Phoebe Will Destroy You Read online

  * * *

  So, after breakfast, Kyle, Uncle Rob, and I got in his pickup and drove into town. It was a gray, overcast day, even though it was June. As we drove, I looked out the window at Seaside in the daylight. It wasn’t the most beautiful place: a lot of junk in people’s yards, and buildings that could use a coat of paint, and car parts and old mattresses stacked up in places. We passed a McDonald’s, which, judging by the many cars outside, was the most popular restaurant in town.

  The Happy Bubble appeared on the right. It was relatively clean and kept up. The sign had bubbles on it, the largest bubble with a big yellow happy face inside. There were two cars waiting to get washed, one car entering the tunnel and another car behind it. A Happy Bubble employee was spraying the hubcaps and wheels of the waiting car with a hose. It was a white SUV, I noticed, with a family inside and California plates.

  “Californians love to wash their cars,” Kyle told me.

  We pulled into the back parking lot. Kyle already had his gray Happy Bubble shirt on, with a patch that said “Kyle” on it in cursive writing. For pants he had on black Dickies, which the other guys wore also. And black sneakers. So that was the uniform. I would need to get that stuff too.

  We parked behind the main building, and I followed Kyle and Uncle Rob into the office. Everything in the place was old: the chairs, the magazines, the notices stuck to the wall behind the counter. It was like the Quick-Stop, worn down but also cozy and familiar in a way. There were donuts in a pink box, and some not very fresh-looking coffee in a coffee maker.

  “All right, let’s see if we’ve got a shirt for you,” said Uncle Rob, taking me into a storage room. He found a Happy Bubble shirt hanging on a rack. This one said “Chris” on the name patch. He handed it to me; it was a medium and I put it on. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it was close enough. The problem was it was a crappy shirt. 100% polyester. And with threads hanging out on the bottom. It felt scratchy and uncomfortable. But Kyle had the same shirt, and he wasn’t complaining. And the guys outside were wearing them. “Yeah,” I told Uncle Rob. “That feels about right.”

  We went back out to the front. There were no more cars, so the sprayer guy, Mike, shut off his hose and took a break. He was older, a grown man, with a mustache and a hardness in his face. He pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and lit one, holding it clenched in his teeth for a few seconds while he tucked in his shirt.

  Kyle showed me how the car wash worked. When a car first pulled up, you sprayed the tires and the hubcaps and along the bottom of the chassis to knock off any mud or dirt. Then, after they paid, you guided them onto a conveyer belt that pulled them through the tunnel. The car needed to be in neutral, and the car windows had to be closed. That was the most important thing. Kyle described a couple times when the windows were left open. These were stories that had obviously been told often: a guy getting his sunglasses blasted off by the side sprayer, or the big roller dropping down into a sunroof and yanking off a woman’s wig, or a cat jumping out an open window and getting sucked into the vacuum intake (it lived).

  Kyle walked me farther into the tunnel and showed me how the machines actually worked. How the big rollers moved against the sides of the car. How the “mitters”—strips of heavy cloth—swept back and forth, cleaning the windshield and the hood. When we got to the other end of the tunnel, I saw that the California SUV was still there. The driver and his family had gone inside, and another Happy Bubble employee, a younger guy, was vacuuming the carpets inside.

  “That’s Justin,” said Kyle. I watched Justin work. It didn’t look like fun, getting down on your hands and knees on the wet concrete to vacuum under the seats of somebody’s car. No sooner did I think that than Kyle said, “That’s probably where my dad will have you start.”

  4

  At twelve thirty Uncle Rob bought everybody lunch from the Freezie Burger down the street. As I sat eating with Kyle, Mike, and Justin, I wondered what my friends at home would think of all this. I wondered what Kate would think.

  Kate was my ex-girlfriend. We’d broken up six months before, mostly because things had gotten so intense and we needed a break. That’s what we told each other. We’d been together during the worst of my mom stuff and the Richard drama, including the night the cops arrested my dad for punching him in the face in front of our house. I’d slept over at Kate’s a couple times when things got too crazy.

