Eli said yes to Tuesday. I asked which café he wanted to go to. He said the Black Sheep. He said it had the best coffee in town. I closed and reopened the messages app before responding. It annoyed me—this implication that I didn’t know where the best coffee was. I had grown up here!
At the same time, I couldn’t tell if the houses on Elm Street had looked newer five years ago, or if college had turned me into a person who noticed peeling paint.
On Tuesday, I put on a tank top with buttons down the front. Then I took it off. I didn’t know if I wanted the power of looking beautiful or the power of looking like I didn’t care about beauty. Either way I couldn’t wear sleeves. Underarm sweat spots could never be construed as power.
So that I wouldn’t be early, I spent time printing out two poems from the internet. I taped them to Jan and Steve’s fridge. I read them out loud. In the empty kitchen my voice sounded like a dried-out gel pen. One poem was by Robert Lowell and one was by Seamus Heaney. They were both about skunks. Robert Lowell’s skunks were militaristic garbage swillers. I liked to read poetry by men that was inaccurate. It made me feel feminist. Seamus Heaney’s poem was more true. It was more about a woman than it was about a skunk.
When I got to the café, Eli was already there. Usually, I arrived places first. It was a relief to not have to wait. It also made me feel severed from my personality.
He was wearing a T-shirt that said ACADIA NATIONAL PARK and had already ordered. I waited in line by myself. When I sat down across from him, he asked what I’d gotten. He’d taken the booth seat. He could look out at the rest of the room, whereas I could only look at him.
Just coffee, I said.
Just black?
Yeah.
Eli had gotten an oat milk latte. We had the conversation about milk types. It was a conversation I often had with acquaintances—dairy versus plant-based, whole versus skim, oat versus almond. Once Eli had taken an internet quiz that was supposed to say what kind of milk you were. The quiz said he was pumpkin seed milk. Now, whenever he went to a new grocery store he asked if they had pumpkin seed milk. They never did. He still didn’t know what he tasted like.
His eyes kept floating up to a spot above my right shoulder. I wondered if there was a print of one of his favorite paintings on the wall, or if an ex-girlfriend had walked in. Eventually I turned in my seat to look. It felt rude to be pointing out his rudeness.
Sorry, sorry, said Eli. It’s my friend Rachid—he’s the one working the espresso machine.
The man at the espresso machine wore a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Every time he twisted the portafilter on and off the machine, his shoulders flexed. I remembered that he liked to play tennis. He had a recently shampooed look about him that was different from the boys I’d known in college. So: Rachid had been here the whole time, watching or not watching. Had Eli known, when we arranged this coffee, that Rachid would be on shift? If Eli and Rachid were girls, I wouldn’t have needed to wonder. The answer would have been yes.
I asked when Rachid got off, and if we should invite him to join us, but Eli said not for another few hours. I asked if Rachid working there meant Eli got free coffee. Eli shrugged.
In a way, Rachid’s presence was another relief. It gave a physical reality to the feeling that everything was happening somewhere over my head.
Do you like living here? I asked. Being back?
He shrugged. I do. It’s a good place. Honestly there’s a lot of young people—people I’d never met.
I nodded.
And like, I saw Mrs. Leopold at the dentist the other day.
I took a sip of coffee. I liked that he saw running into your old calculus teacher at the dentist as a positive. It was relaxing to be in a place where people had already made up their minds about you. Your current actions had little bearing on your image. In high school I never drank black coffee. In high school I went to this café a lot.
Will you stay here? Eli rolled his paper napkin between his fingers.
I shrugged.
I know, I know, said Eli, shaking his head. Terrible question.
No, it’s a good question, I said. I just don’t know the answer.
What’s your alternative? Like, is it here or anywhere, or here or New York?
Philadelphia. Is where I was going to go.
Mikayla was in Philadelphia, and Henry. Orin had run away to Europe. Sometimes he posted ominous statistics about climate change in the rectangle of his Instagram story.
But …? Eli wiggled his fingers in the silence like a fill-in-the-blank.
I tried to take another sip of coffee, but my cup was already empty. I wished I understood my own motivations. If I had, I would have explained them to him. Something about Eli always made me want to scoop out my tonsils and hand them to him on a paper towel.
