We pulled into the service area, The Blanford Service Area, to be more precise, caught about twenty miles in between Exit 2 and Exit 3 on the Mass Pike, which is also I-90 West, a road that runs all the way to San Francisco. I topped the gas tank off and Kate went inside the travel center. I pulled the bike over to a parking place so we could combine our luggage and shrink it down some. It was boiling hot on the asphalt. Kate emerged with two bottles of water. Her face was fresh to me. Studying it, I got this giddy feeling that she was all mine until Chicago. She had nowhere to go but back to me and the bike.

 

It was a good feeling. I didn’t have anywhere else to go either, and that was an even better feeling. Clarity. She caught me staring at her as she walked towards me and she gave me the finger. Kate’s really beautiful. Part of my good feeling was the result of knowing I was allowed to look at her all I wanted. I didn’t have to snatch glances at her or hide the interest in my eyes when she looked at me. She sat down on the curb to eat a bag of Doritos.
“I’m starved,” she said. “Haven’t eaten a thing.”
“Nutritious,” I said.
Kate’s vegetarian.
“Okay,” she said, “Ranked in order, would you rather be an Ewok, a Smurf, a Gummy Bear, or a Snork.”
She was trying to bust up the awkwardness. It wasn’t terrible awkwardness, but we were both having trouble letting words out of our mouths. I wanted tell her right out that I knew why she’d come with me, but I could not figure out how to say that so I’d gotten quiet.
“Snork?” I asked.
We were the exact same age and had watched the same cartoons.
“They’re like underwater Smurfs.”
“I know,” I said. “And Gummy Bears from the cartoons, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I loved that show. It’s underrated cause it’s named after a candy. Toadwart was a deep character.”
Toadwart was a troll but he was a runt so he was an outcast. By nature trolls were supposed to eat gummie bears, but Toadwart was always bailing them out of trouble. Only problem was sometimes he turned on them too. He was caught in the middle and no one liked him. Generally I don’t like arbitrary answers to hypothetical questions. But Kate made me feel like the question was important to whether she liked me or not. It was part of a tryout and I wanted to do well.
“Gummy Bear, Smurf, Ewok, Snork,” I said, confident I was right.
“You like the forest more than the ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you like Snorks?”
“Gummy Bears were a legendary race entrusted with magic, the last of a dying breed. Smurfs lived a secret quiet life now and again threatened by disaster, like medieval farmers. Ewoks were a tribe, powerless in a world of technology but brave and true. I just don’t like that they were midgets that looked like Norwich terriers. And Snorks were just an ABC knock-off on the Smurfs with a corny theme song. ‘Snork along, let’s snork a happy song.’ Snork this.”
She waved the back of her hand at me and nibbled the corner of a Dorito.
“I like Snorks. They’re carefree.”
I liked the game. It was like being with my older sister. She always made up imaginary worlds for me to play in. We used to play school and she would relish giving me Ds. I liked getting them because I was too young to know what they meant and they seemed to make her happy. My sister’s four years older than me and my best friend. When she went to college our house was dysfunctional so she never came home. I felt abandoned by her but as an inexpressive teenage boy I couldn’t tell her that. We got over it one day when I was in college and we were on a vacation together in Normandy.
“I feel like if I wasn’t your sister, you wouldn’t even like me,” she told me.
I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe and then I told her how I felt like she’d abandoned me and that mom had abandoned me too. It was the first time since puberty I’d ever told anyone how I really felt about anything and the first time I’d cried in front of my family since my parents told us they were splitting up.
I finished untying the pack from the backrest while Kate munched away. It took about five minutes just to get all those knots loose. I had sweat dripping off my nose when I was done. I went inside to piss and she combined our stuff. She’s neat. When I came back out she had the bag re-packed and tidy. It didn’t even look like it had gotten any bigger.
“You should always roll your clothes up if you’re trying to squeeze,” she said very seriously.
I started to tie the bag back on the bike, sweating the whole time, and it took forever. I could tell she was getting impatient. I was getting fed up with my monkey-rigged operation. The trouble with starting late in the day on a road trip is that the sands of the hourglass hit you one by one like water torture. I finally got the bag tied to the backrest, climbed on, put my headphones in, and my goggles and helmet on. Then Kate hopped on, put her headphones in, her helmet on, and pressed play. When our brains were connected to the four white strands of the I-pod phones, I hit the start button on the bike and it was dead. I mean deader than dead. No sound, no lights, no nothing. I checked to see if the run switch was on or off. On. I turned the key back and forth. I hit the start button again. Nothing. I shook my head. Tried again. The music was blaring in my ears so I had to kind of tear the helmet off and the earphones out in order to think. Kate noticed. She turned off the music and got off the bike.
“No power,” I said, sounding calm. “I don’t know why.”
Maintenance deferred. Kate sat down on the curb and didn’t say anything. I tried the bike again.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s dead.”