  Kate probably wouldn’t think much of the Happy Bubble scene. She would never say that, of course. She was always supportive. But the idea of me working in a car wash, wearing a crappy uniform shirt, vacuuming old French fries and Cheetos out of people’s cars? That wouldn’t seem like much of a summer. Especially to her, who would be on Orcas Island with her grandparents, who had a summer house there, and a tennis court and a sailboat.

  When I’d finished my cheeseburger, I got out my phone and thought about texting her for some pity points. But I decided not to because that had been part of the problem, too much information on my end, too much burdening her with my family shit. As Dr. Snow said, sometimes people—young people especially—just want to be carefree and not think about other people’s problems, not even their boyfriend’s. Which I understood.

  * * *

  When my training day was over, instead of riding home with Uncle Rob, I plugged in my headphones and went for a walk into town. Seaside wasn’t very big. The busy part was Main Street, which had shops and arcades and bumper cars, and then the Promenade that ran along the beach. The big hotels were closest to the ocean, and behind them were some smaller streets with souvenir stores and restaurants. I found a decent-looking coffee shop a couple blocks inland that was closed. An ice cream shop was open, but it was pretty cold already, so I skipped that. I went ahead to the actual beach.

  The beach at Seaside wasn’t like what you see on TV. It went for miles and was wide and windy, and the wind gusts blew the sand into your face. I took off my shoes, despite the cold sand, and walked a bit. When I let a wave come up around my feet, it felt like ice water. Still, I kept walking. I went north. It didn’t take long until tiny Seaside (population 6,000) disappeared behind me. Then it was just sand and dunes and the mountains to my right, the foaming gray sea to my left. I listened to my music and tried to think what I was going to do here for the entire summer. I had a lot of time to kill.

  * * *

  Eventually, I noticed there were houses above the dunes again, and I could see that I’d come to another town. I checked my phone. Gearhart, it said. Population 1,500. I saw a trail that led through the dunes. I walked up it and found myself on Gearhart’s main road. There were houses, and smaller roads, and a grocery store and a few other shops at the one intersection. Since I was off the beach and sheltered from the wind, it wasn’t so cold. It was nice, this little town. The houses were newer and in better shape than in Seaside. The cars were more Volkswagens, Subarus, and BMWs, the kinds of cars you’d see in Eugene.

  I went into the store. They had a deli counter with gourmet cheeses and baguettes and Perrier water, the same stuff my mom always made my dad buy. I was hungry, so I ordered a bagel with cream cheese. The woman was very lively, with her lipstick and red apron; she was chatting with the customers about different things. I got my bagel and paid and thanked her.

  There was a small park across the street. It was still light out, so I sat on a bench and ate my bagel. A seagull appeared, and I gave him a tiny bit of it. Then another seagull appeared, and I gave him a little bit too. Then about twenty seagulls came crowding around, so I stopped doing that. Instead, I changed benches and watched the people in the park. A well-dressed man was walking his dog. A woman ran by in a jogging outfit. She had sunglasses, spandex pants, something strapped to her bicep. She looked like a Eugene person: blond, slender, and fit.

  This was the kind of town Kate’s family might stay in. I imagined Kate sitting with me. She would have gotten a salad, something healthy—her mom was big into organic greens. I liked Kate’s mother,
but we had a difficult history. One of our first encounters was her catching me in their house one night, sleeping in Kate’s bed, during one of my mother’s drama binges. Kate’s mother had freaked out and threatened to call my parents. Kate had to explain to her about my situation at home, and why I was there, and why I couldn’t go back to my own house.

  Then, a couple weeks later, was the famous night that Richard came to our house looking for my mother and my dad punched him in the face and got taken to jail for assault. After that Kate’s mother told me I could stay with them any time I wanted, no questions asked. They even made a little room for me in their basement. At the time I thought how nice of them to help me out. But later, looking back, I could see that was probably the beginning of the end for Kate and me. I mean, Kate’s parents didn’t want her mixed up in stuff like that. Cop cars and fistfights and the neighbors standing in the street. That was no place for their daughter. Of course they were super nice to me, but it was pretty clear the message Kate was getting: Is this the kind of family you want to be part of?