At one point he knocked over the last tablespoon of his latte and we had to get more napkins. Did him knocking over his drink mean he was nervous? I never knew what made for a good date—free-flowing conversation or being so attracted to someone that you couldn’t speak. I never knew if it was attraction that made me unable to speak. This wasn’t a date.
The second time I saw the skunks, there was only one. The ankles of my sweatpants were bunched around my thighs from sleep.
I’d been having a dream about a grocery store that was also an art museum. In the dream, Eli had been there. It’s a commentary on consumerism, he kept saying. We expect our food to be art. The price of art is going down because we demand that everything be art. He was carrying our basket and I kept adding things to it, things I knew we didn’t need, just to make our hands bump into each other. A jar of pickled beets. A roll of paper towels. I decided I wanted a different brand of paper towels because our hands hadn’t touched the first time. In produce, Eli said the apples were obeying the rule of thirds. Could Eli tell I didn’t know what the rule of thirds was? That they were equal—Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, Golden Delicious—felt too simple. I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing for the price of art to be falling. On the museum steps I lost him in the crowd. Then the steps were empty. He was at the bottom and I was at the top and we were running toward each other. It was always you, he said. It was a good kiss. The steps turned out to be a grocery store pyramid of apples. There were apples thundering down all around us and it was a good kiss.
I rolled over in bed and lifted the corner of the blinds. It was raining. The raindrops made an extra window screen between me and the world. The skunk, down below in the grass, was a drenched pilgrim. Nothing could shift or hasten her route.
By the time I got downstairs she was gone. When had I decided it was a she? I circled the house in my rain jacket. The earthworms made long straight lines on the driveway.
I made a cup of instant coffee and sat at the table, stirring. Next to the coffee was a blank sheet of paper. Dear Skunks, I wrote. Then I got stuck. What was there to say about the skunks? Of course there was the smell—the spraying. Everyone’s mind jumped to the spraying. I often forgot about the spraying entirely, which was nice because it made me feel that I wasn’t like other people.
The picture book hadn’t mentioned the smell. The threat of the smell was so obvious it didn’t need to be named. The man was wary of the skunk from the start.
I felt sorry for the skunks. Their cultural identity was subsumed by a single action. How were they to know if an approaching creature was looking for genuine connection, or only courting danger? And once it happened, everyone forgot about the skunk. Everyone ran shrieking to take a shower and tell their friends. Evolutionarily, this must have been the point—the skunk was free to escape. But it made me sad. How did the skunk feel after? Triumphant? Exhausted? Did reactions vary, or did it mostly feel the same for every skunk, every time?
I had too many questions, or too many ways of phrasing the same question. Was a skunk’s first spray a rite of passage? Was it something adolescent skunks looked forward to, or dreaded? Or did skunk culture send them so many mixed messages they didn’t know what to feel?
The piece of paper went in the recycling. It wasn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to know if the skunk was lonely or just alone.
I lay on the couch again and touched my phone. I clicked into “Messages.” This time my conversation with Eli was right there on the first screen. I didn’t have to scroll down to be reminded. The last message was still my me too! in response to his hey thanks for the coffee idea, had a great time. I stared at the words. Eli’s message attributed the “coffee idea” to me. Was that accurate, I wondered? Yes, I had been the one to text him asking about coffee. In academia that was how you owned something—by writing it down. But Eli had been the one to say the idea out loud, before that, in the kitchen of his childhood home. Maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe he hadn’t considered it his idea because he hadn’t meant it.
With dates, a follow-up text was supposed to include a “we should do this again sometime,” even if you had no intention of seeing the other person again, ever. It was common courtesy. But my coffee with Eli hadn’t been a date. In a way, the lack of “we should do this again sometime” was encouraging. It gave me fewer opportunities to doubt his sincerity.
Since I had sent the text initiating the coffee, it was up to him to send a text initiating something else. I wondered if he felt that since my me too! hadn’t left much room for the conversation to be continued, the responsibility for reinitiation was actually mine. Or, if he did remember that the coffee idea had been his, maybe he felt that I should have the next idea. Was he a person who enjoyed texting for texting’s sake, or did he only text as a way of facilitating in-person interactions?
I clicked into Instagram and navigated to the profile for the bakery he worked at. The latest post said it was strawberry rhubarb season. They would have strawberry rhubarb bars, while supplies lasted. Hashtag, come and get it. Hashtag, local produce. Eli clearly wasn’t in charge of their social media.
