You were walking up the incline, one hand bridged across your forehead to shield your eyes from the setting sun. I watched you approach, idly running my fingers through the grass I was sitting on. There was a patch of earth where I’d pulled up the blades in chunks, letting them scatter on the breeze. They didn’t go far but then nothing in this place went far. You had stopped and turned back to look down and across the town; I. thought maybe you were worried that Marv had noticed that you’d clocked early and had followed you up here. It was unlikely. Any time past three and he could reliably be found at Frank’s, holding forth on the betrayal of the American heartlands, why the great state of Nebraska deserved an NFL franchise, and how folk who didn’t make it to church on Sunday had no place in his town. If you could get past the MAGA hat and the bluster he wasn’t so bad. His perspective was just a little narrow, that’s all. I was finding it a struggle to stop mine narrowing each day too.

“Do you think we’ll do it this year?”

You’d turned back from looking at the town and called up to me.

“Do what?” I humoured you. I knew what you were asking. We played this game all the time.

“Scratch two off the sign. Welcome to Trenton, population 516. Is this the year we make it 514?”

“They won’t change the sign” I smirked. “Someone will squeeze out two more to replace us before the year’s out. Nothing else to do round here. Frank’s and a fumble on Saturday, repent at church on Sunday, try and find work Monday to Friday. Besides, we won’t leave. We’re never getting out.”

You sat down next to me, frowned, and pushed a fist gently into my arm, a playful punch. “That’s what I come up here for my little ray of sunshine.”

“Hey, if you wanted sunshine then you’re in the wrong State. I believe Florida has that one all sewn up.”

We sat quietly for a while. I leant back on my elbows and let my head fall back, tried to watch the sunset, upside down, behind me but it made me feel queasy. Neither of us had ever said it but I liked to think that we came up here because if anyone was watching us from the town we’d be backlit by the setting sun, silhouetted against the horizon. Probably looked pretty cool. But neither of us had said it and I wasn’t going to go first in case you thought it was dumb. It always seemed like a fine line between what was cool and what was dumb and not many people drew that line in the same place as me. Once, couple of years ago, before we graduated, I told some of the other girls in school that I thought it’d be fun to dig out some old Disney movies, have a sleepover round someone’s house, pretend to be kids again. I don’t know, maybe I thought we could be all ironic about it but if I’m honest I think there was part of me that wanted the simplicity of evil step-moms and brave, impossibly big eyed girls again. It didn’t go well. They started posting pictures of my head super-imposed on a succession of Disney Princess bodies and posting them to Snap, Insta, whichever flavour of social was in favour that day. They were captioned. I don’t remember all of them but it was stuff like Beauty & The Beast: definitely the beast or Frozen: panties. Nothing that was going to trouble their GPA. Nothing too smart. The one of my dismembered head being held aloft instead of Simba from The Lion King was quite well executed though. Props for the photoshop talents. They left me alone after a couple of weeks when Jennifer Harlow bleached her hair blonde but did something wrong with the peroxide and it all turned bright orange before starting to fall out in clumps.

I met you later that year. You were a year ahead but flunked graduation and they held you back. I guess I’d been aware of you through school but the older kids didn’t really mix with the other years and you weren’t actually there that much. Hence, the flunking. It must have been hard for you. I felt like we were both misfits and maybe that’s why we started hanging out. I thought Jennifer might join our little tribe of the ostracised but she dropped out of school and works now at Cindy’s Grooming. There were some pretty funny looking pets for a while in Trenton but last time I saw her she said she was getting the hang of it. So it was just me and you.

I got you through graduation and you got me through the year. That ended up being the deal, tacitly understood but never stated. I worked hard enough for both of us and we spend long evenings where I’d catch you up on George Washington or irrigation systems or algebra or The Grapes Of Wrath. It wasn’t like you weren’t smart because you were; you just didn’t see the point and didn’t want to do the work. I saw the work as the only way out but maybe even then you didn’t think there was an exit and you gave up before giving it a try. I was determined to prove you wrong back then, it’s only this last six months or so that I’ve felt like the off ramp to anywhere else but here has been closed for essential maintenance with no indication of when it might be open again. I owe you though. It’s true that I got you through the exams but you had my back that whole year. Nobody messed with me because it meant messing with you and your no-fuck’s-given persona was just unpredictable enough that no-one was quite sure what you’d do and didn’t really want to find out. Someone started a rumour that you had a pistol, that they’d seen you shooting at birds over in Bush Creek. It wasn’t true but you didn’t disabuse them of the notion and gradually people fleshed out their own idea of you as some sort of troubled outlaw, firing clips at Blue Jays down by the river on weekends and spoiling for a fight in school in the week. The most troubled I saw you was on Wednesdays when we used to try and learn math. Or wait, it was actually when we first stated looking at sexual reproduction in biology and you had gotten so flustered that you’d left and said you thought you should learn this by yourself. I thought it was kinda sweet and also, to be honest, a relief.

