The Spectacular Now
I’m always reading biographies online—Dean Martin, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Rasputin, Hank Aaron, Albert Schweitzer. And of course, you have to love the three-namers—Edgar Allan Poe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jennifer Love Hewitt. People’s lives are interesting. Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it’s good.
After finishing the last of my beer, I pull the flask out of my jacket pocket. “So, if you could go on any adventure here on this planet—I mean, like a real-life adventure—what would it be?”
She sips at her wine cooler. “I guess it’d be something with horses. Someday, I’m going to take a trail ride into the mountains, maybe like the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Me either. I’ve just seen them in books.”
“That’d be cool,” I say, though it’s a little hard to picture a pale bookworm riding the high country in a pair of chaps and a Stetson hat. “So, you’d just ride up there alone?”
“No, I’d have someone with me.”
“Who? Someone like that Zoster guy?”
“Maybe.” She looks off down the road. “How about you? What kind of adventure would you go on?”
“Hey, every day’s an adventure for me. I’m not much of a long-range plan maker. But I’ve thought some about going to the Amazon. I’d go down there and, like, fight against these rain forest–bulldozing corporations that run the natives out of their Garden of Eden and stick them in little wino outfits. That’s what I’d do.”
“That’d be great,” she says, but I get the feeling she was hoping I’d jump on board with the horse idea, so I go, “Have you ever thought about riding horses in the rain forest? I mean you wouldn’t want to just hike around down there and get your foot eaten off by an exotic tarantula. No. What you’d do is take horses in by boat and then ride them around on these ancient Incan trails and everything.”
That perks her up. “I bet you could. I bet they have mountains down there with views that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“Oh, it’d be panoramic, for sure. You never know—they might even have some hidden valley with pterodactyls flying around and stuff.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I bet that’d be an amazing trip.”
Our shoulders touch as we walk, and she looks up and smiles.
A ways down the road, there’s a covered pier that people fish from, so we walk out there and sit on the railing facing the water. The stars are bright and make crosses of light on the little black lake waves. Aimee’s about to the bottom of her wine cooler. I wish I’d got her a couple more. When she finishes it off, I take the bottle and toss it, end over end, at the trash barrel about twenty feet away. Real loud, it clangs against the inside, and I’m like, “He scores from three-point range!”
As a reward, I take a swig from the flask, and surprisingly, she asks if she can try a little.
“You sure? It’s pretty stout stuff.”
“I’ll just take a sip to see what it’s like.”
She turns it up and more than a sip goes down, and the next thing, she’s coughing and gagging all over the place with her eyes bugged out. I slap her on the back but there’s too much coat back there for that to do much good. Finally, she calms down and goes, “Wow, I guess some went down the wrong pipe.”
“I told you it was stout.”
“I’ll be careful next time.”
“Next time? That’s what I like to hear. You fall off the giraffe, you gotta get right back on.”
“Give me a couple of minutes.” Her eyes are watering but she’s smiling and not a sickly little smile like before either. She’s enjoying the shit out of herself.
We stare off at the lake for a moment. “You know what?” she says. “There’s something else I’d like to do too. It’s not like a big grand adventure or anything, but it would be a big deal to me.”
“What’s that?”
She looks at my flask. “Can I have another drink?”
“Already?”
She nods. This time she just takes a little sip. When that doesn’t throw her into a fit, she takes a bigger one. “That’s not bad,” she says. “It kinda burns going down, but it’s not bad.”
“Yeah, it’s good stuff.” I take a shot myself. “Anyway, what’s this big deal thing?”
“Well, this isn’t something I’ve told anyone else, not even my friend Krystal. But what I really, really want to do is go live with my sister in St. Louis and go to college where she goes—Washington University. It’s a great school.”
I’m wondering what the big secret is. Seems like a perfectly normal thing to want to do. “No reason why you can’t. I’m sure your grades are plenty good enough.”
“It’s not my grades I’m worried about. It’s my family. My mom says I have to stay here and help with the paper route and the bills and everything. She’s not as healthy as she used to be with her heart and all. In a couple of years my brother can help out more, but until then, I’ll just go to the community college.”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I’m staring at her, all amazed at what she’s saying, but she just gazes down into the black water. “I mean, you’re like this extraordinary genius chick, and your mom’s making you go to the community college? No way. You need to get yourself to St. Louis with your sister tout de suite.”