West
My mother named me West because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and she has always preferred the end of the day to the beginning. I don’t like mornings either, so West represents the one thing my mother and I have in common. It could be worse. She could have called me East.
Sid
I met Sidney James in 9th grade. He was skinny and wore glasses and his shoelaces were untied. I doubt I would have liked him if he were any different.
It was the first day of school. I was sitting on the floor in the corner of the foyer watching everyone hug and squeal and reunite. I put my headphones in to block out the noise and watched them from my safe distance. Where are my friends? I thought. Do I have any?
Sid came up to me and said, “I’ve heard that people who hate the same things get along really well, and you look like you want to be here even less than I do.Don’t worry, I’m not hitting on you. I’m very gay, but I could use a friend, and it’s the first day of school so I have nothing to lose. I’m Sid.”
I felt like crying. I wasn’t sure why. His words filled me with the warmth everything else was missing, something I had been lacking for a long time.
“Hey Sid. I like bonding over things I don’t like, and I’m pretty sure I’m gay too because I’ve been looking at that girl over there all morning, and I can’t decide if I want to be her or be on top of her. I’m West.”
Sid looked over at the tall girl I was pointing to with the long blonde hair and the hot pink flip-flops. He turned back and smiled at me. “Nice to meet you.”
Our Town
Our town is ugly. Our town is the place you run from if you are the one who doesn’t fit in. Our town is a black hole, a void, an abyss. Our town is a wasteland full of people who do not understand, people who are all the same. Our town feeds me sorrow and reminds me I’m not good enough. Our town is the cage in which I am prisoner.
Rip me from it. Plant me somewhere I can grow.
Runaway(s)
On the last day of high school Sid and I had an epiphany: we needed fresh air. We needed to leave. We needed to go somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t where we had been. Now we could.
“How about Florida?” Sid asked.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Don’t be picky. We’re kind of broke.”
“Your parents just gave you two thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, for my graduation present. It’s meant for college.”
“They’ll give you more. And I have a bunch saved up from working.”
“We need to do the math before we go anywhere. I don’t want to end up stranded because we can’t pay for gas.”
“Fine,” I said. “But not Florida. The entire point of this trip is to clear our heads. Florida is for people who drink margaritas and tan more than they swim. We won’t run out of money if we take it easy. I need the ocean, Sid, but not Florida. I need an ocean far away. I need a sky we haven’t seen yet. I need a new fucking universe.”
We Won’t Tell
When I was twelve I was invited to a popular girl’s birthday sleepover. The girl’s mother forced her to invite every girl in the class, even the ones that nobody liked, so that meant I was there, too. At midnight she made us sit in a circle and say what boys we liked.
“West, who do you like?”
“I don’t like anyone.”
“Oh, come on. You have to like someone.”
“Really. I don’t like anyone. I swear. There’s no one cute in our grade.”
“But if you had to choose.”
“I don’t know. There’s really no one.”
“We won’t tell. What happens at this sleepover stays at this sleepover. Right girls?”
“Yeah,” her popular friends agreed. “We won’t tell.”
I thought for a few moments, trying to decide the least damaging person to admit. I’m not sure if I believed that my answer would really stay at this sleepover, or if I wanted to believe so bad that I convinced myself that I wasn’t being messed with.
“Alex, maybe?” I said. Even though he was a head shorter than all the girls in our class, his family had money and he liked sports and he was the most popular boy in the grade. I hated him.
“Great! Emma, who do you like?”
By the time I realized she didn’t actually care about my answer, it was too late. ThatMonday at school, Alex laughed every time he looked at me. The popular girls never spoke to me again.
Sid is the only person I trust.
Yellow Blood
We left the day after graduation. I packed nine pairs of jeans, seven bikinis and a necklace from the only boyfriend of my mother’s I hadn’t despised. I dyed my hair periwinkle and Sid pierced his ears and we were on the road by 10am.
We didn’t know where we were going. We only knew we had to get there. We headed West. I stuck my head out the window and let the wind take my breath away. The hills and the grass and the sky passed in a blur. We sung along to Supertramp and Fleetwood Mac until we lost our voices. We saw the earth change color and we played road trip games to keep us entertained.
“Yellow,” I said.
“Butter is yellow.”
“The sun is yellow.”
“Lemons are yellow.”
“That car is yellow.”
“Those little corns that go in salad are yellow.”
“Why wouldn’t you just say normal corn? And why are yours all food related?”
“I like food,” Sid shrugged. “Have you ever thought about what life would be like if things were different colors? What if the sky was yellow?”
“I would be devastated. Blue is my favorite color.”
“What if the grass was blue? What about a purple ocean? What if our blood was yellow?”
“Whoever created this planet could have made our blood yellow. I wonder why they chose red.”
“Who do you mean?”
“You know. The creators of the simulation.”
