He could see the powerlines through the grape-hued murk hovering over the eastern part of his hometown of Inglot. Tacoma was north of it, and everything else was burrowed in a mountain south of it.
At first she paced around the front of the car. Now she wanted to see the back of it.
He tried to remember what school she went to. Enumclaw. Issaquah. One of those. It wasn’t so far away that she considered him a stranger. This he knew.
The bottle of Gatorade still rested on the front hood. She’d taken only three drinks from it since he bought it for her, when they stopped for gas. He was hungry then so he ate.
A cop siren burst open below them. Heard and unseen. Between collapsed branches and chasmic tenements they final saw the cop car in all its glory, rushing past industrial human resource offices and fruit warehouses to a disturbance on the other side of things.
Now she paced back and forth at the tail end of the car.
He wondered what she would say if he took a drink of the Gatorade he bought for her. He still had half the 44-ounce of Diet Dr. Pepper in the cupholder between their seats in the car. She didn’t know what he was thinking, and he was thinking of taking a drink of her Gatorade. He would take a huge swig even though he wasn’t too thirsty. Would it be enough, he thought, to make his stomach hurt?
A sound followed his movement, almost like an echo.
He turned and saw that she tossed her body over the back hood of the car. Her hair strewn across the metal. The tiny white fingers poked through the ends of the sleeves of her dark sweater. She dyed her hair to look like an oil slick. All the girls were doing this. Sometimes they had the right hair, but so many didn’t, and it went dull and desaturated the following day. It reminded him of an Icee when you try and layer two different flavors, but the chaos of travel and the heat of the day melted those flavors together, red and blue, into one incoherent hue that was no less appetizing because it was that color. It was all you had.
The car moved.
He looked and saw that she jumped up on the hood with her back to him. Her butt didn’t make a dent in the metal. She didn’t weight that much to begin with but she had been gaining weight since the term began.
Perhaps that was why she said nothing else when he said he’d take her out when she had free time, or that she never had free time but he asked anyway and she said yes. He didn’t want her to think he asked her out just because she started gaining fifteen or twenty pounds after one term. Everyone did at some point and things were about to change. If not for the better or for the worse then for the fuck of it.
He remembered when he first saw her. She had nothing but blonde hair then. Everyone dyed their hair that blonde. She looked down at her phone with her hair in her eyes, and didn’t speak. She had pale arms, undefined appendages, sticking out from a black T-shirt a size too large for her, with The Cure’s Pornography album cover on it, with a track list of songs in bold copperplate font letters down the back of it.
First off, she didn’t know where Inglot was. Sometimes he didn’t know either. He just told people Tacoma, Tacoma, and they understood that much. Except her. She was far enough away that he could tell her anything, even the truth. She assumed he’d already had a girlfriend somewhere if not here, where they were parked, outside Inglot.
The rest of the term went by fast. He knew how to pronounce “Wundt”. That was pretty much all he gleaned from that first term they shared together. She said she had a girlfriend, once. She had nobody now. She wasn’t blonde anymore. Her hair was an oil slick now. But they bounced around between places, took different classes, and spoke in between them, on their way to one or the other.
One time she asked what it was like being Indian. It wasn’t anything he was ready to answer, but he struggled to find a way to make her understand right away. He didn’t know too much about the world she lived in. He only knew she was tired of it enough to want to go to school in Auburn chasing a degree that would lead to a career in veterinary medicine.
What could he say? That he was poor but not destitute? That he didn’t know what an MS-DOS system was for, or its history in computer programming? That he didn’t know who Turing or Babbage were? That he only just learned how to pronounce “Wundt”? Having to tell people, my family lived in Muckleshoot. I bussed to Inglot, with the others, the white kids, the black kids, some other races he got lumped into because he was neither of those things, and people mispronounced his name to such a degree he understood what Wundt must have gone through wherever he was from. Or maybe not.
He bought the Gatorade she wasn’t drinking anymore and now the air made it too warm to drink.
She listened to him, that first time, trying to find an answer. What was it like? It was then that he wanted her eyes. They weren’t blue. They were the same color brown as his. Her hair changed colors but it always smelled the same.
She looked at her hands, at the tips of her pale fingers. It was sunny, but she wore long sleeves. If she took off her sweater, would her arms be gamey, or dry? It was something to look forward to.
He paced back and forth in front of the car, waiting for her to jump off the back hood.
The sirens of another police or ambulance vehicle beeped down below, in a part of the valley where there weren’t too many trees and too many industrial warehouses and power stations. It didn’t look like anybody lived in that part of the world. If they did, what could they have possibly owned, or possibly done, that they had to call those sirens in to vindicate its existence, to say it was worth municipal consideration, worth protecting?
He jumped into the car and started the engine and put it into reverse. He heard her squeal something before pulling open his passenger side door, pointing her finger, yelling at him, tossing junk, his 44-ounce Diet Dr. Pepper, and crumpled napkins out of her opened door. She slammed her door.
They were back out on the north road when she kept opening her door threatening to jump out. A car was behind them, a green Grand Prix, that kept its distance, not wanting to run her over if she decided to jump out. She didn’t though. She slammed the door one last time, and the Grand Prix drove around them, and this, for some reason, brought them serenity, enough that silence took over, and things tended stayed that way. It stayed that way for a while. It stayed that way for a long time.