Petra was right about green being a dangerous color to dye a person’s hair. We ended up dying it twice, layering blue over the green to get the right color, the perfect shade of dark cyan that matched my suitcase. She was also right that if we found the perfect shade it would do great things to my dark blue eyes. She did not cut much my long, dark hair off, only shaped it better. She moved the part to the side and gave me a thick sweep of bangs. I felt lopsided and frustrated with it for the first two days, but she refused to let me put it back. The color appeared in a thick stripe just behind my eye poking bangs, accented by a smaller hank underneath, behind my right ear.
I wore green and blue that summer to match the ever-morphing shades of those two stripes. Never much one for fashion, I let Petra define my style and she liked to tell me that I sparkled like a mermaid in a perfect ocean. Petra too matched her clothing to her hair and her suitcase, flashing red and black and giving her clothing a new Kitty-like edge. She wore the black cocktail dress with bright red tights and shiny black boots. She painted her face and did her hair and was Kitty from top to bottom. Kitty’s dress was a favorite all summer and was well worn and several times mended.
Jamie and Petra nearly disappeared. We introduced ourselves as Kitty and Buttercup when we could get away with it. Before long we had shortened it to just Kit and B, occasionally Kathryn and Beatrice when we were asked for full names. Whether they believed us we didn’t care. We were wild and uncaring of anyone but each other. You can still read the story of Buttercup and Kitty in the photos and dozens of full sketch pads that still fill the blue-green case.
Petra had a nose for the travel, for the random cross country movement. She knew which motels would ignore our age in the presence of daddy’s shiny credit card. She knew which gas station attendants would sell us cigarettes, which clubs would let us in and which bartenders would serve us. We didn’t drink much, maybe one cocktail at the beginning of the night, but we weren’t there to get drunk. We were there to dance, and dance we did.
We had rules for when we were in the clubs, lots of them. We never went anywhere apart, ever. No one came to our room and we never went anywhere with anyone. We made friends most nights, and kept to ourselves others. We took pictures and heard our favorite songs and still danced to the ones we hated. The clubs themselves fade into a singular blur of music and motion and flashing colored lights. It was the same with the kitchens we washed dishes in and the street corners where we sat and sang.
Sometimes we’d stay in town a couple days and wait tables during the morning rush at the same gross truck stops where we went to get coffee after dancing all night. Occasionally we skipped dancing when Petra would convince me to play open mike nights. I almost always made good tips those nights, playing the music I knew best; music written by my brother, lyrics written by my best friend. People all over the country heard the genius of Eric and Tommy years before their band would become a common name on radio stations in those same towns.
There is a picture I drew of Petra in the suitcase of a day I don’t need a photo to remind me of. It was a nothing special day in some hot and dry state shortly after we’d turned back from the daunting rockies. We’d decided not to cross and head south instead and. She sat with her legs crossed under her on the folding table. She held Mansfield Park open in her hands and a cigarette burned between her fingers. Our clothes rolled and twisted in their washers and driers around us as she read from the book. I had been reading out bits and pieces to her while she drove, but soon she had been engrossed in the story. She now shared reading duty when we stop. She rarely let me drive.
I drew pictures of the places we saw on blank index cards and sent them back to my family. The post cards said where we were and what we were seeing, but nothing of explanation or destination and no indications of when I would return. I sent cards to Kevin as well with only brief phrases of greeting on the back. It was against our agreement, I knew, to seek contact like that. He had expected me to be in Sutter all summer, though and I couldn’t expect him to survive on news from my family.
I called home once a week, always catching someone different, but never my dad. My brothers did not have to say why he wasn’t answering. Jeff, the oldest, lectured me when I talked to him and I bore it, but would not relent and return home.
We managed to survive for the most part on the money we made doing the odd jobs that had inspired the flight. The cash from grandma sat in my account untouched and marked as the car emergency fund. Petra’s credit card was used from time to time for luxuries we couldn’t afford with our handfuls of change. We needed our cigarettes and our hair products.
