Stowaway

Mom got so mad at my itsy bitsy teenie weenie fluorescent pink hey-boys-come-fuck-me bikini. Guess her stupid rule came back to haunt her, didn’t it? “If you want this junk so badly,” she’d totally droned, “buy it with your own money.”
But that was gift shops ago. She was referring to some dumb bottle opener keychain with my name engraved on it. SARA. No “H.” Most mementos always put the stupid “H” at the end, so when I saw this keychain emblazoned with my name, I was all like—Oh, finally, someone actually spelled it right. That’s when Mom’s Sunday school upbringing decided to suddenly kick in for once in her life. She put her foot down, saying, “I can’t quite justify buying a bottle opener for a fourteen-year-old.” It’s not like having some dumb keychain would send me downward-spiraling into alcoholism or whatever, but she wouldn’t budge.
Like $1.99 would break our vacation’s budget, anyway. She bought Peter that stupid hat that said BEACH BUM, a pair of pale butt cheeks under it, but Mom apparently didn’t have any moral quandary over that particular purchase. She can be such a fucking hypocrite sometimes.
I spotted the shoestrings dangling on the rack back at the last hotel, along with all the Budweiser beach blankets and god-awful T-shirts.
CHECK OUT MY LADY NUTS.
I NEED AN ALCOHOLIDAY.
SHELL YEAH, BEACHES.
That’s what I totally thought they were, at first. Neon lime shoestrings. Cotton candy laces. Just a few loose threads suspended from a coat hanger . . . but no, those were totally meant to cover your boobs. As in, that’s it. Nothing else. Just some fluorescent floss and a pair of triangles. Nipple pyramids. I knew it would piss Mom off, but what was she going to do? Stop me? It was my money. If I wanted any of “this junk so badly,” I could “just buy it myself.” Her words.
Now I never take it off. It’s my highlighter pink protest for the duration of our family vacation. If I’m going to be stuck in the car for two weeks, suffering next to my dipshit baby brother and his incessant nose-picking, then I’m wearing my brand-new bikini through our whole road trip, rain or fucking shine, and nobody can stop me.
“At least put a shirt on while we’re in the car,” Mom grumbled from the front seat. She wouldn’t look at me, couldn’t grace me with eye contact, speaking out the windshield instead.
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like anyone’s watching.”
“Truckers are watching. Biker gangs are watching. Anyone who drives by is watching . . .”
Nobody’s noticed me. Yet. No sixteen wheelers honking their horns or bearded, beer-bellied Hell’s Angels revving their engines as they pass our car on the highway.
The bikini definitely has taken some getting used to. At first, I kept covering myself with my arms. Too many exposed moles. The seatbelt saws at my chest, chafing against my skin.
Dad hasn’t waded into the bikini discourse, aside from suggesting I should put on suntan lotion, even in the car. “You’re destined for skin cancer without it.”
He’s more focused on the road, to be honest. Reaching the next destination. No HoJo’s for our fam, no sir. It’s been backroads and roach motels for the Pendletons all the way. Dad’s so hell-bent on his Americana Tour, steering clear of the interstates as much as possible for what he says is “a real good look at what’s left of the country.” “The forgotten America,” he calls it. “Let’s see it before it all fades away.”
Whatever that means.
I’ve sulked next to just about every pool within a three-thousand-mile radius of our house. At least now I can do it in style. See how Mom feels about all the gents checking me out. I don’t care who’s looking. Let the dads all stare for all I care. I definitely don’t. Care, that is. The acne-riddled hotel clerk with the protruding Adam’s apple can stare too, if he wants to. Or the dudes who seem to be living out of the back of their trucks, or the traveling bible salesman, or any of them. I just don’t care. Hey, everybody, let’s all have ourselves a poolside peepshow!
This was supposed to be my Spring Break. We could’ve gone anywhere, but no, we all had to pile into the car and make every single pitstop Mom and Dad wanted, just to see the world’s biggest ball of yarn or some prehistoric tar pit in the middle of nowhere. I was missing my friends for this?
The war started between Mom and me after she took my phone away. Dad made some grand sweeping statement at the beginning of the trip that he didn’t want to see our faces buried in our screens while there was a whole world just waiting outside our windows for us to witness, but he didn’t enforce it or anything. That was up to Mom. Dad focused on driving while she always got to be Bad Cop. We battled over who gets to charge their phone, and I lost out because she said she needed hers to navigate, but Dad won’t even let her turn on the map app. He says, “that defeats the whole purpose,” which I completely agree with, taking his side much to Mom’s chagrin. She still wouldn’t let me use the charger. She took my phone away after three warnings, which I didn’t really think she’d do because who even does something like that, but here we are. I told her I was taking pictures of our trip to share with my friends—you know, all my friends, who are all having the time of their lives in Daytona with their families right now? Not like there’s any reception out here on the backroads, anyway. It’s been zero bars all week.
