The Full Ride

Lying on her side, she curled against the base of the oak and tried to cover herself, the sexy knee-high split in her skirt suddenly annoying. She pulled at as if there might be enough fabric for cover but, of course, there wasn’t. Skin was everywhere.

A squirrel chattered high above her, intruding when she knew he was complaining about her encroachment. She looked up to find his tail flicking, little hands pleading, and she began to cry and hated him for making her do it, yet when he leaped to another branch and hurried away, she cried all the harder. She was asleep, cheek in the dirt, when Harley found her. “How ya doing?” he asked, brushing her face with a nearly indiscernible touch as she turned to him. She had no answer.

“Nobody knew,” he said, settling beside her.

“I knew.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

She flared. “So it’s all right to crash and burn?”

“It’s gonna happen. How you handle it is what’s important.”

“Youhandled it. I just…”

“They thought you were great. You should have heard them afterward, everyone wanting to congratulate you, asking where you’d gone.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you had to pee.”

Jennalee laughed when she didn’t want to and sat up. “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

“What, you want to hang onto your pain?”

Nowhe was asking questions, the one time she didn’t want him to. “I just don’t want to avoid it, okay? Something happened.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.”

He slid an arm around her and eased back against the tree, and Jennalee found after a bit that she wanted more than anything to figure it all out. She waited until the sun was nearly gone to tell this to Harley. Find the original chapter at novelceo dot com.

“Figure what out?” he asked.

“Where I went.”

He squeezed her as if he knew the question intimately and for the moment, that brought comfort. “It’s happened to me,” he offered. “Maybe not the same exact way, but it still happened. Probably does to everybody, even civilians. I picture the produce guy at Safeway suddenly waking up and he’s drowning lettuce.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Lettuce and music? They are to the produce guy. We’ve all got a place we go. Ours requires a little more skill, but it’s still a kind of refuge, only sometimes you go along thinking nobody can get you and you find out you’re wrong, the eggshell does crack.”

Jennalee wanted to ask about his eggshell world—there seemed to be so much more to it than hers—but got the feeling he’d tell her only if she didn’t ask.

“I used to wish I could go off somewhere and just play my fiddle,” he continued, “but you can’t get far enough. The moon maybe, but there’s no sound up there so what do you have? I got partway, though.”

“Did it work?”

“No.”

Darkness had crept across the bluff when he took up the story again. He let go of her and drew up his knees. “It wasn’t really a place,” he said, “as much as a person.”

“What happened?”

She could scarcely see him in the dark yet knew his eyes had closed. “It went on a long time,” he said softly, “but it’s over now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes when I play, I wake up in the middle of a piece like cold water’s been thrown on me and I have no idea where I am, but I’m still playing. It’s like I’m one person and the guy with the fiddle is someone else.”

“Scary,” Jennalee said.

He turned toward her. “Terrifying.”

“So what do we do?” Read the latest chapters at no⁠velceo.com.

“You can’t not play,” he said.

He was so right that Jennalee seized the phrase like an amulet he’d given her, a charm that gathered fragments into a whole. “It’s never happened before,” she told him.

“Then you’re lucky. And maybe it won’t ever happen again.”

Jennalee thought of Garth and Kendall and all the boys she’d been with, all the penises she’d handled one way or another. “Maybe you’re right.”

They stretched out on their backs and looked up at a moonless sky. “You ever been in love?” Harley asked.

Jennalee had to think about it. She’d professed love for Howard Li, but he was slipping away and, if that could happen, was it really love? She gave Harley the truth. “I’m not sure.”

When he didn’t offer anything of his own experience, as a person usually does when they’ve asked that kind of question, she nudged him along. “You were, weren’t you,” she said. “What was she like?”

Suddenly he was on his feet and at the bluff’s edge, where he looked like he was considering jumping. Jennalee had no idea what to do or why asking about his love, the subject he’d drawn her into, was wrong. She fidgeted, then called to him. “Harley? If I said something wrong, I’m sorry.”