(no subject)
Here's a new story that I'm writing, about me and my two friends. I'm mostly writing it for them, but anyone can read it if they want. Here's the first chapter.
Chapter One
Drama, Diva, and Darling
That summer was the best of their entire lives. It was all sunshine and smiles, all freedom and joy. It was all days of driving with the top down and the sun in their eyes; it was all days of endless warmth and all nights of peaceful stillness. There was no end to their happiness--it seemed eternal.
August turned out to be the best month. August found Pennsylvania to be in a heat-induced sleepiness that hit everyone halfway through the summer, but the three girls were happy. For in this month there were no classes at the community college; there was no camp; there was no low-paying job, at least not a full-time one. There was only money from the low-paying job to spend, a reason to give oneself a reward (which was the hours that they slaved away at the college), and there was a cheap car and the road. There were trips to the beach and to the amusement park and to anywhere they felt like going.
Of course there were boys, who are continuously wreaking havoc upon the peaceful lives of peaceful girls, and have no purpose otherwise in their very existence. However, the trio somehow managed to put these problems aside and be content, even while bearing the burdens of romance. For boys gave them a reason to stay up late into the night, when all of the rest of the world slept, and talk in whispers of love, and in turn, hate. Although boys made them suffer, boys also gave them a reason for passion.
It was a pleasant evening, when Kelly trudged up the familiar path. The birds were singing goodbye to the day, and the sun was setting the sky afire in the west, turning all the earth a shade of orange. Her shadow stretched out before her on the trail.
She came to an odd structure, a wooden makeshift cabin of thick trees and logs that was several feet wide and long and situated on the side of a tree. The door, on the western side, had a message engraved upon it: “Ad Infinitum.” Kelly knocked three times--tap tap tap--and said loudly, “Fierce Chihuahua.” Presently, the entryway swung open, and Jessi was grinning at her. “’Bout time you got here, Esch. Come on in--we’re just sitting down.”
Inside, the room was confined but cozy. The floor was of thin, splintery wood--they’d talked long of replacing it with tile, but nothing had ever come of it. They had at least put tin on the roof to keep the rain out. On the wall made of the huge fallen tree, they had painted a great mural of various scenes. Mountains with mist all around them. A fairy’s mushroom circle at midnight. A deer in the snow.
The table was low to the ground so that they sat cross-legged around it, like some do when eating Asian food. They had painted it as well, but with designs of stars and swirls.
Noelle held out her arms, smiling at Kelly and gesturing to the food on the table. “Welcome.” She had prepared a great feast of utmost nutrition and elegance: pizza and homemade cheesecake. Jessi and Kelly chuckled and sat down.
They huddled together, munching on the delights. They appeared to be such children of the earth, hunched over their wooden table in their cabin, each wearing only light clothing and touched by the hand of the summer sun. Before Kelly arrived, the other two girls had obviously gone swimming and had time to dry, for Noelle’s hair was curling now into a thousand ringlets, glimmering golden.
Noelle was the most ambitious of the three girls, and she had a knack for heavy work loads and for understanding impossible concepts in a matter of seconds. She played the cello with a deft hand, and read her music and schoolbooks with blue eyes the color of a robin’s eggs that shone as bright as the North Star. Yet the capability of her mind provided her with the opportunity to enjoy herself, sometimes more than she should. Although she was the most hardworking of the girls, she could sometimes be the most wild. Her experience with the world sometimes made her cynical or pessimistic, but she was all the same a hopeless romantic at heart.
Beside her sat Jessi, the tannest of the three, and was, as most boys she knew then would agree, an exotic and remarkable beauty with rich chestnut hair, who looked at the world from a mysterious pair of green-brown eyes. She possessed a will to succeed and accomplished nearly everything she attempted. She was the most forthright, the loudest of them, who wore her colorful character and opinions on her sleeve. If Noelle was the Drama, Jessi was the Diva, the girl with a knack for fashion and glamour. But beneath all of her makeup and disguises lay so many secrets that she did not admit, even to herself. Not secrets of events, but secrets of feelings, feelings which scared her to death.
Last there was Kelly, the daughter of the woods, the girl who sang with a clear voice and plucked on a guitar and wrote in books, the Darling. Although there were fiery passion and desperate love within her, she seldom surfaced them, and was most often chaste, for her part. Her primary concern was happiness, and her deepest desire was to hear the voices of the ancient and to make her journey in the world the way she wished.
