We’re in Nikki Dugan’s backyard on Astor, high on the hillside where on clear, quiet days you can look out over the roofs of the less fortunate houses lower on the slope and watch and faintly hear ocean waves breaking on the beach down below. But right now it’s late and dark and the ocean is just a giant black mass off in the distance and there’s far too much going on to notice the muffled crash of faraway waves and anyway who cares? No one. Tonight has nothing to do with any of that. By the edge of the pool the girls from the drama club are crying extravagantly. I can’t believe high school is over, Tina wails and the others tearfully nod and fan their manufactured tears and one slings an arm around Tina’s bony shoulder and nestles her chin in the crook of Tina’s neck and their lumpy bodies convulse for a moment or so until they disentangle and swivel their heads from side to side and I know exactly what they’re doing, it’s so obvious: scanning the backyard for observers of the little tragedy they’ve staged in the center of everything (but am I not one such observer, for shame). John is the only guy in their group and he’s only there because of Sarah. They haven’t fucked yet as far as anyone knows despite weeks of effort on his part, which is surprising for several reasons: one, because John’s track record in such endeavors is sterling (it never usually takes him this long); two, because Sarah is really not that attractive (thin to the point of gauntness, with thick eyebrows and an unusually long forehead); and three because, if the constant reports of unexpected hookups during the past several weeks are to be believed (they are), then everyone else seems to be doing it with ease. If it’s going to happen, tonight, in the delirious afterglow of graduation, will be the night and if it isn’t going to happen it won’t be for lack of effort on John’s part. From across the pool I see him rub Sarah’s lower back, whisper in her ear and brush the hair from her forehead, but something in the gesture displeases her and she saunters to Tina, leaving John alone and plainly livid. But his anger is short-lived as right then a naked figure barrels through the backyard, charging towards the pool but two yards from the edge he seems to spot the cluster of drama girls and veers towards them, snagging Tina and Sarah with outstretched arms, sending all three of them on a wild tumble into the water, an unruly mess of flesh, hair, and flailing limbs, and while the girls resurface enraged and sputtering (What the fuck, Tina screams; You fucking asshole, Sarah adds) and a few of their drama club friends dramatically crouch to guide them safely to the pool’s edge, everyone else is cheering and chanting and in a moment another body breaks the water and then another and another and shirts are flung to the grass, bare skin is glistening and soon there’s more water sloshed onto the brick patio than there is left in the pool, filled as it is with writhing legs and arms and abs and tits and those who haven’t jumped in yet crowd the perimeter and empty their Solo cups over the shimmering bodies of those who have, though most barely notice the sticky beer dribbling down their foreheads amidst all the rubbing and grabbing and stroking and caressing going on beneath the surface and by the time I leave the water to smoke a bowl by the firepit I’m pruned and wrinkled and it’s not at all clear to me whose tongue was tracing circles on my neck and whose fleshy legs my fingers were just between and my eyes are cloudy from too much booze and too much chlorine and as a fug of pungent smoke envelops the backyard from the bowl and the bongs and the half dozen joints getting passed around, the temperature drops and no one has thought to bring towels so damp bodies pluck random shirts from the ground and someone tugs a curtain from its rod just inside the glass doors and someone else hurls a quilt from a second floor balcony and everyone is rubbing themselves dry as we cram into the cavernous den and onto the couches and chairs and lushly carpeted floor and I fall asleep instantaneously, the moment my head touches the ground, and awaken only once in the night to the nearby sound of stifled moaning and the crash of skin on skin and a sideways glance reveals that the moans are coming from drama club Sarah, lying beneath John, both covered by a blanket that ripples and rustles with the movement of their bodies and my last conscious thought before drifting back to sleep is: the drama club girls were right. I can’t believe high school is over.
