Jason Pinter - The Mark

“Carl?”

“Amanda, oh, God, thank you.”

“Hey, it’s just a ride, I don’t think I’m worthy of deification just yet.”

Then I noticed just how gorgeous Amanda Davies was. Her brown hair spilled over her beautifully tan shoulders, draping over lovely toned arms and smooth skin. She had on a green tank top and tight blue jeans, and there was a hint of faded sunburn on her neck, and a tiny mole by her right collarbone. Her skin had a brilliant luster to it and there was a slightly mischievous tint in Amanda’s emerald eyes. If I had to be stuck in a car for hours with a complete stranger, I could have had it worse. Much worse.

“Sorry about that, Carl. I didn’t mean to scare you, but I thought it’d be funny to play a joke, you know. Make you think I’d left.” I forced out a laugh, and looked at my savior. Not only was Amanda Davies gorgeous, but she had a pretty sadistic sense of humor.

“You need to stop for anything before we get going?” she asked. “Coffee? Bathroom?”

“No,” I said. To be honest I was starving, but there was no time to waste. “I’m good for now.”

Amanda nodded, gunned the engine and merged into the northbound lane. The car smelled faintly of grease and breath mints. An empty McDonald’s wrapper lay crumpled on the floor, surrounded by a graveyard of Tic Tac containers. She saw me looking at them and smiled.

“What, girl can’t go nuts on a McChicken every now and then? We need to eat tofu and broccoli every meal?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but you were thinking it.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I said defensively. She leered at me, a hurtful look on her face.

“You think I’m bulimic, don’t you?”

My head snapped to attention. “What?”

“You think I chow down on burgers and fries all day then go puke it all up.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, I swear.”

“I know your kind,” she sniffed, slamming down the blinker and following the signs toward the Holland Tunnel. “You think you’re hot shit cause you eat protein-enriched sprouts all day then spend eight hours on the elliptical machine. Well, let me tell you something, Carl. Some of us have natural metabolisms. We don’t spend all day reading Ladies Home Journal and wishing we were Heidi or Gisele.”

“Who’s Heidi?”

“Oh, forget it,” she said. “This obviously isn’t working out. Maybe I should drop you off somewhere.” My breath caught short. I stammered.

“You can’t…you can’t do that. No, I swear, I didn’t think that at all. I just noticed the wrapper, that’s it. You can eat whatever you want. I don’t care if you have lard for breakfast. In fact I encourage it.” Amanda looked devastated, her lips contorting into an ugly grimace.

“So you’re saying I’m fat.”

“No, Jesus H. Christ, I’m not saying that at all. You probably have the fastest metabolism on earth. If you want to eat McNuggets and candy all day…”

“Carl,” Amanda said. Again, the name took a moment to process.

“Yeah?”

“I’m messing with you.”

An awkward silence enveloped the car as her lips collapsed into a maniacal grin.

“You were screwing with me.”

“Come on, you really think I care what a guy I just met thinks about my dietary habits? No offense, Carlito, but I don’t. I give you credit for keeping your cool, though. I’ve been with other guys who’ve started calling me names and telling me to lay off the milk shakes.”

“So you actually do this often. That’s kind of scary.”

“Saves me money on gas and tolls, can’t blame a girl for wanting a little entertainment to go with it.”

“Well then I’m happy to oblige,” I said. “As long as we get to…St. Louis in one piece, I’ll sing show tunes if it’ll make you happy.”

“If I hear one chorus from ‘Dancing Queen,’ you’re walking to St. Louis.”

We pulled into a line of cars waiting for the outbound Holland Tunnel. Traffic was agonizingly slow, but Amanda steered us into the E-Z pass lane. I lowered my head as we passed through the tollbooth, not wanting to offer an easy glimpse to an attendant who might be perusing the newspaper while bored on the job. Within minutes, we were heading west toward New Jersey.

Sodium lights whizzed by, my life now squeezed into a one-lane road. The speck of light at the end of the tunnel grew as we neared the exit. I felt nauseous. I was out of NewYork, away from my personal ground zero. Hopefully arriving in St. Louis by nightfall. But in the commotion to leave, I’d been so delirious that I didn’t even consider the next step. All I knew is that an opportunity for survival had arisen and I’d taken it.

I didn’t know what to do once we got to St. Louis, didn’t know a soul in the whole state. I had no phone to use, forty dollars in my wallet and a gunshot wound in my leg. Mya was out of the picture, as was Wallace Langston. The police were probably circling them both like vultures. They were gangrenous appendages I had to cut off. Perhaps permanently. My life now existed in a parallel social universe, where I could trust only strangers, forced to alienate everyone who cared.

Guilt flushed through my system as I looked at the girl sitting next to me. Her eyes were stuck to the road, so delicate, innocent. I hadn’t considered the implications of what this could do to her. Amanda Davies was there, and I’d blindly reached for her. And now she was at the mercy of chance. I wanted to apologize, to tell her what she’d gotten into. But if I offered the truth, she wouldn’t be a stranger anymore. As long as my story was Carl’s, as long as I remained a stranger, I was safe.

Amanda took a pair of aviator sunglasses from a pouch above the rearview mirror. As we pulled onto US-1/9 south, the bright sunlight of morning shining golden on the horizon, she turned to me.

“You mind opening the glove compartment? Just pull the tab upwards. It might be stuck, so give a good tug.”

I complied, and half a dozen maps spilled onto my lap. A tape measure. Three old movie tickets. Chewing gum that seemed to have petrified.

“Okay, now what?”

“Hand me that notebook,” she said. “The spiral one in there.”

Behind a mass of red-and-blue illustrated tributaries lay a tiny reporter’s notebook, spiral bound at the top, with white lined pages. I’d seen many like it in various newsrooms, had a similar one in my backpack. Many reporters kept them on hand. Was Amanda a journalist? A writer? The odds were staggering, but who else kept a notebook in their glove compartment?

She took it from me and flipped to a clean page, then bit the cap off the pen while balancing the pad on the steering wheel. Then she began to write.

“Uh, hey,” I said, watching the two-ton vehicles whizzing by in a blur on either side of us. “Isn’t the first driving commandment ‘keep thine eyes on the road?’”

She said, “I do this all the time.”

I nodded, as though I’d seen this kind of motor vehicle behavior a thousand times. My hands, however, firmly gripped the armrest in the event she was lying.

“So how long’s the drive to St. Louis?” I asked.

She stopped scribbling. “Depending on traffic, between twelve and fourteen hours.”

“And you can make that in one sitting?” She looked at me as if I’d asked if her hair color was real.

“I’ve done it a hundred times. We might need a pit stop or two for coffee and bathroom breaks, but we should be there by midnight. You’ll have to let me know ahead of time where I’m dropping you.”

“Will do.”

A moment later, she added, “So I’m guessing your clothes are all there.”

“Huh?”

“Well, either all your clothes are wherever I’m dropping you off, or you don’t run up much of a laundry bill.”