“What was that?” Dana said.
“Tire blew,” I said.
She sat up and took a deep breath, and then another one. “I thought we were dead.”
“The key,” I said, “is not to panic.” I turned on the hazard lights. The double arrows lit the car with regular bursts of yel ow light. We were going to have to ride the rim to the next exit. As I pul ed the car onto the roadway I told Dana, “It’s just going to be bumpy.”
She nodded and kept taking those bel y breaths.
“If you keep breathing like that, you are supposed to use a paper bag. You can hyperventilate.”
“Okay,” she said. “That was terrible. I thought we were going to die.”
“Wouldn’t it be terrible to die while you’re stil in high school?”
“It would be just my luck to die before I get to go to Mount Holyoke.”
I gave the car a little bit of gas and we clunked along a little faster. “You don’t have to rub it in. I’l probably have to go to Georgia State.” Maybe it was just the release of al the tension caused by the blowout, but I was suddenly very sad. I wanted to travel, to leave Atlanta. I had never thought about Massachusetts before, but now I wanted to go there more than anything. I had almost six thousand dol ars saved — that was a lot of five-dol ar hours — I wanted to spend it al on tweed blazers and lobster rol s. I wanted a future.
The exit had promised gas, food, and lodging, but the sign didn’t tel us how far off the interstate we would have to travel to find these services.
On the way back home, after everything, I would notice a sign letting me know that we were only a half mile from the freeway the whole time. But stil , a half mile is a long way when night is fal ing on two black girls alone in the sticks. The sound of the damaged car on the almost empty stretch of road was obnoxious in the quiet evening, like the noise of high heels in an empty hal way.
“Don’t cry, Chaurisse,” Dana said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”
21
THE MEN ALL PAUSED
THE GAS STATION was smal and out-of-date — not so oldfashioned as Andy Griffith but dated enough to let us know we weren’t in Atlanta anymore.
The pumps, boxy with flip-over numbers, did not display a sign saying you had to pay first. Just from the curb, you could tel that the convenience store didn’t sel anything but chewing gum, Coca-Cola, and motor oil. I aimed the Lincoln at the corner of the lot, where a pay phone was mounted in a glass booth.
When we stopped the car, the lights on the smal lot got a little brighter, like we were approaching a private home and somebody flipped on the floodlights. The clerk, a white lady about the age of my mother, stuck her head out the door and looked around. Her auburn updo, permed half to death, was proof that people should never be al owed to apply chemicals to their own hair.
Dana said, “She can’t help us fix the tire.”
“No,” I said. “The rim is al bent up by now anyway. We’re going to have to get a tow.”
“Towed to where?” She said it so fast that it came out like one word.
“Back home,” I said. “We’re not going to make it to the party.”
Her face took on that wild cast again. “It’s just a tire. Somebody can get us on the road again.”
“The rim is al bent out of shape. We drove on it for, like, two miles.” I spoke slowly, like I was talking to a child.
She answered speaking even more slowly. “No, Chaurisse. We are going to the party. You invited me to a party.” She picked at the hair around her temples. The gentle brown of her scalp gleamed through. “I’m going inside to ask for help. It’s a gas station; somebody in there has to know how to change a tire.” She hopped out of the car and jogged into the little store, leaving the car door open.
It wasn’t warm enough for our matching tube tops; this much was clear as I walked over to the pay phone. The superman booth made the whole setting seem make-believe, like we were on a movie set. “Col ect cal from Chaurisse,” I said to the operator.
“What is it, Buttercup? You okay?”
“I’m okay, Daddy. But the Lincoln’s not.”
“You had a wreck?”
“No, Daddy,” I said. “A blowout.”
I heard him say to my mother, “She’s al right.”
“I kept control of the car,” I told him. “I steered with the swerve.”
Daddy said, “That’s my girl. Where are you?”
“Up 1-75,” I said. “We got off at exit twelve. You’l see a Chevron.”
“You by yourself?”
“No, I’m with one of my girlfriends.”
“Wel ,” he said. “Me and Raleigh are headed out right now. You and your friend get back in the car and lock up. You do not want to fool with those peckerwoods out there.”
“Okay, Daddy,” I said, watching Dana prance out of the store with a skinny white guy. He wasn’t ful y adult,
