Casually Homicidal, page 14
That’s what his words felt like.
“What? Why?” I said.
“I just . . . I’ve been really swamped with my new job at the movie theater, and now hockey is starting up and stuff. It’s totally not you. I still like you a lot, I just think we need to take a break or something because I just don’t have time for all this anymore-”
“Get out.”
“What?” he said.
For a moment, I considered not doing it. I considered hearing him out. I considered letting him stay in my car, with the slim chance we could talk this out, end it civilly.
“Get the fuck out of my car.” Someone had jammed my heart through an apple slicer, the pieces flayed out like a blood red rose. I’m not sure I really wanted him to leave, but I needed the space. His words had crowded out the car—we were drowning in it.
“Michelle, please hear me out. It’s not you-”
“It’s Arden, for God’s sake! And did you not hear me? I said get out of my car!” I shouted. I shouted because I knew if I didn’t, I’d start sobbing.
Elliot gives me one last look. Something behind his eyes broke, but I couldn’t see it right then. All I saw was the lies, the betrayal on his lips. Later however, that brokenness behind his eyes—it haunted me.
Then he got out, and I sped away.
I pounded the steering wheel until the bones in my hands ached. I screamed until my voice gave out. I turned the music up so I could feel it in my chest, in the hollow space where my heart was now in pieces. I drove out to the outlook, where I went after Sarah, where I went that Wednesday night after work. The one that feels like ages ago. And I sobbed.
Because I wasn’t enough for him to stay. I wasn’t enough for him to fight, to make the time. I wasn’t enough.
Even now, I can’t fathom how he could do that to someone. Just up and leave, for a goddamn movie theater job no less.
I would never do that to someone.
Would I?
It wasn’t until after that I realized I used him. Yes, I loved him, but I also used him. Strange how those two things can exist in the same space. He became a weapon I used to gain attention and affection, both from him and others. He was where I found my meaning, my self worth. What a great foundation to build a relationship upon. Maybe that’s just what broken people do. Use each other.
Elliot and I ignore each other now. Afterwards, I kind of hated myself for leaving him like that. But he left me first, so of course I was going to leave him harder. Yes, I still hate myself for it. Have I forgiven him? To an extent, yes. Have I forgiven myself? I don’t know.
At this point, you’d think I wouldn’t have anything left of me to leave behind anymore. I had left behind so many places and people until I started feeling just as strange, just as empty. I suppose I was just leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, leading to and from my own destruction.
I left so many parts of myself in those places, until I too became just a place left behind.
And the cycle goes on.
Hendrix and I rolled out of bed at the ripe hour of 8am and checked out of the motel by 9—only to find that some asshole slashed three of my tires last night.
“Well, fuck.” I drop my bag onto the gravel. Hendrix glares at me, like there’s anyone here who gives a damn what comes out of my mouth. “Shit. What are we gonna do now?”
Nothing but a couple of unsure stutters come out of Hendrix’s throat.
I scoff. “Oh my God, you’re useless, you know that?”
Hendrix’s nose flares, and his knuckles, wrapped around the handles of his bags, turn white.
“Sorry, that was awful. I just— God!” I exclaim. This doesn’t seem to satiate Hendrix, but then again, what does?
“Maybe we should call someone,” Hendrix suggests, but there’s a twinge in his voice that sounds teasing, threatening. Nonchalant. Seething, it makes my blood boil even more. It’s like he doesn’t care.
I blink. “Yeah, and tell them that our first order of business was to commit petty theft? You remember those cops that came into that bar? What the hell would we tell our parents?” I turn toward Hendrix, the morning sun casting harsh and ugly shadows around us.
Hendrix stops, grits his teeth. “The truth.”
“Oh yeah, and you’re really great at being honest, huh?” Sighing, I back off. I press my palms to my temples, breathing and poking my fingers into the slits in the black rubber. My fingers come away black with dirt. I can tell you right now that we don’t have enough money to replace three tires. Installation fees, cost of the tires, absolutely no insurance, the cost of a tow truck . . .
