People We Meet on Vacation

DO WE HAVE a rental car?” Alex asks as we head out of the airport into the windy heat.

“Sort of.” I chew on my lip as I fish my phone out to call a cab. “I sourced a ride from a Facebook group.”

Alex’s eyes narrow, the jet-induced gusts rolling through the arrivals area making his hair flap against his forehead. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“Remember?” I say. “It’s what we did on our first trip. To Vancouver? When we were too young to legally rent a car?”

He stares at me.

“You know,” I say, “that women’s online travel group I’ve been in for, like, fifteen years? Where people post their apartments for sublet and list their cars for rent? Remember? We had to take a bus to pick up the car outside the city and walk, like, five miles with our luggage?”

“I remember,” he says. “I’ve just never stopped to wonder why anyone would rent their car to a stranger before this moment.”

“Because a lot of people in New York like to leave for the winter and a lot of people in Los Angeles like to go somewhere else for the summer.” I shrug. “This girl’s car would’ve been sitting unused for, like, a month, so I got it for the week for seventy bucks. We just have to take a cab to pick it up.”

“Cool,” Alex says.

“Yeah.”

And here is the first awkward silence of the trip. It doesn’t matter that we’ve been texting nonstop for the past week—or maybe that’s made it worse. My mind is unforgivingly blank. All I can do is stare at the app on my phone, watching the car icon creep closer.

“This is us.” I tip my chin toward the approaching minivan.

“Cool,” Alex says again.

Our driver takes our bags and we pile in with the two other people we’re ridesharing with, a middle-aged couple in matching BeDazzled visors. WIFEY, says the hot-pink one. HUBBY, says the lime-green one. Both of them are wearing flamingo-print shirts, and they’re so tanned already they look something like Alex’s shoes. Hubby’s head is shaved, and Wifey’s is dyed a bright bottle-red.

“Hey, y’all!” Wifey drawls as Alex and I settle into the middle seats.

“Hi.” Alex twists in his seat and offers a smile that’s almost convincing.

“Honeymoon,” Wifey says, waving between her and Hubby. “What about you two?”

“Oh,” Alex says. “Um.”

“Same!” I loop my hand through his, turning to flash them a smile.

“Ooh!” Wifey squeals. “How do you like that, Bob? A car full of lovebirds!”

Hubby Bob nods. “Congrats, kids.”

“How’d you meet?” Wifey wants to know.

I glance at Alex. The two expressions his face is making right now are (1) terrified and (2) exhilarated. This is a familiar game for us, and even if it’s more awkward than usual to have my hand tangled in and dwarfed by his, there’s also something comforting about slipping out of ourselves in this way, playing together like we always have.

“Disneyland,” Alex says, and turns to the couple in the back seat.

Wifey’s eyes widen. “How magical!”

“It really was, you know?” I shoot Alex hearty eyes and poke his nose with my free hand. “He was working as a VS—that’s what we call vomit scoopers. Their job is just to sort of linger outside all those new 3D rides and clean up after seasick grandparents.”

“And Poppy was playing Mike Wazowski,” Alex adds dryly, upping the ante.

“Mike Wazowski?” Hubby Bob says.

“From Monsters, Inc., hon,” Wifey explains. “He’s one of the main monsters!”

“Which one?” Hubby says.

“The short one,” Alex says, then turns back to me, affecting the dopiest, most over-the-top look of adulation I’ve ever seen. “It was love at first sight.”

“Aww!” Wifey says, clutching her heart.

Hubby’s brow wrinkles. “When she was in the costume?”

Alex’s face tints pink under Hubby’s appraisal, and I cut in: “I have really great legs.”

Our driver drops us on a street of stucco houses surrounded by jasmine in Highland Park, and as we climb out onto the hot asphalt, Wifey and Hubby wave us a fond farewell. The instant the cab’s out of view, Alex releases his hold on my hand, and I scan the house numbers, nodding toward a reddish-stained privacy fence. “It’s this one.”

Alex opens the gate, and we step into the yard to find a boxy white hatchback waiting in the driveway, its every edge rusted and chipping.

“So,” Alex says, staring at it. “Seventy bucks.”

“I might’ve overpaid.” I duck around the front driver’s-side wheel, feeling for the magnetic box where the owner, a ceramicist named Sasha, said the key would be. “This is the first place I’d check for a spare if I were stealing a car.”

“I think bending that low might be too much work to steal this car,” Alex says as I pull the key out and straighten up. He walks around the back of the car and reads the tailgate: “Ford Aspire.”

I laugh and unlock the doors. “I mean, ‘aspirational’ is the R+R brand.”

