The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Read online

  The problem was, if I went, I knew I might regret that for the rest of my life too. There might have still been a way to get my life back on track, my quiet little highway to a good college and eventually to medical school. That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it? Like Mr. Harkin had said, I wanted to be a doctor just like Dad.

  Didn’t I?

  So there I was, standing on the street corner in a city I didn’t live in, thinking about getting into a van driven by some quasi-hippie guy I’d just met, wondering if I should go on a cross-country road trip with a guy I hadn’t been friends with since the fourth grade, a guy that was by all accounts not really right in the head. Charlie, the Human Squid, bruised and confused, stealer of cars and writer of secret love notes, Charlie who was about to do something that could possibly turn out to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life. Or the best. Only time would tell.

  “Okay,” I said, and I got into the van.

  chapter seven

  The floor of the van was covered with the brightest orange shag carpeting I’d ever seen. It was like walking on an orange peel. The walls were decorated with faded black-and-white photocopies of wizened Asian men with long beards, most of them smoking long pipes. Colorful beads separated the driver’s area from the rest of the van, and there were pastel-colored paper wind chimes hanging in the rear, twirling endlessly. Instead of seats, there was a plaid couch and a purple beanbag. The van smelled so strongly of pine—from the little green tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror—that I had a headache immediately.

  Gabe had barely put the van in gear and I was already having second thoughts. What was I doing? I was going to throw my life away being stupid. But then we were moving, and I told myself to just calm down, that it would all work out for the best, even if I didn’t know how yet. I could always find a way home from Bend. So I wasn’t committing to a long road trip, not yet—just one evening. One evening couldn’t ruin my life. And it was fun. I kept repeating that to myself. You’re having fun. You can always back out later. If nothing else, this will be a great story you can tell girls to impress them, which is a lot better than telling them you have every single issue of the original Transformers comic book series.

  Jake and I sat next to each other on the couch. I looked for seat belts, going so far as to dig under cushions.

  “Dude, relax,” Jake said.

  “I just—I don’t want to die, you know,” I said.

  “You won’t die. Come on, it’s not . . .”

  He trailed off, and I saw why. We were passing Mr. Harkin’s Mustang, still parked in the center of the street where Jake had left it, and that wasn’t all: Mr. Harkin himself stood next to the car, looking inside it, and there were two policemen on the other side watching him. As the van rumbled past, they all looked at us.

  Both Jake and I had the same reaction. We ducked out of sight.

  Gabe glanced back, raising his eyebrows. His pink glasses had darkened to crimson from the glare of the low sun. “You gentlemen in any trouble with the police?” he said, sounding like an inspector from an Agatha Christie novel. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the grinding roar of the engine.

  “Nah,” Jake said. “We’re just stretching our legs.”

  It was obvious Gabe didn’t believe it, but he shrugged and returned his attention to the road. Since we heard no sirens and saw no police cars tailing us, we moved back to the couch.

  “You dudes really venturing all the way to the great state of Colorado?” Gabe asked.

  “Yep,” Jake said.

  “Fabulous. I’ve been to Colorado.”

  We waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. He clicked on the radio. It was some sixties band singing about love, which really didn’t narrow it down, I know, but I didn’t know much about sixties music. Actually, I didn’t really know much about music at all, except that I should never admit I liked Britney Spears around anyone my age. Probably not around anyone of any age, though I’d never tested it. When you’ve been laughed at by an entire classroom because of your choice in music, you don’t tend to speak about it again.

  The van passed through the neighborhoods and the small Grantville downtown, and after passing fields with grazing goats, cows, and llamas, we were back on Highway 47, headed east. The sky was turning a hazy dark blue, and the few streaks of clouds looked liked they’d been slapped up there by a quick dash from a paintbrush.

  “It’s going to be night soon,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jake says, “that usually happens.”

  “I don’t have a toothbrush.”

  “What a crisis.”

  I looked at him. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Yep.” He laughed and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, man, we’re on the road! Don’t worry about small stuff. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Okay,” I said, still wondering what I was going to do without my toothbrush.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you write that note?”

  “Huh?”

  “The one to Tessa Boone.”

  I thought about what to say, then decided, what the heck. I’d already abandoned reason back on the sidewalk in Grantville. “Yeah, I did.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Put it in her locker and everything?”

  I hesitated. I still didn’t remember doing that part, but I didn’t want him to think I was any crazier than I already seemed. “Yep. Stupid, huh?”

  He turned and watched the passing landscape. We were beyond the reaches of the cities outlying Rexton now, passing through rugged ranchland, a few tall pine trees here and there lining the road as we approached the foothills of the Cascade mountains. The flat highway had turned into a gradual rise.

  “Why her?” he said finally.

  “Huh?”

