Oliver sat on the bleachers watching the purple-orange of the setting winter sun. He hadn’t seen Daphne in two weeks. He’d sent her some vague texts, lame greetings that made him cringe while he hit “Send”:
“How’s it going?”
“How was the first day of your last semester?”
“Happy One-Week Post New Year’s! Why isn’t that a holiday?”
Each text had elicited equally vague and lame responses:
“Fab.”
“Meh.”
“You should lobby Hallmark.”
Whatever had transpired between them at Penny Layton’s New Year’s party, he was sure he’d messed up, but he wasn’t sure how. He wondered if even Daphne knew. If he asked her, would she tell him?
He replayed the dance floor scene every time he saw a girl with short, choppy hair or a girl wearing black. He’d never noticed how many of these girls existed. His mind was hitting rewind in all of his classes and in the hallway between.
He and Daphne had been dancing, no big thing. Before New Year’s Eve, he’d imagined dancing with Daphne would be like dancing with one of his ex-girlfriends, a relationship so far removed from his present that the memory felt like fiction. Tricia Grasso, to be exact.
Oliver and Tricia had dated in seventh grade for a month. They’d held hands and kissed a few times. One day he’d opened his locker and a note dropped down to his feet.
Dear Oliver,
I don’t think we should date anymore. I hope you understand.
Sincerely,
Tricia
Oliver still felt a pang in his abdomen whenever he remembered that note. In seventh grade, he was finally adjusting to athletic rejection in every sport he participated in besides unwanted baseball. With fifteen words and a carelessly folded piece of notebook paper, romantic rejection had fallen upon him as well.
He’d held it together at school that day, but he’d cried as soon as he hit the safe confines of his bedroom. It was the ironic Sincerely that tore him up, a heart dotting the i, all the other i’s dotted with the same paradox. What was sincere about breaking up with someone through a note? Sincerely would have been dumping him in person, or even the dignity of a phone call. Tricia would’ve been forced to accept his response, even if it was only dumbfounded speechlessness. A note held no consequence for her. There was no justice between those blue lines. And it didn’t help that she was dating someone else on the basketball team the next day. Someone who didn’t sit on the bench the whole game.
The years had passed. Other than a tinge of bitterness every so often, Oliver held little more than indifference for Tricia. From a distance, he half-admired the way she chose her boyfriends. The boys wrapped themselves around her little finger, silk ribbon eager to be twirled in whichever direction she desired. She gracefully discarded them when their edges frayed or showed resistance, same as she’d done with him. His interest in Tricia ended there. While undeniably pretty, he never checked her out as she swept down the hall, turning the heads in her path. The thought of kissing her, even touching her, repulsed him. It would be like kissing his sister, if he had one.
That was the sensation he’d expected to feel when dancing with Daphne Bowman. After resting his hands on her hips, he’d waited for her to become the imaginary sister. Instead, her body kept moving under his hands, warm and free, magnetizing his torso into sync with hers.
He’d tried willing her to feel like Tricia Grasso, but his body had kept moving, unobstructed, his heart pumping hot blood to the beat of the music. The odd feeling in his stomach wasn’t curdled milk. It was something more complicated, a mixture of complete joy, utter dread, and borderline hysteria. Daphne especially hadn’t felt like Tricia when she leaned over and purred in his left ear. Two weeks later and he still recalled her breath flowing into him.
When school had returned to session, Oliver had avoided the chapel. He could predict that future. He’d see her sitting there, not know what to say, and sneak away before she spotted him. Also, he was afraid to find her absent. He didn’t know what to do with an empty pew.
Two weeks had been a long time, the amount of time he needed to confront his cowardice. As far as he could tell, Daphne wouldn’t let a little intoxication and well-meaning warnings at a party cause her to abandon her homework haven. She was probably halfway done with her calculus assignment, and all the time he devoted to imagining the bare chapel was wasted seconds/minutes/hours of his life. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and bounded toward the cross, eye level with his seat in the bleachers.
Oliver stepped inside, confident she would be there, but the room was empty. His footsteps echoed against the stained glass windows. Jesus, Mary, the angels, and all the sheep mocked him. Oliver inspected the pew Daphne usually occupied. No grand prophesies or holy wisdoms trickled down with the dust through the beams of sunlight.
Oliver sat down in Daphne’s place, putting himself in her pew. He pulled the book Of Mice and Men from his bag and flipped to the dog-eared page. Concentration eluded him. He read the same paragraph over and over again, unable to absorb a single word. His vibrating cell rescued him, a text from Penny: “What r u up 2?”
