First Love Read online

  But I took a deep breath and somehow successfully shifted gears. When the car didn’t explode, I forced myself to lightly press the gas pedal. The car moved forward. Slowly. Jerkily. But it moved. “Oh my God, I’m driving,” I said.

  Robinson grinned. “And the prize for stating the obvious goes to… Alexandra Moore!”

  “Shut up,” I squealed.

  Robinson laughed. “Sorry—I couldn’t resist. You’re normally a much more subtle thinker.”

  “I hate you,” I said, but I was laughing, too.

  I was going twenty miles an hour and it felt like flying. I was also quickly nearing the edge of the parking lot. “What do I do now?”

  “Why don’t you try turning,” Robinson suggested. “So we don’t, I don’t know, go barreling into traffic?”

  I slammed my foot on the brake and whirled to face him. Sure, I’d had a good thirty seconds of decent driving, but some things just weren’t funny yet. “This is hard for me, you know!” I yelled.

  Robinson reached over and put his hand on my arm. It was… calming. “Axi,” he said gently, “is it really hard for you? Think about it before you answer.”

  I frowned. It was scary, yes. Unfamiliar. But hard? Well, not really. It was like Robinson said: gas pedal on the right, brake on the left. Four gears forward, one reverse.

  All I needed to do was move forward.

  It was almost as if Robinson could see the fear leaving my body. He gave my arm a squeeze. “See?” he said. “You get it. You’re going to be fine.”

  And I was fine. I drove around the parking lot for almost an hour while Robinson, the human karaoke machine, sang driving songs: “On the Road Again,” “I Get Around,” and “Mustang Sally.” I practiced turning, accelerating, and even parallel parking.

  Finally Robinson said, “I think you’re ready for the street.”

  I said, “I think I’m ready for you to stop singing.”

  “Deal.”

  So at the edge of the lot, I looked both ways—and then I pulled into traffic.

  “Pedal to the metal, Axi!” Robinson said.

  I was giddy, thrilled, scared. I was behind the wheel of a car, in fantastic Los Angeles, with the boy who was possibly the love of my life sitting next to me.

  “Whoa, you cut that guy off there,” Robinson said.

  “I did?”

  “Don’t drive like you own the road; drive like you own the car.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, checking my mirrors and accelerating, “because I don’t own it, and neither do you.”

  “If I can just get off of this LA freeway / Without getting killed or caught,” Robinson sang—it was some old country song.

  Wasn’t he supposed to not sing? “It’s not a freeway,” I pointed out.

  And it was a good thing it wasn’t, because what happened next would have been a lot worse.

  The other part of Newton’s First Law? A body in motion will remain in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force.

  In this case, the outside force was a parking meter.

  I don’t know how it happened. One minute everything was fine, and the next minute we were at a dead stop and blood was pouring out of my nose.

  16

  DIZZY AND OVERWHELMED, I STARED out the window with a T-shirt held to my face as Robinson hurried us onto the 10. He’d handed me the shirt as he slid into the driver’s seat. We had to leave the scene quickly—there were witnesses.

  “You’re okay, right?” he asked.

  “I think so.” My voice came out very small. I wasn’t worried about my nose—I was worried about having smashed up a stolen car.

  “Don’t worry,” Robinson assured me. “The LAPD’s got way bigger fish to fry.”

  But his voice sounded sort of shaky. As if maybe he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. And he kept glancing in the rearview mirror, like he was watching for flashing lights.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. But I don’t think he heard me.

  His eyes darted from road to mirror and back again. “Well, Axi, in the immortal words of Dale Earnhardt Senior, ‘You win some, you lose some, you wreck some,’ ” he said. “Every path has its puddle, you know? Nothing ventured, nothing gained! You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And who wants to live in a world without omelets? Besides chickens, of course. I mean, I’m sure they’d be totally fine with it, ecstatic, really—”

  “Robinson, you’re babbling,” I said.

  “What?” He turned to me, his eyes flashing.

