I watched the pastures whiz by at I sat in my family's ancient minivan on our way to a "fun family adventure!" (my mother's words) at the beach. In the backseat, my little brother and sister (ages seven and four) launched into another round of 'the song that never ends.' It was my father's turn with music, and since my walkman had run out of batteries thirty miles back I was forced to listen to the Eagles blaring over the van's questionable sound system. My father was singing along and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, while my mother added to the cacophony by telling my dad about this woman she absoluely hated at her office.
This was definitely my own personal hell. And would be for the next week as we bonded as a family through such activities as tidepool walks and horseback riding. I'd been dreading this trip all summer, and now that we were finally on it...it was already worse than my worst fears.
Vacations such as this might have worked if our family functioned at all. However, we really didn't. My mother was a high powered executive for a paper company. She makes the calls on which forests to chop down and how much of them to destroy. She's like a bitchy form of god. Then there's my father, who is an orthopedic surgeon. Long hours and not much time for his family. Sometimes I feel really sorry for my father--it's like he fell asleep one day in the seventies and woke up married to an awful woman with two obnoxious brats and one all right teenager. He spent time away from us because he couldn't quite understand how we came to be. Or perhaps he just didn't like us. I didn't quite know.
Anyway, my mother had talked to one of her high-powered friends and found out about these beach cabins on the Oregon Coast. For some reason, she'd gotten the brilliant idea to drag us all along and do things as a family. I could see the family meltdowns around the bend. If things were bad when we were at home and barely speaking, I didn't even want to imagine how ugly things would get cramped in a cabin.
This was the state of affairs when we finally reached our destination. "Beachside Bliss", a group of five cabins nestled on a rocky hillside overlooking the beach. It wasn't exactly what I'd been expecting. The "cabins" were little more than shacks, with tacky yellow paint peeling off the walls and the shingled roofs slowly falling apart.
"Well, Marcia said it was quaint but...I never expected this!" My mother exclaimed, looking disdainfully at the cabins and the fading sign atop the apparent office. "Who wants to go to the Four Seasons?"
Living in Myrtle Point isn't really as bad as it sounds.
Well, no, that's a lie- it is as bad as it sounds. But we get by.
Summers are the worst, though. It's kind of counter-intuitive, really. You see, Myrtle Point is just a little nothing town on Highway 42. We're one step north of a shanty-town, really. Our only claim to fame is that we own exactly one gas station and two traffic lights more than our closest neighbor, Coquille to the north. Not much, but we stretch. So you'd think that summer'd be the best time- all the traffic flowing up and down the coast? Drifters pulling in, tales of West Coast intrigue, all that rot? It very well might be for most people. But living in a town like Myrtle Point has given me a rather unique outlook on life that can only lead to one conclusion- I hate people.
Not individuals, mind you. Just hoards. Tourists. Cityfolk. The kind who seemingly spend all of summer caught in a loop between Portland and Sacramento. There's nothing else like them and there's nothing else worse. That's why I hate summers in Myrtle Point. And that's why I love Beachside Bliss.
My father picked up Beachside Bliss about 15 years ago. His friend, Larry Schmidt, was 1500 in the hole for poker, and put up his deed as collateral. Beachside Bliss hadn't been used in years; during the 70s, tourism had really slumped, and nobody had bothered to fix the place up. I guess Dad had nothing better to do. That's not to say it's much fixed up now; if anything, it's probably worse. Ever since Mom died, the place has lacked that certain...female touch. And it shows. We try to pitch in and help Dad out with it all we can, but there's really not much that can be done. We've even gone so far as to surrender entirely one cabin to the raccoons, in the hopes of appeasing nature with an offering. No such luck yet on that one. But the other four open seasonally every year. Dad teaches history at Myrtle Point High, and so Beachside Bliss is only a summer thing. It's a very welcome one at that.
I guess it's counter-intuitive again, right? I know, I know- I hate tourists. I can't stand them. I think we ought to shove the lot of them into the Pacific and never think twice on it. But I love Beachside Bliss? Why?
Because at Beachside Bliss, I call the shots. I'm honorary busboy, and I can do whatever I want to make them think twice about visiting Myrtle Point again. We don't really need their business, and we don't really need their company. Beachside Bliss is my way of sticking it to the moneydropping self-proclaimed philanthropists.
