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Kansas was the Sunflower State. The state bird had a yellow chest, like a sunflower. Kansas looked like South Dakota to Dean, down to the sunflower fields. He’s sitting in one now, in South Dakota. Not far from the Badlands, pulled off on the side of the highway. He’d climbed down the bank of the road and walked right in and sat down. It was going to storm. There were black clouds on the horizon, far off cracks of thunder rumbling along.
For the first time in his life, he was alone.
There was a crackling electricity in the air, a static anticipation of the skies opening themselves up. When he was a kid and it stormed he always imagined giants in the sky, stomping around and having a tantrum. Sometimes, standing in a tiny motel bathroom staring in the mirror at his own glassy eyes, he pictured crying so hard and so loud it burst into the world in a crack of electricity. His dad was kind of like that. Sammy was kind of like that. Dean just didn’t know how to make himself that big. He was surrounded by giants, and now they were gone.
He thought about the western meadowlark, sometimes. He’d learned about it, once, in middle school. They’d been in Olathe a few weeks, and hit it at the right time to catch the first day of school, one of the few he’d ever attended. The very first social studies class had been about the state of Kansas. They’d learned about the flag and the sunflowers and the state seal and the state bird, the western meadowlark. He remembers because he’d spent that fall looking for one everywhere they went. That entire fall instead of counting flags or trying to complete the alphabet first from words on signs, he and Sam kept their eyes peeled for meadowlarks. They’d spotted a lot of cardinals, some blue jays, even a few robins, but never a meadowlark. Now, he lies back so the sunflowers tower above him under the ominous sky, and thinks about painting his chest yellow like the meadowlark. He thinks about flying away.
-
He stops in Rapid City for lunch, has his fourth cup of coffee of the day and bats his eyelashes at the pretty blue-eyed waitress. She’s not really having it, just fills his mug with what might be an eye roll if she didn’t have her customer service face on. He eats his pie slow just to linger in the bustle of the diner for a little longer, pushes pieces around his plate while he considers where he might go next. Thinks if he’s gonna be alone, he might like to do it with wide-open skies. He leaves an extra ten on the table and drives around town until he finds a music shop. The woman working has a buzzed head and a nose piercing and a fiercely joyous smile when he tells her he’s looking to buy whatever album she recommends.
“Really? Anything?” She’s arching an eyebrow but already sorting through tapes to find the one she wants.
He nods. “It’s sort of, uh, a thing I do, I guess. Best souvenir to remember a place I’ve ever found. And you get tired of the same thing all the time, you know?”
“How many have you gotten, now?” she asks, still rifling through. She seems to be looking for something specific.
“Oh, about a dozen.”
“And have you liked any of them?” she asks, gripping a tape in hand triumphantly that’s got two figures on a pink backdrop. He thinks about listening to Tracy Chapman last week as he drove west from Philadelphia, rewinding it again and again to listen to Behind the Wall just one more time, marveling at its deceptive simplicity. Thinks about driving at two am across southern Ohio with a discarded Red Bull can rattling on the floorboards and another sitting half-empty between his thighs, singing Fast Car to himself without the music playing. He smiles back at her.
“Yeah, turns out people who work at music shops have good taste. Who knew?” They laugh, and she hands him the tape. He turns it over. It’s Rites of Passage by the Indigo Girls. He pays and he waves on his way out, smiling to himself.
He pops in the tape and turns left to get back on the highway, he bobs his head along and heads to big sky country as a woman sings.
Three hits to the heart son
And it's poetry in motion
One could send you down the river
Three's a strange way to be delivered
-
-
He drives out of his way, following the signs to the Devils Tower in eastern Wyoming. It turns out to be exactly what it advertises, an enormous pillar of earth cutting into an otherwise empty horizon. He pays to get into the park and pulls over to watch the prairie dogs stand like tiny sentries in the field on the side of the road. When he gets up to the base of the tower he reads on a sign that the Cheyenne called it Na Kovehe , Bear Lodge. He reads that two little girls had been running from a bear and The Great Spirit had seen and lifted the earth under them high into the sky to keep them safe. There’s another more temporary sign up at the entrance of the path to the base of the tower, declaring that there’s a voluntary climbing closure for June. A woman taps him on the shoulder.
“Could you take a picture of us?” she asks, handing him her camera.
It was a family of four, mom, dad, a girl, and a boy. The woman wore a floral sun visor and the man wore sandals. The kids looked deeply unenthusiastic to be standing outside in 100-degree weather, and the woman prompted them to smile, speaking through her own painfully large smile. Dean took the picture.
“Thank you! Okay, come on, let’s go. Everybody back in the car, we can stop at the shop in town on the way out,” she says, not missing a beat and instantly herding her family toward their car.
