Girl Number One
by AD Schweiss
Cal spots the girl in the truck stop before she spots him. She’s got pavement eyes from years of getting bounced between hard choices and hard people.
Tough girls aren’t usually Cal’s thing but Cal gets fuzzy when miles drone on and he’s awake for too long. The way he doesn’t like eating greasy fast food until it’s been twelve hours since eating, and he’s licking a wrapper clean down to bits of waxy paper.
Sometimes Cal can’t afford to be picky. Maybe tonight is that kind of night.
Fourteen girls in all, now. Cal’s been at it—driving—near twenty years.
He questions his number sometimes. Firsts are easy to recall but those middle years bleed together from sleeplessness and fending it off. Two women, Cal is pretty sure, died in a single forty-hour period of insomnia.
Fourteen. Could be more.
But none of them live in the passenger seat like Girl Number One.
Girl Number One shows up right on cue, appearing in the passenger seat just the way she did that first night, with her feet up on the dash without asking. Cal remembers how she played with the radio dial until she found a Goo Goo Dolls song.
Late October clouds pack the sky tight like they don’t want to miss a good show. Chance of snow on I-15 tonight.
Outside, the girl in the truck stop lot is fishing for eye contact along the row of truckers; stiff legs in the cold under tweety-bird sweatpants.
Inside Cal’s truck, sitting right beside him, Girl Number One still has those same shorts she wore that First Night; the reason Cal stopped for her in the first place. It was early-July hot when he found Girl Number One.
Sometimes he even smells Girl Number One; other times it’s just the smell of turned earth and wet clothes; the stink of raw fat exposed to air.
Some days he drives fast from the fear that some family member of his might sign up for one of those DNA databases the police can access—Cal listens to enough podcasts to know about those.
Girl Number One sang along to the music—no cigarette rust on her voice like the dirty girls Cal finds most often. Bottle-blond hair, too, the way Cal likes. Outside the truck, Cal sees that tweety-bird sweatpants’s hair is deermouse brown.
Beside him, Girl Number One says: She doesn’t even seem like your type, Mister.
The weird thing about Girl Number One: when Cal isn’t listening to the music or a podcast, he can hear her—actually hear Girl Number One—and she says things more than just what Cal imagines she ought to say. More than some puppet in his imagination, the girl in the passenger seat is like talking to a real person. She sucks at her same Big Gulp that’s almost out of pop, that she had all those years ago. Her Big Gulp never runs out.
He kept that cup like a souvenir.
Snow collecting on the windshield, little more than frozen rain, passes in front of headlights like gnats.
Snowy out, Girl Number One says, making gas pedal pushes in the air with her bare feet. You need to make up time.
The girl outside Cal’s truck gets closer. Cal sees how tired her face looks. The wet road on the hem of her nasty sweatpants; even her decision to be out in this weather—not Cal’s type, deep down.
Beside him, Girl Number One puts her not-there lips close to his ear and pleads: So why pick her up, Mister? Why not just let her leave?
Cal likes imagining that Girl Number One gets a little jealous, but instead there’s a plea in her voice Cal didn’t count on; one he hasn’t heard before.
Cal worries about the next delivery, sure, but it’ll only be an hour, maybe. He’ll need to find a culvert or a lake when he’s done. So much he can’t tell about the girl from seeing her in the lot. Will she smell like Girl Number One?
Just let her go, Mister.
“Stay out of this,” Cal says aloud.
Cal sees the girl outside the truck like greasy fast food; locks eyes with her until she thinks Cal’s her customer and Cal knows she’s his meal. She hustles to the driver’s side. Cal worries his throat will go too dry to speak. Cracks the door. “How far you going?” he asks.
She says Helena. Talks like a smoker.
“Get in,” Cal says, part of the ritual among working girls, ‘just asking for a ride.’
She’s about to move but those pavement eyes go toward the passenger seat of Cal’s truck and rest there a moment too long. The girl with the tweety-bird sweatpants looks back at Cal like he’s got an extra head.
“Got a friend waiting on me,” she mutters, gesturing back the way she came. Starts walking fast enough Cal can’t get down from the cab to catch her without another trucker seeing.
Cal’s redlining in his head; his hands shake. Has to decide whether he will take the risk and grab the girl from behind. She’s slim enough; it wouldn’t be hard. Needs to make up time on the next delivery.
Would need to find a place to put the body after.
Cal watches tweety-bird sweatpants moving straight-legged, the way people do when their muscles are frozen in the cold. Not quite at a run.
Cal puts his truck in gear and leaves the lot. Tries to get the music right, to make the road hum. To bring Girl Number One back to him, only he can’t.
*
Along the highway, the woman in tweety-bird sweatpants walks with an easy confidence—the kind that lives in the body and comes from no longer being alone. Not as cold now, somehow.
Against the roar of a diesel engine from a truck coming opposite on I-15, she asks the girl walking beside her:
“Okay, I’ve got to ask: ain’t you cold in them shorts?”
The Molotov Cocktail 