Well, slap my ass and call me Sally. That’s just a saying, by the way. Scott Shamwell used to say that sometimes. I don’t want my ass slapped, and I prefer to be called by my own name, which is Edward.
I pull over and wait for the officer.
After the patrolman gives me a $250 ticket for reckless driving—and scolds me for texting while driving, saying that I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself or somebody else or worse, which seems silly to me because what could be worse than killing or being killed?—I remain in my turned-off car on the side of the interstate.
Who is this, really? I type. Don’t lie.
A few moments pass. Kyle. LOL.
You just cost me $250 and got me in big trouble with the Montana Highway Patrol.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!
The taunting messages from Kyle keep coming. He tells me to be a “gangsta” and not pay my ticket. He tells me that the Dallas Cowboys suck and that the Denver Broncos and Tim Tebow rule. He tells me that he’s going to whip my butt on all his Wii games, which is probably true; I never was very good at Wii. He tells me that his parents are stupid and that his school is full of “douches.”
I watch the messages as they continue to come through as I drive, which I’m probably not supposed to do, but I can’t help it. I’ll be stopping to eat in American Falls, which is 170.6 miles away, and I can answer his many text messages when I get there. In the meantime, I will monitor them.
At 12:37, however, I receive a message that causes me to turn off the bitchin’ iPhone.
Dont be all stupid when your here.
I blink twice when I see it. The words sting me. Kyle, as much as anybody, should know that I’m not stupid. I explained my condition to him soon after I met him, and I know Donna has told him about it, and still he saw fit to message my bitchin’ iPhone and call me stupid. I’m not stupid at all. I’m very smart. I know a lot of things, and I know how to do a lot of things. The world sometimes doesn’t make sense to me. Other people regularly flummox me. I’m bad with crowds, and I don’t know what to do when people are emotional, but none of that means I’m stupid. The irony is now I’m the emotional one. Kyle’s message makes me want to stop this car and beat on it with a hammer.
Also, Kyle has some nerve calling me stupid when he doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
I try to imagine what Dr. Buckley would tell me to do, which is a poor substitute for actually hearing from her. For one thing, it forces me to use conjecture, and I’ve been clear all along that conjecture can be a dangerous thing. I guess I have no alternative now.
I suppose Dr. Buckley would say that Kyle is a boy, and boys can be cruel. She might also say that his ugliness toward me is just a misplaced manifestation (I love the word “manifestation”) of his frustration with himself. Dr. Buckley often said that when we say nasty things about other people, we’re really criticizing something in them that we don’t like in ourselves. I’m not sure I ever fully understood what she meant by that, but taking that and applying it to Kyle somehow makes it easier to process. I know Kyle is having a tough time in his new town and at his new school. Maybe people are calling him stupid. Maybe he’s putting that on me so it’s not on him any longer. That’s a lot of maybes, which makes me uncomfortable.
Finally, I remember Dr. Buckley once telling me that the children who would make fun of me when I was young were, in many cases, simply dealing with differences the way children often do. Children are perceptive about differences, and they sometimes fall victim to a sort of mob mentality where a lack of conformity is identified and punished. It saddens me to think that this might now describe Kyle, because up until this point, he and I have never let our differences—like our age—keep us from being good friends. When he and Donna and Victor left Billings 190 days ago, he hugged me in their old driveway, and I hugged him back, which is hard for me. Now he’s speaking (writing) to me this way. What if we can’t be friends anymore? I don’t think that’s something I want to contemplate.
I resolve to leave the bitchin’ iPhone off until I arrive at Donna and Victor’s. I won’t get to take pictures of Idaho, and if I’m late in arriving, I won’t get to follow the Dallas Cowboys’ game tonight against the New York Giants, but I also don’t want to be confused by Kyle any more than I already am.
After dinner at the Pizza Hut in American Falls, I settle back into the seat of my Cadillac DTS and turn on my bitchin’ iPhone. I can’t help it.
A voice mail is waiting for me.
“Hi, Edward, it’s Donna. I got hold of Kyle’s phone and saw the crap he’s been sending you. I am so, so sorry about the ticket. We’ll pay for that. And you can bet you won’t be getting any more messages. This young man seems intent on digging himself a bigger hole than the one he’s already in. Gosh, we’re really so excited to see you, if you can stand to come still. See you in a few hours. Call if you’re going to be delayed. Bye now.”
Hearing Donna’s voice makes me feel funny, but not ha-ha funny and not bad funny, either. It’s like a warmth inside my body, something similar to the way I would feel when I was a little boy and I was sick and my mother would stroke my forehead and tell me stories about bunnies who live in the clouds, which is of course impossible. It’s something I haven’t felt at all since Donna has been gone. She is my best friend. Kyle was also my best friend, and I’m hopeful that he can be again, but right now Kyle and I are in difficult circumstances. Kyle seems to be in difficult circumstances with a lot of people.
That Donna would offer to pay my traffic ticket just shows what kind of person she is. That’s silly, though. I would never let them do it. I know Donna and Victor are financially comfortable, but $250 is a lot of money, and it’s not like they did anything wrong. If anybody should pay the ticket, it’s Kyle; he’s the one who caused it. But Kyle is just a boy, and he probably doesn’t have $250.
I’ll pay the ticket. Regardless of what Kyle did, it’s my responsibility. And fuck it, I’m loaded.
A half-hour’s drive down the road, after the sun has dipped below the horizon, I see the headlights coming at me from the eastbound lanes as long streaks of light. I’ve already stopped once to pee, which I should have done back at Pizza Hut. I’m close now, less than three hours away if my calculations are correct, and they usually are. (I’m not including gas in that statement, as those calculations continue to flummox me. In American Falls, I needed 13.013 gallons of gas to fill up, at $3.0699 per gallon. That came to $39.95, which sounds like a television commercial price. From Butte to American Falls, I traveled 278.3 miles, which means I got 21.4 miles per gallon.)
Despite my relative freshness, I do not like driving in the darkness, and I especially do not like it on a road that I haven’t been on before. At home, in Billings, I know the roads just fine, and I even know most of the right-turn-only routes through town. Here, on the interstate, at least I have the knowledge that I will be heading in a consistent direction: west. What I don’t know are things like where the rises are, if any patches of the interstate are in disrepair, or whether lanes will be closed due to construction. I will find these things out as I go, in the darkness. And that’s why I’m ill at ease.
I remember that one time my father had a bad wreck in the darkness. He and my mother had been in Sheridan, Wyoming, visiting some friends, and my father hit a deer on Interstate 90 as they were coming back that night. It was a bad wreck. The car—a Cadillac, naturally—wouldn’t drive anymore, and a tow truck had to come and get it and bring my father and mother the eighty-something miles back to Billings (I do wish I knew the exact distance, but I never did find out). The insurance company said the car was totaled, and it gave my father the money to buy a whole new Cadillac, which he of course did. My father wouldn’t drive any other kind of car. He used to call the Cadillac the greatest negotiating tool in the world. He would say, “When they see you coming in a Cadillac, they know two things: first, that you know quality, and second, that you don’t need their deal. You know why? Because you’re driving a goddamned Cadillac, that’s why.”