Swell ran up and grabbed M around her tiny waist and lifted her in the air and spun her. She squealed. M was not a squealer. Swell carried her out of the room, her legs dangling over his arms, her flip-flops falling off her feet. (M, of course, had dressed perfectly for the party). J and L looked at me. Angel came over with beers. He gave us each one. He and J were both wearing the same thing: short-sleeved Polo shirts, plaid shorts, and flip-flops. He took her hand and they walked away. Even from across the room I could see J’s dimples and the light in her eyes.
L was wearing Topsiders and a white tank top that made her brown skin glow. She and I looked at each other; she frowned, as usual. Hot came over and she frowned at him. He shrugged and walked away. L and I sat on a couch. Tan-the-Man came over and joined us.
“Looking good, ladies,” he said, putting his hand on my knee.
I realized that I wanted to lose my virginity. And A wasn’t there. We’d won a fifties dance contest. He was a great kisser. He lived in John Davidson’s guesthouse. He had a motorcycle. We’d had an accident. What if I’d gotten really hurt? My mom would have been so angry at me, I think. Or maybe she wouldn’t have noticed because she was so worried about my dad. Maybe dying on a motorcycle with A would be better than watching my father die slowly of cancer and my mom die of grief soon after.
I swallowed some beer. “My dad has cancer,” I said to Tan.
He leaned closer and cocked his head so his ear was near my mouth. “What?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Hey, you want to go see the upstairs?”
“Sure.”
We left L sitting on the couch and rolling her eyes. That L, she was the smart one. She would attend Harvard in the fall. She wanted to be a veterinarian.
Tan took me to a bedroom upstairs. He took out a vial of white powder and sprinkled it onto a mirror. I thought of the mirror I’d won at Phases. I’d put it on my dresser at home under a tangle of jewelry made of plastic and rhinestones.
Tan snorted and then offered me some. I snorted, too. It hurt my sinuses with a bright white pain. I didn’t feel anything else except an accelerated heartbeat and a kind of shiny panic. Maybe it was bad coke. Then I left my body quietly while he pulled my jeans and underwear down over my hips and shoved himself inside of me. It actually didn’t hurt that much, maybe because of all the dancing I’d done. I think I’d broken my hymen that way. Or maybe the coke worked to dull the pain. Or maybe it was my naturally high pain tolerance. Or the fact that I wasn’t really there.
M was right; I felt different afterward. But not more mature. I got so sick the next day—I’d never been so sick. My whole body burned with poison fever. I wondered if I was just responding to the metaphor of feeling fucked.
I missed A with a longing as strong as those hot winds that ravaged us that summer, that hot sun that had burned blisters on my skin. But I had not chosen A. Somehow, with all the grief and confusion and fear and years of mild but persistent negative thoughts that had worn a path in my brain, I had chosen to get fucked by Tan-the-Man instead.
Love can be so strange and sad. It can be hard to understand why we run toward certain people and away from others at different times in our lives. Why we search so hard for that thing we are looking for, and then run so fast when we find it.
* * *
Years will go by.
M will be happily married and working as an art director on movies. She and I will have had a falling out after I finally let her know that I’m sick of her telling me what to do. She will say, “You don’t know what love is. I’ve been the best friend you could have.” Maybe she’s right.
J will be a heroic CHP officer, married with two kids.
L will be a successful veterinarian, still single, still beautiful, and so smart.
None of us will be in touch.
Maybe A will be living in a bungalow in Hollywood, working as a graphic designer, still writing and drawing zines, still listening to punk music. If he is losing his hair, or even if he isn’t, maybe he shaves his head. Maybe he still wears creepers. Maybe he has kids. A boy who is a musician in a garage band. A girl who is an artist. Maybe A will have just gone through a divorce and just be starting to think about dating again.
I will have lost my parents, one to cancer, one to cancer and grief. I will have two children I adore, and, a few years after my divorce, I will just be starting to think about dating again. I will like myself a lot more than I did when I met A, but I will still have to work at it every day.
Words will be the answer. They always were.
I will write a story about A for you. Maybe it will make you feel better. Or at least feel. Something. And the story will be for A, too. Maybe he’ll read it.
Marigold hated this time of year. July was hotter—and maybe even wetter—than the rest of summer, for one thing. The air swelled thick with humidity. Sweat trickled down the hollows of her body. And the rain showers, so frequent in the afternoons, caused more inconveniences than relief. Dark clouds became a weary sight.
She hated the sunscreen and the gluey white paths it left behind when smeared across her skin. She hated the bloodsuckers—the hidden ticks with their threat of Lyme disease and the inexhaustible mosquitoes, buzzing inside her eardrums and always preferring her above other people. She hated the texture of her hair, fattened and frizzed, unrecognizable as her own. And she especially hated the boiling hot parking lots.
Parking lots like this one.
Marigold Moon Ling’s relationship with North Drummond had been bookended by parking lots. They’d met in an Ingles grocery store parking lot last winter, and he’d broken up with her in a Bed Bath & Beyond parking lot last spring. At the time, she’d been holding a small microwave purchased with one of those big, blue twenty-percent-off postcard coupons. It was her first appliance for her first apartment. She’d been leaving the laid-back mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, for a job in the gridlocked urban sprawl of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta was a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. Three and a half hours seemed manageable to Marigold. They did not to her boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend.
God. That prefix still stung, even in her head.
But it was this specific sting—this steadily intensifying sorrow, this oppressive sense of guilt—that was the reason Marigold was standing in the parking lot of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, about to make what might be the most humiliating mistake of her newly adultish, nineteen-year-old life.
Marigold was here to save her ex-boyfriend.
Not save in the Southern, religious sense. Less dramatically and more specifically, Marigold was here to convince her ex-boyfriend to follow her back to her apartment in Atlanta, split her rent, and enroll in college.
It was still a tall order. She was aware. But the mission was platonic. It was about helping out a friend who had helped her, about repaying a massive cosmic debt. It felt both intolerable and unjust that Marigold got to leave while North believed that he had to stay.
What Marigold didn’t understand was what North was doing here. She’d returned to North Carolina under the guise of visiting her mother, but, before even dropping off her weekend bag, she’d driven the extra thirty-two miles past Asheville to his family’s Christmas tree farm near Spruce Pine. His mother had shocked her with the news that he no longer worked there. He’d been adamant about staying at home so he could manage the property for his ailing father, but now he was working another full hour’s drive away—down endless winding roads, past countless overgrown campgrounds and churchyards—even deeper into the mountains at Mount Mitchell State Park.