Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Maybe I do hate you,” I said with real malice in my voice, “but I’d rather work on something great with someone I hate than work on something tiny with people I love.”

That was a lie, but it was the kind of lie Peter Petrawicki might believe.

MAYA

“We have to go now.” April’s voice tumbled out as she started covering the twenty or thirty feet between us.

“April?!” I shouted.

“Now!”

I turned and got into the truck, immediately hitting the button to make sure the passenger side was unlocked. Then I looked over to see if she was coming, but she was gone. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when the passenger door was flung open. How had she gotten to the truck that fast?

“Drive,” she said blandly.

I was trying to split the difference between speed and safety, and that required me to pay 100 percent attention to the driving and not to April, the real living person who was sitting next to me in the truck, not dead.

“What’s going …” But before I could finish my question, the stereo blared on.

La la la la lala la la

It was Britney.

“Just drive,” April said. I looked over, and she was cradling her face in her hands.

La la la la lala la la

The song gushed through the cab of the truck, rhythms tumbling over themselves in that 2008 Britney way.

Love me, hate me

Say what you want about me

But all of the boys and all of the girls

Are begging to if you seek Amy

I didn’t know where I was going, so I headed toward my Airbnb. I knew how to get there and I figured, once we arrived, we’d have time to actually talk. This wasn’t safe. I was crying too much. Was it relief? Exhaustion? Love? I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t any particular emotion; it was all of them at once.

The song pulsed so loud, and I was blinking through angry tears. I wanted to stop the truck and hold her and have her sob into my arms while she explained what was going on, but she just kept her head down, her face in her hands, her hair spilling down, longer than it had been. She hadn’t noticed my hair, she’d barely even looked at me. Was I mad that she didn’t notice my hair? No, I was mad because this moment was supposed to be simple, and it was not.

I was on a back road, about a half mile from my Airbnb, when Britney was done having her weird wild way with the English language. I expected another song to come on the radio, but as the space between songs stretched out, I realized that it hadn’t been the radio that played … The song had just started when April got in the truck. The noise of the road was all that filled the cab now. And the tension and the fear.

“April, are you OK?” I asked.

Without looking up she said, “Yes, I just need you to keep driving.”

Her voice did what seeing her hadn’t. Her voice made it real. It was her. She was alive. Every nerve in my body became ultrasensitive; every tiny hair stood on end. I had found her. I was right! And I realized, briefly, that I didn’t know if I had ever really believed I would see her again. I really did believe she was alive—that was real—but I didn’t actually think I’d find her!

Through the tears that I didn’t have the will to stop, I said, “April, oh my god … where have you been?”

“In that abandoned bar …” She looked up, and my eyes couldn’t make sense of the left side of her face. “Apparently still in New Jersey.” She must have seen a street sign.

A laugh burbled out of me.

And then, lights behind me. Blue and red and white. Police.

How the fuck was I getting pulled over right now!? I mean, who knew, though. I’d been driving through tears and fear and worry.

“Keep driving,” April said.

“April, it’s the cops. You pull over for the cops.”

She repeated, more firmly, “Keep driving.”

“I can’t, April,” I said as I started to pull over.

She changed tactics, starting to beg. “Please. Please, Maya. Drive.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as I stopped the truck.

Maybe I should have kept driving—what the hell did I know about a situation as messed up as this?—but I have very specific police-interaction protocols. Keep hands visible, don’t move quickly, do exactly what they say.

A tall guy in uniform walked up. His partner had stayed behind in the car.

I rolled down my window as he approached and then put my hands back on the wheel.

“Ma’am, step out of the truck.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, even though this felt extremely wrong.

I opened the door and stepped outside.

“I’m going to put handcuffs on you now. Do you have anything sharp or dangerous in your pockets?”

This was all wrong. “No,” was all I said. He searched me, and then I put my hands behind my back, shaking.

That was when I noticed that the other officer had left the car and was approaching April’s side of the truck.

The other officer shouted, “Get back in the truck!”

“April, do what they say!” I was on the edge of panic.

Into my ear, the officer said, “Miss, get on your knees and stay there.” I got onto my knees, hands cuffed behind my back. Then I heard April’s voice ring out clear and loud.

“Daniel Robinson, Alex Hinch. Officers of the Woodstown Police Department. You are not on police business. No one has told you to pull us over. Why did you pull us over?”

“Get back in the truck.” His voice was loud and firm, but not a shout.

“I will not. Because you do not have any reason to have pulled us over, but you targeted us specifically. You broke the law by pulling us over, and I need you to explain why you did that.” April’s voice was so loud and clear and strong that it almost didn’t sound like her. I’d never heard her speaking like that before.

“That is not how this works. Please get down on the ground, facedown.”

“Daniel, your wife, Cindy, works in sales for Marriott Hotels. Alex, your wife, Yolanda, is a stay-at-home mom watching after your two boys, Jaime and Sammy. They are all healthy and well. And they want you to come home today. They want you to be safe.”

I was listening to this, staring at the blue door of my rented Nissan Frontier. A car rushed by us on the interstate, and then silence slowly returned. And then, simultaneously, both of the officers’ cell phones went off.

“Your wives are calling you. They’re worried you may be hurt.”

I stayed on my knees, powerless and terrified, as a number of sounds happened: scuffling, scraping, slapping, grunting, and thudding.

Suddenly, April was behind me.

“I’m sorry, that was probably really scary,” she said into my ear, as calmly as if she were bringing me a bowl of mac ’n’ cheese, which, to be clear, she had never done.

All of a sudden my hands came loose. I pushed myself up to see April head-on. Half of her face was a cloudy white flecked with the faintest traces of green and pink—like a gemstone from the bottom of the ocean; like something from another world; like the rocks that I had, right now, in the bottom of my backpack in the back of the truck. Her dark eyes shone out from within it.

“Your hair,” she said.

“My hair.”

“You cut off your locs, it’s so short. I like it.” There wasn’t any enthusiasm in her voice.

She stood up and moved smooth and fast past the two officers, now lying quietly on the ground, handcuffed to each other, toward their car. She sank her hand through the hood up to her elbow. Her hand just … drove into it. A hissing noise happened. Then she walked back to the two officers.

“Why did you pull us over?” she asked coldly as I walked over to them.