Spun Down

The motel was shitty and we’d stopped way too early and there wasn’t a pool, and I wasn’t about to sit in the dingy room with my mother and watch pay-per-view, so I walked outside and tried to get lost.

Well, not really, but I walked a block down the street and sat on a bench outside of a convenience store to kick some dirt around.

We’d stopped just outside Santa Fe because tomorrow we’d be driving through mountains and my mom wanted to rest up because it would be “demanding.” The U-Haul attached to her beat-up Honda Civic certainly wasn’t helping our progress.

I looked around the town and thought how soon, my home would be some dead-end town in the mountains just like this. Cripple Creek, Colorado. Jesus. I don’t know what my mom was thinking coming from Phoenix to a town called Cripple Creek, but if she wanted a “big change” as she claimed, she’d succeeded.

I’d lived in and around Phoenix my whole life, and even though we moved a lot, we’d never moved that far, until now. My mom was obsessed with “new starts” and keeping life “exciting.” And I’d thought maybe she’d get over it long enough to let me finish out high school with my friends and with Tom, but I guess not.

Before high school, I hadn’t really cared about moving around that much, but that was before everything. Before Tom. When I arrived for the last two months of my freshman year in Scottsdale, hopelessly behind in a World History class I hadn’t signed up for, Tom offered to tutor me because he was just so goddamn nice. And when school ended we hung out every day over the summer and he finally kissed me in August and asked me to be his girlfriend. We dated all sophomore year and all junior year, and maybe it was love; he was pretty convinced that’s what it was, but I was always a little more skeptical.

In the end, my skepticism didn’t save me, because here I was sitting on a bench in front of a convenience store outside of Santa Fe wishing I’d have been naturally gifted at world history so I never would’ve met him in the first place.

I closed my eyes as a car drove by so the dust wouldn’t get in my eyes, but then on second thought I opened them so I’d have an excuse if I started crying again.

And then, out of nowhere, this huge wave of anger just swelled up inside of me and all I wanted to do was scream or kick something or get up and start running straight into the desert and all the way back to Phoenix. I pressed my hands against my face and suppressed a moan, and then I got up and walked into the convenience store because that train of thought was getting me nowhere.

The store was dingy, kind of like the motel. I walked over to the Good Humor cooler and gazed at the different ice creams, deciding if I wanted a drumstick or a Flintstones push-up. I chose the push-up because I’d eaten them all the time when I was a kid, and I bought it from a girl behind the register who was only a couple years older than me and already had like nine visible tattoos.

“So, is there anything to do around here?” I asked her, half curious, half attempting small talk.

“Nope.” She popped the ‘p.’ I kind of laughed and thanked her and began walking out of the store, wondering if any teenagers even lived in Cripple Creek and if they did, did they know how to throw a good party.

I kind of doubted it.

I still didn’t want to go back to the hotel, and I didn’t want to keep sitting on the bench, but I also didn’t want to actually get lost, so I walked around the block a couple times. The sun was setting, and the temperature was dropping rapidly, and I thought about how in Colorado the highs and lows weren’t so drastically different and how that might be a little more convenient, but it ended up just making me weirdly nostalgic for something that wasn’t even gone yet. I was shivering and my ice cream was gone and there was nothing else to do, so I began walking back.

My mom swooped down on me as soon as I swung the door open, asking where I had been and why had I left my phone here and who did I think I was, making her worry like that? And then she sat down and stopped acting mad and got really serious and said, “Cassidy, look. I know it’s hard on you. It’s hard on me, too. Moving is hard, but you have to believe I’m doing this for your own good. Our own good.” Which was total bullshit, because after myself my mother was probably the most selfish person I knew.

All I did was blink at her and she sighed and then I stood in the shower for about an hour because the hot water never runs out at hotels.

She’d phrased it in a completely different way when she’d first told me. Maybe because she hadn’t had a chance to convince herself otherwise yet, maybe because Tom was there. In any case, we were in my room, the door cracked open as per her sanction, watching something stupid on the laptop and waiting until we could leave and go out to a party Taryn was throwing to celebrate the end of exams.

I remember his arm ran down the length of my back, his hand resting on my hip, and his chest was a really good pillow, and that and his breathing and the show as background noise were nearly lulling me to sleep until we were interrupted.

“Cassidy!” she exclaimed, barging in, then adding, “Oh, hi Tom,” like she didn’t already know he was here. She turned back to me. “Cassidy. I have News!”