  I took the shirt away from my face and felt a trickle of blood make its way down my lip. It tasted like salt. “You’re babbling,” I said. “Are you freaking out?”

  His eyes widened. “Who, me? No! I’m not freaking out. Nope, no way! Not me.”

  “The fellow doth protest too much, methinks,” I said, feeling suddenly woozier. Robinson was usually so calm; seeing him flustered definitely didn’t make the situation better.

  Robinson said, “Huh?”

  “A slight modification of a Hamlet quote,” I said weakly. I realized I was tapping my feet really quickly on the floor—almost like I was trying to run away inside the car.

  “Are you speaking English?” he demanded. “Like, even now?”

  I clenched my hands. It was my first real moment of doubt. Deep, profound doubt. As in: What were we doing? Was this whole trip the worst idea I’d ever had in my life?

  I guess I must have said that out loud, too, because Robinson almost instantly calmed down. He took a long, deep breath, then leaned over and squeezed my knee. “We had a little adventure, and now it’s time to be moving on,” he said gently. “This trip is a brilliant idea, Axi. The best.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Are we about to get caught?”

  “No,” Robinson said, this time sounding certain. “We’re fine. Although we’re missing a headlight and you have blood on your chin, which looks weird. Like maybe you’re a vampire or something. But seriously. We’re fine. We’re better than fine. We’re invincible. What’s next on our itinerary?”

  I couldn’t believe how fast his mood had changed. But if Robinson felt confident again, I would try to, too. Because if I didn’t trust him, what was I doing driving across the country with him?

  “Well… Vegas, actually,” I said. Yes, we were in over our heads—I understood that. But maybe things would still work out for us.

  Robinson pounded the steering wheel. “Vegas, baby, here we come!”

  I could hear the happiness in his voice. Part of me wanted to shake him, and the other part adored him for his unfailing optimism. How many times had I been in the pits of despair, only to have Robinson reach down and haul me up into the sunlight? More than I cared to remember.

  “It’s all your fault, you know,” I said, dabbing at my nose and chin.

  He snorted. “I’m not the one who crashed.”

  “But you’re the one who tried to teach me to drive.”

  “It’s a life skill, Axi. I’m not going to be able to chauffeur you around forever.” He turned to smile at me then. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but it seemed there was a new glimmer of melancholy behind his smile.

  “Yes, you are,” I said softly. But Robinson didn’t reply.

  17

  WE DROVE ON THROUGH THE NIGHT. The dark shapes of the Los Angeles hills gave way to flat nothingness, and then, after a few hours, an orange glow blossomed in the sky. It grew steadily brighter, and when the highway began its gentle slope downward, suddenly a vast ocean of glittering lights stretched out below us.

  “Oooh, Las Vegas ain’t no place for a poor boy like me,” Robinson sang. Then he turned to me. “That’s Gram Parsons,” he said. “Did you listen to that album I gave you?”

  I hunched down in my seat, shaking my head minutely.

  Robinson laughed. “Doesn’t matter. I can sing the whole damn thing for you.”

  “And you probably will,” I said.

  Humming, he dr
ove us down the Strip, which was lit up like Christmas times a million. It was as bright as day on the street, even though it was after midnight. We passed signs for the Bellagio, Bally’s, the MGM Grand—casinos I knew from Ocean’s Eleven set in a landscape I knew from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  “So we have to gamble, right?” Robinson asked.

  I nodded, suddenly resolute. “I believe it’s required.”

  I cleaned myself up in a 7-Eleven bathroom while Robinson ate his ten thousandth Slim Jim. Then we went to the Luxor, mostly because it was shaped like a pyramid. It even had a giant Sphinx out front—an absurdity we just couldn’t resist.

  The moment we stepped inside, we were in yet another world. The sound of pinging slot machines, the smells of air-conditioning and sweat, the flashing lights above the pits: it was total sensory overload.

  Robinson put his arm around my shoulders. “You want to win big?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we’ve got twenty bucks to blow.”

