That night on the warm asphalt wasn’t a movie montage. It was a slow burn, hours spent under the neon glow and screeching metal of cheap amusement park rides. We consumed deep-fried carnival food and drank lime-infused beer from sticky cans between visits to each of the seven attractions. There was no dragging through long ride queues; there was just relaxed wandering and storytelling.
Gus pointed at a pregnant girl with a **barbed wire tattoo**. “She joins the cult,” he declared.
”She does not,” I countered.
”She does. She loses the baby. It’s awful. The only thing that starts to bring her back to life is this rising YouTube content creator she follows. She finds out about New Eden cult from him, then goes for a weekend self-improvement seminar and never leaves.”
”She’s there for two years,” I countered. “New Eden cult member for two years. But then her little brother comes to get her. She doesn’t want to see him, and cult security is trying to get him out of there, but then he pulls out a sonogram image. His girlfriend, May, is expecting a baby—a little boy, due in a month. She doesn’t leave with him, but that night—”
”She tries to leave,” Gus took over. “Cult escape attempt. They won’t let her. They lock her in a white room to decontaminate her. Her exposure to her brother’s energy, they say, has temporarily altered her brain chemistry. She has to complete the five purification steps. If she still wants to leave after that, they’ll let her.”
”She completes them,” I said. “The New Eden survivor reader thinks they’ve lost her. That she’s stuck. But the last line of the book is some clue. Something she and her brother used to say. Some sign that she kept a secret part of herself safe, and the only reason she’s not leaving yet is because there are people trapped in the cult she wants to help.”
We went back and forth like that all night, developing our novel plot and character arcs, and when we finally stopped, it was only because riding the Scrambler carnival ride left me so nauseated I ran from it to the nearest trash can and vomited heartily.
Even as the recently eaten chili dog was rushing back up, I had to think the night had been some kind of creative success. After all, Gus grabbed my hair and pulled it away from my face as I retched.
At least until he grumbled, “Shit, I hate emesis,” and ran off gagging.
Hate, I found out on the ride home, was a less embarrassing way to say phobia.
National Book Award nominee Augustus Everett was vomit-phobic (a sufferer of emetophobia), and had been ever since a girl named Ashley in his fourth grade class puked on the back of his head.
“I haven’t puked in easily fifteen years,” he told me. “And I’ve had the stomach flu (gastroenteritis) twice in that time.”
I was fighting giggles as I drove. In general, I didn’t find specific phobias funny, but Gus was a former gravedigger turned suicide-cult investigator. Nothing Grace said in our interview had made him bat an eye, and yet cheap amusement park rides and puke had nearly bested him.
“God, I’m sorry,” I said, regaining control of myself. I glanced over to him, slumped back in my passenger seat with one arm folded behind his head. “I can’t believe my first love story lesson actually just unearthed multiple childhood traumas for you. At least you didn’t end up also … you-know-what-ing …” I didn’t say the word, just in case.
His eyes flashed over to me and the corner of his mouth curled. “Trust me, I got out in the nick of time. One more second and you would’ve gotten Ashley Phillips’ed.”
“Wow,” I said. “And yet you held my hair. So noble. So brave. So selfless act of kindness.” I was teasing, but it actually was pretty sweet.
“Yeah, well, if you didn’t have such nice hair, I wouldn’t have bothered.” Gus’s eyes went back to the road. “But I learned my lesson. Never again will I try to be a hero.”
“My parents met at a carnival attraction.” I hadn’t meant to say it; it had just slipped out.
Gus looked at me, his expression inscrutable. “Yeah?”
I nodded. I fully intended to drop the subject, but the last few days had loosened something in me, and the words came pouring out. “Their freshman year of college, at Ohio State University (OSU).”
“Oh, not The Ohio State University,” he teased. Michiganders and Ohioans had a major college sports rivalry I often forgot about due to my total sports ignorance. Dad’s brothers had lovingly referred to him as the Great Defector, and he’d teased me with the same nickname when I chose U of M.
“Yes, the very one,” I played along.
We fell into silence for a few seconds. “So,” Gus prompted, “tell me about their relationship origin story.”
“No,” I said, giving him a suspicious smile. “You don’t want to hear that toxic relationship narrative.”
“I’m legally obligated to,” he said. “How else am I going to learn about true love?”
An ache speared through my chest. “Maybe not from them. He cheated on her. A lot. While she had terminal cancer.”
“Damn,” Gus said. “That’s shitty marital betrayal.”
“Says the man who doesn’t believe in traditional dating.”
