THERE WAS ALWAYS BETH — EMILY JAMES
/And Beth always drove. Champagne-colored Saturn, we called it the Bullet, but it looked like ET with those the pop-up headlights. She’d pull up the driveway and do a quick high-pitched honk, the Alien Cry. Liza was the smallest of us, barely 4’11’’, but always sat shotgun because she’d brought the mixtapes. Sublime, Radiohead, Mary J Blige, cut off at the end and then click-clack and flip onto the other side. I brought the bud. Me and Cass squeezed in the back, Cass rolling the joint, hers always pulled best, embers falling onto bare legs, crumbs balanced on bumpy roads, they’d trickle into the cracks of our thighs, we'd pluck them from the suede with our uneven fingernails. This thing have shocks? We'd scream, Fuck! Beth would just stare, shake her head, her finger resting on the blinker, pointed like an arrow always ready to signal, always ready to turn, never letting her back rest against the worn fabric of the seat. Carrying all the stress of us from one road to the next, from 7-Eleven to the Palisades Mall, from anywhere to everywhere, just like she carried everything in her big house on the hill, a pool green from too much or not enough chlorine, her four little brothers and little white, oily-eyed, yapping scratching dog and a mom found in the broom closet with a stomach full of pills. Everywhere, like she’d carry us the rest of our lives, to and through all places and things, known and unknown, weddings and stomach cancers, babies in bellies who lived and died. Beth bought the cards. Beth cleared the casserole trays. Beth showed up first. But back when the future was just a pinhole through which none of us could see, Beth always drove, the damp cigarette scent pouring from the vent when we turned up the heat dial, when we smoked with windows closed, Upstate New York frost beneath our fingers. Beth never laughed, only sighed, until she cackled so hard she couldn’t breathe. Beth never sang, only nodded, lips tight and pulled, until she screamed, lyrics all wrong, high as a kite, head back and hands on the wheel, the road still ahead. We never thought then how one day we’d be swallowed, and how could we have imagined Beth as the first to go, when we were just the four of us unbuckled, driving and wailing and staring, sixteen and small in a world that had gotten too large too quickly, couldn’t hold us in, couldn’t take us away.
Emily James is a teacher and writer in NYC. Her recent work can be found in Pidgeonholes, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus, The Atticus Review, The Rumpus, JMWW Journal, among others. She is the recipient of the 2019 Bechtel Prize from Teachers and Writers' Magazine. You can find her online at www.emilysarahjames.com and tweet her @missg3rd.