Actually, we have bigger concerns: how do we get anywhere from here? My beloved Oldsmobile has gone to shit.
What I do know is that we can’t go back. I can’t go back, because my world will be nothing but disappointed eyes and sad pats on the back and lips curled just enough to show how bloody disappointed everyone is in me. But really, what else is new?
Point being: we can’t go back. I will not go back. There is still something to be had from this; I just don’t know what it is. I can feel it in my bones, in my soul. So, I hike up my shorts and haul my bag higher on my shoulders, and start walking down the road. I hear Hendrix follow.
“Whoa, where are you going?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. Speaking it aloud almost boosts my false sense of confidence. The sun shines down into the valley, cutting through everything and blotting the sky to a piercing white. Hendrix’s luggage rumbles over the gravel.
“Are you just going to leave your car there? Where the hell are you going?” Hendrix’s voice rises with intensity, to a level that sends hackles raising on my neck. My vision tunnels, the green falling away until it’s just blackness.
I whip around to face Hendrix, and his nagging questions halt. “No, Hendrix, I don’t know where we’re going. My tires are fucking pancakes , and unless you’ve got a couple hundred bucks lying around, I can’t pay for a tow truck or new tires right now. I don’t know where the hell we’re going because I’ve never known! You want to know why I went on this fucking trip? I don’t know! ” I scoff, dropping my bag on the gravel, moving closer to him. His nostrils flare at me, as if he’s warning me, but I keep going. “I don’t know, but all I know is that I had to get out of that fucking town, and I dragged you into this and . . . and you can’t leave now. You can’t.”
Hendrix swallows, meeting my red-hot frustration with cold indifference, when he himself was just yelling at me a moment ago. “Why not?”
I sneer. “Because they’ll blame this on you. You’re the guy, and you’re bigger than me. They’ll think you kidnapped or murdered me, and maybe I’ll let them believe that.” It’s awful, I know, but I cross my arms and step back.
Fire rages behind his eyes as he scans me, evaluating the situation. “I saw they had bike rentals around here. We could take those.”
I blink. Just like a match being snuffed out, all the anger previously seen in Hendrix is gone. He seems to mirror me—when I’m hot, he’s cold. I’m so stunned that I just watch as he strolls right past me, toward the bike rentals.
I run after him, dragging my bag. I toss one good look at my car. Someone’s going to find it and see the receipts from restaurants, the old shoes, the ice scraper that I had to buy. They’re going to smell the drugstore perfume and the hockey scent from Elliot’s hoodie that I still haven’t given back to him because I’m a coward.
My car is now a place left behind. And just like that, I leave all the pain behind, trapped inside the cabin of my red 2003 Oldsmobile Alero.
I glance over at Hendrix, and he’s studying me right back. “Let’s go, then,” I say.
About half a mile down the road, there’s a small wooden shack with an old geezer manning the station. A wood-carved sign advertises bike rentals and an entrance into Lolo National Forest. The sun pokes in through the dappled trees, the gravel crunching as we approach the man. The late spring air is balmy and warm. What a beautiful day for the world to fall apart.
“You pay as you go,” he says. He blinks at us like he couldn’t be more disinterested, his white stubble pushing through his leathery skin. “There’s a timer on it. Rates are $2 an hour, plus a flat rate of $5 to start. We close at dusk.”
I rustle through my wallet, smiling through my teeth as I realize that I’ve only got two $20 bills left and a few ones. Who knows what Hendrix has. “Thanks,” I say.
I glance over at Hendrix, who stands solid as the old man brings out bikes for us to try out. We hop on the bikes, and the old man regurgitates the rules to us that I tune out. I’m too focused on what we’re really doing. We’re really doing this. I’m really doing this. There’s something in these woods, and beyond them. The world is big and beautiful, and I want to get a good look at it before I grow up and can’t see the stars anymore.
But another voice chimes in. What the hell are we doing? I worked all summer for that car. Am I really going to leave it behind?
Yes. Absolutely. And all of the shitty things that happened inside it.
