Destination Anywhere Page 9
“Don’t you do that, Peyton. Don’t you put that on us.”
“I’m not putting anything on you,” I say. “I’m just asking you to listen to me. You’re still not doing that.”
She doesn’t speak for a long time, and when she does, her voice is defeated. “Okay. We’re not getting anywhere here. I hope you have a nice time on Vancouver Island.”
I swallow. My eyes are stinging. “I’ll send you another postcard.”
“Another one?”
“Yeah, I sent one on my first day,” I say. “Hasn’t it arrived yet?”
“The post hasn’t come yet today,” she says. “I’ll look forward to getting it.”
There’s a silence. “Okay,” I say. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she says.
NOW
VANCOUVER ISLAND
Vancouver Island, I discover, is beautiful. It rains almost constantly the first couple of days I’m there, but even that can’t dampen how beautiful it is, which says a lot. As I explore, the scenery unfolds before me under the frame of my umbrella, where I’m often hunched, trying to sketch what I see and protect the paper from raindrops at the same time. Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, is a big city, but in comparison to Vancouver’s urban sprawl, it’s almost homey. I don’t get lost on the buses once, and I manage to make my way around the south of the island, ticking off visiting spots on my list, pretty easily. On paper, it’s perfect: I’m doing exactly what I’d planned to do when I was sitting on the plane. I’m an independent traveler; bold and brave.
But here’s the thing. You know what traveling alone actually is? Lonely. Really, really lonely. And honestly, kind of boring, too. After three days of just me and my own head and no one to talk to, even as everything around me is so amazing, the idea of going across the whole of this giant country on my own is starting to seem less and less of a good idea. I’d hoped I’d settle into it by now, but I haven’t, not really. Sometimes I wonder if I want to go home, but that seems more and more impossible, too. What would I do when I got back? Apologize to my parents, let them force me back into college because I have no other choice, fall back into the same misery I was trying to escape? And I’d have nothing to show for it.
So I carry on, doggedly exploring Victoria and its surroundings. Every day I get a message from Khalil, Still alive? and I smile every time as I reply, Yes, Khalil. If I’m totally honest with myself, I know I’m letting my pride stop me from doing what I deep-down-honestly-really want to do, which is tell Khalil that he was right and I’m lonely and can we please be friends.
After a few days, the restless, lost feeling that had taken over me in Vancouver is back, maybe even stronger than it was before. I want to step out of my skin, parachute out of my life, be someone else. Going somewhere else wasn’t enough, clearly. It’s me that’s the problem. Me I can’t escape.
So I decide to go on a day trip to Salt Spring Island, which is one of the smaller islands off the coast. I have to get a bus to the harbor, and it occurs to me on the journey that the reasoning I’d used for this trip is almost exactly the same as the reasoning I used to get me to Vancouver Island in the first place. A smaller island will be more manageable, I’d thought. It will make it clearer why I’m here. And now that’s exactly why I’m going to Salt Spring Island. What am I going to do—keep finding smaller islands until I stop feeling overwhelmed in my own life?
I shake the thoughts out of my head. This is just a day trip to a pretty place. It’s a totally normal thing to do as a visitor to Vancouver Island. In fact, it would be weirder if I came here and didn’t visit Salt Spring Island. There—that’s solid logic. Well done, Peyton.
I’ve got time to kill at the harbor before my boat leaves, so I explore the terminal, where I end up buying a gigantic bag of kettle corn because the seller lets me try some when he hears my accent, and I love it so much I can’t leave without taking some with me. It seems like a quirky, fun thing to do until I’m sitting on the boat, by myself, with a huge plastic bag of popcorn on my lap and no one to share it with. If I had a friend, we could talk between fistfuls of corn, chucking pieces at each other, trying to catch them in our mouths. We’d take pictures posing with the bag and post them on Instagram with captions like, Hand included for scale! #CORNY
Instead, I’m just on my own, and it doesn’t taste as good as it did when I was talking to the friendly kettle-corn guy. Now I’ve got to carry the whole damn thing around with me for the entire day. Why didn’t I get it on the way back? Why can’t I get anything right?