“Here.” Alex takes out his phone and steps back. “Let me get a picture of you with it.”

I pop the door open and prop my foot up, striking a pose. Immediately, Alex starts to crouch. “Alex, no! Not from below.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I forgot how weird you are about that.”

“I’m weird?” I say. “You take pictures like a dad with an iPad. If you had glasses on the end of your nose and a UC Bearcats T-shirt on, you’d be indistinguishable.”

He makes a big show of holding the phone up as high as possible.

“What, and now we’re going for that early-2000s emo angle?” I say. “Find a happy medium.”

Alex rolls his eyes and shakes his head, but snaps a few pictures at a seminormal height, then comes to show them to me. I legitimately gasp when I see the last shot and grab for his arm the same way he must’ve latched on to the octogenarian he rode next to on the flight.

“What?” he says.

“You have portrait mode.”

“I do,” he agrees.

“And you used it,” I point out.

“Yes.”

“You know how to use portrait mode,” I say, still aghast.

“Ha ha.”

“How do you know how to use portrait mode? Did your grandson teach you that when he was home for Thanksgiving?”

“Wow,” he deadpans. “I’ve missed this so much.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m impressed. You’ve changed.” I hurry to add, “Not in a bad way! I just mean, you are not a person who relishes change.”

“Maybe I am now,” he says.

I cross my arms. “Do you still get up at five thirty to exercise every day?”

He shrugs. “That’s discipline, not fear of change.”

“At the same gym?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“The one that raises its prices every six months? And plays the same New Age meditation CD on repeat at all times? The gym you were already complaining about two years ago?”

“I wasn’t complaining,” he says. “I just don’t understand how that’s supposed to motivate you on a treadmill. I was pondering. Contemplating.”

“You take your own playlist with you—what does it matter what they play over the speakers?”

He shrugs and takes the car keys from my hands, rounding the Aspire to open its rear door. “It’s a matter of principle.” He tosses our bags into the back and slams it shut.

I thought we were joking, but now I’m not so sure.

“Hey.” I reach for his elbow as he’s walking past. He stills, eyebrows lifting. There’s a knot of pride caught in my throat, stopping up the words that want to come out. But it was pride that tore our friendship up the first time, and I’m not going to make that mistake again. I’m not going to not say things that need to be said, just because I want him to say them first.

“What?” Alex says.

I swallow the knot down. “I’m glad you didn’t change too much.”

He stares at me for a beat and then—is it my imagination, or does he swallow too? “You too,” he says, and touches the end of a wave that’s come loose from my ponytail to fall along my cheek, touches it so lightly I can barely feel it at the scalp and the delicate motion sends a tingle down my neck. “And I like the haircut.”

My cheeks warm. My belly too. Even my legs seem to heat a couple degrees.

“You learned how to use a new feature on your phone, and I got a haircut,” I say. “Watch out for us now, world.”

“Radical transformation,” Alex agrees.

“A true glow-up.”

“The question is, have you gotten any better at driving?”

I arch an eyebrow and cross my arms. “Have you?”

•   •   •

“IT ASPIRES TO have working air-conditioning,” Alex says.

“It aspires to not smell like a butthole that’s smoking a blunt,” I say.

We’ve been playing this game since we got on the highway heading into the desert. Sasha the Ceramicist had mentioned in her post about the car that its air-conditioning came and went at random, but she’d left out the fact that she’d evidently been using it to hotbox for five years straight.

“It aspires to live long enough to see the end of all human suffering,” I add.

“This car,” Alex says, “isn’t going to live long enough to see the end of the Star Wars franchise.”

“But who among us will?” I say.

Alex wound up driving by virtue of the fact that my driving makes him carsick. And terrified. Truthfully, I don’t like driving anyway, so I usually defer the position to him.

Los Angeles traffic proved challenging for someone as cautious as him: we sat at a stop sign waiting to turn right onto a busy road for, like, ten minutes, until three cars behind us were holding down their horns.

Now that we’re out of the city, though, he’s doing great. Not even the lack of AC seems like a big deal with the windows down and sweetly flowery wind rushing over us. The bigger issue is the lack of an aux input, which has us relying on the radio.

“Has there always been this much Billy Joel traveling over the airwaves?” Alex asks the third time we switch channels midcommercial only to plunge back into the middle of “Piano Man.”

“Since the dawn of time, I think. When the cavemen built the first radio, this was already playing.”

“I didn’t know you were a historian,” he deadpans. “You should come talk to my class.”

I snort. “You could not drag me into the halls of East Linfield High with the combined force of every tractor in a five-mile radius of that building, Alex.”

“You know,” he says, “your bullies have likely graduated by now.”