“Hand it over,” Mom had said. “Now.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know, hon,” she said. “Read a book.”
I picked up some dumb paperback left behind at the last hotel. Someone must’ve read it then abandoned it. There was a whole shelf of forgotten novels. Beach reads. Boddice rippers. That sort of thing. I found a copy of A Million Little Pieces and figured I’d give it a spin. The cover was curling over, the spine cracked back so you could barely read the title anymore. But it was about drugs and I could tell Mom didn’t want me reading it, so I had that going for me. She asked to read the book description on the back, so I gave it to her and watched her face pucker as she took it all in. “I remember this,” she said, tossing it back. “Turns out it wasn’t true.”
“So?” I asked. “Still pretty stimulating.” To prove my point, I read a particularly heinous passage from the backseat for all to enjoy. The one about the teeth. The root canal stuff. Peter started crying, so Mom made me stop. “What’s everyone’s problem?” I asked. “This is literature.”
“No,” Mom retorted, “that’s just you pushing your brother’s buttons.”
“You could just give me my phone back . . .”
“Not happening.”
Every motel has the same setup: some concrete pool just off to the side of the parking lot, wrapped in a rusted chain-link fence. No umbrellas, so the sun soaks up into the asphalt. Plastic lawn chairs. Not beach chairs. Lawn chairs. There is no ocean out here. No sand. All we have are these roadside oases. Concrete beaches just next to the highway. The water usually has a slight greenish tint to it. Who knows the last time anyone dumped any chlorine in. I can always feel the algae clinging to my skin whenever I climb out, totally coated in this sticky thin film of slime that dries into a coagulated crust, like soda. There’s always a bevy of dead bugs drifting along the water’s surface. Fist-sized mosquitoes. Beetles paddling on their backs.
These pools are supposed to be the main draw for most traveling families. Some motels have a putt-putt set up or free HBO, never any Wi-Fi, but the pools are the real lure. Always with a sign, NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, posted on the fence. There are always a couple kids splashing around, floating on some inflatable unicorn. It’s a miracle there aren’t any drowned babies bobbing along with the bugs. Mom makes Peter put on these inflatable armbands that make him look like a total ’tard. As soon as we pull into the hotel, or motel, or no-tell, li’l Petey leaps out of the car and races to the pool faster than Mom can blow up his rubber biceps.
Take a wild guess who’s inevitably put on babysitting detail?
“Keep an eye on your brother,” Mom said.
“Why?”
“You want to unload the car instead?”
“Fiiine.”
I could tell Mom was hating our vacation just as much as I was. Maybe even more. The only people who seemed to be enjoying themselves, or pretending to enjoy themselves, were Dad and Peter. Mom seethed through each state. I almost felt bad for her. Almost.
I plopped down in a lawn chair next to the pool while Pete had the water all to himself. Nobody else was out here, thank God. I had a pair of sunglasses that kept the rest of the world at bay, just in case. I had dragged my paperback halfway across the country at this point but I’d barely made a dent into it. Most days I don’t even open it. Just carrying it around gives me an excuse not to engage with anyone. I’ll just flip to a rando page and stare off somewhere, anywhere else other than the words, hiding behind my sunglasses and just tuning the fuck out.
“Good book?”
Where the hell had he come from? The skin on my arms prickled from his proximity. One second, I was all alone—the next, there was someone else, a stranger, invading my space. Probably somebody’s dad, bored with his own family, singling me out and hoping to flirt. Ick.
I side-glanced the guy but pretended not to’ve heard him. He wasn’t in my field of vision, even if I could feel him close by. I didn’t want to turn my head and acknowledge that I’d heard him, not yet, but I still couldn’t quite clock his location. Which was weird. Where was he?
I felt his eyes.
On me.
I suddenly found myself wishing I was wearing a T-shirt. Too much of my skin was exposed to this creep. The laces of my bikini slowly constricted around my torso, the strings tightening like a garrot at my chest, squeezing against my ribs until I couldn’t breathe.
“Never read it.” This guy clearly wasn’t taking the hint, so I closed the book and turned.
