Seven Beck
Seven
Beck
After the zoo and a long lunch at a quiet hole-in-the-wall taqueria, it’s time for Lucas to check in at his next hotel.
Unlike the last place, a huge international chain with impersonal elegance and every imaginable amenity, this hotel is a cozy little boutique with only ten rooms. Natural light from large windows floods the lobby.
Light, breezy curtains and rattan chairs with oversize cushions in robin’s-egg blue and seafoam green give the place a casual, coastal vibe.
Forget corporate chic. This place is coastal comfort, like checking in at your favorite aunt’s beach house.
After Lucas gets his room key from the woman at the front desk, he finds me gazing out a window at a snug brick courtyard with a marble fountain burbling at its center.
I love this place.
“Spot any turtles yet?” Lucas says.
“Not yet, but I’m optimistic.”
I turn to face him. I wonder if he is as charmed by this place as I am, or if he’s seen so many beachy boutiques that they’ve all started to blur together, resulting in a chronic case of déjà view.
“I’ve got to take a quick call,” he says. “It shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes, but I don’t want to keep you waiting if you’ve got better things to do. Do you want to meet me at the museum in an hour? I can meet you there.”
Oh, sweet summer child, I think. Because no, I do not have better things to do. And besides, if I go home now, there is a ninety percent chance that if I sit on my couch, I will not find the willpower to get up again.
Momentum is key. A Beck in motion stays in motion until she simply can’t take it anymore. And a Beck at rest stays at rest unless provoked by an act of God or inconvenient survival instinct.
But I don’t tell Lucas all that. Instead, I say, “I don’t mind waiting here.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to be quick. Promise.”
I must be doing a better job of being Fun Beck than I thought, because Lucas sounds grateful that I don’t mind waiting around for twenty minutes.
He clearly has the wrong idea about what my weekends look like.
I can’t blame him. This weekend is a desperate attempt to shock me out of my comfort zone, because the closer it creeps to my thirtieth birthday, the more I worry that I’m wasting my life away.
Everywhere I look, I get the same message—that life is all about experiencing as much as possible.
I know that social media is just a highlight reel, but shouldn’t I at least want the things that everyone seems to want?
A life filled with new people and new places.
Concerts and parties and traveling to faraway cities.
Splashy dinners at fancy restaurants with ornate chairs that look beautiful but feel a little too stiff.
I have no idea. Because the truth is, my sensory issues don’t scare me. I don’t feel like they’re keeping me from some other life I could be living. Sure, they can be annoying and painful and frustrating, but I’ve been doing this my whole life. I know how to live with them and feel okay.
What actually scares me is how okay I am with my small, quiet, comfortable life.
Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes I get lonely or feel like I’m missing out on something.
But when I really think about what I want, when I imagine what better looks like for me—it doesn’t look like what everyone else tells me it should look like.
It doesn’t look like a big friend group or dinner parties or jet-setting around the world.
The life I want isn’t all that different from the life I already have.
A little more companionship would be nice.
A little more novelty here and there, but not much.
A zoo outing with a big silly hat. A new season of my favorite reality TV show.
More funding for my research, of course.
Trying a new drink at a café, even if I end up hating it.
But that can’t be right, can it? Surely I am missing something. Surely I should want more for myself than new episodes of trashy TV and a terrible frappé now and then?
“Do you want to wait in my room?” Lucas says. “Or is that weird?”
I gave up on trying to figure out what’s weird and what’s normal years ago. Besides, as gorgeous as this lobby is, I don’t think I can stay in here for long without getting a migraine, because someone—the desk attendant, I think—is wearing way too much perfume.
“Your room, please,” I say. “I’m worried if I stay here, I’m going to smell like a department store for the rest of my life.”
Lucas glances at the desk. “I feel like I’ve booked a stay inside of a Glade PlugIn.”
I follow Lucas to his room. When we step inside, I sink onto the edge of the dreamy king-size bed at the center of the room.
Lucas doesn’t even take a moment to check the place out.
He moves around the room like a machine.
Carry-on set on the bench and unzipped. Clothes quickly put in drawers.
Toiletry bag spirited away to the bathroom.
“Sure I don’t need another spray of cologne?” he calls from the bathroom.
“If you do, you’ll end up at that museum all by yourself,” I say.
Once Lucas finishes unpacking his things, he clicks on the TV and tosses the remote to me. “I shouldn’t be long,” he says. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Will do!” I say, though making myself comfortable is the last thing I should be doing right now.
Once Lucas leaves, and the door clicks shut behind him, it’s just me and Jim Cantore, who is reporting live on the Weather Channel.
