Six Lucas
Six
Lucas
Beck picks me up early the next morning.
When I get in the car, she eyes the carry-on I’ve put in the back seat. “You really stay at a different hotel every night?” she asks.
“I really do.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“It can be.” I look over at her. Today Beck is wearing a yellow sundress. And instead of the ponytail, she wears her honey-colored hair in two neat braids.
She looks very pretty.
“Hello?” she says.
“Huh?”
“Zoo first, right?”
“Oh, yup. Zoo.”
She grins at me. “You are so going to regret bringing me around turtles.”
Beck pulls out of the hotel parking lot and onto a busy street. The sun is in her eyes, so she flips down her visor, but it only helps so much. At the next stoplight, she grabs her purse from the back seat, and after rummaging through it, she tosses it back again with a sigh.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I left my sunglasses at home.”
I twist around in my seat as if her sunglasses might appear if I just think hard enough about it. “Should we go and get them?”
She waves away the suggestion. “Nah, we’re almost there. I’ll be fine.”
We aren’t at the zoo for long before it becomes apparent that Beck is not fine without her sunglasses. She squints her way through the alligators. Shields her eyes to see the toucans. She scowls at the monkeys, mostly because of how bright it is outside, but also because she doesn’t like monkeys.
“I just don’t get what’s so cute about screeching and throwing feces,” she says.
“Don’t knock it until you try it,” I say, sure that if she weren’t too busy blocking the sun from her eyes, she’d be rolling them at me.
To me, the sun is a mild annoyance, one I can put aside. For her? It seems actually painful.
After the monkeys, I steer Beck by the shoulders over to a patch of shade beneath a giant palm tree.
“Wait here,” I tell her. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you—”
“I’ll be right back!” I call, already jogging away from her.
When I return ten minutes later, Beck is exactly where I left her. When she spots me, she covers her mouth with her hand to hold back a laugh.
“What is that?” she says, her gaze fixed on the large wide-brimmed sun hat on my head.
“This is my new hat,” I say.
“Ah. It . . . uh, looks lovely on you.”
“I got it at the gift shop,” I say. I take the hat from my head and settle it gently on top of hers. “It was the one that matched your dress the best. I think, anyway. If it doesn’t match, don’t tell me.”
“Wow,” she says. With her eyes shaded, her face relaxes some. “How do I look?”
“I think you’re missing something.” I reach into the shopping bag that hangs from my wrist and pull out a pair of sunglasses. “They’re not prescription, but hopefully they’ll help. I bought the biggest ones I could find.” I set the sunglasses on her face over her regular glasses, and she laughs.
“You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to,” I say.
She looks left, then right, then up, before her gaze lands on me again. “Oh, this is way better. I don’t look too silly?”
I take a step back. “You look silly, but not too silly.”
“Well, thank you. You really didn’t have to go out of your way like that. But yeah, this is way better.”
“I don’t mind,” I tell her. And really, I don’t. It sucks that she has to deal with sensory issues, of course. But I like that I can help. It feels good finding ways to make her more comfortable. I like that I can buy a hat and a pair of sunglasses and that it can improve her whole experience.
After all, my whole thing is making sure people have fun.
I offer her my arm. “Shall we?”
Beck tips her ridiculously large hat to me, then loops her arm through mine. “We shall.”
“Capybaras? No. Lemurs? Surprisingly, no. Alpacas? Yes. Sun bears?—” I don’t get to find out if sun bears are on Beck’s hypothetical shit list, because she gasps mid-sentence and skips away from me without explanation.
When I catch up to her, I find her crouched down in front of—surprise, surprise—a turtle.
“He’s not a turtle, he’s a tortoise,” Beck says when I make a comment about it. I try not to laugh, but it’s no use, because then she peers up at me, two pairs of glasses still stacked on her face, and says in a tone that is deadly serious, “Tortoises? No. Red-eared sliders? Yes.”
“There’s a turtle you don’t like?” I say. “That’s it, I need to leave.”
“They are incredibly invasive!”
“No, I’m sorry. This is too much. Everything I thought I knew about you is a lie.”
“You probably can’t see, but I am rolling my eyes at you,” she says.
“Oh, fine. I’ll stay,” I say and crouch down beside her.
“Aren’t you a cute little guy.” Beck coos at the tortoise.
“Little?” I say. “He’s at least three hundred pounds!”
“Eh, more like five hundred,” she says.
I look at the tortoise in front of us, then look at Beck looking at it. She is so enthralled, it’s as if she’s never seen a tortoise before in her life. I don’t remember the last time I looked at anything like that.
“What is the difference between a tortoise and a turtle anyway?” I ask.
Beck is more than happy to tell me.
I don’t get half of what she’s saying, but I am more than willing to listen.