Matthew drove my old blue Nissan Sentra north on I-5. The hot air formed wavy lines above the asphalt on the horizon when we were still in the valley, on flatland. The hills crouched up to the freeway edge, dry and yellow. We were in a drought with record temperatures, but I shivered on my side of the car.
He pushed down on the gas, accelerating the 18-year-old car to the far edge of the speedometer, faster than it could go. It shook uneasily. We were only a couple years older than the vehicle, but the human lifespan outpaces a busted, old Nissan. Matthew didn’t try to hide his annoyance at driving home. That wasn’t part of the plan. Even though we didn’t really have much of a plan for the impromptu trip from the Bay Area down to Southern California.
The temperature gauge started to sway toward the hot zone and I switched the air conditioner off to keep the car from overheating. The air grew stale and until Matthew rolled down the window. My long hair whipped around my face, and my eyes teared up. I never drove with the windows down, but then I wasn’t driving.
We sat in silence until Matthew slapped his hand against his leg suddenly and yipped.
“What the hell?” he said.
He did it again. The car swerved into the empty lane next to us.
“Watch what you’re doing,” I said. “Jesus, don’t drive so crazy.”
“I’m not. There’s something crawling on me. A bug or something.”
He wore jean shorts that went down to his knees and he shuddered as he leaned forward into the steering wheel to reach his bare calves. The car lurched again. I pushed my hand out against the dashboard as though I could control our movement from the passenger side.
Matthew grimaced as he pulled off the freeway at the last stop before the incline up toward Fort Tejon. Cracked asphalt spread out before us in the empty parking lot of a fast-food restaurant adjacent to a gas station, a solemn final outpost of Los Angeles.
“There are fucking ants all over me,” Matthew said as he swung the car door wide. “How the fuck did ants get into your car?”
He swiped them off his legs and shoes with sporadic arm waves, his dark hair flopping from side to side. Squatting next to my car, he peered into it just as I folded myself in half from the passenger seat to inspect, our heads nearly touching.
In organized fashion, black dots formed a line from the driver-side seat, down below the center console, just under the gear shift and onto the floor mat near my feet.
I might have hummed the “Ants Go Marching,” but then I realized the ants were collecting in a plastic bag I left in the car overnight. With the remnants of grape-flavored Robitussin in the little cup that came with it.
The ants were my fault, too.
Matthew suggested the trip a week before when we were on the phone, still home from college while all our friends had returned to campus. He went to a U.C. on a quarter system that wouldn’t start until the end of September. I had a plane ticket to England for a semester abroad, departing in two weeks.
“I’m going to be gone until January, six months without seeing any of my L.A. friends,” I complained. “They’re going to forget me.”
“No one is going to forget you,” he said.
“They will. I’m not that remarkable.”
“You could drive down for a visit before you leave. Make a quick weekend trip.”
I was in a contrary mood. “It’s such a long drive. I’d hate to do it alone.”
“I could go with you.”
I kicked my foot against the wall of my high school bedroom, a loud sigh escaped.
“Yeah, but with you, I won’t be able to just crash in a dorm room. There is, like, one hotel down there, and it’s expensive.”
“I’ll pay for the room. You pay for gas.”
“Why do you even want to go with me?”
“Your friend Lita is super cute. This is my chance to meet her in person.”
He’d seen Lita in a photo album I had on my desk in my bedroom. She grew up in the East Bay, with a Chinese mom and a white dad, just like Matthew. Matthew always found a half-white, half-Asian girl to pine over. The more athletic and artistic, the better. I was half white, but my other half was Mexican, the wrong mix. And he’d watched me fail the fitness test in our co-ed PE classes too many times to believe I had a sporty bone in my body. I didn’t want to be his type, though. We’d been friends too long for that.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.
“You have to do all the driving. And I get to pick the music.”
We made the drive down with one quick stop near Buttonwillow when Matthew switched to Metallica to annoy me as we made our climb over the Grapevine and down into the valley north of Los Angeles. We stopped at the hotel and then headed to campus a few blocks away.
My friends had packed a mini fridge with wine coolers and beer snagged with a fake ID. It might have been the long drive or the cheap drinks, but drowsiness made it hard to follow the conversations with my friends. I leaned my head onto Matthew’s shoulder and sank down against the wall.
“Are you okay?” Matthew asked as he pushed my head up off his shoulder. “Had too much to drink already?”
I didn’t think so. I had a high tolerance, not like Matthew’s whose cheeks burned red after half a beer.