We kept a cooler full of yogurt and mangos in the backseat and a box of graham crackers between us. We drank diet coke and iced tea like it was water. We rented our bad motel rooms and got a picture in front of every one. We kept a paper grocery bag in the trunk that was filled with spent cameras. We stopped at thrift stores and clearance racks in every big city but each only kept what fit in the suitcases. Everything we wore out got passed onto our thrift store brethren in the next town, the next county, the next state over.
We were out of our element and into something new and different. Together we skipped our first period that should have tormented us the middle of the second week. When it appeared a new moon later, bashing us hard within hours of each other, we declared it an emergency. We splurged on a 3 day stay at a hotel with a VCR. We spent our days with the shades drawn, lying in bed and watching chick flicks. We used huge pretzel sticks as edible spoons to more easily devour cans of frosting and ordered extra cheese pizzas. We spent those nights dancing off the cramps and the calories. Then we moved on again.
We were fearless and we were an inseparable pair. The combination worked to scare off any would be assaulters that our youth and assumed innocence would have drawn. We floated just under the surface of an ocean of adults, almost invisible to them as we passed by them in a flurry of laughter. We sparkled through the skies and alighted momentarily here and there like glittering sprites in the woods. Nothing touched us, nothing stopped us.
That’s not true . We had car trouble in Louisiana and spent an afternoon watching Jason and Clint fix the Buick. That night we bent one of our rules and went to a bar with the boys where we learned about dancing in Louisiana. We didn’t drink and we stayed aware, but the boys never had any interest in us. To them we had revealed our real names, our real ages, and what we were doing so far from home. They were still young enough to understand us and for a night we had a pair of older brothers who were quite willing to take Kit and B out to see their town. They were not the only ones we left behind with a story.
Petra and I shared everything; clothes and words and food and cigarettes. We spent the occasional night sleeping in the car and long days driving with only the wind howling between us. We never had a fight; we took each new difference between us in stride. Since we were not playing ourselves we could be whoever we wanted and declare ‘doesn’t matter’ about anything we chose.
We never spoke about Kevin or Tommy or Petra’s mother’s drinking problem or anything that was waiting at home for us. I never really even thought about it. Petra was too busy painting her Kitty-red streak through the world and I was busy watching her. Falling in love with her took all of my attention. We never discussed what happened between us either. We never needed to. It became what Kitty and Buttercup were as much as red and green hair streaks and the trail of empty yogurt cartons we left behind.
I twisted my ankle on a crumbling cement step one morning. That night’s dancing was out of the question and we found a motel room early. Petra took care of me with ice and jokes and a huge array of snack food from the nearby vending machine. We so rarely saw prime time TV, but we caught up on all of our favorite summer shows. It had been almost 6 weeks since we left Sutter behind. It had been three days since I had actually realized that I had fallen in love with Petra.
It had come upon me in a most preposterous way. I had laughed at my own sudden realization; it burst from my throat before I could stop it. I watched her set down a bag of Funyuns on the counter and then she dropped me a wink. That is what it took to finally melt what reserve I had maintained to keep my emotions bottled. She ordered our brand of cigarettes and paid without a flinch, smiling at my startled laugh. I wondered if she felt the strange switchover as forcefully as I had, but she made no mention of it.
I took it in stride, as the summer had trained us to do. Then three days later we found ourselves cooped up with nothing but the TV to distract us and no real interest in it. Out of boredom Petra decided we needed a spa day and broke a rule. She went down to the drugstore on the corner alone to get supplies. We were tip rich from a recent open mike night where I had been the star of the show with some of Tommy’s best.
We did a deep conditioning on our dyed and manipulated hair. We painted our nails and babied our aching, calloused feet. We applied facials and sat side by side on the bed to wait for the paint to dry and the cream on our faces to do its job. She tossed her left leg over my right and occasionally tapped out a beat on my calf with her toes.
