1985 Camaro
AMERICAN DREAM, Chapter 2. You can find all other IkeSen works of mine here. NOTES: Brief conversation about prior death, otherwise safe. Thank you @missjudge-me for commissioning this piece!
---
They camped out on the back patio until the sun set. He cooked gyoza and rice balls and some pan-fried chicken, and she ordered ice cream delivery, and they nested their knees together and tucked into a pint of something labeled ‘Just Ask’ and when he asked, she wouldn’t tell him, not even when he tickled her (It wound up being a delicious caramel-Oreo flavor). She instead told him about her degree and moving out, about keeping in contact with Mitsunari as he served in Tanzania through hand-written notes on origami paper. They swapped curated Instagram snapshots and embarrassing anecdotes and reminisced.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “About your dad.”
Masamune shrugged. There was nothing to say. It hurt and always would, but that was his private journey. “Old bastard waited too long to have kids s’what. If he’d had me at a nice, respectable age, we wouldn’t be doing this, the old coot!” He waved a dramatic fist at the sky, relishing her giggles. “You fucked up!”
Overhead, his mother’s bedroom light flicked on.
“Shit,” he muttered. She dropped her face into her hands to stifle the raucous laughter.
“How—” Now she was whispering. Masamune wriggled closer, their legs reflexively entwining. “How’s that going?”
“Better than it used to. We can talk without yelling. Something something time and distance. I’m planning on hunkering down here for a little bit, and once all of the stuff is settled, I’ll probably go back north. The restaurant owners offered to hold my position for me, which is really nice.”
“Hell yeah it is. Isn’t that kind of a cut throat world? They must love you.”
“Yeah. Good openings don’t stay open long in the restaurant biz, so that’s really cool.” Absently, he ran his thumb over the whorls of the deck. “What about you? What’s next?”
“Well.” And she paused, eyes luminous. “I got offered a job interview out east. It’s a good job.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Once upon a time, when she was too nervous to really settle her heart on something she wanted, she smiled shyly and fluttered her eyes away. Some things stayed the same. His heart surged as the familiar expression played out before him. “It could be a game changer for me.”
“That the case, huh?”
“Yeah. I mean, I have to do some logistics, and I have to interview, right? But if I get it…” She stretched up to the sky, wriggling her fingers long at the clouds, all the prickled flesh on her arms visible in the cold moonlight. Without thinking, he shuffled closer to warm her. “I mean, I have to actually get to the interview first, so there’s the first hurdle.”
Masamune chewed his lip. “How far out is it?”
“It’s in Virginia. Complete other side of the country. The plane tickets are outrageous.”
“Damn. Guess you’re road tripping, huh?”
A gust of warm breath huffed from her lips. “I mean, I hate going on them alone, but I don’t even have a car right now. Mine got totaled; kid hit me when I was driving down here. Guess I’m taking a damn greyhound.”
His first reaction was to say ‘yikes’, and then… well. Masamune paused, soaking in the possibilities. “So you need a car is what you’re saying?”
“Mmhmm.”
Back in the day, his dad often said that the universe lined things up. Masamune didn't exactly believe in fate—he believed in making things happen—but occasionally, he saw the reasoning.
“How do you like eighties cars?” He asked.
She eyed him, a smile in her eyes and voice. “Like the Camaro? Sure, it’s cool. Why?”
Masamune snickered. “Everything in the Date family is cool as hell. What if I told you I could get you a car and a road trip buddy?”
The click of her brain working was almost audible. “Don’t you have to be here?”
“Gotta wait for the death certificates, which is probably a week or so. Mom wants the Camaro gone, and if she has to be around me too long, she’ll probably get sick of me real quick. I might as well make myself scarce and hang out with a dear friend. Besides—I’ll cut you a deal on selling you it. Call it a test drive.”
“A test drive? For like, a week?” But she was grinning, her shoulders angled in toward his. “Weeklong test drives aren’t kosher, Mr. Date.”
“And I’m not Jewish.”
“Are you being serious right now?”
“Serious as my dad’s grave.” Masamume brushed a lock of stray hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Want me along for the ride?”
Once upon a time, years ago, the whole gang got into an altercation with an older man in a Ford pickup. They were only teenagers sitting on a dock, but the guy pulled up and screamed at them for ‘loitering’. Mitsunari tried to intervene, and when the man acted like he might hit him, Ieyasu almost threw hands himself. They’d retreated into the woods—and when the man left, Masamune, Mitsuhide, and she went back and lit the dock on fire to spite him. Right beforehand, she’d fixed him with the most mischievous expression he’d ever seen: mouth sucked into her teeth, eyes glittering, staring out from under her lashes.
Now, she made that same expression, and it lit a fire in him.
“We’d have to leave like…” She mentally calculated. “In three days to make it.”
“Or we could take the long road, do a little sightseeing, and leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She echoed. Only a half second later, that smile was back. “I’m game.”
---
At six a.m. sharp, Masamune tried to wake her by flinging rocks at her window. That didn't work. At last he resorted to calling her, discovering that she stayed in a completely different room now.
“Could’a used that knowledge,” he chuckled, hopping in place to warm his legs. The fog pressed in around him, September chill early this year. “Don’t suppose anyone is using that room?”
Her voice was thin, but warm over the phone. “No, it’s a home gym now.”