The letdown that the text wasn’t from Daphne was quickly soothed by Penny’s adoration. A hot girl liked him. Nothing bad about that. Nothing bad at all. Before he could respond, she’d already sent another text: “Want 2 hang 2nite?”
He did. His whole body was in full smirk as he typed. Then it hit him. It was Thursday. He threw Of Mice and Men into his backpack and broke into a run. His steps echoed off the walls and the holy figures seemed to scowl at him.
He was halfway to Sweetie’s before worry slowed his steps. What if she hated him? What if it was going to be weird forever? What if she didn’t want to do the list anymore?
The last question brought him to a full stop. The last few months, the list had become shiny texture poking through the surface of dull days. Was he about to lose that? Had he already lost it? Would she complete the list without him? Had she already? He prepared for the worst: she never wanted to see him again. Oliver didn’t want to do the list alone. It would only make him sad. Depressed. Like Jason. And the last thing in the world Daphne Bowman was going to do was make him be like Jason.
He neared Sweetie’s doorstep, his feet leaden with doubt. Oliver was out of options, so he did something he never did with Daphne. He faked it.
Oliver pushed through the door, a deep grin on his face. She washed a set of ice cream scoops in the sink, glanced over at him without moving her head, and refocused her attention to her hands under the faucet. She still wore red lipstick. That had to be good sign, right? Or maybe she didn’t associate the lipstick with him, never had. His mind went blank, what he imagined a blizzard to feel like, never having been in one—cold, white, nothing. All the clever things he’d envisioned coming out of his mouth as he’d pushed open the door washed down the drain with the ice cream drippings.
Daphne turned off the water. “Of all the ice cream parlors, in all the towns, in all the world…”
At least she was speaking to him. His vocal chords unclenched, making conversation possible.
“I like yours the best.” He stepped up to the counter.
She tilted her head down and peered at him incredulously. “You’ve been in here before?”
He liked the way she forced honesty out of him. Instead of a smooth injection, Daphne shoved truth serum down his throat.
“No, but I like yours the best out of all the ones I haven’t been in. Because you’re here.” It was the right sentiment tacked onto the wrong sentence. He broadened his smile to balance his inner cringing.
Daphne remained unmoved. “Lucky me.”
She wrung out a sponge and wiped down the counter, eager to do something other than tolerate him. The humming squeak of wet friction against stainless steel became the only sound between them. Oliver browsed the ice cream case.
Daphne acknowledged his perusal. “Cup or cone?”
“Cone.”
She rinsed her hands. “What flavor?”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Vanilla.”
Oliver gasped, “Vanilla? No one’s favorite flavor is vanilla. It’s so boring.”
“It’s timeless. And you never get a bad vanilla. My palate doesn’t like disappointment.”
“Well, my palate likes actual flavor, so I’ll have cookies and cream.”
“One scoop or two?”
“One, please.”
She dug the scooper in the black and white frost, “That will be three fifty.”
“Friends don’t get free ice cream?”
She stopped mid-scoop, leaving the scooper wedged in the cookies and cream. “Oh, we’re friends?”
And there it was, the dreaded rhetorical question. At some point in grade school, was there a secret session where the administration pulled all the girls aside on their way in from recess and gave them this valuable life advice? When a romantic interest offends you, but you sense that he or she doesn’t know how or why, instead of stating the offense, merely raise or lower the pitch of your voice and repeat some benign phrase that the offender has spoken. This will signify that you are offended, and the offender needs to scramble to fix it. If an amicable solution is not reached, repeat until desired outcome occurs. Or someone leaves the room.
Oliver found it best to use few words in these situations. “Yes.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. She expected more from him, like everyone else. “See, that’s what I thought. But on New Year’s we were acting like friends and having a perfectly civil conversation surrounded by our inebriated peers, and you started laying out guidelines for this so-called friendship. Friends don’t do that. Friends just be and then they stage an intervention when you need one.”
The argument slid from her mouth without calculation. Her eyes weren’t buried so deep in emotion that she couldn’t see him, like other similarly frustrated females in his life. She wanted to be friends. Nothing more. Now he was embarrassed that he’d warned her off. All along he’d been the one imagining a romance between them. On New Year’s, those delusions had tunneled out from his subconscious and broke free at the front of his mind.
“You’re right. I staged an intervention when you didn’t need one. I’m sorry.”
She nodded and packed the cone with an extra shaving of ice cream.
Oliver noticed the gesture. “That must mean a truce.”
“Enemies truce.”
“Then let’s agree not to truce.”
She held out the cone. As he reached for it, she pulled it back. “You still need to pay.”
Oliver put on a show of reluctance and pulled out his wallet, gladly paying pennies for dollars.