I glanced at her in wonder when she brought Kevin up out of the blue. I almost asked ‘Kevin who?’ I had so easily forgotten everything of Sutter and my home. The boy and girl on the show we were watching reminded her of the two of us, she said. I nodded as I considered the pair of young lovers on the screen.
“What was it that stole your heart so young?” Petra asked me. “You said he moved to Sutter when you were kids, was it love at first sight?”
“The first time I saw him I was 10, the day he moved to town. His parents had sent him off to get him out of the way of the movers and he went for a walk around the neighborhood. I was up in a tree in the Pearson’s yard and he came walking up the sidewalk with this camera hanging from strap around his neck. He stopped at the edge of the yard where all the boys were in the middle of some ultimate wrestling match or another. He just stood there for a little while and watched them. He didn’t say a word to them and I don’t think they noticed him at all.
“Then he turned and looked up at me. He had studied my brothers and the rest of the boys for a considerable time, but with me it was barely a glance. He lifted his camera and snapped a shot of me and then walked away.”
“And that won you over?” Petra asked. She carefully maneuvered a cheesy chip past her goopy mask into her mouth. I watched her movements with a faint distraction.
“No, I thought he was weird,” I said finally. “And he was a year older than me so he ended up being Joey’s friend, they were all in the same class. I still saw plenty of him though, Eric, Joe and I have always been close and Kevin just became part of the group. He never really asked me out, but we would go to dances together and no one else asked me out because they thought I was with him. What made me fall for him was when he gave me that picture of me in the tree on my sixteenth birthday.”
“Awww!” Petra sighed.
“I hung the picture in my work area,” I said. “I’m never taking it down.”
I told her the rest of the story that she hadn’t heard before. She was introduced to Kevin and I as a couple. She had accepted the fact. We were just a given to her as we had been for all of our lives; as we had been to the town of Sutter. I told her about our first real date and our first kiss and our first everything. She listened and asked questions and laughed and teased. I couldn’t help but notice her two-thoughts squint, though.
“Five years. Geez. You’re like an old married couple,” Petra sighed. “I’m starting to understand why Sutter and your family are so confused. After being together that long how could college possibly break you up.” I didn’t have an answer to give her on that subject that she had not already heard and she shrugged and continued, “What about the first time you had sex. You have to tell me that.”
I glanced at her and shrugged sheepishly. Her eyes opened wide. “No! You must have had sex already.”
I shook my head and for the first time felt a sort of embarrassment in the company of Petra. Her advanced experience in most things had never before made me uncomfortable and I didn’t know why this should.
“James no!” she grinned. “Oh, you are a buttercup!”
“Shut up!” I told her. I bumped her shoulder with mine. She must have felt the same spark, as hot and bright as it was, but she made no sign.
“Everyone assumes that we have, but we have neither confirmed nor denied it to anyone,” I paused, “Except Eric. I have always told him everything. And I guess, now you too.”
“Wait, so are you Catholic?” she asked
“If you’re talking to my father I damned well better be,” I warned her with a pointing finger.
“Alright,” She laughed. “So what exactly is your excuse?”
“I think some of it has to do with the fact that we have been together for that long. Our first kiss was prepubescent, and then we went through puberty together. Maybe some of that innocence has lingered, I don’t know. Plus we’re both so busy with the rock band and the marching band; his swimming and photography and my painting and cheerleading, there isn’t really a lot of time.”
“I still can’t believe you’re a cheerleader. I’m coming to every basketball game at your school next year.”
“And we’re not prudes,” I said, ignoring her threat. “We have done stuff, but I have four brothers who tend to burst into rooms at inopportune times. And ever since this past Christmas when we realized that we’d have to separate in the summer, it didn’t seem like the best idea.”
“You told me that if he sleeps with every blonde bimbo you won’t care.” She said.
