Synesthesia: Chapter Eighteen

serial fiction

Image: Lana Kot, Unsplash, edited by me in Canva

I dropped the pink baseball cap on the filthy tiled floor and ran out of the restroom. I searched the front entrance area inside, then walked through the shuddering automatic doors to check outside.

Gas Stove and Amber were nowhere to be found.

“Fuck,” I breathed into the hot desert air.

“What’s wrong?” a familiar voice asked from behind me.

Fucking Hoka guy.

“Come on,” I ordered him, and he followed me across the parking lot toward the Mustang. The white school bus still sat in the same spot next to the Mustang, dusty and silent.

But then the front door folded open with a wheeze, and Amber stumbled out, her face as pale as the sun-bleached paint of the bus. Waves of odor emanated off of her, alternating like the colors of a police light: wet dog, watermelon, cut grass. Wet dog, watermelon, cut grass.

“Zode, he’s gone!” she wailed, her eyes as wide as melons, looking like she might collapse at any moment like a Jenga tower picked full of holes. “I walked in and he… and he saw me and…”

She wasn’t making any sense. She walked in and saw who?

“Hang on, slow down,” I urged, reaching for her arm without thinking, something in me needing to save her from collapse. “Who saw you? What happened?”

She gulped down an impending sob, but her eyes were rimmed with tears. She took a breath, then exhaled a summer full of watermelon.

“Jacob,” she whispered. “He was here.”

Then she leaned into me and bawled into my chest.

I wrapped one arm, then the other, around her scrawny body. The bones of her back and shoulders shuddered through her skin as she wept.

Hoka guy reached one long, lithe arm out and stroked Amber’s head.

The watermelon smell of her heartbreak was so thick, I could taste it.

---

After Amber ran out of tears to cry, I asked her to show me the bus.

She wrenched the door open with a strength I hadn’t expected, then stepped up into the sweltering darkness of the bus’s interior. The hot air curled toward me, reeking of sour milk and wood smoke.

I placed my foot on the first step and shifted my weight onto it, moving slowly into the gloom.

“He was here,” Amber repeated, pointing into the darkness.

I squinted and blinked, waiting for my eyes to fully adjust to the dim interior, which was lit only by the open front door and the numerous small scratches in the white paint that covered every window. The original bus seats had all been removed and replaced by a few threadbare couches that might have qualified as vintage in some parallel universe where they had been better treated.

I didn’t understand what she was telling me. “He was here, and where’d he go?” I asked stupidly.

A gust of generic soap scent hit me.

“He left,” Amber seethed, and I realized she was pointing toward the back door, included by the bus’s designers as an emergency exit for children in desperate circumstances. “He saw me and he ran away.”

She was a table of cut watermelon again, and for a moment she broke apart into deep, aching sobs before sniffling herself back into some sort of composure.

“You mean he ran away from you?” Hoka guy asked. He was standing behind me again, irritatingly close to the back of my neck. “Aren’t you his mom?”

The watermelon buffet evaporated, replaced by hotel soap that made my nostrils burn.

“You stay the fuck out of this!” Amber screeched, and lavender and cardamom invaded the domain of the soap. “Disgusting piece of shit! I know all about you and what you like to do to girls like me! We shoulda killed you and left you at the motel! Breast cancer awareness! Ha! Yaraceli told me about you. How much you took from her. How much pain she was in for days afterward. It’s not too late to kill you right now!”

She lunged for him, but I caught her in my arms and held her as she fought to break out of my grasp and attack the fitness enthusiast and half-marathon aficionado.

Hoka guy’s wet-dog smell of confusion shifted briefly into fear, then gradually faded into the unleaded gasoline stink of finding something amusing.

The gasoline smell reminded me: I still had no idea where Gas Stove was.

“Okay, everybody cut it out right now!” I snapped, and surprisingly, both Amber and Hokas obeyed. In the silence of the empty bus, I could hear the three of us breathing, but nothing more.

I just needed a few moments to think.

Finally, I said to Amber, still tangled up in my arms, “Did he actually see who you were? Or did he maybe just hear someone come in and run away?”

Amber was silent for a long minute.

“Maybe he didn’t see me,” she said at last. “But I saw him,” she quickly added, her body tensing.

“Okay,” I said. “So we know he’s around here somewhere. Right? It’s a start. We’re close.”

I hoped this would appease her. She said nothing, but she glowered with a faint soap aroma that told me she wasn’t happy with the current situation.

I cleared my throat, and a river of sweat coming down my forehead crossed my eyebrow and flowed into my left eye.

“I don’t know where Gas Stove went,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could muster.

Amber swore and tore herself free from my grip, then pushed past me and Hoka guy and off the bus.

I followed, scrunching my eyes against the painfully bright midday sun of the Sonoran Desert.

Ahead of me, Amber stood in the parking lot looking bereft, turning her head first one direction and then the other, her hands at her sides closing over nothing, then opening again, still empty.