  He looked at me, squinting as if he was trying to see the hidden image in one of those pictures with all the colored dots. “I mean, was it just her looks? She’s pretty hot, I guess. But she seems so . . . I don’t know, empty. It’s one thing if you were just hanging out with her and getting some action, but writing a love note . . .”

  “It was more than just looks,” I said defensively.

  “Oh yeah? What is it you like about her?”

  “Well, she’s . . . well, for starters, she’s . . .”

  I struggled to come up with a single thing about her I liked that wouldn’t seem shallow. She had a great smile. She looked good in her cheerleader outfit. Somebody on the street might mistake her for Pamela Anderson’s little sister. None of that would sound good. I could say she was nice, I guess, but it was more that she wasn’t awful to me, unlike a lot of other girls. But that didn’t mean she was treating me any different than she treated lots of other geeky guys.

  “It’s hard picking out one thing,” I said.

  “That’s bull,” he said. “She’s got big boobs and she’s a cheerleader. ‘Nuff said.”

  “No, no, it’s more than that. She’s—She’s made the honor roll. And she’s always in the advanced classes.”

  “Ooooo, honor roll and advanced classes. Who cares? Even if she is the smartest one in school, it’s not why you like her.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

  He nodded smugly. “You like her because you can’t have her.”

  “What? That makes no sense at all.”

  “It makes perfect sense. You obsess about some girl you can’t have. That way you never really have to let a girl you can have get close to you. It’s classic.” He crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back on the couch, his long blond hair fanning out behind him, and I found myself getting angry at his arrogance.

  “It’s stupid is what it is,” I said. “I really liked Tessa a lot.”

  “Liked? As in, you don’t anymore? It’s over that quick, huh?”

  I sighed. “What I meant—�
��

  “You’ve never gotten laid, have you?”

  “What?”

  “Come on,” he said, “it’s okay to admit it. You’re a virgin.”

  I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks, good old tomato face coming out in full force. No way I could bluff my way through this one. He’d see right through me.

  “So what if I haven’t?” I retorted. “I just haven’t met the right girl. Besides, I think it’s better to wait until you’re married for that sort of thing.”

  He snorted. “Okay, sure, whatever.”

  “I do.”

  “All right, fine. You ever even kissed a girl?”

  “Sure, lots of times.” I answered quickly, hoping that if I showed no hesitation he’d be more likely to believe me.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who?”

  “Oh, you know, different girlfriends.” I was really on thin ice now.

  “You’ve had girlfriends?”

  “Sure.”

  He shook his head. “You’re lying.”

  “Am not.”

  “Am too.”

  I leaned forward, yelling at Gabe. “Stop the van! I’m getting out!”

  “Don’t listen to him!” Jake yelled. “He doesn’t mean it!”

  Gabe looked at us with a blank expression, then went back to driving.

  “I’m not lying,” I said quietly.

  “Okay, whatever,” Jake said. “It’s no skin off my back anyway. I just thought you might want to talk about it. I could maybe give you some pointers.”

  “Oh, and I guess you’re all Mr. Experienced and everything, then. Huh?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve definitely been with girls. I mean, I don’t want to brag or anything, but I just got laid today.”

  “Right.”

  “I did, man. You can call Laurel and ask her if you want. She wouldn’t be happy I told you, but she wouldn’t lie about it.”

  I thought about the way he and Laurel had looked after Jake had woken me from my drawing-induced coma, and I knew there was a good chance he was telling the truth. I’d heard guys bragging about it sometimes in the bathrooms, talking about stuff like who would go down and who wouldn’t, and all that stuff that only vaguely made sense to me, but I never thought most of them really had done it. Maybe I knew deep down a lot of them were doing it, but it was easier to pretend they weren’t.

  In reality, I hated that I’d never been with a girl, but I didn’t know what to do about it. When even talking to girls was terrifying, it was hard to imagine putting my lips on a girl, much less doing more. Plus I knew there was something to what he was saying about me obsessing about girls I couldn’t have. There had been a few girls who’d shown an interest in me, some girls in my art classes and stuff, but none of them seemed interesting. Now I wondered if I didn’t think they were interesting because they were interested in me. In other words, if they were interested in me, that must have meant there was something wrong with them.

  Or maybe I was just a snob. Maybe I thought I was better than them. Any way you looked at it, it was bad. And depressing. Just more reasons to hate myself.

  “Whatever,” I said, looking out the window. There was hardly any light out there now, and the landscape was just one shadow on top of another, like piles of dark laundry in a dark room.

  “Look, Chuckster, I’m not trying to embarrass you or anything. I’m just calling it like I see it.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I mean . . . Let me ask you something. It might seem kinda weird, but . . . have you ever, you know, jerked off?”

  I was shocked by the question. “What?”

  “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

  “God!”