That’s when I found him.
Actually saw him.
He was sitting two lawn chairs down from me. There was an empty seat between us. Which was weird. Again. Just a second ago, I could’ve sworn he was sitting right next to me. Leaning over. Sharing the air between us.
How was he so far away?
I had to bring my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun to see him, almost as if he was hiding behind the light, his silhouette keeping his features in the shadows.
What I could make out was handsome enough, so at least he had that going for him. He looked like he was in his thirties, I think. I don’t know, it was hard to tell. Older guys just look old to me. I have this affliction called “adult blindness.” When men reach a certain age, they all begin to blend together for me. He could’ve been thirty or fifty or whatever and I really wouldn’t even know the difference.
He was alone. That much I could tell. No beach towels or inflatable pool toys. No bottle of sunscreen or six-pack of Bud. He wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. Just dull adult clothes.
“. . . Well?”
“Well, what?” Ugh. That was the best I could do. Echo his question like some dumb parrot.
“Do you like the book?”
“It’s okay, I guess.” My shoulders sprung up in an involuntary shrug.
“Just okay? I’ll pass. Life’s too short for ‘just okay.’ I want something that’ll change my life.”
That could’ve easily been the end of the conversation. I was already feeling the urge to pick the book up and hide behind its pages, but he kept looking at me. Staring at me. Not at my bikini or anything. Just me. At me. Like, my eyes or something. There’s a difference. He seemed genuinely curious. About me. It felt weird. I didn’t really know what to say, so I said nothing.
This guy seemed to live in that silence. Like, he was totally okay to just sit and stew in that awkward quiet for as long as he wanted. He smiled even. Just basking in it all. He knew he was in control of the quiet and it was going to be his decision to break it, like popping a tiny bubble of saliva clinging to my lip with just the tip of his finger—plip.
“So where you heading?”
“West,” I said, even if I had no idea if we were coming or going. It was totally one of those noncommittal answers that doesn’t give away too much information. I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t about to give him our home address or anything. But it was enough of a bread crumb to keep the conversation going. He could come back for more, if he wanted. Follow me, if he wanted.
“You with your family?”
“Yeah.” I turned to look over my shoulder, just to see if I could pinpoint my parents. They must’ve still been checking in to our room. Unloading the car. They certainly weren’t here, protecting their kids against the poolside advances of some potential serial killer. Thanks, guys.
“Must be a drag.”
“You said it.” He didn’t say anything in response to that, so instead of stewing in even more awkward silence, I managed to ask, “How about you? Are you with your family?”
Ugh. Even I could hear the yearning in my voice. It was too much. I’d given him too much. I could feel the blood rush straight to my solar plexus, this rash spreading across my chest and here I am, wearing a shoestring for the love of God and I can’t hide it. I sounded like such a cooze and now I’m full-on blushing and I have nothing to cover myself up and I’m so—
“No family,” he said with the slightest exhale of a laugh. Maybe it was a laugh. “Just me.”
“That must be fun.”
“Sometimes. Feel like I’ve been stuck here for ages, though . . .”
Okay. This was interesting. Here’s this guy, this stranger, offering up a little something of himself. To me. This was the first honest conversation I’d had with anyone in like, days. Weeks.
“Does it get lonely?” I had to ask. “Traveling all by yourself?”
“Depends. Every so often I meet somebody nice. We get to talking and it doesn’t feel so—”
“Sara!” Mom’s voice cut through the parking lot, snapping me out of our conversation. I spun around in my chair to find her standing there, arms planted on both hips. Even from across the lot, I could sense the exasperation seeping out of her pores. She waved me over, beckoning me back to the car with a single sweep of her arm, as if that’s all it took to get me to come trotting. Couldn’t she see I was in the middle of something here? Couldn’t she just, you know, give me a minute to finish my conversation? “And pull Peter out of the water!”
Fuck. Peter. I’d totally forgotten him. Luckily, he was still alive, bopping about the water with his floaties. Not floating face-down or anything. Thank God for small miracles.
“Sorry” I felt all of me blush. My whole body this time, not just my chest. “I gotta go . . .”
“No worries, Sara,” he said—and I could tell, I could just tell, he knew my name didn’t have an “H” at the end of it, saying it so succinctly, so sharp. “You know where to find me.”
It wasn’t until after I left that I realized I didn’t even know his name. I hadn’t asked.
Totally slipped my mind.