The couch cushions kept sliding forward. They threatened to dive to the floor, dumping me into the underneath with all the lost pencils and crumbs. I had grown up with a futon. The shifting cushions were unfamiliar and disconcerting.
My phone often made me unhappy. I knew it wasn’t really the phone’s fault—it was what was inside the phone, combined with what was inside me. I closed Instagram and checked my email. No new messages. I opened Instagram again. I couldn’t think of any reason to put my phone down. Eventually I clicked into YouTube and watched videos of skunks. Skunk videos were sort of like porn in that once you thought you understood what the internet had to offer, you could add another search term, sort of at random—stuck, kitchen, in the rain—and be confronted with a whole new dimension of videos. Skunks, it turned out, often got their heads stuck in jars. They’d be trying to lick up what the humans had left behind, and then they’d be stuck. In the videos, they swung their jar-heads back and forth in wide arcs, like time-lapse sunflowers following the sun throughout the course of a day. The head-swinging did little to dislodge the jars. One local TV station in Ohio had done a news story about a stuck skunk. The jar in this instance was a family-sized container of Skippy peanut butter. There was a lot of footage from before the animal control agent arrived. I wondered who had been called first—the rescuer or the people with the video cameras. Had the journalists asked the animal control agent to hold off until they got the right angle? Had the skunk known it was being filmed?
I would visit Eli at the bakery, I decided. It would be a coincidence, since social media was still the only reason I knew about his job. Any knowledge gleaned from social media—even if you hadn’t sought it out—had to be denied. I would go after work the next day. I was an adult! I had a job! A baked good could be a reward as well as a coincidence.
In one rectangle, Henry stands over a fallen pizza box in the dark, hands clasped to his cheeks. The flash makes his eyes into little silver sink drains. The pizza is blurry. The slices drape over the edge of the box, slack and soggy, half on the cardboard and half on the sidewalk.
A few days later, Henry’s hands slice a fresh loaf of focaccia. The steam appears like smoke on the screen. Halved cherry tomatoes dot the top of the bread.
A poster on a bus, zoomed in enough to be slightly grainy, advertises an opportunity: POOP FOR SCIENCE. Researchers hope to cure a disease. Participants will be paid up to forty dollars per poop.
The sun sets over tall buildings.
Henry and a stranger run up the museum steps, the ones everyone runs up when they’re reenacting that scene from that movie. In the background audio, Mikayla laughs.
An album cover on a black background. It’s an album Henry liked, that he claimed reminded him of me—the fourth track, anyway. I never liked it. All the lyrics, not just the lyrics of the fourth track, had too much in common with Hallmark cards. That Henry related to them wasn’t encouraging. It proved he was more in love with the concept of a relationship than with me personally, but of course he got mad when I said that.
The sun sets, again, over tall buildings.
I pushed my bike down the street, one pedal banging into my ankles. The bakery was a couple of blocks from the yoga studio, and you weren’t supposed to bike on the downtown sidewalks. I’d biked to work. A little girl balanced on the curb between the concrete and the grass in front of a church. She put one sparkly plastic shoe in front of the other, holding on to her father’s hand. This is my sidewalk, she said to him as I passed. That’s your sidewalk.
Maybe, I thought, I would buy a croissant.
The bakery was out of croissants. There was an empty wicker basket in the display case, with a laminated sign that said CROISSANTS. The basket wasn’t really empty—it held crumbs and wax paper.
And the person behind the counter was a woman, not an Eli. She had long curly red hair. The hair set me against her. It was exactly the sort of hair I had wanted for myself as a child.
You’re out of croissants? I asked.
She nodded.
Obviously they were out of croissants. I hadn’t learned anything by asking, only revealed myself as a customer prone to living in denial.
The bakery had four round tables for sitting and eating at. None of them were occupied. Next to the register sat a bowl of donut holes. When I was little and too small to see over the counter, my dad had bought me these donut holes. I couldn’t remember what they tasted like. I used to eat them in small bites. After every bite I would lick my fingers. Then my fingers would be damp and more sugar would stick to them. It had been like trying to clean the sand off your feet at the beach, except pleasurable. Once I’d asked to buy an extra donut hole, to feed to the chipmunk we sometimes saw outside the bakery. My dad had said chipmunks didn’t like donut holes and I had believed him.
