Chapter Text
Jonathan doesn’t remember Indiana that much. Not of his hometown. Not of Hawkins. Not really.
He is twenty years old and instead what he has is pieces of it: feelings of the dry winter cold come January and the damp, crisp air of early October falls. Springtime playing in puddles of the muddy potholes in the long dirt driveway to his home. A public library that smelt of must and mold but had a very nice librarian who read stories to the children every Saturday afternoon. There’s a memory of a park near his old elementary school, too, the one where he fell and broke his arm that one time. Sometimes, the flashing lights of the motel’s roadside sign will remind him of the bright fluorescent lights of that general store chat his mom used to work at. The one where he would sometimes visit and the old man—the owner—would hand both him and Will pieces of penny candy. Melvald’s, he thinks it was called. But again, he’s not quite sure.
So he doesn’t remember Indiana that much—not in the way that he’s supposed to, really. It’s been nearly eight years since his mom ushered them all into her old Ford Pinto, just quietly and casually, telling Jonathan that he needed to pack his things—just what he thought he needed—because they were going on a trip. His Dad wasn’t home—his car was missing from the driveway—and when Will later asked his mother if they were going to wait for him (because shouldn’t he be coming too?), he remembers her just shaking her head, “No, sweetie,” and not looking back.
Instead what he has now is California. He has hot, year round winds and thick, lung choking smog. He has baking concrete sidewalks and salty sea air and traffic jams on the Santa Monica Freeway heading into Los Angeles.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the mid-city motel circuit—of all the places you can rent by the night, the week, or for the month. Some of them even have free cable.
He has memories of the three different high schools he went to—each one only for a year or two, sometimes maybe even just a couple months—and then he was gone again. Moved to a different motel. Moved to a different part of town.
What he has now is the shattered pieces of lost Indiana summers overwhelmed by the bright blue shards of the hot white Mar Vista sun. What he has now is a job at a gas station and cleaning the pool at the Royal Palms Paradise for Sal on Saturdays. What he has now is a farmer’s tan from walking too far in the early mornings to head down to the beach with his camera, and a crate full of old negatives that he drags around with him from motel to motel.
And he knows his mother tries. He knows why she did it. But what he has now somehow isn’t good enough. What he has now is something that’s just...there.
The more responsible side of him—the more anxious side—knows he shouldn’t complain.
Jonathan knows, with a quiet sort of resignation, that he is luckier than some. Not most, but some. And sometimes—sometimes he doesn’t mind it. The life he is living, that is.
The way he and his mother can quip and smile as they strip bedding during the busy season, challenging each as to who can remake the beds the quickest with the least amount of wrinkles bunching up the fabric almost makes it all worth it. Or the way he sometimes catches his brother talking to the old, reclusive man living in Room 3. Mr. Mozarowski, Will tells him, used to lecture at a university back in Poland—something to do with art history—and he likes to see what Will is drawing in school these days.
Sometimes there are moments where he finds himself liking it. Sometimes, he can even laugh.
The old TV in their room only gets three stations, tops, but because of it both he and Will can practically recite line by line every word from the reruns of Growing Pains. There’s a crack in the bathroom mirror and his brother also teasingly likes to remind him it’s from when he tripped over their moms’ shoes and hit the glass with the end of a mop. There’s an off-coloured mark on the carpet near the kitchenette from when his mom spilled a microwaved meal. A weird stain on the ceiling above the pull-out couch that almost looks like a cat from when the roof leaked last fall. His mother tells him it’s like their pet. There’s scratchy bed sheets that should have been replaced some twenty-odd years ago and they only seem to get worse with each and every wash. Will used to parade around with them as a cape, and their threadbare state makes it easy for them to transform the space between their beds into a pillow fort without worrying about ruining them.
It’s a home, but it’s not home.
A place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to shower, all until it’s not.
And this space—this room in the motel near the off-ramp to the freeway—is the closest they’ve had to normalcy in a long, long time. Over two years spent helping his mom clean rooms and skimming dead shad-flies from the pool out back in between shifts at the Stop ‘n Go. Two years of watching old Mr. Mozarowski argue with the nosy Mrs. Whitaker about the way she litters her cigarette butts all around the motel parking lot. Two years of seeing travellers come and go, go and come, and telling himself it would all be worth it, if only to see Will graduate from the same high school that he started at.
