Being Young And Getting Older

“There is a point when everyone is young, you know.’’

“Yes, I know that,’’ I say. “Everyone knows that. I’m no different.”

Linnea turns to look at me, the hair that’s sprawled around her head nearly getting in her mouth as a breeze comes by. “Yeah, it’s obvious, but do you ever really think about it? Like your science teacher Mr. Bower, or your neighbors? The old lady that works at the dollar store? The one we always see taking smoke breaks?’’

I turn my head away from her, looking back at the multi-colored sky. The sun is setting and we’re lying in the back of her truck on blankets, feeling the air get cooler and watching everything darken.

I furrow my brow. “They came from somewhere, so, sure.’’

Then she sits up, and I prop myself up on my elbows to show her I’m willing to listen because she’s already waving her hands like they can somehow get her point across. “No, no. I don’t think you get what I’m saying. We graduate high school in a week, Max. One day we’ll be old, and no one will think about our dreams and aspirations. We may not even think about them. You know that?’’ She stares at me for a minute, trying to gauge if I’ve gotten anything she’s trying to say.

Which, in all honesty, haven’t.

She sighs, slouches, and looks up, squinting like the clouds can give her the words. “Right now I can say I want to be a journalist. And, I have no idea where that will take me. It’s exciting and open. What about when I am a journalist, though? I’ll just do that, and I’ll get older, and no one will see me as young again. I won’t see myself as young. I’ll do what I do, and maybe that’s all anyone will use to define me.’’

“You’ll be more mature,’’ I reason. “It might not seem so bad then.’’

“There is a part of me that likes being naive, Max. New things are exciting. That makes almost everything exciting.’’

It feels like she’s right about that. Like how getting my driver's license Junior year I felt like I had the world in the palm of my hand. Every highway and interstate, right there. When I couldn’t take my car and a suitcase and travel across the country though, I took to the back roads with Linnea, who always had something to say. Some story to tell. Those drives could have been road trips, even if they were only twenty miles, and we memorized the route within a day. 

“There is something to be said for new things and excitement,’’ I agree. “But you don’t know that getting older and settling into something is boring. You’re the least boring person I know, and you’re so set on being somebody I don’t think you’ll ever be nobody.’’

“The lady at the dollar store is a nobody,’’ Linnea mutters. “And what if she had dreams just like I do?’’

“I don’t know the answer to that. What if?’’ I put my hands behind my head and lie down again, stretching my legs out. The sky looks pink now, blending into purple, which I know bleeds into a darker blue.

“I can’t be the lady at the dollar store. I can’t be boring Mr. Bower who hates his job, and I can’t just be someone’s wealthy neighbor. I can’t just be a journalist.’’

“Then don’t.’’ I close my eyes, feeling the air toss my shirt, and slip along my skin, tickling the hairs on my arms.

“You make everything sound so easy, Max. What if I lose my vigor?’’

“Well, don’t.’’

“To hell with you,’’ Linnea laughs, shoving my shoulder.

I open one eye, and look at her, smiling. “You said it yourself. We leave high school in a week. What do you want to do with that? Stress about it?’’

She watches me, eyes sliding over my face. Her hair is fluffy with the breeze that’s been blowing through the fresh air, looking much lighter. Her hands are resting in her lap, intertwined in a ball. “No.’’

“One step closer to not losing your vigor then, huh?’’ With that, I stand and bunch up my blanket, motioning for her to do the same.

Linnea looks confused for a second but does so. She stands up rather stiffly as I jump down from the truck, but follows anyway, digging her keys out from her back pocket. I swear she’ll accidentally press the panic button one day with how tight most of her pants are, but she likes them that way.

“Where do you want to go? The diner?’’

“The diner?’’ I ask. “At this time? No. We’re going to the dollar store.’’ 

Linnea scoffs. “To do what? Buy paper plates?’’

“If you’re thinking about how adults got to be how they are, and how they were once young, and have judged this poor worker, then maybe you deserve a little clarity, huh?’’

Linnea swings her keys on her pointer finger, popping a hip. “You think that lady is all-knowing or something?’’

“No, but when the store closes she doesn’t shut down like a robot and turn back on in the morning, I’ll tell you that much.’’

She rolls her eyes, staring at me, waiting for me to decide I don’t want to go, but I just breeze past her and get in on the passenger’s side.

Soon her door opens, and she gets in after me, plopping down heavily in her seat, and jamming her key in the ignition. Her hands wring along her fuzzy pink steering wheel cover, and then she pulls out of the lot we’ve parked in; the one right down Mirae road where the lake is.

The drive to the dollar store is twenty minutes, and within those twenty minutes, I get a week's worth of pop music, cranked up, at full volume. We don’t have much else to do besides this, since our whole afternoon has been filled with activity, so Linnea doesn’t suggest anything else. Instead, she’s settled for looking disinterested and drowning me in her favorite playlist.

When we pull up to the lot, right in front of a small strip mall, it only takes the two of us getting out of the car, walking right up to the store, and pulling on the door, to find out it’s closed.

The lights are on, and the sign above the entryway still flashes ‘open’.

Linnea swears under her breath. “The woman forgot to turn off the lights and clocked out. This place is closed, and it doesn’t even look that way.”

I give the handle one more good tug and sigh.

Linnea peers in, nearly smushing her face up against the glass. She looks around and silence covers us, a stillness in the air. I watch her eyes hop from aisle to aisle. From gift bags to plastic silverware, coloring books to snacks. She’s staring into this dumpy dollar store, and I’m staring at her face, trying to read it.

