Casually Homicidal, page 6
That shuts me right up.
We get gas on our way out of Harlowton. Arden buys fifty dollars worth of snacks like she’s preparing for the apocalypse. I know she says she’s still got six hundred dollars left, but I’m not convinced. She told me to bring all the cash I had, and I did because I have no plans on returning home.
“Alright, where to now?” Arden asks, now that we’re back on the road. Things are starting to get more mountainous—less forested river valleys and golden plains, and more hearty gray rock jutting to the skies. Shouldn’t I be asking her where we’re going? She dragged me along on this stupid trip.
“Arden,” I ask. “Where are we going?”
Now she clams up. She sighs, picking at the hem of her shirt. “I mean, does it matter? We’re just out here exploring our home state, you know, seeing our little corner of the world—”
“Cut the shit,” I say. God, this might have been a mistake. Sometimes Arden is so annoying I can’t stand it. I twist my hand around the leather steering wheel, taking some pieces of the decaying material with me. I should have killed her when I had the chance. “Where are we going, and why ?”
“Because I wanted to! It doesn’t matter why. I mean, who doesn’t want to just get away for a while? That’s why vacations exist, you know.”
“Where are we going?” I accentuate each word, because I’m so irrationally angry that it has no other place to go but out.
Arden huffs in indignation. “Alright, you’ve got me. I guess I don’t know where we’re going. Does that matter either?” She’s defensive now, her voice pushing against the roof of the car.
“Nothing matters,” I say, countering her emotionality with dryness. I’ve found that’s something that always works.
Arden huffs at me like she’s going to launch into a rant, but just sighs and slinks away from me, leaning her head onto the window.
The thing she doesn’t get is, it absolutely does matter why you leave. People who are content and happy don’t just leave. I’d be the first person to know.
Arden puts in her earbuds and pretends to be more angry at me than I am at her. We’ve passed Ringling and Sedan in relative silence. We’re driving south towards Bozeman when Arden’s phone rings. I’m surprised it took someone this long to contact her.
“Oh shit,” she says, pulling out an earbud and sitting up. “It’s my dad.”
“You gonna answer it?” I tease.
Her nostrils flare. “Hello? Dad? Yeah, I’m just on a weekend trip with some friends. No, you don’t know them.” Pause. I try to decipher the muffled speech to no avail. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Is Mom worried about me?” Her dad speaks for a long while, and Arden visibly deflates. “Okay, bye.”
I flick the end of my cigarette out the window. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”
Arden seethes next to me, her head turned away. “Shut up.”
I consider for a moment, if I should keep egging her on. Since I can’t kill her while driving, why not? “Did you cover for us?”
“Why do you care?” she snaps. Yikes. But her voice, it cracks, revealing the truth.
“Oh, I don’t.”
Arden rolls up the windows, shutting us in a bullet of our own misery. “If they really wanted to find me, they could just get the police to track my phone.” She scoffs, slumping back down in her seat. “I’m actually not surprised. They only care about me now that I’ve gone and left.”
“And that’s bad, why ?”
“Because it’s fake. They’re only doing this so they can convince themselves that they care. We’re eighteen, we can leave whenever the hell we want to. My parents don’t give jack-shit about anything else in my life unless it affects them. But if we turn around and drive home, then everything will just go back to the way it was. And I’ll tell you what, it’s fake because they only care about me running away because they can’t control this. ” She gestures to the car around us. I assume she means our situation. “My mother likes to exercise control over all things. But she cannot control me.” She sits back down, facing the open road, scoffing. “You just don’t get it. You don’t fucking get anything.”
Her flaring anger only throws gasoline on my own fire. My hand goes to my hip, where the knife digs into my flesh. “Oh, right, yeah I forgot. I couldn’t possibly understand.”
“What?” she spits.
There’s something hot and bitter trying to boil up inside me, but it gets caught in years of dusty cobwebs. I clench the wheel until the tendons in my hands snap. “That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t see my dad calling me, do you? At least your parents pretend to give a shit.”