Near the front of the boat, I see the sloping back of a tall guy with black curls out of the corner of my eye, and my heart leaps with an excitement that surprises me. Khalil? If it’s Khalil, I can go up to him, grinning, all cool and confident. “Fancy seeing you here,” I’ll say. If he’s here, Beasey will be, too. They’ll help me eat the popcorn. When they laugh at me for buying such a big bag for one person, I’ll laugh, too. We can all spend the day together on the island and what a relief I don’t have to spend another day alone—
The owner of the black curls turns slightly and it’s not him. Of course it isn’t. I deflate with disappointment, the hope of the day fading in an instant. Khalil had messaged me this morning, right on schedule, as he had each day I’d been here. Still alive? I’d replied, Yeeees. He’d said, Beasey says hi!
A stab of loneliness guts into me and I cram a handful of popcorn into my mouth. There’s a couple on the boat near me who seem around my age, having the kind of hushed, gritted-teeth conversation you have in public when what you really want is a private argument. When she turns away from him to look out to sea, he rolls his eyes at her back. Not for anyone’s benefit—he doesn’t know I’m watching—but because whatever he’s feeling inside has spilled out, uncontrollable.
Of course I think about Travis and me. We must have had a hundred interactions like that over our year together as a couple. God, a year. An entire year. How did that happen?
I know how it happened. I know exactly how it happened, because it was all me. I was the one desperate to be in a relationship with Travis because I was convinced that being his girlfriend was some kind of shortcut to having friends. That is, Flick, Eric, Casey, Callum, and Nico. That group of diamonds.
Now it’s me rolling my eyes, except I’m on my own and I’m doing it into thin air. Or maybe at myself. Had I really believed it was that simple? Did I not give myself a second, not once, to think, Are these really the friends I actually want?
No. No, I did not.
BEFORE
aka
Peyton and Travis: The Love(ish) Story
aka
Peyton, what the hell were you thinking??
I threw myself at Travis, that’s the truth. Wholeheartedly. After those first kisses in Flick’s kitchen, we entered that in-between period that seems short in retrospect but felt endless at the time. We chatted over WhatsApp—who knows what we had to talk about then, but I still remember that buzz of hope every time I looked at my phone, hoping for a new message from him—and shared secret, flirty smiles at college. He’d bump my elbow and wink at me in math. A couple of times after our last class of the day, we “took a walk” together, which meant going to the nearest park and kissing on the grass. Those were good kisses, long and slow, the kind that made my heart race. It was all good, actually, but I was still nervous, desperate to have the solidity of a relationship.
Travis really likes you! Flick messaged me, about a week after that night at her house.
I like him sooo much! I replied. Did I mean it then? I can’t quite believe that I could have, but maybe I did. Maybe I’d been able to focus on how sweet his smile could be, how good those kisses were, how my whole body warmed up when he took my hand and held it as we walked.
She sent me heart-eyes back. Emboldened, I messaged Travis.
Me:
Thinking about you :)
Travis:
Oh yeh? Thinking what? ;)
Me:
Wouldn’t you like to know.
I surprised myself with how good I was at playing the game. I’d learned so much from the books I’d read and the films I’d seen, and it paid off with Travis. Too well, really. I think I got so into following the script I knew so well that I forgot that both Travis and I were real people. I remember how, in those early days, I’d look up and see him next to me, and the reality of him would almost make me jump. I preferred him on the other end of a WhatsApp conversation, just words and emojis and potential.
After a couple of weeks of the in-between, Travis asked me round to his on a Saturday afternoon. (His parents would be out, he assured me.) When I arrived he poured me a glass of lemonade and took me into the living room, which was a sweeter alternative to the beer-and-bedroom scenario I’d been half expecting. He put something on Netflix and started to kiss me and that’s how we spent the next hour, the TV and lemonade ignored, buried in each other.
