I READ ON THE ROAD WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN. I don't know if I ever sat still again. It's all a vague memory now—I barely remember it and I've never reread it—but I'd been restless ever since I read Kerouac. Mom probably blames my bullshit on an Honors English class I'd taken. Brought it on yourself. Better than everybody else now you've read some Mark Twain, huh? No, but I knew.
Something else was out there. Something.
I left when I was seventeen, and I told myself I'd never look back.
He said his name was Dean. I didn't know. I didn't care. It wasn't any less safe to stick around and wait, I'd decided. His expression seemed diminished, doused in darkness, angled down from his cab. His gaze burning a direct course to my cleavage. I shifted my backpack, hitching it up, elbows knocking together as I hooked both straps beneath my thumbs. A cold breeze funneled between us, whipping a few loose strands of hair across my lips; I plucked them away to ask him. Everything I'd ever been taught not to do, but I wasn't thinking clearly.
GO GO GO GTFO.
It was darker than I'd imagined, my own little Kerouac journey. I'll only be able to tell it partially. Bette, I'd called myself.
"You're on the south side of the Turnpike," he'd said, looking up, glancing around: a rest stop off I-95. It was a vague origin, I'd gotten off at a joint Park & Ride lot. "Goin' south?"
You could only go South, you wanted to say. It would be too cold Up North. Because you believed in being a flightless bird; a cure for unwarranted wanderlust is a reason to run, fearful migration forcing you into a permanent transient, a Sal Paradise by burden. I'd romanticized it, I know.
I told her I wouldn't wait for her.
You told him you needed to go South.
Questions came running. Dean didn't want any trouble to follow him, to find him.
Yeah I'm fine.
No not a runaway.
I'm visiting a friend in New Hampshire.
No I won't be any trouble.
Yeah if you can get me to Vermont.
It was the beginning, and I'd thought it was safer to travel with somebody. Hitchhike. Stations set to Oldies—Hits from the 60s, '70s, '80s. Truckers telling you all about a daughter in Massachussets who doesn't talk to 'em anymore. Stories. People. Motion.
Everything had been set in motion before I could get away from it. I refer to from when I met Dean at a Park & Ride to when I paid a $9.50 toll to get into New York City as a wilderness year, an anthology of disassociated experiences bred from a sleep-deprived darkness so quiet I keep forgetting. It became a blur of restless drives on open road—afraid of breaking down in the middle of nowhere; afraid of dozing off in a backseat; afraid of abandoned gas stations, slanted signs, flashes, a smudge in my rearview mirror, hovering, hovering, hovering...
Nightfall began to linger.
America is a dark venture. Something is out there on empty back roads, waiting for you. Don't go looking for it.
It'll find you. Maybe not now, but... eventually.
Dean rambled on about a truck route down into Massachusetts. Haverhill—Lawrence—Lowell—Littleton. Pause. "Could I tag along to Lowell?" I asked.
"I thought you was meetin' somebody in New Hampshire." Dean readjusted his cap, a glimpse of a Steelers logo. Intriguing. "Portsmouth, you said?"
I hadn't said Portsmouth. No.
Nodding, I shifted a look away. It was grey. Nobody else pulling off, idling. Nobody would know. Rain had begun drizzling, dotting my cheeks, nesting in my hair in tiny droplets. I told her I wouldn't wait for her, and I couldn't.
If you don't leave now, you will never get away.
"Lowell," I said decidedly, allowing my gaze to rise again. "I'll call my boyfriend from Lowell."
"Ah, I see." His mouth crooked into lewd grin. "You got friends everywhere, huh?"
"Mm. Something like that."