That's what I was thinking, anyway, as the LandRover pulled into the parking lot. It sounded like "Hotel California".
The first family conflict came when a decision had to be made about staying or leaving.
My mother of course, couldn't stand dirt. She was a complex woman--stood up for environmental rights when her job was to destroy old growth forests, hated getting dirty when she pretended to be an environmentalist. I generally just called her a hypocrite, which made her angrier than anything. She was all for leaving and driving, maybe even hours, maybe even to Portland, until we found a "decent" hotel. She refused to stay in "this dump" another minute.
My father probably would have caved and left Beachside Bliss behind us forever if an employee of the resort (if you could call it that) hadn't shown up out of nowhere. My father couldn't abide being rude, and telling off the hired help would have definitely qualified in that category.
"Can I help you?" the boy asked, looking straight at my mother. She stood there, unsure of whether to cause a scene or not.
"Ah, yes. Are these the only cabin models you have at this time?" she asked, pursing her lips in the disapproving way I had seen too many times.
"Yes ma'am." the boy replied. I caught a tinge or something in his voice, contempt maybe?
"Well, that certaintly puts a damper on our vacation plans." my mother laughed artificially for a moment. "You see, we'd expected somewhere a wee bit larger." She said this apologetically, as if letting the boy in on a secret.
"I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do about that. Now, either you decide to take your cabin and shut your mouth, or you leave and I turn back on the 'vacancy' sign. Agreed?" The boy crossed his arms, as if the matter was closed. I cheered silently. My mother looked completely taken aback. She opened her mouth a few times, but no sound came out.
My father finally stepped in. "Yes, we'll take the cabin. Thank you." he said to the boy. The boy gestured to the small office, and my father went up with him to find out about our room.
As soon as they were gone, my mother clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "Now that boy has one more day of work. Tops. When I tell his boss about what he said to me..." She shook her head indignantly.
"I don't know. I guess he has to deal with this sort of thing all the time. It's excusable." I said, amazed at myself for defending this boy I'd never met.
It was obviously a tactical error, because my mom turned on me in anger. "No, Emma, you should never tolerate rudeness. Under any circumstances. What that boy did was beyond forgiveness and he deserves to be punished for it. The reason America is falling apart is because people are becoming more and more rude. There is never an excuse for it. Understood?"
So I was taken off of staff for a week. So what? It was worth it. When I saw that soccer mom pull up in her LandRover with her smelly kids (I can't say for sure whether the kids were smelly or not; her mom smelled like a perfume catalog sampler), I knew what had to be done.
I told Curtis all about it when he called that night. Kurt understands. Kurt's in Texas right now, trailing a deadbeat dad with a record the length of I-5. Kurt's a Social Services bounty hunter. He might be one of maybe 15 people in the country who's paid to do what he does. Kurt tracks down deadbeat parents, runaway children and the like and then hands them over to the State. Dad calls it being a Tool of The Man. Kurt calls it making a living.
When Kurt calls, I just tell him all about the goings on in Myrtle Point. Kurt always purports there's nothing interesting going on in bounyhunting (a claim I gravely dispute!), and besides, I can't tell what the hell he's saying half the time.
"So what's the LD with the CEO?"
"Dad? He's kind of miffed. Not really though. We had some nice marks last month, real lifers, stayed for like a month and lived off Dad's homemade snack machine. We raked in a bundle."
"Living off the land, huh? That's shooting trout by the handful for you."
That's the thing about Kurt. You don't know if what he's saying actually makes sense, or if it's just a combination of long-distance static, his misplaced accent or both. No one's really sure where he picked up the accent, for that matter. It sounds kind of like a bad Bronx imitation. He just started talking in it when he was about 12 years old.
"Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Not much has been happening here."
"I've got that on the word-of-mouth. So what's the rook-to-queen-4 for the DT? Going to get yourself some R&R self-TLC? In MP?"
"I guess. There's not much to do in town when you've been fired for a week. I thought I'd just hang out around the movie theater. Lou Bruega got a job there last week, says he can get me in free. I don't know. I'm not really up for another boring summer."
The door was creaking open. "Gotta go, Kurt! Someone's here."