“We really can’t be sure,” I say.

He looks over, face sober, mouth pressed small. “Do you want me to kick their asses?”

I sigh. “No, it’s too late. Like, all of them have kids now with those cute oversized baby glasses and most have found the Lord or started one of those weird pyramid-scheme businesses selling lip gloss.”

He looks at me, his face pink from the sun. “If you change your mind, just say the word.”

Alex knows about my rocky years in Linfield, of course, but for the most part, I try not to revisit them. I’ve always preferred the version of me that Alex brings out to the one I was back in our hometown. This Poppy feels safe in the world, because he’s in it too, and he, deep down where it matters, is like me.

Still, he had an exceptionally different experience at West Linfield High than I had at its sister school. I’m sure it helped that he played sports—basketball, both for the school and in the intramural league at his family’s church—and was handsome, but he’s always insisted the clincher was that he was quiet enough to pass for mysterious rather than weird.

Maybe if my parents hadn’t been so completely encouraging of every facet of my brothers’ and my individualism, I would’ve had better luck. There were kids who dealt with disapproval by adapting, making themselves more palatable, like Prince and Parker had in school, finding the overlap between their personalities and everyone else’s.

And then there were people like me, who labored under the misconception that eventually, My Fellow Children would not only tolerate but ultimately respect me for being myself.

There’s nothing so off-putting to some people as someone who seems not to care whether anyone else approves of them. Maybe it’s resentment: I have bent for the greater good, to follow the rules, so why haven’t you? You should care.

Of course, secretly, I did care. A lot. Probably it would’ve been better if I’d just openly cried at school instead of shrugging off insults and weeping under my pillow later. It would’ve been better if, after the first time I was mocked for the flared overalls my mom had sewn embroidered patches onto, I hadn’t kept wearing them with my chin held high, like I was some kind of eleven-year-old Joan of Arc, willing to die for my denim.

The point was, Alex had known how to play the game, whereas I’d often felt like I’d read the pages of the guidebook backward, while the whole thing was on fire.

When we were together, though, the game didn’t even exist. The rest of the world dissolved until I believed this was how things truly were. Like I’d never been that girl who’d felt entirely alone, misunderstood, and I’d always been this one: known, loved, wholly accepted by Alex Nilsen.

When we met, I hadn’t wanted him to see me as Linfield Poppy—I wasn’t sure how it would change the dynamic of our world for two once we let certain outside elements wriggle their way in. I still remember the night I finally told him about it. The last night of class our junior year, we’d stumbled back to his dorm from a party to find his roommate already gone for the summer. So I borrowed a T-shirt and some blankets from Alex and slept on the spare twin bed in his room.

I hadn’t had a sleepover like that since I was probably eight: the sort where you keep talking, eyes long since shut, until you both drift off midsentence.

We told each other everything, the things we’d never touched. Alex told me about his mom passing away, the months his dad barely changed out of pajamas, the peanut butter sandwiches Alex made for his brothers, and the baby formula he learned to mix.

For two years, he and I’d had so much fun together, but that night it felt like a whole new compartment in my heart opened where before there had been none.

And then he asked me what happened in Linfield, why I was dreading going back for summer, and it should’ve felt embarrassing to air my small grievances after everything he’d just told me, except Alex had a way of never making me feel small or petty.

It was so late it was almost morning, those slippery hours when it feels safest to let your secrets out. So I told him all of it, starting with seventh grade.

The unfortunate braces, the gum Kim Leedles put in my hair, and the resulting bowl cut. The insult added to injury when Kim told my whole class that anyone who talked to me wouldn’t be invited to her birthday party. Which was still a solid five months off, though it promised to be worth the wait, thanks to her pool’s waterslide and the movie theater in her basement.

Then, in ninth grade, once the stigma had finally worn off and my boobs had arrived practically overnight, there was the three-month stretch during which I was a Hot Commodity. Until Jason Stanley kissed me unexpectedly and responded to my disinterest by telling everyone I gave him an unprompted blow job in the janitor’s closet.

The entire soccer team called me Porny Poppy for, like, a year after that. No one wanted to be my friend. Then there was tenth grade, the worst of all.

It started off better because the younger of my two brothers was a senior and willing to share his Theater Kid friend-group with me. But that only lasted until I had a sleepover for my birthday, at which point I found out how embarrassing everyone thought my parents were. I quickly realized I didn’t like my friends as much as I’d thought.