Hendrix eyes me as I stroll back over. “You ready?”
I sigh. Am I? The voice in my head reminds me that I have no idea where we’re even headed to begin with. Just anywhere but where we are now. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
We speed down the trails, keeping an eye on the map that I snagged from the stand—always heading west. Technically, the trails are a big loop so eventually we’ll circle back to the rental place, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. The wind blows through my hair, and the summer sun paints our skin with bronze. My anxiety from earlier is mysteriously gone, and I can’t help but think to myself that this is good. The speed, the mountain air, the trees—it’s all good. Hendrix even seems to be having a good time.
On a rocky ledge overlooking a field, Hendrix stops, and we soak in the view. I smile, the sun painting the grass golden, and the trees a striking, warm green. The mountains and clouds in the distance turn a deep, cobalt blue. I dig in my bags for my camera. “Beautiful, ain’t it?” I say. The air is sweet, like the sticky tips of clover. The wind rustles Hendrix’s dark waves with a soft hand.
But he doesn’t say anything. He just hops off his bike, and fiddles with the timer on the top bar of the bike, below the handlebars.
“What are you doing?” I ask, but I feel like I already know the answer.
He looks up at me. “Taking off the timer. We have no intention of returning these bikes, do we?”
I laugh once. “No. Right. Yeah.” In the beauty of the trail, I almost forgot our original intentions. Hendrix’s sudden willingness takes me by surprise. It makes me uncomfortable, actually. This whole trip, I’ve had to drag him along like a sack of potatoes, and then all of a sudden we want to go off the grid and he’s all for it? The familiar kick of adrenaline flickers to life in me.
My sweaty fingers fumble with the buckle, and the timer falls to the side, but it’s still connected by a ziptie. And then—of course—Hendrix whips out his knife.
He points the blade at me, and my neck tenses. He recognizes that I’m confused so he flips the knife around. I take it and saw through the plastic
Hendrix removes his timer, and I hold mine up to the light. “Should we leave them here? Break them? Send them careening into the valley?”
He scratches his cheek. “No, they might have trackers. We should just leave them on the trail just in case they come looking. If we smash them, that guy will probably figure it out.”
“Yeah, right. You’re right,” I say, holding the device in my hands. And then I walk to the edge and throw the device into the prairie grass, and watch as it tumbles down the hilly incline.
Hendrix comes up behind me, scoffing lightly, as if he’s just a little bit proud of me. He tosses his over as well.
“That’s that, then,” I say, glancing over at him.
He raises his eyebrows. “It is.”
I grab his hand, feeling the surge of adrenaline that sends my blood running golden. I remember my camera and take it off from around my neck. “Hey, we should take a picture together. To remember this moment.”
Hendrix frowns. “Why?”
I scoff. “Hendrix, can you just humor me for five seconds and let me take a picture? Besides, we’ve been on this misadventure for four days, and I have no pictures with my road trip buddy.”
He sneers. “ Road trip buddy ?”
“Yes, road trip buddy,” I insist. “Now, smile.”
“Fine,” he grumbles.
Extending my arm, I hold up my camera to our faces, making sure that I get the gorgeous mountain valley in the background. One click, and it’s done. I turn the camera around, checking to see if it’s a good one.
“Perfect,” I say, and I catch Hendrix leaning over my shoulder to peek at the picture. See, he does give a shit sometimes. “Let’s go, Hendrix. We haven’t got anything else to lose.”
He smirks at this, and we jump on our bikes and ride.
For most of the day, the scenery is bright and colorful. The sun dusts the summer grass in gold, and the mountains open up like the mouths of whales to reveal the pastel sky. Often, Hendrix carries a near-tactile mood with him, but this time, even that falls away and the darkness disappears from the corner of his eyes. It relaxes the knot in my gut for a while.
We stop for lunch in a wider part of the path, next to a grove of pine trees, spaced apart and waving in the slight wind.
“So we’re still on the trails, right?” I ask, picking at my granola bar.