“Great! I didn't hassle anyone else. Get out here, Kitten, we got a road to get on.”
She emerged twenty minutes later, sweatpants fresh from the dryer, wet hair in a sloppy bun and a suitcase click-clacking behind her. She never was a morning person. Masamune snickered and popped the Camaro trunk. “Wanna drive, or wanna let me do it?”
“You start. Can we get some Starbucks?”
“Ugh.” He clutched his chest, mock-wounded. “All of the coffee places in the world, and you want Starbucks. My palate is crying.”
Rolling her eyes, she slid into the passenger seat. “Drama queen.”
They got Starbucks. She tucked her feet into fuzzy socks and folded them under her knees, clutching the large mocha. Only the rush of the road beneath their tires filled the silence. Asphalt and trees emerged from the mist like a benevolent ghost, Americana obscured. They’d only just merged onto the highway when Masamune realized there wasn’t an audio jack in the car.
“Shit,” he muttered.
She opened her eyes, head lolling on the headrest. “What?”
He flicked the dashboard. Nope, no audio jack. Not even a CD player. No; amidst all the toggles and buttons of the dash was a cassette player. “I don’t have anything to listen to. This thing won’t hook up to the phones, and I don’t have any tapes.”
“Hm.” Taking a long sip of her drink, she mused, “Maybe your dad has some in here?”
“I guess that’d make sense. Take a look around, would you?”
Sure enough, she was right. Tucked away in the glove compartment was a treasure trove: Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, AC/DC, Prince, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen. “Damn,” she chuckled, “Your dad had good taste.”
Masamune took the copy of Rumors in his fingers, never taking his eyes off the road. The dust was thick under his thumb. “He’d play ‘Back in Black’ when he picked me up from school. It was cool as hell.” With a snap, he pried open the copy of Rumors and popped it into the player. The speakers hummed to life with strumming guitar, Fleetwood Mac echoing. “I know there’s nothing to say, someone has taken my place…” She rested her elbow on the center console, brushing his arm with her as she texted.
“Guess what?” She murmured. “Mitsunari just got back from Tanzania.”
“Oh shit, really?” How long had it been? Masamune mentally calculated the dates. “I guess it has been two years, huh? The Peace Corps finally turned him loose?”
“Yeah. He’s apparently crashing at Ieyasu’s place—” Masamune barked a laugh, and she tittered, but continued, “—and wants to know if we’re going to head that direction.”
“He’s in Maryland, right?” Fishing out his phone, he checked it. “Yasu didn't tell me about this. Bastard. Well, we get there fast enough, then we can definitely hunker down there for a day or so and celebrate his coming back.”
Classic rock kept them company on the long drive. He didn't mind roadtrips. There was something sacred about them. Forget the American Dream; it was dead. Long live the American Road Trip, a rite of passage for the lost souls from sea to shining sea. Nothing cleared the senses like cranking up the heater on the floorboards and rolling down the window to a blast of autumn air. She let down her hair and it whipped wild in the wind.
Thank God she was here. Masamune quietly relished her reappearance in his life. She was a gateway to an old world, one with his father alive, one where he still snuck out of the house at night and biked to the 7-Eleven for slurpees at 3a.m. They stopped at a Cracker Barrel for dinner and ordered root beer floats and roasted each other over the annoying ‘jump-the-pegs’ game perched on every table. Though you were supposed to reduce it to one peg, she couldn’t quite manage it. Somehow she kept getting two or three.
“I got it down to one peg once,” she laughed, shoving it toward him. Masamune swirled it under his hand.
“I can do it,” he commented. “But that’s because Mitsunari taught me the trick years ago.” He knocked the first peg out of the top of the triangle, moving it elsewhere. “That’s the one that’s gotta be empty. From there on out, there’s a set solution.”
She craned over it, investigating. “What’s the set solution?”
A long, hefty pause lingered between them as he slurped some of his float.
“Dunno anymore.” He cracked a grin. “I forgot like, eight years ago.”
“Ass! Then you don’t know!” She swatted at his arm and grinned. “Liar!”
“Hey! I was just trying to look cool in front’a you, Kitten, I can’t look like some big dumb stud after all these years—”
“I love how you allow for the possibility that you’re dumb,” she cackled, “but not the possibility that you’re anything other than hot.”
“Am I wrong? Look at me.”
The roll of her eyes was exactly what he wanted. She shoved a biscuit at him over the table. “I think Mark Twain said something like, ‘it’s better to stop talking and appear dumb than open your mouth and remove any doubt’, Masamune.”
He clutched at his chest, but took the biscuit anyway. “You wound me, Kitten.”
As they were paying the bill, she split off and reappeared a minute later, plunking thirty cents onto the cash register and tucking a cinnamon stick into his jacket pocket. “Here.”
“My favorite!” He peeled back the plastic wrapper. “Thanks, Kitkat. You remembered.”
For the first time since they’d seen each other again, her expression evolved to one he’d almost forgotten. He’d only seen it once before. It was a moonlit night back in their senior year, after prom, when they were both lingering in the pool as everyone else passed out drunk. He’d wiped a leaf from her hair and told her she was beautiful, and she’d looked at him like that so long and hard that he wondered if he’d ever known her inner thoughts at all.
“Of course I remembered,” she answered at last, soft and clarion clear. “I remember all kinds of things about you, Masamune.”
