A Ticket to Ride Read Online Free PDF Page A

pinpoint her in space and time, to will her to call him back, he thoughthe might as well have been using weightless string and Styrofoam. She would call again or she wouldn’t. She would be okay or not. Ray, I don’t know what to do , he heard again, a cracked bell sounding in his head, but the phone in his kitchen was mute and useless. He went to bed insisting to himself that she’d call in the morning, and when she didn’t, he grabbed a map, put coffee in a thermos, and went to find her.

DIAMOND GIRL
    I n the car on the way home from O’Hare, Fawn mostly talked to Raymond, filling him in on details from home. Her mom was fine. Her dad was working a lot. Her little brother Guy had had pneumonia in the spring, but he was better now, and was even playing soccer again. Raymond listened and nodded, occasionally asking about one thing or another. I looked out the window, my mind ticking, trying to think of the perfect thing to say—witty, worldly, memorable—that would show Fawn how fundamentally great I was. But my tongue was dead in my mouth. My brain felt leaky and unreliable.
    When we reached the house, we sat on the couch in front of TV trays and ate burgers we’d picked up from A&W, Fawn slathering her onion rings with French’s mustard. (Mustard!) After dinner, we watched the Movie of the Week, which was about a mischievous but brilliant chimpanzee that helped his detective owner solve a murder mystery. He knew sign language, and when he found various clues, he would shriek and sign wildly to the detective, who was apparently an idiot. I thought this was atotally unbelievable story, but Fawn laughed and seemed into it, so I was too.
    At bedtime, Fawn had her turn at the bathroom first and when she came out she wore an actual nightgown made of a pale blue eyelet. There was a white satin bow affixed to the center of the neckline and just above it, she wore a tear-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain so fine it could have been spun out of confectioner’s sugar. I hadn’t noticed the pendant before, but I had noticed Fawn’s hair, which was gleaming as she brushed it now with long, even strokes. In the car, I had been mesmerized by the way the sun transformed the somewhat ordinary brown into a dazzling, minky ribbon. A thick strand lay across the back of Fawn’s seat, and I felt it pulling magnetically on my hand, which was lying, for the moment, tame in my lap. If I moved slowly, the way pickpockets did, I could reach up without anyone seeing, stroke just once, and then know exactly how soft it was, how fine. But I resisted. Wasn’t it weird to want to touch someone else’s hair? And what if I was caught? What would Fawn think of me then?
    What Fawn did or didn’t think of me was to become my principal obsession that summer, so much so that it would fully eclipse and cancel out its reverse: what I thought of her. It never occurred to me to ask myself if I liked Fawn. The real question, the only question, was did she like me ? If not, how could I make her like me? If yes, then how much? And when? And why?
     
    In the days after Fawn’s arrival, nothing and everything happened. Raymond took a personal day from work and drove us up the Great River Road all the way to Dubuque, where we went up a steep hill in a rickety funicular that delivered a spectacular view of the Mississippi. At the top, a college-age boy took our twenty-five cents. Long rust-brown hair fell fetchingly into his eyes, and he sported a dimple in his right cheek deep enough to swallow a blueberry.
    “They sure do grow them cute out here,” Fawn said to me as we walked away, and I puffed up, feeling pride though we were in Iowa, not Illinois. Out here was a broad enough swath, I thought, and regardless, Fawn thought we had something to offer her. Maybe we actually did.
    It was on the way home from Dubuque that I first learned Fawn could sing. Raymond had Gordon Lightfoot on the eight-track; he was a sucker for “The Wreck of the Edmund