First Love

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  For Jane—

  In the fall of 2010, I turned in the outline for First Love to my editor, but the story actually began many years before. I was in love with a woman named Jane Blanchard. One morning we were out for a walk in New York City. Seemingly out of nowhere, Jane suffered a violent seizure. She was sick with cancer for nearly two years after that, then died at a young age. Far too young. Janie, I miss your smile. I hope it lives on in this book, this love story that reminds me of our time together (though I don’t remember stealing any cars).

  —J.P.

  prologue

  one

  OKAY, I MAY NOT BE PUTTING MYSELF IN the best possible light by admitting this, but let me say right at the start that I was such a straight arrow, such a little do-gooder, that skipping my last two classes that day (AP physics and AP English) made me so insanely, ridiculously jittery that it actually occurred to me this whole crazy plan wasn’t going to be worth it.

  Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I was this close to backing out of the most beautiful, funny, painful, and life-changing experience I will ever have.

  What an idiot I was.

  I was at Ernie’s Pharmacy & Soda Fountain, and I had about five hundred butterflies throwing an epic party in my stomach. The toes of my vintage Frye cowboy boots kept knocking against the counter, until Ernie—who’s about a million years old and pretty much a total grouch—told me to quit it. Ernie is one Nickelback concert away from complete deafness, though, so I took my boots off and kept knocking away.

  I was glad he didn’t ask why I was sitting in his ancient shop, drinking a giant coffee (which I needed like I needed a hole in the head), instead of two blocks down the street at Klamath Falls High School, listening to Mr. Fox blather on about the space-time continuum. Because what would I have said?

  Well, Ernie—Mr. Holman, I mean—I’m waiting for a boy I could never date, and I’m about to ask him to do something so major that it’s going to either save our lives or completely destroy us.

  Ernie doesn’t care much for teen angst, which is probably why practically no one I know ever comes to his shop—that and the fact that all his candy has dust on it and the Snickers bars are hard enough to use as crowbars.

  But I don’t mind. And neither does the boy I mentioned. Ernie’s is our place.

  That boy had sent me a note earlier in the day. He’d somehow gotten it inside my locker, even though he doesn’t go to my school anymore and we have Navy SEAL–type security guards to protect us against God-knows-what (rioting due to sheer small-town boredom, maybe).

  Axi—

  So, you got earth-moving news, huh?

  I’m shocked you think you can surprise me—

  or surprised you think you can shock me.

  Or something like that.

  You’re the word nerd.

  Well, anyway, can’t wait to hear it.

  Ernie’s. 1:15.

  Yeah, that means cutting class.

  No excuses.

  —Your favorite “scalawag”

  That’s Robinson for you. I’d jokingly called him a scalawag once, and he’d never let me forget it. He’s almost seventeen years old. My best friend. My partner in crime.

  I heard the front door open and could tell he’d arrived by the way Ernie’s face perked up like someone had just handed him a present. Robinson has that effect on people: when he walks into the room, it’s like the lights get brighter all of a sudden.

  He came over and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Axi, you dope,” he said (affectionately, of course). “Never drink Ernie’s coffee without a doughnut.” He leaned in close and whispered, “That stuff will eat a giant hole in your guts.” Then he straddled the stool next to me, his legs lanky and slim in faded Levi’s. He was wearing a flannel shirt, even though it was late May and seventy-five degrees outside.

  “Hey, Ernie,” he called, “did you hear the Timbers fired their coach? And can we get a chocolate cruller?”

  Ernie came over, shaking his grizzled head. “Soccer!” he groused. “What Oregon needs is a pro baseball team. That’s a real sport.” He put the doughnut on an old chipped plate and said, “On the house.”

  Robinson turned to me, grinning and pointing a thumb at Ernie. “I love this guy.”

  I could tell the feeling was mutual.

  “So,” Robinson said, giving me his full attention, “what’s this crazy idea of yours? Are you finally going to apply for your learner’s permit? Have you decided to drink a whole beer? Are you going to quit doing your homework so religiously?”

  He’s always getting on me for being a good girl. Robinson thinks—and my dad agrees—that he’s such a bad boy because he quit high school, which he found “insufficiently compelling” and “populated by cretins” (cretins being a word that I taught him, of course). Personally, I think he has a point there.

  “I’m probably going to fail everything but English,” I said, and I wasn’t exaggerating. My GPA was about to take a nosedive, because finals were coming up, and with any luck, I wasn’t going to be around to take them. A week ago, knowing that would have kept me up at night. But I’d managed to stop caring, because if this plan worked, life as I knew it was about to change.

  “Knowing you, that seems highly unlikely,” Robinson said. “And so what if you’re a little distracted and you—God forbid—get a B plus on something? You’re busy writing the Great American Novel—ow!”

  I’d swatted him on the arm. “Please. Between school and taking care of dear ol’ Dad, I haven’t had any time to write.” My dad hit a rough patch a few years ago, and he’s been trying to drink his way out of it. Needless to say, the strategy isn’t working that well. “Can we focus on the matter at hand?” I asked.

  “Which is…?”

