“This is the strangest tour I’ve ever been on,” Leila said, entering the bathroom and giving him an inquisitive look with just a hint of a smile to it.
“Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times,” he said as she passed by.
Two urinals, a stall, and a sink was all there was to the bathroom. An automated hand-drier that barely whirred hung from one wall. Leila looked up at the chalkboard over the urinals. Hudson followed her gaze, trying to guess which bit of scrawled handwriting she was reading.
Someone had doodled an impressive dragon. Joan slept with The Beaver! was scrawled in block letters across the top of the board. And below that, in tiny script, as if the author had meant it as a whisper, You have been relentlessly on my mind. Lyrics to a Johnny Cash song, a Bible verse, and a drawing of a penis were scattered across the wall. Hudson couldn’t help but smile at the collection of escaped thoughts captured in chalk. He looked back at Leila and saw that she was smiling, too, her hands behind her as if she were appraising a piece of art.
“You see the treasures?” he asked.
She nodded, her lips spreading into a smile, her gaze passing over the smudges of white and blue chalk. “That’s my favorite Vonnegut quote,” she said, pointing at the line I urge you to please notice when you are happy.
Hudson felt himself blush, wondering whether to confess that he’d been the one to write it on the chalkboard a week ago. “This is fantastic,” she said. Then she reached for one of the inch-long pieces of chalk sitting on the metallic ledge of the board. Taking only a brief moment to gather her thoughts, Leila stood on tiptoe to reach a blank spot, her neat handwriting standing out against the rest of the words on the board. People of Vicksburg, you live in a special place.
Silly, how rewarding just that one comment from her was, how it made Hudson want to keep on babbling, to take her to every single place that he’d enjoyed for even a millisecond.
Hudson led them back to the car, eager to show her anything else at all. They went to the church that had burned down and been rebuilt by the town, the Capture the Flag field at the park by his house, the closed-up candy shop where a dead body had once been found, making the lone remaining bag of root-beer–flavored candy Hudson had in his house feel very much like a treasure.
“You know what? Why don’t I take you to go see it?”
“Your house?”
“Yeah,” he said, surprised by his own boldness but thankful for it. “You know, for the root-beer candy.”
Leila considered him. He held up an understanding hand. “I’m acting purely as a treasure guide here. It might not be the most interesting place to everyone, but it’s a place that I know well enough to know where all the hidden details are. Don’t you want to see the room that Hudson the famed mechanic has been sleeping in for seventeen years?”
She tilted her head back and squinted as if she were examining him. He worried he’d messed things up until he realized she was mock-scrutinizing him, saw the hint of a smile tugging at her lips. “Do you have one of those race-car–shaped beds?” she asked.
“I do not,” he said, pretending to be offended as he switched his foot to the gas pedal. “I got too big for it last year.”
Leila burst out laughing again. For fear that he would giggle with pride as soon as he opened his mouth, Hudson kept quiet on the short drive to his house.
* * *
Hudson parked Leila’s car in front of his house and handed her the keys as they walked up his lawn onto the narrow porch. His dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway yet—probably out shopping for groceries for dinner.
“This is the porch,” he said, gesturing redundantly with one arm as he jiggled the keys out of his pocket. “We don’t use it much.”
“How come?” Leila asked.
“Our next-door neighbor is quite the talker,” Hudson said, looking around the block at the cars and pickup trucks parked in open garages, the American flags drooping like undrawn curtains in the still air, the bicycles lying on the driveways in after-school abandon. “My dad and I actually missed a movie once because she insisted on filling us in on neighborhood gossip. Someone’s cousin had adopted an Asian baby, and that seemed to require a thirty-minute, slightly racist speech.” He turned to the door, having finally fished the keys out. “The true treasure of Vicksburg lies in its people.”
He turned over his shoulder to smile at her and then led them inside. They went fairly quickly around the house, living room to bathroom to kitchen. He showed her the backyard, the modest plastic patio furniture set up around the barbecue grill. The lawn was big and green, stretching out between the neighbors’ fences until it hit a line of trees. After a few moments, when the sun had all but dipped beneath the branches, Hudson led her back inside to show her the rest of the house.
The staircase was just wide enough to allow them to climb side by side. Hudson asked, “So, what are you going up north for?” He honestly didn’t really have a strong desire to know, since it would affirm that fact that she was going, possibly very soon.
“Haven’t I mentioned it? I’m going to see the Northern Lights.”
“Oh, nice,” he said, his heart dropping a little. “How far north do you have to go to see them?”
“Well, it kind of changes. I’m going up as far north as I can to give myself the best chance.”
“Wow. I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty excited,” she said, but her voice didn’t quite convey that excitement. “I’m just hoping that...” She trailed off.
“That what?”
“No, nothing,” she said, as they reached the landing at the top of the stairs. She held her arm out across his chest. “Wait.” She looked at the four closed doors that made up the second floor. “Let me guess.” She pointed at the door closest to them. “Master bedroom, bathroom, your room,” she said, pointing at each door from left to right. “And, I don’t think that’s another room, because you’ve got an only-child air about you, so I’m gonna say that’s the linen closet.”
“Unbelievable.”
“It’s a special gift.”
“That’s special, all right,” he said, wondering what she’d stopped herself from saying on the stairs. “How’d you know I’m an only child?”
“We can smell our own,” she said with a wink.
Once inside his room, Leila went straight to his bookshelf, where his car magazines and the novels he’d read for school and liked enough to buy a copy were neatly stacked. Her back was to him, her figure silhouetted against the fading light so that she seemed a little less real, a little less like a beautiful girl who understood him standing in his room and more like an apparition that could dissipate at any second. He flicked the light switch on but said nothing, giving her space to explore. He didn’t want her to seem like an apparition, wanted to keep her real for as long as possible.
“What’s this?” she asked, grabbing a seashell he kept on his windowsill.
He walked closer to her. “That is a souvenir from the first time I went to the ocean. I was bodysurfing, you know, just enjoying getting the crap kicked out of me by the waves. And this one wave just grabs me and beats me down against the shore. I felt my forehead catch on something hard, harder than the sand. So I grabbed at it, and it was this seashell. I think you can still see the scar.” He pulled at his hair and tilted his head down so she could see.
She lifted her hand and ran a finger along the scar on his forehead. He could hear her breathing, could smell something sweet on her breath.
“Why’d you keep the seashell?”
“I don’t know,” Hudson said.