The house was empty, she said. The floors were part broken through. My foot slid between the boards and this boy, he had to lift me out and he was laughing. They were playing music and speakers were all over the house, one set up on an old banister thick as a tree trunk and everyone dancing and beer and Wild Irish Rose, wine so red like bloodshot eyes and smoking, getting high, and the whole place alive and I danced, one of them danced with me, so dark and with a diamond in his ear and he said he’d take me to Fox Creek, near the trailers, and we’d shoot old gas tanks, and I said I would, and he sang in my ear and I could feel it through my whole body, like in lab when Mr. Muskaluk ran that current through me in front of the class, like that, like that. It was this. I could do anything, no one cared. I could do anything and no one stopped me.
“What did you do, Keri?” I asked, my voice sounded funny to me. Sounded fast and gasping. “What did you do?”
Anything, she whispered, voice breathless and dirty. Anything.
Did I have time for that, for that kind of trashiness? Don’t you see, Joni said, she’s Harper Woods. She may look Grosse Pointe, she may have one on her arm. But that’s a flash, a trick of the eye. Deep down, she’s five blocks from the freeway. It all comes back. You can fight it, but it comes back.
So we dropped her and it was just as well because lots of things were happening, with boys’ hockey starting and everyone’s parents taking trips to Florida and so there were more parties and there was the thing with the sophomore girl and the senior boy and the police and things like that that everyone talked about. Other stuff happened too — I’d dropped out of tennis and then dropped back in — there was a boy for me with a brush of brown hair and the long, adam-appled neck of a star basketball player, which he was, and I took him to Sadie Hawkins’s dance and he took me to parties and to parents’ beds in upstairs rooms at parties and slid his tongue fast into my dry mouth and his hands fumbling everywhere, and his car, it smelled like him, Polo and new sneakers and Stroh’s, and when it was over and I smelled those things, which you could smell on a dozen boys a day, it was him all over again, but then before I knew it, it was gone. He was gone, yeah, but the feeling that went with it too. Just like that.
Please, please can you drop me somewhere? Keri said, and we were in the school parking lot and her eyes rung wide and fingers gripped the top of the car door.
Okay, I said and even barely seeing her for months, a quick hello in the hallways, a flash in the locker room, me on my way in, she on her way out. To Kirk’s? I asked.
She said no. She said no and shook her head, gaze drifting off to the far end of the parking lot. Further than that. Further than that.
And then I knew and I told her it was my father’s car and if I got a scratch, he’d never buy me the Fiero come graduation and she promised it would be okay and I said yes. Against everything, I said yes.
So she was next to me and the sky was orange, then red as the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club, its gleaming white bell tower soaring — when I was a kid I thought it was Disneyland — I was going to take her. I felt somehow I had to.
Where are we going? I’d say, and she’d chew her gum and look out the window, fingers touching, breath smoking the glass. She was humming a song and I didn’t know it. It wasn’t a song any of us would know, a song we sang along with on WHYT, a song we all shouted out together in cars. It was something else all together. Plaintive and funny and I thought suddenly: Who does she think she is in my father’s car singing songs I don’t know in her white Tretorns and her pleated shirt and hair brushed to silk, whirling gold hoops hanging from her ears? And she thinks she can just go wherever she wants, do things in other places, touch more than the surface of things, and then keep it all inside her and never let anyone see in. Never let any of us.
You can drop me here, she was saying. We were at the foot of Windmill Pointe.
You just want me to leave you here? I asked, looking around, seeing not a soul. In Grosse Pointe, especially these its most gleamy stretches, the streets were always empty, like plastic pieces from a railroad set.
Yes, she said, and waved as she began walking toward the water, toward the glittering lighthouse.
Wait, Keri, I said, opening my door so she could hear me. Where are you going?
And she half turned and maybe she smiled, maybe she even said something, but the wind took it away.
When I saw her in school, I asked her. I said, Where did you go? What were you doing there? She was putting on her lip-gloss and shaking her hair out. I watched her eyes in the mirror magnet on the inside of her locker door. I thought maybe I’d see something, see something in there.
She watched me back, eyes rimmed with pale green liner, and I knew she had to tell someone, didn’t she? What did it count to run off the rails if you didn’t tell a soul? I looked at her with the most simpering face I could manage to make her see she could tell me, she could tell me.
But she didn’t now, did she? And that was the last time, see? It was the last of that flittering girl.
“Her cousin’s letting her drive her Nova, you should see it,” Joni was telling me. “I saw her in it. Do you think she’s taking it there? Next thing you know, we’ll be driving down Jefferson to go see the Red Wings game and she’ll be rolling with some black guys.” Joni was telling me this as we squeezed together on the long sofa at a party, beers in hand, Joni’s face sweaty and flushed, bangs matted to foreheads, chests heaving lightly.
I said I didn’t think she went at all anymore. I told Joni she wasn’t going at all. I didn’t want her to know. It was something between us. And, truth told, if she’d asked me, I’d’ve gone with her still. But she didn’t ask me, did she?
It was in the aching frost of February and I was coming out of a party on Beaconsfield and I saw her drive by. I saw the blue Nova and I saw her at the wheel and I saw which way she was headed and maybe my head was a little clogged from the beers, but I couldn’t help it and I was in my dad’s car and I headed toward Alter Road. She was long gone, but I kept driving and I thought maybe I’d see the car again, especially once I hit the ghostly pitch over the bridge at Alter and Korte Street. How many beers was it, I thought I could hear the squeal of her tires. The only sound at all, other than the occasional sludge of water against the creaking docks over the canal, were those tires. I thought it had to be her and I stopped my car, rolled down my windows, couldn’t hear anything so figured she stopped. Did she stop? I edged past the side streets and ended up back at that shell of a trailer court, those aluminum and wood carcasses, like plundered ships washed to shore. And that was when I thought I saw her, darting around the bowed trees, darting along like some kind of wood nymph in a magic forest, and yet it was this.
I could admit, if I let myself, there was a beauty in it, if you squinted, tilted your head. If you could squeeze out ideas of the kind of beauty you can rest in your palm, fasten around your neck, never have an unease about, a slip of cashmere, one fine pearl, a beauty everyone would understand and feel safe with. But I wouldn’t really do that, not for more than a second, and Keri, she would. It was like this place she’d found was Broadway, Hollywood, Shangri-La, and she would make it hers.
I parked my car and got out, the wind running in off the lake and charging at me, but I went anyway. That beer foaming my head, I just kept going. Who was going to stop me? I was going to see, see the thing through. I wasn’t going to tell, but I was going to see it for myself.