Wallace

On the way to the hospital my Uber driver, Leah, in a Silver 2017 Toyota Camry, starts telling me this long-winded story about the Chinese restaurant her family used to own downtown. Either this is her way of getting me to stop crying, or she seriously hasn’t noticed me just completely ugly sobbing in the backseat. 

She says her dad kept the place open till well after midnight and when she was fifteen years old she’d sit behind the cash register, with the cellophane wrapped fortune cookies and packets of spicy mustard, doing her algebra homework. She says that the smell of seafood and garlic and chili oil stuck in her hair no matter how much she washed it and everyone at school called her shrimp bitch.

It think I should be laughing with her at this story, but I’m still just fucking crying. And it’s that awful, soupy kind you only do when you’re high and I can’t stop it and I’m doing a shit job of hiding it— runny nose with thick, gelatin tears pouring down my face.

But Leah is like completely unfazed by all of this.

And I’m grateful for that. Really. Because if I were sober, and Leah were asking me what the hell my problem was, I’d have to explain everything about Wallace and me and Jo, which would mean explaining Wallace’s motorcycle, and him crashing it on the freeway, and him almost dying, but also me moving out and me being weird, and Jo being weird about me being weird, and I can barely keep any of it straight in my head.

So it’s probably better that she just keeps talking about her dad’s shrimp fried rice.

If Jo were here she’d be laughing her ass off at how badly I was freaking out. Her sense of humor is kind of mean like that I guess, but honestly, maybe, given the whole Wallace situation, we’d both be freaking out. What would that even look like for Jo? I had no idea. She was always like supernaturally calm in a way that made people take her seriously—or made them think she was kind of a bitch.  I’d never seen her in a real crisis, unless you count the time we found a mouse in our dorm sophomore year. 

Imagining her makes me feel tiny and the back seat of Leah’s Uber feel massively, unbearably empty. I choke on a sob and start coughing so hard Leah pauses her monologue for a second, then starts up again once I’m quiet.

I genuinely can’t remember the last time I cried about anything, so I keep looking at my reflection in the window to see what’s happening to me. My lips are puffy, my eyelashes stuck together like squished bugs. The rest of me is gone, except sometimes between the streetlights I see a ghost-self projected onto the road, huddled in her big jean jacket, floating in the dark.

I’m crying about Wallace, I think, forcefully. You are crying about Wallace.

But actually, I can’t think any useful thoughts about Wallace at all. My brain won’t stop giving me this fucked up kaleidoscope of a car crash—shrieking metal, chrome and shrapnel, blood on pavement. It’s awful and I press my face into my hands and want to scream. I bite the inside of my cheek. I scrub at my eyes like a toddler until there’s two big ugly wet splotches on my sleeves. But even then I still can’t access Wallace in my mind—his face, his body, the sound of his voice. What I get instead is this random moment from yesterday evening, when I was moving some last boxes into my car. 

On the empty street in front of the share house, I closed the trunk, and when I looked up I saw Jo was on the front porch, watching me. The evening was going long and purple, shadows gathering up in weird corners, and Jo was kind of invisible and shady by the door, but I could tell it was her by the way she was leaning a hip against the porch railing. And I don’t know, I thought maybe she was going to say something.

People had been saying lots of things to me since graduation—things like good luck congrats, I’ll miss you, come visit sometime. So right then I was sort of hoping Jo would say something honest. Not just reassuring or nice, something real. And it seemed like an opportune moment or whatever, out on the pavement in front of the house with no one else around. But she just stood there looking at me in the dusk while the streetlights came on.

And then she went back inside. 

And then it was just me and the boxes and my reflection in the rear window.

Maybe I was the one who should’ve said something. There was something, wasn’t there? Something I’d meant to say if I saw her that day?

The memory starts looping. I can hear Leah’s voice droning in the front seat, but I’m not in the Toyota anymore. I’m putting the boxes in the trunk and Jo goes inside. I take the boxes out and Jo comes back. The streetlights flick on and off, shadows stretching, shrinking. I should’ve said something. Something like I’ll miss you. Something like I’m sorry for banging Wallace.

Shit. Why would I ever say that? Fuck.

In the backseat, I knock my forehead into the window repeatedly. Leah, thank god, is ignoring this, too busy explaining that MSG isn’t toxic and its bad reputation was actually a racist smear campaign.

The truth is I knew I’d been acting weird at Jo for weeks. Not because of me and Wallace or anything like that, I just really didn’t want people helping me move. 

I’m kind of superstitious—Jo and Wallace would say neurotic—and it just seemed like a bad omen to have them or any of our other three roommates touching my stuff as I prepared to leave. Like they’d all taint it with their bad karma or something. So I’d wait. And when it was dark or no one was home I’d hustle my boxes out to my car one at a time—like a fucking lunatic. And it’s not like everyone didn’t notice. They were all just nice enough not to say anything.