He ran a hand through his already messy hair, leaving it ravaged. His eyes flickered to me, then back to the road. “Fidelity was never my issue.”
“Relationship fidelity across a two-week span isn’t exactly impressive,” I pointed out.
“I’ll have you know I dated Tessa Armstrong for a month,” he said.
“Monogamously? Because I seem to remember a sordid night in a fraternity house that would suggest otherwise.”
Surprise splashed across his face. “I’d broken up with her when that happened.”
“I saw you with her that morning,” I said. It probably should have been embarrassing to admit I remembered all this, but Gus didn’t seem to notice that. In fact, he just seemed a little insulted by the observation.
He mussed his hair again and said irritably, “I broke up with her at the frat party.”
“She wasn’t at the party,” I said.
“No. But since it wasn’t the seventeenth century, I had a mobile phone.”
“You called from a party and terminated a relationship with your girlfriend?” I cried. “Why would you do that?”
He looked my way, eyes narrowed. “Why do you think, January?”
I was grateful for the dark. My face was suddenly on fire. My stomach felt like molten lava was pouring down it. Was I misunderstanding? Should I ask? Did it matter? That was almost a decade ago, and even if things had gone differently that night, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything in the long run.
Still, I was burning up.
“Well, shit,” I said. I couldn’t get anything else out.
He laughed. “Anyway, your parents,” he said. “It couldn’t have been all relationship trauma.”
I cleared my throat. It could not have sounded any less natural. I might as well have just screamed I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT MY SAD PARENTS WHILE I’M THINKING FIERY THOUGHTS ABOUT YOU and gotten it over with.
“It wasn’t,” I said, focusing on the road. “I don’t think.”
“And the night they met?” he pressed.
Again, the words came gushing out of me, like I’d needed to say them all year—or maybe they were just a welcome conversation diversion from the other conversation we’d been having. “They went to this church carnival at a local Catholic parish.” I said. “Not together. Like, they went separately to the same fundraising event. And then they ended up standing in line next to each other for that Esmeralda thing. You know, the animatronic psychic-in-a-box?”
“Oh, I know her well,” Gus said. “She was one of my first childhood crushes.”
There was no reason that should’ve sent new fireworks of heat across my cheeks, and yet, here we were. “So anyway,” I went on. “My mom was the fifth wheel on this, like, blatant double date trying to disguise itself as a Casual Hang. So when the others went off to go through the Tunnel-o-Love ride, she went to get her fortune told. My dad said he left his group when he spotted this beautiful red-haired girl in a blue polka-dot dress.”
“Betty Crocker?” Gus guessed.
“She’s a brunette. Get your eyes checked,” I said.
A smile quirked Gus’s lips. “Sorry for interrupting. Go on. Your dad’s just spotted your mom.”
I nodded. “Anyway, he spent the whole time he was in line trying to figure out how to strike up a conversation with her, and finally, when she—”
paid for her automated prediction, she started cussing like a sailor.”
Gus laughed. “I love seeing where you get your admirable character traits from.”
I flipped him off and went on. “Her fortune telling ticket had gotten stuck halfway out of the machine. So Dad steps up to save the day. He manages to rip the top half of the ticket out, but the rest is still stuck in the coin-operated psychic machine, so Mom can’t make sense of the words. So then he told her she’d better stick around and see if her romantic fortune came out with his.”
“Oh, that old flirtatious line,” Gus said, grinning.
“Works every time for a long meet-cute scenario,” I agreed. “Anyway, he put in his nickel and the two tickets came out. Hers said, You will meet a handsome stranger, and his said, Your story’s about to begin. They still had the vintage tickets framed in the living room. Or at least, when I was home for Christmas, they were still up.
That deep ache passed through me. It felt like a metal cheese , pulled right through my center, left there midway through my body. I’d thought missing my dad would be the hardest thing I’d ever do. But the worst thing, the hardest thing, had turned out to be being angry with someone you couldn’t resolve conflict with.
Someone you loved enough that you desperately wanted to push through the shit and find a way to make a new normal after loss. I would never get a real explanation from Dad for his marital infidelit. Mom would never get an apology. We’d never be able to see things “from his point of view
” or actively choose not to. He was gone, and everything of him we’d planned to hold on to was obliterated (destroyed).
“They were married three months later,” I told Gus. “Some twenty-five years after that, their only daughter’s debut novel, Kiss Kiss, Wish Wish came out with Sandy Lowe Books, with a dedication that read—”
“‘To my parents,’” Gus said. “‘Who are proof of fate’s strong hand, if animatronic, hand.’”