Eventually you broke the silence. “Marv’s talking about retiring.”

“Retiring? Doesn’t he do that every day? To Frank’s?” I replied.

“No, properly retiring. Says it’s getting too much for him now and wants someone to take the business on. He’d own it. Just needs someone to run it for him.” He paused, looked at me.

“Truck and car washing? You’re not seriously considering it? What about…”

“What about what?” He cut me off. “What else have I got? I’m not getting out. I’m not smart like you, I barely graduated High School. Where would I go? This is all I know.”

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “You kept telling yourself last year that you weren’t smart, that you weren’t cut out for books and school but it wasn’t true. It isn’t true.”

“I’m not like you,” he said. He shook his head firmly as if to emphasise the point, as if that was the end of it. I wasn’t prepared to leave it alone, to leave him alone. We’d been having the same conversation for the last two years, planning where we’d go, what we might do, how we’d leave all this small town small mindedness and find somewhere we felt at home. I thought I was the one having doubts recently but had always been encouraged by his enthusiasm, his talk of scraping enough together to catch the Greyhound to Denver, find some work, keep heading West over to California. He knew I had my heart set on San Francisco, an idealised romantic setting down of roots somewhere made up of misfits, the original home of the dreamers. Somewhere in my head I knew I wouldn’t be writing spoken word poetry in a loft apartment, sunlight streaming through the skylights in the eaves; it’d be spot work at Starbucks and a waitressing gig at night but, maybe, just maybe, I could carve out the other stuff too. I just wasn’t sure I was brave enough to do it without him and the realisation of that hit me as he told me about his new future.

“Why are you so scared to live?” I whispered it but it was loud enough for him to hear. His face flushed briefly with anger.

“I’m not scared of anything,” he said, voice rising. “You think I’m too good for this town, that it? Too good for some honest work running a business. Too good for a beer on Friday with the boys? I ain’t too good for any of that. Maybe you think you are.”

I was angry now. We hadn’t really had a cross word since we’d known each other, united in our deal at school, united in our plots and plans since we’d left. “Maybe I am too good for that. Maybe I give myself a bit of credit and don’t want to wind up either washed up at Frank’s, picking at labels on beer bottles and drinking away my regrets, or knocked up by some local who once had the run of the town ‘cos he was captain of the hockey team but now binge watches Fox and complains about liberals ruining America.”

“A local like me?” he said.

I stopped, held his gaze. “You were really terrible at hockey,” I said finally.

He smiled. “I really was. You got me.”

“And you don’t think liberals are ruining America.”

“No, I think America is managing that pretty well on its own.”

“So, don’t stay. Don’t settle for this. I do think you’re too good for it. Or, maybe a better way of putting it, is that I think it’s bad for you. There’s someone you could be that you won’t become here.”

“I’m not like you,” he said again. “That person you think I could be isn’t like you.”

“I don’t want you to be that,” I said. “I want you to be you, the widescreen, all possibilities version of you that will get narrowed and reduced if you stay here….” I trailed off, considering whether to reveal more of myself. It was another one of those moments where I couldn’t decide if what I wanted to say was kinda cool or kinda dumb. Maybe I needed to stop thinking they were mutually exclusive or maybe I just needed to stop second guessing myself all the time. “I can’t do it without you,” I said eventually. “I’m the one that’s scared. I’m the one that’s scared to live.”

The sun had set behind us and the dark was drawing in, lights winking on down in the town in front of us. You could see how contained, how small Trenton was at night, a neat rectangle of lights marking its boundaries and then darkness save for the strip of illumination, East to West, where Highway 34 sliced through the countryside. You rummaged in your pocket and pulled out a set of keys on a fob from Dirt Dawg Car & Truck Wash. You held them up between us. “Reckon we’ve got twelve solid hours before Marv notices it’s gone. Maybe more if he has a big night at Frank’s tonight.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. It was quiet now, just a distant thrum from the Highway in the distance.

“I’m saying that we leave now, tonight. Leave it all behind. Run to California, ditch the pick-up, hope that by the time they find it that they don’t find us. It ain’t strictly theft if the owner gave you the keys, is it?”

“I guess not,” I said. “At the very least it’s ambiguous.”

“Come on then,” he said, standing up. He reached out his hand, smiling. “You scared?”

I matched his smile, took his hand and let him pull me up beside him. “I’m terrified but that’s living, right?”

---

At time of writing, July ’23, I am trying to deliver 26,000 words as part of a fundraiser for British children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street. Link for donations: here

Not sure where this one came from but have been main-lining the brilliant Ethel Cain record so perhaps it was partially inspired by her “A House In Nebraska” song. Her record is much better than my story so don’t let the above put you off.