Ashes, Ashes

4 - Rest Stop Bathrooms

"It's weird, you know? Being all together again?" Dawn rubbed her arms, like she was taken with a sudden chill. She was wearing a thin sweater that did little to protect against the swiftly dropping temperatures; I could see the prickle of gooseflesh near her wrists where the sleeves had drawn back. 

It would be gentlemanly of me to offer my jacket, but I wasn't feeling that charitable. I buried my hands deeper into its pockets. 

"Yeah. It's been a long while," I said. "What, since...your wedding, I guess?" 

Dawn had started dating Parker our senior year of college, an outsider to the group that had formed and cemented and held itself together since we were all freshmen. It had given her the air of a perpetual outsider, the person who had been allowed into our exclusive club on a technicality. It felt a little bit like letting her into the crew had been the beginning of the end, like that was the wedge that started to drive us all apart until we were scattered like so many broken pieces. 

But that wasn't fair, and even I have to admit that. Things had already started to fall apart before she got here. 

"Yeah. Like five years now, i guess. Wow. Can you believe it's been that long?" She did some mental calculations, touching each fingertip of one hand to her thumb, and then shook her head. "Crazy. And we weren't even all there for that. Liza didn't come." 

"We're not all here now, either," I reminded her, glumly, thinking about Laurel's ashes and how they were still sitting in the baseboard of the car. A pang of guilt, depthless and awful, stabbed into my heart. 

Does it hurt to die? 

I don't know. Are you hurting now? 

Logan. Logan, I'm scared. 

The cabins were situated in a little grid, each separated from the next by some artfully planted, shaggy evergreens. Parking spaces wound between them, snakelike, but the whole area was more than a little claustrophobic. 

The bathrooms, as it turned out, were on the far side of the cabins, so we had to walk past several empty buildings before we reached them. They were in a squat cinder block building that sat on its own, a sad gray afterthought when compared to the rustic cabins. 

Dawn shot me a questioning look, and I shrugged. 

"Guess we'd better go in and scope it out," I said, bracing myself for who-knows-what kind of awfulness. Public bathrooms are always a mixed bag of potential horrors. 

We separated, her ducking around a corner marked by a faded stick-figure-in-a-skirt silhouette, and I took a deep breath and made my way into the men's side. 

It was cleaner than I'd expected. The floor was gritty off-brown tile, the walls a graying white plaster. A line of sinks was divided by a flimsy aluminum barrier from a row of urinals taking up the left wall. Across the room, a few toilet stalls. They shared a wall with a couple of showers, which I ventured closer to examine. 

The shower heads sprouted from the wall, and the floor rippled and tilted toward the drain in the middle of the floor. There were dividers between each shower stall, but there were no privacy curtains. 

The whole thing felt a little bit like how I imagined prison must be. But it wasn't terrible. Achingly cold, the chill outside dampening the walls with condensation, but not unbearable. 

I ventured into a stall, closing the door behind me even though I knew I was alone. 

A thick cobweb spread in the corner between the stall divider and the sweating wall. I could see the husk of flies tangled up in it, dead for who knows how long, but there was no sign of the spider. 

The toilet was the kind that juts out of the wall, no tank, and sitting on it I could feel an unnerving draft coming up from the hole underneath. A glorified port-a-potty. I tried hard not to think about the spider missing from its web. 

When I was a kid, I heard a story about black widows nesting under the seats in a port-a-potty. You'd sit down, and here comes the spider crawling up from the underside, its dark little body curling up over the lip and sinking its fangs into an exposed ass cheek. I heard stories, too, about snakes coming up through the sewer pipes, emerging wet and angry into the bowl of a toilet, blunt snouts and venom-dripping fangs poised just inches from your bare bottom...

But it was too late in the season for that, I reminded myself firmly. 

And besides, it was ridiculous. 

When I was 10, I went to a sleep-away camp, three nights away from my parents for the first time. I'd been so scared to use the port-a-potties that I'd refused to go to the bathroom. I held it in until it burned, my stomach cramping and seizing, and I still held out until the second night when it all burst out in my sleep, flooding my bed clothes. I woke up with my pajamas already going cold and sticky against my skin, the stench of urine burning my nostrils, and the burn of shame growing on my cheeks. 

There was no hiding it, not in those tight quarters. The whole tent stank of pee, and before I could even begin to mount a defense for myself it seemed like everyone in camp knew about it. I was the kid who still wet the bed, and no one would let me forget it until I finally begged the counselors to call my parents and let them pick me up early. 

It was terrible, but in a way it innocculated me against the kind of life I'd end up leading -- as the fat kid, as the butch dyke, as the lady-boy. The moving target of the insults would change, but the cruelty of it was always the same, so much that I almost got bored of it. 

And maybe that's another reason why I loved Laurel so much, why I always felt like there was a debt between us that I was always trying to settle. Because she was kind to me, but also because she didn't make a big deal about being nice; like it hadn't even occurred to her that anyone would give me a hard time. I think if she had pitied me, I don't think I could have handled it. 

Back in the cold, damp campsite bathroom, there were no spiders. 

I washed my hands in rusty water that never quite got warm and went outside where Dawn was already waiting, hugging herself against the cold. 

"Well? What's the verdict?" I asked, shoving still-damp hands -- there had been no paper towels -- into my jacket pockets. 

She shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Could be worse, probably?" 

I laughed. "Well. We better get back and make sure nobody's killed each other yet." 

"It's been...kind of tense," she agreed, and I bit back a swell of anger. 

How would you know? I wanted to ask. You weren't even awake. You weren't even there, just like you were never one of us before. 

But I didn't say that, because it was unfair. Because we were here for Laurel, and we were supposed to be having a good time, and I at least had to try to make that happen even if nobody else was trying. I had a promise to make good on, after all.