Hendrix glances at the pamphlet. “Yeah. But the trail circles back around a few miles ahead. We’ll either have to take the Mountain Ridge one, or trek our own path west until we get out of the woods.”
“Literally, or metaphorically?” I tease, smirking up at him.
“What?” He frowns at me.
“Nevermind. Maybe we’ll try the Mountain Ridge, but eventually we’re going to have to go completely off the grid.”
Hendrix pauses. “You sound apprehensive.”
“And you’re not?”
I can tell Hendrix thinks about this for a while, because the sharpness in his eyes flickers for a moment. Then he just shrugs.
I sigh. “Let’s go, then.”
Thursday, May 24th. 3pm. That’s when Hendrix and I diverge from the beaten path and go completely off-grid. We belong to no one now.
The afternoon clouds roll in like the underbelly of a wave, taking a washcloth to the hard edges of light and shadow. Eventually, we have to walk our bikes up the forested ridge because the area below is too heavy with brush to drag the bikes through. From here, I can see the world. Or, rather, my slice of it. Somehow, nothing else seems to matter out here. And I like that.
We stop for a moment, though, when I take out my digital camera. It’s just too beautiful not to photograph.
However I notice Hendrix scrunching his face at me. “Why do you have to photograph everything?” he asks.
I sigh. “Because I live in the past.”
“What?” He says it like I just insulted him and not myself.
Holding up the camera to my eye, I capture the yellow fields, the evergreen forest, and the gaping blue sky, forever imprinted in an arrangement of ones and zeroes. I’ll forever remember where I took this photo and who I was with. Not just the image is imprinted—now the memory is, too. “Because I want to capture the good stuff in life and put it in a bottle and relive it over and over again.”
The darkness around Hendrix is so deep I can barely see his eyes. “That’s not how life works.”
His voice—so harsh and severe and hopeless —makes me inhale sharply. “I know.”
Breathing carefully, I lift the camera up to my face, aim the lens at Hendrix, and— click.
The afternoon light has turned gray, a pale sheet that barely pierces through the trees. When the landscape changes and the forest only gets denser and the trees only get taller, something takes flight in my stomach. Except then that something flutters and fights against the wind and falls to its death. Hendrix hasn’t smoked in a while, and it’s actually a bit concerning. Digging my fingernails into my thigh, I check my watch—5pm.
Fuck. We should be out of here by now, shouldn’t we? And then it hits me—I don’t know how large this forest is. I don’t know where the next town is. The map only covers the trails. I’m so stupid.
My eyes travel up to Hendrix. He stopped a few paces ahead of me, facing into the endless forest. It’s like a mirage—a sick, twisted optical illusion.
“Hendrix,” I say. “Do you know where we are?”
He scratches his head. “Uh, the sign said ‘Lolo National Forest’, probably near the Montana and Idaho border-”
“Wow, really, no shit,” I say. “No, what I mean is, how close are we to a town, a road, or something?”
Hendrix’s voice catches in his throat. “Didn’t you bring the atlas from your car or something?”
“I don’t know!” I say, hopping off the bike and unzipping my backpack. But I must have misjudged something and all of my shit careens out of my bag, spilling onto the forest floor. “Shit.” Fear shakes my insides around like a baby’s rattle.
I claw through my stuff, mud accumulating under my fingernails. Hendrix is just standing there, as helpful as a tree. No, actually, trees are more helpful. They produce oxygen. Hendrix produces nothing.
Since I’m a dumb bitch, I must have left the atlas in my car. Our phones are useless this far out. We could go back, but we’d be biking all night and it would be dark, but we’d have to deal with my car, and I can’t go back. Maybe I’ve gone completely mad, but for some reason my gut tells me we can’t backtrack. “Fuck.”
“What?” Hendrix spits, and with just that single word, something in my brain snaps, like the twig that crunches under my feet.
“What do you mean, what ? I can’t find the atlas, and we’re lost, Hendrix. We’re lost . No one knows that we’re out here, and-” My voice cuts out. My vibrating anger has burned away into sobs that pound on my diaphragm. Break my chest in two like a wooden board. I’m terrified.