He never thinks long on it, though. About his dad that is. Because that’s where this all started. It requires the sort of energy he can’t afford to expend and quietly overthinking the mental hangups running circular ‘what-ifs’ about a man who couldn’t even remember his own son's birthdays only leaves him tired.
Instead, he has a job to do. Rooms to clean and pools to skim and gas to pump. Meals to finagle together using only a hotplate and a microwave. Will’s homework to look over. Moments to carefully if not selfishly eek out to himself in the admittedly sometimes cloying space of their too small motel room.
It’s a muggy Tuesday morning and for once, he is not working. His mother has gone to the small grocery store just beyond the boardwalk, the one that sells crates of fresh, bright oranges for cheap, and Will is at school. And Jonathan, more than well then aware that this is the most time he’ll have himself in weeks, flops down onto one of the beds.
As he lays there, cheek pressed firmly into the lumpy pillow, his eyes wash over the room—over to the messy sheets of the matching bed next to him and to the flaking chipboard microwave stand; over to the pile of unwashed clothes sitting near the bathroom door and to the empty stack of suitcases—and eventually his gaze falls to the crate tucked neatly next to the pullout couch. Beneath the ever growing stack of photo envelopes, beneath the equally thick stack of polaroids, are the brochures the guidance counsellor from his last and final high school had given him: entrance information for the universities of UCLA and Berkeley.
He doesn’t take them out—hasn’t in a while—but likes that they exist as an idea. He likes that he knows he has the grades to get in—even might have received a scholarship!—even though he is two years past graduating and settling for silver in so many ways. As his fingers curl against the edge of the mattress, he stares at the crate and doesn’t think of them. He doesn’t think of them in the same way he doesn’t think of the growing laundry pile he knows he should be doing, or even acknowledge it. ‘It’ being that forgotten part of himself with the unfilled dreams and ambitions that he broke apart from the moment he decided that this was a life he would have to make work. He doesn't think about it in the same way he doesn’t acknowledge the overfilled trash bin sitting near the door that should have been emptied some days ago.
In the too loud emptiness of the achingly alone afternoon, he doesn’t hear the wheezy rumbling of the air conditioning unit running at full blast, nor the distant din of horns clashing with the thick roll of traffic on the freeway. He doesn’t hear it or see any of it in the same way he does not feel anxious or guilty for all the things he will never say. Full of longing for things he cannot have: an education. A real home. A life without the repetitive hardships of poverty.
But Jonathan Byers has always been a wonderful liar.
The Channel 4 news traffic helicopter soars overhead, the choppy whooshing of air mixing messily with the rumble of the nearby traffic, and Jonathan sits up.
There’s laundry to do, he thinks. And trash to be sorted.
Five minutes is all he has to be selfish and if he really wants to think about it, like the thoughts about his fathers, it's five minutes that he cannot fully afford.
It isn’t but a moment later that he’s crossing the parking lot towards the giant blue dumpster at the back of the property, the bag of trash tied off and slung over his left shoulder, and a laundry bag pinched closed and slung over his right.
As he’s tossing the trash bag into the dumpster the all familiar bell of the motel’s lobby front door rings out across the lot and he glances over to see Sal standing there in his obnoxious floral Hawaiian shirt which is as always, tucked in too tight to his Bermuda shorts.
Jonathan shields his eyes against the audacious late September sun as Sal, with his grey crew cut hair and sideburns down to his jaw, pushes his aviator glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Marco’s on the line—,” —Jonathan’s boss at the gas station—“Says Dickie called in sick and wants to know if you can take his shift.”
He lets the bag of laundry fall to the pavement with a heavy sigh. So much for a morning to himself, even if he had planned to spend most of it perched on top of a washing machine, staring up at the comically small television that was mounted in the corner of the laundry room.
Weighing his options—the appeal of a bright, beautiful day, seagulls crying out over head, the soft breeze off the ocean washing the air with the tempting smell of salt water versus the cramped space behind the dingy counter of the gas station paired with the allure of money that they desperately need in order to recharge the air-conditioning in the Pinto before the full heat of the fall smothers them—he nods.
“Tell him I’ll be there in ten,” he says, shouldering the bag again and heads back to their room.
