Sylvie
“Do we have to go straight to Springfield?”
“God,” I say. “I hope not. That’s not much of a vacation.”
“Is this a vacation?”
“It feels more like one now,” I say honestly.
Knox is scrolling on my phone. “So it’s okay if I’m looking at lists of the weird stuff we can do in southern Michigan?”
“Famously the weirdest place in the world.”
He smiles. “You can find weird in places you wouldn’t imagine.”
“Did you see a lot of unusual stuff, growing up the way you did?”
“Probably. It’s hard to tell what’s strange and what’s not, you know? You develop this baseline for strangeness. And my baseline is like . . .” He creeps his hands apart wider and wider. “It grew every year after we got on the road.”
“How long were you guys traveling around for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Years. Would you believe me if I said I lost track?”
“I almost forgot my birthday one year,” I tell him. “I only remembered the day before.”
“So you believe me.”
“Sure.”
“Put it this way: it was long enough to forget what normal life is like. And so the thing I really wonder about is, what does it feel like to be normal? I have a sense of the visual, I think, from movies I saw when I was a kid. Books I read. Normal life has school desks with chairs attached to them and a literal bell that rings at two forty-five and prom and a job at Wendy’s on the weekends and you stay up late texting your friends.
Or maybe you’re more idiosyncratic, maybe your parents won’t let you have Instagram or you don’t make the football team and you feel like a loser or you wear a lot of black because the goth thing is appealing and so you’re different that way .
. . but those are all still stories I’ve seen versions of, you know?
That’s a weird I can visualize, even though I haven’t experienced it, so it’s not so different.
I haven’t really seen a version of my different. ”
“Yeah, I can definitely see how you’d miss that.” I’m tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. I make myself stop. “Sometimes . . .”
Knox doesn’t step into the silence. He waits. Another way he’s different from Cal.
“Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if nobody else was around.
To see me, I mean, and judge. Or to need me.
Like on a Saturday when I’m making my mom a sandwich at noon because she’s hungover, and if I don’t, she won’t eat, and it’ll be worse later.
So what happens on a Saturday when I’m alone?
What do I do at noon, if no one is looking or expecting anything from me? ”
“You make a sandwich for yourself?”
I stuff a handful of chips in my mouth. “Honestly, sandwiches sound pretty good,” I tell him. Crumbs go everywhere.
“Ew.”
“Ew yourself,” I say.
“What’s a sandwich place that normal people go to for lunch?”
“Jersey Mike’s? Jimmy John’s?”
“Is it a thing that you need to have like . . . a clown dude nickname in order to sell sandwiches?”
When I burst out laughing, it’s like a crumb volcano. “Oh my God. I never thought of that. I mean there’s like Panera Bread, and Subway—”
“Are those better than these Mike and John guys’ sandwiches?”
“Knox. I can’t. I’m gonna drive off the road.”
He fiddles with my phone for a minute. “How do I find out where these dudes are?”
“Mike and John?”
“Yeah.”
“You look in the mirror at midnight and chant Bloody Jimmy John three times, and then you shut your eyes . . .”
“On your phone! How do I find a Jimmy John on your phone! We need to go there immediately.” He pauses. “Okay, I’m realizing that this means I’m asking you to buy me lunch.”
“Just stop. I still have my debit card, and there’s a few hundred bucks in my bank account. Let’s assume that lunch is on me for the foreseeable.” Then I tell him how to use Maps.
“Five point six miles. Wow, that’s exact. Okay, it’s set to take us there. I’m really interested to see if this place lives up to what I’m imagining.”
This is too good to resist. “What are you imagining?”
“Barbershop stripes, for some reason? It’s really bright in there. Everyone is dressed like a clown.”
“You’re stuck on this clown thing.”
“You know, like sandwich clowns.”
“You’re saying that like that’s a known thing, Knox.”
“I just mean clowns wearing aprons!”
