I’ve been sitting in my car for an hour before Jules gets there. She’s sweating. She’s on foot. She bangs on the passenger side window.
She gets in.
I drive.
Ash used to be used to it, and now Jules is—but when I need to think, I drive. You don’t ask questions. And there is no destination.
We’ve been by the Bob Evans, along this desolate strip of road, by this McDonald’s, in Riverside. I pull off in the Carroll High School parking lot. Some track kids are warming up. This tall sign informs us that "Congratulations! Math Team 3rd in State of Oho."
Jules is pressed against the far window, as far away from me as she can be, and she’s got this look on her face like I better talk: now.
I just tell her: "I tried acid last night."
"Was Ashley there?"
"She wasn’t there until the end."
"Did you tell her not to come to your house?"
"I told her."
"Has she been over?"
"Since that one day? No."
"You need to tell me, right now, do you still like her..like-her like her?"
"No. Absolutely not." I’m looking at Jules like we’re both in a courtroom and wondering if this is how our relationship is going to be for the rest of our lives.
She’s gripping the door handle. Wearing sweatpants.
I’m hearing the track kids outside the car as they’re shouting and laughing and their coach tells them to shut up. "Math Team: 3rd in State of Oho." I’ve got to get out of this place. I should ask Jules if she wants to go to New York, right now. She can show me her home. Someone like Jules doesn’t belong in this place. She deserves someplace where they can spell the name of their own state, even in a state with more than four letters.
Jules is looking at me, breathing in and out. Then she starts to cry. She starts to hit my chest. And she’s in the seat with me. She’s yelling at me—I mean really yelling. The car is getting hot and I want to turn it on so we can use the air conditioning but I can’t the way Jules is sitting. I don’t want to be disrespectful—even if I am hot. I hate being stuck in a car with someone and those track kids are looking at us, and then their coach looks at us and he makes the kids go back to their stretches, but there’s still some of them looking, as Jules cries, and I see them looking up from their shoes, and the grass, into our car.
This is the crying part of the relationship. This is the stuffy part, when neither one is happy and neither one can change it. But you stay together, because even horror isn’t enough reason to break it off. Because this doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. And she knows you love her. She knows. Every time you tell her.
But she bangs on my chest, and she gets it out. And I’m crying too, gripping her hair, and she’s looking up at me, quiet now, with humongous eyes, asking me why, why, why—why did I try acid.