The red-haired woman straightened a stack of wax paper bags. I could tell she was trying not to make me feel self-conscious about how long it was taking me to pick a baked good. Part of me wanted a donut hole and part of me was scared. Even though I couldn’t remember what they tasted like, what if they tasted different from before?
The water cooler in the corner gurgled.
I bought an oatmeal raisin cookie and left.
Outside, Eli was locking his bike to the bike rack. His bike was red and had those handlebars that curved under. My handlebars stuck straight out to the sides. From this I understood that I was the less serious biker.
Isabel! he said.
Oh, I said, hi! I didn’t need to pretend to be surprised. I was actually surprised.
He said he worked at the bakery. He asked what I had gotten.
I held open the wax paper bag and he leaned in to look. There was a small hole in the fabric of his T-shirt right next to the neckline.
Rookie mistake, he said. Not our best product. Not chewy enough, eye-em-oh.
What is your best product? I asked.
The donut holes.
I nodded a couple of times to take up space. He rocked his weight from the balls of his feet to his heels. He was on the brink of something.
Here, he said, come back in, I’ll get you a donut hole. They’re like, sixty-five cents. I mean, I’m allowed to give them away.
He held open the door of the bakery. I didn’t see any option besides walking through the door. Even if there had been other options I would have walked through the door.
The red-haired woman seemed younger, now. When she saw Eli she exclaimed something about how a band had released a new album, and had he listened, and what did he think?
You’re kidding, he said, swinging his backpack off as he went around the counter. This is Isabel, he said.
Until Eli pointed me out, it wasn’t clear if Red-Haired Girl had registered my presence, or that I was the same person who had just taken too long to buy an oatmeal raisin cookie.
She’s here for a donut hole, Eli explained, selecting one with a pair of tongs and dropping it onto a piece of wax paper. He slid the paper toward me across the counter.
Thanks, I said.
I took a small bite. Eli said no, what was I doing, a donut hole had to be eaten all in one bite, that was the point of it. Women, he sighed, rolling his eyes.
What the fuck, Eli, said Red-Haired Girl. That’s so sexist.
Eli shrugged. He wrinkled his nose.
I’m Brynn, said the girl, turning to me. Don’t listen to him.
My mouth was full of donut hole. I’d stuck the rest of it in my mouth as soon as Eli said it should be eaten in one bite. It was a disappointingly normal-sized bite. My jaw didn’t have to open any wider than it usually did. Still, my mouth was full enough that I couldn’t talk.
Brynn stared at me. God, Eli, she said. You’re such a bad influence. I’m going to check on the baguettes.
She swept through a swinging door into the kitchen. She really walked like that: like sweeping.
I folded the wax paper into a little square. Thanks for the donut hole, I said.
It’s nothing, he said. Don’t worry about it.
I should go, I said. Good to see you, though. Athena says hi.
Eli laughed a little bark of a laugh, the kind that meant it was genuine. I had surprised him. I didn’t know what was so surprising about a cat.
Well, he said. Tell Athena I say hi back.
Outside, I wasn’t sure what to do with the cookie. I didn’t see any chipmunks. Still, I tore off a corner and set it on the curb. Maybe the chipmunks were feeling shy.
The Eldest Skunk took a piece of dead grass between her teeth and pulled. It came away like a leg disengaging from a cricket. She carried it in her mouth to the stream, and tossed it gently to the skunk in the water. The skunk in the water looked at the dead grass. It hung between them. So the skunk in the water was confused, too, thought the Eldest Skunk.
She brought more pieces of dead grass and laid them in straight lines in the mud on the shore. Then she brought pieces of green grass, and live earthworms, and wood chips, and oblong pebbles that fit neatly beneath her tongue. The earthworms kept squirming out of order. She nosed them back. Hold still.
Soon she had a long line of short lines. The short lines ran perpendicular to the long one, railroad-track style rather than traffic-lane style. What good has a long line of short lines ever done anyone? The Eldest Skunk counted her trophies. One, two, three, eleven. One, two, three, eleven. Eventually she let the earthworms go. The sun was higher in the sky and it was time for bed. Under the forsythia, she braided her tail with her siblings’ and dreamed of ants. In the dream, the ants were coming out of the hole at the top of their hill. Instead of marching down the hill headfirst, they lay perpendicular to the ground and rolled, enjoying the cylindrical properties of a thorax.
Her siblings giggled in their sleep.
But when they woke, the Eldest Skunk’s confusion was still there. When had a twilight become connected to the dawn that preceded it? Why did the problems of one waking extend to the next?
The oriole might have said that this was purpose and direction, and he would have meant that this was what created a plot. But the oriole didn’t say anything. He was down by the stream, taking advantage of an unlikely concentration of worms in the mud.
The Eldest Skunk kept thinking about building materials. The thoughts were inaccessible to her siblings because her siblings still hadn’t heard about the pigs. The skunks had never been differentiated like this. It hurt. The Eldest Skunk was reminded of building materials more and more frequently. The bottom layer of grass, where last year’s blades decomposed, seemed like straw. A forsythia bush was already a house of sticks. There were stones at the bottom of the stream.
So there was nowhere for the thoughts to go because she couldn’t share them. They built up inside her like so many leg hairs in a shower drain. She tripped over her siblings’ tails, either because she needed to feel closer to them or because she wasn’t focused on the present. Never mind that solving the second problem might have solved the first. Her siblings got tired of the bruises on their tails, and the Eldest Skunk spent more time by herself.
This was the state of things when the oriole came to say goodbye. If he hadn’t become a father, he might have known it was his fault. If he hadn’t become a father, he might have been curious about what would happen next. That day, the compost smelled of kale gone slimy at the edges.
“Goodbye,” said the oriole. He was a father, now. His children had grown up, except the one that had died. First they’d hatched, then they’d eaten as many worms as he could regurgitate, and then they’d eaten as many worms as he could carry whole. Now their childhood was over. It was time for him to go.
The Eldest Skunk swished her tail from left to right, tracing an invisible rainbow in the air above her haunches. Then she brought her tail back to the left, keeping it low to the ground, and repeated the original swish.
It could only be solved with motion. When a playground swing changes direction, there is a moment of stillness between rising and falling. Something like that was happening inside the Eldest Skunk. The potential energy was building up, and could only go away by becoming kinetic.
What was her fortune? She needed to see more things in case she would know her fortune when she saw it.
The oriole had caused the disquiet. He’d been a pair of eyes, and the skunk had seen herself through those eyes, walking back and forth across the same stretch of grass. An oriole couldn’t see that grass existed in layers. From up above, it was all green. Yes, he came down to eat the beetles sometimes. No, he did not pay attention. It’s not that he was unobservant, only that he was focused on the sky instead of the grass.
So the Eldest Skunk had to leave. At twilight she made a big pile of acorn caps under the forsythia and slipped away.
My father and I went wild blackberry picking. We met at 8:30 AM and drove together into the hills, leaving my car at his house. It was early in the season. Blackberries shouldn’t have been ripe yet, but Brigitte said these ones would be. It was her secret picking spot. She gave us directions. The berries there were always fatter and juicier than anywhere else, she said.
I buckled my seat belt and my father handed me an Oreo. Breakfast of champions.
In the car I rested my head against the window. It could have been seven years ago. He could have been driving me to school. Parallel to the road, a rock wall ran through the woods. Each section looked the same as the last, but if you tried to focus on a single stone, the illusion fell apart: the car was moving very fast.
My father had seen a coyote the day before. He was due for another planting of salad greens, and Brigitte wanted him to fix the shelf in the pantry.
We laughed about Cecelia wanting to be a skunk for Halloween. We hoped it would last, and that her friends would understand how cool she was. Next year the streets could be flooded with children, all wielding lavender-scented spray bottles.
Cecelia’s family had gone to Maine for most of July. I would miss them.
The trees around the blackberry patch hung heavy with wild grapevines, which in turn hung heavy with dew. Water droplets shook down on us as we squeezed between branches, holding the longer twigs out of the way for each other. I was soaked within minutes.
Brigitte had stayed home to make the pie dough. It was because her knee was acting up, not because she was a woman. My father and I carried yellow plastic buckets.
Hear that? he said, pausing with a twig held between forefinger and thumb. Pileated woodpecker.
We listened. The call was a sarcastic laugh or a sharp chiding.
The berries were real blackberries, not black raspberries. Most people didn’t know the difference. Black raspberries are small and hollow, thimble shaped. True blackberries are solid, and have polyps the size of engorged ticks. In preschool I’d argued with my friends about the contents of their lunches. No, I remembered crying, those aren’t blackberries.
