The last time she hitchhiked was at the end of a long day on the river in the July before she left town for university. She was supposed to get a ride with someone’s cousin, but they wanted to stay so Petra started walking back to town. She still had fifteen km to go—and was at least ten from a payphone—when she decided to push her ratty, river-tangled hair behind her ears and stick her thumb out into the empty road.
A huge beige car emerged from one of the driveways in the subdivision past which she walked, just right there, like he’d been watching for her.
He unlocked the door and she asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Just returning some tapes to the video place on Festubert, that good enough?”
They chatted about one of the tapes he’d rented. The Thing. There was one part with a defibrillator, where the man’s chest opened up and the doctor shoved his hands right up inside the body. But that monster—it bit his hands off and swallowed them and then turned into something new and then something else new. He laughed. He said it again, about the doctor’s hands plunged inside the man up to his wrists and bitten right off.
Then, halfway into town he asked, “Are you working?” And Petra said no, she was going away to school in September, so she wasn’t even sure if it was worth looking, though last summer she’d got a job at an ice cream place. That had been okay.
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I was looking for a girl.”
“Yeah,” Petra said. “Ha-ha.”
Ten minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot of the Video Pantry. She picked up his three VHS tapes and reached for the door. It locked under her hand.
She pulled on the handle.
“You want to go have coffee?”
“No, no thanks. Ha-ha,” she said.
“Too bad.”
She pulled on the handle again.
“I have to get home. Ha-ha. My dad—”
She pulled on the handle. She didn’t see him move, but this time the door opened. She returned The Thing and the other tapes, then waved over her shoulder and fled along the sidewalk of the strip mall hoping she would not look up to see the beige Reliant and the man watching her. As she walked the rest of the way home, she thought not of the instant the door clicked shut, even though it was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and even though she was in a parking lot full of minivans and children.
She fixed him in her mind: the man with the scaly red skin along his white hairline, the heavy ring on his left pinky, the tuft of white hair poking through the placket of his golf shirt. His khaki slacks. The pine-scented beige-velvet interior of his car. The doors that lock and unlock and lock again.
Not that it was the first time someone had asked if she worked. It starts early. Fourteen on the sidewalk after the movie let out, waiting for Petra’s mom. A car pulled up close and the driver—some guy with a scrubby moustache and the ubiquitous baseball cap.
“You girls want to party?”
Jen giggled, and Petra said something like, Um. I don’t know? Her voice weak-sounding, the way it rose at the end. The guy pulled away without saying anything else.
“He was kind of cute,” Jen said.
This was how it used to be. You are both sixteen. You will be an actress. You will be a world traveler. You will direct great films, or write epic novels. You will fuck a million beautiful men. Just for now, though, you’re lying together on an air mattress in a backyard and listening to a mix tape you have listened to a thousand times already and which has been distorted by all those listenings and by the cheap cassette deck in the car, and by the heat of summer. For twenty years afterward you will keep the tape, and when you listen to it, and hear the familiar distortions that time and repetition make, it will break your heart a tiny little bit.
When you’re sixteen, though, that doesn’t matter, because you’ll be out of here pretty soon, and mix tapes are easy to make and easy to lose.
Jen says, “This is the start of a montage. Like. The opening part.”
And yes, Petra thinks. Because these are the sharp, poignant scenes that spark the story, and what begins with two sixteen-year-old girls pledging their eternal ambition and their absolute affection will, in fact, end somewhere else entirely.
This is true.
But this was how it ended up happening. In July there are parties in someone’s woodlot or in a gravel pit where even on a hot night the air is cool and clammy. Some girl was playing Bon Jovi and someone else insisted, noisily, on Guns N’ Roses. There are two guys. Chris with the startling dark eyes and the buffalo plaid, his chin angry with pimples, drinking Kokanee or Carling High Test. He’s brought a friend, Eric, whose eyes are not so startling but who is otherwise identical, down to the High Test. Eric was obviously instructed to entertain Petra while Chris chats with Jen, and Petra is aware of this.
For these reasons she shotguns the gin she stole from her parents, and is surly, and thinks, This is just so stupid, but Eric sticks with her. Jen and Chris move farther away, and a little closer to one another, then farther again from where Petra sits on the hood with her attendant Eric talking about Guns N’ Roses, who suck.
Jen says something Petra can’t hear, but she knows what’s happening because she’s seen it before, when Jen was faced with any number of men, gas station attendants, and waiters, with the boys in their Consumer Education class, with Petra’s own younger brother. His looks were always plaintive when Jen came to dinner, with her very blue eyes, and her very dark hair, and her translucent skin, the fine, long bones of her fingers, her narrow ankles, the pale stem of her wrist.
“So, what’s going on with you?” Eric tries again.
“Just. Stuff. Summer stuff.”
“Cool. Cool,” he says, then, “Yeah.” Then, “So you hear about that girl?”
“At the Petro-Can?”
“No. She was off the trail at Skutz Falls. Don’t know how long she’d been there, but someone saw her on the highway a few days before. It’s pretty stupid, you know, it’s pretty stupid to go out there alone.”
“I guess,” she says.
“I heard her neck was—”
Petra listens for a few minutes longer than she can stand about what happened to the girl.
Abruptly she has to pee, so she explains to Eric, who is like, Um, okay, and she knows he’s happy to interrupt their conversation. Petra walks through the long, spindly shadows the bonfire casts among the trees, and though the night is very dark around her, she keeps her back to the light and pushes through the bush. She can feel around her the night that engulfs them, the deep reaches of the island’s interior, its valleys and mountain ranges. And she thinks, as she often does—because this scene is not singular, but often repeated that summer—about how far she would have to walk to reach the dark places of the island. How long, she wonders, would it take to become lost?
She’d walked the trail to Skutz Falls a dozen times. She’d gone on field trips there and camped with Jen, hanging out on beach towels by the river.
For a moment she hears—as though she was still in the beige-velvet Reliant—the sound of a door locking and unlocking, locking and unlocking.
When she got back, Petra was happy she couldn’t find Eric anywhere. She crawled into the back seat of Jen’s car and put her head down on a bunched-up sweatshirt that smelled of Cool Coconut Teen Spirit. She sank into the uncomfortable, paralyzed state that is necessary when one tries to sleep in the damp backseat of a Plymouth Horizon, but she did not sleep. Time passed quickly and slowly and quickly again, so when she closed her eyes, “Patience” was still playing on the tinny speakers of a car somewhere nearby, and when she opened them it was “Stairway to Heaven.” Between closing and opening her eyes she had lived only a few, fretful moments.