At our carefully planned rest stop, Emma and Eleanor, nearly inseparable themselves, giggled to themselves as they picked out and Emma bought what would seem even to the most sugar hungry to be too much candy. Eleanor’s parents were not rich, and that in an expensive private school as ours made her feel always slightly out of place. Her finances felt to her like a dark secret that she confided in Evony and Davynn late one night on a school trip to DC. She lived in a small house on Westminster Avenue, she had two sisters, and though she was as quiet as a mouse, she played the piano like a queen. Her quietness too she carried like a burden, and none but her closest friends would often hear her talk.
The rest of us easily paired off as well. The strange group we had gathered was made up of these pairs with tenuous connections between them. It seemed odd that this had happened. Senior trips took longer than two months to plan and were talked about since the beginning of the year, not since there were four extra spaces in a grey rental van. But Emma had wanted to take a trip, and she had wanted to take a big trip. She gathered and convinced her friends, but all others she recklessly asked had other plans. But Emma wanted a bigger trip, with more people and more to do, so Evony arranged to rent an eight-person van and asked me quietly to bring three of my own. Those I could convince stopped at two, so Ansel would extend the offer to his closest friend, Joseph, and that, it seemed, was the strangest part of the trip. No one had expected Joseph to agree. They expected him to have parties to go to and girls to hook up with. They expected him mostly to have better things to do than to be seen with them. The small Thursday group rang with shock when he accepted, but they moved over silently to accommodate him as he marked his own stop in the flashy city of Vegas.
Joseph would be the first I would choose for the sun god to take. He was almost universally disliked, to all appearances a jerk. I knew him from my synagogue and our families were friends. We were on good terms, but he had never been nice. The constant dislike directed at him by peers and teachers alike seemed not to silence him but to egg him on. He became worse when girls yelled at him for pulling their hair when he sat behind him. He interrupted more when he was told to shut up. But he was a good person. Evony, in her own silently steaming hatred of him, knew this as well. He found her once in the back of a bus, yelling at a gaggle of friends-not-her-friends, insisting that she would not be forced from the coveted three-seat row, ending with a plea, tears edging around her voice, “I just want someone to sit by me.” In what seemed to be, but was not, the valiant beginning of a love story, Joseph stepped up from nowhere and offered his unexpectedly valiant words, “I’ll sit next to you.” Evony would hold it against herself that she never made it up to him, but he would not be taken by the sun god.
We left the grimy gas station buzzing and groaning in anticipation. Not all of us were the mountain-going nature-loving sort, but we each got one stop, that was the deal, and none of us knew that Evony’s would take us to the sun god. There were grumbles as Askii and Ansel, the tallest of the group, folded themselves in the back of the van, and Evony, sated with a bag of jerky and an aggressively fizzing bottle of Diet Coke, took her place in the driver seat to bring us through the mountains she had chosen, to bring us into the land of the sun god.
Nihilistic Porcupine 