We reconvene at the Cantina, naturally. I don’t realize how ripe I am until we’re being led by a nonplussed-looking waitress to an empty spot on the front patio. My hair is slimy with oil and grease and I can feel sweat, beer, and pool water caked on my skin. John, to my right, smells like lavender. We showered, he says and smiles that cocky smile of his. The waitress brings Bloody Marys—we’re at the Cantina most weekends and tip well enough for them to overlook the fake IDs—and John tells us (me and Todd) about last night: I was getting nowhere and was ready to move on until Greg streaks through and tackles her into the water and when I pull her out she’s crying and shaking so we hug and she starts kissing me and then someone hands us shots and someone else passes a joint and an hour later we’re fucking on the den floor. Her first time, he says, with his infuriating smirk, fingers interlaced behind his head. Seriously though, why her? Todd asks. John leans in and tents his fingers on the table. You lack vision, he begins and his face is unbearable. You see only what’s in front of you. I’m prospecting for undiscovered talent. In five years, she’ll be the hottest girl from our class and I’ll have been first. John’s father owns a modeling agency; we’ve heard his nonsensical theories on beauty before. Eggs and pancakes arrive and bits fly from Todd’s mouth as he goes on about next year at Wisconsin: how his frat choice will depend on whether Beta escapes Spring probation, how it’s all just a case of administrative overreach because some freshman passed out against the bio lab in a torn serape and a puddle of puke after doing jello shots at the frat’s Mexican party, but if Beta can’t wriggle out of it he’ll settle for Theta something-or-other, which this smoking hot and absurdly rich girl from Newport Beach he met at an admitted students thing a few weeks back heard hosts amazing parties so… John explodes: for fuck’s sake, Todd, enough, it’s a fucking state school! This again: a jab to Todd’s most sensitive vulnerability. Next Todd will mumble that John considered state schools too and John will say Michigan is leagues above Wisconsin and Northwestern is better than both and Todd will say he only got in there because of his father’s money and John will say even Todd’s father’s money couldn’t get him in anywhere better than Wisconsin, that he’d’ve bankrupted himself just trying. Then John will gloat and Todd will sulk and I’ll ask Todd why he does this to himself time and again. It’s a well-worn script we’re reading from. I rub an ice cube on my forehead to ease the low-grade throbbing and allow my mind to drift. When I tune back, they’ve moved on to graduation. Did you see who was in the second row? Todd asks, and answers his own question: Deena Meredith’s parents. I wonder how I could have missed them. I’m surprised they’d go; too painful I’d think, John says and Todd tells us Deena’s mother told his mother that they’re still in touch with many of her friends and felt they needed to be there. It just seems like masochism to me, John says, and I flash on a memory of Deena at five or six, in a baby blue uniform with her blonde hair swaying from the back of a baseball cap, plucking and shredding blades of grass during a t-ball game, tossing them into the wind and laughing wildly as green bits clung to her face and shirt and hair. Our bill must have arrived and been settled while my mind was elsewhere and as we walk to the exit I realize that my phone is missing. I must have left it at Nikki Dugan’s.
But she hasn’t seen it, she says. I call from Todd’s phone on the drive to my house and she tells me there were a bunch at the bottom of the pool, maybe one was mine, and for the moment I have to assume she’s right and hang up as she asks if I know which fucker ruined her curtains. My house is mercifully quiet. There’s a note on the counter from my parents telling me to call them. I don’t. Instead I shower (heavenly), chug a Red Bull and drive to the Plaza on Forest Avenue.
My contacts, texts, photos: all gone. I can transfer your existing number to a blank phone, a bored technician tells me, but there’s nothing more I can do. I text my parents and post a plea for friends to message me numbers. There’s nothing more I can do, either.
With nowhere to be and no one to call, I pass several not unpleasant hours listlessly daydreaming around the Plaza, but at one point I alight on some thought that triggers a vague notion of importance, as though I’ve stumbled upon a destination I didn’t know I was looking for, and when I try to figure out what this unclear something actually is it evaporates and because my path to it was so erratic there are no breadcrumbs to track and I find myself frustrated, ashamed and oddly guilty, as if I’ve been careless with something that deserved great delicacy. It’s confusing. Anyway, I notice how few shoppers remain and head to the parking lot as Plaza employees are beginning to leave too, huddling in clusters at the bus stop or trudging to Kias and Corollas on the distant edges of the lot and as I pull away I consider how dim the sky is and how bright it was earlier and how little of that brightness the workers would have been able to enjoy, passing the day as they did helping rude customers navigate display cases full of luxurious things they’ll never themselves be able to buy. I pity them. Their lives seem sad.