  “Is that what your budget tells you? Well, that’s two games of blackjack with a ten-dollar buy-in.” He grinned. “That’s assuming we don’t win, which we will.”

  “Twenty dollars’ll last longer at the slots,” I said, because sitting in a semicircle with a bunch of strangers and trying to decide whether to tell the dealer to “hit me” was more than I was up for.

  Robinson eyed the blackjack table longingly. He probably thought he could charm the cards into falling the way he wanted them to. Not me. Maybe I wasn’t GG anymore, but I’d never be the gambling type. Because it was my babysitting money we were talking about, and I’d wrangled some serious brats to earn it.

  Maybe it was just as well that a burly guy in a black vest came up to us as we headed for the slot machines. He wanted to see our IDs.

  “Well, you see—” Robinson began.

  The guy cut him off. “Save it. If you got an ID, you can play. If you don’t, scram.”

  “Go on,” I said to Robinson. “Now you can play a hand of cards. I’ll wait outside.”

  He shook his head. “No way, Axi, we’re in this together.”

  I liked the sound of that a lot. “Okay, what do you want to do now?”

  Robinson yawned so deeply I decided not to wait for an answer. I said, “Let’s go find a place to sleep.”

  So we pulled into the nearby parking lot of Treasures, which at first I thought was a gift shop. “Why’s it open so late? Who needs a snow globe at two AM?”

  Robinson laughed—at me, not with me. “It’s a strip club, you dope. This is Sin City, remember?”

  I was too tired to take offense. I settled down in the backseat and pulled my sweatshirt over me. Robinson snaked his hand around his seat in the front, and I reached out and took it. Here we were in the car again, three feet of air and eight inches of foam between us. Why hadn’t I made a move at the hotel?

  “Tell me a bedtime story,” Robinson said.

  “Sing me a bedtime song,” I retorted.

  “Flip a coin,” he said.

  I agreed, and he lost. So I fell asleep to Robinson singing, drumming lightly on the dashboard.

  There was a girl named Axi

  who was a runaway.

  Instead of taking a taxi

  she tried to drive around LA.

  She crashed her car and hurt her nose

  and I don’t mean to brag

  but who should rescue Axi

  but a charming scalawag?

  It was a pretty good lullaby, all in all.

  The sound of ringing laughter woke me at 4 AM. A handful of dancers were leaving the club, done with their shift for the night.

  One passed by the car and spied me in the backseat. “Hey, girl,” she said, leaning in so close I could smell perfume and sweat. “You can’t sleep here. They’ll tow your car and take you and your friend here to the pound.”

  Robinson sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Huh?”

  “Y’all need to be getting on home,” said another. I could hear her smacking her gum. “Wherever that is.”

  Robinson leaned out the window and smiled at them like they were long-lost friends. “That is excellent advice,” he said. “And I thank you for giving it. But unfortunately it is not possible for us to follow it at this time.”

  The women burst into laughter. One nudged the other with her bony hip. “Look at them! They’re as cute as kittens. Chrissy, you take ’em home with you.”

  The blond one called Chrissy looked us over. She spent an especially long time looking at Robinson. “My car’s the white Chevy over there,” she said finally. “Y’all follow me out.”

  18

  SUFFICE IT TO SAY THAT I DID NOT WANT to go. What if Chrissy was an ax murderer?

  But Robinson said that for one, the chances of that were very slim; and for two, being killed with an ax was conceivably more appealing than spending another night with the emergency brake poking into his side. So we followed Chrissy toward the old Las Vegas Strip (the place they used to call Glitter Gulch) and into a modest apartment complex.

  “Here we go,” she said, pointing toward a sagging red couch in the middle of a dingy living room. Neon lights from the signs outside reflected on the bare walls. “You sleep in there, and your boyfriend can have the floor in the kids’ room. It’s carpeted.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, out of habit. I could see Robinson getting ready to deliver his line—She asked me out, but I turned her down—so I quickly added, “He’s not my type.”

  Chrissy raised one thin, painted eyebrow. “Oh yeah? ’Cause looks to me like he’d be everyone’s type.”