“Sure,” Sid said.
“I’m serious. I wouldn’t mind yellow blood. It’s happier.”
“The color of our blood has nothing to do with how happy we are.”.
“You don’t know that. I’ll take all the help I can get.”
Mom and Dad
My mother called once when we were passing through Nebraska. I almost didn’t answer.
“Hey baby! Do you know where my pearl earrings are? The ones that dangle? I’m going on a date tonight and I really need them.”
“Check the top of my dresser,” I said, even though I was wearing them and planned on keeping them.
“Perfect! Thanks, West. I gotta run. Hope you’re having fun on your little trip! Wish me luck tonight!”
Sid’s parents called every night to make sure we weren’t lost or killed in a car wreck. For as long as I’ve known him, he always answers the phone with, “Hey mom and dad,” because his parents put him on speakerphone so they can both talk to him. This makes me want to dance and kill myself at the same time.
Sometimes I think I’ll feel like this for the rest of my life.
Naked
The worst part about saving money and sleeping at rest stops was that we didn’t have our own bathroom. Bathrooms are important to me because most of the time I spend in them is devoted to staring at myself in the mirror until I like what I see. This has been my worst habit for the past several years.
Eventually we splurged on a hotel somewhere in the middle of a state we didn’t care about because Sid finally gave in and decided he wanted a real bed. He lay on the ugly floral-printed duvet reading a dog-eared copy of Slaughterhouse Five while I scrutinized my naked body in the full length mirror on the back of the front door.
Besides Sid, the only boy that has seen me naked is the boy I slept with from my summer job a year ago. I only did it because I knew he liked me and I felt bad for him and I was lonely. Sometimes I just let things happen.
“I can’t believe I did that,” I said, dropping the complimentary soaps and shampoos in our suitcases.
“You were self harming,” Sid said. He shrugged. “We all do it some way or another.”
“I find them attractive sometimes, you know. Men. At least I think I do. I just don’t like them. They make me nervous. I think you’re the only man in my life who hasn’t let me down. Not that that has anything to do with it. Fuck. I’m a stereotype, aren’t I?”
“It’s not a real stereotype. I have a nice dad and I’m still gay.”
“I guess.”
“We should stop in Montana for a while. The sky is supposed to be big there.”
Memories
I remember kissing Britt Jacobs on the cheek during a game of House in the third grade. I remember wanting to kiss her on the lips instead.
I remember holding my friend Alice’s hand until she told me to stop because it was weird.
I remember looking at certain girls and wanting them to like me. I don’t remember a time when this wasn’t the case.
I remember thinking that all girls felt this way.
I remember realizing they didn’t.
Montana
Montana was ethereal. The sky was a mysterious shade of blue I had never seen before and when night came we could see the stars without having to squint. We went to Yellowstone and pretended to be tourists. We saw geysers and mountains and bison. I decided I would move there and paint pictures of the sky and the grass for the rest of my life.
Montana was Sid’s least favorite stop. It was in Montana that he got a phone call from his parents that made him so upset he didn’t talk to me the entire way from the park back to the hotel. I knew it was bad because Sid gets quiet when bad things happen, but I was afraid he was going to cry if I asked him what was wrong so I kept my mouth shut because if he cried I wouldn’t know what to do. The only time I’ve seen Sid cry was when a car hit his dog last summer. He was so upset that he couldn’t talk for hours and all I knew how to do was hold him.
When we got to our room, I sat on the edge of the creaky bed and listened to Sid cry in the shower for a while until he came out and said, “Lucas proposed to his girlfriend before leaving for the army. They wanted me to call and congratulate him.”
Lucas was Sid’s neighbor. Sid had been in love with him for almost two years. No one knew except me. He got in bed and I held him for a while and we fell asleep at 9pm.
How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
We got tattoos in Seattle and I cut my hair up to my neck with shitty scissors in Portland. By the time we got to California, I was so ready for the ocean I thought I was going to explode.
“I’m sick of the road,” Sid said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, not the road trip. The actual road. Like, looking at it. In front of us. All day. It’s giving me a headache.”
“I wish road trips didn’t cost anything. We could do it forever.”
“Anything to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Let’s not go back.”
“We have to.”
“We don’t.”
“Yes we do.”
“No we don’t.”
“We do, West. For a while, at least. Until we can figure out how to move out here without breaking the bank.”
“We could be starving artists.”
“But not the cool kind. We’d actually be starving.”
And then I could see it. I rolled down my window and reached my hand out as far as I could. Seagulls were talking. The smell of brine enveloped me. I could taste the salt. It was big and blue and beautiful. It was exactly where we were supposed to be.
Homesick
There is sand in our eyes and our dreams burn our skin like the sidewalks under our feet. We are homesick for a place we can’t return to. We are homesick for a home that never was.