It’s a humid, quiet night and when I arrive (unannounced) at John’s house he seems almost giddy. I have an idea, he tells me and insists we take my car. You’ll love it, he adds coyly and it goes without saying I’m not so sure. He won’t say where we’re going, just barks a direction at each darkened street corner, and when he sends me left on Dorado and I realize where he’s been leading me, his cackle is exactly his father’s.
We’re huddled in the darkness beneath the monkey bars at Las Palmas Elementary and I’m trying to remember if I’ve been here at night before, if somehow I never have been, and if maybe that’s why, in the thin glow of Jenn’s flashlight, it looks so disorienting. No one else seems bothered. All of us—me, Jenn, Ashley, Kevin, Brad, Trey, Hunter, John—went to school here except the blonde nestled under John’s arm, a girl I’ve never met before and clearly not one of his undiscovered talents because she’s obviously beautiful even in the terrible lighting that’s making the rest of us look like ghouls. Hunter is saying the obvious, that the playground seemed so big when we were kids, how even as fifth graders stories of shattered bones from monkey bar falls made perfect sense because they were so high that only the tallest and oldest, straining on the tips of their toes, could reach them and, as if to emphasize how far we’ve come, he casually grabs a bar. I know exactly what comes next: someone will mention lava or hide-and-seek or the other playground games we used to play and then someone will remember Louis Ferraro stuck in the tube slide or Sienna Walker panicking atop the monkey bars or any of the stories etched in our collective elementary school memories and then it’ll be the TV shows everyone watched or the movies we all loved or the songs we’d sing as we chased each other around the playground and honestly I feel like I’ve had this conversation a dozen times in the weeks leading up to graduation. But John cuts in: I have an idea, he says, and his blonde unrolls a baggie. The idea, John explains, is to smoke a little and bury the rest so some lucky kid finds it and becomes the coolest kid in school, so we huddle beside the swing set barely able to see each other because John’s got the flashlight trained on the shallow hole he’s digging in the middle of our circle and his blonde rolls, lights and passes a joint and it flares briefly in the darkness as Trey takes a long drag and says how awesome it’ll be for whatever kid discovers this stuff, how it could change the kid’s whole life, and Brad takes the joint and says, not necessarily, you were always a lost cause and the biggest bag of weed in the world wouldn’t have changed that, and everyone laughs, Trey too, and Ashley inhales next and says, but what if the kid that finds it is a kindergartener or something, and Kevin says, then the kid will have the luckiest parents in the world, and we laugh again and then Jenn coughs on her exhale and asks who the coolest kid in our grade was, and Hunter says, it was Deena, right, it had to have been Deena Meredith, and it becomes quiet then, as John drops the Ziploc into his hole, covers it and rises: the burial concluded. Right then a door slams and John mutters, fuck me, as the flashlight finds two approaching figures. Sarah and Tina reach us and say hey, and we all say hey back and John says, this is Angelica, and from beneath his arm the blonde says hey, and man, I wish I could see Sarah’s gaunt face just then. As the joint dies the group fragments. John and the blonde (Angelica apparently) slink off to the playground and I’m left by the swing set with the drama club girls, Sarah, sullen and bratty over John’s indifference, and Tina, talking enough for the three of us, most of it nonsense about the rush of live performance and how her greatest moments in life have been on our high school’s stage. It’s excruciating. I’m about to extricate myself but Sarah mopes away first to inflict herself elsewhere, leaving me alone with Tina (charmless, dramatic Tina) and I’m turning to see whom I can talk to instead when she lowers her voice and says, I’ve been thinking about you since last night in the pool. I turn sharply to face her. Your fingers felt so good inside me, she says, and I think, fuck