  “I’m running away,” I said.

  Robinson’s mouth fell open. By the way, unlike yours truly, he never had braces and his teeth are perfect.

  “And FYI, you’re coming, too,” I added.

  two

  “DID YOU HEAR THAT, ERNIE?” ROBINSON called. I’d have told him he sounded gobsmacked, but he’d never let me forget that particular vocabulary word, either.

  Of course, Ernie hadn’t heard anything, not even Robinson’s question. So Robinson pushed away the doughnut and stared at me like he’d never seen me before. It’s not often I can surprise him, so I was enjoying this.

  “Did you ever read that copy of On the Road I gave you?” I demanded.

  Now Robinson looked sheepish. “I started it…”

  I rolled my eyes. I’m forever giving Robinson books and he’s forever giving me music, but since he’s distractible and my iPod is dead, that’s usually about as far as it gets. “Well, Sal—who’s really just Jack Kerouac, the author—and his friends go all over the country, and they meet crazy people and dance in dive bars and climb mountains and bet on horse races. We’re going to do that, Robinson. We’re leaving this dump behind and taking an epic road trip. Oregon to New York City—with stops along the way, of course.”

  Robinson was blinking at me. Who are you? the blinks were asking.

  I sat up straighter on my stool. “First we’
re going to see the redwoods, because those things are totally mystical. Then we’ll hit San Francisco and Los Angeles. East to the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. Then Detroit—Motor City, Robinson, which is so right up your alley. Then, because you’re such a speed addict, we’ll ride the Millennium Force at Cedar Point. It goes, like, a hundred twenty miles an hour! We’ll go to Coney Island. We’ll see the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’ll do anything and everything we want!”

  I knew I sounded nuts, so I spread out the crumpled map to show him how I’d figured it all out. “Here’s our route,” I said. “That purple line is us.”

  “Us,” he repeated. Clearly it was taking him a while to wrap his head around my proposition.

  “Us. You have to come,” I said. “I can’t do it without you.”

  This was true, in more ways than I could admit to him, or even to myself.

  Robinson suddenly started laughing, and it went on so long and hard I was afraid it was his way of saying No way in hell, you totally insane person who looks like Axi but is clearly some sort of maniac.

  “If you don’t come, who’s going to remind me to have a doughnut with my coffee?” I went on, not ready for him to get a skeptical, sarcastic word in edgewise. “You know I have a terrible sense of direction. What if I get lost in LA and the Scientologists find me, and suddenly I believe in Xenu and aliens? What if I get drunk in Las Vegas and marry a stranger? Who’s going to poke me in the ribs when I start quoting Shakespeare? Who’s going to protect me from all that? You can’t let a sixteen-year-old girl go across the country by herself. That would be, like, morally irresponsible—”

  Robinson held up a hand, still chuckling. “And I may be a scalawag, but I am not morally irresponsible.”

  Finally, the guy says something! “Does that mean you’re coming?” I asked. Holding my breath.

  Robinson gazed up at the ceiling. He was torturing me and he knew it. He reached for the plate and took a thoughtful bite of cruller. “Well,” he said.

  “Well, what?” I was kicking the counter again. Hard.

  He ran his hand through his hair, which is dark and always a little bit shaggy, even if he’s just gotten it cut. Then he turned and looked at me with his sly eyes. “Well,” he said, very calmly, “hell yes.”

  part one

  1

  IT WAS 4:30 AM WHEN I WOKE UP AND pulled my backpack out from under the bed. I’d spent the last few nights obsessively packing and unpacking and repacking it, making sure I had exactly what I needed and no more: a couple of changes of clothes, Dr. Bronner’s castile soap (good for “Shave-Shampoo-Massage-Dental-Soap-Bath,” says the label), and a Swiss Army knife that I’d swiped from my dad’s desk drawer. A camera. And, of course, my journal, which I carry everywhere.

  Oh, and more than fifteen hundred dollars in cash, because I’d been the neighborhood’s best babysitter for going on five years now, and I charged accordingly.

  Maybe there was a part of me that always knew I was going to split. I mean, why else didn’t I blow my money on an iPad and a Vera Wang prom dress, like all the other girls in my class? I’d had that map of the US on my wall for ages, and I’d stare at it and wonder what Colorado or Utah or Michigan or Tennessee is like.

  I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to get up the guts to leave. After all, I’d watched my mom do it. Six months after my little sister, Carole Ann, died, Mom wiped her red-rimmed eyes and took off. Went back East where she’d grown up, and as far as I know, never looked back.

  Maybe the compulsion to run away is genetic. Mom did it to escape her grief. My dad escapes with alcohol. Now I was doing it… and it felt strangely right. At long last. I could almost forgive Mom for splitting.

  I slipped on my traveling clothes and sneakers—saying good-bye to my favorite boots—and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder, cinching the straps tight. I was going to miss this apartment, this town, this life, like an ex-con misses his jail cell, which is to say: Not. At. All.

  My dad was asleep on the ugly living room couch. It used to have these pretty pink flowers on it, but now they look sort of brownish orange, like even fabric plants could die of neglect in our apartment. I walked right by and slipped out the front door.

