Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho

Author:Cristina Moracho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

chapter nine.

ALTHEA WAS RIGHT. She really is fooling everyone.

The plan was simple: Tell Garth she was driving to New Mexico for Thanksgiving, then shoot up the coast to New York instead. Find Oliver, beg his pardon, maybe go to the museum to check out the dinosaurs. Then she’d go back to Wilmington, take her finals from home, avoid Coby at all costs, spend a week or two following Garth around some ancient temples, and when Oliver returned from the hospital things would go back, more or less, to normal.

She fills an old camping backpack with her sketchbook, clothes, toiletries, the tapes Minty Fresh and Valerie made for her over the summer—riot grrrl mixes from Val, a badly dubbed copy of Tartar Control from Minty—her own worn-out copies of the Gits’ Enter: The Conquering Chicken and Concrete Blonde’s Still in Hollywood and Sugar’s Copper Blue, and the Doolittle cassette she had borrowed from Oliver and never given back; she rolls up the old quilt and straps it to the pack like a bedroll. She uses half a loaf of bread to turn the entire contents of the fridge into sandwiches—cream cheese and marmalade; roasted chicken, Craisins, and arugula; even the garlic mashed potatoes get slathered between slices of seven-grain and wrapped in tinfoil. And from the very bottom of her sock drawer, she takes the stack of old birthday cards from her mother and finally removes the cash that until now has remained spitefully unspent over the last dozen years, thankful, for once, for her ability to hold a grudge. She shoves the cash, about two hundred dollars, in her unraveling canvas wallet, along with the calling card and the money Garth left her on the kitchen table; she takes the Toyota through the car wash one last time and hits the road.

It’s another beautiful autumn day in North Carolina, cloudless and only a little cool. Once Althea’s on I-40 she is soothed by the rush of the asphalt beneath her car, the trees and telephone poles a blur outside her window. She turns up the music and sings along to the Gits, trying to fill the inside of the car with her voice and the shriek of electric guitars, buoyed by the remainder of Oliver’s pills. An hour passes, and another and another. She pulls over at a rest stop somewhere in Virginia and sits on a picnic table, eating a black bean and sour cream sandwich and drinking a warm soda. The mouth of the can tastes like the inside of her car. There’s a metal trash bin a few feet away from the picnic table, and she underhands the can in its direction and misses. It falls to the ground and rolls back toward her, the rest of its contents emptying into the grass with a carbonated sizzle.

If the great thing about driving is that—like drinking, like a punk rock show—it turns off Althea’s brain, then the problem she doesn’t anticipate is that this hypnotic effect will wear off after the first six hours and she’ll just be bored as hell.

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