Hey, everyone
Basically, I have a bunch of dialogue here and I'd like it to sound natural--I don't want it to seem forced. Does it flow well? If not, suggestions? Oh, and its a little long. Feel free to skim. Thank you.
Morgan stood staring at me. I could tell I’d startled him. Next to him was the car. It looked very old.
“Hi,” he said, very quietly.
“Hi,” I answered.
After a sickeningly long pause he said, “You’re the kid from the window.”
“Josh Campbell,” was all I could say. He looked like Thomas, and I was having trouble speaking all of the sudden.
“Josh, yeah, sorry.”
We were nearly whispering.
I shook myself from the resemblance. This was not Thomas. I said: “Tara sort of dumped me off here. Sorry to surprise you.”
He laughed a little and smiled crookedly. “Yeah, she’s kinda flaky.”
“Sorry,” I said again. “I told her I though you would want to be alone. I said I didn’t want to bother you.” I hadn’t said any of this to Tara, and felt bad for making her sound even worse.
“It’s no problem,” he said. “I’m just—I’m not very good a making friends, so if you could help me with that, then…”
He trailed off, looking me dead in the eyes, which he didn’t seem afraid to do. I liked something about that. And he had just implied that we could be friends, which excited me.
Morgan’s clothes were dirty, and his face was blotched with oil and grease. His hair was long enough to me mussed properly, and light enough to contrast well with his face, which was tanned and freckled from the sun. His nose was abbreviated, his mouth slender, and his strong jawbones complemented his whole visage. He looked intrepid and weathered, like he’d seen a lot of things, and he probably had…or at least felt a lot of things, which was just a significant. And he still looked like Thomas, but not as much as he had before.
“So here it is,” I said, motioning toward the car.
“Yeah, it’s a disaster,” he replied modestly.
“No, I love it,” I said, with more enthusiasm than I had intended.
He smiled.
I walked over to it and took a better look. I knew only a marginal amount about cars, but I could read the badges. “A Toyota 4Runner. There’s a newer one around here, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, beaming. “That one’s a 2018 or so. Nice car.”
“What’s this one?” I asked.
He laughed shyly. “A 1994.”
“Wow,” I said. The car was thirty years old, and it kind of looked like it, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead I asked, “Does it work?”
“No,” he said quickly. “But it did awhile ago. The engine’s alright; there’s just a lot of shit I’ve got to drain out of it. And I’ve got quite few replacement belts and hoses. And the timing belt’s actually fine.”
“Awesome,” I said, pretending I knew what that meant.
“I think its been rebuilt before, but anyways, hell of an old V6.”
I nodded.
“I haven’t said this much to anybody in a long time.”
“Oh,” I said, fishing for a response. “Oh, well, I suppose it’s easier if you’re talking about something you’re interested in.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
I circled the 4Runner, and Morgan followed me anxiously. Rust had eaten through the fenders in several places leaving gaping holes through which I could see the tires. He had all the windows down and I looked in at the disheveled interior. It actually wasn’t all that bad. The seats were well-worn but not torn in too many places. It was blue but the paint had cracked and faded and chipped off in some areas. I had an odd sense of intense appreciation for the thing. It was bizarrely beautiful, in a way I couldn’t even begin to articulate. I grinned and looked at Morgan.
He smiled his biggest smile yet.
“I named it—” he paused coyly and finished, “I named it Amory. Its out of this old book.”
“Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise, right?”
“How did you know that?”
I blushed. “My sister read it, actually, but I glanced through it. I think I got lucky on that one.” After a time I said, “I want to help you.”
“With this?” he asked, genuinely amazed.
I said this half-without-thinking, meaning I said exactly what I had wanted to say. “Yeah…I mean, if I won’t be in the way—”
“You won’t be in the way,” he said quickly. “So if you really want to, you can.”
“I do,” I said, without being very sure. What I really wanted to do was get to know Morgan, and I might’ve been shyer but I could sense that perhaps he wanted to get to know me too. He confirmed this by saying, “Well, I’m done with this for awhile. Let’s do something else.”
The small door in the corner of the garage banged open. “Morgan? I wanted to see the car before we left…”
We walked out from behind the 4Runner and met with Tara and Michael. “We’re leaving?” I asked, trying to inject a subtle amount of disappointment.
“Well, I thought you might want to go to the market and spend Michael’s stamps with us.”
“What about Morgan?”
Morgan laughed nervously and said, “No thanks,” and I quickly realized that this was just the way things were.
I looked over at Morgan and our eyes locked. I could clearly see that he didn’t want me to go. So I said, “I’ll stay here, if it’s okay,” and he smiled.
