16: Modern Travel
Chapter 17: Carmen in Carnikava
Chapter 18: Cherry Strudel
Chapter 19: Zhenya
Chapter 20: Thorn Forests
Chapter 21: The Guider of Guiri, the Singer of Songs
Chapter 22: All Things Are Numbers
Chapter 23: Lost Children
Chapter 24: Missing Time
Chapter 25: Roses for a Farm
Chapter 26: Dread
Chapter 27: Emil
Chapter 28: Warsaw
Chapter 29: The Dragon and the Honey
Chapter 30: Instead of Auschwitz
Chapter 31: The Clock in Trieste
Chapter 32: A Town Called Heartbreak
Chapter 33: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Chapter 34: My Rags of Heart
Chapter 35: Jimmy Eat World Pain
Part Three: The Blue Suitcase
Chapter 36: Freshman Summer
Chapter 37: Sophomore Summer
Chapter 38: Junior Summer
Chapter 39: Senior Summer
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake
We’re not serious when we are seventeen.
One fine evening, full of pints and lemonade,
In rowdy cafes with their dazzling chandeliers,
We stroll under the linden trees in the park.
Now you’re in love, till August anyway.
You’ll make her laugh, you’ll write her poetry
At night you wander back to the cafes
For more pints and lemonade …
We are not serious when we are seventeen,
And when we have green linden trees in the park.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Romance”
CHLOE SAT ALONE ON THE BUS RIDE HOME ACROSS THE TRAIN tracks, dreaming of the beaches of Barcelona and perhaps of being ogled by a lusting stranger. She was trying to drown out Blake, Mason and Hannah verbally tripping over one another as if in a game of drunken Twister as they loudly argued the pros and cons of writing a story for money. Threads of songs played their crowded lyric notes in the static inside her head. Under the boardwalk like no other lover he took my hand and said I love you forever—all suddenly overpowered by Queen’s matchless yawp Barcelonaaaaaaaaa …!
She placed her palm against the glass. The bus was almost at their road. Maybe then this psychodrama would end. Outside the dusty windows, made muddy by the flood of recent rain, past the railroad, near a clearing of poplars, Chloe spied a fading billboard of a giant rainbow, which two white-suited workmen on ladders were papering over with an ad for the renovated Mount Washington Resort in the White Mountains.
She had just enough time to glimpse the phrase on the soon to be obscured poster before the bus lunged past it. “Johnny Get Your Gun.” This left her to contemplate, alas not in perfect silence, the philosophical meaning behind a rainbow being papered over.
Just before the bus stopped, she remembered where the sign was from. It was an ad for the Lone Star Pawn and Gun Shop in Fryeburg. Remembering it didn’t answer Chloe’s larger question, but it answered the immediate one.
“What idiot thought a rainbow was a good symbol for a gun store?” Hannah’s mother had said. Soured on men and life, she had pawned her engagement ring there. Got seventy bucks for it. Took Chloe and Hannah for lobster in North Conway with the money.
They all got food poisoning afterward. So much for rainbows.
Is that what they called karma?
Or was it simply what happened next?
On the dot of 3:40 in the afternoon, the small blue bus pulled up—extra carefully and slowly—to the pine trees at the beginning of Wake Drive, a dirt road past another dirt road marked with a rock painted with a black whale. Four kids jumped off into the dust.
Because it was the merry month of May, and almost warm, they wore the clothes of the young out in the boonies—denim and plaid. Though to be fair, that’s all they ever wore, blizzard or heatwave.
In what universe could a five-minute speech by Mrs. Mencken about the annual Acadia Award for Short Fiction at the end of English period right before lunch—when there wasn’t a soul in class who was paying attention to anything but the rumble in their empty stomachs—result in Blake and Mason deciding they were suddenly writers and not trash collectors?
“Character is everything,” Chloe said doggedly into the dirt. “Character is story.”
The mile of unpaved road at the end of which they lived was all downhill between dense pines. It meandered through the thick forest, getting narrower, crossing the train tracks, hugging the small lake, ending in pine needles and disarray, not a road anymore, just dust, and that’s where they lived. Where the road ended.
Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Two couples, two brothers, two best friends. A short girl, a tall girl, and two brawny dudes. Well, Blake was brawny. The scrappy Mason was all about sports the last few years, ever since their dad had his back broken. Mason was a soccer midfielder and a varsity shortstop. Blake got the lumbering body of a man who lived in a rural town and could do anything: lift anything, build anything, drive anything. Blake’s wavy, bushy hair hadn’t been cut in months, his beard was weeks overgrown. The brown Timberlands were grimy. The belt was six years old. The extra large plaid shirt was his dad’s. The Levi’s were hand-me-downs. His light brown eyes darted around, dancing, laughing, full of good humor.
Next to him, his smaller brother looked like a child of prissy aristocracy. Mason’s hair was shaggy straight, but it was meant to be shaggy. It was designer shag. Unlike Blake, who rolled out of bed, hair slept on, and ran to school, Mason woke early and worked hard to make his hair just so. The girls loved his hair, and tortured Chloe about it. Oh Chloe, they chirped, you’re so lucky, you can run your hands through it any time you want. Mason shaved every day, and did not wear plaid. He wore black and gray T-shirts. He was monochrome and his jeans were washed yesterday. On his feet were sneakers. He didn’t cut wood, he played ball. He didn’t look like Blake’s brother,