—
He doesn’t know how he feels about the gas station, only that like that motel, it’s there.
Just...there.
Needed but unwanted.
An end to a means.
A reminder of all the things he’ll never have.
Instead, what he has is this:
Two hot summers in a row with a broken air conditioning unit that Marco promised he’d have fixed up by late last fall. Reminders of the weird, grimy floor mat that sits next to the slushie machine, the one that sticks to the soles of his shoes whenever he forgets to step over it. Time spent stocking eggs on the night shift in the coolers, carefully watching the storefront over the twist of his shoulder and listening for the half-busted call bell. It was eating the day-end hotdogs from the rotisserie cabinet—the ones destined for the trash—the meat transformed into a strange, polarising texture that was almost too dry and yet somehow indescribably greasy. Even now, after two years of it, those hotdogs still make his tongue feel weird. It was sitting on the milk crates out back, counting the minutes pass by on his breaks and listening to Sam talk about the latest fight with his girlfriend. It was spilling gas on his shoes and getting engine grease on his fingers and coming home and not having enough change to wash all his clothing until Friday. Some days he wakes up and it’s all he can smell: gas and oil. Oil and gas.
And it’s not like there’s anything fundamentally wrong with working at the Stop ‘n Go—Marco was a fair boss and ever since he’d been given a key holder position, he’d been making just above the minimum wage. It was a perk, he supposes, even if it means sometimes waking up before dawn to get to the store before the 7 a.m shift starts to do inventory.
It was just…
That at the end of the day, he could probably do without it. Without the reminder of how this was probably going to be the rest of his life.
He goes to work for 8, walking in the early light as he makes his way the six blocks south of the motel. He doesn’t mind the morning shifts. It’s rarely busy before ten, the pumps dead, and the only customers being the nearby locals stopping in for a cup of coffee. Besides, this early in the morning the air is still cool enough as he walks that by the time he gets to the gas station he’s barely broken a sweat.
Sam greets him with a wave, sitting mutely in his truck and smoking on a cigarette—he’s always early, always with a story about it, despite the attached service garage not opening for another hour. Jonathan waves back and pulls open the dirty glass door to the front of the shop, a sharp bell trilling before it cuts out in a garbled electronic sounding decrescendo as he steps inside.
Marco is at the till, leaning lazily over the counter, the morning newspaper spread across the lotto ticket display and he barely moves to acknowledge Jonathan, merely flipping his fingers toward the dairy cooler where six or eight milk crates are stacked. Some have cartons of eggs, others jugs of milk, and Jonathan wordlessly nods, slipping into the back and scribbles his name onto the timesheet before getting to work.
He stocks for most of the early morning, only stopping when he hears the gas bell ring. Marco mans the register, clicking the gas pumps on and off and handing Jonathan receipt slips for the customers who pay in cash at the car. By 10:30, it’s time for a break, Marco shooing him out the door and telling him to take it easy for a few.
“I don’t pay you to worry so much, Byers. Grab a coffee or something. We need to dump the pot anyway. Sam’s probably out near the garage doing fuck all, so maybe take a page outta his book for a bit and join him.”
Jonathan passes on the sludgy coffee and finds Sam sitting out in front of the small service station adjacent to the store, lazily lounging in a metal framed lawn chair with green and yellow lattice backing, a book in hand. He was a thirty-something know-it-all, the type of guy who claimed he could have gone to some fancy Ivy League school when he was young, except he knocked up his girlfriend-not-wife, Carla, at eighteen and he’s been changing oil filters at the gas station ever since.
“Marco finally got tired of your scowl?” he laughs when he sees Jonathan approaching. Then, he pats at the overturned milk crate next to him, beckoning for him to sit down.
Jonathan returns a half-smile, sinking down onto the hard surface of the blue plastic crate and shrugs.
“Said I should take a page out of your book,” he smirks. Sam raises a lone brow, setting down his book on his knee and pulls out a pack of cigarettes from the front of his shirt pocket.
“So spend some time doing fuck all then?” he grins, pulling out a smoke and bringing it to his lips.
“That just about sums it up,” Jonathan says and Sam laughs, loud and breathy before bringing a lighter to his cigarette and inhaling deeply, puffing out a cloud of smoke.