"Um, yeah, hi. Are you Randy?" I asked the boy who had told off my mother. I'd gone into the office to talk to him, and since no one was in there but I'd heard a voice in the living room, and gone through the open door, and here I was in the most awkward situation known to man.
Randy was sitting in the living room of his house (well, kind of a shack really, but we'll call it a house to be nice). It looked like he'd just gotten off the phone. "Yeah, that's me. Can I help you with something?" he asked, looking confused and irritated at the same time.
I didn't really know what to say to him. I didn't know really why I was there, it was weird in the first place, just dropping in on him like that, and then not even being able to explain why I was there in the first place... "Yeah, well, no, you can't help me with anything, but, uh, I heard you got suspended from staff for a week."
Randy looked at me cooly. I could tell he was assessing the situation, trying to decide what my motivation for standing in his living room was, why the daughter of the woman who got him in trouble cared about him in the first place. "Yes, I did." No elaboration. This sent me mumbling again.
"Well, see, the thing is, ummmm, no one's really talked to my mother like that before." The minute I said it he tensed up, and I knew it was the wrong thing to say.
"Are you gonna beat me up or something? Because if you aren't, I'd like to get on with my day. And if you want an apology, forget it."
"No, no, that's not it at all. See, I thought it was kind of...heroic." Oh god. Heroic? What kind of word was that?
"Heroic?" Randy looked like he was trying not to laugh. I looked at him miserably.
"Well, you know, my mother thinks that she runs the world. It's great to see her taken down a few pegs occasionally." I tried to explain myself, but I felt like I was digging myself an even bigger hole. I didn't even know why I'd come.
To my surprise, he started laughing. "Well, thank you! Anytime!" he exclaimed.
I laughed some too, but it was abruptly interrupted by Randy's father entering the living room. Randy immediately stopped smiling at his father's angry face. I instantly got the impression that fraternizing with the guests in the house was against the rules.
"Can I help you with something, miss?" Randy's dad asked.
"Well, I was just asking when the towels would be delivered. Like, I really want my towels, and no one was in the office, but I could see that someone was in here, so I came into find some towels." I tried to put on my best ditzy, 'i'm used to luxury hotels' voice.
Randy's dad looked like he was trying hard not to smile. "We don't provide towels. You are supposed to bring your own, miss." he said.
I slapped my forehead. "Gosh! My mistake! Well, that's all! See you later!" I moved towards the door. Before I reached it, though, I made eye contact with Randy, who mouthed a silent 'thanks' at me.
Wait. Shit. What the fuck was her name?
"You know you're not allowed to socialize with any attractive looking guest that romps through here, Randy. You know better than that."
I was pretty sure she hadn't said it. I ran my mental VCR back five minutes and replayed the conversation in my head. In this version, I had rippling biceps and she was wearing scantily-less clothing, but the conversation still seemed basically the same, and she definetly didn't introduce herself. Fuck.
"Although maybe you don't. I don't know, Randy. I'm starting to wonder if bringing you to work here every year has taught you a damn thing."
What was I going to do the next time I saw her? Fuck, I thought, that was going to be awkward. She'd walk up to me and say something like, "Hey there, brave sir Randy- slain any dragons lately?" and I'd be like "Hey there Little Miss-Something-Or-Other." No! This was unacceptable!
"I don't know, Randy. I don't know what I'm going to do with you. Offending one customer, then spending some quality time with her teenage daughter, all in the same day! I'd fire you now if I didn't know Mark isn't near old enough to run all of your duties. Hiring someone is sounding more and more agreeable."
Wait! Wait a minute! I realized I'd seen it on the hotel checklist. Let's see, her mom's name was...Ruth? No. Not Ruth. Rae. Maybe. And their last name was...Rommel? No, that was in history. Roeddel? Ramsey? Ramsey. I think. There was the father (Dick?) and some unspecified young ones and...something starting with an E sound. Adelle? Erudite? Eunice? Ella? Emily? Emily. Yes! Yes, I was pretty sure that was it. So that was her name then. Emily Ramsey.
"I'm sorry, Randy, but I think I'm going to have to fire you then. From the hotel. At least for the summer."
My ears perked back up. I looked at dad for the first time in five minutes. "Say what?"
That went well.
