she always rides fast when the boardwalk is empty; but it’s not empty, really; it’s just not what it is at night; it’s just not what it is with crowds and lights and the smells of grease and sweat and smoke; and the screaming from the rides; the screaming from the games; the step-right-up; the rifle shots; the balloons on the tops of plastic clown heads filling with water so some dumb fuck can win a stuffed toy that isn’t even worth the price of the ticket you need to play the game;
she always rides fast, her hair flying back so it tangles in a way we call beachy; it’s a way we call just-fucked; it’s a way we all want our hair to look and can’t always get it just right; we use soap on it; we use salt in it; we use cooking oil and suntan oil;
and at the place where my brother’s friend goes to eat, he always pulls at her tangled hair; he says things like, Rough night; like, Did you get some; he punches his fist into his palm; and she always laughs when he’s being like this; when he’s being a dick;
my brother’s friend once won a tiny stuffed dog for knocking over a pyramid of cans; and even though it was ragged, dirty, missing an ear, and my brother’s friend pretended to fuck it, she wanted to keep it and tied it by its legs to the back of her bike where it flaps up and up, faster as she goes faster;
we’re also into my brother’s friend; but we’re into him only sometimes; we’ve both hooked up with him on the dock; and in a sitting room in the boathouse; and in a guest room in the boathouse; and once, just for one of us, on a boat;
but today isn’t about my brother’s friend; because last night wasn’t about him; it was only about us getting fucked up; and we’re still fucked up; so we’re walking the boardwalk in search of food; and the sun is too bright; and the smells and the sounds; this isn’t our greatest day;
now imagine two kids on opposite sides of the boardwalk; the kids are locals, you can tell; it’s the way they style their hair; it’s the way they dress and the way they stand; it’s a small kid and a big kid; the big kid has a bruise on his face; the small kid looks like he never eats; he’s all ribs jutting out and hip bones; he’s a face like the skull of a bird;
now imagine the kids stretching a wire, high, across the boardwalk; imagine how someone walking along would walk into the wire and stop; can you see how funny that would be if you were the one who thought up this trick, if you were the one tightly holding the wire as someone walked in; and can you see how funny it would be if you were the one to walk into the wire; well, we do walk into that wire; we stumble right in like fucking drunks; it’s funny to the local kids; it’s funny, at first, to us; but it stops being funny at a certain point; our hangovers are too distracting; we’re unable to have real fun;
but we can force ourselves to pull it together; we duck under the wire and say to the kids fuck off; we say we’re done with this game, and fuck them for wasting our time; but the kids aren’t looking in our direction; they’re back in their places, the wire stretched tight;
this part is harder to describe; how it happens fast, but also in slow motion; how we see her in the distance; we see her riding down the boardwalk; and it’s her hair all wild, her face like that; and we mean to run out, to tell her to stop; but our reflexes are super slow; it’s like our reflexes are broken; like our reflexes have never worked; and she’s unstoppable, besides; she’s racing to see my brother’s friend; she’s determined to get there first; because if she’s first, he can’t call her a spy; he can’t call her a stalker; and she’ll sit at the counter; she’ll order a soda; she’ll wait, alone, until he walks in; and then what; no one knows what; there’s just a way that love can fuck with you that hard; there’s a way the things your body does are no longer up to you;
so imagine her riding right into the wire; imagine the kids losing their grip on the wire she’s going so fast; imagine her flying, her bike crashing, the wire like a scarf flowing behind her; can you see her bike spinning away, the wheels on the bike still spinning; can you see how now we’re paralyzed; how we’re absolutely stuck in place; it’s like we know we have to call for help; and we’re saying we have to call; but no one is calling; we’re just walking to her, slow as we can;
we’re told in our schools to devise a master plan; by master, they mean pretend you’re guys; by plan, they mean forever; our master plan, we decide, is science; we’re atypical in this way; we’re atypical for science kids; we’re hotter than those kids; but like those kids, we need to know the reasons why; we need to know the numbers of; the fourteen billion years; the one hundred billion stars; the five-point-eight trillion miles;