 And then, the lights flick off. Linnea steps back, and her hand wraps around the strap of her bag, which hangs over her shoulder. We exchange a glance, and then the open sign flicks off, and the door opens.

It’s the smoker woman, and she steps out, staring at us. “We’re closed.’’

Linnea nods, backing up more, looking at me again. ‘’Yeah, I thought so. We better go.’’

“What do you kids want? Rattling the door while it’s locked?” The woman asks, incredulously.

I don’t even know what to say. In an instant, I find it completely strange to ever ask this lady about herself. She’s looking at us not with curiosity, but with recognition. Like our features have been on every person that’s come in, and we might as well be all the teenagers on earth, or in this town. Just two young faces with bodies dressed in the resurgence of 90’s fashion.

“We just wanted to buy paper plates,’’ Linnea says. “Picnic.’’

“Go somewhere else. There are plenty of places open twenty-four hours.’’ The woman shakes her head. “Kids. Use your apps, will you?’’ She smells like smoke, and her skin is papery and thin. Stringy greying hair, cracked lips, and beady eyes. 

With blank stares from both of us, she sighs, and it’s almost like she’s pulling out a mental script, one she typed herself. “The place is called Tuckers. Once you leave the parking lot, turn right, get to the light, turn left, and it’ll be ways down on Troy Road.’’

We nod.

She then slips out from behind the door, letting it close, and giving it a tug for good measure. Crickets chirp, and the sky is dark now, humid night air swallowing us. “Have a good one.’’ She says, gruffly.

As Linnea backs up, I find my feet planted in the ground. The woman stares at me, looking bored, and expectant. 

The raise of her eyebrow gets me to spit it out. “Name?” 

Now she furrows her brow.

“Sorry. What’s your name?” I ask. 

She glances off, towards the street, and sighs. If she’s wondering why I care, she certainly doesn’t ask. “Susan.”  

“Susan,” I repeat, and twist around to look at an impatient Linnea, who is standing on the curb. Then I look back to Susan. “Pretty.”

She smiles, and it’s softer than I’d expect. “Thank you. Go on.”

I nod, and once I’ve made my way to Linnea, we make our way back to her truck, shoulder to shoulder. “She’s scary.’’ Linnea murmurs.

“She’s used to this.’’

The silence that follows really isn’t silence at all. More than anything it rings: that’s what makes her scary.

After situating ourselves back in the truck, and the slam of heavy car doors, we just sit there, gazing out the windshield. I blink as my eyes sting from staring too long, and then I look around Linnea’s car. At her fuzzy pink steering wheel, and the pink plastic gummy bear dangling off her

 keys. I regard Linnea herself, with her tight clothes and shiny jewelry, and soon turn around and stare at the slushy stains on the backs of her seats. They’re from when we brought buckets to the “bring your own cup day’’ at the gas station and filled them with all the flavors we could combine. They were spilled as her boyfriend saw us, and slammed himself up against the car door, sending us screaming, and him grinning. “Hey, pretty ladies.’’ He’d sneered, after Linnea rolled down the window, red goop covering her white pants. 

“I sure won’t look pretty after this!” She’d snapped, even though I was watching her fight a smile. 

Everything looks darker, but I can see the accents of it all, like the way the stains could be shadows, or Linnea a silhouette.

Suddenly the truck feels too big, and yet somehow too small.

Overall, too old.

I place my hand on my door and rub my thumb along the bumpy texture of it.

Trying to help Linnea find clarity hasn’t done much, except get my own stomach in knots. 

“I—” Linnea seems to sputter like she doesn’t know what to say. It makes me jump, snapping me out of whatever trance I was in. “I wish we could stay here forever.’’ She blurts, a sort of declaration like that will set it in stone: Linnea’s truck, me, the dollar store parking lot, always. 

She looks at me then, the whites of her eyes much more noticeable in the dark, dimmed pupils flicking over my face. “I am going to be fifty years old and will be stared at by young people how we just looked at that dollar store lady. The day it happens, I will die. I will die, Max. Of shame, and embarrassment, and self-pity.”

Linnea has always been over-dramatic. I know for one when she's fifty she’ll have bigger fish to fry than what the younger generation thinks, but as of now, I decide not to tell her that.

I don't want to argue. Not a this moment, and even all of summer, if I can help it.

“Yeah, I get that,” I mumble, pausing, trying to see through the slightest change in her expression that she's heard my validation. Her chewing her lip is the cue, and I sigh. “Did you see how the woman looked at us?”

Linnea scoffs. “Yeah,” and then she glances out the window, into the parking lot, illuminated by bright fluorescents. “I did.” The lights pour over the pavement, making the shadows look darker, and the sky above feel paler. “I guess there's a point when everyone is just used to things too, huh?”

“Of course.’’

 Linnea bites the inside of her cheek, something I’ve seen her do during multiple tests, and quizzes. Even when she’s debating what to eat.

She reaches up and slides her keys into the ignition, and the car seems to click, an unknown noise rolling through the dash.

After knowing the girl long enough, I can see it’s hard for her to say when she’s having doubts on her own opinions. She’ll be full of them, and if they wind up not being the truth, her silence says more than anything.

Sometimes I think her truck is alive; it seems to say what she doesn’t. The noise comes through the dash again, and I smile, feeling like it’s talking to me, explaining what Linnea isn’t. 

“Gears, turning.’’