Read Online Notes From the Backseat by Jody Gehrman - Free Book Online

from my childhood. I can see the whole town in my mind; it’s a vast, convoluted topographical map. Remember Mr. Colwell telling us about the experiment with spiders on acid—how their webs were all wonky and haphazard? The lines of my map are like that—way too complicated and crazy to follow.
    It’s sad, really, because I know that good things happened here, too. I mean sure, most of the kids at school thought I was a certifiable nutter, which made at least eighty percent of my adolescence excruciating and torturous, but after I met you, everything changed. I was still considered a freak, but when you signed on as my friend I could feel the rest of my life opening up and beckoning me forward. You were an ambassador to the future sent to remind me that there was so much beyond that myopic, claustrophobic little high school. Remember that night when we snuck out and drove your mom’s car to Salmon Creek? We stood in the dunes, staring out at the water. The moon was so bright that our shadows were etched into the sand. You sang that Cat Stevens song “Moonshadow,” and I called you a hippie and then we ran down to the crashing waves and closed our eyes and let the mist pour over our faces in the dark while the cold foam licked at our bare toes.
    You see what I mean? Get me within county lines and I become a font of nostalgia. Actually, that’s not accurate. I become more like AM radio; every once in a while there’s a good song that comes soaring out of the static, but mostly it’s just a bunch of lame, reactionary crap.
    Enough careening down memory lane. Suffice it to say, I’m not happy that this dog-hair infested couch I happen to be writing you from is the epicenter of all those bad memories.
    Â 
    So there I was, trapped in the ’57 Mercury with my gorgeous nemesis. As I snuck glances at her profile, I couldn’t help thinking about the bags of silicone inside her boobs. Do they still use silicone—isn’t it like saltwater now? If she had it done eight years ago, what did they use back then? I was overcome with an irrational impulse to ask her about the surgery. What did it feel like, rising from the operating table like a sexed up Frankenstein? Did it take her long to adjust to her new proportions—did she run into things for a few days? What did people say when they first saw her? Were they too polite to comment on her new cleavage or was it so in-your-face they couldn’t help but blurt out something inappropriate?
    â€œSure is dark.” Dannika’s voice in the front seat was surprisingly squeaky. “You want to sit up here?”
    Was the queen actually inviting me out of the servant’s quarters? “I’m okay,” I said.
    She turned around to face me. “You’re not cramped back there?”
    Gee, I’ve only been wedged between two surfboards and a steamer trunk for eleven hours, now—how kind of you to notice. “It’s not too bad.”
    An awkward silence ensued. The barking seals started up again, so far away you could barely hear them. It comforted me, knowing we were close to the water, even though we couldn’t see it from here.
    â€œIt’s getting kind of cold,” she said.
    â€œYeah,” I replied.
    An owl let out a high-pitched, lonely hoot. Dannika shivered and pulled her sweatshirt together at the throat. “Why don’t you come up here?” she said. “That way I don’t have to turn around when I talk to you.”
    It’s all about you, isn’t it? I thought, but I went ahead and climbed over the seat into the front. She was sitting dead center and I climbed into the passenger side so she had to scoot over behind the wheel. I couldn’t see any reason why I should contend with the steering wheel—not when her surfboard had been dripping cold, waxy blobs on my beautiful car coat for the past two hundred and fifty miles.
    Freed now from my confining