“Yeah, exactly. They’re pretending. At least your dad is honest enough to not bother you.”
The words cut deep, stinging with poison. I grind my teeth. Breathe.
Arden sighs, and it’s like ash falling from the sky. “All my parents ever do is pretend. When they’re not pretending, it’s because I’m an inconvenience to them.”
I hesitate. Something aching pulses in my chest, like a long-forgotten heartbeat. Fuming, I give in to the conversation. “My dad . . . is a lazy piece of shit. That’s probably why he hasn’t called.”
“Yeah,” she says. There’s a pause that lasts for an eternity. “I’m just so sick of it all, Hendrix.”
I can barely speak. Glue has dried in my throat. “Me too.” Not a lie.
“My dad’s a spineless loser, actually. Lets my mom run all over him and only cares about his work. And I hate him for it.” Her words settle like snow, heavy and deafening. “What’s your mom like?”
I keep silent. The darkness has its claws locked on my shoulders, pressing down, down, down, until the weak spots inside of me begin to crack. It’s almost physically painful.
Arden frowns. “C’mon, Hendrix. Why don’t you ever want to talk about anything? First in the motel room, now—”
“Cause I just don’t.”
“Why, though? You pushed me on the whole ‘where are we going’ thing, so I’m going to push you on this.”
That’s when I snap like the painful, instantaneous breaking of a rubber band. I slam on the brakes and tear the wheel to the right, veering off the road. The underside of the car eats up the tall, golden grass and rumbles over the uneven ground. Arden shrieks, grabbing the handle above the car door. “Jesus, be careful! This is my car!” We shudder to a stop.
“Because I just don’t! ” I shout, slamming my hands on the steering wheel. Arden reels back, her face torn with fear. “I don’t want to talk about my mom.”
Tears shine in Arden’s eyes, but I don’t feel bad about it. What I do feel bad about is the awfulness, the abhorrent everything that rises to a scream inside me. Her absolute insistence on picking me to shreds only makes me want to kill her even more. With a small voice, she asks, “Why not?”
“I said I don’t want to fucking talk about my mom.” My voice is not my own. It is steel and darkness.
Heartbeat. Blood. Breathe. Heartbeat.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Heartbeat. Blood. Breathe. Heartbeat.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asks.
“Yes.”
We get out and trade places.
A great monster inside of me has begun to stir in his slumber, something greater than this present darkness. Arden’s monsters are dragging my own, kicking and screaming, into the light.
8 Arden
Monday, May 21st
‘Yu Yi’— the desire to feel intensely again
It annoys the hell out of me that Hendrix won’t tell me anything about his mom. He’s hiding something—bad or just plain painful, I don’t know. But I do know one thing: if it was a good thing that he’s hiding, he wouldn’t feel compelled to hide it.
However, there’s nothing to hide about my mother. She’s all glossy red lips and pinstripe skirts and motivational quotes that don’t actually mean anything. I mean, I love my mom. I just wouldn’t say that I like her. She’s a pusher. She pushes people, especially my dad and me, even when we don’t need or want pushing. She pushed me into taking a stats class first semester senior year, which I couldn’t care less about. She pushes Dad around just . . . in general. Dad wants to order Mexican food? Nope, can’t happen because Mom’s not feeling it. But you know what she is feeling? Italian. Italian food would be so much better, honey. You know I don’t like the way they do the salsa there. C’mon.
I think she does that sort of stuff because she expects people to be a certain way. I think I can be that way sometimes, too. The only difference is that my mother does it in such a disgusting, condescending way that can make anyone feel about an inch tall. She can also get what she wants with and without crying.
Every kid goes through a phase in middle school where they’re trying to figure out what their interests are, so they start a lot of stuff, and subsequently quit a lot of stuff. I, of course, went through a phase like that and took ice skating lessons, guitar, etc. I wanted to quit most of them because I knew they weren’t for me.