I’m not going to say it didn’t feel good. It felt really good. He still kissed with too much tongue, but I’d learned how to move my own gently enough to slow his down. We kissed with our eyes closed, so I almost forgot it was Travis I was kissing and went off into my own vague daydream. It didn’t matter who I was kissing; it mattered that I was kissing. When his hands went wandering, I liked that too.
We took a break to come up for air. I gulped down some lemonade and smiled at him when he smiled at me. I think we may have talked for a little bit, but if we did, I don’t remember what we said. I put the glass down, he reached for me again, and then his hand was working at the zip on my jeans as he kissed me, his tongue wild in my mouth. Wilder than usual, just by the prospect of touching me. It was strangely gratifying, being wanted like that. Even as my heart thundered with a mix of excitement and dread, even as I wished this was all happening with someone else, I still wanted him to touch me. I wanted to feel in his touch how touching me affected him. It was intoxicating. Is that what people mean by being turned on? In that moment, the first time Travis pawed at me, I thought I understood it.
His hand had found its way inside my jeans, and he was rubbing at me through my underwear, and the biggest surprise was that it did feel good. It felt really good. But then he was wrenching my underwear aside, fingers scrabbling, and he was almost grunting into my mouth. His fingers seemed so much bigger than they did when he held my hand, so… fingery. Weird and uncomfortable. Poking, jabbing and—ouch!—pushing inside me. It didn’t feel really good anymore. I wanted the rubbing back.
He’d leaned back slightly to look at me, and I gathered by his face that this was the bit that was meant to be good, that he was expecting something from me. Jab, jab, jab. “You love it,” he said.
I really didn’t, but it was confusing, that’s the thing. I’d never done anything like this before, and he had, so he’d know, right? This was clearly meant to feel good, and if it didn’t, that must be my fault.
“Mmmm,” I said.
He was looking at me so intensely, waiting for something, but all the intoxicating want I’d had in me before had gone. It was just the physical—very weird—reality of his fingers moving inside me. He was clearly still into it, and what if he realized I wasn’t?
Distraction. That was the solution. I put my hand on him, on his jeans between his legs, and he let out a noise, nodding hard. I unzipped, pushed my hand in, found his erection. I wanted him to tell me what to do, but he didn’t—he just looked at me expectantly. I moved my hand, almost like a question, and he groaned quietly, biting his lip. Everything about it felt strange and weird, but I carried on, encouraged by the way his breathing changed, how he dropped his head between my shoulder and my neck, like he was surrendering himself to me and my touch.
It didn’t take long. I felt his body spasm, heard his groan, felt something hot and wet on my hand. He turned his head to kiss me, sloppy and wet. “You’re amazing,” he said. I’d never been amazing before. I kissed him back, and it felt good again.
Another two weeks after that, weeks that included a couple of nights spent at Flick’s and further experimentation in the locked bathroom with the light off, he invited me to his house again. This time we graduated to his bedroom—his parents somewhere else, which is how he always timed my visits—and his bed. First on top of the covers, lying underneath him with the mattress below me and my body on fire with nerves and anticipation, and then under the covers, layers slowly removed, him with an impatience I knew he was trying to hide, and then sex, brief and painful, the ultimate anticlimax. He held me after and stroked my hair and said he was sorry it had hurt, that it would get better. He said, “Will you be my girlfriend?”
And I smiled so wide and said yes, and he kissed me, and it was all so, so worth it.
If this all sounds like it was very fast, then yes, it was—barely a month from never been kissed to devirginized in my boyfriend’s bed—but it really didn’t feel it at the time. It felt like exactly the right thing to do, not just because it was inevitable but because it was what I wanted. A way to secure the deal, you know? Like putting a deposit down on a house. I know how terrible that sounds, maybe even ridiculous, but I have to be honest about how I was then, how my mind worked when it came to Travis and the group. I think I would have done just about anything to get what I thought I wanted.
