It’s beautiful, she said without even saying it.
If we’d all been speaking out loud, we’d have never had the guts to say it.
And eventually, we saw people.
First, a stray cluster of figures, young men, walking together. A man alone, singing softly, we could hear, our windows open, radio off, we wanted to hear. Do you see? We wanted to hear. He was singing about a lady in a gold dress.
A woman, middle-aged, clapping her hands at her dog, calling him toward her, the dog limping toward her, howling, wistful.
But mostly small fits of young men standing around, tossing cigarette embers glowing into the street.
At first, Joni’d pick up speed whenever she saw them, chattering high-pitched and breathless, about how they’d try to jack her mother’s car and take it to a chop shop — there’s hundreds of them all over the city, there are — and in twenty minutes her mother’s burgundy Buick Regal would be stripped to a metal skeleton. That’s how it works, she’d say. That’s what they do.
None of us said anything. We felt the car hop over a pothole, our stomachs lifting, like on the Gemini at Cedar Pointe.
Then, Keri: This time, Joni, go slow. Come on, Joni. Let’s see what they’re doing. Let’s see. And Joni would teeth chatter at us about white girls raped in empty fields till they bled to death, and we let her say it because she needed to say it, had to get it out, and maybe we had to hear it, but we knew she’d go slower, and she did.
And then we’d be long past Alter, past Chalmers even, into that hissing whisper that was, to us, Detroit. Detroit. Say it. Hard in your mouth like a shard of glass. Glittering between your teeth and who could tell you it wasn’t terrifying and beautiful all at once?
His voice was low and rippled and yeah, I’ll say it, his skin was dark as black velvet, with a blue glow under the streetlamp, and he was talking to his friends from the sidewalk and we could almost hear them and God we wanted to and there was Keri and she had her hands curled around the edges of the top of the car door, window down, and he was looking at her like he knew her, and how could he? He didn’t, but he couldn’t miss that long spray of hair tumbling out the window as she craned to get a better look, to hear, to get meaning.
“You lost, honey?” is what he said, and it was like glass shattering, or something stretched tight for a thousand miles suddenly letting loose, releasing, releasing.
“Yes,” was all she managed to whisper back before Joni had dropped her foot down on the gas hard and we all charged away, our hearts hammering …
… and Keri still saying, Yes, yes, yes …
You have to understand, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know anything at all about conditions, history, the meanings of things. We didn’t know anything. We were seeing castles in ruin like out of some dark fairy tale, but with an edge of wantonness, like all the best fairy tales.
Keri, by the lockers Monday a.m., doors clattering, pencils rolling down polished halls, she leans toward me, cheek pressed on the inside of my locker door, swinging it, rocking it. She says, Remember when Joni drove the car real slow and let us get our eyeful and he looked at me and in his eyes I could see he knew more than any of us, more than all the teachers at school, all the parents too, he knew more in that flashing second than all the rest of everyone, all of them sleeping through forever in this place, this marble-walled place. In his eyes, what I could see was he was someone more than I could ever be.
Keri, she tells us, first date with Kirk Deegan, he resplendent in Blue Devils jacket and puka shell necklace from a December trip to Sanibel Island, he winds his way from his hulking colonial on Rivard to her faded one-story in Harper Woods, can smell the pizza grease from the deli on the corner and he won’t come inside. No, he stands one foot on the bottom porch step, Ray-Bans propped, and says, “Nah, where would I fit?”
I should’ve seen it coming because who wanted to keep doing the same thing, which was fun at first, but where could it go, in the end? You couldn’t get out of the car. It was for kicks and you did it until the kicks stopped. This time, it worked like this: Joni started dating a De La Salle boy and he had a car anyway and evenings were now for him and I was starting up tennis and there were new parties and Keri, we saw her more like a long-haired flitter in the corner of our eye. We barely saw her at all. She was there in the Homecoming Court, glowing in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still. Face so frozen for all the flashing cameras, for all the cheering faces, for all of us, for everybody.
It was her last of everything that year. It was her last. You could kind of see it then, couldn’t you? It was there somehow, making everything more special, more like something, at least.
Later, at the dance, willowing around Kirk Deegan, he towering over her with that bright wedge of hair, the black-watch plaid vest and tie, that slit-eyed cool, he who never let another boy come near, even touch her shoulder, even move close. What boy ever kept me so tight at hand? What boy? I ask you. He loved her that much, everyone said it. He loved her that much.
Sidling up to me in study hall, eyes fluttering, red, Keri’s voice tired, slipping into my ear. How was the party? she’s asking. Was Stacey mad I didn’t go? I just smiled because of course Stacey was mad, because Keri was supposed to come and bring Kirk, because if Kirk came, so would Matt Tomlin, and she was angling for Matt Tomlin, was so ready for him she could barely stand it.
Where’d you guys go? I asked. And she gave me a flicker of a smile and she didn’t say anything. And I said, Did you and Kirk … and she shook her head fast.
I didn’t see him. It wasn’t that.
And she told me Kirk was too wasted to go anywhere, showing off some old Scotch of his father’s and then drinking three inches of it, passing out on the leather armchair like some old guy. So she took his Audi and went for a drive and before she knew it she was long past Alter Road, long past everything. Even the Jefferson plant, the Waterworks. She said she drove all around in his car and saw things and ended up getting lost down by some abandoned railroad.
She was crazy to be doing it and I told her so and she nodded like she agreed, but I could tell by the way she looked off in the other direction that she didn’t agree at all and that all she’d realized was that she wouldn’t bother telling me about it anymore. But she didn’t stop going. You could feel her rippling in her own pleasure over it. Like she was someone special who got to do things no one else did.
I met some people a few weeks ago, she said. They invited me to a party at this big old house, I don’t even know where. You could see the big Chrysler plant. That was all you could see. The house, it had turrets like a castle. Like a castle in a fairy tale. I remember I wanted to go to the top and stand in the turret like a lost princess and look out on the river, waving a long handkerchief like I was waiting for a lover to come back from the sea.
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I never heard anyone talk like this. I think it was the most I ever heard her talk and it didn’t make any more sense than Trig class to me.