Later that night, he responded to Penny Layton’s invite with an apology, saying he’d been busy. She suggested another meetup. The texts lit up his cell phone without pause. He considered cluing her in that she would read more desirable if she played harder to get. Ultimately, he decided against it, realizing that a transparent Penny was easier than the murky waters he navigated with Daphne. These girls were two vastly different lakes. After the ice cream make-up, Lake Daphne was the only place he wanted to swim where he couldn’t see his kicking feet.
He told Penny he’d text her after the weekend. He expected her to respond with a chipper “Gr8!” and five emojis, or at the very least “ok,” but a response never came. He instantly liked Penny Layton a lot more.
• • •
The weekend rolled around. Oliver waited anxiously for Daphne’s shift to end at Sweetie’s. He picked up his room, rearranged the mess on his dresser. He pulled out the bottle of Jason’s cologne, stored under his workout clothes, hidden from the world by a barrier of mesh and elastic. He sniffed. It smelled like intimidation—the notes held power and strength. This was the scent of a man. Against his nose, the richness made him feel like a boy, unworthy. He had the sudden urge to spray himself, but he remembered his parents were downstairs. He’d need to say goodbye to them on his way out and feared recognition. Oliver didn’t want any questions. He didn’t have any answers.
He contemplated arriving at Sweetie’s early but didn’t want to come off too eager. Playing video games in his bedroom was the best remedy to pass the time, but his thoughts refused to hold still. The only place he could find silence was the point where his stylus met his tablet. He didn’t have any good ideas, so he recreated the Sweetie’s logo with a modern font and a waffle cone with an ice cream scoop for the “i.” While it wasn’t a work of art, the finished product was an improvement over the current design. He might even show it to Daphne. He glanced at his phone to check the time and did a double take. The half hour had passed like a finger snap. He grabbed his keys, wedged his feet in his shoes, and ran to his car.
An hour later, he and Daphne stood on Venice boardwalk. Beautiful people played beach volleyball as an excuse to show off their toned figures. A yoga class namasted on the grass. Muscular bodies that defied human anatomy hoisted massive barbells and grunted with every press.
Daphne set her eyes on the empty beach in front of them. “There used to be a zipline here. Janine and I came down a couple summers ago and the place was flooded with gross teenagers everywhere.”
“You’re a gross teenager,” Oliver pointed out.
“I’m a sophisticated, gross teenager.”
“Yeah, that sounds much more appetizing. Did you go on the zipline?”
She threw him a look of absolute disgust, as though he’d suggested going to Hollywood and Highland, the biggest tourist trap in the city.
“No.” Her defense softened. “We walked up to Santa Monica, ate a funnel cake, and rode the Ferris wheel like respectable Angelenos.”
Oliver watched all the curves and lines in her face, searching for clues to whether she was serious.
“It was fun,” she conceded.
“Did you want to go on the zipline?”
“No.”
Oliver threw up his hands. “Then why are we here?”
“It was the closest thing to skydiving that I could think of.”
“We could try parasailing?”
“It’s too expensive, I already checked.”
“Daphne, do we have the smallest inkling of desire to do anything resembling skydiving?”
“I think we’ve already established that I don’t.”
“Then we agree.”
Daphne sighed, “I feel like we failed.”
“Well, there’s always that one thing on the bucket list that doesn’t get done.”
“Or ten.” She rolled her eyes, more frustrated at herself for making a bad joke than annoyed by his reassurance.
Oliver plodded on with his postmodern optimism. “So maybe this is the one thing that doesn’t get done. And we’re extra diligent about the rest of the list.”
“Fine. Skydiving was a poor choice, anyways.”
“But it brought us here, to this place, to this moment.”
“Oliver the Philosopher.” She drew in a long breath. “You know, there is something I’ve always wanted to do.”
A half hour later they pedaled mountain bikes up the Venice boardwalk, racing the fading sun.
Oliver challenged her. “Bet I can beat you to the pier.”
He pedaled faster, harder. She equaled his speed and force, squealing in delight with the exertion. Oliver caught as many glimpses of her face as he could while weaving around slower cyclists and rollerbladers. This was the first time he identified her as truly happy, all the mystery wiped away, only the sunset bouncing off her cheeks. Seeing this new beauty in her pleased and pained him at the same time.
“Never!” She leaned forward and surged ahead of him.
The night sky oiled over the remaining purples of the sunset. Bikes returned, they strolled along the pier past the cacophony of the arcades, the click and swallow of inserted quarters rising above the black noise.
Daphne scoured the beach. Oliver turned in the same direction, meeting her focal point. A ball of orange glowed in the darkness.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She whipped her head around to face him. Her eyelids were weighed down without appearing tired, and her eyes shined extra bright with a new idea.
