a ride to my mechanic. My bike won’t start, which means I can’t get out of here.”

  “Where’s your mechanic?”

  “Roswell.”

  “Roswell is a hundred and twenty miles away,” I said. “Why would you have a mechanic out there?”

  “He’s the best,” said Sophie. “Can your truck make it that far?”

  I peered back in the direction of my distant house, where my 1986 Chevy pickup was sitting in the driveway, looking like it was on the verge of snapping in half, which was the normal vibe it put out into the world.

  My truck is a death trap. A hole in the passenger-side floor goes through to the undercarriage, a problem my father had solved by covering the hole with a piece of plywood on which he had spray-painted the words REMOVE AND ACTUALLY DIE. The interior lights randomly turn blood-red, as if receiving electric signals directly from hell, and I’d covered the rotting steering wheel with a zebra-patterned sleeve so I don’t have to physically touch it, which imbues the truck with a safari feel. It needs thousands of dollars of repairs, but my parents had apparently decided to roll the dice with my life because they had had crappy cars in high school too. I think they saw driving a piece of junk as a rite of passage, and they knew if I had a beat-up truck, I wouldn’t be able to travel far.

  I had very little confidence the truck would make it to Roswell, but if it was going to fall apart, I figured it might as well deteriorate while a beautiful girl was riding shotgun. The thought of our pictures appearing side by side in a newspaper obituary was appealing in a morbid way. I liked the idea of readers wondering, How was a guy like that able to get a girl like her?

  “My truck can make it to Roswell,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if this was something I helped attractive women with all the time. “I’ll pull it around and you can throw your motorcycle in the back.”

  “I don’t think I’ll throw the motorcycle,” she said. “I’ve seen your truck and I’m not sure it could take the impact.”

  “Fine, hoist it gently into the b
ack.”

  Sophie thought about this.

  “Hoist is a weird word, don’t you think?” she said.

  “It’s because it sounds like moist, which is always the first word people bring up when you ask them what word they hate.”

  “Nobody ever talks about foist, though.”

  “It’s because foist is a verb, so it’s harder to picture.”

  “Transitive verb.”

  If the verb was transitive, that was news to me. I’m terrible at defining parts of speech. To this day, I have no clue what a gerund is, and the thought of having to pick a quantifier out of a sentence gives me full-body shivers.

  The more I reflect on all the things I don’t know that I probably should know, the more I think I understand Princeton’s decision.

  “Very true,” I said, pretending like I knew what I was talking about. “Transitive verb.”

  “Do you have the same opinion of goiter that you do of foist?” she said.

  “Goiter is really bad,” I said. “It sounds like something a duck might say if it was choking on a fish. I don’t even think I know what a goiter is.”

  “It’s when the thyroid gland starts to swell up because of an iodine deficiency,” said Sophie.

  “I can’t believe you know that.”

  “If I know a word exists, I like to know its meaning,” she said. “How about this: foist some ointment on my moist goiter.”

  I almost gagged. “I feel like you could go around saying that sentence and just make people throw up on the spot.”

  She laughed. Sophie has a laugh that sounds a bit like an earthquake followed by a bunch of rumbling aftershocks: “HA…hehhhhhhhhhh.” Strange. I’ve always found the fact that her laugh is so bizarre to be comforting. It’s nice to know she isn’t perfect, even though she is.

  “Be right back with the truck,” I said.

  I ran to the house to get my pickup. I may have been sprinting. I may have even leaped a hedge.

  —

  Sophie was keeping a white-knuckle grip on the passenger-side door handle. Every time we hit a pothole, the truck’s steel frame screeched and groaned like a steam locomotive from the 1800s.

  Aside from its profound structural problems, the biggest issue with my truck is that the radio is broken, which is a conspicuous hardship for somebody who listens to as much music as I do. The vehicle’s cassette player is somewhat functional, though the only tape I have is the original cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera, to which we were listening.

  “Sing once again with me…Our strange duet…,” said the tape.

  “I never pegged you for a musical theater person,” said Sophie.

  “We bought the truck used. This is the tape that came with it, and I can’t get it out.”

  “And as a result, you happen to listen to it all the time.”

  “The tape player automatically turns on when I start the truck. Try to get it out. I promise you, the Phantom of the Opera isn’t going anywhere.”

  “That’s the way the Phantom works,” said Sophie. “He lingers maniacally.”

  “But misunderstood.”

  “Yeah, definitely misunderstood.”

  Sophie hit the eject button on the tape player. Nothing happened.

  “Told you it didn’t work,” I said. “I know nothing about engines or carburetors or transmissions, but I know about my tape player.”

  “You should buy a huge boom box at a thrift store and drive around with it. That way you could listen to anything you want, and it would look kinda badass.”

  “I don’t go to thrift stores,” I said. “I have a problem with the smell of old blankets.”

  “Really? I buy all my clothes at thrift stores. It gives me the sense of being constantly in costume, which helps with living in the middle of nowhere.”

  “In what way?”