last night, three planets in the sky, we looked from the boathouse lawn; we pretended we were just lying there; and had the guys walked over, we would have closed our eyes; but she was the one who walked over; she was the one now lying on the lawn, looking up; so we pointed to show her, perhaps to impress her; and she said, God; and we said, No; because she meant God, and we meant something else;
so we went inside the boathouse, and she stayed where she was; not because of the planets; not even because of God; it was just because of my brother’s friend; and how sad how she was waiting; sad how she wasn’t allowed in the boathouse; and was she even allowed on the lawn;
the kids with the wire are standing with us; there’s something fucked up with the small kid; he says to the big kid, Is she dead; on another day, this would make us laugh; on any other day, we would laugh our fucking heads off; the big kid says, Shut your mouth, and punches the small kid in the arm; but you can tell the big kid is scared; he didn’t want to hurt this girl; meaning he didn’t want to hurt a local girl; and the big kid is trying to figure out—you can tell by the way his eyes move—we’ve seen these eyes on guys before—whether to stay there or to run;
at times you want to ask for forgiveness; but you don’t know forgiveness from what; and you don’t know who you’re asking it from; but at times you feel you’ve done something wrong; you feel the need to be absolved;
at times you want to press pause on this world, watch everything freeze, then wander around, punching the things you want to punch, and touching some other things;
her hair is spread around her face; she’s looking up at our eyes; she says, I want my cigarettes; she says, I want my purse; but did she even have her purse with her; she says, I want my doll; we’re like what the fuck doll does she mean; at first, we think she means the stuffed dog she’s tied to the back of her bike; we untie it and hold it in front of her face; but the dog isn’t what she wants; and time is moving weirdly again; and she’s looking too much at our eyes; and she still looks hot, even lying there; and it’s so fucked up to think this now; so it’s time to acknowledge the cut; how much it’s been gushing; how hard it is not to look;
last night, we said it wasn’t God; we said no one was in control; we said things didn’t happen for a reason; we said things happened because of mass and time and suns exploding; and a tilted planet, a spinning planet, a planet flying out and out;
like how this happened today because this girl was moving at a certain speed from a certain height at a certain time, and there was, as there always will be, a certain force;
like how eventually she’ll have to rise; and eventually this day will end; and eventually, on another day, she’ll drown;
the big kid tells the small kid to get help; he’s taking off his shirt; he’s handing the shirt to us; he says to hold the shirt to the cut; he’s acting like he’s in charge; like he’s some kind of savior or something; but we’re not falling for this gesture; we’re just staring at his shirt; he says to take it and please; we’re expected by him to do what he says; he’s a guy, after all, local or not, and we’re expected to listen to guys; but which one of us can touch that dirty shirt; and which one of us can touch the shirt to her; we’re finding other things to do with our hands; we put them into pockets; we scratch at bites on our legs; we comb the knots out of our hair; so the big kid holds his shirt to her; so she holds his wrist;
last night, she just pointed to the sky and laughed—and not at us—she would never have laughed at us—but at something we’ll never know;
we’re not in love with my brother’s friend; we just love when he lifts us and spins until we’re laughing so hard we could die; we just want to be with him again with him looking at us the way he does; we want to feel that significant weight, his crushing fucked-up weight against our ribs;
this is a story about desperation; you could also say acceleration; but in this story, they’re the same;
the doll she wants is a doll, she says, from when she was a kid; she’d left the doll in her yard, she says, and we say, There is no doll; but she’s only talking to the big kid; she’s holding his wrist and looking at him like do this for me; like you have to do this one thing; he’s looking at us like what should I do; we’re looking at him like this is all yours; like this is your thing you started; we say again, There is no doll; but she’s only talking to the kid; the doll’s limbs were chewed right off, she says; they were chewed ragged by a stray, she says; and she found it like that in the yard, she says; and her mother, she says, stitched it up;
it’s hard not to be struck by her words; struck by her choices in this moment; because she’s the one chewed ragged; she’s the one who needs to be stitched; the doll is her, and how does she not see this;