  Robinson, who seemed ready to fall over from exhaustion, made a show of kissing his biceps. He was such a beautiful goof—of course he was my type.

  “Dork,” I said.

  “Nerd,” he retorted.

  Chrissy cackled. “God, you two are seriously the cutest things ever. If you aren’t together, I don’t know what your problem is.”

  Then she handed Robinson a pile of blankets and shoved him toward the door of a bedroom. “The kid on the left snores,” she said. “Fair warning.”

  She gave me one last tired, vaguely maternal smile and disappeared into her bedroom. I lay on the soft couch and thought about what she’d said: that if Robinson and I weren’t together, she didn’t know what was wrong with us.

  I didn’t know, either. I mean, there was plenty wrong with us. But was that the thing keeping us apart?

  I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it. About him. Close to dawn, I tiptoed into the room where he was sleeping. He lay on his side, his hand tucked under his cheek. I watched him for a long time, counting his slow breaths and imagining I could hear the strong beat of his heart.

  It sounded ridiculous even to me, but I couldn’t stand not being near Robinson—especially now that I’d gotten to spend every night with him since we started this totally-insane-but-also-the-best-thing-ever trip. He made me feel the kind of joy I hadn’t felt since I was a kid and my family was whole. And he also made me feel… a kind of rush I’d never felt before in my life.

  How could I ever go back to being by myself—being without him—now that I knew these feelings were possible?

  Before I knew what I was doing, I crept forward and lay down beside him, matching my breathing to his. Whether or not he wanted me the same way I wanted him, we were in this together—that was what Robinson had said. It had never occurred to me before what a complicated word together was.

  19

  I WOKE UP GASPING. THERE WAS A weight on my chest, crushing my heart, squeezing the air from my lungs. So this is it, I thought, this is what it feels like to die.

  Next: Oh my God, I haven’t kissed Robinson yet. Except for that one time, ages ago, when I had that beer, which didn’t even count…

  I clawed at the covers, my lungs screaming. My desperate fingers felt something hard and round—a small, bony knee.

  There was a shriek, a high giggle, and suddenly
the weight was gone. I sat up, dazed and blinking. There was a boy on the floor, gazing up at me with giant green eyes.

  “My name is Mason Drew Boseman,” he said pertly. “I’m four.”

  “You must weigh fifty pounds,” I gasped, rubbing my sternum, where he’d just been sitting.

  Then a small girl wandered in, clutching a dirty stuffed bunny. “That’s Lila,” Mason said. “She’s two and she doesn’t know how to use the potty.”

  “I’m… Bonnie,” I said, my breath finally returning to normal. “Nice to meet you both.”

  Mason ducked his head, suddenly shy, like he hadn’t just nearly killed me. Lila simply stared, then slowly brought her thumb up to her mouth and began to suck.

  “Maybe I’ll get up now,” I said, untangling myself from the clean but ratty blanket. Still they stared.

  I walked into the kitchen, following the smell of coffee. “Morning—” I began to say.

  But I stopped. Because Chrissy, who was barefoot and in a silky red nightgown, had Robinson pressed up against the counter—and she was kissing him.

  And it looked for all the world like he was kissing her back.

  I turned around and stood shaking in the hall. Had I really just seen that? Was there a chance I was still dreaming? Mason looked up at me questioningly.

  I counted to twenty, then coughed and tried to make it sound like I was coming down the hall to the kitchen. I heard the shuffling of feet, the screech of chair legs against linoleum.

  This time when I rounded the corner, Robinson was at the kitchen table, reading the paper like he was the man of the house. “Morning, sunshine,” he said, pushing a mug of steaming coffee toward me. He needed a shave, and there was a smudge of dirt on his cheek.

  “He changed my oil, can you believe that?” Chrissy asked me. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “That’s not a metaphor for something, is it?” I asked, looking pointedly at Robinson.

  He chose to ignore the question. “I woke up early. Thought I’d do a friend a favor.”