“Get down,” Elgin says, his voice sharp. Suddenly he looks sober. He grabs one of Kate’s pant legs.
“Let go.” She shakes him off and takes careful steps, placing one foot slowly in front of the other, pointing her toes like a ballerina. “You wouldn’t do this, would you?” she says, smiling at me.
“Get down now. I’m serious.” Elgin goes to grab her again and she takes a wide step back.
“Fuck off,” she says, and I can see there are tears in her eyes. “Just look at me,” she says, holding her arms above her head. “Do I look insignificant?”
“No,” Elgin says. “You look really fucking special right now.”
“Kate, you’re going to fall,” I say, holding out my hand to her. “Please.”
“Fine.” Kate does a pirouette then takes my hand and hops off the wall, casually wiping a tear off her cheek.
“Why do you do shit like that?” Elgin says. All the mellowness has left him and he’s pacing now.
“For thrills.” Kate plucks the joint from his fingers. “Don’t you ever get bored of yourself?”
“I get bored of this shit.” Elgin squints through a puff of her smoke. “You want to be fished out of that river and forgotten.”
“What, like Max?” Kate says. She takes a long drag. “Max was messed in the head. He couldn’t handle anything. He couldn’t handle school and he couldn’t handle his parents splitting and he couldn’t handle girls. Right?” Kate says, looking at me for affirmation. “He couldn’t even handle you.”
“I don’t know,” I stammer, caught off guard by Kate’s question. “I don’t know why he did it.”
“Leave her alone,” Elgin says, turning back to the dam.
“What?” Kate looks at me, but I pretend not to notice. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Just ease up, Kate,” Elgin says over his shoulder. “You’re the one who wanted to come here.”
“Sorry,” she says, stretching out the word and clasping her hands in a prayer. “I’m sorry for stating the shitty truth.” She passes the joint back to Elgin.
“I don’t want any more,” he says.
“You know what the truth is?” I say, quietly. “The truth is, until the other day I hadn’t thought about Max in months.”
We all stand staring at the ground.
“I have to pee,” Kate says, striding away into the forest.
“She’s not dealing with this very well,” Elgin says, without turning to me. He’s still looking out over the reservoir. “She’s been crying at night.” I’m not sure if I believe him. There’s silence underneath the roar of the water. After a while he turns to me and says, “Why’d you guys stop hanging out, anyway?”
I examine his profile, his thin lips and high cheekbones, his soft eyebrows and the curls of hair at the base of his neck. His eyes are always dark and intense, even when he’s telling a joke. I think about saying because of you or making an excuse about being busy with school. I wait too long to speak, and then finally I say, “I don’t know.”
Elgin seems to accept the answer as the one he expected. I wonder if he’s asked Kate the same question. “She’s weird sometimes,” he says, almost to himself. “She gets obsessed and then just sort of drops people.”
“Yeah, I guess. It doesn’t make her sad.” I mean the last part as a question, but my voice comes out flat and dull. Elgin puts an arm around my shoulder. “I’m fine,” I say, but he pulls me closer and wraps both arms around me. I nestle in closer to him, his breath in my ear. For a second it feels like he’s going kiss me, but he doesn’t. Kate’s been gone awhile and I wonder if she’s watching us from a distance — part of me hopes she is.
When she comes out of the trees Elgin doesn’t move. I try to edge away, but he holds me tightly so I let myself sink back against him and try to look nonchalant. Kate stands in front of us with her hands on her hips. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look awkward. She looks at Elgin then looks at me, propping herself up against the wall next to us. “You guys talking about me?”
“Yeah,” Elgin says. I can tell by the way he says it he wants to mess with her.
“What’d you talk about?” she says.
“We talked about why you two aren’t friends anymore.” Elgin finally lets me go.
“What do you mean, not friends anymore?” Kate says.
“I never said that.” I look at Elgin. “Tell her I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll have another,” Kate says. Elgin grabs two more beers from his backpack, handing one to Kate and cracking the other.
“So what, we’re not friends anymore?” Kate says, looking at me.
“Elgin, why would you say that?”
He shrugs and laughs, suddenly indifferent to the whole situation. “I’m going back to the car. I’m gonna to put on some music and smoke some more weed. Come if you want.” He walks off in the direction of the parking lot. “Come in peace,” he yells over his shoulder.
Kate’s watching the falls. She looks angry, the mist and the noise engulfing her. Her anger is mute, but I can feel it like a heat coming off her body. She chugs her beer. “Want to go to the car?” I ask. I say it so quietly I don’t think she’s heard me. When she turns, her eyes have gone cool again and she’s smiling. “No, I don’t want to go to the car,” she says. I feel like I’m being lured into something and back away from her instinctively. “You know we came here for you,” she says, her smile broadening. The words should sound kind, but they don’t.
“What do you mean?”
In the parking lot Elgin has turned on the car, his high beams slicing through the forest.
“Elgin thinks you’re lonely,” she says, staring at me like she’s looking for a reaction.
“I’m sad about Max.” I can hear hip hop playing from the car and I take a step toward the music.
“I mean lonely all the time.” Kate’s smile is gone. “You should know, Elgin is being nice to you because he feels bad.”
“That’s not true,” I say, looking Kate in the eye.
“He feels bad for you.”
“We’re friends.”
“He’s not your friend. He’s nice to everyone. He’s just that kind of guy,” Kate says, and now she’s smiling again, gently the way someone would if they were talking to a child. “I just don’t want you to be confused. That’s why I’m telling you this.” She reaches out to rub my arm, but I pull away from her.
Elgin is making his way back from the parking lot, the headlights blacking him out. “Are you guys coming or what?”
ELGIN SAYS WE SHOULD go to Mosquito Creek to get out of the heat. It’s too hot for late September — Indian summer. Everyone’s prickly from it. We sleep late, skip classes. So far no one has missed us. We spend the morning in bed together eating dry cereal. The milk’s gone bad. Elgin keeps the bedroom window shut against the highway noise and all I hear are our feet in the sheets and his deep breathing. We’ve had sex seventeen times. I keep track in my agenda book with a small x no one could decipher.
After his mom leaves for work — I wait for the shower, the teakettle, the mug in the sink, the car out of the driveway — I get up and Elgin stays in bed. He loves to sleep. The most he’s ever slept is twenty-six hours straight, the night after his stepdad left. He told me he slept deeply, like someone had knocked him out. He says he never has dreams and I tell him that’s impossible. Even dogs dream.
While he sleeps I look around the house. There’s not much that’s interesting, but it’s not about finding something secret or dirty. I open the same boxes and drawers and find the same things. All their windowsills have my finger marks through the dust. The bedrooms are always messy. His mom’s closet smells like body odour and something else — maybe the peppermint candies she’s always sucking. They never have any fruit. I’ve only ever seen Elgin eat cereal and microwaved sausage rolls dipped in ketchup. The couch has deep sags, like there are invisible bodies watching TV. I don’t know why it’s exciting — maybe because it’s not mine. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really here. It’s like being a ghost or a tourist. Sometimes I think about Kate’s bare feet in the exact same spots.