Valentines: “Ridin’ Solo” by Malavika Praseed

Ridin’ Solo

To Malini, it wasn’t worth leaving the house. But Tim insisted that McDonald’s Sprite was the only cure for an afternoon like this. So they’d venture out into the damp, the sticky, April’s tangible sliceable air, for a drink he had in bottles in the fridge. It’s different, he’d say, and Malini didn’t feel like arguing, as long as they rolled through the drive thru and she wouldn’t have to move.

“Where should I pick you up?” he asked.

“At home.”

“Your parents?”

“What about my parents?”

Sure, she still lived at home, but it was much more of a come-and-go arrangement these days, one they’d worked out after years of strife. 

Something distracted her from pressing further. Tim offered to pick her up around the corner, at the gnarled oak tree that served as de facto gate between their neighborhoods. Malini said that was fine.

When she stepped up to the car, Tim wondered what was different. Her hair, it had to be her hair, always changing versions of sensible and short. Maybe her clothes? Had to be a new t-shirt, light pink and sleeveless, setting off her shoulders in the sun. No, Tim knew what it was, her legs. He could see them. Denim shorts that dug into her upper thighs, and her hands weren’t restlessly tugging and pulling at the pant legs. 

“Nice shorts,” he said.

“Oh, thanks,” she said. She didn’t move to cover herself, didn’t twist her knees up into themselves or spread an old hoodie over her thighs. He could’ve reached out and touched those thighs from this distance, as she sat in the car. But Tim wouldn’t push his luck.

She could’ve offered to drive, but Malini knew Tim liked the nostalgia of it all, the taking-my-girl-out vibes, even if it was only McDonalds. He’d been out a while, from the sweat collecting in his curly hair, tinting the dirty blond to tree-bark-brown. He was pale, blue-veined. Glasses slipped from their perch on his high, hooked nose. He wasn’t handsome. He wore his sideburns too long. Perpetually boyish. In high school when the rumors abounded that she liked Tim W, more than one girl cornered her and asked, coyly, if she meant star football player Tim M. She didn’t. 

He didn’t reach for her with his hands, only eyes, and she smiled and pretended not to notice.

“Laney,” he said, “You good?”

No one really called her Laney anymore, she’d been Mali or Malini to most of the breathing population. Laney set off little prickles in the back of her neck, unwelcome and unpleasant, but from Tim she’d tolerate it all. He’d met her as Laney, and who was she to interfere with that? Part of the nostalgia factor.

“I’m good,” she said.

She’d always been too good for him. But now, driving past the Land O’Lakes trifecta—gun shop, high school, nudist colony—Tim could hardly watch the road. It wasn’t just the legs in shorts. Her head thrown back, chin bobbing to unheard music, her fingers twirling a lock of black hair. Hips and thighs and boobs. Breasts, he told himself, at least use the proper term, as if that would banish all the saliva from his mouth. It was true what they said, girls mature faster than boys. She was all woman and Tim was a boy.

She made a crack about the heat, that the nudist colony, Caliente, didn’t sound so bad today. Tim swallowed hard.

“It’s all old people,” he said.

“How old?”

“Like really old. Like Mr. Marsh old.”

“Ew!” she said, and sounded like herself.

The ew came without thinking. Her mind hardly had time to form the composite image of their old AP Euro teacher. The one who rippled over the seat of his Harley Davidson and took no shit. Yes, she could see him now. The picture came back in pieces, in memory. She’d been his favorite student. She had a knack for names and dates, and she helped the other students when she could. She met Tim there, he had the desk behind hers, she taught him about the Holy Roman Empire.

He drove, he paid. She could argue against it, insist that she had her own money and had for some time now, but there was no real protest. She’d shout for a McFlurry into the microphone, and Tim would peel out a few extra bills from his wallet. Then he’d make some wisecrack about her fleecing him for all he’s worth. All in good fun. 

At red lights he fiddled with the radio. Malini admired his tolerance of the whole thing, the constant commercial breaks and inability to pick out the songs you wanted. But there was a freedom to the radio, leaving these small choices up to fate. It was shopping at the mall in December, dating in person, inconvenience for its own sake.

They caught the tail end of Ridin’ Solo on the pop station, and Tim bobbed his head to the peppery synth.

“This is new, right?”

“You’re kidding. It came out in like—”

“Maybe I’m behind.”

“You’re always behind.”

She reached up to ruffle his hair, he turned scarlet, and when he turned towards the road she discreetly wiped the sweat off her hand onto the car seat.

It didn’t mean anything, it was just her hand in his hair. Tim took in a breath and let it go, he gripped the steering wheel and let the blood rush out of his fingers. The electricity, the uncertainty. When he kissed her for the first time she’d shrunk like a wilting violet, hunching her shoulders down, down, until he thought she’d disappear. But she smiled, a little nervous grin and his heart had screamed against his chest. Kiss her again. Again. Again.

He turned left, that one sharp left off SR-54, and there was a ditch just off the side of the road, grim and cavernous.

“They ought to fix that,” he said.

“They never will.”

“People could get hurt.”

“People have gotten hurt.”

Tim strained to remember any news story about the ditch, surely there would’ve been something on Channel 9 about it. More than anything he thought about Laney’s perspective on the whole thing. They’d never fix it? Never? Was that any way to live, mired in pessimism? No, they’ll never fix the hole. No, my parents won’t approve. I could meet them, introduce myself, he said. He remembered the little shake of her head, dismissing the whole idea without thought. 