“Let’s go check it out.” She was ten feet down the pier before he could answer.
As they approached, the orange glow dimmed, shielded by the crowd of one hundred gathered around it, blocking the light from spilling onto the beach. A hailstorm of drumming poured from the center of the circle: kettle drums, snares, buckets, anything in the vicinity with a flat surface that would produce sound. The rattle of a tambourine slithered in and out of the beat.
“Sounds like a good time,” Oliver said.
He would’ve been happy standing on the outskirts, catching glimpses of the fire inside when enough people shifted a couple inches to the left or right at the same time, revealing keyholes of orange between the seams of their bodies. By now Oliver knew the bold quiet of Daphne swam straight to the mosh pit at concerts. He wasn’t surprised when she stuck her toe into the bonfire crowd and began wading to the front of it, pushing against and floating with the current. He drifted into her path before it could close behind her.
The intense heat of the giant bonfire held the circle at bay. The nine drummers were all men, teenager to gray with wrinkles. The blaze illuminated parts of their faces and covered other parts in shadow. A flurry of callused hands pounded without fatigue. Closest to the fire, dancers shuffled their feet in the sand, offering their rhythm up to the night with the rising smoke and embers. Of course, Daphne wanted to dance. She gyrated into the dancing donut hole and thirty seconds elapsed before she flung her head back toward Oliver. He stood motionless on the donut’s edge.
“Come on!” she shouted.
“I don’t dance without alcohol.”
“Oil to your machine,” she laughed. “You’re human. You can dance whenever you want to. It’s the benefit of having a soul. And not living in a dystopia.”
“Okay, then. I choose not to dance.”
“That I can respect.” She turned her back to him and kept dancing.
The beating of the drums hammered through Oliver. He’d expected Daphne to beg him to dance with her like many of his previous dates, bestowing him with gratitude when he finally surrendered. But this wasn’t a date, he reminded himself. Daphne didn’t play by the same rules. She didn’t have any rules, which was unsettling. He didn’t know her game, so he didn’t know how to play her, or how she was playing him.
All of a sudden, he longed to be sitting in Joe’s garage drinking a sixer, listening to Mitch and Joe talk about all the somewhat-real-but-mostly-fake sex they were having. He wanted someone else’s problems to be larger than his own. He wanted to be in the backseat of Penny’s Mini Cooper, hushed and unbuttoned.
A crackling snapped him out of fantasy. One of the logs had disintegrated, failing like crushed bone beneath the burning matter. The fire’s foundation shifted down and to the left, spewing embers in a sigh of smoke. Something in his own foundation was shifting. Daphne was the first person he’d encountered who had the ability to make him feel excluded. She’d challenged him to dance without directly challenging him. Now he wanted to meet that challenge.
Oliver stepped into the donut hole, swaying over to her. He braced himself for Daphne’s teasing. So, you changed your mind, or some other quipping. I was right, and you were wrong. But the I told you so never came. She simply danced with him, satisfied for him as much as herself.
He never touched her. He didn’t want a repeat of New Year’s, but this dancing was different from that night. As they slowly circled around the fire, she never moved into him, never asked anything of his hands. Oliver surveyed the faces surrounding him. Everyone was a stranger. Seeing Daphne’s face full of orange and sweat, even she felt like a stranger. He threw his hands up and out and danced freely in the closed circle of anonymity.
Hours later, on a deserted patch of beach with the drum circle as a lamp in the background, Oliver and Daphne collapsed on their backs into the sand, an arm’s length between them. Oliver liked this distance. It was close enough that he could reach out and touch her. Not that he wanted to, just that he could.
The sun had been under the horizon long enough that the sand beneath their bodies had cooled to the point of feeling wet. Oliver burrowed as deep as his limbs would pull him down. He glanced over and saw Daphne doing the same, her shoulders shifting back and forth, heels pressing up and down, making a well for her legs. The sensation of cold cement crept up his arms and around the sides of neck.
He stared up at the sky. “Nice night. Wish there were more stars.” At times, he spotted pin pricks of light poking through the black expanse above him. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he had only seen stars because of how badly he’d wanted to believe they were there, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
“What would you wish for?” Daphne asked.
“I don’t know. What would you wish for?”
She’d been to this rodeo before and tossed his question back at him like a bucking bronco. “I’m not the one wishing for stars.”
“I would wish for world peace.” He kept a straight face.
“There are two kinds of wishes in this world, the attainable and the implausible. I prefer mine attainable.”
“A wish is a wish because it’s unattainable.”
“You wish for things that you know you’ll never have. A wish for you is a fantasy. I wish for things I can actually accomplish.”