I try to focus on what he’s saying—something about a tropical depression forming in the Atlantic—but I am struggling.
The window is half open and the gauzy curtains sway in a breeze that is just the right amount of breezy.
The hypnotic melody of the Weather Channel theme music lulls me into a stupor.
Late-afternoon light stretches across the room, making me feel as if I’m all wrapped up in a glowy golden cocoon.
I have made a terrible mistake. I should have chosen the lobby with the perfume goblin and risked a migraine rather than having willfully exiled myself to this cozy little room with its big fluffy pillows and its firm, but not too firm, mattress.
The momentum of the day—all that walking and talking and listening and looking—fades into inertia.
C’mon, Beck. We have a museum to go to. We can rally. But I’m so exhausted that even the speech in my head is slurred.
The museum. I groan at the thought of it.
All those people and things to see. All that walking around and commenting on art and trying to read plaques about said art.
I’m so tired I doubt I can read anyway. I would much rather stay here, order room service, and watch Jim Cantore say the same thing over and over every fifteen minutes.
But staying cozy and doing nothing is not the goal of this weekend.
It’s definitely not what Lucas is here to do, at any rate.
I have no idea how I’m going to make it through everything we have planned for tonight, let alone tomorrow, but dang it, I’m going to give turning myself into Fun Beck one last try, not because I think it will work, but because I like Lucas, and he’s only here for a weekend, and I know I shouldn’t care what he thinks, but the truth is, I do, and I really don’t want to be a disappointment. I want him to think I’m fun.
Which is what I am going to do. After a teensy, tiny catnap, that is. I’ll just sit up against the headboard and shut my eyes for a few minutes. Lucas will be back soon, and when he comes in, I’ll hear it and wake up, and maybe I’ll have that second wind I need to keep going.
What could go wrong?
Everything, apparently.
When I wake up, the room has changed. The light is dimmer.
Jim Cantore’s voice no longer floats over to me from the TV, but the voice of some other weather anchor I don’t immediately recognize.
I am most certainly not sitting in the same position as before, given my view of the ceiling.
I sit upright and look at the clock on the nightstand, but I can’t make out the numbers.
I touch my face. Nothing.
“Your glasses are on the nightstand,” Lucas says from somewhere in the room. “I found them on the floor when I came in. I didn’t, like, creepily take them off your face.”
I reach out and find my glasses on the nightstand. Once I have them on, I check the time.
7:10 p.m. That can’t be right.
I squeeze my eyes shut, then look again.
7:11 p.m.
Ugh. Whatever embarrassment I felt before has doubled. Surely I didn’t take a nap that was four hours long. I only meant to shut my eyes until Lucas got back, and then we were going to go to the museum and to have dinner at some beachside tiki place with giant tropical cocktails.
Lucas. I peer around the room and find him sitting at a table in the corner, laptop open in front of him. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he says.
“We missed the museum,” I say. My voice croaks from sleep. Hot. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I very half-heartedly tried to,” he says. He lowers the lid to his laptop, then leans back in the chair like we have all the time in the world and haven’t missed a thing.
“You should have tried fullheartedly!” I say.
“It was cute.”
“Did I . . . snore?” I touch my face again. “Did I drool?”
“No,” Lucas says. “But you were talking in your sleep about some guy named Jim. Should I be jealous?”
“No.”
Lucas raises his eyebrows at me.
“No, as in no, I didn’t do that!”
Lucas shrugs. “If you say so.”
“I am never watching the Weather Channel again,” I say and give the TV a glare. Lucas laughs, but I don’t think this is very funny. We had plans! And now those plans are all messed up because I can’t even do two fun things in a row without needing to take a nap.
Momentum. I need to make some. I push myself to my feet and cross the room to where a mirror takes up the back of the closet door. I smooth my braids and try to think. Maybe the whole night isn’t ruined.
“Can we still make the tiki place?” I ask.
“We missed our reservation,” he says.
“Oh, shoot,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says.
I feel Lucas watching me but keep my eyes on the mirror. I’m not sure what to say.
“The backup plan is better anyway,” Lucas says.
I turn to him. “The backup plan?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Always gotta have a backup plan.”
I eye him with suspicion. “What’s the backup plan?”
Lucas gets to his feet. “It’s a two-part plan. One, we get Taco Bell.” At the look on my face, he laughs. “Unless the empty Taco Bell bags in the back of your car aren’t yours.”
“Guilty,” I say. “What’s part two?”
“You show me what’s so great about going to the beach at night,” he says.
Well, if I have to do something, it might as well be something I like. “Can we swing by my place and grab my beach socks first?”
“I wouldn’t dream of going without them.”