A Ticket to Ride by Paula McLain Page A

Tom asked the kid—Shipman was his name—about who had beer. When Shipman answered, I noticed his voice was blurry, slurred, which made me wonder if he’d recently drunk all the Coors cans that had gone into his ridiculous hat. But then I saw him pass a lit joint to Tom.
    My eyes shot over to Fawn in an alarmed way—I’d never smoked pot before—but Fawn seemed entirely unconcerned. She simply watched the two boys, either waiting for her turn at the joint or for Tom’s attention. He wasn’t sharing either at the moment, not even when she sighed loudly, then flipped one side of her hair back with her hand. Firelight flickered off the strands, but Tom was in a trance, perfectly happy to just stand and watch the fire or stare off into the night. When he spoke to Shipman, his voice was a forty-five record running at thirty-three-and-a-third speed.
    “I guess we’ll be seeing you then,” Fawn said. She turned to me with another pointed sigh: boring.
    “No no, hey,” Tom said, seeming to recover his wits slightly. “Stick around for a while. Have a beer.” He trotted over to an open cooler at the next fire pit and back again while we waited. He handed us the cans, flicking ice water off. “You’re lucky, they’re cold tonight,” he said. “Usually they’re warm as pisswater.”
    Fawn wrinkled her nose but softened slightly. At least he was speaking to her now.
    For the next hour, Fawn and Tom cozied up to each other on a nearby tree stump. Claudia talked to Shipman, taking hits from a second proffered joint. I drank my beer, then another, trying to seem cavalier about it. I’d never been drunk, never been high. I worried that if Fawn knew this, she’d heckle me like Tom heckled Collin, so I drank like I’d be tested on it later, swallowing as fast as I could and hiding the shuddering thatdogged me through my first can, which was bitter and smelled a little like alfalfa silage, a little like vomit. Collin sat near me, but didn’t speak to me or anyone else. Instead, he poked at the fire with a long stick and pitched pebbles into the flames. I watched him, thinking it was something Patrick Fettle would do, at least the Patrick I knew when I was nine.
    Apparently Fawn was watching Collin too. “I’ve got a great idea,” she said, leaving Tom and coming up to where Collin crouched next to the fire. She touched her beer can lightly, proprietarily, to the top of Collin’s head then turned to me and said, “What do you say we get you kids really drunk?”
     
    I woke up at seven thirty the next morning feeling like someone had whacked me in the head with a shovel and then shoved dirty socks in my mouth. All in all, I’d had four beers and a few hits off a cigarette Fawn had begged from Tom. He smoked Mores, like Telly Savalas, long and slim, the color of burned toast. They looked exotic and tasted like tar stuck to the bottom of a shoe. When I inhaled, I coughed for a full minute. Fawn had laughed at me before lifting the cigarette from my fingers to blow a pretty legitimate-looking smoke ring toward Tom.
    Fawn slept until noon, but I went on with our morning routine anyway. I ate a cold peach then read ’Teen while I softened my cuticles in a dish of vegetable oil. I washed the smoke out of my hair and shaved my legs twice and buffed my feet with a pumice stone. By the time Fawn finally woke up, I was on the lawn, tanning.
    “You’ve got some nice color already,” Fawn said, walking up with her towel and a glass of tea.
    “Really? Thanks,” I said, flushing with pride.
    When Fawn stretched out, she groaned. “Man, am I hungover. You?”
    “I feel terrible,” I said.
    “Then you did everything right.”
    We drowsed for the better part of an hour before Skinny Man’s garage door rolled up with a grinding whir. Standing just inside the door, he held a long spray nozzle in one hand, a squat silver canister in the other, and wore an all-white jumpsuit and white sneakers. He looked like a