I was making great time today, actually, since the house was empty, so when Jo called and told me to get my ass to the hospital I was in the middle of smoking a joint and trying to figure out how to tie my mattress to the roof of my car like people did in movies, except I really didn’t want to be seen doing something so goofy and obvious—like, don’t mind me guys, just coming through with my whole ass mattress on my car, happy trails, see ‘ya someday!

Jesus.

And because Jo is Jo, she hung up without really explaining anything and would not pick up or answer my texts, so there was nothing to do but stand and wait for the Uber outside the house, already sobbing, weed smoke clinging to my clothes, mattress halfway out the front door. And I prayed to fucking god none of our other roommates would come home and ask me what was wrong with me.

A new memory spills suddenly from the back of my mind, drowns the one of Jo at the porch and my mattress and my car. The edges of everything dissolve and morph but Jo remains clear, Jo remains constant.

I’m standing in a hazy crowd in the kitchen. It’s maybe weeks ago, or maybe yesterday; I can’t remember because it’s the kind of house party we had every few weekends, same grime and texture as all the others—people mill between rooms, pile on the decaying couch, spill drinks and trip into the backyard. Someone is talking about grad school. Someone is laughing at a joke that isn’t funny. Someone is singing happy birthday for the third time and someone else is telling them to shut the fuck up.

I’m staring through the kitchen into the living room, really just blissfully zoned out. I exist, but only technically, only in the gaps between conversations, the moments I’m caught passing between rooms. I could be furniture. I could be a ghost. I could be a box in the back of my car and could drive myself away.

It takes me a second to realize I’m staring at Jo.

A guy is talking at her on the couch. She’s listening with her blank, stone-faced look that could mean anything, really. That was the thing with Jo, if she was enjoying something or hating every second of it, you’d never really know to look at her. I heard a rumor freshman year, before we were roommates when she was just some spooky bitch in my Psych 101; people said she grew up in a commune or a cult or something, didn’t go to real school until the 10th grade. It probably isn’t true. I never asked. But sometimes when the light hits her just right, with her shadowy eyes and strong cheekbones, I can really picture her in a cabin, like, making cornmeal or whatever the hell.

She looks in my direction.

In my memory, the moment lasts way longer than the actual probably two seconds it did in real life. But even in the back of the Uber I feel trapped, like she’s still here looking at me, eyes like floodlights and security alarms and dogs barking.

I bury my face deeper into my hands. If Leah has noticed that I’m basically curled up in the fetal position in her backseat, she doesn’t let on.

In my memory, in the kitchen, I sort of turn and pretend I hear someone call my name, then slip away, out the back door and into the garage. The sudden quiet after the hot, close kitchen is a balm. I breathe in cool concrete, the smell of damp, a warm breeze slips through the half-open door. 

I’m surprised to find Wallace out there alone. He’s sat on the floor with one leg pulled up like a grasshopper, polishing the half-salvaged Suzuki he calls Madeline.

Wallace does not look like he should drive a motorcycle. He wears thick glasses and has brown-blond hair that lays flat against his head like a bedsheet. His shoulders are kind of rounded and girlish. He studies biochemistry. Jo always says the motorcycle is his way of compensating for all of this, but he’s such a nerd about the pistons and shock absorbers that it still completely fails to get him laid.

I think Wallace thinks I haven’t told Jo we’re sleeping together because it’s going to make her jealous, or ruin our friendship, or something. I also think that Wallace thinks Jo and I talk about stuff a lot more than we actually do. But basically, I hadn’t told Jo I was banging Wallace because she was going to tell me it was a majorly fucking bad idea and that I shouldn’t fucking do it. Because Wallace would get attached and I wouldn’t and it would make things weird potentially forever—and I already knew all that. Better to ask forgiveness than permission or something, I don’t know.

In the garage I sneak up behind him and touch my cold beer can to the little knobby bone above his shirt collar, which makes him jump and say, jesus fuck.

And I say, why are you sitting alone in the garage like a loser.

And he doesn’t say anything for a while. A car hushes by on the street outside. No one is around, so I let myself watch him a little longer than usual.

I like Wallace, but he fucks too slowly, too carefully. Like my body is a thing that he’s going to have to put back together later and he needs to remember what it looked like when he started. It’s fine, I guess, because at the end of the day it’s just a distraction. Fun. Uncomplicated. As long as I didn’t think about it too hard. 

Then Wallace says, Jo knows.

And I say, what.

And he says, you need to talk to her about it.

I think about the look on Jo’s face in the living room, and the look on her face from the porch—except that hasn’t happened yet, or I don’t think it has, but the memory is getting kind of slippery and blurry. I step back, open my beer with a pop and take a slow sip.
I say, if she already knows then why the fuck would I talk to her about it.

Wallace drops his wrench, looks at me hard and says, because you’re making it weird, Ella, like you always do.

I don’t remember if I say anything after that. 

Leah turns off the freeway. She’s telling me about food service laws and how much harder they’re getting on the small business and I’m just absolutely fucking wracking my brain to remember what I said to Wallace—if I said anything. Or what I was going to say to Jo—if I had anything to say. 

Honestly, I probably just left, ducked out under the open garage door and walked off down the street. Seems like something I would do.