He likes Sam in the same way he likes Marco, maybe even a little bit more. Sam was never bothered (only by Carla) and Sam always seemed to take things in strides. He was messy—his beard was never trimmed and his coveralls always seemed to be covered in oil stains even when he washed them—but when he spoke, like seriously, like when he talked about the plastic on the beaches or the ever growing hole in the ozone layer, or even just the bullshit politicians he’d seen last night on the 11 pm news, Jonathan always wondered if he was telling the truth. About his once upon a time and his dreams of going to Stanford or Yale.
Today though, Sam isn’t speaking seriously and seemed far more interested in assessing the type of folks who pulled into the pumps, making farfetched speculations about who they were as people based upon the type of cars they drove.
“That one there,” he grins, watching Marco taking a tenner from an older lady sporting a stiff, high beehive hairdo in a burgundy Oldsmobile. “Probably a prom queen from back in 57’. Her car? Latest purchase from the divorce settlement.”
Marco then disappears into the store and the Oldsmobile rolls out of the parking lot, taking the middle-aged prom queen with it.
Then, a van pulls in.
“Oh,” Sam beams, practically vibrating. “This guy again—,”
The van was...something. A blue, hulking monstrosity with a custom paint job and scuffed, whitewall tires. Jonathan squints, eyes adjusting to the harsh mid morning sun, because was that jellyfish he saw painted on the side of it?
“Overcompensating,” Sam smirks. “The hair? The van? This is a guy who screams, ‘I’ve got a point to prove because the point in my pants doesn’t quite cut it’.” Then, as he takes another puff of his cigarette: “Ah, no brains either—the idiot has pulled up to the diesel pump. 77’ Tradesman B-series takes gasoline.”
Jonathan watches, mute as the man in question hops out of the van, his eyes drifting back to the store. Marco still hadn’t come back out yet and he found himself frowning. Did he not hear the call bell, as busted as it was, when the van rolled over the signal line?
“Shouldn’t we—,” Jonathan starts, slouching back against the garage wall. There’s a pang of guilt that blooms through his chest, even though he was technically on ‘break’. “I dunno’—stop him, or something?”
Sam lets out another loud, raucous laugh, his voice wheezing as he does.
“Fuck no. I get paid to change windshield wipers and dump oil pans. Also, if the guy could read—or even remember—this is a full-service station.” Sam tilts his fingers to the large black letters effacing the dirty white plastic sign box beneath the greens and reds of the large Stop n’ Go signboard, lips pursed. “He’s been here before a half-dozen times and shouldn’t be fucking around with the pumps regardless.”
The lines of Jonathan’s face slip into his own look of disapproval and he rolls his eyes. Sam was being a dick again and if he had to guess, he would bet money on the fact that he probably had another fight with Carla the night before. Sighing, he stands up with the shake of his head and listens to Sam’s laugh grow louder.
“You’re too much of a bleeding heart, Byers,” the older man grins, picking up his book again.
Jonathan simply ignores him and takes off into a jog, trying to catch the customer with the blue jellyfish van before he fucks up his engine.
“Hey—hey wait!” he calls out. “That’s the wrong pump!”
The man was impatiently clicking the bright yellow diesel button, the gas cap of his van already popped off and waiting. Frustratingly enough, he doesn’t respond: it was like he didn't hear him at first and his finger continues to jam itself against the button in rapid succession as if this repeated motion would somehow magically turn on the pump.
“Stop!” Jonathan practically blurts out, exasperated as he rounds on the van. “You’re at the wrong pump!”
Mid poke, the man does. His head snaps right as he looks to Jonathan, his expression curled in confusion.
“I’m what?” he asks.
Out of breath, Jonathan exhales heavily and blinks, motioning for him to resheath the nozzle head into its holder.
“The wrong pump. Your van—,” he tells him, hand sweeping towards the front of it. “It takes gas, not diesel.”
The man with the ostentatious blue jellyfish van does not seem to believe him and instead cocks his hips, arms folding across his chest, the gas nozzle in hand.
“That’s bullshit, man. It’s a Dodge Ram—the entire line takes diesel; it’s like a truck.”