there’s no way, and she leans in closer and tells me how wet she is thinking about it, and I think, could that really have been her, and her lips are only inches from my ear as she whispers that all she wants to do is return the favor, and I’m not sure which of us leads the other to the secluded spot on the deserted playground, just beside the metal slide. We don’t kiss. She drops to her knees and takes my dick in her mouth and I’m thinking that the spongy turf she’s kneeling on wasn’t there when we were kids, that small white pebbles used to cover the playground, and that if the old stories about the town bum sleeping here are true then turf would have been more comfortable for him and who knows, maybe we’re in his old bedroom right now, and that even though the others sound far off by the soccer field I need a solid grip on my shorts so I can yank them up if I hear anyone approach, and that I’d tell whomever the approacher is that I was wandering alone and I guess Tina must have followed without my realizing, and that I should try to finish soon because even though she’s doing a pretty good job everything about this feels off. I think I hear calling; it’s distant but sounds like someone looking for Tina which means it must be Sarah and maybe she’s about to start walking over, maybe she already has, and I tap Tina and whisper, let’s go, but she doesn’t hear me or she’s confused, because she just stares up with widened eyes but stays down on her knees, paused, with my dick half in her mouth. I withdraw and zip. She stands. I don’t say anything and neither does she. I reach the soccer field a few steps before her and we melt into separate conversations and 15 minutes later Sarah whines that it’s late and she’s ready to go but before they do Tina comes over and says how great it is I’ll be in New York next year, how she’s always wanted to live there, how one day maybe she’ll be able to and how happy she is for me that I get to. I say, thanks. They leave.
John’s mom’s away and his dad’s at a conference so sure I can stay over, he says. I even get his bed since he’ll be in his parents’ room, he adds with a glance back at Angelica following behind us in her Mercedes. Two blocks from his place he admits sharing his Las Palmas idea with Sarah at Nikki’s party the night before but insists she had no business joining. We fucked once at a party, we’re not dating, he says. I’m silent. It was Tina looking for me not Sarah looking for him that brought them there tonight; I’m certain of it. But he doesn’t know and doesn’t need to; I don’t consider it a victory.
I wake at 7 and already it’s as stifling as if it were noon. I didn’t mean to wake so early but fuck it, I’m up and the pool is shimmering. I’m about to borrow a swimsuit but John won’t wake for hours, his parents aren’t home and the palms and hedges lining the yard are tall enough to block curious neighbors. I swim naked. And if anyone sees? Fuck it, let them look. Ripples lap against the pool’s granite walls but otherwise it’s quiet. I feel amazing.
None of the handful of contacts I’ve added to my new phone are free but no matter: I leave John’s before he and Angelica emerge and drive to the tiny beach off Pearl Street. I’ve got a bathing suit in my trunk but no towel so I lie on my shirt and watch a gray-haired woman in a billowing sarong chase a fair, blonde boy back and forth across the beach. Each time he approaches the water he scoops wet sand in his tiny fist and flings it at the woman and each time she says, that’s not nice Jason–what’s happened to my sweet little boy, and he laughs and scampers back from the foamy water. They repeat this dance several times and then leave and I’m alone on the quiet beach. The sky is cloudless, the sun is strong, the air is thick with heat. It’s a perfect day. I’d feel guilty being anywhere else.
I’m fairly sure I pass the Merediths, Deena’s parents, driving south on Morningside on my way home but I don’t realize it’s them till they’ve gone and for several blocks after I feel bad about not waving or stopping or acknowledging them in any way, but the feeling passes by the time I’m rinsing off the day’s sand, sweat, chlorine, and salt in my parent’s shower and anyway maybe it wasn’t even them. I hope it wasn’t.
