Work Text:
The car goes screaming across the border, and on the radio Joan Jett is snarling about being a wild child. Sky almost painfully blue overhead, heat oppressive, gotta break it loose, gonna keep ‘em movin’ wild. In the passenger’s seat Helena is leaning out the window, either bobbing her head to the music or just wobbling in the wind. It snarls Sarah’s hair all up, but she doesn’t yell at Helena to close the window. She drums her hands on the steering wheel. Well, I’m a real wild one.
“Sarah,” Helena says, pulling her head back in, hair an explosion of straw on her head, “Sarah, I like this song.”
She’s said this about every song on Sarah’s road trip playlist so far. It’s a long playlist – Sarah wouldn’t admit it, but she sat up for hours trying to figure out how best to introduce Helena to the songs that Sarah heard played from S’ dusty records. Here, she’s trying to say, it’s like this – she doesn’t know what it is, but she needs to give it to Helena. And in the passenger’s seat Helena keeps laughing, loud, like she gets it. Like she understands.
“You like every bloody song, meathead,” she says, instead of any of those things.
“Yes,” Helena says. “I did not know guitars could sound like animals. This I like.” She rolls up the window and the music gets loud, trapping them inside of the growling thrashing sound – Sarah at sixteen, lying on her bed, thinking she was the only person who’d ever been angry in the world.
Now they’re here: somewhere in one of the square states in the middle of America, careening through desert country, stopping whenever Helena can beg Sarah into going to a roadside attraction or whenever Sarah can’t deal with how empty and open it is and she just has to – stop. They pull over. They sit on the hood and say things that can only be said in the middle of the loud loud heat.
The track clicks over. “Heads Will Roll” starts humming out of the speakers and Helena rolls the window down again, sticks her hand out and starts scooping wildly at the air. Last night they’d pulled over to the side of the road and looked up at the stars and Sarah had said sometimes I just get scared and Helena had said I am always scared and laughed like it was something easy. Then she’d tried to catch fireflies in her palms – there are fireflies here. They’d lit Helena’s hands all up. Her face had been so young. Sarah keeps playing the songs that made her furious and lonely when she was a kid, and Helena catches fireflies and then she lets them go.
Off with your head. Dance, dance, dance ‘til you’re dead. Sarah climbing out of windows, Sarah vomiting in back alleys. She can picture so easily Helena behind a sniper rifle, looking away from the scope and watching fireflies. She eases up on the gas pedal, and – without her foot holding it down they’re just flying. That’s all they’re doing, flying.
“At the next restaurant,” Helena says dreamily to the ceiling, “I am going to get pie. I have never had pie. In America, everybody eats pie all the time. They say that apple pie is the most American thing. And I will eat it, like an American.”
That’s the only plan they’ve made. They aren’t thinking further than that, really – next motel, next restaurant, next World’s Biggest whatever the fuck. “You’re gonna fool all of ‘em,” Sarah says. “They’ll all think you were born and raised here.”
Helena laughs, the sound jagged and delighted. She stretches her hands up to the ceiling of the car. The wind winds through her fingers and curls through Sarah’s hair, brushes against the back of her neck, goes again. Silver over everything, everything.
Sarah should be able to put it into words. Sarah should be able to tell Helena why they’re on this road trip in the first place, just the two of them, with the radio screaming out old loneliness and the two of them telling each other secrets in the dark. She should be able to open her mouth and – say it, out loud, like it’s easy. She can’t. Sarah keeps seeing her teenage self behind the back of her eyelids, and that girl is terrified of Helena knowing them.
Helena with her hands full of fireflies, saying I want to keep holding them before she let them go. They flew away into the sky and Helena had grinned after them, said: look, Sarah, they’re alive. Grinned at Sarah, like Sarah got it. When the fireflies got far enough away they looked like all the other stars. Next to Sarah in the car Helena catches the wind in her fingers and lets it go, over and over again.
“Sarah,” she says to the ceiling and the window and the sky, “I like this song.”
“Me too,” Sarah says, and she turns the radio up.