Dean smiled as he heard the little girl ask if they could get ice cream, the little boy piping up to say that she promised. He stops at the gift shop on the way out of town and sees the kids standing on their tip-toes, peering into the glass case. He buys a postcard with a painting of the Devils Tower on it that says, Miss You, Wish You were here…
He tucks it into the glove box and drives west.
-
-
He crosses the border into Montana late in the afternoon, the sun spilling through the windshield golden and bombastic. Eastern Montana looks like South Dakota and Wyoming, but he already feels higher up, closer to the wide-open sky. He drives on the two-lane highway for another hour and only passes two trucks the entire time. Eventually, he sees a little town and a motel sign and decides here is as good as anywhere to take a break. When he pulls into the little old gas station he takes a look around and thinks that this is one of those one-block towns, with a wide road that must’ve been old enough to have been used for horses and buggies, once upon a time. The motel ends up being next to the scrapyard, and for the first time since he’s been on his own, he thinks of Bobby.
There’s a guilty tug in his stomach for not stopping by to see him while he was in South Dakota. He hasn’t seen him since the blowout with his dad a couple years back, but he’d tried to call, sometimes, at least for Christmas. Truth was, he missed him but he wasn’t trying to get on his dad’s bad side, either. Not that he knew why Bobby’s shotgun ended up pointed at his dad’s head but. Well, Dean had sometimes...he shook his head and grabbed his stuff out of the trunk. It didn’t matter.
-
-
There was a shop in town that sold kitschy tourist junk and doubled as a cafe. He walked in behind a guy in full cowboy boots and hat, who said, “Morning, Maureen!” as he opened the door. Maureen turned out to be a middle-aged lady in a tie-dye purple butterfly shirt. The butterfly’s wings were dotted with rhinestones. She looked up from where she’d been fiddling with the coffee maker.
“No Paul this morning?” she asked.
“He’s headed down to visit the kids for the holiday, you know.” The man was counting out exact change as Maureen got a mug out, clearly already knowing his order. Dean looked around while he waited, spotting a table full of red, white, and blue mugs and magnets. The holiday - it was the Fourth of July. He’d forgotten.
“Hey, hon, what’ll you have?” Maureen asked him.
“Oh, just a black coffee to go, please.” She got out a cup for him and Dean noticed a little wooden box stuffed full of multicolor note cards that sat on the counter. He looked closer, then smiled. It was the orders of presumably everyone in town. He imagines having a life like that, for a minute. A life where you’re born in a tiny town and you spend your life there, you make your life there. A life where everybody knows you, knows more than just a pretty face and a loud car.
“Here you go, honey,” Maureen said, handing him his cup. He hands her a five and tells her to keep the change. And then he starts the Impala’s rumbling engine and drives off.
-
The first tattoo Dean ever gets is a sunflower on his right hip in a shop in Bozeman.
He does it on a complete whim, and it takes about an hour and a half of stinging before he gets to take a look. When he does look, his throat fills with an unnamable feeling. It’s a little delicate, a little luxurious, it feels like something that’s not for him. Yet there it sits on his skin, bright green and gold, laying prettily over the curve of his hip. The artist asks him what he thinks, and he pokes at it and says, Perfect . He tips her probably more than he needs, but he’s just a little overcome by this feeling. Turns out, sometimes changing your life is as easy as asking someone to make a permanent mark on it. He’d wanted to paint his chest yellow and now he was yellow forever, now there was a little piece of joy he couldn't escape. It felt revolutionary.
He wanted another.
-
He goes out that night in Bozeman and feels such crashing joy, knowing that he has the sunflower sitting hidden on his hip. He’s so proud of making a choice that nobody can take back his teeth hurt. He is glowing, effulgent, and when he pops outside to see if anyone’ll bum him a cigarette and a light he finds a man with a sharp jawline and dark eyes smiling easy at him. He hands Dean a cigarette and leans in close to light it for him. He drunkenly thinks to himself, Breathe, as the flame flickers. He’s distracted by the man’s hands, elegant long fingers, and black nail polish. Dean thinks, while they smoke, that he might...well, he could. He feels braver tonight than he has in forever.
“You heading out?” the man asks, running his hand through his long hair. Dean can’t read him, just feels his heart thudding in his chest. Needy.
“Yeah but I gotta, gotta get some coffee or something. I drove, so…” he peters off.
The man takes one last draw on his cigarette and then stamps it out with his boot. “There’s a diner a few blocks from here.”
Nervousness flutters through him, “Okay.”
The man smiles, “Okay. I’m Jamie, by the way.”
“Dean,” he replies. Jamie leads the way and as they walk, their elbows bump.
“So are you local, or?”
“Nah, I’m just passing through. I’m headed up to Glacier. You?” Dean doesn’t know why he tells him the truth, it just came spilling out. Jamie nods.
“Yeah, came for college and just stuck around. Too fuckin’ nice to leave. I’m from Indiana so the mountains were kinda a revelation.”
“Yeah, you fall a little in love, huh,” Dean says. “I’m from Kansas, so. I get it.”
They get a booth at the diner and Dean just orders coffee because he’d spent most of his money on the tattoo earlier and needs gas money. Jamie follows suit. He stirs in two creams and one sugar packet while Dean watches, tapping out a rhythm on the table. What was he doing here?
“Do you always drink your coffee black?” Jamie asks.
“Uh. Yeah. It’s how, um, my dad drinks it.” His head feels full of static suddenly and his hands are shaking, so he wraps his hands around his mug and tries to focus on the burning heat. Distantly, he hears Jamie talking about Montana State. He went for music education but works as a barista at the moment, apparently. Dean nods.
“What do you do?” he asks. Dean doesn’t miss a beat.
“I work for my dad, family business, you know. But we’re kinda between jobs right now so...here I am,” he tells him, and immediately feels better when he falls back on the lie. He could be anyone, even here under the spotlight of these fluorescents.
They chat a while longer and when the waitress comes back by with the pot of coffee Jamie puts a hand over his mug and pays for their coffees instead. He asks him if he wants to get out of here. Dean nods. The walk back to his car makes him feel like a live wire, leaving skittering sparks wherever he steps. When Jamie’s pinky wraps around his he thinks he might burst into flames. The drive is silent apart from Jamie giving directions, when to turn left and where to park.
Dean turns the car off and chances a look to his right. Jamie is looking back at him. His heart is beating in his throat and then they’re leaning in and their lips are meeting and fuck, this is what he wanted. He shuffles closer and Jamie cups his jaw in his hand and Dean feels like he could shatter. Dean gets a hand on his chest and feels his heart beating, sinks into the kiss. Jamie runs a hand through his hair and Dean breaks the kiss, makes a high, needy sound. He’s red all over and Jamie kisses his neck, says, You’re so fucking pretty. Dean kisses him again.
Jamie pulls back, “Come inside?”
Dean’s head is staticky again, feels like he’s been thrown out of his body a little. He feels the lingering sting of the sunflower on his hip. He could.
He shakes his head, “I can’t.”
Jamie kisses him again, softly. He pulls away and looks at him for a second. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Dean repeats, mindlessly.
“See you.” And he gets out of the car and walks to his door and disappears.
The night is silent and he’s alone again.
“See you.”
He doesn’t sleep that night, just drives north.
-
He spends a week near Glacier, eating only what he swipes from gas stations for the first two days until he finds some pool he can hustle. He’d kept meaning to get another card after his last one crapped out, but then Sam had left and Dad had left and he’d sort of forgotten before he drove off to Nowhere, Montana. It was fine, he liked Funions and peanut M&M’s and chocolate milk. When he has cash again he buys food, cigarettes, and some bait and spends the day fishing.
He wonders what he might’ve majored in at Montana State, almost laughs when he imagines an alternate universe where he’d gone for art. Would he still drink his coffee black? As he sketches a sharp jawline and long fingers with nails painted a glossy black, he thinks that in another life he’d have met Jamie at a party full of art and music majors. Maybe someone would’ve been playing the guitar out back. Maybe they would’ve met the same way and Dean would’ve asked for a light. Maybe when they got to Jamie’s place he would’ve gone in.
He spends his nights parked on the side of the road, lying on the hood of his car with a cigarette. He looks at the stars and shivers and wonders at how small he feels. His hands shake even as the beauty of it all lodges itself in his throat.
-
A week into this escape he gets a call from his dad. There’s something he needs help with, he’s in Fort Collins, be there by tomorrow night.
“Yes, sir,” he says, and his dad ends the call. It always comes back to silence.
He packs up his stuff and tucks his sketchbook into its place in the trunk and heads south. John calls around noon the next day, clearly breaking for lunch as Dean speeds through the desolace of eastern Wyoming. He thinks about the family at Devils Tower.
“Dad, that sounds like a rugaru,” Dean starts, “Bobby ran into one of them once and he said-”
“I don’t give a shit what Bobby Singer says,” his dad snipes.
“Okay, okay. I’m just saying, it wouldn’t hurt to have some gasoline or something handy.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yep, tonight.” His dad hangs up.
Dean shuffles through his tapes one-handed and pops in Rites of Passage.
-
It’s a rugaru.
-
The guy working at the music shop in Fort Collins recommends The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. His dad heads off for one of his storage units with plans to meet up in North Platte in two days' time. Dean plays the chaotic, piano-heavy songs as he drives up to the highest visitor’s center in the country. He tries to climb up the stairs to get to the very highest point but sways and has to clutch onto the railing halfway up, so instead he goes and stands at the overlook between the two buildings. He steps close to the edge and suddenly the wind gets so strong it nearly knocks him off his feet. He grins and throws his arms out.
He buys a tin mug with lineart of mountains and evergreens and another postcard in the same style as the one from Devils Tower. This one says the same thing, but has a painting of a lake on it instead, with mountains erupting into the sky in the background. There are two figures in the foreground, looking out at the lake. He tucks it next to the other one in the glove box and heads back down.
-
-
Dean spends a night in Estes Park, mostly to see the Stanley Hotel. He’s got to head out before noon so he gets there pretty early in the morning and walks around the hotel grounds until he finds a spot to sit down and drink his coffee. He was usually a McDonald’s coffee drinker, especially on driving days, but today he’d gone to one of the tiny coffee shops that sat along the river to get his morning coffee. He wouldn’t ever admit it in the kind of company he usually kept, but it was good.
He finished his coffee just in time for a family to pull into the parking lot and start walking over to gawk at the front of the building. He pulls out a disposable camera he’d picked up at a CVS months and months ago and asks the mother if she would take a photo of him in front of the hotel.
“Say cheese!” she says and takes the photo.
“Thanks,” he walks over to her to grab the camera. “Do you guys want a photo?”
They do, so he takes a photo of the mother, the father, and their tiny daughter, and he tells them, “Say cheese!”
On the way down from Estes back onto the interstate he listens to the Ben Folds album again, and he knows that it’ll always remind him of these mountains when he listens to it in the future.
Sometimes I get the feeling
That I won't be on this planet for very long
I really like it here
I'm quite attached to it; I hope I'm wrong
-
-
He and John end up on a string of hunts all through August, hitting one right after the other. It’s mostly by-the-book salt and burns, though they run into a ghoul nest outside of Jeff City that gives them a run for their money. It ends with them sitting in John’s motel room stitching each other up and then feasting on fast food junk while they watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s a pretty good night. Otherwise, August is mostly diners day in and day out, crisscrossing the midwest as they pick up leads, and John asking if Dean’s heard from Sam. He hasn’t.
“He hasn’t called you?” his dad asks. Dean tries not to sigh.
“If he’d called, Dad, I would’ve told you.”
“Must be starting school soon, I guess,” John says. He’s been saying that all month, the man is a broken record. He wants Dean to call because Sam might actually pick up the phone if it’s him that does the calling. Sam can call him first, thank you very much. He was the one who left.
“You could always call him, Dad, I’m sure he’d appreciate it,” Dean says distractedly. They have this conversation weekly, it’s always the same. Next, John will say-
“Well, I don’t know if he’s changed his number or not.” Dean hums and tries to get the waitress’s attention for more coffee.
-
In September, John gets a call from a friend who knows a guy in Columbus, who has a feeling something weird is going on. There have been three disappearances and not much else to go on, but the guy has a feeling and so does his dad. It’s only an eight-hour drive to Columbus so they just start driving and get into the city around eleven. By the next morning, they’re out interviewing family members and anyone who might’ve seen something. Dean takes the folks near the Ohio State campus, questions two professors, a graduate student, and a janitor about the disappearances. In the end, the janitor has the only useful information - he happened to be leaving the building at the right time to see one of the victims get into a red ‘97 Toyota Camry. He calls and tells his dad, and it turns out to line up with some of the information he’d gotten.
The rest of the day slips by. Dean lingers in the university library, doing what research he can with a thin lead on a public computer. He’s distracted, can’t help but people-watch, and imagine again an alternate world where he went to a place like this. He would’ve graduated in the spring of 2001. In this world, sitting here on campus the age of the grad student he’d talked to, he’s an imposter. He doesn’t even have his high school diploma.
He leaves.
-
They find the bodies a week later. Well, Dean finds the first body and the other two aren’t difficult to track down after that. It’s something that Dean will never get used to, especially when it’s not a monster they can stop. Sometimes, this time, it’s just a person. Dean stands in the woods looking down at this woman, body half-heartedly covered with dirt, and wonders, not for the first time, how someone could do this to another person. He doesn’t want to be here anymore but he can’t move, transfixed by the way her dark hair covers her face. She’s not wearing shoes. It’s the woman the janitor had seen getting into the red Camry. Dean wonders how long she’s been dead, wonders if she was dead when he sat in the library and felt sorry for himself. He wants to leave but he thinks he’s going to be sick instead.
Oh, god, he can’t. He needs to get out of here before he leaves something behind that can be traced back to them. He doesn’t need another police interrogation, doesn’t need to be lectured by his dad about being more careful. It’s that thought that finally gets his legs moving, out of the trees and back onto the main path of the park. He keeps walking, doesn’t stop, tries to act normal but he’s not sure how well he’s succeeding. His stomach is lurching but he just counts to ten, breathes in, counts to ten, breathes out. He tries to shut down his brain, to get his body to run on autopilot. He pulls onto the highway and thinks, It’s fine. It’s over. It’s fine.
John calls in the tip, and they drive in separate directions out of town not long after. It’s standard for them after a find like this, they take a little time to keep a lower profile. They’d both had enough run-ins with the cops for a lifetime and the last thing they needed was to get dragged into a murder investigation.
And that’s how Dean ended up in a bar in Oberlin on a Friday night. He’s sitting alone at the bar with a whiskey when a group of women crowds up to the bar next to him to order. He accidentally makes eye contact with one of them, she has piercing, sparkling eyes, and big, curly hair. She looks at him right back. He smiles.
“What?” she asks, eyebrow arched.
He laughs, “Nothin’, just…” She waits. “You have pretty eyes.” The woman brightens, and when she smiles her brown eyes soften a little, and it sort of knocks him off his feet.
“Cassie, what do you want?” one of her friends asks, and she turns away to order.
-
He sees her again the next night, and this time he goes up to her. She’s wearing an orange t-shirt and drinking what he guesses is a vodka cranberry. One of her friends leans over to whisper to her and points at him as he approaches, and she turns to watch.
“Hi, I’m Dean,” he says, more awkwardly than he intends. She lets him stand there without replying for a beat longer than is comfortable as she sizes him up.
“I’m Cassie. Didn’t I see you here yesterday?”
“Yeah, I - we saw each other, um. When you came in, I think,” he stumbles. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him that he suddenly can’t talk, let alone process a thought. “I would offer to buy you a drink, but, uh, seems like you’ve got that covered,” he gestures to her mostly-full vodka cran. She stirs her drink as she looks at him, considering. Her friends aren’t being coy about watching the exchange and he feels naked.
“Well,” she says finally, “You could always buy the next one. Wanna sit down?”
He does.
Cassie introduces him to her friends, Jenn, Aubrey, and Alex. They all work at the school paper, except for Jenn who was roommates with Alex their freshman year.
“So, what’s your major?” Aubrey asks.
“Oh, um, I don’t actually go to Oberlin,” Dean says. “I’ve kind of just been doing some traveling recently.”
“Ooh, really? I’d kill to be traveling instead of stuck here in Nowhere, Ohio,” Cassie says.
“Well, I was kind of in the middle of nowhere a lot of the time, just further west.”
“But you can romanticize that way easier!” she exclaims. “I’ve never even seen the mountains.”
From there the tension breaks a little, and Jenn, Aubrey, and Alex break off into their own conversation, but clearly keep an eye toward them. He feels like he’s being graded, at first, but forgets about it when Cassie starts telling him about Mary Oliver, a poet she’d just started reading, and the poems of hers that made Cassie want to do nothing but lie on the bed of a river and, fill my heart with sunshine, she says. She laughs at herself and her smile breaks her whole face into riotous beauty. “I’m so drunk!” she declares.
“Should we get another round?” he asks when both their glasses are empty.
“Yeah,” and she grabs his hand and leads him to the bar, orders for them both, and says it’s on his tab. They sit and wait for their drinks at the bar and then forget to go back to the table once they have them. Dean’s too busy describing a book he read a few months ago.
“He says stuff like, ‘the creek was soft and spread out in the grass like a beer belly.' How do people come up with stuff that feels so...like, I would never think to say that, but it’s exactly right.”
Cassie nods enthusiastically, “It’s so evocative. I think if journalists aren’t reading fiction and poetry, they’re not doing it right. I mean, obviously, journalism isn’t poetry but who else other than poets can paint images like that?”
They talk for another hour before Cassie’s friends come up to say they’re leaving.
“Oh, fuck. What time is it?” she asks, then checks her phone to see it’s almost midnight. “Shit, sorry. I’ve gotta go, too, I have to work in the morning.”
Dean shakes his head, “Oh, that’s okay, I get it.” Before he realizes what’s happening she’s handing her phone to him. He looks at it stupidly.
“Put your number in!” she demands. He does. She takes her phone back and smiles at him, “See you, Dean.”
See ya,” he replies with a wave, and maybe he looks as giddy as he feels because the girls giggle as they walk away, glancing over their shoulders as he continues to wave.
-
He does see her soon.
They get dinner on Saturday and get coffee during her break between classes on Tuesday. She orders him a caramel macchiato and he’s never had coffee so good. He tells her about the little coffee shop in Estes, the one on the river. They keep seeing each other, and he tells her a lot of things. That his little brother started at Stanford this year, that he travels a lot for work, that he’s started collecting music recommendations. He tells her that and they end up laying on her bed one afternoon listening to the little collection he’d acquired. They’re listening to Tracy Chapman when he kisses her. They kiss and kiss until both their hair looks ridiculous, and then Dean’s stomach growls and they decide to grab dinner. Later, he spends the night.
September passes in a hazy glow and early in October he wakes up beside her and remembers what she’d said that first night, that she wanted her heart to be filled with sunshine. His is.
It’s probably the last weekend with warm weather so he takes her to the arboretum to lay on the banks of the pond.
“I hope this is close enough to a creekbank,” Dean says when they sit down, and a grin splits her face and she tackles him to the ground.
“I can’t believe you remembered that, you dork!”
He thinks that this is love, but he doesn’t say anything, yet.
-
She asks him a lot what it is that he does, exactly. Dean plays it off, makes it into their own private joke. He answers differently every time. Traveling mechanic, writer, circus performer, photographer, train conductor. He tells her once that he’s an artist and she says, you could be, you know. If you wanted. She says it so sincerely, and he aches with it. Dean doesn’t want to ruin the freedom she imagines he has, he’s too enamored with the lies he’s telling her. When she gets serious and asks him to tell her, really, he just says that he’s taking a break from the family business. Tells her that he wishes he could say. He doesn’t ask her if she trusts him because he knows she shouldn’t.
Cassie asks about his dad and he doesn’t know what to say, other than that they moved around a lot as kids after their mom died.
Dean says eventually, “He’s just. Old school, I guess. He was always...strict, even if he wasn’t around. Expected a lot. Still does.” He feels like he can’t swallow past the lump in his throat, and it’s so ridiculous. What the fuck does he have to be all choked up about? The face of the dead woman in Columbus flashes through his mind and his jaw clicks shut. Cassie waits for him to say more, and when he doesn’t, she hugs him.
-
“Do you want more tattoos?” she asks one Saturday morning as she thumbs over the sunflower on his hip.
“Hmm, yeah. Why?”
“Well, Alex taught me how to do stick and pokes the other day. We could just...give each other tattoos. If you wanted.”
Dean sat up. “You want me to give you a tattoo? That’s a lot of confidence in me,” he laughed.
She shrugged, “I trust you, what can I say. Besides, it doesn’t have to be good. It’ll be from you and that’s what matters.”
Ignoring the way her words make him feel like the luckiest guy in the world, he says, “Oh, you don’t think it would be good?”
She considers, “I bet I could do better.”
“You’re on!”
They decide on peace signs for both of them, the better to judge who is the better tattoo artist with. Dean does hers on her left shoulder, and Cassie does his on his left ankle. His peace sign is a little squished and hers is a little lopsided, and they spend all week asking their friends whose is better, before they finally conclude that it’s a draw.
-
The weekend before Halloween they’re getting ready to go out - or, rather, Dean is watching Cassie get ready - and he’s laughing at the face she makes when she puts on eyeliner and mascara.
“I can’t help it! That’s just what your face does when you put on eyeliner, I swear.”
“Oh, okay, sure. The international face of eyeliner.”
“Okay, wise guy, if you know so much then why don’t you try it without making the face?”
He hesitates a moment before he realizes the offer is serious, then he smiles, “Okay, I will!”
They shuffle around in her tiny bathroom so he’s the one standing in front of the mirror and she hands him the eyeliner in question. She’s peering over his shoulder waiting for him to try. He stares at himself in the mirror, psyches himself up in the same way you would before trying to pat your head and rub your stomach, and raises the pencil to his eye. He immediately makes the face.
“I told you!” she yells. They devolve into laughter for a minute before they catch their breath, and then she tells him to keep going. He takes a deep breath and just goes for it, and it’s way, way harder than she makes it look. His line is all wobbly and he can’t get his eyelid to stop fluttering because it’s fucking weird to have a pointy object so close to his eye. Eventually, he manages to sort of do one eye and he stops to consider when she takes the eyeliner from him.
“Move over, I’ll do the other one.”
“Oh, thank god.”
She does the second eye in a quarter of the time it had taken him and then asks, “Want mascara?” matter-of-factly. This is where his brain sputters, for some reason.
“I - I mean that seems like a bit much for, uh.” Dean doesn’t finish the sentence, but Cassie just says okay and shuffles their positions again so she can finish the rest of her makeup.
