Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

“OK. What’s up?” I say.

“Huh?” He jerks himself out of his thoughts. “Oh. Nothing. Have a good night, Teags.”

He turns to go. I nearly let him too, even though it’s not like him to be this straight up. Every atom in my body just wants food and bed, and really doesn’t feel like dealing with someone else’s problems right now. Except Carlos isn’t just someone else, and I’m not going to leave whatever this is bottled up inside him. Friends don’t do that to each other.

I drop my bag next to the Jeep’s front tyre. There’s a low concrete wall running along the sidewalk opposite my car. “Sit.”

“I…”

I point to the wall. “Carlos Jesús López Morales,” I say. “Sit your ass down.”

He sits his ass down. I plop myself next to him. It’s probably not a smart move, since getting up again is going to take some willpower, but fuck it.

I nudge him. “You can talk to me, cabrón . You know that right?”

“You really shouldn’t say that. In Mexico that’d get you knocked out, you say it to the wrong person.”

“Then why’d you teach it to me?”

He says nothing. Which is really odd. I practically served it to him on a silver platter.

“Dude, come on. Talk to me.”

“I’m just…” He scratches his head. “Just missing home, that’s all.”

“Home? Like Mexico?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“I don’t get it. Don’t you have, like, a price on your head there? Plus, the way you talk about Tecomán…”

“I know, but—”

“And the whole gay marriage thing… I mean, no offence, Carlos, but you haven’t exactly made it sound like a barrel of…”

I stop when I see the set of his shoulders.

“I just… I don’t know, man.” Again, the hand scratching the head, running across his buzz cut. “I was just waiting for you guys tonight, in the van, and I was just thinking about it. We used to go down to this beach when I was little—Playa Cuyatlan. Not the most beautiful beach in the world or anything, but it was all right, you know? And I just…” He lets out a sigh, long and slow. His eyes have gone back to the middle distance. “You ever just get bored?”

“You’re running around doing secret-agent shit, and you’re bored?” I don’t mean it to sound as dumb as it comes out. Maybe it’s just because the question cuts a little too close to the bone. It’s not that I’m bored—my life is way too weird for that. But what happens if that changes? What if I want to get out? Or if I get older, and can’t do what I do now? Somehow, I don’t see Tanner giving me a gold watch and wishing me well.

I can’t change jobs or leave town, and so far I’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring these problems. Carlos’s question makes that impossible.

“Maybe bored is the wrong word,” he says. “It’s just like… I didn’t wanna be working on cars for the rest of my life, you know?”

“Thought you liked cars.”

“I do . But…”

He trails off. I’m about to prompt him when his eyes light up. “Hey—you wanna get out of here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Take a road trip.” He hops off the wall, spreads his arms. “Fuck it, let’s get out of LA for a while. I was reading about this amazing place, up by Point Reyes, these really cool cabins. We stay there, we check out the area, we go try the bars or whatever. Just hang out.”

“Carlos…”

“No, for real.” He points in the direction of the China Shop offices. “ Vámonos . In fact, fuck it, I’m sick of this shit. Let’s just go tomorrow. We go back in there, tell Reggie we need some time off. We can head up there in the morning. Just hang out, drink some beer. Laugh at the other tourists.”

“That’s not…” I take a deep breath. Carlos is being genuine here—I love hanging out with him, and he’d be amazing to road trip with. But that’s not why I’m hesitant. “I think it’s a good idea,” I tell him.

“Great! Let’s—”

“But not tomorrow, OK?” Just taking off, as tempting as it is, would not exactly earn me brownie points with Reggie and Annie. Or Tanner. As much as I’m not known for my forward planning, these are not people I can afford to piss off more than I have already. “Let’s talk to the guys properly. Let’s make sure they know why we want to take time off. Maybe we can convince the whole office to take a break—like, all of us, going to Tanner and just saying we need a vacation.”

“But—”

I push myself off the wall, tilt my chin up to look him in the eye. “I know you’re feeling it, dude. I get it too. And I do think it’s a cool idea. But I need sleep, and I don’t want to spend the night worrying about whether or not Reggie’s nuclear explosion is gonna take out the whole of LA, or just Venice.”

A smile flickers across his face. And in that instant I want to say, Fuck it . Take what I just told him and throw it in the trash. The idea of spending the weekend getting drunk in Point Reyes is almost too good to turn down.

I make the thoughts stop by gripping his hand tight. “We’ll do it, man, for sure. Let’s just do it right.”

He won’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know if that’s gonna happen, though. You know what the guys’ll say. They won’t let us.”

I stand on tiptoes and give him a peck on the cheek. “Yeah, they fucking will.”

Someone on a motorcycle shoots past, the sound way too loud, dopplering into the night. The tiredness comes rushing back, settling on me like a blanket.

“I gotta go,” I tell Carlos. “ Hasta luego, cabrón .”

He forces a smile onto his face. “ Sí. Hasta luego .”

But as he turns away, the worry comes back. The uncertainty. The feeling that I’ve just let an opportunity go, and I might never be able to get it back.

There’s traffic on Slauson, because this is LA, and not even the fact that it’s nearly 1 a.m. can change that. The Batmobile moves at a crawl, inching along behind a rumbling train of Priuses and Civics.

Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not driving at sixty right now. I didn’t get formal driving lessons until after I arrived in LA. Before that, it was just Dad’s truck in our backyard, which meant I could drive, but knew dick-all about traffic signals and road laws. Driving takes concentration, and right now I can barely keep my eyes open. My stomach is not happy with me, and neither are my lungs. Even this far south, the smoke from the fires in the north worms its way down my throat, turning it scratchy.

Normally, I like to blast music while I’m driving—the Batmobile’s speakers are ancient, but it’s got decent volume. No Bluetooth or even a CD player—just a radio. Right now it’s tuned to Power 106, which is playing a bunch of old-school rap. Volume down low. Every so often a bunch of ads will play: car commercials, shady loan offers, ads for Universal Studios. The kind where they squash the terms and conditions into about three seconds of voiceover at the end of the AD, making it sound like the guy reading it snorted an entire bag of coke right before he got in the booth. I let it wash over me, comfy as a security blanket.

I love Los Angeles.

Even now, when I’m exhausted and cranky. A lot of people hate it—even those who live here. Too smoggy, too expensive, too full of actors and writers and shitty movie people. They hate the fact that it hardly ever rains or gets cold, which is insane to me. But I fell in love with the place from the day I got here. I love the huge sky, the constant hum of traffic, the restaurants and bars it feels like only you know about. I even love the history, although there’s no way I’d let Annie know that. I love how nobody here gives the tiniest shit where you come from.