Thorns gripped the thighs of my jeans. In the evening there would be faint red lines across my skin, as if Athena had been sitting on my lap. Denim only did so much. I lifted leaves to see if there was anything underneath. It was like one of Cecelia’s lift-the-flap books. If the berries had any hint of maroon, I passed onward. They needed to be truly black, truly ripe. They needed to fall, salivating, into my palm, their softness toeing the line between luxury and revulsion. Some of them were stunted or mottled. I was more squeamish than my father, but I picked according to his standards rather than my own. I’d studied these standards from a young age, learning to push down my natural instincts. An ugly berry could still be edible, and shouldn’t be wasted.
The berries thudded into the bucket. My father was out of sight behind a stand of adolescent birches. I could hear when he’d covered the bottom of his bucket because the thuds turned muted, like in that children’s book Blueberries for Sal. In my own bucket, large patches of plastic still showed through. The plastic was a relief. As a child, I’d felt ashamed of picking slower. I’d thought growing up would mean keeping up. Now I felt afraid to outpace him. I wasn’t tall enough for my father to be shrinking.
We didn’t need so many berries for the pie. We would freeze most of them. It would be a peach-blackberry pie, and Brigitte had bought the peaches at a farm stand the day before. I kept wading through the brambles. The sun rose. As the dew dried, sweat took its place, and my shirt stayed damp. I ate one of the berries. It squidged against my tongue. I ate another. This one was more bitter, and the bitterness was pleasant, too.
Two robins argued in a pine tree above us, and three perfect berries eyed me from behind a spiderweb. I was so lucky. Each strand of spiderweb stood out against the morning light. The spider wasn’t home. Had it had a late night, or was it lying in wait, ready to pounce on unsuspecting insects? Maybe there wasn’t any conflict. Maybe the robins were only having a conversation.
Should’ve worn gloves, said my dad, appearing again amid the trees. He held up his forearms. He wore a green long-sleeved T-shirt. His hands were stained brown and purple.
Most of it’s juice, he said.
Meaning some of it was blood, from the thorns. He liked to gather and call it hunting.
On the drive back, we passed a church. Overflow cars dotted the side of the road. A sign out front spelled GOD WELCOMES U in movable letters.
Then my father said something he had said before, and would say again: If there is a God, I refuse to believe he wants me to spend a morning like this inside a building.
Then it was raining. Ellie and I had planned to go swimming. It wasn’t pleasant puddle-stomping rain. It came cold and fat from the sky.
wanna sit in a cafe and pretend to be Italian grandfathers?
I smiled at my phone where it lay on the arm of Jan and Steve’s couch. Ellie and I were thinking about plan Bs from our separate houses. Where did she get this shit? What did the word “Italian” mean in this context? It didn’t have to do with Italy, but the sentence wouldn’t have been the same without it.
I typed yes with lots of S’s, and my phone autocorrected it to yes with even more S’s.
Her next message said: Black sheep?
I didn’t reply immediately. I wandered to the kitchen sink, where my dishes from breakfast sat unwashed. meh, I typed, then rolled up my sleeves and turned on the water. If we went to the Black Sheep, Rachid might be on shift. Would he remember me as the girl who had sat with Eli that one time? Had Eli said anything to Rachid about me, either before or after that one time? Going to the Black Sheep seemed like an unnecessary risk. It seemed like it might distract me from Ellie in a way that I would later be ashamed of.
Ellie’s next suggestion was the bakery where Eli worked.
I moved the sponge across my cereal bowl in slow circles, watching the soap slither down my wrists. My phone screen, on the counter next to me, went dark and then lit up again: actually yes their insta says they have this strawberry rhubarb bar on special this week. we must go.
The cereal bowl was curved in a way that made it difficult to balance in the drain rack. I had to lean it up a few times to get it to stay. We had to go to the bakery. The only thing worse than doing something because of a guy was not doing something because of a guy.
I went upstairs and took a couple of shirts on and off. I settled on one with a line of three strawberries across the chest. It didn’t fit me right. The shoulders were too small, making my actual shoulders look too big. That was okay. It made it clear that I cared more about dressing to theme—strawberry rhubarb—than looking good. My rain jacket went on over the strawberry shirt. I zipped it all the way to my chin and pulled up the hood. Rain was a theme, too.
I ran into Ellie a block from the bakery. We’d both parked on the side streets where you didn’t have to pay.