“Good, well, I’m glad you guys have made friends. So Morgan, my God, look at it. Its…”
“It’s old, I know,” Morgan mumbled.
“Yeah, but its cool,” she said. “It’s going to take us places, right?”
“Should.”
“Awesome. Well, we’re going to get going, so we’ll see you guys.”
We said our goodbyes and they were gone. I looked over at Morgan and he smiled again, and I wondered whether he would say anything about me choosing to stay. He didn’t.
“I’m pretty tired,” Morgan finally said, “so I’m not much good for anything fun.”
“I don’t know what we’d do anyways,” I said.
“Yeah, well…” he hesitated, “…I like to cross the wall and walk the highway a ways.”
I was surprised to hear that you could cross the wall. I had built up for myself this foreboding image of it—as if you weren’t allowed to leave for anything. I told Morgan this and he smiled.
“I thought that too. No, it’s really just a pipeline. And it connects one town to another. You can cross it all you want. What you have to be careful about is the highway. It gets kind of busy and the vehicles go fast…and the dust gets so bad you can’t see when one’s coming.
“Sounds like fun.”
“Mmhmm,” he said distantly.
We stood leaning against the 4Runner, side by side, and I tried to imagine what was going through Morgan’s mind. Everything Tara told me about him had frightened me, but all of that had gone now. Morgan had chosen to act differently with me than he had with everybody else. I didn’t know why but I wasn’t about to let it go. I felt the rusted chrome of the door handle and watched it mostly gleam between my fingers, reflecting the dim white light from overhead.
“There aren’t any windows in here,” I said.
“No,” he answered very quietly, “garages don’t usually have windows.”
I pulled up on the handle and the door popped open.
“Get in,” said Morgan.
I did, climbing into the old, weathered seat and as I shut the door I watched Morgan walk slowly around the front and slip carefully into the driver’s seat next to me. We stared out through the windshield together.
“Well, if you’re tired, then why don’t we just talk?” I turned to him but he just kept staring out the windshield. I quickly began to feel like I was being too hasty.
But then he said, “What made you want to talk to me at the window?”
His question was abrupt, but I think anything he’d said would’ve sounded abrupt. “Honestly? You reminded me of a friend I had once.”
He seemed disappointed, but there was nothing I could think of to say that would console him.
“Do I still?”
“Kind of,” I said, “but you act different from him. It’s your looks, I guess, that reminded me of him.”
“Really?” He grinned. “Like what?”
“His hair was always long and light. And your face, I guess.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “So he’s gone, I take it.”
“Yeah…yeah, the virus…it got him kind of early.”
It would have been customary for him to say “My condolences” at this point, but he didn’t, and I didn’t care. It was, in a sense, more genuine and comforting for him to say nothing at all. He looked very sad now.
“Its—God. Its really…” He looked away from me and out the open window behind him. Towards the blank wall of the garage, he said, “It hard, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I said automatically. I didn’t how to approach this. It seemed like he wanted to talk about the attack, but he was a full-loss and I didn’t have any idea what to expect.
“This is just…weird I guess,” he said, turning back to me.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know you. I think I always thought when I was ready to talk to someone it would be someone I’d known for a long time.”
I turned away. “I don’t know how it’s supposed to work. I don’t know what you should do. But I know what you mean, I guess. Just…just don’t say anything you don’t want to say to me.” I sat and stared at him, my elbow resting on the cracked and worn console between the seats. I considered what I had just said.
“Fuck it,” he said shortly. “I guess I can do what I want. What if—” he paused, looking very frustrated with himself. “What if I want to tell you everything?”
I didn’t want to wait long to answer him. I said: “I think everybody wants to tell somebody their secrets and problems and stuff. I think humans…I don’t think they can stand to…to keep it all in, you know?” I did think this way, but had never expected myself to verbally explain it to someone.
“Yeah. Yeah, I don’t like to think like that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know!” Morgan froze and looked surprised at how he’d raised his voice. “Fuck. I don’t know. Because I didn’t want to tell anyone about my life…for a really long time. But now I can’t handle not telling anyone. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
“I don’t know if I am.”
“Bullshit you don’t know. Don’t you get it? I feel exactly like what you were talking about.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Suddenly I felt the seat under me and smelled the dusty interior of the car. I stared at Morgan, his face still fresh and unfamiliar, no matter how much he resembled Thomas, and I realized fully the bizarre nature of the situation; I had now truly known Morgan for perhaps half-an-hour and he seemed ready to divulge his life story.
And appropriately, he said, “I don’t know why I want to tell you. I don’t know what it is about you.”
and I was just curious too.