But no, Michelle Arden Campbell—daughter of Emma Charlotte Campbell nee Holloway, real estate agent and county board member—would not be a quitter. Even if she was miserable, Michelle wouldn’t be a quitter.
But Arden, well, she was a quitter.
Eventually though, Mom sort of gave up on shoving and squeezing me into her premade molds around my freshman year of high school. When she stopped caring, ironically enough, I started doing lots of stuff. And then subsequently quit them—clubs, activities, jobs, even relationships. I’ve actually made it a personal rule to quit jobs every six months or so just out of fucking spite . She’s stopped noticing at this point.
No one’s really allowed to be themselves in my house, and I think that’s the great tragedy of it.
I love cities. Well, they’re not the greatest thing ever. They can be dirty and dangerous, but at least they’re up front with their darkness—unlike the idyllic countryside, which hides its ignorance and violent isolation behind a friendly facade.
Maybe everything just sucks no matter how you look at it.
We drive around Bozeman for a while, before deciding on a local bar & grill around 5pm. There’s a moment where both Hendrix and I sit in the parking lot, staring out the windshield, thinking about what the hell we’re actually doing. Time feels frozen.
“Are we going dutch? Or do you want me to pay this time?” Hendrix asks, his voice flat. Like he’s the narrator of a documentary from the eighties on the sex lives of aquatic mammals, one that your deadbeat biology teacher would play when he didn’t feel like lecturing.
I frown. “We’re not on a date.” I think I finally get why his voice grates on strange nerves. He sounds so painfully disinterested almost all of the time. The only time Hendrix has had any sort of emotion threaded through his voice was earlier in the car, when my dad called. Even then, the emotion in his voice was rage.
“Oh, right,” he says. His voice doesn’t even indicate a sense of knowing, like he’s reminded of something. It has the rhythm of a human’s voice and even the inflection. But not the soul. It feels . . . saccharine. Manufactured. I hate it. Makes me want to punch him in the face.
In the bar & grill, Hendrix and I look everywhere but each other while we sip our drinks. There’s live music in the back, assumingly to draw in a larger Monday night crowd. The ceiling is low and painted black, with sticky bar stools and lacquered tables.
Hendrix plays with the lemon from his drink, occasionally tasting it.
“You like raw lemons or something?” I ask. It comes out harsher than intended, but hell, I’m actually kind of mad at him. He grimaces and drops the lemon in his water. “What you did in the car was kind of rude. I get if you don’t want to talk about your mom or whatever—” My words trail off when he meets my eyes—so directly it startles me. He says nothing.
Grumbling, I sit back and take in the scope of the restaurant. I ought to let it go. I’d be the first to know that painful experiences can cause us to react poorly. But damn. He couldn’t even apologize.
In the background on one of the TVs, an advertisement shows glittering lakes and polished mountains. ‘Visit Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest,’ it says. Jeez, that’s a mouthful. ‘Where you and nature become one.’
This makes me snort, and Hendrix looks back at me. “What?”
“Just this advertisement.”
“Oh.”
Again, the voice. Its hollowness stings, somehow. I breathe out, holding his gaze. Daring him to stare into my eyes and find something. I can almost imagine him in his ‘Billings’ Best Yogurt’ uniform, staring blankly at the fluorescent tubes, or at the bottom of an ice cream dish. When I close my eyes, I can see his outburst from a few weeks ago. What’s wrong with him?
Reaching into my bag, I take out my wallet and count my cash. You’d better believe I took out a chunk of my savings before leaving, but I only have about $650 left of the $800 I started with. Hendrix hasn’t contributed much other than paying for his food. It annoys me a bit, but I get it. It’s my car. It was my stupid idea to come on this trip. But if we keep draining cash like we have today, we’ll be out before we leave Montana.