Are you getting the strawberry rhubarb bar, too? she asked by way of greeting. She warned me that she wouldn’t give me a bite. Her strawberry rhubarb bar was all hers. If I wanted any I had to get my own. But did I think they would heat it up for her if she asked? And would they do that in a microwave or a toaster oven? She didn’t want it soggy. She wanted something warm and crisp.
I shrugged. You can always ask.
I held the door for her, and she walked past me into the shop, shaking rain from her jacket sleeves. Eli stood behind the counter.
Look what the cat dragged in! he said.
I tried to decide if he was pleased to see me, or only being good at customer service.
Ellie looked back at me, confused. She didn’t know Eli. Why was this guy acting so familiar with random customers? I knew Eli from school, and Ellie had always been separate from that part of my life. She grew up one town over, in a different district. It was why it had been so easy to stay friends through college. We’d never relied on daily contact to glue us together. Our relationship was just us. Other people, and the shifting loyalties of school friend groups, couldn’t get in the way.
I waved. Hey, Eli.
Oh! said Ellie, looking back and forth. You know each other! This is perfect. It makes me feel much better about how annoying a customer I’m about to be.
Ellie was good at acting at-home in situations. She explained to Eli that she needed to know the options for heating up a strawberry rhubarb bar. Could it be put in a toaster oven for a minute? Or the normal oven, if there wasn’t a soufflé in there already that would be ruined by opening the door? The microwave, after all, would be unacceptable.
Uh, we don’t make soufflés, said Eli. So, sure? Isabel, do you want one too?
No, no, I said. I’m still thinking.
Eli took a single strawberry rhubarb bar into the back room.
Ellie frowned at me, like, remember I’m not giving you a bite.
I widened my eyes back, like, I know, I know.
I didn’t know what to get. A donut hole might be a nice nod to Eli, but it would look small and lonely next to Ellie’s bar. I didn’t want to seem like one of those girls who was frightened of eating. In the end I got the strawberry rhubarb bar and said I wanted it cold.
We sat at a small circle table in the corner. There was one other customer, an old man reading a newspaper. He held it up in front of him with two hands instead of laying it flat on the table. His hairstyle endeared him to me—it was the quintessential bald-on-top-with-ear-tufts. At what age had he started to bald? Partial baldness suited him well, now, but it couldn’t always have been like that. Maybe one never stopped needing to grow into things.
Our strawberry rhubarb bars came on plates because we’d asked for them “for here.” Ellie made me push my chair back so she could take a picture, holding her phone horizontal above the table. She shifted my plate slightly to the left, and hers slightly to the right. Diagonals were important in art, weren’t they? She said maybe the next generation of iPhone would have a thermal camera. Then she could post one of the photos on Instagram and everyone would know how much cooler she was than me, because she’d gotten hers heated up.
Maybe, I agreed.
She went to grab forks from the napkin station by the register. Eli didn’t look up. He sat on a stool, leaning his elbows on the counter, looking at something on his phone.
Finally, we had utensils, the photos were done, and we could take a bite. The virtue of the unheated bar was structural integrity. It held its shape on my fork. I found this comforting. It was like a pair of boots with good arch support, but for my mouth. There were lines that the world would stay inside of.
Ellie’s fork dripped strawberry rhubarb goop. She closed her eyes while she chewed. We talked about her mother, and long versus short raincoats. Ellie used to find her mother’s long raincoat horribly embarrassing. Now she just wanted something that would keep her butt dry if she sat on a wet bench.
At some point the bell on the door jingled. An adult with two children walked in. Ellie leaned forward across the table. Okay, she whispered, so how do you know the guy behind the counter?
I glanced at Eli. He was talking to the adult, gesturing at the display of breads behind him. The adult was nodding, trying to maintain eye contact while keeping the kids from sticking their noses against the glass of the display case.
Oh, I said, he’s Jan and Steve’s son. I tried to scrape up a crumb with my fork. The ones I’m house-sitting for?
Ellie nodded, looking over at the counter.
Don’t stare, I said.
I’m not.
Still.
What’s his name?
Eli.
Eli. She turned the word over in her mouth. Did he go to school with you?
I nodded. I knew why the name sounded familiar to her. I couldn’t tell if I wanted her to remember it—the thing I could see her brain reaching toward.
He was one of the ultimate boys, I said.
Oh, right! she said. The hot ones! Maybe that’s it.
