Mostly True Tuesdays

I was wearing the outfit he got me for Christmas at Contempo Casuals which was a big deal because 17 year old boys don't usually buy their girlfriends clothes and my friends, they all squealed when they heard. The top was orange and the pants were printed. I did not like the outfit but I wore it and we sat outside of school while he held the slip of paper with the phone number in his hand.

I want my car back, he said, so I gave him ten cents and he called the guy who he'd sold it to. I sat on the curb in the parking lot. I remember the gravel around my shoes but I cannot remember the print of my pants.
It only took the guy a half hour to get to our high school but he was not in the car but another car: an El Camino. The car's in Petaluma, he said, so we climbed in even though Petaluma was an hour away and let the guy drive us.
He took the backroads. I sat in the middle of the bench seat and for some reason the guy was talking about Hitler. Lampshades made of skin. Trucks and Nazis, engines, or maybe it was ingenuity. I dug the fingernails of my right hand into Bryan's thigh as we sped around curves and hills and into valleys. Nobody knows where we are, I thought, or I think I thought. Surely I must have thought that? In the car of a man whose phone number was only on a slip of paper in Bryan's pocket? Mostly I thought about how I hated what I was wearing and how gross the man was in the way that all adult men are gross to teenage girls.

When we got to Petaluma it was already dark and the man went inside his house real quick to do something. Bryan and I looked at each other and smiled. This is funny, right? one of us said. Weird, huh? All the world a story to be told during 3rd period. So we waited there outside standing on a Rorschach of oil in an otherwise empty driveway. My outfit had not come with a jacket and I was cold in just my orange shirt. I wonder how much longer this is going to take, and then the man came out and said the car was up in the mountains, that we had to drive a ways to get it.Can we use your phone? Bryan asked, we need to call our parents to tell them we'll be home late, but the man said no, his phone wasn't working, and opened the door to the El Camino. Run, Bryan said, run, just like that, not an exclamation point but a period. Run. And so I did, we did, we ran and we ran and we ran until--I don't know? Until we came to a bus stop and the next thing I knew we were doubled over laughing in the back of a bus with fluorescent lighting not really knowing if we were going in the right direction but we were laughing. And then twenty years later I wrote this story thinking it was the 1970 Chevy Cheyenne with the airbrushed wave on the dashboard that we were trying to get back only to read it to Bryan who told me that no, it was the 1974 Chevy Caprice with the fishbone spray painted on the hood, and that he doesn't remember ever buying me an outfit for Christmas at Contempo Casuals.