Presently, Jessi murmured, “The summer’s almost over. Can you believe how fast it went?”
“Uhhh, shut up,” Noelle groaned miserably. “I’m going to miss this so much.”
“There’s still a couple weeks left,” Kelly observed placidly. She leaned across the table and stretched to reach the cooler. She removed three root beers and handed to them to her companions, keeping one for herself. As they cracked them open, she said, “I say we make the best of this we can.”
“I’ll toast to that,” Jessi said, raising her bottle.
“A toast, then,” Kel beamed. “That we might enjoy the last fruits of this seemingly endless summer, and that after that we might have the most enjoyable senior year ever.” The other girls raised their brows at the mouthful of words. “And,” the fair youth continued, “that this cabin, that this society, this union, this guild of sorts that we’ve created, might live on just as summer will live on endlessly, ad infinitum!”
“Ad infinitum,” they echoed, clinking bottles. After swigging down the root beer, Noelle muttered, “Whatever the hell you just said.” They all laughed.
When night fell, they brought the blankets out of the little cabinet they’d built into the tiny cottage, and spread them on the floor. Space was tight, but they lay down beside each other and made as much room as possible.
Kelly took out a set of candles and lit them with a hissing match. They cast a crimson incandescence upon the wooden walls. Settling beside her friends, she remarked, “You know, it’d be cool if we put shelves all around, and installed candles and kerosene lamps.”
“Or if we could put electricity up here,” Jessi responded.
Kelly scoffed at the less likely idea. “So you can watch The Simple Life here?”
“Of course, Esch.”
“It would be cool,” Noelle agreed, “because then we could put in lava lamps and a fridge. And pig out whenever we wanted.”
“Nah, I kind of like the lack of electricity. It’s a break from the materialism of modern society,” Kelly said, throwing in a highfalutin British accent at the end of her sentence.
“All right, Miss Transcendentalist,” Noelle snickered, referring to their studies in English the previous schoolyear.
“Listen to that wind in the trees,” the other girl whispered with sudden awe and reverence. “Can you compare that to all the stuff Kelly Krajeski and Sara are obsessed with, like all the materialism and everything?”
“You guys,” Jessi cut in suddenly. “I still like Begg.”
“Big surprise,” the curly-haired lass scoffed sardonically.
“We knew that already, Jessi.”
“How?”
“Because you never stopped liking him in the first place, maybe?”
“Oh.”
“I say, you stop talking to us about it, and just do something already.”
“Take your own advice, Esch.”
“Point taken.”
“This is pathetic.”
“This is just us. Nothing unusual. Graham, John, Begg.”
“I don’t still like John.”
“Yes you do.”
“Let’s not talk about guys for ten minutes.”
“Five. I really need to tell you about Begg.”
“Okay, how about we can talk about guys, but just not about those three.”
“So that way, Kelly, you can brag to us about how perfect Brian is?”
“Oh, it’s anything but bragging,” Kelly contradicted. “It’s more like, venting, or complaining.”
Noelle rubbed her eyes wearily. “Either way, it sure makes me jealous.”
“No, all you want is Graham, Noelle.” Jessi gave her a toothy grin. “You’re not really jealous of anyone but the girl he might be screwing right now.”
“Shut up,” the girl shot in reply, eliciting a laugh from her companion.
The next morning, Kelly and Jessi woke up at the crack of dawn; the birds were so loud in the forest that they couldn’t have slept if they tried. Noelle, of course, could have slept with a marching band next to her ear.
For a while the two of them taunted her, poking her and calling her names until she groaned, Stop, guys, and then they got bored and abandoned the idea.
The air outside was as fresh as a breath of spring, and the sunrise was painting the horizon. They ambled down the hill, absorbing the serene beauty of the morning. When they reached the pool, Kelly dove in, but Jessi protested that the water was too cold.
“What do you want to do today?” Jessi called out from where she lounged in the shade.
Kelly swam to the wall and squinted up at her friend. “I dunno. What’s today, Friday?”
“I think so. Or is it Thursday? Whatever. But I was thinking we could go to the mall and do a little shopping. What do you think?”
Kelly slapped a wet hand to her forehead. “Ah, damn. I forgot, I’m supposed to hang out with Brian today.”
“Esch,” Jessi groaned. “You hang out with him every day!”