“That’s true ,” I said. I had always believed jealousy to be a useless emotion. Whatever he did over the next year was between him and his own conscience and morals. If he chose me at the end of this year, as I knew I would chose him, then none of it would matter. And regardless of what he was to tell me, I was in love with Petra at that moment and I would have to reveal to him as well. Perspective has always been one of my favorite words.
“It just seems strange that you guys have been together so long and not only have not had sex, but won’t care if your first times are not with each other.”
“Maybe we both just want to be really fantastic on our wedding night,” I said to her with a forced flippancy. I didn’t know how to explain myself to her and still keep my confusing feelings hidden.
Petra tested the paint on her nails jumped off the bed. “I’m going to get this stuff off my face and out of my hair and then I’ll help you into the bathroom.” She ducked through the door and returned with a warm wet washcloth to take my mask off. The sputtering spray of the shower started a moment later.
I wiped the gunk off my face slowly and stared blankly at the images on the TV screen, listening to her move on the other side of the thin wall. She was back before I knew it with wet hair and a towel over her shoulders.
She offered me her hand and I slid one arm around her waist and she pulled me to my feet. It was sprained, I knew with the first step after the fall. But it was not the first time I had sprained some part of me or another and I would survive just fine. Petra had made me promise to go to a doctor in the morning if it had not improved. I knew that it was improving already.
She helped me limp into the bathroom and sat me down on the edge of the tub. She didn’t want me to lean over the sink or to stand in the shower so she had me lean back into the diverted stream of the shower head. She rubbed the conditioner out of my hair and I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do this for you,” I told her as she pushed the nozzle closed and the water trickled off. “Having someone else wash your hair is like heaven.”
“You’ll catch me next time,” she told me and pulled the towel off of her own shoulders. She rubbed the bulk of the water out roughly and then tossed the towel into the sink behind her. She played with my wet hair, adjusting the part and combing through it with her fingers. She studied me critically, though her eyes seemed to stare through me. She rubbed at a smudge of something off my brow with her thumb and wiped it on her shirt.
I didn’t kiss her, but I initiated it, I know that much. She was looking through me with only a single thought stare. When I touched the thin metal ring that looped around the side of her lower lip her pretty brown eyes cleared and she saw me. And then she smiled. She caught my hand in a firm grip and bent to press her lips against mine. They were softer than the quick and flirty pecks that Kitty and Buttercup bestowed on each other. My free hand found its way to her hair and tangled in the wet strands. I breathed her air. She pulled me close against her and I felt her heart racing.
When she finally broke the kiss she still held my hand in her grip. She smiled at me as she kissed the soft skin of the back, then turned it and did the same to my palm. My chest felt tight and I exhaled hard to clear it, but succeeded at nothing.
“Come on,” she said and tugged gently, lets get you back to bed.”
We got me to my feet and gimped to the bed. Then we sat down and she replaced the ice on my ankle and found her seat next to mine. We sat side by side with our shoulders touching with one of her legs crossed over mine just as we had before. Nothing had changed. This was our take-it-as-it-comes summer and we did just that.
After that we got sick of washing dishes and waiting the odd table or two. Suddenly my eye was the one finding the prime spot for a little cash or a chance to use a clean shower. I located the subdivided homes with overgrown grass hiding the bright plastic of children’s toys. We found the overworked mothers of too many children not yet school aged.
Petra could do amazing things with messy closets and disorganized offices. She also had endless charm and in every home, for every woman she did something different. Sometimes some laundry or other random household chores; sometimes spent an afternoon in her clothing closet modifying and hemming and revamping her wardrobe. I spent the hours outside mowing the lawn and collecting the stray toys, doing all of the handyman repair things I had done with my uncle as a kid.
We offered these services in exchange for whatever she could spare and at the end of those days we often went away with more than we had expected. That we were welcomed in the first place was not all that surprising. We may have been homeless nomads, but we didn’t look it. We had appearances to keep up at the club after all. We did not drink so we were never hung over. Petra’s charm, our story and our bright, happy teenage excitement amused the young mothers and for one day at least we saved them from the tedious chores they despised most.