I’d told Alex too about how much I loved my family, how protective I felt of them, but how even with them, I was sometimes a little lonely. Everyone else was someone else’s top person. Mom and Dad. Parker and Prince. Even the huskies were paired up, while our terrier mix and the cat spent most days curled together in a sun patch. Before Alex, my family was the only place I belonged, but even with them, I was something of a loose part, that baffling extra bolt IKEA packs with your bookcase, just to make you sweat. Everything I’d done since high school had been to escape that feeling, that person.

And I told him all of that, minus the part about feeling like I belonged with him, because even after two years of friendship, that seemed like a bit much. When I finished, I thought he’d finally fallen asleep. But after a few seconds, he shifted onto his side to gaze at me through the dark and said quietly, “I bet you were adorable with a bowl cut.”

I really, really wasn’t, but somehow, that was enough to cool the harsh sting of all those memories. He saw me, and he loved me.

“Poppy?” Alex says, bringing me back to the hot, stinky car and the desert. “Where are you right now?”

I stick my hand out the window, grasping at the wind. “Wandering the halls of East Linfield High to a chant of Porny Poppy! Porny Poppy!”

“Fine,” Alex says gently. “I won’t make you visit my classroom to teach Billy Joel Radio History. But just so you know . . .” He looks at me, face serious, voice deadpan. “If any of my juniors called you Porny Poppy, I’d fucking waste them.”

“That has to be,” I say, “the hottest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

He laughs but looks away. “I’m serious. Bullying’s the one thing I don’t let them get away with.” He tips his head in thought. “Except me. They bully me constantly.”

I laugh even though I don’t believe him. Alex teaches the AP and Honors kids, and he’s young, handsome, quietly hilarious, and freakishly smart. There’s no way they don’t adore him.

“But do they call you Porny Alex?” I ask.

He grimaces. “God, I hope not.”

“Sorry,” I say, “Mr. Porny.”

“Please. Mr. Porny is my father.”

“I bet so many students have crushes on you.”

“One girl told me I look like Ryan Gosling . . .”

“Oh my god.”

“. . . if he got stung by a bee.”

“Ouch,” I say.

“I know,” Alex agrees. “Tough but fair.”ConTEent bel0ngs to Nôv(e)lD/rama(.)Org .

“Maybe Ryan Gosling looks like you if he was left outside to dehydrate, did you ever think of that?”

“Yeah. Take that, Jessica McIntosh,” he says.

“You bitch,” I say, then immediately shake my head. “Nope. Did not feel good to call a child a bitch. Bad joke.”

Alex grimaces again. “If it makes you feel any better, Jessica is . . . not my favorite. But she’ll grow out of a lot of it, I think.”

“Yeah, I mean, for all you know she might be working against a lifetime of postgum bowl cuts. It’s nice of you to give her a chance.”

“You were never a Jessica,” he says confidently.

I arch an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

“Because.” His eyes hold fast to the sun-bleached road. “You’ve always been Poppy.”

•   •   •

THE DESERT ROSE apartment complex is a stucco building painted bubblegum pink, its name embossed in curling midcentury letters. A garden full of scrubby cacti and massive succulents winds around it, and through a white picket fence, we spot a sparkling teal pool, dotted with sun-browned bodies and ringed in palm trees and chaise lounges.

Alex turns the car off. “Looks nice,” he says, sounding relieved.

I step out of the car, and the asphalt’s hot even through my sandals.

I thought from summers in New York, trapped between skyscrapers with the sun pinballing back and forth ad infinitum—and all those earlier ones in the Ohio River Valley’s natural humidity trap—that I knew what hot was.

I did not.

My skin tingles under the merciless desert sun, my feet burning just from standing still.

“Shit,” Alex pants, sweeping his hair off his forehead.

“I guess this is why it’s the off-season.”

“How do David and Tham live here?” he says, sounding disgusted.

“The same way you live in Ohio,” I say. “Sadly, and with heavy drinking.”

I mean it as a joke, but Alex’s expression flattens out, and he heads to the back of the car without acknowledging what I said.

I clear my throat. “Kidding. Plus, they mostly live in L.A., right? It was nowhere near this hot back there.”

“Here.” He passes me the first bag, and I take it, feeling chastened.

Note to self: no more shitting on Ohio.

By the time we get out our luggage—and the two paper bags of groceries we grabbed during a CVS pit stop—and wrestle it up three flights of stairs to our unit, we’re sweat drenched.

“I feel like I’m melting,” Alex says as I punch the code into the key box beside the door. “I need a shower.”

The box pops open, and I stick the key into the doorknob, jiggling and twisting it per the very specific instructions the host sent me.

“As soon as we go outside, we’re gonna be melting again,” I point out. “You might want to save the showering for right before bed.”

The key finally catches, and I bump the door open, shuffling inside, stopping short as two simultaneous warning bells start shrieking through my body.