I’m finishing a quesadilla at the Cantina’s bar as the slinky woman a few spots down shifts her body to face mine and with two ringed fingers rhythmically strokes the stem of an empty wine glass and I’m thinking, can it really be this easy, because I know the Cantina will accept my ID and the seat next to her is wide open and every time I’ve glanced at her she’s been staring hungrily back, and I wonder if it even matters what I’d say were I to approach, if she’ll drive whatever conversation I initiate to exactly the destination she has in mind, and on my last bite I think, fuck it, why not, when my phone buzzes with an unknown number. It’s Todd, at some liquor store in Newport Beach, nearly frantic because they’re refusing his shitty fake and he promised the hot, rich girl going to Wisconsin with him that he’d bring stuff to her house tonight and he really doesn’t want to start things off as a liar so please, can I just meet him and help him out, please, and maybe it’s the second please that gets me or the fact that when I turn back the woman has her ringed fingers wrapped around a full glass and her leathery body draped over the bar, deep in conversation with the muscular bartender. Either way, I finish, pay, and go. Ten minutes from the store Todd calls and says he’s not there, that he decided to go directly to her house and anyway it’ll be better for me if the cashier doesn’t see us together and that I should get vodka, scotch and champagne, and obviously he’ll pay me back, and her parents will let me in when I get to her house, it won’t be a problem, and I think: fucking Todd. I should’ve seen this coming. His ID is fine–it’s actually one of the better ones among our friends—but there’s something about him so immediately off-putting that total strangers relish the opportunity to fuck with him and somehow, in his mind, it’s smarter to invite a random guy to a stranger’s house to deliver five bottles of booze than it is to be five minutes late so we can arrive together. None of it makes sense but Todd lives in Todd’s world. It’s like faulting the logic of a small child. Anyway, the fault is mine, really: what a story I’d have had if I’d just bought the Cantina woman her wine when I could have. But it’s done. I buy everything without incident and drive where he tells me.
The house is massive. My car is one of six ringing an ornate fountain in the drive; there’s room for a dozen more. At the door a bored-looking woman says, you must be here for Cara, and I assume I am though I realize Todd hasn’t even told me the girl’s name, but it’s moot, as before I answer the woman calls out: Luisa, another one, and stalks away past a second fountain, this one babbling indifferently in the foyer, and Luisa, squat and broad in dirty white sneakers and with the vague smell of lemon hanging around her, leads me up a curving staircase, down a long hall, past yet another fountain to a closed set of double doors with loud music on the other side. There are six of them, four girls and two guys, perched around the cavernous bedroom, glowering silently until Todd says, great you brought drinks, and the guy nearest me silently grabs a bottle from my bag and gulps. I guess the Scotch drinkers can share your herpes now, says the blonde on the bed, languidly unfurling herself to place a tray of tumblers, flutes, and wine glasses painted with little blue flowers and delicate pink hearts beside a couple of rolled bills on the granite table in front of him. Use a glass, she snaps at the guy, we’re not animals, and Todd laughs too loudly and her grimace of distaste is searing but brief because when she looks my way her expression softens and I wonder if it’s because she’s recognized the same grimace on me. The others gush nonsense: on the blood-red couch one girl tells another about a friend paired with a Guatemalan roommate at Arizona State and the second girl says, my maid is Guatemalan so at least the dorm will be clean, and they laugh and sip, and across from them on twin suede armchairs one guy is describing someone else’s new M5 with black rims and red leather seats, and the other guy says, haven’t seen it yet, and the first says, you won’t get to; he flipped it driving back from Santa Barbara last night, and the second says, dude what the fuck, and over by the window Todd’s telling one of the girls about Nikki Dugan’s party and how our class president ran naked through the backyard and tackled two annoying girls right into the pool, and the girl says, so what, with ice in her voice and revulsion in her eyes as Todd drones on obliviously and incomprehensibly about things of interest to no one. I ignore it all, pluck one of the pink-hearted flutes from the tray and approach the bed, where the blonde’s reclining on a heap of plump pillows with a bottle of champagne resting against her long, bare legs.