“It’s from 1977,” Jonathan sighs, squinting as he takes in the van. Sam might have been wrong. It almost looked like a 75’ or a 74’. Something about the way the chrome fender didn’t fully wrap around the front of the van was a bit off, and if he remembered correctly, they had tried clipping the roof in the late 1970s to make them more “streamline”. This van was boxy. Still, it didn't matter—the issue was still the same.
“I know what year my van is from,” the man responds. His tone was dry and unimpressed, pushing back against Jonathan like scratchy sandpaper. “I got the paperwork in the glovebox.”
Jonathan was beginning to regret intervening. Sam was right; he should have let the guy with his crunchy-looking, too long hair try and fill his gas tank up with diesel and fuck up his engine because the amount of gratitude he was receiving at the moment for trying to do something nice was at an all time low.
“Then you know it’s a Tradesman B,” Jonathan practically snaps. His simple explanation, however, doesn't seem to do anything for the man. Rather, he simply tilts his head left, his brow rising as if the words ‘Tradesman’ and ‘B’ were alien and unknown. Jonathan let’s out another soft sigh, his hand moving to wipe the sweat off his brow from his short sprint across the parking lot. It was starting to get hot out, the temperature creeping into the high 80s, and the shiny asphalt would soon begin to bake. “The Tradesman series is all diesel,” he goes on to explain, moving to recap the stranger’s gas cap. “Except the early B models. It was the only van in the line that started off with V6 and V8 gasoline engines, which was later phased out in the early 1980s after the second OPEC gas shortage in 1979.”
There’s a moment of silence before the man slowly turns, finally resheathing the gas nozzle against the pump.
“Oh,” is all he says, and Jonathan finds himself rolling his eyes again. His sweaty fingers twist the metal gas cap back into place and he gives it one final crank before and he nods to the pump that’s a few feet in front of them.
“Move it up a few feet and we can fill your van up there instead.”
“You work here?”
Jonathan simply points to the crooked name tag pinned to his faded-black t-shirt, the blocky lettering nearly covering the embroidered Stop n’ Go logo in its entirety. Marco had made it with an ancient label maker during his first week of working at the store and had promised he would send away for real one after he passed his three month probation period. That was close to 2 years ago at this point and Jonathan’s crappy-looking nametag still remained.
The man just nods.
“Ah...shit. Sorry.” The man’s lips pull tight as he rocks on the balls of his feet, noticeably sheepish. “I haven’t had to pump my own gas in a few weeks. Vans’ new,” he explains. Then, he swings open the drivers’ side door, pulling himself against the frame of the van to get in. As he does, a fluttering of pink paper slips cascade from the foot well. Jonathan catches sight of them, eyes drifting to the interior and finds that there’s more. A lot more. But the man doesn’t seem to notice or care: he shuts the door, turning the engine over, and the large metal monster shakes to life with a loud rumble. He slowly inches it a few feet forward, but Jonathan’s eyes are still on the handful of pink paper pieces drifting across the shiny asphalt in slow sweeps near his feet. He bends over, picking one up and turns it over in his palm: on the front of it is a scrawl of handwriting, circled numbers and a date-line, finalised with a red, inky signature.
Jonathan blinks.
Parking tickets. The man’s van was filled to the brim with an excessive amount of parking tickets.
This one was for $10. He leans over and picks up another one. It was another $10 ticket. The third slip of paper he managed to grab before it was swept away by a warm gust of wind was for $15. Perplexed, he fists them gently, approaching the gas pump as the man hops out of the van again, this time careful not to kick up the sea of pink slips swimming around his feet.
“You, uh, dropped this.” Jonathan holds out his hand awkwardly, as if knowing the sheer amount of parking tickets this stranger had was somehow far too intimate. The man however, simply raises a brow, a popped, “Ah,” slipping out before he shakes his head, motioning to the trash can between the pumps.
“Toss em’,” he instructs, unbothered, and moves to unscrew the gas cap again. “I got like. Fifty of them in here. “And I can’t pay them, so…” He shrugs, balancing the metal gas cap on the curve of the white-walled tires just below the wheel well.
Jonathan finds himself frowning, but does as he’s instructed. Then, his gaze snaps to the store as he raises an arm, the shadow of Marco finally emerging from behind the tinted windows and moving towards the till. He picks up the nozzle, raising the small emergency stop-start lever that triggers the pump signal in the store, and a few seconds later, the pump chugs to life, a low whirring sound filling up the space between them.