  5

  I bought my black Dickies pants the next day, before my first official shift at the Happy Bubble. I got them at Bill’s Army-Navy shop, which was hidden behind one of the souvenir stores off Main Street. I also found some cheap ($9.99) black sneakers, since that’s what the other guys wore. The shoes didn’t even have a brand; they just said “Made in China” on the insole.

  Then I stopped by the coffee shop down the street and got a caffe latte with almond milk. The coffee at the Happy Bubble hadn’t looked so great. Also, I liked being in a real coffee shop, with real espresso smells like the cafés in Eugene. But when I got to the Happy Bubble, Mike, the older guy, looked at my coffee-to-go cup and frowned. Like, who was I that I couldn’t drink the regular coffee? He and Justin were eating glazed donuts, so I ate one too, to show I wasn’t a total snob. Then we all sat around and waited for customers. It was cold and wet outside; a mist was coming in off the ocean, so nobody was going to get their car washed probably. I said that to Mike, but he shrugged and said that people still got their cars washed. He didn’t know why, maybe because they were on vacation and didn’t know what else to do with themselves.

  Mike went outside for a smoke. Justin scrolled up and down on his cracked phone screen. Uncle Rob eventually called and told us to clean in the tunnel, which was what you did during times with no customers. I mostly stuck with Justin during this. He seemed nicer than Mike, who never stopped smoking. Even when he was doing complicated things with his hands, Mike would still be clenching a cigarette between his teeth and squinting as the smoke went in his eyes.

  I tried to talk to Justin while we wiped the gunk out of the machines. I thought he’d said he went to Seaside High School with Kyle, but now his story was slightly different; he was a year older than Kyle and perhaps hadn’t actually graduated. He didn’t seem eager to clarify, so I didn’t bother him about it.

  I also asked Justin about his left hand, which was missing two fingers. The pinky was totally gone, and the ring finger was about an inch-long stub. He didn’t want to talk about that, either. “Hunting accident,” he finally said. It freaked me out a little, watching him hold things. Sometimes when he gripped the vacuum hose, his left hand looked like a claw. At one point he disappeared for a few minutes, and when he came back, he smelled like weed. This didn’t surprise me.

  In the afternoon, the sun came out and we got a few customers. Kyle was in charge, and he told me to work with Justin, vacuuming and cleaning people’s windows. So I did that. It cost extra to get your car vacuumed so not everyone did it. But most people did.

  The good part of vacuum duty was how powerful the vacuum was. It would suck up everything in the car if you weren’t careful. “Ya gotta get used to it,” said Justin, yelling over the sound of it. I was struggling to vacuum a minivan. The hose kept getting stuck to the floor. You’d pull really hard to get it off, and it would get stuck to the seat. Then it would get stuck to you, sucking up your arm hairs or half your shirt. It was also extremely loud, so I couldn’t hear what Justin was telling me as it swallowed three quarters and a small Star Wars figure out of somebody’s cup holder.

  “What do we do about spare change?” I yelled to Justin from under the dashboard.

  “Suck it up,” he yelled back. “We’ll dig it out later. We’ll split it.”

  “Do the customers care?”

  He shrugged. “Not that I ever noticed.”

  I saw another cluster of dimes and pennies, and reluctantly sucked them up.

  “If they really wanted it, they’d pick it up, right?” reasoned Justin.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  I pulled back the floor pad and uncovered two more quarters and a nickel and a dime. I looked over at Justin. He pointed to suck them up. So I did.

  * * *

  I got off at five that day and walked into town again. It was still sunny out; the streets were full of tourists. I stopped by the coffee shop and got a piece of crumb cake. I was wondering if anyone my age ever hung out at the coffee shop, but it didn’t seem like it. It was mostly old people or clueless tourists standing around, blocking the line and not knowing what a macchiato was.

