"riiiiiick," lucy called to her brother, "rick this is my friend soviet." now my real name is sylvia which i love for sharing with the great, dead-of-her-own-design, ms plath. i changed my name to soviet however, after spying a tattered copy of "the communist manifesto" in the back pocket of mark karlson's skinny maroon corduroys: mark karlson the senior i've harbored a mute, painful crush on for the last two and a half years: delicious, disheveled, angsty, distracted, mark. my perfect mate.

last year i stole mark's worn out army jacket from his locker while he was in chem lab. i slept wrapped in it every night until i developed a bothersome rash on my neck which had to be treated with zinc cream. after that i relegated the jacket to a hanger which hung from a peg on the wall opposite my bed. i'd lie in bed rubbing the cream on my neck, staring at the empty jacket, picturing mark inside it, calling me his girl.

rick didn't so much look up from his game as tilt his head an inch in our direction. a grunted "hey" escaped from a mouth that i am certain never opened. lucy nudged me. i overcame my confusion and took two steps closer to rick. i asked him what he was playing. it took a complete 45 seconds before rick answered me. the silence was horribly uncomfortable. i looked to lucy for support only to find her gone.

lucy reminded me of my task to distract her brother while she stole away to his room, then led us out of the mud room and into a very large gleaming kitchen. to my surprise the interior of the house was actually quite grand: full of dark wood, sumptuous draperies and overstuffed furniture. happy freddy followed at our feet, his nails clicking away on the floor. really not at all what i had expected. the outside of the house had me prepared for something much seedier.

we found rick tucked away in a room down a long hallway that was lined with giant sepia-toned portraits of lucille ball and desi arnez. the room, a sort of extravagant kooky entertainment center, aside from boasting every manner of top of the line entertainment gadget and technology, was equipped with a number of life-size, frozen-in-action sculptural renderings of lucy and desi arnez. a giant reproduction of the indelible "i love lucy" heart buzzed on a wall in purple and white neon, flanked by framed, flattened dresses and suits: pieces of what i presumed to be authentic wardrobe. it dawned on me that lucy was named after "lucy"! and rick, "ricky"! even freddy!! how fucking strange.

rick hadn't noticed us when we walked in, being deeply involved in the video game he was playing. he wasn't at all what i had pictured. he was frail with glasses and the physical presence of a question mark. he wore clothing that i can only describe as forgetable -- unrelatable to any of the dominant "styles" like preppy or skater or hiphop.

lucy pulled up behind her brother's charger. she advised that i leave the cinnabon in the car so as to not tip her brother off about our plans to get high. "the last thing we need is rick and his loser friends fucking up our night," she said. it seemed that smoking pot and eating cinnabons was some sort of family tradition, so much so that to them, one could not be in possession of a cinnabon without having plans to get high.

i followed her suggestion and grabbed only the coke. lucy declined when i asked her if she wanted me to help her clear out some of the trash from the back seat saying she'd get to it later. she insisted on carrying my backpack in for me (i was her guest she persisted). she had a curious but decided code of manners.

the path leading up to the house was unkempt at best: pitilessly littered with cigarette butts and the water-logged, unclaimed newspapers that the paperboy faithfully chucked onto their lawn each day. the surrounding grass was long and trampled. the feeling of ecstacy that i had enjoyed on our wild ride gave way to the possibitly that lucy and her family might be white trash. i wondered what it was i might be in for.

at the instant that lucy cracked open the front door to gain us entry into the house, an eruption of hysterical, high pitched barking nearly caused me to lose my grip on the giant coke. "that's just freddy," lucy comforted. "he's just excited to see us. he'll quiet down in a sec."

freddy was the fattest beagle i've ever seen. he waddled right up to us excitedly. his untrimmed nails made scratching sounds on the linoleum. lucy knelt down to greet him: she scratched his head lovingly while he licked her cheeks and neck. freddy shook rhythmically as his wagging tail transmitted his elation into the rest of his body. "say hi," lucy said. i squatted down to address freddy. he waddled over to me happily. his dancing eyes showed the gluey start of cataract growth.

wild ride

once she pulled us out of the parking lot, lucy really let her rip. she was an absolute demon for speed. she rolled down the windows and the sunroof. she screamed and laughed wildly. the wind pounded our faces and sent our hair whipping in all directions. at a stop sign she took an elastic from her wrist and tied her hair up in a haphazard pony tail at the top of her head. i wondered why she had been so careful with all that hair brushing and make-up when all the while she planned on driving this way.

she told me that she knew exactly where her brother kept his weed. she'd been pilfering buds from his stash all summer. it was my task she said to keep rick busy with converstation while she stole up to his room to procure the necessary supplies for our evening's activities.

the drive to her house was perfectly idyllic. winding country roads. and long straightaways that she'd gas like crazy. i was wide awake now, and in love with chance and the sun and the day. the wind made tears stream from both eyes down my cheeks then pool on my neck near my ears. my heart was pounding -- i was laughing and yelping with lucy out of sheer delight. i breathed air deep into my lungs and exploded it back out again in giggles and shrieks. i opened the last of the two fortune cookies lucy had given me. "dare to dream, hope, believe, seek, feel, find, and love," it urged me. i was feeling hopeful now about everything.