Petra liked to move on sometimes in the still hours of morning when we would bail on a club early, not feeling the groove in that particular mass of moving bodies. When the temperature was nice and the skies were clear we would open the windows. I would fall asleep on the bench seat with my feet in her lap. The seat was wide enough to fit comfortably and I was short enough to not feel scrunched. I would wake when she chose our next motel. We would check in a sleep until the afternoon when it was time to head out and find some lunchtime dishwashing work, or a yard in need of cutting, or a street corner in need of a pair of girls to play the guitar and sing.
But sometimes she wouldn’t stop and I would sleep through until morning. Not long after that first kiss and still a week or so before we would make the decision to end the trip I found myself near wakefulness as the big Buick slowed and turned lazily down white-dawn streets. I sighed and relaxed back into my doze, letting the lull of the road sooth me. For a while I floated between sleep and waking, having small disjointed but soothing dreams.
She woke me as she slid between me and the seatback, her hands running along my leg, over my hip and finding its way under the hem of my shirt. Her palm was warm as it slid over my ribs and around my back. She settled in against me and sighed sleepily. For a while I dozed against her. But then she was moving again, whispering my name, breathing her little kisses against my neck, my cheeks. She kissed my jaw and my eyelids as she spoke.
“Wake up B.” she sighed and dragged her nails softly down my spine. I kept my eyes closed and feigned sleep, but she knew better. I could not hide my smile and I slid my own palms over her body and buried my fingers in her hair. I tugged lightly on the handful of bright red and kissed her.
“Good morning. Did you drive all night?”
“I did,” she said as we shifted around carefully, twining our legs and arms and bodies together until we were comfortable. She pillowed her head on my arm and closed her eyes.
“Why? You should have stopped.”
She pressed a finger to my lips. “Shh… listen.”
I listened, laying my own head down and concentrating on the sounds from outside the car. The sun had probably just risen; the quality of the light would wash everything with the shiny white yellow of tired early morning. Morning was my favorite part of the day, my favorite quality of light. This was different, though. More orange than I was used to back home. I started to sit up.
“No, just listen,” Petra said as she held me down.
I heard a car drive past behind us and the cry and chatter of birds. The breeze whistled through the windows, but under it all was the steady undercurrent of beat that made a symphony of it all
“Where are we?” I asked, but I already knew. I had grown up around lakes and would always recognize the sound of waves crashing on a shore. This was larger and stronger. An ocean.
Petra’s eyes glowed with joy as she saw the recognition cross my face. She let me sit up. I looked out across the hood of the car at the sun that was just a few degrees above the horizon and glittering warmly against the Atlantic. We were stopped at a parkway, the nose of the car separated from a rocky fall by a steel and wood guardrail.
“We’re in South Carolina, I think.” Petra leaned against me and spoke quietly. She kissed my neck as I stared at the expanse of dusty gray-blue. “We didn’t get to see the pacific because of those damnable mountains, but there is no reason we shouldn’t see the Atlantic.”
“Its beautiful.” I said.
“I know!” Petra said. She was suddenly full of energy and she separated herself from me and opened the door of the car. She dargged me out, “There’s no reason we should watch it from behind glass.”
I tucked our cooler under my arm as I got out and we crossed to the guardrail. I dug around the melted ice and pulled out two cups of yogurt. We settled ourselves on the far side of the guardrail, hidden from view of the road and our backs resting against the wooden supports. We were just close enough that we could pass our last cigarette back and forth once we had finished our breakfast.
“I think we should head for Maine,” she said as she stubbed out the cigarette in her empty yogurt cup. “Have the whole ‘New England in the summer’ experience. Eat some Lobster stop at all the boardwalks and ride all the Ferris wheels and live for the smell of the ocean.”
So we headed up the coast, never straying far from the water. We ate crab and lobster and wandered through tourist shops and packed boardwalks. We rode roller coasters and Ferris wheels and no longer seemed to find much time for clubbing. We became tourists of a sort, though still nomadic, still working our odd jobs at odd hours and paying our way through the little towns with our charm.
