Free This One Time With Julia by David Lampson Page A

helped me find our way onto a wide, fast highway, where driving was even easier than on the city streets, and after a while I couldn’t taste Los Angeles in the air anymore, and we were cruising through an open desert.
    “You’ll have to tell me when we reach someplace you’ve never been,” said Julia.
    “It’s already happened.”
    “You’re so full of surprises. You never mentioned being so good at basketball.”
    “That’s because I’m not a show-off.”
    “Why don’t you do something with it?”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. Like play in college. Or play on a pro team somewhere.”
    “I can’t play with people yelling at me all the time. I always go on tilt.”
    “That’s like the fourth time I’ve heard you say that. What does that mean?”
    “You play poker. Alvin must have told you what it means.”
    “He never taught me that word.”
    That one stumped me for a while. I drove through the dark, empty desert for a pretty long time before I thought of a way to explain it.
    “Poker is really hard and it’s always impossible to know what you should do,” I said finally. “But sometimes, even when you know exactly what to do, you go ahead and do the wrong thing anyway. You bet when you know that you’ll probably lose.”
    “Why would anybody do that?”
    “Some people get all drunk, or get angry at the cards, or they start to believe in different kinds of magic. Some people just can’t remember they’re supposed to be trying to win.” This last part was something Marcus was always telling me. “Marcus never goes on tilt.”
    “What about Alvin?”
    “Sometimes. But in a different way.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’m usually on tilt.”
    “I think I’d like to be on tilt for a while.” She rolled her seat way back so she was basically lying down. “We forgot about Max,” she said.
    “That’s okay. Marcus will take care of him, for sure. He loves dogs, and it’s easier than taking care of me.”
    “Listen to us, Joe. Listen to the way we’re talking. What would people think if they could hear us? When did my life become totally insane?” Julia bit her arm for a second, like she was trying not to scream. “I just realized I have no idea what I’m doing. Absolutely none.”
    She closed her eyes and soon I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I drove all night and it was pretty easy except for this one place, climbing over all these mountains that I’d never realized were so close, when I got suddenly a little sad, because I felt like I was falling off a cliff away from Marcus, instead of just driving away from him. I wasn’t waiting for Alvin to come home anymore. I was off on my own. Even now, remembering that night, it still makes my chest thump to think of riding off like that with Julia in the dark. Alvin and Marcus were the only two people I’d known my whole life, and I had no idea when I’d see either one of them again.
    Julia was sleeping and the sun was rising when the car suddenly broke so badly that I couldn’t drive it anymore. I had to pull off the road next to a whole bunch of corn growing next to the highway. Julia woke up pretty quickly.
    “What’s happening?”
    “The car’s broken.”
    She rubbed her face and looked around.
    “Do we have a flat?”
    “I don’t know. It just stopped working.”
    She leaned over and looked at the dashboard. “The car’s not broken. You just ran out of gas.”
    “What?”
    “You didn’t see the light?”
    “What light?”
    “Are you really not familiar with the gas light?”
    I started to go on a very nervous kind of tilt. I felt like I was back at school, and that some teacher was asking me to read something impossible. I had never driven a car long enough to run out of gas before.
    “I guess I just missed it.”
    “You don’t know about the gas light?”
    Julia squeezed up against the car door like she wanted to be as far away from me as possible. From the way she looked at me, and the way she kept