He was still there after dinner. Just sitting by the pool by himself. Nobody else was around. The sun had sunk down, so the lights kicked on under the water, casting this cerulean sheen across his face. The water was still. Nothing broke the surface except for the dead bugs.
“Hey,” I said. “This pool taken?”
“You came back . . .” I don’t think I went back for him. Not exactly. But I was curious. Just to see if he was a man of his word. From the way he was sitting, I would’ve believed he’d been there this whole time, except he wasn’t sunburned or anything like that. The pool was pretty close to the highway, so everything had a burnt asphalt aroma to it. You could almost taste the tar. The thickness of it clung to my tongue, and in a way I imagined that’s what he tasted like. If we were to kiss, which is totally not what I was expecting to do, but still, if—if—we did, I imagined he’d taste something like the road. Like concrete and exhaust. Like heat waves oscillating off asphalt. Even his skin probably felt rough as pavement. Gravel and broken glass.
“I was hoping you’d find me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, not like there’s much else to do here . . .”
“There’s plenty.” He didn’t offer up any suggestions and it felt weird to ask.
I dipped my legs in the pool this time. The water felt warm. I gently kicked my legs, sending these ripples radiating across the surface. The light now warped and danced, casting these baby blue shadows over his face. Why were his features always hiding from me?
“So have you been, like, staying here a long time?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
“Where are you heading?”
“Don’t know just yet . . . who knows? Maybe I’ll follow you.”
He was flirting. Obviously. But it was the way that he was doing it that felt so—I don’t know—uncharted. Most guys just go in for the kill, “God you’re so hot,” but he was talking in this way that felt both extremely direct and frustratingly indirect at the exact same time. Like, if I called him on it or something, he could easily say I had just misunderstood him and then I’d feel like a total idiot. He was subtle. Casting out these lines like I was a fish he was hoping to lure in.
Finally, I said, “You wouldn’t want to be trapped with my family, trust me.”
“Says who?”
“What?” I suddenly felt bold. “You wanna come with me?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Liar.”
“Who says I’m lying?”
“But it’s . . .” My voice faded. I couldn’t find the right word. Boring. Stupid. Soul-crushing. None of them felt right to say right then. They all sounded like something a kid would say.
“But . . . what? What is it, Sara?” He said my name like he’d known it for years, like we’d been sitting by this pool, stranded at this hotel together forever. Like I was his and he was mine.
“Endless,” I said.
He wasn’t at the pool when we checked out the next morning. I never got to say goodbye. Never got his name. It’s strange, but the farther away from the hotel we got, the further his features faded away from my memory. I couldn’t remember what he looked like.
If I ever knew at all.
The rest of the day was spent pretty much in the car. Dad found the world’s biggest ketchup bottle in Collinsville, so we just had to stop there and snap off a few pictures.
I held my paperback in my hands during the ride but never really opened it. I just pressed my temple against the window and stared out at the world slipping by. I rolled down my window at one point to take in a deep breath, just inhale the aroma of the road through my nose, take the highway into my lungs, but Mom scolded me for letting all the A/C out.
The next hotel wasn’t any different than the last hotel. Same set up. Same pool.
Same man.
When I first spotted him sitting in the lawn chair, I accidentally dropped my suitcase. Mom told me to pick it up but I wasn’t really listening.
He was here. Sitting by the pool, like always. Like nothing had changed.
Staring at me.
Smiling.
I didn’t go to the pool right away. I waited until after we’d checked in, and even then I wasn’t in a rush. Peter kept begging to go to the pool, whining like a tea kettle on the stove.
“Sara,” Mom pleaded, her face buried in our bed for the night, her muffled voice seeping out from under the pillow, “take your brother to the pool, pleeease?”
Had he gotten in his car and driven ahead of us? Had he somehow checked in before we did? How did he know this was where we’d stop for the night? It couldn’t just be a coincidence.
Was he following us? Following me?
Hotel to hotel?
Pool by pool?
I almost said something to Dad, but I knew I’d be blamed for ruining our trip by seducing some total stranger with my choice in poolside apparel. Somehow this would all be my fault.
Other people were at the pool, thank God. Kids splashed in the water. There wasn’t anything he could do to me. Not in broad daylight. Not with so many other families around.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Who says I ever left you?”
“I’m going to tell the manager you’re following my family. They’ll call the cops.”
“Sure. You could do that.”
Okay, that wasn’t the reaction I expected. He didn’t seem to be worried at all. He just seemed happy to see me again.
See me.
“. . . Who are you?”
“Someone stuck on the road. Just like you.”
“What do you want?”
