She had a license but no car. She'd never seen the need. Teena had had the Beast, a rusted-out old pickup with the Pats' Flying Elvis painted across the hood. Not "had," past tense. Teena still had the Beast; only, Blue no longer had her. Not Beck, either, who drove a full-sized white pickup that he kept spotless year-round, and who'd always been willing to take her anywhere.
Once she'd had friends. Now she had her feet and almost $900, saved up from cleaning cabins for Emma Bissonette during hunting season, babysitting, and working the shifts Teena tossed her at the diner. Road trip money, earmarked to get them to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Teena had planned it all out for them in junior high. In seventh grade, it had sounded marginally fun. By tenth, Blue could imagine a whole long list of things she'd rather use the money on; but friends did that, right? Stuck with plans they'd made, didn't change things even when they wanted something else.
Never mind. It was Find Cass Money now.
Money stashed safely in her backpack after stopping at the bank, Blue hurried out and up the street. Past Teena's aunt's hair salon, past the Laundromat, past Jayne's Hardware. She hesitated at the diner, her stomach rumbling. In the window she could see Teena, paused by a table, a tray in hand. Teena, not even five feet tall, could party like someone three times her size. She had a Tweety Bird tattoo on her left hip, a brown stain of a birthmark between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and a passion for classic rock.
Cass was Blue's sister, but Teena had been her savior when life had shipwrecked her in Eliotville. She'd ridden up to her on a battered boy's bike, looked Blue up and down as she waited by the door of the 7-Eleven, and said, "We got five kittens in the barn. You ever seen kittens in a barn before, city girl?" Then she'd coaxed Blue onto the handlebars of her bike for the ride to her farm, Blue wondering the whole time whether being a city girl was considered good or bad. She'd assumed that it was something she wore that made her stick out. From that point forward, she'd studied how Teena dressed, adjusting her wardrobe piece by piece until her clothes no longer gave her away.
Blue and Teena. And Beck: nice-guy Beck, with his truck, his cautious smile, and his hurry to open doors for her. He was Teena's cousin, son of the local cop, always around if Blue wanted anything. Like a boyfriend. Options were slim in Eliotville when it came to boys.
"Come on, Blue. He's cute and he's totally into you, and you could get married and we'd have the same last name, and I'd be auntie to all your babies." Teena made their relationship sound as inevitable as graduation.
Blue liked Beck. She liked how he looked, and how he smelled when she leaned close to him, and how his hands felt when he helped her out of the back of Teena's truck. She just didn't love him. Making out with him, after the first time, when half the thrill had been wondering whether he would actually kiss her, had slowly begun to feel as exciting as brushing her teeth. She thought maybe that was what happened, maybe she simply wanted more than a few kisses, and so she'd pushed forward, until she realized that no matter how much fooling around they did, she wasn't interested.
She hadn't even planned to break up with him. She had just said no again and again, to everything, until he finally asked her on the last day of school if she didn't like him anymore. For a moment, standing under the sun as the buses pulled away, she wanted to say no, that everything would stay the same forever.
Instead, she'd said, "I'm sorry." That night, she'd told Teena that it wasn't a temporary breakup. Somehow, though, it became bigger than whether she was going out with Beck. It was about her and Teena, and about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and how she didn't really want to go, and it was like discovering that what she'd assumed was a mountain was a volcano about to erupt. By the end, Teena had called her a bitch, and Blue had said she didn't care, and they hadn't spoken since.
Now, as Teena glanced out the diner window, Blue raised her hand in a wave. Teena turned away. So much for salvation. Nothing ever lasted.
She left town in a truck full of fish. The woman driving had hair dyed shoe-polish black. She kept a cooler on the seat between them, a bag of unshelled sunflower seeds on top.
"Help yourself," she said, waving a hand in Blue's direction. "Always buy unshelled. Slows you down when you're eating. It's important to watch your calories when you spend your time on the road. The first year I was driving, I put on weight like you wouldn't believe. It got so my knees hurt all the time, you know? Probably not. You're too young to know about it."
Blue nodded. She suspected the woman had forgotten she couldn't make a sound, and it wouldn't have made a difference if she hadn't. The woman talked as easily as fish swam, before they landed in her truck at least.
"Anyway, unshelled sunflower seeds, unshelled peas, real peas, not those skinny little kind they put in that Chinese food, and celery sticks. Sometimes in the summer, I'd put in some watermelon all cubed up; but then I figured out it made me pee all the time." She lowered her voice on the word pee, as if someone might hear.
Blue had met her in the parking lot of the diner. Uncertain, she'd leaned against a truck with a basketful of clams painted on the side until the woman came out and studied her from the far side of the parking lot.
"What you doing, kid?" she called out.
Blue opened her mouth, paused, and closed it again. Voice wasn't something she'd ever thought about before. It was just there, like the sun and the moon and the ocean.
She pulled the notebook out of her back pocket.
Need a ride. Can I come with u?
The woman came near, looking from the paper to Blue's face and back again. After a minute, she pulled a glasses case from her shirt pocket. "Reading glasses." She waved them. "Getting old's a bitch."
She read the note, then looked at Blue again. She examined her, as if something more were written on her face—as if maybe those words were more important than the ones on the page.
"Just you? You're traveling alone?"
Blue nodded and pointed at the bag between her feet, then at the guitar by her side.
"A musician, huh? You know about that, right? You never turn down a musician in need. I learned that from my husband."
Pen to paper again.
Is he driving 2?
The woman shook her head. "Bill was a logger when he wasn't playing the drums."
Was. The word needed no explanation. Her mother was, too. Was funny, was smart, was quick to cry, quick to laugh. Was gone forever.
"Okay, kid. You promise me I'm not gonna find the cops on my tail, I'll give you a lift. First, though, how do you know I'm even going in the right direction?"