Capital-n News. I never knew if it was her inflection, or beaming smile, or the general air of her bottling up something really precious and wonderful inside her, but after many, many years of practice, I could smell her announcing a move from a mile away.

My stomach dropped, and I sat bolt upright, and both my mother and Tom were alarmed.

“We’re not moving.” It slipped through my mouth without me even thinking. Tom sat up then, confused.

“Wha—Cassidy,” she fretted. “How did you—”

“We are not moving,” I repeated, and I felt a bubbling, panicked feeling rising up in my chest, and my breathing was already too fast and too shallow, and I couldn’t remember ever being that instantaneously upset over something. At the time, I hadn’t even thought about where it was we’d be moving.

Mom’s eyebrows furrowed, and she pursed her lips. “Honey, sometimes change is good.” It was still bullshit.

“Mom. We’ve been here two years. Please. I thought we were done with this. I thought—UGH.” Tears were pricking at my eyes, and I didn’t want to cry in front of her or Tom.

“I should go,” Tom muttered, but I gripped his arm before I could stop myself, as if acutely aware that I wouldn’t have his arm there to grip for much longer.

“Cassidy, don’t be like this,” she scolded. “I thought you’d be excited!”

She also thought I slept over at Alyssa’s, not Tom’s, every other Saturday, but that was beside the point. “Where? Mesa?” We hadn’t lived there yet, she hadn’t had a chance to ruin that city for me.

And then she bit her lip and her face fell and shit, I knew it was bad.

“It’s the cutest little town, Cass. I’ve looked at all sorts of pictures online, the realtor is so nice, she’s sent me all these flyers and things about the neighborhood. And there’s a school there, it’s so close by, you’ll be able to walk! They’ve got a park, and a community pool, and—”

“Sorry, where exactly have they got a park and community pool?” I inquired with mock curiosity, because I was sick and tired of her beating around the bush every time she had less-than-perfect news. She was optimistic to a fault, that woman.

“Cassidy.” She gave me a look. “I don’t like your tone.”

She was stalling and I knew it, and all I could to was glare at her incredulously as my fingernails bit into Tom’s arm.

Then she sighed, and the jig was up. “Colorado. They’ve got a park and a community pool in Cripple Creek, Colorado.”

I heard Tom exhale in shock beside me, but he was much too polite to say anything, and I was beyond words. I tried to scream at her, or cry, but all that made it out was a strangled little squeak that must have sounded so pathetic it made Tom snap himself out of it and wrap his arms around me. The forearm I had been grasping crossed over my chest, and I remember looking down at the four crescent moons my fingernails had left on his skin.

“Colorado?” I finally managed. Then: “Colorado?! Are you fucking—” and then my voice broke off into another strangled squeak, my throat too tight to manage any more anger.

“Don’t—”

“No! If you get to spring this on me, I get to swear!” I sounded raspy and ugly and not at all like myself, and I briefly wished Tom had gone, but on second thought I’d probably be exploding if he wasn’t here holding me together.

“Cassidy, you’d better snap out of this right now, because this isn’t up for discussion. It’s a wonderful opportunity for both of us, and if you can’t recognize that, it’s your own problem.” She hadn’t gone for the ‘moving is hard,’ understanding tack at the time, instead choosing the entitled one, making me feel like an ungrateful spoilt brat. “We’re leaving at the end of the month, and I hope by then you’ve changed your attitude about this.” With that, she tried to march off, but I interrupted.

“So did you get fired?” I spat. Watching her turn around with an ugly, livid look on her face gave me a strange and awful sense of satisfaction. She tried so hard to be a Good Mother, keeping her expression always between something of polite enjoyment and self-righteous disapproval. Whenever I caught her wearing a face like that, it reassured me that yes, there was a human inside, beyond every people-pleasing, appearance-driven bone in her body.

“No,” she snapped back, her voice almost as acidic as mine. “I quit.”

She slammed the door on her way out, and I had almost forgot that Tom had witnessed the whole thing, and immediately felt intensely embarrassed, but as soon as I turned to face him and apologize, my voice stuck in my throat. He looked as though he was trying valiantly to hold back tears, his eyes screwed up into a heart-wrenching expression, and the way he pulled me into him roughly, almost desperately, was shocking. And all of a sudden I realized what he had no doubt realized the second my mother let the bomb drop, that he was being ripped away from me, that our days were numbered, and that this move was going to be roughly a million times harder than any I’d ever experienced.