“Not drunk,” I said.
“You look pale or something and you’re covered in goosebumps,” he said. “Maybe you’re sick or something.”
“No, I’m fine. Let’s hang out more,” I said, though the thought of a heavy hotel comforter enticed me.
“Let’s go.”
He took the car keys from me and I followed.
In the hotel room, Matthew brought me a glass of water and joked about tucking me in, then moved across the room to the other double bed. With the lights off, our breaths fell out of sync. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of Matthew’s slow and steady exhalations.
“You’re so noisy when you sleep, man,” Matthew said in the morning. “I don’t envy any boyfriend of yours.”
I hadn’t had a boyfriend since freshman year, a relationship that had ended badly and made me leery of falling in love.
I grunted in response to Matthew’s chiding, still shivering under the blankets. He sat on the side of the bed and the mattress shifted me toward him as he reached out a hand to my forehead.
“I think you still have a fever. We should get you to a doctor.”
“It’s Saturday. Nothing’s open.”
Matthew found an urgent care clinic place that took my insurance across the Los Angeles County line in Fontana. I sat in the passenger seat shivering under a blanket from the room as truck drivers pulled around my slow car on Interstate 10, heading to Las Vegas and places further east. When we arrived at the clinic, patients sat with heads hung low in the dank waiting room. At best they were frustrated to be spending countless hours waiting for a doctor on a weekend. At worst they questioned if they should have gone straight to the ER. I didn’t think I should have been there at all, among people with open wounds and broken bones. I had a cough and maybe a fever.
We settled into cushioned seats with geometric patterns. Matthew put his arm around me in a way he never did, like the urgent care dissolved some boundary between us, and I leaned into the unexpected comfort. This doting version of Matthew sat unusually quiet next to me, our normal joking and teasing demeanor on pause for the moment.
When a nurse called me in, I stood up and the warmth of Matthew had provided dissipated and left me chilled again.
“Your boyfriend is cute,” the nurse said as she took my temperature and blood pressure.
“He’s just a friend.”
“Not many friends hang out at urgent care all day,” she said.
“We’re not from here. He had nowhere else to go.”
The doctor spent less than five minutes before offering a diagnosis.
“Bronchitis,” she said. “Get some cough medicine. Run a humidifier tonight. Get lots of rest. Drink lots of water.”
Matthew stood up as I emerged back into the waiting room.
“What’s the prognosis?” he said.
“Bronchitis. Viral infection, likely.”
“Do you need medicine?”
“The doctor said to take cough syrup, but I don’t want it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was 7 the last time I took cough syrup. I gagged and threw up.”
Matthew stopped at a grocery store and bought a can of chicken soup, a microwave-safe bowl, a case of bottled water and cough syrup.
I pouted and turned toward the window.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
He pulled the plastic seal off the bottle and poured a dose into the cup.
“Take it. I don’t want to hear you coughing all night if I’m gonna have to drive all the way home tomorrow. You can’t drive if you’re still this sick.”
I gave in and took it, then tossed the cup in the bag.
Back at the hotel, I told Matthew to meet up with my friends without me.
“I mean, the only reason you suggested the trip was to meet Lita. There’s a party tonight, and you can hang out with her.”
“Sometimes you’re so dense,” he said.
I didn’t answer, the warmth of the comforter pulling me into sleep.
While we slept, outside in the parking lot an ant picked up on the sweet, artificial grape scent of the cough syrup and invited his pals into my car.
On the side of the road near nowhere, Matthew hopped around and cursed, maybe at the ants or maybe at me. The sweet Matthew, the one from the urgent care, had disappeared. My eyes started to tear up and I thought I might cry. I looked over at Matthew, his brow set in determination as he squatted down next to my car and smashed ants with white paper napkins.
“I have to get all of these little bastards. Every last one.”
Just when a tear was about to escape, instead, a guffaw rose up from my belly and I started laughing. And Matthew stopped what he was doing and smiled for the first time all morning.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This trip was for me, and it’s been miserable. Getting sick, now the ants.”
“The trip wasn’t just for you. You’ll get to England and probably fall for some Brit and forget to even email me.”
“Yep, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
I helped him carry the ant-smeared napkins to a trash can at the edge of the parking lot and we got back into the car to continue north on the Grapevine.
I looked out the window as the hills gave way to swaths of farmland as far as the eye could see on a rural road that ran from his campus down to mine. It had never occurred to me before that he was just a straight shot away.