We didn’t make it to Maine. Sixteen days after our first kiss we were watching planes take off and land from a blanket on the ground a few miles out from an airport in New Hampshire. The car doors were open and the radio was on. She was painting her toenails and I was drawing again. That was one thing that had not stopped in the weeks of driving and dancing. I still found time to draw and had even made a little cash on a few things people had liked enough to buy. My love, my Petra was one of my favorite subjects, and I liked to draw her in dresses of my own creation. I was drawing her again, this time in a punkish pink dress. She glanced over and smiled at me.
“I love how you draw,” she told me. “It reminds me of models on clothing patterns my mom has in the closet.
“That’s how I learned to draw,” I said, “That’s why I am so in love with drawing pretty women in pretty dresses. The patterns were in grandma’s attic. I just loved the really simple lines on the model’s bodies; their features are very plain but always beautiful. I liked how the artist was modeling a dress and this woman wearing it was only a base. But in the end it was all about her. At least I always thought so.”
“And then you combine all of that pretty feminine ideology with big bold shadows and bright colors like a comic book. You have too many brothers, my love,” she leaned over and kissed me. I received it with a smile.
“I do love comic books. And I do love color,” I agreed. I studied the page I was working on, and then flipped to a new one, leaving the pink dress unfinished. “Women are the best of the super heroes, you know. They have got to be the ones taking care of the real problems once their men are done smashing all the buildings to rubble. I think Kitty would make an awfully good superhero.”
“Do I get a sidekick?” she asked. She watched as my hand moved across the page and I started to outline Kitty – Girl wonder. The features were simple but purely Petra. I put her in a dress both sexy and versatile to accommodate all of her kung-fu skills her nights out on the town.
“Sure, every superhero needs a sidekick. But not me. Buttercup has no real powers for fighting evil.”
“Buttercup has the innocent looks of a young, beautiful virgin combined with a siren’s voice. It’s all she needs,” she said to me.
She pushed the pad out of my lap and kissed me. I lay back on our blanket, pulling her down with me. “You mesmerize them, the bad guys,” she whispered, “they go wild for your voice and are utterly distracted so Kitty can slip around behind them and rip them to shreds.”
I ran my fingers through her hair. “You’re messing up your toes.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she rolled off of me and stared up at the sky. “I don’t like the color anymore.”
I think that was all it took for me to know it was time to go home. It was startling in its suddenness. I felt remorse, but no regret and no hopefulness that it was only a fleeting fancy to be ignored. I sighed. “We should get hair dye tomorrow.”
“Oh yean?” she asked. “What color now?”
“Brown,” I said faintly. “It’s time we head back home.”
She turned her head to look at me and I met her eyes. She studied me carefully. “You don’t have to dye your hair just to go home.”
“Yes I do. I can’t go back there with green hair. I can’t go back as Buttercup and expect people to understand.”
“We have three weeks before school starts,” she said. She was trying to plead the case of staying, but I heard no real conviction in her voice.
“I know, but I have to be at band camp for most of the last two weeks anyhow. I can’t miss it.”
She nodded slowly. “You’re right. We should have been home ages ago. What were we thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said. “I was too busy being torn to shreds by you.”
“Well it’s not as if I can help it,” she said, “I was so mesmerized by you.”
I laughed. We studied each other, the both of us thinking many thoughts at once. “I love you Petra,” I said finally.
“I love you too, Jamie.” She answered. We kissed and I pulled her close. We danced only with each other that night and didn’t leave our camp by the landing strip until almost dawn. Though it took us four days to get home, that night was really the last we had together with our minds only on each other and on the road.
As we turned the Buick back toward Wisconsin for the long ride back to our real lives, so turned our thoughts. I had a family back there, a disappointed father and at least two brothers who would be pissed at my disappearance. And then there was Tommy. What was I ever going to say to him?
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