The other girl clambered up the metal ladder, dripping wet, and sat beside her friend. “Not every day. I haven’t seen him since two days ago, and I already miss him.”
Zonkle made a noise of disgust. “I don’t want to hear about your perfect little relationship and your perfect boyfriend and his perfect-ness.”
Kelly grinned, toweling off. “I understand perfectly. I’m going to call my mom.” She got to her feet, pulling the towel around her shoulders. “But, tell you what. We’ll have a sleepover tonight while Noelle has work, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah--go call your mom, you perfect little girlfriend with your perfect relationship,” Jessi muttered spitefully.
Noelle rose from sleep about four hours later. She expected Jessi to have already left, and was astonished to find her about a few feet away, crouching over the table with a decorative pen in her hand.
“Uhhh. What’re you doing?” she asked. Her voice was thick with sleep.
“Adding a little design here and there. Do you have work tonight?”
“Is it Thursday or Friday?”
“Good question.”
“Ah, dammit, it’s Friday. You’re right--I have work.” Noelle banged her head against the wall in a mix of rage and exhaustion. After a moment’s silence, she observed, “You know why this summer sucked so much?”
Jessi’s eyes shot upwards. “Are you crazy? This summer was so much fun! The best one we’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let me rephrase that: You know one aspect of this summer that sucked for me?”
“Graham. Or lack thereof. Lack of sucking plus Graham.”
Noelle raised her brows and chuckled at the sexually implicit line. “Well, yes, I guess. How’d you know?”
“Because he’s all you goddamn think about. Jeez, get some independence, Noelle. You’re a person with or without guys.”
“Yeah, you should talk, Jessi. Anyway, I just think the summer’s incomplete. It’s such a shame. I wish something could happen, but last I heard he was traveling the country, so what am I supposed to do? I need closure.” She smirked. “And I don’t think I’m the only one.”
Jessi dropped the pen, studying her work closely. “Whatever. I’m done here.” She shuffled to her feet and stepped over Noelle’s horizontal frame on the floor. “I’m gonna go find something to do. Maybe get high with Chris? Maybe have a random hookup? Maybe get some booze? These things are possible now that I own a car.”
“Screw you.”
“Well, have fun at work tonight. And about the summer being incomplete and all . . . you know, there’s still time.”
“Yeah, what, two weeks?”
“Hey, miracles happen, kid.” She fluffed her voluminous hair and flung the door open. “Kelly and I are having a sleepover tonight, so you’re welcome to join us after work. Peace out, cub scout.” She exited and slammed the door behind her.
Noelle buried her face in her sleeping bag, considering suicide by suffocation.
Kelly and Brian lay woven together on the couch in the soft silence of the evening. The sky was turning to an oil pastel painting of blues and blacks, and some sapphire escaped through a basement window and rested in a square before them. Their forms fit together perfectly, with her head on his chest; they were like two puzzle pieces put together. They said nothing, but drifted in and out of sleep, and sometimes he would press a kiss to her forehead or hair and she would sigh. She was craving for music, but too lazy to go upstairs and get her boombox or iPod speakers, so she tried to put her mind to rest. And for a while she did sleep, and the silence ceased to scream in her ears.
She dreamt that she stood on a vast plain in fall, when the apples were ripe on the trees and the ground was rich and golden, and Brian stood in front of her. They smiled at each other and she felt safe and happy. But then he vanished, and John stood in his place, and she could not tell if either of them were wearing clothes or not, but at the same time she somehow didn’t feel surprised by the possibility of her nakedness. He took a step toward her, and his eyes caught the golden sunlight, and suddenly she felt frightened and amazed and surprised and a thousand different negative or shocking emotions that made her draw in breath quick and sharp. But at the same time she nearly wanted to weep at her joy. Her heart swelled with a love deeper than the bottomless sea.
When she woke, she was frightened for a full twelve seconds, although she did not know what she feared. Perhaps she was only guilty for her dream, or afraid of why she’d had it in the first place, but she did not stop the tears from pooling in her eyes. And then, she realized whose arms she was in, and that her potential nudity was gone and she was clothed and so was Brian and they were safe, and he would protect her from anything. His arms held her as solid and unyielding as stone, but with the tenderness of a feather pillow. He was real, and he would really love her, forever.
When she tried to blink back the tears from her eyes, he stirred against her. She watched him open his eyes tentatively. A smile broke out upon his face. They said, I love you, in perfect unison, and laughed.
