Arches

by Marle Baleo

I meet Francesca in the parking lot of McDonald’s in Mount Vernon, Illinois. Her razor-thin eyebrows and metallic blue eye-shadow keep me captivated at length. Francesca is nineteen like me. She is stocky and small, and her hair sticks to her forehead in oily dark strands. I detect a hint of a dye job but with the parking lights you really can’t be sure. She tells me she is leaving Mount Vernon because the guy she met on MySpace hasn’t worked out. He was a jerk, and treated her like a slave. Like I’m his fucking maid or some shit, you know? She asks. Francesca says I shit you not, a lot. She has been married before. Her marriage lasted five years. Francesca is the only other to me right now, and by virtue of that, she is the whole world. I have been floating on a large and silent ocean, traveling alone, not speaking to anyone for more than ten seconds in days. But now Francesca and I have washed up on the same shore. I  offer to buy her a milkshake. Dragging my heavy red suitcase, I follow her into the bright restaurant. We sit down, facing each other, and sip on our milkshakes. I try to tell Francesca about my own problems but she doesn’t listen. I need someone to appease me but it’s not Francesca. I secretly subscribe to the theory that one should only get their advice from strangers, and that if a sign were to come of what the future will hold, it would come through something like this tête à tête with Francesca. (This was not true here.)
 
Francesca talks about what it is like being Mexican, and how she wants to be considered white because she is half white. She talks about the men in her family, who are all jerks. She talks about Myspace Jerk and his family and how he was a lazy ass with no ambition who only used her for sex and videogames. I think of my own girlfriend who is not here in this freezing parking lot and then I think of how my girlfriend is probably going to dump me soon and about how I’ve known it for a while and I wonder what I thought I’d accomplish by going MIA and why I thought I could possibly find myself and the purpose of my life and a solution to all my non-existent yet intolerable problems in a string of parking lots and Greyhounds. I suck on the straw but nothing comes.
 
I ask Francesca if she’s alone now and she says yes but it won’t be long because I always end up with one asshole or another. I nod.
 
Later, we stand alone in the parking lot in silence, and then other people join us, waiting for the bus, but no one speaks. I can’t feel my toes inside my Chucks and Francesca and I are both aware that our private window of connivance has closed. We stand outside for over an hour, our eyes squinted, counting cars, trying not to blink, waiting for our Greyhound to appear. I am so cold in my hoodie that I am shaken by painful shivers, something like one every 20 seconds, I try to contain them but find I can’t, and it displeases me. Sometimes when you wait too long like this and there is still a hint of color near the horizon you forget about your life, about time and your physical limits, and in my case this almost applies, but I still know I have feet, because I can’t feel them. After some time - could be thirty minutes, could be three hours - the bus is there.
 
We sit in the dark, the loneliest people in the nation maybe. No one talks to anyone.
 
I see Francesca’s head, in front of me, bobbing as we drive through the night and to St. Louis. She is asleep. We near the city from the east, and the Arch appears on the other side of the river, small and shiny then bigger and tall and incredibly thin and then I remember how tiny the egg-shaped elevators are and how small the windows are on top and how wide the sunset looks from there and I am sorry that it is nighttime.
 
Later on, I walk through the hall of the Greyhound station, trying to find the exit and a taxi to take me home. Francesca is there, standing in line, trying to buy another ticket to go to some city in Ohio. It could be Cleveland, or anywhere else. I wave at her and she nods back, her eyelids a flash of purplish blue.
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