When they get to the bar a little later Aubrey comments on how pretty his eyes are, and Jenn agrees and leans closer.
“Are you wearing eyeliner?”
“Yeah.”
“It looks great!” Jenn exclaims.
Cassie launches into the story and the women laugh because apparently everyone really does make that face and Dean laughs, too, and it feels nice to be in on the joke. When they go home a few hours later they aren’t all that drunk but they’re giggly - they have been ever since they left the apartment.
Abruptly, Dean says, “Hey, do you wanna see what it looks like with mascara?”
Cassie smiles and takes his hand and pulls him into the bathroom, sits him down, and pulls out the mascara and a tube of lipstick. When he shoots her a questioning look she explains, “For the full effect.”
Dean sits on the toilet seat and closes and opens his eyes when Cassie tells him to, and pouts his lips and rubs them together when she tells him to. Finally, she steps back and considers.
“Finished!” she declares. She pulls him up and angles him toward the mirror, “Take a look.”
“Woah,” is all Dean can say when he sees. He turns his face back and forth, gets really close to the mirror and inspects his thick black lashes, and then stands farther back to take the whole thing in. He looks...good, he thinks. He doesn’t know what to say. Cassie watches as he takes it in.
“You’re so pretty, it’s almost unfair,” she crosses her arms and pretends to pout.
“Shut up!” he laughs. Dean turns to her and Cassie’s smiling so pretty it could stop his heart. He kisses her and leaves a red stain on her lips.
-
She goes home for Thanksgiving break and for the first time he realizes how long he’s been in Oberlin, and that he’s started staying over at her place all the time. He spends the week in a motel room watching game shows and crime dramas, eating shitty takeout food from all the best spots Cassie had shown him since he’d been there. He thinks about how he hasn’t considered looking for a case in months. His dad had called, a few days after they’d split after Columbus to check-in and remind him to lay low, and a few times since then to work out cases or to tell Dean he was on to a new case. The last time he’d called was the beginning of November, when he’d informed Dean that he was headed to New Mexico and might be there for a while. Dean assumed he still was.
On Thanksgiving, Dean calls Sam.
It rings six times before Sam picks up the phone, “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me,” Dean says.
“Oh. Hey.”
Silence.
“Uh, Happy Thanksgiving,” Dean tries.
“Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving. You and Dad doing the KFC thing?” Sam asks.
“Um, no actually, Dad’s in New Mexico, I think. I’ve just been vegging out for a week in Ohio. Just junk food and game shows, you know. Lot of Family Feud.” As soon as he says it he drops his head into his hand.
Sam laughs, “You don’t say.”
After that, it’s more normal. Dean asks about Stanford and Sam’s classes and if he’s made any friends, and Sam can talk for ages once you get him started, especially about school. It sounds like he loves it, and Dean tries not to resent that. Sam asks him what he and Dad have been up to, and Dean tells him about the ghouls in Missouri, a salt and burn on a particularly dramatic Mormon ghost they’d done in Salt Lake City, of course. He tells him about the murders in Columbus, about the bodies.
“Fuck. I’m sorry, man. That sucks.”
“Yeah.” They’re quiet for a minute. Dean sighs, “Listen man...if you could give Dad a call-”
“You know I’m not gonna do that.”
“Come on, he didn’t mean what he said.”
“He tell you that?”
“Not directly but-”
“No.”
“Sam!”
“I don’t care.”
“Sam, I can tell, he didn’t mean it.”
“Well if he’s really that sorry then he can pick up the phone and call me, and tell me that himself.”
Dean sighs again. “You know he can’t do that.”
“That’s the point, Dean.” A beat. “I have to go.”
“Come on, man,” Dean tries.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Sam replies. Waits.
“Happy Thanksgiving.” Sam hangs up.
-
Almost as soon as Cassie gets back, he decides he’s going to tell her. He can’t keep lying to her. She deserves to know the truth. About him, about everything. He knows he’s acting twitchy, can see her noticing, but he doesn’t know how to bring it up. In the end, he doesn’t have to. Early in December she asks him again what he does, what the mysterious family business is, exactly. She’s serious. He tells her.
Cassie is incandescent with rage.
“Why won’t you tell me the truth!” she yells. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I do! That’s why I’m telling you this, Cas, please believe me. Please,” Dean begs.
Cassie’s pacing back and forth on their living room floor. She’s quiet and cutting when she looks at him. “I can’t believe you.”
Dean wants to fall on his knees and beg, but instead, he says, “Please, I love you.” This, more than anything, seems to push her over the edge.
“Not enough to tell me the truth.”
“Cassie-”
“Get out.”
Dean can’t stand the way she’s looking at him, so he grabs his things and goes.