She raised her head and looked at the television. “I guess the movie wasn’t all that exciting.”
“I guess not,” he concurred. “But this was nice. I love when you’re the first thing I see when I wake up.”
She grinned and ran her hand through his dark curls. “I’m sleeping over at Jessi’s tonight,” she murmured.
He laughed. “Yeah? Should I be worried?”
“No,” she laughed in response. “What would you worry about?”
“You being corrupted,” he replied, embracing her suddenly.
“I promise, I won’t let Jessi or Chris entice me to smoke or drink or get into any mischief.”
“Please, tell me Chris won’t be there.”
She chuckled. “No, no way. You have nothing to worry about. It’ll be pizza and pajamas and nail polish and magazines, I think.”
“I don’t worry about what you’ll do,” he corrected himself. “I worry about what they’ll do to you.” Suddenly his arms around her felt like they could protect her from any threat she could imagine.
Noelle ambled back to the front door of the restaurant after seating an elderly couple. It was busy tonight, which was to be expected, on a Friday and all. But the amount of people in the room and the chatter and smoke that drifted from the bar made her feel nauseous. She was sick of playing hostess. There was a burning inside of her that longed to do something crazy.
Around the crowd, she spotted a boy with a Mohawk and black glasses, Andrew, walking toward her, and realized that he must be leaving. Lucky. When he approached her, he grinned.
“Your shift is over?”
“Yeah. I get to go home and leave you to clean up,” he joshed smilingly.
“Ah, shut up,” she joked sharply, rolling her eyes.
He smiled wider. “I heard something the other day that might interest you.” He pulled from his pocket a worn, crumpled piece of paper and handed it to her.
She surveyed it closely. It was a flyer for some bar in New Jersey, with a list of performers printed on it in huge black letters. At first she couldn’t fathom why he’d given it to her, but then, near the bottom of the list, she saw the name Graham Blandy.
She looked up at him. “It couldn’t be a coincidence, right?” he asked.
“Right.” She took a shuddering breath and felt deep compassion for her friend flow through her. He was a good enough friend to know of Graham somewhat--he’d heard her whine and complain and talk ceaselessly of him. “Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much.”
When he left, she read the paper over and over again a total of one hundred and three times. It was in Cape May. On Sunday.
Chapter One
Drama, Diva, and Darling
That summer was the best of their entire lives. It was all sunshine and smiles, all freedom and joy. It was all days of driving with the top down and the sun in their eyes; it was all days of endless warmth and all nights of peaceful stillness. There was no end to their happiness--it seemed eternal.
August turned out to be the best month. August found Pennsylvania to be in a heat-induced sleepiness that hit everyone halfway through the summer, but the three girls were happy. For in this month there were no classes at the community college; there was no camp; there was no low-paying job, at least not a full-time one. There was only money from the low-paying job to spend, a reason to give oneself a reward (which was the hours that they slaved away at the college), and there was a cheap car and the road. There were trips to the beach and to the amusement park and to anywhere they felt like going.
Of course there were boys, who are continuously wreaking havoc upon the peaceful lives of peaceful girls, and have no purpose otherwise in their very existence. However, the trio somehow managed to put these problems aside and be content, even while bearing the burdens of romance. For boys gave them a reason to stay up late into the night, when all of the rest of the world slept, and talk in whispers of love, and in turn, hate. Although boys made them suffer, boys also gave them a reason for passion.
It was a pleasant evening, when Kelly trudged up the familiar path. The birds were singing goodbye to the day, and the sun was setting the sky afire in the west, turning all the earth a shade of orange. Her shadow stretched out before her on the trail.
She came to an odd structure, a wooden makeshift cabin of thick trees and logs that was several feet wide and long and situated on the side of a tree. The door, on the western side, had a message engraved upon it: “Ad Infinitum.” Kelly knocked three times--tap tap tap--and said loudly, “Fierce Chihuahua.” Presently, the entryway swung open, and Jessi was grinning at her. “’Bout time you got here, Esch. Come on in--we’re just sitting down.”
Inside, the room was confined but cozy. The floor was of thin, splintery wood--they’d talked long of replacing it with tile, but nothing had ever come of it. They had at least put tin on the roof to keep the rain out. On the wall made of the huge fallen tree, they had painted a great mural of various scenes. Mountains with mist all around them. A fairy’s mushroom circle at midnight. A deer in the snow.
