M Coe - New Veronia

“Jay, listen . Maybe we ought to go back. To Delaware, I mean.”

Finally, Jay looked at me. He stopped his relentless forward walk and grabbed my shoulder. “I thought we got over this. You want to give up? When we’re just getting started? You want to give up now, at the easy part?”

“It’s not giving up,” I said. “It’s just going back. I mean, really, we weren’t there; we had nothing to do with the incident.” Internally, I cringed at my use of this word. “And then once this whole episode is over, things will probably be fine, and we can do normal stuff, I don’t know, find some girls for New Veronia…” The thought made me sick, but I figured it might get Jay to agree with me.

“And then,” Jay said, “once we start going back, you’ll just want to turn around again. I think what you really want is to be nowhere. You’re scared to go to Florida, but you’d be scared to go to Delaware, too, so just nut up and get on with it.”

“I’m not scared,” I said. “But we don’t even know where we are…”

“You want to go back,” Jay said, contemplative. “You want to go back to an empty house. Your dad probably left on his road trip and you don’t have a house. You want to go back to get sent to Florida anyway because your dad don’t want you. Or maybe you want to go back so you’ll get thrown in juvie. Or jail , even, depending on what Knees said to people without us there to defend ourselves. Any of this sound smart to you?”

I bit my lip; against my tongue, it felt like a worm. Jay was the smarter of us, even though I always did better in school. I was so stupid; my old life wasn’t at home waiting for me, because things had already started to change even before I’d fled. It wasn’t like I could return to school alongside the impossible ghost-presence of Toshi. My dad didn’t have a job; we didn’t have money; he didn’t want this wicked teenaged thing I’d grown up into. I’d have to move to Florida anyway. Running off probably hadn’t been a punishment to my father at all: I bet that he’d celebrated my sudden absence. Jay had known long before me that the only way for us right now was forward and away.

I didn’t say anything. I just started walking towards the road south.

The forward motion of walking, the physical expense of it, helped me to remember that everything changed all of the time. I would never be able to get back to where I’d been before New Veronia, so there was no point in trying. From now on, I would listen to Jay; at least he had a vision of our future.

We came upon a gas station with a mini-mart attached, and in a flash, I relived our holdup of the Mobil. Sweat broke out across my brow. Jay strode toward the front door and I hesitated for only a second before I remembered the promise I’d just made to myself about Jay and his vision and our future.

By the time I got inside, Jay was working the condiment dispensers over a foot-long hotdog, so I followed his lead. My stomach contracted and expanded like an abused balloon; I couldn’t wait to be a glutton. We each loaded two hotdogs with condiments and started eating even before we got to the cash register. I figured that a hotdog was only a buck, and we had a couple hundred, so probably Jay would just pay for us like a normal person. Up at the counter, Jay gave the cashier money stolen from the other mini-mart, and then he asked her for a piece of cardboard. After she handed it over along with his change, he used the pen attached to the counter by a chain, the one that people signed their checks with, to scribble FLORIDA on the cardboard.

Then Jay headed outside while I ran to the toilet.

There in the bathroom, holding my dick in one hand and my second hotdog in the other made me laugh—it was the first time I’d forgotten all the reasons I shouldn’t laugh since we’d left Delaware. For a moment the release felt good, and then guilt overtook me, and I ignored my inclination to wonder about why.

When I came out, I didn’t see Jay anywhere around; he’d ditched me. It was like that time our class had taken a trip to Busch Gardens, and I’d had to beg my dad for the entrance fee, and I’d looked forward to the trip for months and months, to me and Jay (Toshi hadn’t been able to afford to go) screaming as the roller coaster loop-de-looped, but as soon as we got past the ticket booth, Jay disappeared. I spent the whole class trip miserably wandering around, looking for him; I didn’t go on a single ride. If Jay had left me this time, I wouldn’t repeat that abused dog routine; I wouldn’t sniff around, hoping to find him. I would have to get my own self down to Florida.

But then Jay rounded the corner of the store, and my whole body surged with relief: I wasn’t alone. He hadn’t left me. Jay kept walking as if nothing at all had happened—that was the amazing thing, that in his mind, nothing had.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Guy back there with a radio.” Jay pointed with his hotdog. “I was trying to find a station.” He held up the cardboard FLORIDA. “Check it out: this is our ticket.” With a huge bite of hotdog in my mouth, I was unable to reply, so he went on. “The drivers see this and they know exactly what we want. If they’re heading there, or that way, they’ll pick us up.”

I swallowed. “Maybe we should try to clean up a little. So that we look like good kids. Right? Or like we won’t get the upholstery dirty.” Every crevice on my body felt grimy, and my hair was styled by its own grease.

Jay looked me up and down. “You’re fine. How about me?” He rubbed hard at the back of his neck as if polishing his tattoo.

“You look okay.” His blond crew cut had grown out just enough to catch a few twigs and pieces of leaves. I would have brushed them out if I’d been just a little bit taller. He had a dark smudge on one cheek and a red scratch on the other, and his clothes were streaked with grime. “But do we smell?”

“I don’t smell anything but this hotdog,” Jay said as he took the last bite. Yellow mustard smeared the corner of his mouth.

“I guess we’re all right.” I shrugged. Maybe we would snag a ride out of pity.

At the intersection, we sat down in the shade. When the traffic picked up a little, Jay ambled over to the road headed south and held the sign just below his chin. After a couple hours, when I was dozing in a patch of grass, Jay shouted my name, and I felt my whole body pop upright before I’d even opened my eyes, before I was conscious, really. That felt pretty strange, like I was a puppet and Jay held the strings.

The dynamic between Jay and me had changed. We’d always been a crew; it had always been me, Jay, and Toshi, and even when Toshi wasn’t around, there was still his presence , the idea of him. But now that he’d never be a part of our group again, that presence was lost, and me and Jay were just a pair. Without Toshi, we were lopsided, maimed. But already we were healing up, relearning who did what, and becoming much closer in the process, almost like family, like brothers. Sometimes it bothered me that Jay still hadn’t told me the story of his missing brother, but then again, I hadn’t asked. I needed to, though—if we were going to become tight as real brothers, I had to know everything I could about whoever might have held that role before me.

Jay’s plan worked out great: his cardboard got us into Florida the very next afternoon. That big, juicy orange for the O—I saw the state’s welcome sign for myself, or I wouldn’t have believed that we were there.

“It’s Florida,” I whispered to Jay so that the driver wouldn’t hear the awe in my voice. I was closer to my mother than I’d been in over a decade. I hadn’t really thought that we would make it, that we would find her, but seeing that welcome sign made me believe it was possible.