Читать книгу Let's Get Lost - Adi Alsaid - Страница 14

7

IT WASN’T THE light of the sun that woke him up, but the heat of the starting day and the sweat dripping down his lower back. Hudson opened his eyes in a panic, immediately noticing the absence of stars, the sky bruising with the oncoming sunrise that, under any other circumstances, might have been breathtakingly beautiful.

“Shit. Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He nudged Leila until she woke up with a sleepy smile. “We have to go. We have to go right now.” He lifted her gently by the shoulders until she rolled off him and watched him scurry around looking for the phone he realized he’d left in his car.

“What time is it?”

“Way too late. We have to go.”

Hudson started doing math in his head to figure out how fast he’d have to go to make it to the interview on time. Leila was just barely getting off the ground. He looked across to the mainland as if that might help reduce the distance. She stretched, yawning. It was a shame that he couldn’t take the time to appreciate her beauty in the morning light.

“Please, Leila, we have to hurry.”

This time, he jumped first into the water, going as fast as he could. When he reached the other side, he tried shaking himself dry as much as possible; then he helped Leila out of the river. Hudson hoped that his clothes would dry in time. He opened the car door for Leila, unable to break that habit even under the circumstances. He rushed around and got into the driver’s seat, reached for the glove compartment, and grabbed his cell phone. It was flooded with missed calls and voice mails from his dad. It was 7:15. The interview was in forty-five minutes and about sixty miles away. “Shit,” he said, shifting the car into reverse and getting them back on the road.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

He didn’t respond, but he brought one hand over to where hers was and gave it a squeeze before pulling it back to the steering wheel. He kept his eyes on the speedometer’s rising needle, on the odometer adding on the miles. The car was heavy with silence.

They arrived at the Jackson campus of Ole Miss. It wasn’t where Hudson would be attending, since it was just the medical center, but the dean had scheduled the interview there that day to keep Hudson from having to drive the two hundred miles to Oxford. There were a few buildings, and Hudson didn’t exactly know which one to park near. He turned into the nearest parking lot and hoped he’d guessed right.

The parking lot was full of cars, mostly older, used models and pickup trucks. A couple of women in nurses’ scrubs were sitting on a bench, drinking coffee and catching up on whatever nursing students catch up on.

Hudson pulled the car up to the curb in front of the nurses. He didn’t look at the time so that it couldn’t confirm his fears.

“Go,” Leila said. “I’ll park the car here and wait for you to finish. Good luck.”

Hudson climbed out of the car, breaking into a sprint toward the nearest building. He knew well before he reached the doors that it was a futile act. He was doing it because his dad was there, watching from someplace inside Hudson’s head. Hudson was dressed in clothes he’d not only slept in but had swum across a river in. Twice. His shirt was still a little damp, and his jeans were soaked. Even if this was miraculously the right building and he only had to find the dean’s office, he’d be late. A good first impression was not about to happen. His only hope was that the dean would see him anyway, and that Hudson could somehow express himself well enough to wow the dean and make him forget about his tardiness and his presentation. But the chances of that happening in his current condition were unlikely. He’d slept only a few hours, and he could still feel Leila’s touch on his skin.

He was just about to try the doors when he noticed a sign pointing to the Admissions Department in the neighboring building. He grumbled a few curse words and changed directions, rushing past the nursing students and hearing just a snippet of their conversation, “...it was absolutely awful. I even asked to speak to the manager, and I never do that...”

Only now, while running through the courtyard, did he realize that his muscles were sore from his night with Leila, wonderfully sore.

Finally, he turned a corner and reached the building entrance. He scanned the directory and rushed up the stairs to the second floor. Hudson felt himself relax a little when he saw the office empty save for a matronly woman sitting at a receptionist’s desk. She was large, her hair up in a bun, her eyes rising from her book to look at Hudson. Maybe it was because she looked like an embodied cliché of a teacher, but Hudson thought he recognized her for a second.

“Hi,” Hudson said, trying to offer a polite smile and not seem as if he’d just sprinted up the stairs. “My name’s Hudson, I have a meeting with Dean Gardner. An interview.” He cleared his throat a little and folded his hands in front of his stomach, as if that might hide his clothes.

The woman sighed and put her book down on the desk, turning to her computer screen. She played with the mouse a little bit and then hit the keyboard until the monitor came back to life.

“Hmm,” she said after a moment. “You’re late.”

Hudson nodded, making sure to look ashamed of himself. “I know. I’m terribly sorry. I’ll make sure to apologize to the dean. There’s no excuse for it.”

“Too late,” she said with a sigh. “Sorry, hon. The dean waited twenty minutes. Then he had to go to a meeting across campus.”

Hudson’s immediate reaction was to hang his head. He kept it there for a moment, trying to think, until the receptionist asked if he was okay.

“There must be something I can do,” he said. “When’s his next open slot? I’ll explain as much as I can in however much time he has.”