Leave Montana. It really hits me then, like the squeezing of my heart. Like buzzing anxiety punching right through my diaphragm. This is really what we’ve done, what we’re going to do. Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.
But still none of this feels quite right . Nothing I think about doing in the future feels right . What have we actually done? Driven a few towns over and gotten angry at each other, that’s what. I picked Hendrix to come with me because I thought he was cool. Thought he was cool-weird. Thought he would understand me.
But he obviously doesn’t.
I look back at Hendrix. Is it too late to go back? Hendrix and I work Wednesday evening again, and today’s the Monday after graduation. Could we be back by then? No real harm done.
The waiter comes with our burgers, and I pick at my steak fries. I abruptly stand, pushing back my chair with a scrape. Hendrix flinches a bit, and looks up at me.
“What?” he asks.
I open my mouth to speak, but the live music in the background stops.
“It’s the top of the hour, so you know what that means . . . karaoke time!” In the back of the dim restaurant, the tables closest to the stage clap and cheer.
Something sparks deep in my chest, like the frantic hands of a cold survivor trying to light bits of kindling. I look at Hendrix and his flat demeanor. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Maybe this will pull him out of his funk. Maybe this will pull me out of mine.
I reach forward and grab his wrist, but he pulls away, confused. “We’re going up there to do karaoke.” I say, grabbing his hand again.
“What?” he says, knotting his eyebrows in disdain.
“You. Me. Karaoke! It’ll be fun, loser.”
He sneers, looking at me like I’m crazy. “No, thanks.”
I huff. “C’mon, Hendrix! It’ll be fun! See, this is the ‘crazy shit’ we were talking about!”
His grimace softens, like he’s studying me.
“Well, I’m going if you’re not.”
He just frowns at me with that same vaguely annoyed expression that makes me want to twist his face off with my bare hands. I turn on my heel and start walking to the stage.
My insides bubble and boil. No, this is good. This is going to be fun, even if it’s just me. This adrenaline, this edge-of-the-world feeling, is what I’ve wanted. It’s what I need .
I stand at the foot of the stage and raise my hand.
The lead band member, who looks no older than twenty-one and smoking hot , winks at me. “Looks like we’ve got our first contestant!” He offers a hand, and I take it, stepping up onto the stage. The Monday evening crowd looks like it mostly consists of older couples and families. Suddenly dizzy, I squint under two spotlights. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
For a moment, I can’t speak, and not because the lead singer is staring deep into my head, but because I feel so incredibly small. “Arden. Arden Campbell.”
The lead singer flashes me another dazzling smile. “Cool name. What would you like to sing, Arden Campbell? You name it, we can play it.”
Shit. I should have thought of something before I came strolling on up here. I scan the room, searching for something that might spark an idea. On a black chalkboard, someone’s drawn a massive pie, spilling out maroon cherries. “Try our signature pies” it reads . . .
“American Pie! American Pie by Don McLean. Yeah, that’s what I want to sing.”
The lead singer laughs low and sweet. “We can do that, sweetheart. Alright, boys.” The lead singer looks something up on the iPad resting on his music stand, and with a few snaps of his fingers, the keyboardist starts up the chords.
Somehow, something comes out of my mouth. “A long, long time ago . . .”
Against the harsh stage lights, I can barely find the shadow of Hendrix. He sits at our table, watching me blankly, with just a slight sheen of frustration. It sets off a spark in me. It drives the last nail into the coffin. I can’t stand him anymore. I can’t stand his distance, his confusion. I can’t stand my own complacency, the emptiness that gnaws within me, that stains the shredded fringes of who I am.
I don’t care anymore. I can’t care, not anymore. If we’re really going to do this—leave, that is—I’m going to do it with all that I am.
I throw my head back and belt the hook into the first chorus, and I float away with Miss American Pie herself. The music builds and the crowd begins to sing along with me. Hendrix stands, his hands tucked in his pockets, and my heart swells. A flicker of something passes over his face like the fractals of a rainbow.