“Just! What is this just? Did you have one of these in your living room growing up? Where on earth do you—”
After that we don’t talk. We can’t. Every time I try, or he tries, the other dissolves into helpless, giddy laughter.
A LITTLE LATER
We’re peering in through the windows.
“I think they’ve just opened,” he says.
“Are they wearing red squeaky noses?”
“Sylvie.”
“And big old shoes? Boat-size plastic shoes, in every color of the rainbow?”
“Sylvie.”
“And riding around on little unicycles, flipping cold cuts in the air and catching them—”
“Do you mean juggling? Isn’t that just juggling?”
“Don’t you dare act like I’m being weird, sandwich clown.”
A LITTLE LATER
“This is . . . great.”
“For a sandwich made by clowns or—” I say. We’re sitting on the floor of the van, subs between us, knees almost touching.
He takes another bite of his turkey sandwich. “The bread is nice and puffy.”
“Yep.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had bread like this before.”
“Pillow bread. You could take a nap on it if you wanted.”
He puts the sandwich to his cheek and shuts his eyes angelically. “A brand-new chain restaurant sandwich. I’ve never had one of these before.”
“Because it’s bad for you? Or because of capitalism?”
“More like, this wasn’t the kind of thing we dumpster dove for. If we couldn’t get it for free, we were complicit with the system. Which made us bad people.”
I eat a few more chips. “Absolutes make me kind of nervous.”
“What do you mean?”
“The idea that things are wholly good or wholly bad. Experiences. People. I don’t know. I don’t like it.”
“Why?” It’s not a challenge when he says it. He just wants to hear more.
“I think it’s . . . okay, I don’t mean to be mean about your family and your upbringing or anything, but I think it’s kind of childish. That it comes from a desire for rules to follow, and for good versus evil, and I don’t believe in that stuff. Because it’s hollow.”
He’s stopped chewing. He looks genuinely a little concerned. “How?”
“If you see the world that way—that some of us are right all the time, and some of us are wrong all the time—what side are you going to put yourself on? The right side. The good side. Every time. I don’t really know if humans are capable of seeing themselves otherwise.
So the distinction is meaningless. And then what happens—yikes, I’m like building up speed here—”
“Don’t apologize for having an opinion.”
“—let’s say you say all fast food is bad, it’s capitalist and bad, it exploits workers, it hurts animals, it’s bad for your body—all true, by the way—and then let’s say you’re driving through, like, west Texas, where apparently you can go for like seven hours without seeing a gas station, and you’re starving, you didn’t bring snacks—and that’s on you, your fault—and then like an oasis in a cartoon-y desert at the end of the road there’s . . . a Del Taco.”
“What’s a Del Taco?”
“Oh my gosh,” I tell him, with all the fervor in my heart, “I love Del Taco.”
“We should go there!”
“We need to get farther south first! But okay, wait, I was building to something. You’re this all-good person who only makes all-good decisions!
But then, somewhere west of nowhere Texas: Del Taco!
Your stomach is about to crawl out of your body, it’s mutinying, and your only option is Del Taco!
So you plug your nose and pull in the drive-thru and order with your heart beating hard and then you just kill a bunch of Del Tacos.
Beans all over your face. The whole enchilada.
And now what? You can’t go back. You’re now a bad person who did a bad thing.
Forever. And that’s just eating fast food. What happens when you truly screw up?
“Once you do something bad,” I tell him, “something really bad, something that was nowhere in the plan . . . it’s really hard to know what you are anymore. You’ve erased yourself.”
“But, Sylvie, forgiveness exists. I mean, there are whole religions that are built around the idea of forgiving yourself, or God forgiving you, for when you mess up—”
“I went to Catholic school, I know that stuff! What I’m saying is that I disagree with all that.
Because the—the world is designed for us to mess up.
” I’m saying it with a fervor I didn’t know I felt.
“Everything is a little bit bad! It’s all just a matter of, like, scale.
We mess up a million times every day in ways that we are going to feel forever.
So like, eat your sandwich, clown sandwich, and enjoy it. You know?”