“You should stop parking in no-parking zones then,” Jonathan finds himself admonishing. Then, he turns to face the man completely, with a purposeful: “How much?”
The owner of the van pulls out a slick, leather wallet, flipping through numerous empty slots before fingering out a few bills and a couple of coins. “Uh...like $5…” He trails off, fingers sorting through the handful of change. “$5.40?” He doesn’t address the comment about his bad parking habits and instead pushes out his hand. Jonathan reaches for it, accepting the sad handful of coins and the crumpled, dog-eared bills, shoving them down into his pocket.
“I'll see what I can do. Might not get it right on,” Jonathan tells him, squaring his shoulders as he turns towards the van. He slots the nozzle into the gas tank, and with his eyes on the ticker, begins to pump the gas.
“It’s fine.” The man pushes up against the edge of the van next to him, hip pressed against the door. Then, seconds later, he asks: “You guys got a washroom around here?”
Jonathan just nods, pointing towards the grey metal door at the edge of the service station, partially obscured by a stack of mismatched milk crates, waiting to be picked up during the next dairy delivery.
"Key?" the man asks.
There’s a pause, as Jonathan considers how he knew that the public washrooms here required a key, but then he remembers Sam’s comments. Right. He’s been here before. Jonathan allows a slow nod, teeth chewing on his cheek as he wordlessly dips his hand into his other pocket and fishes out a coppery-coloured key attached to a small, green lanyard. He dangles it out between them and the man takes it, wrapping the length of the lanyard around his fingers.
“Thanks,” he grins. Then in one quick motion, the man pushes off the edge of the vehicle, jogging around to the back of the van. One of the wide double doors swings open and the vehicle jostles slightly, the frame creaking. He then grabs a small bag—no bigger than a carry on—and takes off towards the bathroom in a quick jaunt.
Jonathan frowns. The ticker on the gas pump had just hit $5.05 and less than 15 seconds later, he shuts it off at $5.31. He squeezes the handle gently and the ticker nudges itself forward: $5.33, $5.34, $5.38...he stops, not wanting to risk going over and flips the switch on the pump, the tanks’ siphon shutting off.
It takes a few minutes for him to get a receipt issued from Marco. The man talks his ear off about how he ended his break early and now he’ll need to add the time to his afternoon one and how they shouldn’t really be doing that because it always gets too busy. Jonathan just nods and agrees, but doesn’t mention how Marco was supposed to be manning the pumps to begin with and when Jonathan hands him the sad handful of change and the wrinkled dollar bills, Marco says:
“Blue jellyfish van?”
Jonathan nods.
“Yeah.”
“Used to see him up at Zuma a lot. That was back in July during peak surf season before the park rangers started hammering down on the local beach bum population. Sam thinks he’s homeless.”
The word ‘homeless’ sets something twinging in Jonathan’s gut, but he tries to shake it off, responding with an equally neutral:
“Yeah?”
Marco hums, printing off the gas receipt and hands him back the man’s change: two sad, singular cents.
“Yeah. Lives out of that van. Did he take a bag to the washroom again? Goes in there to clean himself up.”
Jonathan nods again—he did in fact take a small bag with him to the bathroom—and Marco's cheeks pull tight, teeth biting down at the flesh of his lip as he tries to hide how pleased he was with himself for his prediction.
“Maybe he actually just needed to use the washroom,” Jonathan suggests, and Marco’s smiles, wry and knowing as he shakes his head.
“You know—for someone who frowns so much, you sure tend to have a lot of willfully blind optimism, Byers.”
Jonathan frowns again, thick and purposeful, flipping his boss off as he slips back out the gas station doors and back into the mid-morning sun. Marco laughs, and outside again, Sam waves to him, a shit-eating grin plastering his face as he points to the bathroom door, then back to the van. The man still wasn’t back yet and Jonathan just sighs, making his way back to the pumps, only then realizing that the door to the back of the van was still propped open. He wonders if the man had meant for him to watch it for him—his van—or if he had simply forgotten to close it up. The word ‘homeless’ was still rattling around in his brain, still eating up his stomach and setting his skin crawling with a vague uneasiness and curiosity gets the better of him. As he rounds on the pumps, he sidesteps the large, wieldy door and takes a peek inside.
