Page 51 of A Real Goode Time
She shook her head. “Nah, just…thinking.”
I put on a thick Kentucky twang. “Well, now, I may not be the sharpest crayon in the tool shed, but if you feel like talkin’, I could listen.”
“Not the sharpest crayon in the tool shed?”
I shrugged. “I may have mixed a few metaphors, there.”
She was quiet another moment. “I guess I’m just…thinking about what I want.”
“Okay—and what do you want?”
“A lot of things. We went over our bucket lists, but this is different. I want…a future.”
I didn’t respond right away—that deserved a more thoughtful response. “Well, the smartass thing to say is that you’ve got a future, still being, you know, alive and all. But you mean something more specific. Like, a career type of thing.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I just…I feel like I never really launched. Charlie, Cassie, Poppy, they all launched like rockets. Lexie not as much, but she still had an angle and a direction. I just…sort of sputtered into a holding pattern. If I’d grown up somewhere like your hometown, I’d probably never leave. I’d just be stuck there forever. And I want more than that; I just…don’t knowwhatI want. I know I hate school. I hated high school, like with a passion. I was bored stupid in all my classes, except math, which can burn in hell. Then I tried a semester of community college the fall after graduation, and I hated that even more than high school. Honestly, it was all just… on me. Like, no one cared if I showed up, or what grade I got, or if I was struggling or having a shit day. It was just…impersonal. I was just another face out of thousands. And that was a tiny local community college. Expand that by about a hundredfold and a university seems like it’d be even worse. And I just didn’t see the point anyway, if I had no idea what to study, or what to major in.”
I nodded. “College was never an option for me. I make jokes about being a redneck or a hillbilly or whatever, but it’s all just jokes, mostly. I’m smart enough, but not in a books type of way. Never had time for homework, or for studying. None of it ever seemed to matter much. I had goals, and knowing about the War of 1812, or how cells divide, or how to multiply an integer or whatever the hell, none of that was relevant to what I wanted out of life, which was to work on cars, to make money, and to get the hell out of Kentucky.” I laughed. “Meaning, I barely graduated. My GPA was…embarrassing. I could’ve done better if I had bothered to try, but I just barely saw the point of even showing up. I did the bare minimum to get my fuckin’ diploma. In high school, if I got a hot tip on a good salvage, I’d skip faster’n you could say boo. School was just never a thing for me.”
“Well, things clearly worked for you,” she said, scraping a line up and down her thigh, creating azzzzhp-zzzzhp-zzzzhpsound, “considering you own your own company at twenty-six.”
“But the question is, what doyouwant?”
“That’s the problem, I don’tknow!I don’t want to go to school, so that kinda cuts out a lot of options. I’m not really artistic, not like Poppy, Lexie, or Cassie. So I just…don’t know.”
“Well, what do you like? What are you passionate about?”
She seemed embarrassed. “I like reading. If given the opportunity, I’d rather sit and smoke a bowl and read a book. But no one’s gonna pay me to read and smoke pot.”
I eyed her. “Question, which you’re not at all obligated to answer.”
“Okay?”
“Why do you smoke pot?”
A long sigh. “I’ve avoided asking myself that question for a while.” She watched the scenery pass by for a bit, and I gave her space to think. “I guess because I like being able to get out of my head. I can relax. Not think. Just be…happy. It’s not, like,joy, because there is a big difference between joy and happiness. But it’s something. Since I graduated high school I’ve been just working as a server, making ends meet. Paying rent, buying food. Hanging with Jillie and Leighton, messing around with Max. We’ll see a movie now and then, and Leighton is a hostess at a place that has live music on the weekends, so we’ll sometimes go see a show if the band is good—we’re all underage, but her manager lets us in as long as we don’t drink. I guess I just…don’t really have a purpose. I feel like I’m just drifting. And that’s uncomfortable.”
Another silence.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she continued. “I’m not, like, self-medicating. It’s not a gateway to meth or whatever. I have zero interest in anything but pot. I worked with a dishwasher who was a meth-head and, hoooo boy, did that cure me of any curiosity.”
“I bet.” I grimaced. “More than a few of my friends got hooked on it—well, not really friends, just people I went to school with. It’s ugly shit.” I glanced her way. “So it’s just something to…pass the time, sort of?”
“More to distract me from my lack of purpose. Also, it’s just a nice way to relax at the end of the day, because I’m not really a huge fan of getting drunk. Tried it a couple times with my roommates, and the hangover issonot worth the feeling of being out of control. Weird, maybe, but alcohol just is not my thing.”
“You’re very self-aware,” I said. “Most people would just be like, ‘I dunno, I just like it.’”
“You asked me why, I’m not gonna pass the question off with a blah answer.” She looked at me. “You have any vices?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? No. Work, maybe. I’m a workaholic. This is the first break or vacation I’ve ever taken, and I’m fighting feeling guilty about it. Time away from work is time I’m not making money, and I have this fear, irrational maybe, that I’ll go broke and have to move back with my parents, and there is no way in motherfuckinghellthat’ll ever happen. I’d be homeless first.”
Her expression was confused and speculative. “You have a complicated relationship with your parents, I think.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
She chewed on the lower right corner of her lip. “You don’t have to talk about it, but I am curious.”
“Well.” I sighed. “There ain’t much in my life I don’t like talking about. Most shit, I’m an open book about. Grew up poor white trash, lived in a single-wide trailer, wore my dad’s old clothes half my life even when they were eight sizes too big because we were too poor to afford anything else, even from the thrift store.”