During the Dog Days

You slide the straw between your lips and suck apple juice into your mouth, swallow it hard. 

It is the shaky exhalation of summer, everything painted soft and dry purple by the sun. We’re out in the backwoods, up in the trees in that little house your Daddy built so many years ago. The green paint is peeling, but the insides are worn soft, my back pressed against the wall and my knees tucked to my chest. 

“What do you wanna do?” you ask. You are the most beautiful girl in this shitty county, a fact I’ve always been aware of but recently have started to appreciate differently. 

“About what?” I ask back.

“About nothing, dumbass. What do you want to do do?”

“Oh,” I say, my cheeks dusty pink and my eyes darting to my clasped hands, my fingers pulling at the hem on my shirt. “Why do we have to do anything? Can’t we just sit here, talk.”

You press your juice box flat, the sucking noise loud and slurpy. Then you breathe out, satisfied, dropping the waste on the ground next to you. “All right, then talk.”

Nobody ever knows what to say when told to talk and if they do they’re probably cops. “Shut up,” I say instead. You always rattle me, with your mean brown eyes and the uneven fringe, the set of your shoulders like you own this place. You do, almost, but that’s not the point. Ever since we were kids you’ve made me feel like that, an ant under a magnifying glass, waiting for your thumb to squash me. 

But you are also my best friend and I’m sorta half in love with you.

“Let’s plan a road trip,” is what I finally manage to come up with.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere but here.” The only things in this place is a cemetery and a bridge built by the bad guys in the last war. And your house and my house and acres of corn fields and that’s about it, somewhere you go to never be found again. 

“Cheers to that,” you say, but you’ve just finished your drink. You grab a cherry from the bowl and pull off the stem, pop the fruit in your mouth. You spit the stone into a little bowl, a fact I notice and feel irrational gratitude about. You didn’t spit on me. “So we hijack my dad’s car and where’s our first stop?”

“I don’t want a plan,” I say. I reach out for a cherry as well, smooth my thumb over the shiny, dark red surface of it. It’s smooth like a jewel, sweet. 

“You just said you wanted to plan a road trip. Make up your mind.”

“Well,” I say, the cherry stone resting behind my bottom teeth. “We flip a coin. Heads, we go north, tails, we go south. What would you bring?”

“I’d bring a damn torch,” you say and I can’t help but laugh, my mouth stretched out like a snake. “My pillow, some blankets. Cash.”

“Nobody uses cash today.”

“And I thought you wanted to Bonnie and Clyde it up with me,” you say. “We can’t be leaving a digital trail. Let’s do it old school, cash and cup noodles.”

“We’ll need boiling water for that.”

“We get one of those kettles you plug into the car. What’re you bringing?”

“A book of puzzles,” I say, and now you laugh, this beautiful pearly thing, your eyes squinting like little moons.

“You think you’ll get bored in my company?”

“No,” I say, because I don’t, I wouldn’t. “Let’s bring some comics too, a deck of cards. No phones or anything like that.”

You don’t ask if I’m kidding, but just nod your head. You reach your hand into the bowl with cherries again, pick two and hand me one. “You’ll get sick of me in a day flat.”

It sounds like a confession, or something worse. Dark and vulnerable, like we’re still the seven-years-old little girls having our first sleepover in this tree house when I moved here, when I told you I lied about having friends back in London. How you said you’d also never had any friends, only your younger brother and your dog.

There weren’t any other kids out here, still isn’t. I hated my parents for moving here, so far out civilisation has yet to catch on, but now I am glad, because it means I met you, Martha, my angel and my idol. You who taught me how to play video games and didn’t laugh at me, at least not all the time. 

But as much as I love you, I still can’t stand this place. “I wouldn’t,” I say, spitting the stone into my palm. It is tiny, but crushed up it could kill. “If I was gonna get sick of you, I would’ve a long time ago.”

“Touché,” you say with a low whistle. “We’ll bring a journal and colouring pens, and each place we stop we’ll draw a picture.”

Such a romantic idea, because much as you try to hide it, you are a hopeless fucking romantic. Not that I’m better, raised surrounded by trees and more trees like Wordsworth’s wettest dream.

“On the first night, let’s get a pizza. A real pizzeria one in a cardboard box that we can eat immediately when the cheese is still too hot and deliciously melty. We’ll eat it in the car, right there, we won’t have to drive a dozen miles and eat it at home, when it’s already half cold and soggy.”

“Is this a rite of passage thing?” you ask. You push a straw into another juice box and suck it between your lips. You slurp up juice and ask, “our very own Bildungsroman come to life?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Guess we’ll see.”

“When are we doing this?” you ask, minutes later, five new cherry stones in the bowl. I don’t say anything for another moment, stretching out my legs, bending each knee to get the feeling back into them. 

“Soon,” I say finally, which is so vague it’s almost a non-answer but better than the truth, which is probably never. Not that I don’t want it to happen, because I do, more than pretty much anything, but because we aren’t Bildungsroman material. This is a place you don’t escape, a prison, even if my parents saw it as freedom from metropolitan stress. 

But at least I am not caged alone. 

And maybe, maybe, we actually will one day hijack your Daddy’s car.