I don't know. He was pretty cute. He has this longish brown hair that falls in his eyes sometimes, and when he smiled his eyes lit up. You know, all the cliche stuff.
But really, who was I kidding? His name was Randy and he worked in a run-down summer resort. It's not like I could seriously consider him as even crush material. Plus, I'm not over my last boyfriend. Thomas Winslow III. He was the definition of perfection. If you like the pretentious type. Which I sort of do. My mother practically wet herself every time Thomas came over. He was "old money" and he was in a fine position to inheirit a mint when his parents died. We broke up about a month ago because...well, for a lot of reasons. Mainly because he was a snob. But he was still pretty good looking.
Now, Randy, that's stepping down a peg. Plus Thomas and I left it open-ended. I was looking forward to seeing him when I got back from Beachside Bliss.
I pondered this long and hard walking back from the office to my cabin. Before I was even in sight of my temporary home I could hear my brother and sister screeching. I couldn't go back there. I took a sharp right and found myself on a path down to the ocean.
It was nice down on the beach, with the salt air and the seagulls and the waves crashing on the beach. In the distance I saw I figure, walking in my general direction, deep in thought. They had their hands in their pockets and head down. Could it be? It was!
"Hey! Fancy meeting you here!" I called to Randy when he was in shouting distance.
He looked at me, slightly troubled. "Yeah. Hi Emily." Emily? I guess I should be glad he got it mostly right, but...Emily? "Actually, it's Emma." I said, cringing slightly.
"Emma? Oh god I'm so sorry!" he cried, looking properly embarrassed.
"It's all right. I guess you're forgiven." There was a long, awkward silence. I was trying hard to think of something intelligent to say, but nothing was coming to mind. Finally, I blurted out the first inane thing I thought of. "This beach is nice." God. I was kicking myself.
He looked around, vaguely. "Yeah, I guess so." Really, that was probably the stupidest thing I'd ever said, like, in my entire life. In fact, it had to be. I mean, there are a million things I could say to this person, and I compliment his beach? What kind of a moron was I?
Unfortunately, I didn't seem to be listening to a thing my brain was saying and kept babbling. "You know, we don't get to the beach very much, but this one's very nice. Nicer than some of the other ones I've been to, definitely." Ok. That was the stupidest thing I'd ever said.
"Well, thank you." He seemed kind of bemused. I was terrified he was laughing at me. He probably was. I might as well commit ritualistic suicide now, get it over with.
We stood there in silence for a while. I was too terrified to speak, he was just staring out at the water. Finally, he spoke again. "I just got fired for the summer."
"Fired? Oh my god! Was it my fault?" He shrugged. I felt like hugging him, reassuring him that it was ok, anything. He just seemed so...lost. And he was so much cuter when he was lost!
Not that I really cared either way about him. Randy? Nothing. Didn't even know his last name. Probably something stupid and white-trash. Now Thomas Winslow III, that was a real name.
Really. I didn't care. Not one bit.
Well fuck me and call me stupid. I couldn't believe I'd done that. Only some backwater, nowhere-town hick would call someone Emily. But I quickly realized that thinking in that direction wasn't going to do me much good in the self-esteem department, though. There were three Emilys in my first-period class at school, for example.
I didn't even know why I was so upset. I mean, it's not like I was lusting after her. There'd been plenty of pretty girls who had come through Beachside Bliss. I learned from Kurt pretty early on that I could usually have my pick of them too. You see, most of the tenants who come through Beachside Bliss are, shall we say, of the upper-class tax bracket. And Kurt quickly discovered that if there's one thing rich girls love, it's doing what they're not supposed to. And one of the things they're not supposed to Do (if you get my drift) is the bellhop boy of a nowhere resort. It was down there with pool skimmer (Kurt's second job, by way of noting) in their book. And that was made it so alluring.
I could never do it though. I mean- what I need in my life is respect. That was definetly one thing Rockafeller Niece XX lacked. And the way I saw it, I wasn't going to have any fun in anything we did if neither of us had any respect for the other.
A lot of big talk for someone who'd never had a Serious Relationship.
But anyway, back to the matter at hand, I think that was what was different with Emma (EMMA EMMA EMMA NOT EMILY). I wasn't just Poolboy Number 7 for her. Not even Rude Poolboy Number Two. She'd treated me like a person, which was a grace very few people extended me those days. I wasn't even sure why she was doing it. There was something definite going on here, and damned if I was smart enough to figure out what it was.