  My dad gave a small snort in his sleep, but other than that, he never even stirred. In the last few years, he’d gotten pretty used to people leaving. Would it really matter if another member of the Moore family disappeared on him?

  Out in the hallway, though, I paused. I thought about him waking up and shuffling into the kitchen to make coffee. He’d see how clean I’d left it, and he’d be really grateful, and maybe he’d decide to come home from work early and actually cook us a family dinner (or a what’s-left-of-the-family dinner). And then he’d wait for me at the table, the way I’d waited so many nights for him, until the food got cold.

  Eventually, it would dawn on him: I was gone.

  A dull ache spread in my chest. I turned and went back inside.

  Dad was on his back, his mouth slightly open as he breathed, his shoes still on. I put out a hand and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  He wasn’t a horrible father, after all. He paid the rent and the grocery bill, even if it was me who usually did the shopping. When we talked, which wasn’t often, he asked me about school and friends. I always said everything was great, because I loved him enough to lie. He was doing the best he could, even if that best wasn’t very good.

  I’d written about eight hundred drafts of a good-bye note. The Pleading One: Please try to understand, Dad, this is just something I have to do. The Flattering One: It’s your love and concern for me, Dad, that give me the strength to make this journey. The Literary One: As the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” And I want to go create myself, Dad. The Pissy One: Don’t worry about me, I’m good at taking care of myself. After all, I’ve been doing it since Mom left. In the end, though, none of them seemed right, and I’d thrown them all away.

  I bent down closer. I could smell beer and sweat and Old Spice aftershave.

  “Oh, Daddy,” I whispered.

  Maybe there was a tiny part of me that hoped he’d wake up and stop me. A small, weak part that just wanted to be a little girl again, with a family that wasn’t sick and broken. But that sure wasn’t going to happen, was it?

  So I leaned in and kissed my father on the cheek. And then I left him for real.

  2

  ROBINSON WAS WAITING FOR ME IN THE back booth of the all-night diner on Klamath Avenue, two blocks from the bus station. Next to him was a backpack that looked like he’d bought it off a train-hopping hobo for a chicken and a nickel, and his face made me think of a watchdog resting with one eye open. He looked up at me through the steam rising from his coffee.

  “I ordered pie,” he said.

  As if on cue, the waitress delivered a gooey plate of blueberry pie and two forks. “You two are up early,” she said. It was still dark. Not even the birds were awake yet.

  “We’re vampires, actually,” Robinson said. “We’re just having a snack before bed.” He squinted at her name tag and then smiled his big, gorgeous smile at her. “Don’t tell on us, okay, Tiffany? I don’t need a stake through my heart. I’m only five hundred years old—way too young and charming to die.”

  She laughed and turned to me. “Your boyfriend’s a flirt,” she said.

  “Oh, he’s not my boyfriend,” I said quickly.

  Robinson’s response was almost as quick. “She asked me out, but I turned her down.”

  I kicked him under the table and he yelped. “He’s lying,” I told her. “It’s the other way around.”

  “You two are a comedy act,” Tiffany said. She wasn’t that much older than we were, but she shook her head like we were silly kids. “You should take that show on the road.”

  Robinson took a big bite of pie. “Believe me, we’re gonna,” he said.

&nbs
p; He shoved the plate toward me, but I shook my head. I couldn’t eat. I’d managed to keep a lid on my nerves, but now I felt like jumping out of my skin. When had I ever done anything this crazy, this monumental? I never even broke my curfew.

  “Hurry up with that pie,” I said. “The bus to Eureka leaves in forty-five minutes.”

  Robinson stopped chewing and stared at me. “Pardon?”

  “The buuuuus,” I said, drawing it out. “You know, the one we’re getting on? So we can get the heck out of here?”

  Robinson cracked up, and I considered kicking him again, because it doesn’t take a genius to tell the difference between being laughed with and laughed at. “What’s so funny?”

  He leaned forward and put his hands on mine. “Axi, Axi, Axi,” he said, shaking his head. “This is the trip of a lifetime. We are not going to take it on a Greyhound bus.”

  “What? Who’s in charge of this trip, anyway?” I demanded. “And what’s so bad about a bus?”

  Robinson sighed. “Everything is bad about a bus. But I’ll give you some specifics so you’ll stop looking at me with those big blue eyes. This is our trip, Axi, and I don’t want to share it with a dude who just got out of prison or an old lady who wants to show me pictures of her grandkids.” He pointed a forkful of pie at me. “Plus, the bus is basically a giant petri dish for growing superbacteria, and it takes way too long to get anywhere. Those are your two bonus reasons.”

  I threw up my hands. “Last I checked, we don’t have a private jet, Robinson.”

  “Who said anything about a plane? We’re going to take a car, you dope,” he said. He leaned back in the booth and crossed his hands behind his head, totally smooth and nonchalant. “And I do mean take one.”

  3

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I HISSED AS Robinson led us down one of the nearby side streets. His legs are about twice as long as mine, so I had to jog to keep up with him.