  “It’s really no big deal. Most guys whack off. I mean, what do you do if you get one of those hard-ons that won’t go away?”

  “I’m not talking about this!”

  “It’s okay if you haven’t. It just explains a few things.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “All right, all right.”

  We rode in silence, the tires humming over the asphalt underneath us, the engine still loud but no longer sputtering. I couldn’t believe he was trying to get me to talk about stuff like sex and whacking off. The thing was, he was right. I hadn’t whacked off, and I knew I was missing something big, something a lot of guys were doing by the time they were sixteen, but how do you go about learning what to do? It wasn’t like they offered a class in it. It wasn’t like they talked about it in Sex Ed., other than to say masturbation was a normal part of sexual awakening, as if that meant anything to me. I got boners all the time, usually when I didn’t want them, like when I was about to stand up from my desk in class, and I knew that boners were part of the whole sex thing, but words like jerking and whacking sounded like you were supposed to hurt yourself, and I wasn’t going to do that. As a general rule, I avoided pain.

  I once tried to look for some sex books in the public library, but I had gotten nervous when one of the librarians had asked if she could help me find anything. I hadn’t even been near the sex books yet. I had been holding a Julia Child cookbook at the time.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said, deciding to change the subject. “Why do you want to do this?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Go on this trip—you know, to see my dad. Why is it so important to you?”

  “I told you, I just want to see his face when you give him that picture.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to see his face?”

  His forehead furrowed. “Why? I don’t know. Just ’cause. What’s with all the questions?”

  “Oh, it’s all right for you to ask me lots of questions,” I said, “but I can’t ask you any?”

  “Well, not if they don’t make sense.”

  “They make perfect sense,” I said. “I just don’t think you’re telling me everything. I just think you’ve got another reason for wanting to do this, and you’re not saying.”

  “Dude, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m really in it just for the kicks.”

  “All the way to Denver just for kicks?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “Yeah, okay, whatever,” he said, obviously mad that I was pushing this.

  I suddenly had an idea I thought might lead somewhere. “What’s your dad doing anyway?”

  He looked at me, his gaze steady, his face now a stone mask. There was no smirk anywhere to be found.

  “My dad?” he said.

  “Yeah, what’s he doing?”

  “My foster dad drives a long-haul truck. I don’t see him much.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your foster dad. I was talking about your real dad.”

  He stared at me, his eyes narrowing. “My dad,” he said, with an edge to his voice, “is none of your fucking business.”

  “Whoa,” I said, raising my hands. “It was just a question.”

  “I don’t talk about him,” Jake said.

  “Okay.”

  “He’s a loser.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s just drop it.”

  He returned to looking out the window. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I knew I was onto something. There was something definitely going on in his life, something that made him want to get out of town.

  “Hey,” he said, turning to me, suddenly the cocky, smirking Jake again. “You remember the look on that guy’s face in the white convertible when we laid one on him? Remember what happened with his toupee?”

  It took me a second to realize he had just shifted back in time to the fourth grade, the first summer we had started lobbing water balloons. One of our first victims had been a middle-aged guy in a white convertible. Jake’s bright yellow balloon had not only landed right in the middle of the car, but also right on the guy’s thick mop of brown hair—or, what we had thought was hair. T
urned out the hair was actually a bad toupee and in the explosion of water had splatted on the road behind the car like a squashed beaver. That had also been the first guy to screech to a halt and come charging up our steep driveway looking for us.

  We had lots of victims after that, but somehow they had never quite measured up to Mr. Toupee. We had repeated the story to each other lots of times, and each time the details changed, his hair getting bigger, his face wetter, his growling threats more menacing.

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling.

  Jake slapped his knee. “That was the best.”

  “It was pretty funny.”

  “That was where we got our name, too.”

  I stared him blankly.

  “You don’t remember?” he said, and touched his heart as if I had wounded him. He did it in a joking way, but he had a look on his face like me forgetting had actually hurt him a little. “I can’t believe you forgot our name.”

  “Name?” I said, and then right away it came to me. “Water Balloon Boys. We called ourselves the Water Balloon Boys.”

  “That’s right!” he cried, and laughed so loud that Gabe turned and looked at us.

  I couldn’t remember who had come up with it, but it was a name we’d used all the way up until the whole Game Boy incident. We’d even made secret cards with our names and Water Balloon Boys written on the back, but only in invisible ink that would show up with the black lights we had bought at the local magic shop. We were a famous outlaw gang, and there were WANTED posters for us all over the world. We’d sworn a bond to each other, an oath to be there when it mattered, when the chips were down.

  I looked at him, thinking about asking him if he still had his card, but that might lead to the Game Boy incident, and I wasn’t ready to go there. He made eye contact with me for a few seconds, and he must have sensed how uneasy I was, because he got up and went to the front, plopping down in the passenger seat and making small talk with Gabe.