“Did you tell your parents you were heading out?” he asked, as they pulled into the drive-thru.

“Ha ha,” she said. A low, sarcastic drawl, and he returned the fake laugh with his eyebrows up.

What was the fixation with her parents? Malini thought about asking, why bring up the past? It’s all ancient history at this point, and they were still here, weren’t they? Making it work? But she didn’t want to spoil the moment, the sun coming through their windshield, the bliss of cold drinks and ice cream in their hands. 

“I really shouldn’t,” she said, dipping her spoon and swirling the Oreo fragments through her ice cream. “These don’t really agree with me.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. Hey, did you notice the cashier staring at us?”

Malini and Tim attracted stares in the past. In high school the occasional old person would turn down their nose at the sight of them, mismatched, not keeping with their own. But this cashier was a young person, younger than her at least, and didn’t seem the type to raise concern about their races. It was a different kind of stare—confusion, maybe disbelief?

“Probably nothing,” said Tim. He reached a hand out to touch her, maybe a fake punch in her shoulder, but he drew his hand back and returned it to the steering wheel.

Tim had noticed the stare, and he knew it was distinct from the ones before. He told himself it was an obvious compliment, the cashier no doubt baffled at the beautiful girl in his passenger seat. He was geeky, awkward, and Laney outstripped all that and far surpassed him. She’d always been beautiful, hadn’t she? But there was something different. Not just the clothes and the ease of manner. Something else.

“You look nice today,” he told her.

“What, I don’t look nice every day?”

He gulped, unable to parse out any irony from her stare. “I-I didn’t mean…I swear I—”

“Tim, it’s a joke.”

And there it was—levity, mirth. He exhaled and relaxed his hands on the wheel. It calmed him to hear his name in her voice.

“Since when do they all look grey like that?” he asked, looking out the window.

“What?”

“The McDonalds. Didn’t they used to be all colorful and shit? They’re all grey now. Are the play places grey too?”

“Dude, put the games down and look outside once in a while. They’ve been grey for years.”

“What?”

Something wasn’t right.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. One of those iridescent blue sidekicks with the slide-out keyboard for texting, no internet. You’d meet the assholes who eschewed modernity on purpose, Tim never struck her as one of those types. 

“Still holding onto that old thing?”

“Ha ha.”

“What?”

“I just got this. Last week.”

The radio, still on, still audible, droned out loud. Sex with me…so amazing…

Tim fumbled with his Sprite cup and slapped the sound off with the heel of his hand. His face beet red. Their car careened to another halt, a little early, they jerked forward towards the airbags. Malini nearly dropped her ice cream.

“What’s gotten into you? It’s just a song.”

What had gotten into him was prom. The looming thought of it, the expectations baked into it as construct. He’d seen the movies. She’d told him she was wearing red and he pictured so many iterations of red, long and short, covered and bare. Get ahold of yourself. A stiff wind and a radio song would get him going now. I love you, he’d tell her then, on the dance floor, bend and whisper it in her ear. No pressure, unless she wanted it, then he’d drive drive drive and they’d find somewhere alone. I love you, he’d say and mean it. 

“So...” he began. “I know the tie’s supposed to match the dress and all, but there’s like…a lot of types of red. Do you know, like, if it’s a dark or light kinda red?” Pathetic.

Laney looked up. She gripped both sides of the passenger seat, and the sun glittered and danced on her bare brown skin. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Prom, he said. And he went on to say it was next month, didn’t she remember? After their AP Euro final. They had pictures planned at Nate Grant’s house and the afterparty at Chelsea Lynn’s, though they didn’t need to stay for that if she didn’t want to, if her parents needed her home at a certain hour.

Prom, he insisted, and Malini opened her mouth to contradict, and they drove up to the side of that ditch by SR-54 again, and he took the turn too fast, and they veered left a little bit. She should have driven.

Prom. She acted like she was all over it now. More than over it. Dismissive. Mentally past the concept. Did she not want to go anymore? Did she not want to go with him?

Prom, she remembered. He wore a red tie that night, they’d danced and sang aloud to Ridin’ Solo, which was new, and skipped the afterparty to eat hamburgers at a red and yellow kitschy McDonald’s, and they kissed in the parking lot, and he whispered in her ear I love you and she’d returned it, and he’d said let’s go to my place and she’d said yes, screw the afterparty and her nagging parents and all the expectations. Tim took that left turn on SR-54 even sharper, by the gaping, swirling ditch, the one they’d never repair even after. After. 

“Tim,” she said, and she couldn’t finish her sentence, her mouth hung dumb and open. Neither of their realities truer than the other, unmistakably separate. His body seventeen, hers twenty-seven. 

She reached out for his hand, and no sooner had she touched him did his skin fade away. The blue veins turned translucent until they disappeared completely, and no one was driving, and at least they were stopped at another red light. A moment of stillness in this, ten years after prom, after they loved each other, after Tim never made it out of the ditch.

About Malavika Praseed

Malavika Praseed is a Pushcart-nominated writer, genetic counselor, and MFA candidate at Randolph College. Her work has appeared in Identity Theory, Defunkt, Khoreo, The Twin Bill, and others.