Because Wallace was right I was making it weird, but how else could I make it when that’s the whole thing about it, right? Jo knows. And I know she knows. And I know she knows that I know, but she’s doing the nice thing and pretending she doesn’t.

A lot of people don’t get Jo. Which is stupid, because Jo is the like, most straightforward person I’ve ever met. She sort of comes and goes whenever she wants and interrupts and never explains herself and I guess that rubs people the wrong way, but those are all the best things about her, really. Because with Jo it’s all just what it looks like on the surface. If she doesn’t like you, she leaves. If she doesn’t have anything to say, she doesn’t talk. You don’t have to read between the lines. And most people, Wallace included I think, aren’t used to that.

So why didn’t he talk to her, if felt like there was so much to fucking say?

The only time Jo gets even remotely chatty is when she’s high, and it’s kind of adorable, how she says whatever random shit she’s thinking about—and really it’s always just completely off the wall. Lately when the three of us light up, she starts going on about how we all need to take a road trip to Arizona. 

I have to see the Grand Canyon before I die, she says one night.

We’re on the floor in Wallace’s room, half-smoked joint between us, but I’m not really listening to what Jo is saying because I realize I’ve left a T-shirt balled up in the corner by Wallace’s bed.

I’m only going if we stop at the Mystery Spot, Wallace says.

Jo throws a pillow at him.

What’s wrong with the Mystery Spot, he says.

You don’t eat a McChicken before you go to a Michelin restaurant, she says.

The Mystery Spot is like at least a triple double, he says.

I say, it’s my car so I think I will be deciding whether or not we go to the Mystery Spot.

Then Wallace says he could just take Madeline and go by himself and Jo and I say absolutely the fuck not. Wallace pouts. I surreptitiously kick my T-shirt under the bed. 

Then Jo leans back against the wall and closes her eyes and starts describing the route we’d take through California with this insane level of detail and clarity like she’s watching it all happen on the back of her eyelids. National parks and motel rooms and coastlines. Late night stops at the gas station. Trails and monuments. And I guess that’s when I realized, with this awful, cold kind of shock that she’d really thought about it that much and it’s real to her and if the road trip is real so is graduation, and me moving out, and this stupid shit I’m doing with Wallace, and everything that is going to happen after I leave will happen whether everyone watches me leave or not, whether I talk to Jo about it or not.

I feel suddenly certain that Leah’s 2017 Toyota Camry is going to drive me straight off a cliff. I clutch the door handle for dear life.

Later that night, after Jo goes back to her own room, Wallace is tracing little lazy patterns on my stomach as I lie on my back and say to the ceiling, we really should try and go.

Yeah, he says from somewhere near my earlobe.

Like, I think it’s important her, you know, that we all do something together before we graduate, I say.

Right, he says from the vicinity of my left hip.

It’s special, I say, we should make it special.

And maybe that’s what Jo was waiting for me to say on the porch. Something like come on hop in, we’re going to Arizona. Something like I was listening, I was, when you told us about the Redwoods and the Pacific Coast Highway and the vortexes in Sedona, and I would drive if Wallace promises not to play Radiohead the entire time and you actually help me navigate. Something like I wanted to do all that with you, I still want to, because I get it and I get you and you’re my best friend and if all that stuff about the cult or whatever is true I hope we would’ve been best friends back then, too, in the fold together.

Fuck, I say out loud in the back of Leah’s Silver 2017 Toyota Camry.

Leah says she’s sorry about the traffic and we’ll be at the hospital any minute.

——

I stumble into the ER, which is weirdly way brighter and quieter than I expect it to be. Tired people in beige chairs look at the clock then at the doors and back again. The women behind the desk give me suspicious looks while I stand there blinking. 

I spot Jo in a chair in the corner at the same time she spots me. Something about the lighting makes her look all small and pale, or maybe that’s how she always looks and I’ve just never noticed. I rush over. She stands up. I hug her. This is something I don’t think we’ve ever done. She smells like laundry detergent and smoke. Her shoulders are bony.

Then I realize what I’m doing and kind of half pull away with my hands sort of resting softly in hers and she looks at me and says, you look like shit.

And I say, he’s—is he—Wallace—

And she says, he’s okay. He broke like, all of his ribs but he’s okay.

Oh, good, I say.

Jo opens her mouth to say something else but I interrupt, because I’m worried I’ll or forget or lose the guts again and I say, I’m sorry for banging Wallace and I’m sorry for not telling you about it. And I’m sorry I didn’t say anything when you were on the porch yesterday, but if you still want to and if Wallace gets better I think we should all drive to Arizona and see the Grand Canyon.

And Jo stands there with her hands still lingering on mine and that goddamn blank look on her face for what feels like a whole minute.

Then she just starts laughing. Quietly at first then hard and loud. The people in the beige chairs look over at us like we’re fucking crazy. I grip Jo’s arms tightly, trying to quiet her, but whatever it is infects me too and now I’m giggling and crying saying over and over again as we sink to the floor oh thank god, thank god you’re here, Jo, thank god.