“In more ways than one,” she said.
They headed for the exit.
“I don’t know you well enough to say it, but I don’t think you’re a happy camper,” he said when they stepped out.
She stood there just looking at him. It was time for Donna’s Buddha-like pronouncements about happiness. She opted for something else: honesty.
“I’m not,” she said.
He looked toward the top of the hill. Of course, Spindrift wasn’t visible from this angle. “Why go back?” he asked. His question was so simple. He was at a place in his life where he didn’t do anything he didn’t want to do or anything that might displease him. He didn’t have much, but he had that, and for the moment, she envied him.
“Where else would I go?”
“Away,” he said. “Wherever. It’s sort of . . . invigorating to just leave and not have a specific destination other than anywhere but here. You go to A, and because you’ve gone to A, you go to B.” He shrugged, then added, “That’s about it. For now, at least.”
“A rebel without a cause,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not true. My cause is myself.”
She smiled.
“Why is that funny?”
“I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about my schoolmates. Nobody up there comes right out and says that, but they live by it.”
“But not you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Your friends didn’t want to come back here tonight, but you did. That’s something. I don’t know what’s up there, but you’re looking for an answer you don’t think you’ll find there.”
She simply stared at him.
He put up his hands. “Don’t say it. I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s been . . . different,” he said, and started away.
“Okay,” she said. He paused and turned back to her.
“Okay what?”
“I’ll try it.”
“What?”
“Hanging on,” she said.
She liked that he didn’t smile or laugh. He just waited for her and walked silently with her toward the parking lot.
4
What Mayfair thought was remarkable about all this was her lack of fear. She wasn’t indifferent, nor was she as excited as she knew most teenagers her age would be when they were about to do something expressly forbidden. But she actually wanted to feel fear or some fascination with being reckless. Unfortunately, instead of riding her emotions when she first mounted his motorcycle, she was thinking deeply, as usual, and she hated it.
She began with logic, reviewing what she had in her possession and how long or successful that would make this . . . what should she call it, her flight? She had a little over two hundred dollars, her Spindrift door key and Spindrift ID card, two credit cards and her medical insurance card in her pink leather wallet, and the clothes she was wearing.
She drove the analysis back, screaming at herself inside, clamping down hard on her cerebrum, that part of the brain that she knew was responsible for higher-order functioning, thinking, perceiving, and planning. No thoughts, she told herself, no philosophy, and no statistics will be in my mind tonight. There was only one conclusion she’d permit, one thing she knew for sure: she hadn’t wanted to return to that aseptic white room and address some problem in higher math or molecular theory tonight, maybe not ever.
No, she told herself, what she wanted was to . . . breathe. That was it. She wanted to feel the wind in her hair and for a while be no one or nowhere, a nonentity, a blank page on which she could write everything new. After he had taken off with her sitting behind him on his motorcycle, she felt as if she was clinging to something wild, a creature who rode the wind. Seconds into it, she felt more alive than she had in the past few months, maybe the entire past year.
But he should know what he was in for, too, she thought.