Chapter 8: Stranded
Cathy felt her bravado evaporate as soon as the other car was gone. She watched Jason fumble with the driver's door, his hands shaking as badly as hers. She slid into the passenger seat, the familiar vinyl creak a comfort. Safety. Home. She wrinkled her nose. The whole car smelled like beer and piss. They would have to get the interior cleaned.
Jason jammed the key into the ignition, his brow furrowed behind his glasses. The engine coughed once, a wet, grinding hack that died before it could catch.
The silence it left behind was louder than any sound.
“Come on,” Jason muttered, more to the dashboard than to her. He turned the key again.
Click-click-click-click was the only sound the car made.
A rapid, metallic chatter that spoke of absolute emptiness. It was the sound of a toy running out of batteries. Not the sound of escape.
Jason slumped back in his seat, letting go of the key. He stared straight ahead at the fractured windshield view of the empty lot, the dead payphone. “You've got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” Cathy asked, though the pit in her stomach already knew.
“It won’t turn over.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It was fine. It was totally fine before.” He leaned forward, jiggling the gearshift, as if it were in the wrong position. He turned the key again. Same desperate, fruitless clicking.
He stopped. The silence pooled in the car, thick and cold. Cathy watched his face in the greenish gloom of the dashboard lights. She saw the moment his technical brain bypassed panic and went straight to diagnostic.
“It’s not the battery,” he said, voice low. “The lights are bright. It’s… it’s like it’s not getting fuel.” He looked at her, then slowly, deliberately, his gaze dropped to the instrument cluster. Cathy followed his stare. The fuel gauge needle was pinned hard left. Beyond the ‘E’. It rested against the stop as if it had given up all hope days ago.
A detached part of her brain noted the symbol, the little yellow gas pump icon. It looked so childish. So innocuous.
“It’s empty,” Jason said, the words flat. “It’s completely empty.”
The warmth of relief evaporated, leaving a sharp, metallic fear in its place. Cathy’s mind replayed the last hour in jagged flashes: the rough hands shoving them into the trunk, the laughter, the slam of the lid. The car had been here, unattended, for who knew how long.
“What, they just drove here until the exact moment the car ran out of gas?" she asked. "Come on."
"Maybe they siphoned it," Jason said. "While we were in there. So we would be stranded just like this.”
It was the perfect, petty cruelty. A final joke. They hadn’t beaten them up, hadn’t stolen the car. They’d just stranded them. Left them in a metal box in the middle of nowhere with the illusion of salvation just out of reach. The laugh, she thought, would be about watching them realize it.
Jason swore, a short, harsh word that cut the stillness. He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. The horn didn’t even bleat; it gave a sad, muffled squawk. “Of course they did. Of course. Because just letting us go would have been too easy. They had to get the last laugh.”
Cathy looked past him, out his window at the vast, indifferent darkness of the lot. The rusted payphone was a tombstone. The stars were icy pinpricks. The nearest streetlight was a quarter mile away, a distant, hazy glow that seemed as unreachable as the moon.
"All our stuff is in an iHop dumpster," Jason groaned. "My phone."
“My phone too."
Jason let out a long, slow breath that fogged the cooling windshield.
“Okay. Okay. So we’re in a dead car, in the middle of nowhere, with dead phones.” He stated it like a systems report. A very, very bad one. "And we're naked and covered in piss."
“Also, I'm a little drunk,” Cathy added. "Which is probably why I'm not panicking."
She told herself that none of her words were slurred.
Her eyes dropped from his panicked face, skimming over the dashboard’s glow, and landed in his lap. It rested there, a soft, pale stub no longer than her thumb, protruding meekly from a thatch of dark hair. In the stark, indifferent light, it looked less like a part of him and more like a forgotten detail, a shriveled afterthought against the worn fabric of the seat.
A wave of something hot and sour washed through her—not desire, but a profound, unsettling pity. She found herself staring, thinking about how vulnerable and small it looked, and how that word—small—echoed in her head, grafted now to the cruel laughter about her own body. “My tits are too small,” she said suddenly, the words out before she could stop them, blunt and stark in the stale air.
Jason flinched, his head snapping toward her as if she’d shouted. “What? Cathy, what are you talking about? The car is dead.”
But the car’s deadness was a fact; the laughter in the dark was a live wire. She wrapped her arms across her chest, the chilly vinyl seat sticking to her skin, and stared into the swallowing night beyond his shoulder.