-
Dean spends a week in the same motel he’d stayed at over Thanksgiving, waiting for Cassie to call. To reconsider. He finds himself crying so hard that it’s hard to catch his breath. He feels like he’s been shattered into pieces and thinks that this grief could shake the skies.
Cassie doesn’t call.
He ruined it. Forever. He leaves Oberlin with a lopsided peace sign on his ankle, Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud, and a broken heart.
-
Dean spends two weeks in Indianapolis. He’s always hated Indianapolis, so it feels right to wallow in his shitty motel bed eating shitty food and watching shitty TV. He deserves Indianapolis. During the second week, Dean breaks out his Vonnegut collection and rereads Palm Sunday. He laughs when he finds the quote he’s looking for.
There is surely more than enough to marvel at for a lifetime, no matter where the child is born. Castles? Indianapolis was full of them.
Vonnegut’s a genius, but Indy fucking blows.
-
His dad calls to ask where he’ll be for Christmas, and Dean dutifully tells him: Indianapolis. John says that he has a case somewhere in Illinois, so he’ll be there when he finishes up.
Dean has another week to himself, so he goes to pick up more provisions at the Walgreens. Mostly because it’s across the street and he can’t bear any more effort than that, at the moment. As he’s walking down the aisles he passes a display of nail polish and thinks about Jamie from Indiana and his black nails. Without thinking too hard about it he slips a bottle into his pocket, then pays for his food at the register. That night he eats generic cheese puffs and paints his nails for the first time. He gets smears of black on the sheets and doesn’t care, it’s not like the name on the card he’s using is his, anyway. He blows on his nails while he watches Barefoot Contessa. Dean fans his fingers out when they’re dry to admire them as Ina presents her beef with gorgonzola sauce. He’s not sure what gorgonzola tastes like.
Christmas approaches, and on the morning of the twenty-fourth, his dad calls again to say he won’t be able to make it, actually. The hunt is running long. He’ll see him in the new year, most likely. Dean hangs up and flops on the bed. This was going to be the most depressing Christmas ever. And that was saying something.
He sighs. It snowed two days ago, so now it was mostly grey slush outside. And because this was the worst city, it was sure to stay that way. Anything would be better than this. Actually, driving would be way better than this. He’s missed it.
Something occurs to Dean, and he sits up. Before he can second-guess himself, he throws his things into his duffel and rushes out the door.
He drives west.
-
Dean pulls in early on the twenty-fifth. He drove straight through the night, and as he pulls through the old junked cars stacked up on either side of the drive, he can see the kitchen light is on. He kills the engine and steps out into the blue dawn. When he makes his way up the steps of the wooden porch he feels like he’s fallen back in time, the way that they creak under him feels like home. Bobby opens the door with a cup of coffee steaming in his hand before Dean even gets there.
“Dean,” is all he can manage.
“Hey, Bobby. Merry Christmas.” He didn’t even grab his duffel, he’s just standing there shivering in his jacket.
“Well, don’t just stand there in the cold. Come in.”
Dean’s so relieved he could cry.
-
Dean makes pancakes, and when Bobby asks him what he should put on he tells him Blue because he knows Joni Mitchell is Bobby’s favorite. After breakfast and another pot of coffee, Dean gives Bobby the hastily wrapped-in-newspaper gift he’d picked up at the gas station, in the great Winchester tradition. It’s what is advertised as buffalo jerky, a deeply ugly crystalline dolphin statue, two novelty lottery tickets, and a quarter to scratch them off with. Bobby gives him The Left Hand of Darkness.
All in all, it’s not the worst Christmas either of them has ever had.
-
On Boxing Day, Bobby asks where John is.
“Somewhere in Illinois, I guess. He was on a case,” Dean shrugs.
Bobby purses his lips but doesn’t say anything. “And what have you been up to?”
Dean looks up from the eggs he’s cooking and considers how much to say. Bobby’s earnest and Dean doesn’t stand a chance. He serves the eggs, turns off the burner, and sits down.
“I was, uh, in Oberlin all fall. Until like two weeks ago. And then I was in Indy. And now I’m here.” He doesn’t look at Bobby, just fiddles with his shirt sleeves.
“What kept you in Ohio that long?” Bobby asks. Now, Dean looks up.
“A girl.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” Bobby waits. Dean sighs. “I told her.”
“You told her? About-”
“About the stuff that goes bump in the night, yeah.” It’s painful to think back to it, to remember Cassie pleading for him to just tell her the truth. “She thought I was full of shit. So. That was that.”
“Dean,” Bobby lays his hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry, son.”
Dean’s lip trembles and he looks up, wills himself not to cry.
“Yeah, me too.”