Some Magical Portal
As the forecast had promised, the rain kept me inside my walls the next two nights.
In that time, I didn’t hear from the boys again. I didn’t get another text from Adam, or even a first text from Levi.
And each night, it felt like I sank a bit deeper into my sheets, my body more restless, the raindrops on the roof as fretful as my heart.
When I did finally hear something, it was somebody climbing my trellis.
My heart jolted against my ribcage as I rushed to the window at the knock, my brain thinking it safer to stop the noise before it could disturb my dad instead of keeping away from a potential burglar.
Crime free, I reminded myself as I pushed up the glass, inch by inch, then looked out.
I held my breath to see a mess of blond hair as I finger-tamed my own, then let it out when I saw a mess of dark hair.
“Hey,” Adam whispered with a smile, practically face to face with me. At least he was keeping his voice low, but my heart was still jolted.
“Get down,” I whispered back with the next two jolts, sounding more like I hissed at him. I felt the urge to apologize, but my head swiveled instead toward my dad’s window—still dark—then back at Adam, who followed my checking.
He freed a hand and held it up, mouthing sorry , then climbed down in a slide, his unbuttoned shirt, over what looked like a tank top, catching the breeze he created as he dropped down with not much grace.
But not much noise.
Still dark.
“Let’s go,” he whispered up at me, only sounding louder from the ground.
I shushed him and held up a finger, ducking back inside to put on my sneakers. I didn’t know where we were going, but I’d been waiting days for this, and he knew as well as I did that I would go anywhere that wasn’t in here.
I met Adam at the bottom, barely missing a puddle. I tugged down the hem of my pajama shorts as he walked backward for me to follow him and get away from these windows.
“What about Levi?” I heard myself asking, glancing around for his waiting shadow while dodging more dampened soil. Where’d all that mud come from? wasn’t going to be a question I’d risk hearing from my dad.
Adam spun around with a shrug as we evened our pace. “Out of commission,” he said. I took that to mean Levi was sleeping, and the bounce in my step lost some of its bounce.
I thought about not getting any texts from Levi, and I almost asked Adam if he even gave my number like I’d asked. But I didn’t, because he said he would.
I lost the rest of my bounce from the thought that Levi just didn’t want to reach out to me.
“But I could use some company,” Adam added, with another smile angled at me. “Yours.”
My mouth curved up at him. “I am your distraction,” I stated as another tease at the word.
He gave me a puckered, playful eye roll. “We’re sneak out buddies.” Yeah, right. He didn’t have to sneak. “Let’s go,” he repeated, breaking out into a jog as we met the street, and I jogged to keep up, my feet much more comfortable and quieter in my sneakers.
“This is yours ?” My voice echoed in the silent street as we approached the car pulled off against the curb, one house down from mine.
“Yeah,” Adam confirmed, so, as he rounded for the driver side, I went for the passenger side. “It was a bribe—I mean, birthday gift last year,” he added, his slip of the word purposeful enough to make me chuckle as we got in.
My mouth hung open like I’d never been inside of a car before. I was ingrainedly shocked at seeing other teens with vehicles of their own, because I still didn’t even have my license. And I didn’t know if I would. When I would, I corrected the thought. Because I would. Just because I didn’t have my license when I should’ve didn’t mean I wouldn’t ever.
I was learning that for sure this summer.
This was the summer of will s.
Adam’s car was cleaner than I would’ve guessed it would be. Just a few straw wrappers scattered around and some dirt on the floor mats. And he had a satellite radio, just like my dad’s. He didn’t skimp out on that, either.
“What music do you like?” he asked me once he got us moving, finger-punching through the stations.
Ten Decembers came into my head, the songs I’d listened to with Levi, so many lyrics almost all at once.
“Rock,” I told him, lifting my chin to feel the cool air from the vents on my neck. I kept my answer general, as I wanted to keep Levi’s and mine’s favorite band to us. From my little time being around both of them, I sensed they were also different with the music they listened to.
Adam’s response put a swelled feeling in my chest that Levi kept our favorite band to himself too.
“Rock’s pretty good. I did not peg you for a rock girl, though.” His brows were raised with his smile as he punched through the stations with more of a mission.
I smiled to myself, too, over not being so easily pegged , for being so easily pigeonholed. If my grandmother were to describe me, that’s the word she’d use. Pigeonholed.
“Pop rock is good too,” I teased with emphasis on the pop genre, going off my assumption of the music he assumed I jammed out to in my bedroom. “Punk rock. Soft rock. Alternative rock. Indie rock…” I trailed off with a peek at his profile to spy an amused crease around his mouth.
“Yeah, okay, I got it,” he said with his playful tone as he settled on a station, the music now crooning through the speakers cutting off the rest of my list. I had at least six more subgenres ready to fly.
“Not country rock, though,” I clarified. Which was true, but the tease was still in my voice.
He snickered. “Definitely not country anything .”
My throat squeezed as I imagined my mom hearing Adam say that and defending her favorite genre, then I swallowed down the feeling.
I shifted on the seat, tugging some more at my shorts when my bare legs made a sound against the leather, and watched the trees and buildings and streetlights—that were passing a bit fast by the window.
We weren’t going too fast, but. . .
I took a breath and sighed it out, observing that Adam had control. He kept us between the lines, and there were no other cars on the road. I was just used to my dad’s cautious old man driving.
And this speed was kind of thrilling . And it made sense for Adam.
“What’s the plan?” I asked him.
He gave me a side stare, his brow raised. “You trust me?”
My mouth shaped my response before I pushed it out through a laugh. “I don’t really know you.” I knew things about him and he knew things about me. And I knew he put an extra beat in my pulse when he grinned at me a certain way. But we still had depths to go.