I wake early again; it’s not like me but maybe my subconscious is punishing me for the disorientation that comes from sleeping in unfamiliar places, or maybe I just had to pee. Cara’s still asleep. I decide there’s no need to wake her so I grab my shirt and pants off the floor as noiselessly as possible and slink away to my car, but a voice in the kitchen stops me. Leaving already, says a man seated at a big empty table in the impeccably white, sleek room. The voice startles me, I didn’t think anyone else would be up, and I immediately steel myself because I know what he’s thinking—who is this little shit skulking down from his daughter’s bedroom just after sunrise—and I know the answer can only lead to fury, but the question is whether his fury will be a partial simmer or a full boil. You should have coffee before you go, he says. No thank you, I say and add a sir for good measure and he says, some water then, and there’s something in his tone I can’t describe that makes me accept. Hydration is as essential an instrument of wellness as diet or exercise; this drink may be the most important thing you’ll do today, he says, and as he watches me finish the glass I wonder if the indescribable something in his voice was madness. I thank him and edge towards the door but he says, you remind me of someone, and I hold back. We went to school together and were friends for a time though I can’t remember his name now; it isn’t even that you look like him so much as there’s something I sense in your presence that brings him to mind. We drove to Biloxi together once, he and I, after winter term when neither of us wanted to stay in Chicago but neither of us wanted to go home either so we borrowed a buddy’s car and left without so much as a toothbrush and two days later found ourselves in Mississippi getting fat on the best gumbo you can imagine. As he was speaking, his gaze shifted to a point just left of my face but he looks back at me now and continues: at the time it all felt fairly unremarkable like something that could happen any given week but later you recognize it as one of the great stories of your life yet you can’t even remember the name of the person you spent it with. He’s quiet for a moment then says, anyway whoever he was you reminded me of him, and tells me I should have another glass of water before I go. I thank him and leave and as I’m speeding away from the magnificent house I’ll surely never see again I decide it wasn’t madness I detected in his voice but loneliness and I wonder what it was in my presence that that sad, wealthy man sensed.
I do want coffee though so I head to Morning Glory and as I’m waiting for my macchiato I hear my father’s braying laugh on the packed back patio and I know before I turn exactly how it will go when I approach him and my mother, who’s almost surely with him: my father will say, see he is alive, and my mother will say, I knew he was; I’ve seen the credit card bills, and my father will say, but where do you think he’s been, and my mother will say, surely at a library opening or museum exhibit, and to any observers it will appear that this performance is for my benefit, but really I’ll be an irrelevant bystander as they dazzle each other with their own cleverness until eventually their self-satisfaction fades and one of them will ask me if I intend to return home this evening, but the question will be so laced with indifference that I won’t bother to answer with anything more than a shrug, which is all they’ll be expecting anyway. But when my coffee arrives and I glance at the patio my parents are nowhere to be found; it must have been a different man burdened with my father’s obnoxious laugh.
After the imagined encounter with my parents I’m in no mood to go home so I return to the Plaza on Forest Avenue thinking it’ll be as benign a place to pass a few hours as before and maybe I’ll stumble upon the seemingly important thing I skirted a few days back, but even though I meticulously retrace my steps the phantom revelation fails to materialize and I find myself bored and restless and yearning for sunlight. During the hour or so I spent inside the day’s gone from bright to blinding as daggers of light ricochet off long rows of shiny cars and the pavement itself seems to melt and quiver in the malignant heat. As I scramble out to my parking spot I think I see Tina—charmless, dramatic, fellating Tina—in a gray smock from one of the food court places shuffling alone towards the entrance but when I gaze over a second time my head throbs from the sunlight and whether or not it’s actually her matters less to me than escaping this bleached hellscape before my brain explodes and my eyes liquefy and dribble down onto the molten tar.