The table was low to the ground so that they sat cross-legged around it, like some do when eating Asian food. They had painted it as well, but with designs of stars and swirls.
Noelle held out her arms, smiling at Kelly and gesturing to the food on the table. “Welcome.” She had prepared a great feast of utmost nutrition and elegance: pizza and homemade cheesecake. Jessi and Kelly chuckled and sat down.
They huddled together, munching on the delights. They appeared to be such children of the earth, hunched over their wooden table in their cabin, each wearing only light clothing and touched by the hand of the summer sun. Before Kelly arrived, the other two girls had obviously gone swimming and had time to dry, for Noelle’s hair was curling now into a thousand ringlets, glimmering golden.
Noelle was the most ambitious of the three girls, and she had a knack for heavy work loads and for understanding impossible concepts in a matter of seconds. She played the cello with a deft hand, and read her music and schoolbooks with blue eyes the color of a robin’s eggs that shone as bright as the North Star. Yet the capability of her mind provided her with the opportunity to enjoy herself, sometimes more than she should. Although she was the most hardworking of the girls, she could sometimes be the most wild. Her experience with the world sometimes made her cynical or pessimistic, but she was all the same a hopeless romantic at heart.
Beside her sat Jessi, the tannest of the three, and was, as most boys she knew then would agree, an exotic and remarkable beauty with rich chestnut hair, who looked at the world from a mysterious pair of green-brown eyes. She possessed a will to succeed and accomplished nearly everything she attempted. She was the most forthright, the loudest of them, who wore her colorful character and opinions on her sleeve. If Noelle was the Drama, Jessi was the Diva, the girl with a knack for fashion and glamour. But beneath all of her makeup and disguises lay so many secrets that she did not admit, even to herself. Not secrets of events, but secrets of feelings, feelings which scared her to death.
Last there was Kelly, the daughter of the woods, the girl who sang with a clear voice and plucked on a guitar and wrote in books, the Darling. Although there were fiery passion and desperate love within her, she seldom surfaced them, and was most often chaste, for her part. Her primary concern was happiness, and her deepest desire was to hear the voices of the ancient and to make her journey in the world the way she wished.
Presently, Jessi murmured, “The summer’s almost over. Can you believe how fast it went?”
“Uhhh, shut up,” Noelle groaned miserably. “I’m going to miss this so much.”
“There’s still a couple weeks left,” Kelly observed placidly. She leaned across the table and stretched to reach the cooler. She removed three root beers and handed to them to her companions, keeping one for herself. As they cracked them open, she said, “I say we make the best of this we can.”
“I’ll toast to that,” Jessi said, raising her bottle.
“A toast, then,” Kel beamed. “That we might enjoy the last fruits of this seemingly endless summer, and that after that we might have the most enjoyable senior year ever.” The other girls raised their brows at the mouthful of words. “And,” the fair youth continued, “that this cabin, that this society, this union, this guild of sorts that we’ve created, might live on just as summer will live on endlessly, ad infinitum!”
“Ad infinitum,” they echoed, clinking bottles. After swigging down the root beer, Noelle muttered, “Whatever the hell you just said.” They all laughed.
When night fell, they brought the blankets out of the little cabinet they’d built into the tiny cottage, and spread them on the floor. Space was tight, but they lay down beside each other and made as much room as possible.
Kelly took out a set of candles and lit them with a hissing match. They cast a crimson incandescence upon the wooden walls. Settling beside her friends, she remarked, “You know, it’d be cool if we put shelves all around, and installed candles and kerosene lamps.”
“Or if we could put electricity up here,” Jessi responded.
Kelly scoffed at the less likely idea. “So you can watch The Simple Life here?”
“Of course, Esch.”
“It would be cool,” Noelle agreed, “because then we could put in lava lamps and a fridge. And pig out whenever we wanted.”
“Nah, I kind of like the lack of electricity. It’s a break from the materialism of modern society,” Kelly said, throwing in a highfalutin British accent at the end of her sentence.
“All right, Miss Transcendentalist,” Noelle snickered, referring to their studies in English the previous schoolyear.
“Listen to that wind in the trees,” the other girl whispered with sudden awe and reverence. “Can you compare that to all the stuff Kelly Krajeski and Sara are obsessed with, like all the materialism and everything?”
“You guys,” Jessi cut in suddenly. “I still like Begg.”