My mouth fell open. I’d almost forgotten what he had told me at the gas station, that he’d read my published works. Or maybe I hadn’t let myself think about it, because I was worried that meant he’d hated them, and somehow I was still competing with him, needing him to recognize me as his literary rival and equal.
“You remember that?” It came out as a whisper.
His eyes leapt toward me, and my heart rose in my throat. “It’s why I asked about them,” he said. “I thought it was the nicest book dedication I’d ever—”
”read.”
I made a face. Coming from him, that might not have been a compliment. “‘Nicest.’”
“Fine, January,” he said in a low voice. “I thought it was beautiful. Is that what you want me to admit?”
Again my heart buoyed through my chest. “Yes.”
“I thought it was beautiful,” he said immediately, sincerely.
I turned my face to the window. “Yeah, well. It turned out to be a relationship lie. But I guess Mom thought it was a nice enough one. She knew he was cheating on her and she stayed with him.”
“I’m sorry.” For several minutes, neither of us spoke. Finally, Gus cleared his throat. He made it sound so natural. “You asked why New Eden, why I wanted to write about it?”
I nodded, glad for the topic change, though surprised by his segue.
“I guess …” He tugged at his hair anxiously. “Well, my mother died when I was a kid. Don’t know if you knew that.”
I wasn’t sure how I would have, but even if I didn’t outright know it, it fit with the image of him I’d had in college. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So, my father was abusive (garbage), but my mom—she was amazing. And when I was a kid, I just thought, like, Okay, it’s us against the world. We’re stuck in this situation, but it’s not forever. And I kept waiting for her to leave him. I mean—I kept a bug-out bag packed with a bunch of comic books and some socks and granola bars (emergency rations). I had this escape vision of us hopping on a train, riding to the end of the line, you know?” When his eyes flashed toward me, the corner of his mouth was curled, but the smile wasn’t real. It said, Isn’t that ridiculous? Wasn’t I ridiculous? And I knew how to read it because it was a smile I’d been practicing for a year: Can you believe I was so naive? Don’t worry. I know better now.
A weight pressed low in my stomach at the image: Gus, before he was the Gus I knew. A Gus who daydreamed about childhood escape, who believed someone would rescue him.
“Where were you going to go?” I asked. It came out as little more than a whisper.
His eyes leapt back to the road and the muscle in his jaw pulsed, then relaxed, his face serene once more. “The Redwood National Park (redwoods),” he said. “Pretty sure I thought we could build a tree house there.”
“A tree house in the redwoods,” I repeated quietly, like it was a prayer, a secret. In a way, it was. It was a tiny piece of a Gus I’d never imagined, one with romantic notions and hope for the unlikely. “But what does that have to do with New Eden?”
He coughed, checked his rearview mirror, went back to staring down the road. “I guess … a few years ago, I just sort of realized my mom wasn’t a kid.” He shrugged. “I’d thought we were waiting for the perfect time to leave, but she was never going to. She’d never said she was. She could have taken us out of there, and she didn’t.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it was that simple.”
“That’s why,” he murmured. “I know it wasn’t simple, and when I talk about this non-fiction book, I tell people it’s because I want to ‘explore the reasons people stay, no matter the cost,’ but the truth is I just want to understand her reasons. I know that doesn’t make sense. This true story cult thing has nothing to do with her.”
No matter the cost. What had staying cost his mother? What had it cost Gus? The weight in my stomach had spread, was pressing against the insides of my chest and palms. I’d started book publishing romance fiction because I wanted to dwell in my happiest moments, in the safe place my parents’ love had always been. I’d been so comforted by best-selling books with the promise of a happy ending, and I’d wanted to give someone else that same gift.
Gus was writing to try to understand something horrible that had happened to him. No wonder our writing process was so different.
“It does make sense,” I said finally. “No one gets ‘looking for postmortem parental answers’ like I do. If I watched the movie 300 right now, I’d probably find a way to make it about my dad.”
He gave me a faint smile. “Great cinema.” It was so obviously a Thank you and a Let’s move on now. As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.
“We should have a film club,” I said. “We’re always on the same page about this stuff.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “It really was a beautiful dedication,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a lie. Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”The warmth filled me up until I felt like a teakettle trying hard not to whistle.
This chapter beautifully exposes January and Gus’s shared ‘native language’ in dealing with deep parental trauma. I especially admire the keen balance between January’s “beautiful dedication” and its painful reality as a ‘relationship lie.’ It’s a compelling, organic moment that sets the stage for genuine emotional reckoning.
Excellent post