Blue blushed. She'd just assumed. The woman could have been headed back up the coast, straight on up to Canada, and Blue knew she didn't want to go there.
"You gonna hitch your way anywhere, you gotta make sure your ride's going the right way."
Once they'd worked things out, Blue had put her bag and the guitar in the cab and hopped in. Lou, the driver, had talked ever since.
As they passed over the bridge and left Maine behind, Lou checked a packet of papers attached to her visor. "I'm going straight into Boston. You want that, or should I let you out before then?"
Blue shrugged, then immediately regretted it. Wrong answer. The right one would have made it seem she had a real destination.
Lou stayed silent for a minute. "Listen, kid. This is the deal. Sometimes when you're hitching, you're gonna meet people who think they know better than you. Some of them do. Some kids don't have any sense at all. They leave homes where people love them and end up in places where people don't give a fig for them.
"Sometimes, though, the people who think they know better don't. Some kids got real good reasons to leave a place behind, and some self-righteous fool could do them real damage by putting them right back in it."
Blue nodded, not knowing what else to do. She didn't fit either category. Yes, she was leaving Lynne, and Lynne had loved her—or, at least, had given her a good home—but she could always go back. And she was moving toward Cass, so really she was leaving someone who loved her and going to someone who loved her. Total win.
"Another group of folks won't care a bit about where you're going or why. They'll give you a ride if it works for them, usually 'cause they're bored and talking makes the miles go by. Some of 'em will be hoping you'll give them something in exchange, if you get what I'm saying."
She waited until Blue nodded again before continuing. "And once in a while, if you're really unlucky, you meet a monster. They're out there, kid, and you won't know it by looking at them. You gotta learn to trust that little alarm system that lives inside you, right? You know about those alarms? They're what goes off when you're a little kid and you see a dog that's not quite right, and something in you tells you to walk away from it and hide behind your mama's legs. You gotta keep that alarm sharp if you're taking to the roads. When the monsters come calling, it's the only thing there to keep you alive."
One more nod, this one a whole lot less certain. The thought popped into Blue's head that Lou was one of the monsters, that maybe she was going to peel away her face and reveal one made of thorns and pus and teeth. The thought vanished just as fast. If Blue had any kind of alarm system at all, it couldn't be less interested in Lou.
"There's one last group, the kind you hope you get. The people who know all about the good and the bad because they've been there themselves. They're the kind who'll be happy to give a lift to a kid with no voice and a guitar, happy to tell them that if they're thinking of using their money to stay in a motel somewhere, they're better off not going into Boston 'cause the prices are gonna be much higher. Got it?"
Blue gave her a thumbs-up. Lou glanced in the rearview mirror and switched lanes. "Like I was saying, you gotta eat good if you want your body to last you long enough that you can see your grandkids, maybe even great-grandkids …"
Lou taught Blue a few more things, too. For one: some motels that said they wouldn't take cash would, as long as you offered them a deposit up front. A straightforward lesson, like the ones Mama had taught Blue and Cass once she knew she wouldn't live.
Not that Mama'd explained them that way. After she was gone, Blue realized the lessons had been part of a long good-bye that started one Sunday morning, both girls just out of bed—Cass wearing a shorty nightgown, Blue in flannels—and snuggled against Mama on the saggy couch in their latest apartment. Tish hadn't been around for a few days, and the house felt emptier without her.
"Here's the thing, girls," Mama'd begun. She often started that way, as if they'd been waiting to hear whatever she was about to share. It could be about anything—homework, or bees, or how to choose guitar strings. Those were sometimes the best times, listening, being close, or sometimes the worst. "I think maybe it's time to stop with the moving for a while. Lynne has space in her house in Maine, and I miss her."
Cass had hissed a little through her teeth. There was something about moving that Cass loved. She was drawn toward instability the way magma's drawn through cracks in the earth. Even at eleven, she had a quality that sucked people in, made the kids at every new school flock around her as if she were an emissary from the Land of Glamour. Her thoughts on settling down, in Maine or anywhere, were written clearly on her face.
"Maine is boring."
"Maine is America's Vacationland," Mama said, grinning. "People save up all year just for the chance to go and stay for a week in the summer."
"On the ocean. Lynne lives in the woods. Nowhere."
Mama wrapped an arm around Blue then. "What about you, Miss Bluebird?"
Blue wasn't like Cass. Every new place came at her like a hurdle over a bar that kept rising. She didn't want to try again. She wanted everything steady and still—places, people, things—and not to have to figure out how to fit in all over again.
But she didn't want Mama to feel no one was on her side, either. "Sure, I guess. Where will Tish stay?"
A frown—thunder and doom—for just a moment. "Tish's going her own way. This adventure's ours. We'll start by skipping school tomorrow to pack. Packing's a skill as important as fractions, don't you think?"
She hadn't told them then. Not a word about it until they were with Lynne, until there was nothing but forest to run to, and more arms to fence them in. The words came then, the ones no one could take back, about stages and options and the fact that lives could be cut down into a measure of months.
Eight years ago, and she could still feel that day burn up the back of her throat as she lay on the bed in the room Lou had helped her find. "Listen, your money ain't gonna go far if you keep staying in motels," Lou'd said. "Shelters, you're best staying out of them if you can. Each place you come to, you figure out the best option there. Hostels aren't bad if you're only staying a night or two. Don't flash your money around, don't ever leave it alone. Stay clear of any man that comes up to you all friendly in a bus station, train stop, that kind of stuff. When they come on all sweet, you know they're trouble."
She'd paused, looked over the room one last time. "You take care of yourself, kid. If you run into trouble, just trust your gut."
She was halfway out the door when she turned back. "And remember, unshelled sunflower seeds. They keep you eating nice and slow."