Emma watched me warily. It was like she wasn't sure what to do next. I smiled. "Well, uh, you know, there's lots of worse reasons for getting fired. It's not like I set your room on fire." Tactical error! I'm not even sure where the words came from. Some deepest pit of mind I never want to touch again, that's for sure. Emma looked at me like I was speaking Tagalog. I was just about to bail out the window when her expression broke into a smile. Then a laugh.
"Yeah, yeah I guess that's true! You didn't hit my mother in the face or anything either. You're just racking up good points!"
Yes! Randy Ketchum scores a big one! Time for the follow-through. I ran through possible choices in my head. None of them were very appealing- "Yeah. Your mother looks quite hitable." "My brother was really into racks, he's got a whole book full of torture devices, would you like to see it?" "I like scoring good points- but only if I have a place to cash them!"
I realized I wasn't saying anything. Emma stood there looking confused. I started out with a nice "Well, uh..." But of course, things always work out for Randy Ketchum, and this time things worked out in a way to alleviate me of having to end that sentence.
Things working out this time, though, was in the form of Lolly Ruida flying through the air and tackling me to the ground.
Remember what I said about Serious Relationships? That still stands true. Lolly Ruida was serious, though, alright- Seriously Stupid.
Things, of course, never work out for Randy Ketchum. And so, naturally, Lolly Ruida's first words in two years were "Hi! I'm Randy's girlfriend!" And in the stammering silence that followed, the next were my mumbled "wouldyouexcuseus", leaving behind a silent, confused-looking, Emma Rsomething.
So he had a girlfriend. So what. If he wanted to date the poor man's Pippi Longstocking, I wasn't going to stop him.
I didn't know why I expected more anyway. He just screamed 'white trash.' A momentary lapse in my sanity, I'm sure. I didn't particularly want to stand around rejected for the rest of the afternoon, so I began to make my way back to our cabin. When I got there, my mother was sitting on the couch, drinking her usual four o'clock bourbon. The terrors were nowhere in sight, but unfortuately they were still within hearing distance. My father was seated in a chair opposite my mother, looking slightly irritated.
My mother smiled when I came in the door. "Emma! I desperately need your opinion on something!" she exclaimed. She was slightly tipsy. I got the impression that she'd already had a lot more than her usual dosage if the half-empty bottle next to her bore any testimony.
"Um, I guess." I said warily. It was good to seem noncommittal if I needed a way out.
"What do you think about moving to that resort we passed on the way here? I saw that they had a heated pool and a jacuzzi. Your father thinks it would be rude to leave without at least giving it a try, but I'm tired of this place already. It depresses me. What do you think?"
For a moment I was violently opposed, then I started thinking about it. This place was pretty much a dump, there was no two ways about it. It was of much lower caliber than what I was used to in a resort/hotel. The thought of Randy tugged in my mind, but I angrily pushed it away. He wouldn't care if I turned out like all the rest anyway, with his Anne of Green Gables girlfriend. And I certaintly didn't care about leaving him behind. He deserved it, after the way he treated me and my mother.
But there's a limit on how much you can lie to yourself, and I'd just about reached mine. Of course I cared that he had a girlfriend...and of course I cared that I was never going to see him again. There was more promise in Randy than I'd ever seen in a guy my age (mostly because I was pushed around country clubs looking for a 'nice mate). However, he was unattainable and I didn't really want to hang around and watch him have a passel of children before my very eyes. I'd get over Randy. There was no question about that.
Of course, there was still one unpleasant thing to do. I at least owed it to him to tell him I was leaving. I was dreading that more than anything.
Okay. Fine. I know I've been trying to build myself up this whole anti-hick image, but I'm sorry to say I took Lolly to the barn. Yeah, yeah, I know. "A barn? Are you kidding me? Resorts don't have barns!" Well, they do in western Oregon.
Lolly blinked her big stupid blonde eyes at me. "Aren't you happy to see me?"
I looked at her, hard. "I'd be more happy if you hadn't jumped on me. And had told me where you were going two years ago, while we're on the subject."
Lolly laughed and tossed her hair back. It got caught in a bike chain. She was as stupid as ever. "Oh, right!"