symphony of horror

mission recommenced

i sat at the picnic table and waited for lucy for something like two hours. over this course of time she would visit me periodically, baring some new offering from the food court: first a chocolate shake, next fries, last an egg roll, two fortune cookies and a sprite from the wok-n-roll. my well-being seemed to be her greatest concern. she cared for me the way i imagined she might have cared for a stray puppy, or a wandering orphan. i began to understand that my appearance in lucy's life was probably more excitment than she had had in some time. she'd drag over the other girls to meet me: to see what exotic thing she'd found. she was full of pride. if i wandered off to the bathroom without first telling her, she would chide me gently upon my return, telling me i had her worried sick. back at home i would probably have been put off by lucy's gushy, good samaritan, blondeness. i probably would have told her to fuck right off. but the ride with the smithfields had left me feeling lonely and disturbed. i needed this.

at the end of her shift lucy came bounding over to me with a giant fountain coke and a cinnabon. she said we should wait to eat the cinnabon until after we smoked some of her brother's weed. she handed me the coke and cinnabon, and threw my backpack over her shoulder. we walked over the grass out of the picnic area and into the employee parking lot. lucy had the look of an ice skater. something about her eye shadow and highlights and everything's-coming-up-roses freneticism. in her excitement she seemed to be gliding across the parking lot as if on ice, beaming out smiles like ice skaters do.

lucy's car was a vaguely sporty, dusty junker of an indeterminate blue. she said she hated her car and acted embarrassed by it. it was a hand-me-down from her older brother rick. i could have guessed as much from the startling number of cigarette burns in the seat cushions. rick had always hated the car, too as it was the product of ill-won compromise. he had really wanted a camaro, but his parents had refused him for fear that he might involve himself with potentially deadly drag racing, which had recently become a favorite pastime among the town's youth. rick and his parents had butted heads for three long months before they had bought him this car. the cigarette burns were his rebellion. lucy had inherited his car when rick bought himself the red dodge charger that he now drove, with money he had saved up from his job as shift manager at the local movie theater.

i sat in the passenger seat and waited for lucy as she cleared a space on the backseat for my backpack, which she nestled with great care among the accumulted trash: candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, a rumpled bag of mcdonald's remains, ateast three empty cinnabon boxes. when she sat down she yanked off her uniform hat and put it on the dashboard. she aimed the rearview mirror at herself, pulled a hairbrush from between the seats and ran it through her hair with intense focus -- over and over again. from the glove compartment she fished out blush and the kind of frosty pink lip gloss that is applied with a wand. she turned each cheek toward the mirror with exaggerated ceremony to access her pallor as she rubbed her giant blush brush back and forth over the strip of pink compressed blush powder. when she felt the brush was sufficiently loaded up, she worked the powder onto her cheeks in swiftly executed, tight circles. next she unsrewed the tube of lip gloss and pumped the wand up and down in the frosty emulsion. she brought the wand to her bottom lip and swept the foam tip of the wand from lower right to left and back again. then she pressed her lips together to spread the gloss from the bottom lip onto the top lip. when she when she was finished, she stuffed everything into the glove compartment, heaved an inflated sigh of relief, flashed me a smile and turned the key in the ingition.

moving on

I was in Virginia. Near a town called Vienna. There were no free tables in the picnic area: I would have to share one with some other travelers. after a brief survey of the crowd, I decided to sit at the end of a table whose opposite end was occupied by a pudgy and awkward father and son who sat eating burgers in seeming silence. I lugged my overstuffed knapsack on to the table. It made a dramatic “thud” sound that caused the young boy and father to jump up in fear and turn around with meek, fear-filled eyes and upturned eyebrows. They stared at me as if waiting for further violence. Their mouths were agape, still filled with food as the surprise had stopped their jaws from continuing the motion of chewing. I shrugged apologetically, surpressing my urge to tell them to quit acting like girls. I unzipped my knapsack and extracted my journal and the giant bag of red vines I had stolen. I put the flinching father and son act out of my mind and sat absent-mindedly eating one red vine after another while scribbling away about events that took place over the last 24 hours. I had to be sure that i remembered everything for my blog.

When finished updating my journal I continued to sit and eat vines. My gaze drifted from one fussing family to the next. I watched the activity at the trash receptacles. Some men made grand displays of chivalry by holding the swinging door of the garbage receptacle open so that women and children could dispose of their trash without having to incur the impact of crashing their trays into the door. I listened to the crack the empty serving trays made as people politely stacked them in the designated repositories atop the trashcans. I watched the cleaning attendants, mostly pimply teenage boys and a few girls with dyed-blonde ponytails issuing out from the stiff brown and maroon baseball caps they wore as part of their uniforms, as they roamed the area wiping down tables with rags of questionable cleanliness.

The father and son got up and waddled off to one of the trashcans. It troubled me that they were moving on, essentially leaving me in their dust. I was beginning to feel like my journey was losing steam. Day one was on the wane and as far as I knew I was nowhere near a cemetery. When one of the ponytailed cleaning attendants came over to wipe up after my departed chubby tablemates, I decided to ask for direction.

Lucy was pretty in spite of her drab uniform. Her maroon polo shirt was way to big for her but clean and neatly tucked into the tiny waist of her requisite black workpants. To exert her individuality she had a Guns and Roses pin next to her name tag at the top left of her brown apron. She wore blue eye shadow and mascara to enhance the color of her eyes no doubt which were more grey than blue. She chewed gum mercilessly. She seemed thrilled to make a new friend and blow off her table wiping duties for a bit. I told her my story. She said there was a cemetery about a half an hour south of the rest stop. Her shift ended in an hour and a half. She said I should wait around for her: she’d give me a ride. We’d stop at her place first so that she could change into "normal clothes". she also said we could steal pot and vodka from her older brother who was home from college. She even had a ouija board and candles.