But my brain is fine and my eyes are intact and once the wave of hysteria breaks, depositing a thin film of embarrassment as it ebbs, the biggest issue I’m left with is a pair of missing sunglasses. After re-plotting the trajectory of the past few days I decide I most likely left them at John’s but when I arrive he isn’t there. His father is, though, in purple slippers and a cinched gold robe, intently surveying the immaculately green lawn. The lazy bastards aren’t watering enough, he sneers through my open window and gestures to a section he says is starting to brown and die, though it looks perfectly healthy to me. I ask how the conference went and he says, is that where my son said I was, and laughs mirthlessly (John’s cackle is a perfect replica) with a heavy sip from the highball in his left hand. He offers no further explanation. The sun is still scorching and my head is starting to hurt again and I know, like every parent of a friend I meet these days, he’ll want to talk about graduation and college and how fast it all went and how little we were what seemed like only days ago, and I’m not feeling any of it so I tell him I think I left sunglasses here a few nights back and he says he hasn’t seen any but removes the pair he’s wearing and thrusts them through the window and tells me to take them, he’s got dozens, and at first I think he’s kidding but he waves them around until I uneasily try them on and he steps back and says approvingly, handsome guy. So tell me, he says with a conspiratorial glint in his now unshaded eyes, how much pussy did two handsome guys like you and my son get this year? I fidget and make non-committal sounds as his gaze hardens and sharpens with acute distaste and when I’m done babbling he contemptuously mutters something about modesty being a misguided virtue my generation seems to foolishly cherish and he begins to move away from the car. But he pauses and turns back: one more thing, he says and after draining his highball he adds, swim here as often as you like but next time wear trunks, alright big guy? I leave him where I found him, examining the supposedly dying patch of grass in his exquisitely manicured lawn and as I pull away, with my head beginning to pound again, I decide John deserves forgiveness for every obnoxious thing he’s ever done or said. He never stood a chance.
I hate his sunglasses. The orange tint makes me feel like I’m peering out of a defective microwave and I don’t need to consult the rearview to know they’re all wrong for my face. I miss mine. I again delve into the past few days trying to remember where I might have left them, but the particulars become confusingly muddled: in Nikki Dugan’s backyard tepid beer dribbles down my chin and a cloud of sour smoke hovers overhead and oddly it’s Cara, Todd’s fellow Wisconsin-ite (who wasn’t even at the party) suckling on my neck as I probe the soft flesh between her legs; at the Cantina the morning after it’s not Todd beside me babbling about Wisconsin fraternities as egg shrapnel flies from his gnashing teeth, but Cara’s father, explaining how familiar my presence seems to him and how few of his once-close friends he can now even name, as he noisily slurps gumbo and implores me to stay hydrated in the blazing heat; after dark at Las Palmas a group surrounds John as he buries the baggie beside the motionless swing set and the Merediths, Don and Julie, solemnly and silently watch him pile dirt onto the shallow grave, their faces revealing a level of despondence so deep I can’t even contemplate it; on the isolated playground a few yards away the woman from the Cantina is on her knees with her bejeweled fingers grasping my thighs as her head mechanically juts forward and back while her bored, lonely eyes bear deep into mine; at the Cantina’s green-lit bar a woman stares over with desperation radiating from every pore and everything about her, from the poorly-dyed hair to the cheap-looking bracelets to the scuffed golden heels crammed on large, boxy feet, screams that she’s dying to be rescued from the sad life she’s living, but poor Tina, it won’t be me to rescue her from the Plaza food court so she can fulfill her dream of living in New York; and at the tiny beach off Pearl Street a small child runs through the surf, scooping sand and releasing it in a playful twirl, but it’s not the boy I saw days earlier but a girl, a perfect, adorable, sweet little girl, and she’s not in a swimsuit but in a baby blue baseball uniform with blonde hair swaying out the back of her cap, and as she twirls and smiles and laughs and beams in the delicate sunlight it dawns on me who she is, and when the dial turns from recognition to realization, her figure dissolves before me, she just simply vanishes, and I’m alone on the empty beach staring at the spot where this beautiful little girl I once knew was just standing. The sensation is so strong, the image of Deena so vivid and searing, that I have to pull over.
The sun is starting to set when I arrive at Las Palmas and I go straight to the spot beside the swing set where we buried the baggie and in the dying light I begin to dig, because it was a bad idea, a dumb thing to have done, no child should ever find that Ziploc, and I know that I can fix it, I know just where it should be, but I dig and dig and dig, deeper than John dug the other night and once the first spot comes up empty I widen the excavation zone right and left and it’s almost fully dark when I give up, empty handed. The bag isn’t there. I walk back to my car knowing I should head home, have dinner with my parents, wash the dirt off my hands, properly scrub my face, go to bed early, catch up on missed sleep, start tomorrow fresh and rejuvenated.
But I don’t.