I helped her extricate her hair. "So?"
Lolly looked confused. Then, confusion turned to quasiunderstanding. She shrugged. "I don't know. I went to Kansas. With my real father? I thought, you know, wouldn't care or something."
At this I tensed up. I might have pulled her hair. I frankly didn't care. "Oh yeah, right, that's right, because I didn't care about anything. Especially not my disappearing-act girlfriend."
Alright, yeah, I know, I've heard it all before. I remember it. "What the hell are you thinking?" "Lolly Ruida? The stripper's daughter?" "Isn't she pregnant already?" And yeah, Lolly wasn't the smartest apple in the bushel, by a long shot. But when I was early in high school and still unwise to the world, she was nice. And available. And I was Needy with a capital N. I got a lot of shit for it though. I still remember Burton's (age 11 at the time!) "Chickens have breasts too, you know" comment. Well fuck them. Lolly was very...nice. And quiet. Or at least in Needy Randy's DistortoVision she was.
"Well, I don't know, Randy! You were always just so quiet and, you know, quiet and stuff! Even when we had sex!"
OKAY. Let's get something very very clear. I did not ever, ever, EVER have any sort of physical relationship with Lolly Ruida. Lolly was raised in a strip club, and so everything became sexual to her. She called me buying her candy "knocking her up." "Having sex" was watching television. I never pretended to understand it. But it got old. Fast.
"You know, Lolly, I still don't think that word means what you think it means."
Lolly blew the hair out of her face. "See, there you go again! You were always so mean! That's why I didn't tell you when I went to Kansas! I thought you'd just be mean about it!"
Well, she had me there. I definetly would have been. "Alright, I'm sorry."
Lolly whooped and jumped on top of me. It looked like time, or personal space, knew no bounds for Lolly Ruida. I tried shoving her off of me. She laughed. "Come on out to the store with me, and you can knock me up!"
I've already had time to explain to you what that meant. Unfortunatly, I hadn't yet had time to explain to Emma, who was standing in the doorway. By the time I got Lolly to shut up, Emma had crossed the parking lot. By the time I got Lolly off of me, they were already driving away.
I wasn't crying. I was again sitting in my van, staring out the window while I listened to my parents fight and my siblings sing loudly, but this time I was holding back tears. I really didn't know what the hell was wrong with me. It must have been PMS or something. I really shouldn't have let someone I'd met that day, and talked to for maybe five minutes, affect me that much. My emotions must have been completely messed up.
It was stupid of me to even try to find him. At the desk they'd told me to look in the barn. I was really hoping I wouldn't find them in an, uh, compromising position, but hearing that was almost as bad. I'd always hated the expression 'knocking you up.' it was extremely crude and really spoke volumes about their society. It was a phrase uneducated people used, really, in the city do you ever hear it?
Perhaps it was just that Randy was the forbidden fruit, that my mother would have blown her top if she'd caught me with him. But would I still be crying if that was the case? Couldn't I have just shrugged it off, and had sex with the first gas station attendant I came across?
No, there was more to Randy than that. And I was crying because I felt like I'd just given up my destiny. Not to sound too completely cheesy. Christ. But really, all jokes aside...I felt like I belonged to him. Really belonged to him.
But then again, hormones do crazy things.
Checking into the hotel was a huge ordeal. We didn't have a reservation and it was pretty full (how big can the attraction to Oregon in the middle of the week possibly be?) and my mother absolutely refused to have a smoking room. Eventually she harassed them so much that they found a place to stick us. By this time it was late. I was tired, hungry, and broken-hearted. I didn't want to deal with room service, and I certaintly didn't want to deal with my family. I ended up leaving the hotel for a bite to eat (McDonald's was everywhere, right?) when I saw him.
Randy was walking into the hotel lobby, looking anxious and worried. I didn't know what he was doing there, but I sure as hell was going to find out.
I know. I should be cut out of this story by now. Twice, thrice, I'd screwed up! But no longer. This time I was setting things straight.
When the Rsomethings pulled out of the parking lot, I wish quick to pull into action. My first action was a lot of selfabuse. I walked around the outer perimeter of Beachside Bliss mumbling to myself, ripping apart my fingernails and shoving away Lolly. I definetly did not want to knock her up now, in either fashion.