“Big surprise,” the curly-haired lass scoffed sardonically.
“We knew that already, Jessi.”
“How?”
“Because you never stopped liking him in the first place, maybe?”
“Oh.”
“I say, you stop talking to us about it, and just do something already.”
“Take your own advice, Esch.”
“Point taken.”
“This is pathetic.”
“This is just us. Nothing unusual. Graham, John, Begg.”
“I don’t still like John.”
“Yes you do.”
“Let’s not talk about guys for ten minutes.”
“Five. I really need to tell you about Begg.”
“Okay, how about we can talk about guys, but just not about those three.”
“So that way, Kelly, you can brag to us about how perfect Brian is?”
“Oh, it’s anything but bragging,” Kelly contradicted. “It’s more like, venting, or complaining.”
Noelle rubbed her eyes wearily. “Either way, it sure makes me jealous.”
“No, all you want is Graham, Noelle.” Jessi gave her a toothy grin. “You’re not really jealous of anyone but the girl he might be screwing right now.”
“Shut up,” the girl shot in reply, eliciting a laugh from her companion.
The next morning, Kelly and Jessi woke up at the crack of dawn; the birds were so loud in the forest that they couldn’t have slept if they tried. Noelle, of course, could have slept with a marching band next to her ear.
For a while the two of them taunted her, poking her and calling her names until she groaned, Stop, guys, and then they got bored and abandoned the idea.
The air outside was as fresh as a breath of spring, and the sunrise was painting the horizon. They ambled down the hill, absorbing the serene beauty of the morning. When they reached the pool, Kelly dove in, but Jessi protested that the water was too cold.
“What do you want to do today?” Jessi called out from where she lounged in the shade.
Kelly swam to the wall and squinted up at her friend. “I dunno. What’s today, Friday?”
“I think so. Or is it Thursday? Whatever. But I was thinking we could go to the mall and do a little shopping. What do you think?”
Kelly slapped a wet hand to her forehead. “Ah, damn. I forgot, I’m supposed to hang out with Brian today.”
“Esch,” Jessi groaned. “You hang out with him every day!”
The other girl clambered up the metal ladder, dripping wet, and sat beside her friend. “Not every day. I haven’t seen him since two days ago, and I already miss him.”
Zonkle made a noise of disgust. “I don’t want to hear about your perfect little relationship and your perfect boyfriend and his perfect-ness.”
Kelly grinned, toweling off. “I understand perfectly. I’m going to call my mom.” She got to her feet, pulling the towel around her shoulders. “But, tell you what. We’ll have a sleepover tonight while Noelle has work, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah--go call your mom, you perfect little girlfriend with your perfect relationship,” Jessi muttered spitefully.
Noelle rose from sleep about four hours later. She expected Jessi to have already left, and was astonished to find her about a few feet away, crouching over the table with a decorative pen in her hand.
“Uhhh. What’re you doing?” she asked. Her voice was thick with sleep.
“Adding a little design here and there. Do you have work tonight?”
“Is it Thursday or Friday?”
“Good question.”
“Ah, dammit, it’s Friday. You’re right--I have work.” Noelle banged her head against the wall in a mix of rage and exhaustion. After a moment’s silence, she observed, “You know why this summer sucked so much?”
Jessi’s eyes shot upwards. “Are you crazy? This summer was so much fun! The best one we’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let me rephrase that: You know one aspect of this summer that sucked for me?”
“Graham. Or lack thereof. Lack of sucking plus Graham.”
Noelle raised her brows and chuckled at the sexually implicit line. “Well, yes, I guess. How’d you know?”
“Because he’s all you goddamn think about. Jeez, get some independence, Noelle. You’re a person with or without guys.”
“Yeah, you should talk, Jessi. Anyway, I just think the summer’s incomplete. It’s such a shame. I wish something could happen, but last I heard he was traveling the country, so what am I supposed to do? I need closure.” She smirked. “And I don’t think I’m the only one.”
Jessi dropped the pen, studying her work closely. “Whatever. I’m done here.” She shuffled to her feet and stepped over Noelle’s horizontal frame on the floor. “I’m gonna go find something to do. Maybe get high with Chris? Maybe have a random hookup? Maybe get some booze? These things are possible now that I own a car.”
“Screw you.”
“Well, have fun at work tonight. And about the summer being incomplete and all . . . you know, there’s still time.”
“Yeah, what, two weeks?”
