At the only Taco Bell in Thomson, Georgia
by Courtney Justus
you waited alone for three hours for a tow truck, sitting at a corner booth, as vapor snaked from the hood of your white Ford Fiesta, Why Won’t You Date Me still queued up on your iPhone 6, Chicken Crunchwrap Supreme wrapper crumpled on the passenger seat, GPS set to Wilmington, North Carolina, where you lived, which you left for a month to see your family until you were done with the screams echoing from the attic to the kitchen two floors below, done with the old man now looking at you from the other side of the restaurant, asking if you were all right, and you mumbled something incoherent while on hold with the tow truck company, told them yes you are still waiting, waiting in this strip of fast-food joints and motels in a state you barely know, the restaurant quiet save for mumbling and shuffling and the glow of lights behind the counter, and when the truck finally arrived, no mechanics in a 20-mile radius were open, so your mom got you a room at the Castle Inn across the street, where you watched MasterChef reruns and scrolled Instagram, only to see your ex, Brett from Ohio, shirtless on Wrightsville Beach alongside his friends and their golden retriever, and you weren’t mad at Brett but at the fact that he was in Wilmington, North Carolina for Memorial Day weekend and you weren’t, that he was sitting by the ocean drinking Coors Light and you were stuck in a musty hotel room in Thomson, Georgia with your half-finished lemonade and crusty sheets, a copper-rimmed bathtub and a soap bar the size of your pinkie, days before the protests, before you learned about George Floyd, before you went to a protest for the first time in your life, before you threw up at the Ford dealership in Augusta (probably the fast food, though your mom said it was nerves) while they fixed your car’s cooling fan, before you made it back to Wilmington and stood by your friends at City Hall, accepted a pink cloth mask from Rachel the poet, who you almost didn’t recognize because of her own patterned mask, and you stood by Wade with his forest tattoos, Wade who you’d tend the community garden with months later, met bleached-blond Evan who knew your classmates, Evan who knew the article “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People,” and blue-eyed Zeke in the indigo sneakers, Zeke who walked you to your car after dark, and you marched down Chestnut Street to Second to Grace then back to Third Street, which you drove down every week to work at a radio station, where you got calls about how your station’s broadcasts skewed too liberal, letters in bold insulting reporters, paper shreds labeled NO MORE in bold red Sharpie, and two blocks away people stood on the steps of City Hall, posters and megaphones held high, and you joined them, chanted until your throat turned raw, gave the middle finger to politicians whose names you don’t remember, took sidewalk chalk to asphalt the night before the Fourth of July, wrote “Say Their Names” and “Black Lives Matter” in a beachside parking lot, dreamt of a tsunami wave and woke up in a sweat, and avoided the beach that Fourth because too many people would be there, even during the pandemic, that same summer you moved to the forested apartment complex off College and Gordon, where the assistants gave your Black roommate the cold shoulder, your roommate who consoled you after terrible dates and made empanadas because you love them and they remind you of home, your roommate who convinced you that aliens are real, who cried after facing those assistants, those stoic, platinum blondes with neutral-tone blouses and Blue Lives Matter bumper stickers on their SUVs, and you wanted to yell at them like you did at the counter-protestors and local officials and the MAGA flags poking out of the pickup trucks that drove down Market Street, the name in itself for a road where they once sold slaves, in a city where the only coup d’état in US history took place in 1898, a coup so many people don’t know about, and there is so much you don’t know yet, so much you didn’t know as you sat in the only Taco Bell in Thomson, Georgia, counting the miles and exits until you were home.
Courtney Justus is a Texan-Argentinian writer living in Chicago. Her adolescence spent in Buenos Aires and her Argentinian heritage frequently inform her work across genres. She is a 2022 Tin House YA Workshop alumna, a Best of the Net nominee, and a recipient of residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Barnstorm Journal, Whale Road Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. You can visit her at courtneyjustuswriter.wordpress.com.
Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash