Page 7 of Keeper
I could feel him trying to get a good look at my face.
“Pump one,” I muttered, shying away from his prying eyes. I felt like some kind of fugitive. Which, in a way, I guess I was.
I hastily paid for my gas and my cappuccino and scampered away.
At pump one, I leaned against my car, sipping my sinfully-sweet cappuccino while gasoline rushed into my tank with a soothing hum. The scent of gasoline billowed around me like a cloud—again, I know it’s bad for me, but I didn’t exactly resist it. The noxious fumes permeated my lungs, giving me a nauseous buzz.
The smell of gasoline: go ahead and add that to my list of ultra-guilty indulgences.
I know. I’m weird. But the combination of cheap, frothy coffee and the smell of gas triggered a rush of pleasant memories of time spent on the road—and anythingthat took my mind off the brutal fact that mylife had just been ruinedwas a very welcome distraction, indeed.
Yeah, I used to be quite the road-tripper back in my high school days. Of course, back then, I didn’t go alone—because what fun is a road trip when you’re alone?
No, I’d had a partner in crime.
Marta,I thought, taking in a deep breath.
Marta Mansour was my best friend in high school. During senior year, we used to go on day-long or weekend-long road trips all the time, driving as far as we reasonably could. One time, we drove all the way out to Boulder and back in a single day just because we were both dying to see and smell the mountains. We could only stay for an hour once we actually made it there. But the whole trip was a blast, and the pictures I took were some of my all-time favorites of us.
Why didn’t our parents didn’t stop us, you might ask. Well, my parents were too busy fighting with each other to worry about what I was doing—which was the reason I was so desperate to get out of the house in the first place: to escape the messy unraveling of their marriage. And Marta’s parents simply didn’t care what she did—hell, their credit cards funded our excursions. Whether they knew it or not was a different question.
Anyway.
All that happened before things got weird between us, of course. I suppose I should clarify: things between me and Marta regularly alternated between great or weird—but things gotweird-weird at the end of our senior year. During the ensuing summer, we maintained an icy distance from each other. Our paths forked even further apart in the fall, when I started college and Marta moved away to do her own thing. We hadn’t talked since.
I still peeked at Marta’s Instagram from time to time to see how she was doing. Besides all the ink she’d added to her body, she looked exactly the same. Which is sort of crazy, because if I hadn’t known her from high school, I’d swear I was looking at the Instagram account of a famous model.
Her bio said she was located in Dallas now, but her pictures gave the impression that she was always traveling the world. In half her pictures, she seemed to be modeling skimpy swimwear on some exotic beach with crystal clear water. In others, she bent over the side of a luxurious yacht, contemplating life’s mysteries as she stared across the sea in a cheeky bikini. The rest of her page was filled with sexy poses in barely-there clothing, seductive pouts, and “I woke up like this” selfies. Her captions were always empowering, seize-the-day type sentiments. In the comments section, legions of thirsty men fawned over her in a variety of languages.
She’d gone from popular in high school to world famous on Instagram.
Her life looked amazing. And yeah, I’ll admit it: considering how our friendship ended, it’s hard not to feel a small spark of jealousy trying to ignite in my heart when I see her success. But that being said, I can honestly say that I’m happy for her. She looks like a happier person now. And I truly hope she is.
… Actually …
Maybe it was the buzz from the coffee or the contact high I’d gotten from the gas fumes. But I started to wonder: what would Marta have to say about this little mess I’d gotten myself into? She’d probably think it wasn’t a big deal. She’d say I was over-reacting, as always. She’d tell me that she’d donewayworse, that she’d learnedlongago to ignore the slut-shamers and live her “best life”—haters be damned.
If only it was that easy for me.
Having filled my tank, I climbed into my car and started to drive. But now, each turn, each fork in the road filled me an existential angst.
Should I turn left or right?
Wherewas I going, anyway? At least when Marta and I would head out on our spontaneous road trips, we had a destination in mind.
What was the point of all this? How long was I going to run? This wasn’t fun, this wasn’t a helpful distraction—it was actually becoming kind of sad.
I’d lost the will to just keep driving. And I couldn’t stop glancing over at the passenger seat, where my backpack sat. My phone was in there. So were the trolls, but—
fuck the haters.
I pulled off the road and powered up my phone. Ignoring the text messages that continued to pour into my inbox, I scrolled through my contacts list and found Marta’s name still listed.
I tapped out a text. “Hey, Marta. Long time no talk. How are you?”
I didn’t expect to get an answer, but I stayed on the side of the road and waited just in case.
Surprisingly, she wrote back a few minutes later. “Who’s this?”