“What you want,” he said. “Someone to talk to.”
“If I see you at the next hotel, I’m telling my Dad and he’ll—”
“Who are you talking to?”
It was Peter. In his pajamas. Picking his nose. The sun had gone down. The pool was empty. It looked just like the last pool, which looked like the pool just before it, and on and on.
Wasn’t I supposed to look after Peter while he went swimming? Or was that yesterday?
Which hotel was this? How many pools had there been?
“Mom says it’s time to come inside,” Peter prodded.
“Go away.”
“But Mom said to—”
“I said go!”
I stopped wearing my bikini. Not that Mom noticed. She hasn’t said much of anything to me for the last few days—I think it’s been days—on the road. She just stares out her window. We all do. Everyone’s been so quiet in the car lately, like we know something’s changed.
Mom knows. She senses it. Smells it, maybe. I’m not a little girl anymore. I don’t need a stupid bathing suit to prove it. Whatever’s been unlocked within me happened at one of these rundown hotels and I think that scares her. When she turns around in her seat to look at me now, I just stare back. No whiny retort. No pithy comeback. She doesn’t recognize me anymore.
Where did her little girl go? Oops, sorry, she must’ve gotten left behind at the last hotel . . .
Should Dad pull over? Turn around and go back? Nah, it’s been miles now . . .
We’ve all come so far.
Seen so much.
I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a woman now.
He told me so.
He was waiting for me at the next hotel. And the next. Wherever we pull in, it’s like he’s been sitting next to the pool all along. Just waiting. Smiling as soon as he lays his eyes on me.
We talk about all kinds of things. I learned that he’d been stuck at that one hotel—where I first found him—for years. Maybe even longer. “Time sure loses shape out here,” he said.
I was the first person to see him, he said. Actually see him. Which is weird ‘cause I still couldn’t tell you what he looks like. Couldn’t describe his features. I don’t know if that’s true, but I want to believe it. Believe him. That means I’m special, then. Different than all the rest.
I was the first to see him. And he sees me. For who I am.
A woman.
Some of the things he says don’t really make much sense, but none of this makes any sense. None of this feels real. But here we are, sharing the road together. The endless road.
He tells me about the rooms. Every hotel room we stay in together. Everything that’s ever happened inside them. Things that, if you knew, really knew, you’d never check into a hotel again. He points out the bloodstains under the beds. The brown spots speckling the mattresses. The moles of mildew. The solar flares of urine stains radiating out beneath the bed sheets. The sun patches of dried blood. The rusted crust just under the bathroom sinks, still clinging to the faucet. All the nooks and crannies where the bleach couldn’t reach. The hidden crevices the cleaning ladies never found.
These rooms are bad places. This is where he’s lived. Where he always lived. He calls these hotels home.
But now he wants to come home with me.
Whenever I try to change the subject and ask him why he was stuck at that first hotel, he closes up. It’s weird because he’s so open about everything else—”an open book,” he said—just not about that.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, “because we found each other.”
I imagine he must’ve been left behind, like a brush or book you forget in your room, abandoned beneath the bed until the cleaning lady picks it up and tosses it in the lost and found. I imagine him as some forgotten item accidentally stranded at the hotel until someone—me—came along and claimed him. Books get left behind at hotels all the time. When somebody finishes their paperback, rather than throw it out in the trash, they just leave it for someone else to pick up and flip through. They pass it along. You never know where it might end up.
Who it ends up with.
“Where are you?” he asks me. “You seem distant . . .”
Miles away.
Tomorrow we’ll finally make our way home.
Dad mapped out the rest of our trip and he says we’ll reach our house in less than eight hours, as long as we wake up early enough and don’t make any more pit stops.
“We’ll all be sleeping in our own beds tomorrow night,” he said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Hallelujah,” was all Mom said.
I don’t have the heart to tell him. I know I need to. Say goodbye. But I don’t know how he’ll take it. If it’ll hurt his feelings or something worse. I don’t know.
But he can’t come home with me. He can’t.
So I end up saying nothing.
I say nothing for the rest of the ride home. All eight hours.
All the way home.
Mom’s breath catches as soon as Dad pulls into our driveway. She sees it first. I lean forward in my seat and glance out the windshield, even though I don’t need to see.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asks. He doesn’t know yet. Doesn’t see.
“The front door’s open,” Mom says.

Clay McLeod Chapman writes novels, comic books, and children’s books, as well as for film and TV. He is the author of the horror novels The Remaking and Whisper Down the Lane.