Once I was done grinding my fingers to the bone, I figured out why I was so upset. I missed her. I didn't know her, and I missed her. And I missed the chance of getting to know her! Hardcore! The odds of the Rsomethings making their way back to Beachside Bliss were slim to none, especially following my little escapade with Emma's mother.
And especially since I still didn't know their last name! Christ Almighty, Randy! I tore into the registration office, ignoring Burton's "hey, I thought you didn't work here" barbs. I grabbed the check-in book and flipped to the end. There. The Ramaleys, checked out at 2:15 today. I knew that!
I thought for a minute. Better than just priding myself in knowing that, it gave me an angle of attack.
I searched under the desk and found a yellow pages. I flipped to "hotels/motels" and ripped all seven pages out. Lolly had been lurking around, and now I set her to task. We called up every last one of those hotel/motels with the same prescripted message- "Hi, this is Mike Ramaley. I was just wondering if my wife and kids have gotten there yet." Upon hearing the young ones were nowhere in sight, we'd respond "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot they DIED!" and hang up the phone. Lolly may not be good at a lot of things, but she's good at following instructions.
I was about to give up when I reached the final hotel, Zapruder's, in Coquille. When I asked gave the irate operator at Zapruder's my spiel, she started to transfer me to the rorom. I panicked and slammed the phone down. I didn't know what I was going to say!
Lolly looked up from her stack. She was checking to make sure she'd gotten them all. "Do we know where your friend is staying now?" I nodded.
Lolly grinned. "So now we can kill her?"
I'm pretty sure I mumbled out a terrified 'what?' as I began to back out of the room.
Lolly grinned again, as she pulled a quick action Colt revolver out of her pants. "Ain't that what we're doing? Looking her up so we can go out and kill her? So I can be your one and only girlfriend?"
I'm pretty sure I didn't stop running until I got to Zapruder's.
There was a McDonald's across from the hotel, and I'd spent three hours in my quest to get there (more on that later), but I couldn't stop- I was damned hungry. So it was a Big Mac Combo for Randy.
Which wouldn't have been a thing if I hadn't run into Emma walking out of the lobby as I carried it, wolfing it down. Talk about McEmbarassed.
I didn't know what to say. I asked her if she wanted some fries. And then I kept talking. And talking and talking and talking. I told her everything. About the nature of my platonic relationship with Lolly, for example. That she shouldn't be embarassed for finding us in the barn, that it probably saved me quite a headache. I told her about...well, I don't really know what I told her about.
I do know what I didn't, though. I didn't tell her about Lolly and her Colt. And I didn't tell her I'd stolen a car to get here.
Life is full of unexpected moments.
Who knew that a cliche like that could really apply to my life? I mean, to be honest, my life didn't have too much variation. Unexpected things didn't really happen to me. And yet, there was Randy, in the lobby, having run after me.
The question now was, what did it mean? Did it mean that Randy had actually felt something of what I'd felt for him? Or was he just a genuinely nice person wanting to set things straight? Or did he feel like he owed it to me for insulting my mother so much? I had no idea. I was so confused.
Randy and I walked out of the hotel. My hunger had all but vanished, and his fries helped a great deal. Our options were limited. I shuddered to think of what my mother would do if she caught us together. It was a terrfying thought.
We ended up standing in front of a beat-up, rusting car. Randy gestured to it. "Like it?"
I actually did--I've always had an affinity for crappy stuff. Probably a symptom of growing up in such affluence. I told Randy so.
"Let's go!" he cried, and walked/ran over to the driver's side.
Standing there, at dusk, in god-knows-where Oregon, with my family probably frantically worried about my whereabouts and a boy I barely knew offering me a ride, it suddenly occured to me. What if I went with Randy? What if I just didn't show back up at the hotel? Sure, my parents might be upset for a while, but they had a couple other children to perfect. What if I became a runaway?
The idea was crazy but I couldn't get it out of my mind. My hand stayed on the handle of the door while my thoughts raced. Did I dare do it? And what did Randy have in mind? It wasn't like I could casually mention that I was running away with him. Did he just want to take me to get food or something? Or did he have more in mind, too?
Randy looked up at me. "Are you coming?" He started the ignition.
"Of course." I said and got in the car.