The woman shook her head, angling her eyebrows sadly. She turned to the computer and made a show of scrolling up and down the calendar in front of her. “You were his last meeting here. He’s across campus now, then at lunch with the school president, and then he’ll be driving back to Oxford straight from there. Nothing I can do.”

Despondent, Hudson turned away. He crossed the courtyard slowly, trying to think of how he could possibly explain himself to his dad. The two women were still chatting on the bench, steam rising from their coffee, thick like smoke from a train wreck. Leila had parked on the far side of the lot, her red car pointed away from the campus. She was sitting on the hood, her knees up and legs crossed in front of her, looking out at the road, which was as quiet as you’d expect on a Saturday morning. She looked tired but happy. There was some light bruising where her collarbone met her neck, a hickey Hudson hadn’t noticed because of the morning’s hectic mood.

Finally she noticed him and slid off the car. “What happened?”

“I didn’t make it in time.”

She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him in tight. “Shit, I’m so sorry.” It was weird how he could recognize the hug’s physical comforts yet not be comforted. “Maybe you can reschedule?”

He returned the hug briefly, then pulled away from her. “No, I can’t reschedule. I just no-showed the most important interview of my life.” He felt like hitting the car.

“Maybe if you—”

“Damnit, Leila, no.”

The harshness of his voice surprised them both. He turned so that he was facing the road, Leila’s pretty face and whatever expression it was contorted into—sadness, shock, disbelief—just out of sight, where it couldn’t weaken the anger he wanted to be feeling.

A loud cackle echoed through the parking lot. Hudson turned around and saw one of the women with her head flung back, laughing. The heavier of the two was talking excitedly, and the laughing one waved her hand, as if begging her to stop.

Hudson caught himself biting on the end of his thumb, a nervous habit he usually tried hard to avoid, since he hated the little bumps of chewed-off skin that were left behind. This time he let himself go on. After a while, Leila walked up to Hudson so that her legs straddled his and he had nowhere to look except at her. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. All he could think about was the empty office where he should have been sitting, his back straight, keeping eye contact, projecting confidence and a genuine interest in his education—all those things that FAQs on the Internet had told him to do.

“Let’s go,” he said after a few moments. “I have to tell my dad.”

Leila’s eyes narrowed until he could only see green irises and black pupils that matched her hair. He dropped his gaze to the ground, focusing on the line where the paved lot met the grass, thinking about her story of the two different anthills. He walked around to the driver’s side, opening the door and getting in behind the wheel before Leila had moved.

He turned the engine on before Leila got in, which she was slow to do. When she did, the air took on, simultaneously, the feel of weight and fragility. They were quiet, the only sound being the car itself, the brakes chirping whenever Hudson slowed for a turn. There was a clear sense that, if either of them spoke, something would break. He adjusted the rearview mirror wide to the right so that he wouldn’t have to look in her direction. He drove brusquely, with quick accelerations, sudden braking, and jerky turns. Angry driving, his dad’s voice said in his head, is the most dangerous thing on the road.

When they got back to Hudson’s neighborhood, his dad’s black Camaro was still in the driveway, sparkling in the morning sun as if it had just been waxed. Hudson parked Leila’s car at the curb and let the engine idle for a moment. He gripped the steering wheel, trying to squeeze out the tension from his fingers. His left leg jittered nervously against the door, making something in the car rattle annoyingly.

Who the hell was this beautiful tornado of a girl who had come into Hudson’s life and uprooted everything he’d known?

“All I had to do was stay at home,” he said, looking out at his house. “Get some sleep, show up there on time. It was so easy. We could have stayed in. We could have...I don’t know. Why did we have to go to the island yesterday, of all days?”

He could sense her eyes on him. “Your dad’s a nice guy. He’ll understand.”

“It doesn’t matter if he understands,” Hudson said, his voice rising. “I may have just ruined my future. Don’t you get it? This was my one shot at a full scholarship. There’s no way they’ll give me one now.”

She reached out and put a hand over his, but he kept it tight on the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white. “I’m sorry this happened. But wasn’t it worth it? It was still the greatest night of your life, right?”

In a few minutes, his dad would walk out, on his way to work. Hudson’s stomach turned with guilt at the thought. His dad spent all his time in the garage, wanting only one thing for his son, and now Hudson had thrown it right back in his face, all for some girl. He couldn’t help but bow his head, as if his shame could just drop right out of him.

“I don’t know,” he said, turning toward her. “It’s hard to see it that way right now.”

Leila’s eyes glimmered in the rising sun. What right did she have to be so beautiful at a time like this?

Somewhere in the neighborhood, a car was coming down the road. Hudson could hear its engine, at least a V6, in good shape. Hudson wished they would have just stayed at home, fallen asleep on top of his comforter, woken up on time in merely sleep-wrinkled clothes, avoiding any room for doubt about whether or not it had been the greatest night of his life. But his night with Leila was tainted by this hungover morning.

