Edward Adrift

curses, I will write it down and I will show these marks to his parents.
These are the rules.
Stop writing.
Stop.
Shit.
OK, that’s it.
    I draw a line through numbers six through ten, and then I hand the notebook to Kyle and tell him to sign it,acknowledging that he understands the rules and agrees to abide by them.
    “What if I don’t sign?” he asks.
    “I will call your parents right now and they will come get you.”
    He signs the paper.
    “And what’s this about cussing? You cuss.”
    He’s right. Shit. “I am a grown-up,” I say.
    “So what? If I can’t cuss, you shouldn’t be able to cuss, either. How about if you cuss, I get a dollar?”
    I consider this. It seems reasonable. I shouldn’t curse as much as I do. I take the paper from him and add an asterisked entry:
    * Each time Edward curses, he owes Kyle one dollar.
    “There,” I say, showing it to him. “But I’m going to amend the terms to say that if you curse, you have to give up one dollar, if you’ve accumulated any, and that I will tell your parents.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    “Yes, it is. You’re the one who’s in trouble, not me. All you have to do is stay out of trouble and collect the money if I say ‘shit’ or something.”
    “You owe me a buck.”
    “For what?”
    “You just said—” Kyle almost says the word but stops. “You just said the
s
-word.”
    I pull out my wallet and hand Kyle a dollar bill. “You owe me two dollars,” he says.
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Look at the paper,” he says. “I can see where you wrote ‘shit.’ Writing it is as bad as saying it.”
    “I’ll keep the dollar,” I say.
    “Why?”
    “Because you just said it.”
    “When?”
    “Just now, when you were telling me I’d written it.”
    “Shit!”
    I reach over and pull the first dollar bill out of his hands.
    “You did it again,” I say.
    Kyle’s face gets red, and he starts flopping violently in the passenger seat as he screams.
    This is going to be an interesting trip.

    We’ve gone 17.2 miles when Kyle asks if we can listen to something else. Michael Stipe is singing about a parakeet that is colored bitter lime.
    “I don’t have anything else on the iPhone,” I say. It pains me not to call it my “bitchin’ iPhone,” but I don’t want to lose money. “I put all of the R.E.M. I had on it before I left.”
    “They’re boring.”
    “They’re not boring. They’re great. They
were
great. They’re my favorite group. You would like them.”
    “You’ve been telling me that since I was nine years old. I’ve never liked them.”
    There’s an old saying: You can’t account for taste. I don’t think this is true. I think if you had the time and access to everyone in the world and could ask them questions about what they like and don’t like, you could account for taste. As I think about it now, that sounds like something I would enjoy doing.
    “Do you have something else we could put on?” I ask Kyle.
    I don’t really want to do this, but Kyle is now my guest, and I will have to try to be accommodating to him, within reason. Fortunately for me, Donna has given me the authority to define what reason is.
    “My mom has my phone.”
    I remember now that Donna took it from him.
    “Too bad,” I say.
    “Can we just turn it off for a while?”
    This seems like a reasonable request. I unplug the bitchin’ iPhone from the auxiliary cable that carries the music into my Cadillac’s sound system.
    “Thank you,” Kyle says.
    He’s almost being polite—I say “almost” because he’s still clearly glum. Still, it is a nice change from him calling me a fucking freak, which I don’t say out loud because I want to hold on to my dollars.
    We drive on, and I hum the downbeat from the R.E.M. song we just cut off.
    Kyle looks at me. “Can we turn you off for a while, too?”
    I stop humming. We wouldn’t want the politeness to come on too strong, would we?
    I just made a sarcastic joke.
    I’m pretty funny sometimes.

    Even though it’s early, only 10:23 a.m., we take exit 211 and drive the 3.8 miles from the interstate into Burley, Idaho, so we can have lunch. As we cut through the southeast corner of Idaho, we’re not going to see many towns until we get into Utah, so it’s best that we eat now. Plus, I have to pee.
    We find a JB’s restaurant that is serving lunch and breakfast, and that works for us because Kyle says he wants pancakes. Aswe wait for our food, he asks if he can use my