We exit onto a rural highway, and now we are entirely alone on the road. There is nothing remotely like this on the east coast. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. It makes me feel important, like, instead of being one of a million people to travel through the Lincoln Tunnel one day, I’m the only one on a lonely stretch of highway. Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing in New York? The thought that I matter?
Fifteen miles past Bridger, the first town we pass through with an actual stoplight, I spot a yellow deer sign surrounded by flashing lights.
“So that’s where flashing deer cross, I guess? Are they doe? A deer, a female deer? Do they flash for money?” I ask.
Aisha is lost in another world, because she doesn’t answer. Tegan and Sara melts into jazz explodes into the hip-hop sass of Janelle Monae, and ours may be the only car in all of Wyoming at this very minute in which Janelle Monae is playing. We let “Q.U.E.E.N.” envelop Aisha’s Neon. How cool would it be to be able to rhyme like that? So flawless and smooth and quick. And then I think about how she gets to go into a studio, and she gets do-overs. The recording we hear is her final cut. Maybe in life, most of us feel inferior because we compare our dress rehearsals to Janelle Monae’s final performance. If I could just broadcast the Best of Carson Smith, and erase all the thoughts that go flat, all the jokes that don’t go anywhere, maybe I’d be amazing too.
“So if you could create an app, any app, what would it be?” I ask.
“Is this where we’ve gone now? What happened to prideful pigeons and flashing deer?”
I laugh. “You gotta keep up,” I say. “My brain does this.”
“I think there are medicines for that.”
I look down at my fingernails. Is she trying to pick a fight? “If I had to create an app, it would be one where you give haircuts to feral cats, or maybe one where you chase witches around a plant nursery. If I had to create a reality TV show, it would be called America’s Next Top Podiatrist. Contestants would face increasingly bizarre and disgusting foot diseases.”
Aisha sighs. “I would not watch that show.”
“Aw, come on. Scabies of the foot? Pinky toe rot?”
“Oh my God, Carson,” she says, raising her voice a bit. “Am I actually going to have to murder you in the first hour of our road trip?”
“You want to kill me over pinky toe rot?” I ask, blowing air against the window and then wiping up the mist that forms.
We drive on in silence, and I find several spots on the window to breathe against and then wipe up. When we are ten miles outside of Belfry, the sun comes up on the left, and the buttes begin to illuminate on the right.
“Nice butte,” I say, and Aisha says nothing.
“I like big buttes and I cannot lie,” I mock-rap.
Aisha groans. “Everything is a joke with you.”
“Whoa,” I say. “Where did that come from?”
“I’m serious. Why can’t you just not make a joke once in a while? Silence. It’s golden.”
“So silence is a color now? When did this happen?”
“Just — shut up, Carson. Shut up.”
I stare out the side window at the blur of pine trees. I imagine each of those tree branches slapping me in the nose, my stupid, annoying nose.
“You just … Why can’t you talk about what’s up?” she asks. “With your dad, I mean. Like say something real for once, and not hide behind some stupid joke.”
“So you’re a psychologist now?”
“It doesn’t take a psychologist,” she says.
I close my eyes. Am I this bad now? Am I being psychoanalyzed by homeless chicks? I feel like the anger could just bubble out of my mouth, like the acid could ooze out and smoke could billow from my ears and I wouldn’t be able to stop until there was nothing left inside me anymore.
“Yeah, you’re nothing like that,” I say finally. My voice doesn’t really sound like mine. “It’s not like the first time I met you, you said the tiger was at the zoo because his father kicked him out for being gay. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure that one out either, looking back. Thank God you don’t use humor as a shield.”
I hear her inhale. But she just keeps driving, and we say nothing.
“So now you’re not talking to me? Great. Real mature,” I say.
She turns up the rap song that’s playing. Then she turns it up louder, and the thumping bass starts to rattle my brain. It’s one thing to be angry, but giving me hearing loss seems a little aggressive.
Aisha turns down the music when it starts to bug her too, I guess. She mutters, “Fuck. You know what the worst thing about car fights is?”
When I don’t reply, she says, “You can’t leave.”
I feel something that is way too big for a Dodge Neon boiling in my bloodstream. I don’t need this shit. I don’t need my fucking crazy family, and my mom and her psycho-fucking-babble and my lame-ass dad and his dying and my one friend of the moment and her bullshit.
Maybe my dad had it right all along. A glass of whiskey. Beats people.
The miles slip by, and my anger washes over me in waves. I play the conversation over and over in my mind, and I think of other things to say, meaner things, smarter things. Aisha slaps a button and the music goes from soft to off. I steal a quick glance at her face and her eyebrows are arched high in much the same way as when she’s excited. The only way I can tell she’s angry from her face is the tightness of her lips.
Then something inside me shifts, and I remember that when she’s not being a total B-word, she’s my best friend. In under a week, Aisha has become the best friend I’ve ever had, and maybe I wouldn’t say that to her, because it’s undeniably pathetic, but it’s also true.
So I take out my phone and text her.
im sorry
I put my phone away so she won’t see me holding it when hers buzzes. She gets the buzz, pulls her phone out of her pocket, and glances down to read it.
She starts to text back.
“Texting while driving?” I ask. “Really? Why don’t you just steer us directly into a tree?”
She gives me an annoyed look, but then she does something that surprises me. She slows and pulls over to the side of the two-lane highway.
I’m sorry too, she writes.
i didn’t mean to bug you
and i didn’t mean to piss u off
I was being a bitch.
no comment. me too. a male version of a bitch
Bastard.
hey watch the name-calling
Let’s be nice to each other. I’m sorry. Upset about Kayla today.
you’re too good for her
I guess.
do u think it says something bad about us
that we are texting our apologies?
It’s not a great sign.
i kinda love u, u know
I know. Love you too kinda.
We hit the road again. We’re quiet, but at least the tension is gone.
“You text in full sentences, and you use punctuation and capitalization,” I say.
“Does it take that much longer to hit shift?”
“I think I’ll start doing that,” I say. “I mean, with all the many friends I text.”
That makes her laugh. That. Not all the awesome ideas I came up with earlier, but the sad fact that I haven’t had a textual transmission in a week except what she’s sent me. And she must know it, because we’re together all the time.