“I didn’t keep you on the island,” Leila said, her voice calm, soft. “You did.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Hudson shot back. “The way you stayed parked outside my house last night? How was I not supposed to come running out? And we didn’t have to swim across the river—that was your idea. We could have taken the boat, brought our cell phones with us, set an alarm. We didn’t have to stay there all night. You knew I had the interview.”

“You knew better than I did, Hudson.” She brought her feet up to the dashboard, tucking her knees against her chest. “You want to pretend I was in control last night, go ahead. But we both know the truth.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“You chose to stay out there with me. We could have swum back. I even asked you if that was what you wanted.” He couldn’t take the sight of her eyes anymore and turned away, catching his own reflection in the window. “‘No place I’d rather be.’ That’s what you said.”

“I don’t remember saying that.” Hudson’s leg still jittered against the car door, the annoying rattle filling the pauses between words, not letting silence grab hold of the air in the car. “And if I did, it’s only because I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Leila’s breath caught, as if it had stumbled on something. He could see her chin quiver ever so slightly.

Outside, Mrs. Roberson was walking her twin Chihuahuas, Bowser and Nacho, their tiny legs scampering to keep pace with her. She waved at Hudson cheerily, dressed in a pink tracksuit, her hair up in a ponytail. He raised his hand in response, feeling the tension in his fingers subside.

“You knew exactly what you were doing, Hudson,” Leila said, her gaze following Bowser and Nacho’s path down the street. “I think you were looking for an excuse to miss the interview. I think this happened for a reason, and as soon as you’re done being scared of admitting what you really want, you’ll see that maybe this is for the best.”

Hudson snorted derisively. “What are you talking about? Without that scholarship, I can’t afford school. Without school, I have no fucking future,” he said. He shook his head, amazed that the girl who’d understood him so clearly just yesterday now didn’t seem to get him at all.

Leila took her feet off the dashboard, slipping them back into the flip-flops and sitting up straight against the car seat. “Stop lying to yourself. You don’t want to go to school, Hudson.”

“You don’t even know me, Leila. What makes you think you know what I want?”

Leila suddenly opened the car door, swinging around so that her feet were on the asphalt, her back turned toward Hudson. The morning sounds came in through the open door, birds chirping, insects, somewhere a couple of kids laughing.

“I’ve heard you talk about this town like it’s the only thing you love aside from fixing cars. People go entire lives without figuring out exactly what they want from life. You already have it, and the future you and your dad have planned out for you is going to take it away from you.” One of her hands went to her face, but Hudson couldn’t see what she was doing with it. “You let us fall asleep on the oxbow because this is exactly where you want to be. You weren’t just talking about being there with me. You’re afraid of leaving Vicksburg, of leaving your dad.”

Hudson felt short of breath. He opened his own door and swung his feet out onto the curb, so that he and Leila had their backs to each other, like an old married couple moving to opposite sides of the bed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He stood up, slamming the door behind him. He meant to storm into his house, but his legs were weak, and he leaned back against Leila’s car, his gaze on his front door, the rolled-up newspaper lying on the welcome mat, its pages crumpled from its collision against the side of the house. A few moments passed, Hudson taking deep breaths to steady himself, his legs refusing to move. Then he heard the rubber smacking of Leila’s flip-flops stepping toward him.

He couldn’t tell exactly what he felt when he saw that she was crying. Whether he wanted to comfort her and wipe her eyes dry or whether he wanted her to keep crying, each tear proof that he was not the only one at fault. There was another part of him that may have even been a bit proud that she cared enough about him to be crying. How could all those things exist inside him at the same time and not tear him into shreds, reduce him to a pile of rubble on the sidewalk?

“Okay, okay. I messed everything up,” she said, standing right in front of him. “What can I do to fix this?”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, his voice calmer than he’d expected. It reminded him of his dad’s voice. “Maybe you should just go.”

A light breeze picked up, sending a waft of fresh-smelling air their way. Hudson realized that the two of them probably smelled of the river, of the ground they’d slept on, of yesterday. For how long would the smell or the sound of the river bring Leila to mind?

Her eyes were red, redder than they should have been, since only a couple of tears had slipped out and dripped wet streaks down her cheeks. Or maybe they were red from straining to keep the tears in. She took a breath, the air rushing into her lungs sounding thin and sharp, on the verge of whistling. “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

She threw her arms around him, too quickly for him to try to stop her. He could feel her tears dripping onto his neck. The breeze blew again and cooled the wet spots on his neck. It felt as if they might freeze.

Without another word, she kissed his cheek and then moved him aside to get into her car. The engine sounded good when it came to life—healthy, ready for her trip. He watched her struggle with the seat belt, then put the car into drive, glancing back at him and forcing a crooked, broken smile. Then the sun caught the window, and he couldn’t see inside anymore, which was just as well, since she was already headed down the road.

The girl responsible for the best night of his life was gone, headed vaguely north—who knew exactly where. He stood out there on the curb for a few minutes, watching his block, the familiar driveways basking in the light of the morning sun. Hudson lingered there, as if waiting for something else to happen. Then he turned to his house, determined to put her out of his mind.