And I had it, didn’t I? Everything I’d ever wanted. It had gone even better than I’d dreamed it would. I had a boyfriend and a group of friends, people who smiled when they saw me and made room for me to sit down beside them and added me to their group WhatsApp chat. No one was bullying me or even giving me a hard time. Victim Peyton was a thing of the past; a Claridge Academy relic. I’d made it.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t feel happy. Not really. I was surface-happy, sure. But it was a desperate kind of happiness; there was something almost frantic about it. It made me think of a toddler chasing butterflies. I couldn’t depend on it, and there was nothing I could do to control it or be sure it was safe.
If I’m going to talk in “should haves,” this would be the moment I’d start. I should have been able to talk about my feelings with my boyfriend, to begin with. And I definitely should have been able to talk about them with my friends—isn’t that why people have friends? Maybe not the group as a whole, but definitely Flick, who I already thought of—though nervously, silently, like I wasn’t really allowed—as my closest friend. I don’t know what Flick would have done if I had tried that level of honesty with her, but I never did. For one thing, it would have involved telling her where I’d come from, who I’d been, and that was unthinkable. How do you tell someone you want so desperately to like you that you haven’t been liked in the past? How can you put that thought into their head, that maybe you aren’t likable, and maybe they shouldn’t like you either?
They all knew I’d come from Claridge Academy, and even that I’d left because I hated it there, but they didn’t know I’d been bullied so relentlessly, and no one ever asked why I didn’t talk about former friends. Maybe they were sensitive, or maybe they just didn’t care. Only Casey ever came close to knowing, but she never pushed me for more, and as far as I know she never told any of the others. That’s another one of my “should haves,” actually. Casey. Why did I pin so much of my friend hope on Flick? Casey was right there.
Anyway, that flighty happiness, it was like trying to catch a flame in your hand. It was beautiful, and it was there, but it was fleeting, too dangerous to look at too closely, let alone touch. The only way to hold on to it was to let it burn into me, scarring some part of me I couldn’t see but would feel forever, a tender point I would never be able to forget even after it had gone.
Which, of course, is what I did.
NOW
SALT SPRING ISLAND
Salt Spring Island is beautiful. So beautiful it calms my frazzled head, soothing the heat from my face and my hands. If anything is going to make it all worth it, it’s places like this. This is why I came here.
/> It’s hours until the last boat back to Vancouver Island, so I can take my time. I explore a few of the shops and stalls near the harbor before I get a bus to Ganges, the largest village on the island. I spend a calm couple of hours meandering around the streets, finding a postcard for my parents and sketching myself happier than I am for them, eating alone at a cafe, staring out at the street.
I leave myself plenty of time to return to the harbor before the boat is due to leave, getting off the bus several stops early so I can head toward the coast and see the beach. I have to walk through forest to get there, and I try to appreciate it as I go, anchoring myself in the moment like mindfulness tells you to, breathing in the cleanest air I’ve probably ever breathed, listening to the birds.
When I get to the beach, I explore the rock pools for a while before settling myself on a rock overlooking the sea and taking out my sketch pad. I touch my pencil to the paper and let my mind clear, sweeping across the page. I draw what I see in quick, bold strokes, then turn the page, draw myself on the boat, popcorn in lap, my face glum, chewing. Me on this rock, the island a backdrop behind me. I look back over the last few days’ worth of sketches, filling them in with extra details. I’ll make a map, I decide, of Vancouver Island, and add my sketches from place to place. And then, depending on how far across Canada I actually get, I’ll sketch a map of the whole of Canada, like Joni Mitchell did in that song my mum loves.
I sketch Mum and me in her car. She’s driving, I’m in the passenger seat, both of us singing. It makes me homesick. I turn the page.
It’s a long time before I gather myself up and head back toward the main path I’d been following before. So long that my legs feel stiff. I hug my sketch pad to me as I walk, my one true faithful companion. Wherever I am, alone or not, my hand still draws the same, my sketches are still me and mine. That’s something, isn’t it? I can be lonely, but at least I have art. What was it Amber Monroe used to say? “Maybe you should draw yourself some friends.” Well, maybe that was good advice.