“But you’re in my car,” he pointed out, and I released a hum toward the dark sky.
“I guess…I trust myself.” I trusted my instincts. I trusted I was making the right choices. And if not the right choices, I was at least making my own.
Adam nodded like he liked my answer, then he gave me his. “We’re just driving.” He said it low, both his hands tense on the wheel, before sliding down to rest together at the bottom, and I deduced this is what he needed.
“You like driving?”
“I like my car,” he said with a laugh. “It helps me get away.” This was said in that same low volume, another confirmation, before he moved a hand back up the wheel and added through another laugh, “Spinning wheels on the road ease the spinning in my head.”
He was being open in a dismissive way. I wouldn’t have dismissed him, but I knew how difficult it could be to give voice to your pain. I let mine be heard, when and with who I could, but this was how we were different. Adam didn’t live in the sun but he survived off its shine.
“It can be that way for you too,” he told me next, and I leaned my head against the headrest as I focused on the spinning wheels, on the music, on the hum from the car, all like a lull for every nerve.
Being in a car with my dad wasn’t like this at all. Besides some part of me always being rigid around him, we never just drove around. There was just Destination B, sometimes a Destination C, before coming right back to Destination A.
“What about Levi?” repeated low from my mouth, as it’d been whispering across my brain since the first moment I asked. But I wondered now if he was sometimes a passenger on these drives. Was Adam’s ex the passenger? “Does he usually come along for these rides?” I asked with more of a voice, knowing that question was safer than asking the other one.
Adam took several seconds to respond. “No. It’s always just me.” There wasn’t a lilt of anything in his tone, nothing to give away if he had any feelings about that. But that answered both questions. And explained why he hadn’t met with us in his car that first night after calling Levi.
I swept my gaze over the glow of Adam’s profile in the lights with that lulling feeling settling deep in my stomach. He knew this wasn’t just what he needed, and now I did too.
I started to like him more. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; I just didn’t know where to lean with him. I couldn’t tell what he wanted with me, I guess. And he could be difficult to pull from, but he was here, offering his kind of support system, the ways he copes with what he has to cope with. Driving was his thing, and he was sharing it with me.
He wanted what I wanted. What I yearned for. What he told me after he dropped from my trellis. The same thing he gave to me on my way back that first night and I gave to him. Company.
“I don’t mind being your passenger,” I told him back, confirming for him , letting him know instead of pressing him to know more of the things already pressing at him.
“I didn’t think you would.” That certain grin. That flirting. My blush. That all sat me back up as I turned toward the windshield, my exhale released as a laugh.
“Yeah, if you ever need a driving around buddy, you can holler at me.” The image of my dad’s window glowing and the sound of heavy footsteps down the creaking hall seized that idea. “Except don’t—”
“Don’t actually holler,” Adam finished with another crease around his mouth, and I relaxed back into the seat. But his hand was still tensed at the top of the wheel. “It sucks about our dads. Mine’s not exactly like yours, clearly,” he said with a gesture at his nice car, his way of getting away. “But…”
A pit opened in my stomach for him, resting beside my own, touching in the places with feelings we shared. But mine sunk deeper in the places we didn’t.
“He’s still letting you be who you want,” I reminded him, offering the plus side I didn’t have, attempting to smile through my personal pity party.
Adam’s chuckle held his own personal pity. “Not without a price.”
He told me more about the baseball career he’d mentioned in passing that night. He only got his dad’s support to continue playing in college because he agreed to get the degree that would allow him to work at his company. His dad could hire him without a degree, but doing it properly would look better for everyone involved, his dad claimed. And Adam had a partial scholarship so he had to rely on his dad’s help for the rest if he didn’t want debt. Which he didn’t. If letting his dad think he would one day change his mind would set him free to play, he’d hit whatever books he had to. A four year sacrifice for a whole lifetime of doing what he loved? He’d take it.
I told him I would’ve taken it too.
Sport was also his thing. Since he was a kid, since he discovered how good he was at playing and fell in love. It was his way to make his own life.
I was seventeen and still searching for mine, time taunting me for growing a backbone too late.
Adam’s story was another example of the distance between me and so many other teenagers. My arms pressed in closer to my stomach as I told myself I wasn’t behind, they were just ahead. Even when it felt like a lie.
“I have to major in something, right?” were Adam’s final words on the subject before he turned up the music, and now, I was ready to move on too.
“Let’s have some fun,” he whooped over the song. It wasn’t a favorite of mine, but I knew the lyrics.
That fun-loving nature back in Adam’s voice brought back the bounce in my body as he finger-punched a button on the dash.
I followed the sudden sound above my head and my mouth hung open again.
His car had a sunroof.
I had memories that weren’t my own of people’s experiences with sunroofs, and I was already unclipping my seatbelt to make mine.
“Ready to try it out?” Adam asked with a laugh at my eagerness I wasn’t even trying to cover anymore.
“Can I?” It was a murmur, so soft, like this sunroof was some magical portal, or like I was a Disney princess taking my magical carpet ride.
I really needed to get out some more.
Then I was, seeing the world waist up in the warm wind that whipped at my face and through my hair as Adam flew down the road.
There were lights lining the white lines and some off in the distance, where I could see the bay.
I spread out my arms and closed my eyes and imagined myself on a boat.
Then I snapped my eyes open. Back to the car. Back to the road. Staying in this moment, that was real.
My hair tomorrow would look like I got another not good night of sleep, but worse, like I was turning and tossing all over my pillow.
But that was tomorrow’s trouble.
The music grew louder below me and I raised my arms with an adrenaline-rushed scream. I glanced down once to see Adam’s shoulders jumping with his laughter as his hands drummed the wheel.
This time, when I closed my eyes, I sang along, knowing I now had a memory that would be forever attached to this song.