Chapter 13 Bird
BIRD
It’s a very strange feeling, riding shotgun in Jessa’s car, in the daylight, on a Saturday, not even knowing where we’re going.
Strange, but good. Good, but a little scary.
Scary, but a little freeing. Because somehow, even though I don’t really know her at all, I have the sense I could ask her to drive us somewhere, anywhere, far away from here and she would do it, no questions asked.
I tilt my face toward the open window, let the breeze flow over me.
The beach. Maybe she knows how to get to the beach.
Couldn’t be too complicated. Just drive east, I’d imagine, until you hit ocean. Three, four hours… we could be there.
“So, what’s with the books?” she asks, pulling me back into reality.
I turn to her and realize we’re still in our little town, sitting at the corner of Main and Church, and Jessa’s watching me as we wait for the red light to change. I look down at the small stack of books perched in my lap.
“Oh, I—I may have told my mom we were going to the library.”
“Man, are your folks that strict?” she asks, accelerating too fast as the light changes to green. “You can’t just go out?”
“No, no, they’re not strict at all, really. I guess I just… I don’t know,” I say, because now that I’m thinking about it, I really don’t know why I couldn’t just say I was going out. “It’s just, sometimes I like to keep things to myself.”
“What, they wouldn’t approve of you hanging out with someone like me? You need to keep it a secret?” She laughs it off, but there’s also something in her voice that sounds hurt.
“No, no, no. That’s not it. That’s not what I mean at all. I—”
“Then what?” she interrupts.
“I don’t know. It—it’s hard to explain. I guess we tend to keep secrets in my family, and also, sometimes I feel like…” There’s more to this, I think. But I don’t quite know how to put it into words. It’s a feeling I have about wanting to keep things, not even secret, that’s not the right word.
“Like what?” she asks, carefully glancing over at me as she drives, it seems, a little more cautiously.
“I don’t know. No one’s ever asked me to explain it before.”
She nods but doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. I’m sure she’s thinking I’m some kind of pathological liar now.
“Well,” she begins. “In my family, we’re big on pretending everything is shiny and sweeping things under the rug. So, I get it.”
She turns off Main onto a street I’ve never been down before.
The mood changes as we get away from the busy part of town, driving through neighborhoods that have seen better days.
Left, right. Right, left. Down all these side streets, rumbling over cracked pavement and pothole-pocked roads that I don’t think see much traffic anymore.
“Um, Jessa?”
“Yeah?”
“Where exactly are we going?”
“It sure ain’t the library!” She gives me a tantalizing grin and then turns up the volume, some loud band screaming out “Rebel Girl.” I turn it back down. She playfully swats my hand away and adjusts the dial to slightly less ear-bleedingly loud.
“Jessa—”
“Calm down,” she says, laughing. “I’m taking you to a very special place. It’s sort of like my home away from home.”
“Okay. I mean, as long as you’re not ambushing me into attending homecoming,” I joke.
Her head snaps toward me with a strange questioning in her eyes before she looks back to the road. “Please. Do I look like I’m going to a school dance?”
Now she has me looking at her, and I have to admit how her current band tee with a horror-movie face imprinted with the band name Battle Beasts on it hugs just the right curves of her waist and tightens around her arms, which are more muscular than dainty.
Strong, solid. The kind I’d like to grab onto, the kind I’d like to have hold me.
Okay. I can’t keep up with my seesawing.
I just miss Silas and Kat—our closeness, the comfort of them, their openness.
They were soft the way Jessa is hard, they were warm where Jessa is cold.
She’s really nothing like either of them, so I swallow back my thoughts.
“I wouldn’t know,” I finally answer. “Kayla and I vowed never to go to school dances back in freshman year, but here she is, doing homecoming with Mr. Perfect.”
She glances over again, eyebrow crooked. “Mr. Perfect?”
“Well, according to Kayla, anyway.”
“Riiight,” she says, dragging the word out while she slows the car to a stop along the side of the road, in front of what looks like an old abandoned house. “Dade’s my best friend, but he’s a million miles from perfect,” she says. Then she turns the car off and starts unbuckling.
“I’m not going in there,” I announce.
She just shakes her head and laughs, opening her car door.
“I’m serious,” I yell through her still-open car window.
I watch her walk around the front of the car, tucking her keys into her side pocket along the way.