  After that I walked the 2.4 miles back to the Reillys’ and took a shower. I was pretty dirty from crawling around on the wet cement with my vacuum hose. I’d got some machine grease on my arm somehow and had to scrub it super hard to get it off.

  But overall it felt good to put in a full day’s work and be pleasantly tired afterward. It made me feel like a real adult. Also, the vibe of the Happy Bubble, it wasn’t like folding sweaters at the Gap. It was a working-man’s job. Heavy machinery was involved. And hard physical labor. Which made it more satisfying in a way.

  When I was all clean, I went down to my basement room and texted Kate. I told her about my first days in Seaside, making fun of it a little, which she usually appreciated. That was one thing she liked about me, I could always make her laugh.

  Later, I went upstairs for dinner, which was mac and cheese and Aunt Judy’s special meat loaf, which was delicious. Then I watched the Mariners baseball game with Kyle and Uncle Rob. This wasn’t the most exciting thing, but I liked hearing Uncle Rob and Kyle talk about baseball strategy. They knew a lot about it.

  6

  The first social thing I did in Seaside was with Emily. That was on Saturday night. Kyle was at Oregon State for the weekend; he was already working out with his college baseball team, even though he’d just graduated from high school three weeks before. So Emily got stuck with me. She was going with some friends to a movie, and her mother suggested they take me along.

  I thought Emily had been avoiding me a little. Not that I blamed her. She was fifteen, and it was probably awkward to have her boy cousin suddenly show up and be living in her house and taking showers in her shower.

  Since her mother told her to invite me, I made an excuse to let Emily off the hook. But Aunt Judy heard me and yelled from the kitchen that she needed me to go, because I could drive. So then I had to.

  I drove Emily in Aunt Judy’s Toyota. We stopped at another house to pick up her three friends: Jace, Kelsey, and Lauren. They came running out of the house and jumped into the back seat.

  “Jace!” said Kelsey, as they squeezed in. “Are you going to text Zach or not!?”

  “I told you, I’m not!” said Jace, who was the tallest of the three.

  “But you have to!” insisted Lauren. “He talked to you at the party. This is your chance!”

  “You guys have to put your seat belts on,” I said from the driver’s seat.

  The three girls dug around for their seat belts.

  “But I don’t know what to say!” said Jace.

  “Say anything,” said Lauren. “Ask him what he’s doing tonight.”

  “But he’ll think I like him!” said Jace.

  “But you do like him!”

  “You have to do something,” said Kelsey. “Or nothing will ever ha
ppen.”

  “Willa Flores isn’t afraid to text boys,” said Lauren. “And now she’s with Luke.”

  Everyone agreed that Willa Flores had the right approach. From the silence, I assumed Jace was typing something.

  “What did you write?” asked Kelsey.

  “I wrote, what’s up. But then I deleted it.”

  “Jace, you have to do this!”

  “But I can’t!”

  “Give me your phone!”

  “NO! GIVE IT BACK! Jeez, you guys!”

  “He might like you. What if he likes you, and you don’t do anything? You’ll regret it for the rest of your life!”

  “If he liked me, then he would text me, not the other way around!” said Jace.

  “You have to make boys like you,” said Lauren.

  I pulled into the Cineplex parking lot. We were early, so I took my time looking for a parking spot.

  “So what do I say?”

  “Say: Hey, Zach. What’s up? We’re going to the movies.”

  “Just that?”

  “Yes, just that.”

  “But it doesn’t ask him anything,” said Jace. “It’s not a real question.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a real question. You’re just starting a conversation.”

  “You guys sound like fifth graders,” said Emily. She was in the front seat beside me and hadn’t spoken through any of this. “Just write the stupid text and shut up about it!”

  There was a brief silence as Jace typed into her phone.

  “Okay . . . ,” said Kelsey. “Now press send.”

  “I can’t,” said Jace.

  “Just do it.”

  “Okay, I will,” said Jace. “Don’t touch me!”

  “Send! Hit send!”

  “Okay, okay. Gawd. I did it, it’s done!”

  There was a great sigh of relief from the three girls.