  “If I’m wearing somebody else’s clothes, I can trick myself into thinking this isn’t my life.”

  Made sense.

  “I can’t wait to get out of New Mexico,” I said. “Look at this place. It’s like some dystopian event happened and we’re the only survivors.”

  Outside, scrubby green bushes dotted the dead brown landscape. Power lines buzzed endlessly. Wind turbines stood motionless in the distance, starting to cool after a day of spinning in the sun.

  For a while, Sophie and I made small talk. She asked if I knew where I was going to college. I told her my first choice was Princeton, but I was on the wait list, which felt like a hopeless situation. She told me the wait list was still pretty good—better than a straight-up rejection—and asked if I had any strategy for getting off it. I told her I was thinking of trying to find religion, or maybe looking up some minor god to whom nobody else was praying and asking it to help me out.

  “My suggestion is you try Utu, Sumerian ruler of the sun,” she said. “I always liked that particular deity.”

  “You’re putting some deep knowledge on display there.”

  “I like arcane information,” she said. “It makes me feel like less of a cookie-cutter human being if the things in my head aren’t the exact same things that are in everybody else’s. I never in my life want to have a conversation about a reality television program.”

  “What about being on one?”

  “My deepest nightmare.”

  “Nobody would ever consider you a cookie-cutter human being,” I said.

  “What do you like to do outside of school?” she said. “I don’t know anything about you, except that you play music.”

  “…You know that I play music?”

  “When you plug in your amplifier, I hear you playing guitar in your house,” she said. “Do you have a microphone too? Because sometimes I think I even hear you singing through the amp.”

  “Yes, I have a microphone.”

  “Maybe that’s what can set you apart from everybody else when it comes to getting off the wait list. You should send Princeton a Sgt. Pepper–style concept album about how much you want to get in.”

  My stomach twisted. The thought of Sophie hearing me playing guitar—hearing me singing—was petrifying. I never even sang if my parents were in the house. I only practiced when I knew I was alone. I had never realized my unfinished songs would drift outside into the street and be carried to Sophie on the treasonous desert wind.

  “I’m not sure Princeton wants me to send them a playlist of my crappy songs,” I said.

  “Your songs aren’t crappy at all, but you should finish one sometime. I’ve noticed they always seem to cut off in the middle. I’d love to hear a whole one someday.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I had used her name in my songs before. I glanced over to see if she had a look on her face that might indicate she was aware that I sang about her, but she was playing with the tape deck again, trying to get the Phantom of the Opera cassette to come out.

  “So where else did you apply to college?” she said.

  It was time to feel stupid again.

  “Princeton was the only place I applied,” I said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I genuinely thought they would accept me. In retrospect, it wasn’t my strongest idea.”

  “Thousands and thousands of students don’t get in. Just looking at the percentages, you’re out of your mind.”

  “My grades were basically perfect,” I said. “My SAT scores were at the low end of Princeton’s average, but I thought they would at least put me in the mix. I guess I figured that I wanted it so much there was no way they would say no and just leave me here.”

  Sophie whistled, a long, thin whoooooo. “Wow. I’ve never heard of anybody applying to just one college. I mean, if only one college in the world existed, it would make sense, but, y’know…there are quite a few.”

  “Subconsciously, I think I must want to be stranded forever in the desert,” I said. “Where are you going to school?”

  As soon as the question passed my lips, I regretted asking it. Here I was
talking about how I was worried about Princeton, and I didn’t even know if she was going to college. Sophie wasn’t in any of my AP classes, I never saw her in SAT test prep, and she didn’t do any extracurricular activities, as far as I knew. On weekends, she usually just disappeared with her motorcycle—to see the ex-boyfriend, presumably, which probably isn’t something you can really highlight on a college application. In the same way she seemed to be beyond popularity, she seemed to be beyond academia.

  “I didn’t mean to assume you were going to college if you’re not, which is a perfectly fine choice,” I said. “Lots of people who don’t go to college become entrepreneurs or artists or captains of industry….”

  “I’m going to Princeton,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  My mouth went dry.

  “I’m going to Princeton. I applied early action and I got in. The letter came in December, I think.”

  A cold wind blew through my car, though it was ninety degrees outside. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a chorus of hyenas laughing. The Phantom of the Opera cast recording suddenly grew louder—Past the point of no return…The final threshold…I clicked it off. We rode in silence. I saw a dead coyote on the road. It looked like the vultures had already gotten to it.

  “How did I not know about that?” I croaked eventually, because I had to say something.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” said Sophie. “It’s nobody else’s business.”

  “That’s…a great accomplishment,” I said. I was sweating. I could feel the synapses in my brain misfiring, yelling at each other to form coherent thoughts.

  “Thank you,” said Sophie.

  “You know, I read somewhere that Princeton doesn’t typically accept two students from the same school,” I said. “Especially if it’s a public school like Gordo High. Did you know that? Did yooooouuu…”

  The dryness in my mouth went up to my brain.

  “Are you okay?” she said. “You just made a sound like you were having a stroke.”

  There were two more dead coyotes up ahead.