so perhaps we’re confusing terror with humor; and perhaps this says something bad about us; but we’re so hungover we can’t even think; so we’re laughing now; and she says to stop laughing; and this makes us laugh even harder; so she says to the kid, This isn’t funny; she says to the kid, This is real; This could have been them, she says to the kid; and she’s right that this isn’t funny; and she’s right that this is real; but she’s wrong that this could have been us;
it couldn’t have been us because: one, we don’t ride bikes; two, if we did ride bikes, we wouldn’t ride that fast; three, we wouldn’t be going to find my brother’s friend in the day; four, we would never make our feelings known; five, we’re not that desperate; six, we’re not that dumb; and on and on and on;
our master plan is science; and by master we mean control the world; and by plan we mean control the world; and by science we mean fuck you;
we say, Get up; but she won’t get up; she’s mad at us, she says; we laughed at her, she says; and she wants her doll, she says; she says she’ll stay there, and she’ll die there, unless she gets her doll; she says to the kid God is punishing her; we roll our eyes so hard; she’s done some things, she says to the kid; the kid says, What kind of things; but we don’t give a shit what kind of things; she looks like she’s about to cry; she says to the kid she just needs help; no shit she needs help; We’re waiting for help, the kid says;
this is a story about salvation; but that doesn’t mean this girl was saved; and it doesn’t mean that we were saved; or that anyone was, or ever would be; it only means that something, in this moment, needed saving;
at times you just want to keep pause pressed; you want the planet’s spinning to stop; you want to stop rushing into space; you want a second to think about things; or not to think about things; just a second to pull it together; to understand your sad desire; this sad force;
at times you just want to surrender to holy, to fall to your knees—we’ve seen this surrender in this girl before—in front of it all;
my brother’s friend is walking toward us; there are girls in bikinis walking behind him; the younger girls who want to be us; typical girls like we once were; my brother’s friend doesn’t see her yet; he sees us, though, so we pretend we don’t see him; we’re trying to look better than we feel; we’re trying for something like casual, something like beautiful; he points his fingers at us like a gun; his shoulders look so wide;
he came to the boathouse late last night; by then, we were just a drunken mess; we said, Where have you been; he said, What do you care; we said, Don’t you love us; he said, What; then that look in his eyes we know too well; then he walked outside, and we watched from the window; we watched him find her on the lawn; we weren’t spying on them; don’t think we were; we just watched him lie down next to her; and were they holding hands; and was that God punishing us;
when you’re with him, nights, it’s first like flying; it’s then like crashing again and again;
then, after, you’re back in your normal orbit; you can feel an entire revolution;
then, after, alone on your back, looking up at some star, some ceiling, some flash of thought, it’s like being punched in the gut and punched in the gut and punched in the gut;
so you’re driven right up to the line of violence; you can feel your fingernails cutting into your palms;
so you drink what’s left; so you find your friends; how it always goes; the guys being guys; the girls being girls; the girls being guys;
the night on the boat was different though; it was different because of the boat; it was tied to the dock; but it felt like we were floating farther out there, somewhere;
no, the night was different because he stuck around; so I stuck around until it was light; and then everything was the same;
this is a story about forgiveness; because I’ve done some things; and what kind of things; does it even matter what kind;
at times I want to fall to my knees; I want to stay on my knees;
and at other times I want billions of years and trillions of miles of something real;
now everything is going too fast; a summer cop running toward us; my brother’s friend running toward us; and his face has changed to serious; so this is serious now; so he pushes us out of the way like we’re guys;
now everything is so sad; the big kid looking smaller now; the small kid holding the stuffed dog now; he’s petting it now, and I’m scared for these kids; so I say to these piece of shit local kids, Run; I say, Now;
so it’s the big kid outrunning the small kid; the small kid running like a girl;
it’s the cop bent over her body; my brother’s friend bent over her body;
it’s the girls in bikinis whispering; these girls now looking at us and please; you do not want to look at us today; you do not want to be like us today; because we’re not the saviors in this story; we would have let her die there;