“I’m telling you, you gotta try it,” Mal said. “It’s a hoot. Why not put up a profile and see what happens?”
“It just seems dangerous,” said Pauline. “I need to do something, but not that.”
“Dangerous? I’ve stopped keeping track of what’s dangerous. It’s tiring.”
“There’s a bunch of perverts in their underwear leering at your picture, Mal. Thinking God-knows-what.”
“I just want to go on a few dates. A girl used to be able to do that. Anyway, the picture I use is tasteful.”
“I’m sure it is,” Pauline said.
“It’s fun browsing through the guys. You get a bunch of likes and dislikes and hobbies. Then sometimes they’ll brag that they have a job.” She smiled. “Rick couldn’t brag about that. He bragged about his dad’s boat.”
Rick had been Mal’s most recent semi-steady guy, a man easily older than Pauline, way too old for Mal, with a tattoo on his neck and a hairline that had begun to recede. Pauline hadn’t seen him in a week or so. “What ever happened with Rick?”
“Yeah, that.” Mal ran a palm down her cup, wiping it dry. “His friend called and asked me out and I said no way, then I told Rick about it and he says, ‘I know, I told him to. It was a test.’ I was like, these fuckers are weird.”
“Did you have to lie about your age, for the site?”
Mal spit ice into her cup. “Been doing that all my life. Sometimes I forget how old I actually am.”
Mal pulled her hair back and bound it with a rubber band. It was a light shade of brown and always looked a little greasy. Though Pauline talked to Mal most every day, she still knew almost nothing about the girl’s childhood. She’d been raised a couple counties away, Pauline knew, in a place she’d said was even more raggedy than Palatka, by an old woman she called Granny who wasn’t really her grandmother. The old woman had passed away a couple years back. Pauline didn’t pry; Mal was the type who would tell you everything she wanted you to know.
“What have you eaten today?” Pauline asked her.
“Eaten?” said Mal. She tipped off the banister stiffly toward Pauline, as if falling, then shot her feet down and landed like a gymnast. “I don’t know. I eat biscuits every morning, then I don’t get hungry again.” Mal gave the ice in her cup one sharp shake, then swished inside, the screen door swatting behind her.
Pauline rose and climbed into Mal’s spot on the banister. She pressed her back against the beam and gripped the railing under her legs. The balcony felt solid enough, though its planks were discolored and warped. After several minutes Pauline grew comfortable with her balance, though she knew she didn’t look at ease, like Mal had. She didn’t look like a wise stray kitten.
Pauline hadn’t had sex for over a year now. She was too picky, was the problem. There was a certain type of guy she was comfortable with, and that often liked her in return — guys who were nowhere near handsome but were cocky anyway due to some offbeat talent they possessed, who were gentlemanly without overdoing it — and that type of guy existed in college towns, not in regular Florida. Those were the guys who hadn’t minded entertaining and winning Pauline, guys who spoke useless languages and played outdated musical instruments. Pauline remembered what it was like to be with one of them, how each hour had seemed unique. They’d been so sweet and honest. They’d been boys, she supposed, not men.
The last night Mal had brought Rick home, Pauline had turned her seldom-used TV up as loud as it would go, blaring a news story about a museum burning to the ground. The noises Mal made were like giggling. His were like someone getting burned by a cigarette.
Mal burst back onto the balcony. “Believe it? I’m officially one hundred percent out of tea. How do I let these things happen?”
Pauline lowered herself from the banister and curled back up in her chair. The heat of the day was taking hold. She could feel sweat trickling down her neck. “Mal, how many friends do you have?” she asked.
Mal’s face went blank a moment. “No close ones, I don’t guess. None like when you’re a kid and you’re friends with someone. Friends like me and you, maybe seven or eight. If I have a friend long enough, I get in a fight with her.”
“Why? What do you get in a fight over?”
“Different things. Usually their boyfriends come on to me. This one dude, I threw a candle in his face, then my friend took his side. Says I could have blinded him.”
“A lit candle?”
“Hell yeah, a lit candle. She said I was jealous of her because she had this great guy, so I was trying to ruin it for her. Meanwhile he’s got a crossed eye. He was part-owner of a roller rink.” Mal crossed her arms. She was wearing a tank top that revealed the flat bones of her chest. “She said I was always flirting, even if I wasn’t trying to. The way I bop around and, you know, look at people. Maybe she’s right.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “Do you think she’s right?”
“I don’t know,” Pauline said. “Look straight at me.”
Mal arranged her face over-seriously and rested her eyes on Pauline. It certainly wasn’t flirty. Mal wasn’t blinking; she was waiting for some sort of verdict. And as Pauline looked back at her, thinking of what to say, she began to suspect that the face Mal was making was Pauline’s face, that she was unconsciously mirroring Pauline.
***
Pauline had been so happy, a year ago when she’d finished college, to find a pocket of the Florida peninsula that had not yet been subdivided and sodded, a swampy area with no easy access to a beach or to Disney World. She’d wanted a bold move, a move she wouldn’t have expected of herself. She’d wanted an escape from the familiar, a place where she could find something out about herself. Her friends from school had gone back to their hometowns and were predictably stepping into the molds of their young-adult lives, and Pauline was here, in Palatka, with no one to catch her if she faltered. She was proud of this original little life she’d forged, proud to have a consistent freelance job that paid the bills and then some, but whatever test she’d been hoping for hadn’t arrived. She felt more capable than when she’d moved here, but nothing important about her had changed. She was the person she’d always been — cautious, a judger of character and debunker of myths.
And what of Palatka? It was less a town, more a tangle of numbered roads lined with lethargic trailer parks and dusty farmhouses. The daytime was uneventful, and most people stayed in at night because there was nothing lurking out there but trouble. Pauline’s apartment was one of eight in her building, only two of which were rented — hers and Mal’s. The whole row was on stilts. The apartment, if she looked too closely, was shabby, but it was a big space for one person, and out the windows she could see the sun rising and setting. Out the windows there were mucky cypress bogs, and in the near distance a strip mall that contained a tidy thrift store and a low-rent lawyer’s office. A little farther off was a field of soybeans in perfect rows. And beyond all that was an unlabeled water tower, painted a pale yellow, peeking up over the treetops.
Pauline finished the work her company had sent her around midday, and then began feeling generally anxious for reasons that were hard to narrow down. She put in a hairclip, slipped her flip-flops on, and drove over to the outlet mall. This was another thing that hadn’t changed about her — when she felt anxious, shopping helped. She waded inside with the old women, who all wore sweaters against the pumping chilled air. She passed a shop for kitchen gadgets and a discount store for bras, then wound up walking into a depot for outdoor gear and drifting to a huge bin marked LIQUIDATION. She picked through all variety of backpack, fishing vest, and cozy hat, then turned the price tag on a pair of men’s boots: WAS $230.00 / IS $19.99. The boots were bulky and sleek at once, seasoned-looking yet pristine, rugged yet soft as a cloud. They were from Italy. She could smell the boots’ neutral scent — the odor of a very clean and organized workshop. She hung them over her arm by the laces and started looking around for the registers.