Page 16 of Anywhere with You

A few other tourists had arrived, and one of them looked at me and grinned when my stomach audibly grumbled. As huge as breakfast had been, it was a long time ago now. I hadn’t checked the clock, but my stomach said it was dinnertime.

“Ready to go?” I asked Cara.

She took one last look around. “Yes. And never.”

I led the way on the path to the parking lot, stopping halfway down a rocky slope.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to an animal the size of a Labrador, snuffling ahead at the bottom of a boulder.

“How should I know?” Cara asked, standing on tiptoe and narrowing her eyes.

“You’re the biologist.”

Cara rolled her eyes. “Oh,” she said, “that’s a javelina.”

“I knew you’d know. What’s a javelina?”

“It’s a distant relative of pigs. Very distant. Sort of a rodent-like pig.”

“Giant hairy rat pig. Got it. I’ll definitely be googling him later. Is he going to come at us with those tusks?” I asked.

As if it had heard me, it lifted its hairy snout in our direction.

“Um…” Cara said, taking a step backward.

The javelina grunted. It opened its mouth briefly to show not just the two bottom tusks, but two upper ones as well. They were long and yellow and sharp.

I stepped backward, too, my feet making a loud crunching sound on the gravel.

The javelina grunted again and charged, tiny hooves pounding the dirt, barreling toward us with surprising speed.

Cara and I ran back toward the cliff dwellings, panting as we tried to keep our footing on the rocky path, glancing behind us constantly as the tusks and the fast, panting grunts grew closer.

I was a little heavier than Cara, and I expected that she’d outpace me quickly, but I managed to keep up. I supposed that she wasn’t going on a lot of long runs after teaching all day any more than I was closing up a music shop at midnight and hitting the gym.

Then Cara’s foot slipped, and she hit one knee hard on the rocky ground.

I stopped. “Come on,” I said gently, grabbing her arms and pulling her up as fast as I could without dislocating anything.

I swore I could feel the javelina’s hot breath on my ankles as we ran.

Even without Cara’s fall, I doubt we could’ve outrun the thing. We would’ve ended up tusk-gored and bitten and probably rabid, for all I know.

But maybe the little monster was just showing off, or maybe it knew we could escape inside the walls of the cliff dwelling. Maybe it got a whiff of our sweat and decided that we wouldn’t be very tasty.

Whatever its thoughts, by the time we reached the outer wall, it had vanished. Only a few crushed bushes and a haze of kicked up dirt remained, and Cara and I could’ve caused that as easily as the javelina.

I looked carefully down the path, my eyes scanning the brush. There was no movement, not a sound.

But there was a fierce stink, the sort of eye-watering, gaggingly strong stench that was impossible to ignore.

“Fuck, are we being attacked by skunks, too?” I asked.

Cara gasped, then gagged, wiping sweat from her face as she limped to a bench. “I’d bet that’s javelina musk. I’ll look it up later.”

“You have fun with that,” I said, then started to laugh, wheezing a little because I was so completely winded. “Oh, thank God Badger isn’t here. That thing would’ve eaten him whole.”

Cara’s mouth dropped open in an expression of horror.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’d never take him out in nature. He has zero survival skills. How is your knee?”

She stretched it out, examining the scraped skin. “Not too bad. Just a little bruised.”

“Are you okay to walk back to the car?”

“As opposed to living in the cliff dwellings and eating cactus until it doesn’t hurt anymore?”

“Yes, smart-ass. Or you could lean on me. Or if it’s really bad, I can go find you crutches or some big strong paramedics.”

Cara grinned. “Tempting, but I’m good to walk.”

We waited until a bigger group of tourists was leaving and followed them, letting them flush out the wildlife for us.

We were exhausted and drained from the adrenaline rush when we finally pulled back onto the road.

Cara had poured clean water over her knee, insisting that it was her turn to drive.

I pulled out drinks and snacks from the cooler for both of us, noting that Cara’s supply of bagged, prepopped popcorn was already dwindling and wondering how I could still be hungry with javelina musk lingering in my nose.

As soon as my mouth was full, I started searching for appealing local restaurants. We were distressingly far from a city with a decent population.

“It looks like an hour and a half,” I said.

Cara groaned. “I’m finally starting to miss home. There are probably two hundred restaurants within an hour and a half of my apartment.”

“I could go buy ingredients from four different stores and cook a three-course meal in an hour and a half,” I said.

“I could have Japanese appetizers, a Brazilian main course, and a French dessert in an hour and a half,” Cara said.

“I could get a custom cake with my face on it and deliver slices of it to my ten closest friends, at each of their homes, in an hour and a half.”

“I could make a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge with supermarket baguettes and then eat it—all—in an hour and a half.”

We were ridiculous, but at least we entertained each other.

Cara pulled face wipes out of the glove compartment, offering me one after she saw me side-eyeing her cleansing ritual. She brushed her hair and applied lip gloss and looked very much like she hadn’t been running for her life minutes before.

I took one look at myself in the mirror and decided I’d better try to do the same.

There was something about that streak of purple that made me look either extremely cool or deranged, depending on how recently I’d brushed my hair.

I braided each side into a thick braid, then held a bottle of water from the cooler against the back of my neck.

Finally, finally, we found a Mexican restaurant. There were even enough cars in the parking lot to give the impression that the food was edible.

“This is perfect,” Cara said.

“Because they’ll immediately bring us chips and salsa?”

“Exactly, Honey. Exactly.”

In five minutes, we were seated at a table and had already placed our orders and were halfway through our first basket of tortilla chips.

“Not the best chips. Not the best salsa. And yet, somehow I don’t mind,” I said.

“It’s the near-death experience. Being almost gored by wild animals always makes me hungry, too.” Cara seemed to be trying to scoop more salsa than was possible onto her chip.

I gestured to it. “Does it make you try to break the laws of physics, too?”

“Always,” she said, giving up and putting the chip in her mouth, then pouring a little salsa straight from the bowl into her mouth.

I laughed out loud. “I don’t know if I can keep going places with you if you’re going to embarrass me with your poor salsa etiquette.”

Without expression, Cara poured the remaining chips onto a plate and placed the empty chip basket upside down on my head, like a hat.

“Ah…” the waiter said, setting down our margaritas. His nametag read Fenske .

I made eye contact with Fenske, peeking from under the chip basket. “May we have more chips, when you have a chance?”

“Sure,” he said and walked away, shaking his head.

Cara was grinning widely. “It looks fantastic on you.”

“Red is my color,” I said, finally removing the basket and setting it back on the table.

The chips and salsa may have been mediocre, but the margaritas were delicious, and when our enchiladas came, they were impressive, both in size and quality.

“This place is a hidden gem,” Cara said. “That’s what my Yelp review is going to say.”

“Oh, and our Mesmio review,” I reminded her.

“Oops,” she said, pulling out her phone and shooting a few seconds of video, including me drinking out of both our straws at once.

Thankfully, she stopped recording before I dribbled margarita all over my shirt.

She definitely wouldn’t have edited it out for me.

I had a giant smear of ketchup on my chin in an earlier video, and it was still out there for the world to see.

Once the worst of Cara’s hunger was sated, she slowed down, watching me unabashedly lick grease off my fingers.

“Who was your first love?” she asked.

“This enchilada,” I said with my mouth full. “Who was yours?”

Cara took a long drink of her margarita. “Well, I was in seventh grade.”

“Oh, we’re starting really early, then.”

“Do you want to hear this or not? Her name was Melissa. She had these Elton John–style glasses.”

I laughed. “Oh my God. Was this the eighties?”

“Shut up. She also had a notebook that was covered, I mean absolutely covered, in Lisa Frank stickers.”

“Hot.”

Cara rolled her eyes and took another bite. After a minute, she said, “I followed her around like she was the Messiah for two years.”

“That’s a long time, at that age.”

“Did I mention she played guitar?”

I laughed so hard that I choked. “Oh no,” I said, when I could manage to speak. “Were you a groupie?”

Cara shrugged, piling a bit each of enchilada, refried beans, and Spanish rice onto a spoon. “Can you be a groupie for a twelve-year-old who only knows two songs?” She dipped her entire spoon in salsa before eating it. She might be a genius.

“Depends. Was one of them ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’?”

Cara’s mouth fell open. “How on earth could you know that?”

“It’s a classic beginner song. So you were obsessed with a musician. Happens to the best of us. What happened next?”

Cara gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I tried to learn guitar, but I gave up pretty quickly.”

“Right. The elbows.”

She laughed. “It’s weird how you remember the random things that come out of my mouth. Yes, the elbows. Where are they supposed to go? What is their role?”

I shook my head at her. “So no guitar. What happened then?”

“Oh, eventually we went to high school, and by then, I had a crush on someone new every week.”

“Poor Melissa.”