"They kept saying it, Jason," she whispered, her voice thin against the vast dark. "Laughing about how my tits were like little coins, that there was nothing to grab. And how we're matched pair, aren’t we?" Her eyes flicked back to his lap, then away, a sharp heat climbing her throat. "Both so small and disappointing," she finished, the words hanging in the stale air like a verdict. "That's what they said. Disappointing."
Jason waved her off. "The first thing he did when they saw your breasts is, he got his dick out, right?"
Cathy blinked. That was true. The first thing Carrey had done was taken out his dick. While she thought about that, Jason cranked the key in the ignition, as if he might start the engine by sheer willpower. The engine did not start.
"We have to think about a plan, right?" he said. "We can't just sit here. Who knows who will find us next. Probably a psycho killer or something, the way this night is going."
But it seemed that Jason's anxiety was unnecessary. There was a flash of light as a car pulled into the lot. Cathy dropped low into her seat, covering herself before she recognized the other vehicle. It was Carrey and the others. The other car pulled alongside them, and the driver rolled down his window to lean over and look in at Jason.
"You having car trouble?" he asked, laughing. "Don't worry," he added. "We're calling someone for help, right now."
From inside the car they could hear David's voice as the rear window rolled down. David leaned back and waved to them, his hand pressed to his ear as he spoke into his cell.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess it is kind of an emergency," he said. "My friends and I are over at Kronert Park and there's a couple that's butt-ass naked in the parking lot having some kind of kinky sex party in public." He paused, grinning through the window at Cathy and Jason. "I'd rather not say," he said. "But it looked like they were pissing all over each other, like they were drinking, or drunk or something. I can see beer cans in the lot, you know. But there were kids out there too, I think. Underage. You'd better send someone right away. It's not safe out there. Yeah, Kronert Park. I can see them now, actually."
David ended the call, the smirk on his face visible even in the dark, and Carrey didn’t wait a second before hitting the gas. Their tires barked against the cracked asphalt. The sound punctuated their laughter, which hung in the air long after the red taillights had bled into the black.
Cathy felt a cold, solid dread lock her joints, more final than any insult about her body.
The police were coming now, summoned to a scene of public lewdness, and they were naked, covered in drying beer and urine, sitting in a car that wouldn’t start. She watched the empty space where the other car had been, the silence now complete and accusing.
"Do you think he really called the cops?" Cathy asked.
"I don't know," Jason said. "But we can't stay here, can we?"
"Oh yeah?" she asked. "And where do you want to go, exactly, in our current state?"
Jason slammed his hands against the steering wheel again, the impact jolting his glasses down his nose. "Anywhere but here, Cathy! I don't know, just anywhere!" His shout was too loud for the confines of the car, a raw crack in the silence.
She turned in her seat, the vinyl sticking to her thighs. "Oh, brilliant, so we just waltz out there? Two naked, piss-stained idiots hoping to hitch a ride before the cops show up for the 'public sex party'?" Her voice dripped with a scalding mockery, echoing David's cornered report.
Then Cathy's eyes landed on the console, and she forgot her irritation and panic entirely.
Her hand shot out. Her fingers scrambled across the sticky console, gathering up a scrabble of quarters and dimes. She didn't know how long it would take the police to arrive, if they were even coming, but she knew they had to hurry.
The metallic chill was a shock against her palm as she shoved the driver’s door open. She didn't look back at Jason’s stunned face or pause to explain herself. She just bolted across the cracked asphalt, the cold biting her feet. Her whole world narrowed to the skeletal shape of the payphone under the flickering neon.
There was a dial tone when she pressed the receiver to her ear, and that's all that mattered. She dropped change into the phone. Only some of it seemed to stick. She noticed the sign that said "Quarters Only" a few moments too late, but it didn't matter. She had enough. It was ringing.
Cathy only knew one number by heart. All her contacts were saved on her phone, but she had spent nearly five years as Evan's girlfriend. She had his number memorized. She dialed it, hoping against hope that he would pick up in the middle of the night on a Friday. She had never called him this late. But she was drunk and desperate, after all.
"Hello?"
Her heart leapt. Evan had answered.
"Evan, it's me," she said. "It's Cathy. Oh my God, you answered the phone." Her words came out in a rush as she shivered in the night air. At least there was no one around to see her, other than Jason, who was watching from the car. "Evan, I need your help. It's like, life or death help. For real. Come get me, like, immediately. Like, it's a 911 situation."
"Cathy?" said Evan. He sounded sleepy, like he was waking up out of a dead sleep. "Do you know what time it is?"
"I am stranded at Kronert Park without my clothes," she said. "And if you're not here in fifteen minutes I'm going to jail. Evan, please. You're literally my last hope. Please. Don't ask me any more questions. I just need you to haul ass out here, please."
That did the trick, or close enough. She hurried him along, and Evan promised to be there as quick as he possibly could.
Cathy returned to the relative warmth of the car. Jason was rummaging in the back seat, scrounging for anything resembling a cover. He hadn't even managed to scrounge up a blanket or anything from the backseat, but he relaxed visibly when she said she had called them a ride. It didn't even seem to bother him that the ride was Evan.
"He said he would bring something to wear," she said. "I told him just to hurry."
But Jason wasn't content. He fidgeted in his seat, craning to look out the windows in every direction. The lot was empty and the adjacent field was still. A lone car went by on a nearby road, completely unaware of them parked and lurking in the shadows. No cop lights flashed in the distance. No headlights approached.
"It's fine," Cathy soothed him. "We're fine."
"It's not fine," Jason insisted. "I bet he really did call the police. They'd send someone to check, I bet."
Jason wouldn't let it go. Cathy agreed without much persuading that they should wait for Evan somewhere else. There was a row of hedges on the far side of the lot, between the lot and the field, where the security lights left a deep shadow. They squatted there, hiding themselves in the dark. The sour smell of pee and fermentation followed them both. It hung around her face like a halo where it had saturated her hair.
"We stink," she said to Jason.
She could still feel the effects of the alcohol. She didn't drink often, and when she did, she was something of a lightweight. Cathy rocked on the balls of her feet as she squatted down, leaning against Jason slightly as she swayed. Jason said nothing. He was fixated on the parking lot, worried most probably about the police. Cathy doubted the police would even show up. This empty lot looked to be on the far outskirts of town. No one was rushing out here for a late night call about a piss-heavy sex show, and she tried to tell Jason that.
But before she could finish explaining why the police weren't coming, a bright pair of headlights appeared on the far road. It was not Evan, as she hoped; as the vehicle drew closer she saw the top-heavy outline of the emergency lights flash. It was a police cruiser, and it flashed its lights as it approached their car.
They watched from a distance as the cop car slowed to a stop and idled. Cathy leaned over to Jason and whispered as quietly as she could.
"Did you lock the doors?"
He nodded and shushed her. It didn't matter, she realized. All he had to do was run their plates. The car was registered to their address. That's probably what he was getting ready to do right now. Cathy watched as the shape of a uniformed officer got out of the car and walked around the vehicle, shining a flashlight through the windows and the front windshield before returning to his car.
"I guess it's a good thing we weren't there for him to find us," she admitted. Jason nodded but didn't say anything.
The cruiser idled there in the lot next to their car for a few more minutes, though the officer inside made no effort to search the rest of the lot or the adjacent field. He seemed to be satisfied that there was no public orgy taking place inside the vehicle. Then his shadow stepped back out of the car, and he placed a piece of paper under the windshield wiper of their car. A ticket.
"Goddammit," Cathy muttered.
Jason shushed her. "We'll deal with it later," he whispered. "Just stay down."
Finally the cruiser left the lot. Cathy and Jason stayed crouched low in the bushes, shivering. She huddled low against him for warmth, oddly glad for the alcohol Drew and the others had given them on the way out, even if the gesture had been one last weird 'fuck you guys' in the end. The beer was still a shield against the cool night air, or at least it was tricking her brain into thinking she was warmer than she was. Now that they were alone, and the policeman was gone, and the three looming bullies were gone, the seriousness of the night and the unfairness of it all seemed a little less overwhelming. And it was a little funny, wasn't it? It could hardly be more absurd.
"Hey Jason," she giggled. "Do you want a little handjob while we wait?"
Jason looked over at her, his face expressionless. "A little handjob?"
Cathy snorted.
It turned out there was no time to give his diminutive member a little attention. Before they could discuss the matter any further, another pair of headlines rolled up slowly toward the lot.
The driver was slow, hesitant, but inexorable in his approach toward the lone car parked in solitude.
Evan had arrived.