“Hey, miracles happen, kid.” She fluffed her voluminous hair and flung the door open. “Kelly and I are having a sleepover tonight, so you’re welcome to join us after work. Peace out, cub scout.” She exited and slammed the door behind her.
Noelle buried her face in her sleeping bag, considering suicide by suffocation.
Kelly and Brian lay woven together on the couch in the soft silence of the evening. The sky was turning to an oil pastel painting of blues and blacks, and some sapphire escaped through a basement window and rested in a square before them. Their forms fit together perfectly, with her head on his chest; they were like two puzzle pieces put together. They said nothing, but drifted in and out of sleep, and sometimes he would press a kiss to her forehead or hair and she would sigh. She was craving for music, but too lazy to go upstairs and get her boombox or iPod speakers, so she tried to put her mind to rest. And for a while she did sleep, and the silence ceased to scream in her ears.
She dreamt that she stood on a vast plain in fall, when the apples were ripe on the trees and the ground was rich and golden, and Brian stood in front of her. They smiled at each other and she felt safe and happy. But then he vanished, and John stood in his place, and she could not tell if either of them were wearing clothes or not, but at the same time she somehow didn’t feel surprised by the possibility of her nakedness. He took a step toward her, and his eyes caught the golden sunlight, and suddenly she felt frightened and amazed and surprised and a thousand different negative or shocking emotions that made her draw in breath quick and sharp. But at the same time she nearly wanted to weep at her joy. Her heart swelled with a love deeper than the bottomless sea.
When she woke, she was frightened for a full twelve seconds, although she did not know what she feared. Perhaps she was only guilty for her dream, or afraid of why she’d had it in the first place, but she did not stop the tears from pooling in her eyes. And then, she realized whose arms she was in, and that her potential nudity was gone and she was clothed and so was Brian and they were safe, and he would protect her from anything. His arms held her as solid and unyielding as stone, but with the tenderness of a feather pillow. He was real, and he would really love her, forever.
When she tried to blink back the tears from her eyes, he stirred against her. She watched him open his eyes tentatively. A smile broke out upon his face. They said, I love you, in perfect unison, and laughed.
She raised her head and looked at the television. “I guess the movie wasn’t all that exciting.”
“I guess not,” he concurred. “But this was nice. I love when you’re the first thing I see when I wake up.”
She grinned and ran her hand through his dark curls. “I’m sleeping over at Jessi’s tonight,” she murmured.
He laughed. “Yeah? Should I be worried?”
“No,” she laughed in response. “What would you worry about?”
“You being corrupted,” he replied, embracing her suddenly.
“I promise, I won’t let Jessi or Chris entice me to smoke or drink or get into any mischief.”
“Please, tell me Chris won’t be there.”
She chuckled. “No, no way. You have nothing to worry about. It’ll be pizza and pajamas and nail polish and magazines, I think.”
“I don’t worry about what you’ll do,” he corrected himself. “I worry about what they’ll do to you.” Suddenly his arms around her felt like they could protect her from any threat she could imagine.
Noelle ambled back to the front door of the restaurant after seating an elderly couple. It was busy tonight, which was to be expected, on a Friday and all. But the amount of people in the room and the chatter and smoke that drifted from the bar made her feel nauseous. She was sick of playing hostess. There was a burning inside of her that longed to do something crazy.
Around the crowd, she spotted a boy with a Mohawk and black glasses, Andrew, walking toward her, and realized that he must be leaving. Lucky. When he approached her, he grinned.
“Your shift is over?”
“Yeah. I get to go home and leave you to clean up,” he joshed smilingly.
“Ah, shut up,” she joked sharply, rolling her eyes.
He smiled wider. “I heard something the other day that might interest you.” He pulled from his pocket a worn, crumpled piece of paper and handed it to her.
She surveyed it closely. It was a flyer for some bar in New Jersey, with a list of performers printed on it in huge black letters. At first she couldn’t fathom why he’d given it to her, but then, near the bottom of the list, she saw the name Graham Blandy.
She looked up at him. “It couldn’t be a coincidence, right?” he asked.
“Right.” She took a shuddering breath and felt deep compassion for her friend flow through her. He was a good enough friend to know of Graham somewhat--he’d heard her whine and complain and talk ceaselessly of him. “Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much.”
When he left, she read the paper over and over again a total of one hundred and three times. It was in Cape May. On Sunday.