Alex walks into me, a solid wall of sweat-dampened heat. “What’s—”

His voice drops off. I’m not sure which horrible fact he’s registering. That it’s disgustingly hot in here or that . . .

In the middle of this (otherwise perfect) studio apartment, there sits one bed.

“No,” he says quietly, as if he didn’t mean to say it aloud. I’m sure he didn’t.

“It said two beds,” I blurt out, frantically trying to pull up the reservation. “It definitely did.”

Because there’s no way I could have possibly screwed up this badly. I couldn’t have.

There was a time when it might not have seemed like a huge deal for us to share a bed, but it is not this trip. Not when things are fragile and awkward. We have one chance to fix what broke between us.

“You’re sure?” Alex says, and I hate that note of annoyance in his voice even more than the suspicious one riding alongside it. “You saw pictures? With two beds?”

I look up from my inbox. “Of course!”

But did I? This unit had been ridiculously cheap, in large part because a reservation had canceled last minute. I knew it was a studio, but I saw pictures of the sparkly turquoise pool and the happy, dancing palm trees and the reviews said it was clean, and the kitchenette looked small but chic and—

Did I actually see two beds?

“This guy owns a bunch of apartments here,” I say, head swimming. “He probably sent us the wrong unit number.”

I find the right email and click through the pictures. “Here!” I cry. “Look!”

Alex steps in close, looking over my shoulder at the pictures—a bright white and gray apartment with a couple of thriving potted fiddle-leaf figs in one corner and a vast white bed in the middle of the room, a slightly smaller one beside it.

Okay, so there might have been some artful angling to these photographs, because in the shot the bigger bed looks like it’s king-sized when it’s actually a queen, which means the other couldn’t be bigger than a double, but it definitely should exist.

“I don’t understand.” Alex looks from the photo to where the second bed should be.

“Oh,” he and I say in unison as it clicks.

He crosses to the wide, armless chair, in coral imitation suede, and yanks off the decorative pillows, reaching into the seam of the chair. He folds the bottom out, the back pressing down so that the whole thing flattens into a long, skinny pad with sagging seams between its three sections. “A pullout . . . chair.”

“I’ll take that!” I volunteer.

Alex shoots me a look. “You can’t, Poppy.”

“Why, because I’m a woman, and they’ll take your Midwestern masculinity away if you don’t fall on the sword of every gender norm presented to you?”

“No,” he says. “Because if you sleep on that, you’ll wake up with a migraine.”

“That happened once,” I say, “and we don’t know it was from sleeping on the air mattress. It could’ve been the red wine.” But even as I say it, I’m searching for the thermostat, because if anything’s going to make my head throb, it’s sleeping in this heat. I find the controls inside the kitchenette. “Oh my gosh, he has it set to eighty degrees in here.”

“Seriously?” Alex scrubs a hand through his hair, catching the sweat beading on his forehead. “And to think, it doesn’t feel a degree over two hundred.”

I crank the thermostat down to seventy, and the fans kick on loudly, but without any instant relief. “At least we have a view of the pool,” I say, crossing to the back doors. I throw the blackout curtains back and balk, the remnants of my optimism fizzling out.

The balcony is way bigger than mine at home, with a cute red café table and two matching chairs. The problem is, three-quarters of it is walled off with plastic sheeting as, somewhere overhead, a horrible melee of mechanical rattles and screeches sound off.

Alex steps out beside me. “Construction?”

“I feel like I’m inside a ziplock bag, inside of someone’s body.”

“Someone with a fever,” he says.

“Who’s also on fire.”

He laughs a little. A miserable sound he tries to play off as lighthearted. But Alex isn’t lighthearted. He’s Alex. He’s high-stress and he likes to be clean and have his space and he packs his own pillow in his luggage, because his “neck is used to this one”—even though it means he can’t bring as many clothes as he’d like—and the last thing this trip needs is any unnecessary pushing on our pressure points.

Suddenly, the six days ahead of us seem impossibly long. We should have taken a three-day trip. Just the length of the wedding festivities, when there’d be buffers galore and free booze and time blocked out that Alex would be busy with his brother’s bachelor party and whatever else.

“Should we go down to the pool?” I say, a little too loud, because by now my heart is racing and I have to yell to hear myself over it.

“Sure,” Alex says, then turns back to the door and freezes. His mouth hangs open as he considers his words. “I’ll change in the bathroom, and you can just shout when you’re finished?”

Right. It’s a studio. One open room with no doors except the one to the bathroom.

Which wouldn’t have been awkward, if we weren’t both being so freaking awkward.

“Mm-hm,” I say. “Sure.”