“That’s a goal, not a wish.”
“It’s all semantics.” She shrugged her shoulders into the sand.
“So, what’s your wish?” he asked, again.
Her words were automatic, no thought required. “To get into Berkeley, and then Stanford law.”
Though new, these wishes were unsurprising. Jealousy prodded him between the ribs, how she could envision her future with such conviction. “Well, your semantics expertise will do well there. Plus, you’ll be closer to Emily. The symbolic Emily buried in San Fran.”
Daphne pressed her neck deeper into the sand. “Hmm. I never thought of that. I will be much closer to the symbolic Emily.”
Oliver worried that he’d pointed out the single flaw in her master plan. He’d reminded her that she couldn’t escape the past, no matter how many counties she removed herself. He’d also reminded himself.
Daphne laughed softly into the night. “I could celebrate her birthday again. And the Day of the Dead. Might be soothing.”
Sand tickled the base of Oliver’s neck as he nodded. He carried out the hypnotic motion again and again, long past being a mere response. He was lost in the uncertainty of his own future, so he turned to the uncertainty of someone else’s past.
“Why didn’t they leave a note?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the point of suicide? You have nothing left to say.”
“I mean, do you think they planned it? Or was it spur of the moment?”
“I’ve thought about it. A lot. I don’t know what I want to believe. The evil premeditation or the hopeless spontaneity.”
“You think they wrote the list near the end? Maybe they were trying to talk themselves out of it.”
“I like that. I’m gonna keep it.” The exertion of the fire had stripped Daphne down to nothing but her truth. “Do you ever get scared that you’ll get it? Mental illness, depression, go bipolar. I mean, I know you don’t catch it like a cold. But it’s genetic. I feel like it’s inside me and someday it’s going to take over. One day, the darkness could settle, and I won’t be able to escape.”
“I think about it sometimes. But there’s help. You know the history. Our families know.”
“But help wasn’t enough for them.” Worry strained her voice.
He wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t comfort himself.
Oliver wipes the midnight sleep from his eyes and stumbles into the bathroom. Jason stands over the toilet, sprinkling pills from a white bottle. He and Oliver both jump, startled by each other. Jason drops the bottle into the bowl and fishes it out.
Oliver says nothing. What could he say?
A great number of things, turns out.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay?”
Oliver says nothing.
“Oliver, okay?” Jason demands.
“Yeah, okay.”
He’d kept his word. And now they were here. Oliver turned to her, his ear against the sand. For a moment, he considered confessing the middle-of-the-night pill run-in with Jason, but she might not forgive his silence as easily as his parents had. Plus, there was another truth to tell. “You know they went off their meds, right?”
The parting of her lips turned his question into a revelation. Her voice was weak. “No.”
“They stopped taking their medication months before. There was no trace in their toxicology, and my parents found full bottles of Jason’s pills. I always assumed they quit together.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They were in their love euphoria, I guess. They thought they didn’t need the meds, so they stopped without telling anyone. And they came crashing down.”
“Why didn’t my parents ever tell me?”
“Because you’re fine.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Daphne cackled at the sky. “You’re fine. There’s some more semantics for you.”
Oliver laughed with her until calmness set over them.
“It’s getting late,” Daphne said to the absent stars.
Oliver didn’t want the night to end, and he wasn’t tired. “Yeah.”
Neither of them moved, staring up into the dark abyss, now lightening to blue at the corners.
“What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” What was he asking? How had that question escaped his lips?
“Are you asking me to spend Valentine’s Day with you?”
He didn’t know. Did he want to date her? He deciphered nothing from her question. No delight, no distrust, no anger. She would be completely blameless in any misinterpretation. It all rested squarely on his shoulders.
“No.” But he’d expelled his no in a guilty laugh. It had been a yes. What was happening? He’d asked Daphne Bowman to hang out with him on Valentine’s Day. Nothing good could come from that. It would only make everything more confusing than it already was. The imaginary stars above him spun around the sky.
“I have plans. Watching a rom com with Janine that we both pretend to hate but secretly love. Probably The Notebook.” She’d saved him. And she knew she’d saved him.
“Gosling is hot.” It was his best attempt to smooth the situation.
“So is McAdams.”
After that, Daphne went quiet. They still spoke, but there was no more discussion of semantics or philosophy. She was inside her own head, and Oliver was annoyed at himself for sending her there. The birds had begun their song when she opened her mouth to speak. He knew she was going to say something that made everything okay.
“Thanks for dancing with me, Oliver.” Sleepiness weighed on her vowels.
“Any time.”
One thing he knew for certain: he liked dancing with Daphne Bowman.