At first I’m thinking she’s going to just leave me out here, but then the heel of her boot churns in the gravel as she walks to my door and stands there, looking down at me like she’s waiting for me to do something, say something.
When I don’t, she hinges forward, her forearms resting on my open window as she leans in, her face so close to mine I can see her individual eyelashes, see the tiny flecks of green in her brown eyes, her mismatched dimples as she smirks at me, her hands dangling so close I feel like I should back away. Only I don’t.
“What?” I force myself to breathe.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You really need to chill out.”
“I’m not getting high with you, if that’s why you brought me here.”
She rolls her eyes and stands upright again, her hand reaching to unlock my door from the inside, then steps aside to hold it open for me. “That’s not why I brought you here.”
I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out of the car, my sandals sinking into the gravel.
She closes the door behind me and doesn’t bother locking it.
I follow her up the sidewalk toward this house that looks like a former crime scene.
Thick black hand-painted letters spell out TOUCHSTONE across the brick facade above the windows on the first story of the house.
“I really don’t want to go in there,” I say again, trying to catch up to her.
She turns around, hands in her front pockets, while she walks backward a few steps, watching me. “Why not?”
“Because it looks haunted as hell!”
“Haunted?!” she crows, turning back around and laughing out loud. “Okay. It’s not haunted, except maybe by the spirit of Kurt Cobain, or Tupac, or hell, maybe Jeff Buckley….”
“What?” I shout, and finally do catch up to her. “Wait, just stop. What are we doing here?”
“Oh my god, you’re so uptight, Bird!” she says, all exasperated and annoyed. At me.
“I’m not uptight, I’m just not going into some weird house in the middle of…” I look around at all the other broken-down, decrepit buildings growing out of the ground like sick trees.
“This is the Touchstone, okay? It’s just a badass underground music venue. Not haunted. And not even open, by the way. We’re goin’ out back to hang. It’s chill. Quiet. Perfect place for plotting, all right?” she says, and starts walking faster, ahead of me.
I rush to catch up again. “Well, you could’ve just said that!”
“And miss out on this fun conversation we’ve been having?”
I stop walking. I cross my arms, consider turning around and going to sit in the car instead.
Why is she getting to me like this? Why am I letting her get to me like this?
It takes her a few seconds to realize I’ve stopped following.
“Ugh, Bird !” she groans, as she turns around and stomps toward me.
She loops her arm with mine. “C’mon. You’re making this too easy. ”
Jessa starts walking again, pulling me along. Her arm is pressed in the crook of my elbow, warm and softer than I expected. Strong. Normally I wouldn’t let anyone lead me around in this way. But I let her. I want her to.
She walks us past the house and up what was at one point a driveway, to a gate in the worn wooden fence encircling the property. With a practiced hand, she slides the open padlock off the latch and tugs the hefty gate open.
“Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?” I ask her.
“Yes, Bird. We’re allowed to be here,” she says, with slightly less attitude than before. “I’m tight with the guy who works the front door. Told you, it’s my home away from home.”
Inside the gate, which Jessa closes behind us, is a wide yard filled with rocks and more dusty gravel, disheveled picnic tables and benches strewn throughout, melted candles and ashtrays everywhere.
“See?” she says. “Not so scary.” Then she walks toward one of the few tables that has an umbrella sticking out of the center.
She drops her bag on the tabletop and reaches underneath the rusty umbrella and starts cranking hard, until it extends, forming a protective shadow all around us.
She plops down on the bench, and I finally sit across from her, holding my bag tight against me.
Looking all around, there’s no one in sight. But I do hear faint music playing inside. “I guess not,” I tell her, though it really is kind of unsettling to me, in a different way than before. “But it’s still really weird.”
“Okay, whatever,” she murmurs, and picks at her chipped nail polish like I’ve personally insulted her.
“No, I just mean it’s like one of those…” What’s the word? “One of those liminal spaces, you know?”
“What kind of spaces?” she asks, meeting my eyes once again.
“You know, a sort of weird, dreamy, in-between kind of space,” I tell her.
She looks around, squinting at everything like she doesn’t see what I’m talking about.
“Like, this is a music venue, right?” I try. She nods. “Well, there’s supposed to be a lot of people and noise and energy and everything. But people aren’t usually here when it’s like this. It’s as if the place is waiting… for something. Something that isn’t here yet.”