Instantly, he frowns.
The interior was fully carpeted: a soft faded beige that covered not only the floors, but the walls and ceiling as well. It was all very outdated and very tacky—especially when Jonathan caught sight of the pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror up front. There was a mattress in the back too, alongside a few errant piles of clothing. Some seemed damp and were sandy, like they had been squeezed out at the beach and left to dry in the sun, but hadn't been left out quite long enough. There was a crinkled plastic bag filled with an abundance of snack cake wrappers too, alongside a faded glittering red surfboard with a few noticeable large scratches that had been shoved up alongside the edge of the sandy mattress.
Nothing about the interior of the van seemed to either confirm nor refute Sam’s belief that the man was homeless. It just seemed like the man liked to surf and spent a lot of time at the beach. Yes—the van was a touch messy, and yes, there were an abundance of parking tickets up in the front seat—but it wasn’t uncommon for vans such as these to have mattresses tossed in the back of them, nor was it uncommon to see wet beach clothes strewn around in the interior of cars in coastal California. Maybe the man just sucked at reading road signs. Maybe he didn’t care about parking tickets because the plates—and Jonathan had checked—were from Indiana. Maybe he was just some rich kid on a break year. It would make sense: a van with a custom paint job and out of town plates, no regard for local parking infractions, spends his time at Zuma with the surf crowds and oh, right—doesn’t know how to pump his own gas either.
For the second time that day, Jonathan thinks that Sam just might be wrong.
Lips drawn thin in contemplation, Jonathan takes a step away from the rear of the van and finds himself leaning against one of the flaking, rust covered poles that held up the gas station pumps’ awning. He still had the man’s receipt and change (all two cents of it), but he still wasn’t back from the washroom. God, how annoying: he hated customers like this. If you were going to pay at the pump and then get out of your car and go into the store, then what was even the point? He was two seconds away from pinning the receipt under the windshield wiper and pocketing the pennies for himself when he felt a hand clamp around his shoulder and the honey-warm intonation of:
“Hey, man—thanks for watching the van.”
Jonathan twists to find the stranger grinning at him. His face was slightly cleaner, like he had just shaved, and the roots of his hair were wet. Then, he held out the lanyard with the washroom key and dropped it into Jonathan's hand.
“Forgot to shut the door again—keep doing that. Thank god the folks here in Mar Vista are a lot nicer than those assholes in the Hermosa area.”
Jonathan raises a brow, holding out the man’s receipt and change, who takes it, fumbling and nearly dropping the coins onto the pavement.
“Found this guy rifling through my shit one time,” he goes on to explain despite Jonathan not having asked the question. He fingers the pennies together before slipping them back into his pocket and crumples up the receipt. “Like, full on crawled into the back of my van and was digging around in my shit.” The man lets out a disgusted huff, shoving his hands into his pockets as he rocks on the balls of his feet. “Anyways—thanks again. For watching the van. And you know—the gas thing.” He flashes Jonathan a large, nearly blinding grin and before Jonathan can say anything else, he’s in motion again, moving around to the backside to shut the wide, heavy door and then quickly making his way around the front.
As he yanks open the driver side door again, another wash of pink parking tickets pour out from the floor well, fluttering to the asphalt and across the parking lot.
“See you around—,” he pauses, squinting as he stares at Jonathan, expression pinched. Jonathan realizes belatedly that he’s trying to read his name tag, and although he sighs, he finds himself tugging on the fabric of his shirt, pulling it forward so that the man could see it better. It causes the stranger to beam, who finishes his slow sounding sentence with a popped, “Jonathan!”
Then, he tilts his fingers to him, the van roaring back to life. The speakers pick up this time too, blaring and loud and almost painful to his ears as they crackle. If Jonathan’s not mistaken it was that annoyingly catchy pop song by The Romantics, too. The man doesn’t seem to mind it, however, and Jonathan barely catches him bopping along as he pushes a pair of black framed sunglasses onto his face. The blue jellyfish van rolls forward, creeping towards the edge of the parking lot in a slow crawl, and then it is gone, speeding towards the direction of the Santa Monica Pier.
—