My cheeks felt warm, though I knew Eli hadn’t heard. He was right there.
But that was high school, I said. We’re just, like, acquaintances now. Hardly even that.
Ellie took another big bite of strawberry rhubarb bar. To be fair, she said as she chewed, he’s still hot.
I thought I had escaped. I hadn’t.
Ellie called as I turned into Jan and Steve’s driveway. I put her on speakerphone and her voice rustled through the parked car: Wait, wait, wait, she said. Wasn’t Eli the one you hooked up with?
Technology had dulled the safety of distance. In the olden days, physical space could be counted on to impede communication; if you wanted to avoid someone, you only had to move across the country. Today, miles meant nothing. A few finger taps could always produce the outlines of a person: a voice, a face, a tweet about postmodern armchairs from last October.
I pressed my head back into the headrest. Ugh, I said, yeah.
Okay, said Ellie. Okay, hold on, I’m just getting home, I think my housemates are here. Wait while I walk through the living room. Don’t hang up.
I unbuckled my seat belt and took off my raincoat, wadding it into a ball and hugging it against my body. Over the phone, doors opened and closed. Pleasantries were exchanged. One of the roommates wanted to order pizza for dinner. One of the roommates thought they’d been eating out too much.
A door shut on the other end of the line. Why didn’t you say that? Ellie wanted to know.
There were lots of responses I could have given. The responses wouldn’t have been lies, but I wouldn’t have been confident they were true. I might have said I’d felt awkward talking about it within earshot of Eli. I might have said it was high school and didn’t matter anymore. I might have said I thought Ellie didn’t like it when I talked about boys.
And what was Ellie’s motivation for the question? Was she hurt that I’d kept something from her?
I told her the hookup was a long time ago. It hadn’t seemed relevant.
She sighed. I can’t tell if you’re being dumb on purpose.
What?
Hookups are always relevant.
We were both quiet for a minute, and then spoke at the same time.
Look, I have to go—
If you want to—
It’s fine, it’s fine, said Ellie. I’ll see you later. You’re just funny, sometimes.
After we hung up, I got out of the car and went into the house. I hung my raincoat in the mudroom closet next to Eli’s parents’ winter parkas.
It was too hot to turn on the stove. The rain had pinned the heat to the earth, and the air felt like waking up feverish and sweaty under a hotel room blanket. I chopped celery into three-inch logs and spread peanut butter down the center. In a cabinet, behind the turbinado sugar, I found a single-serving box of raisins. I placed raisins on the celeries one at a time, like I was dealing cards. It seemed important for each stalk to end up with an equal number.
Eli and I had hooked up in high school. He’d been a senior, and known. I’d been a sophomore, and unknown. There was no way to tell the story without arousing pity: I had been used for my body. Yet I still believed, as I had then, that I had used Eli more than Eli had used me. He’d been rewarded with mediocre sex and slight disapproval from a segment of his female friends. I’d become known.
I could never explain this to Ellie. If I said high school could be divided neatly into two pieces, Before Eli and After Eli, she would have shaken her head. She would have felt that she was a grown-up, while I was a child of the patriarchy. And maybe she would have been right. But what was I supposed to do about it? You couldn’t choose your parents.
Every time I bit into a new stick of celery, I clamped my teeth around the unbroken fibers and turned my head from side to side, stripping them from the rest of the stalk. Celery was the vegetarian version of stringy meat. Dogs and babies found it comforting to gnaw on things.
In the past, I had tried to write a short story that began with the line He was an eight and I was a mermaid. It was going to be a story about Halloween costumes. It never went anywhere. In reality, Eli was a bass and I was an alto.
At our high school, the freshmen all had to do chorus, and they all had to be part of the big, non-auditioned freshman choir. After that year, chorus became optional, and you had to audition. My friends all auditioned, so I did, too. The choral director let all my friends in, so he let me in, too. “You know, Isabel,” he said to me in his office, after I had sung the scale, “you’re a good person. This chorus needs more good people.” He went to church every Sunday, but he also believed in earthly rewards. So then I was in a chorus with Eli Homer-Drummond.
I’m putting the choral director’s words in quotes because it’s exactly what he said—everything else I don’t trust memory to reproduce. The choral director meant he had problems getting theater kids to be quiet when he asked them to. He meant I didn’t quite belong, so maybe I would be a good influence. I smiled and nodded. He was naive. To think that in a room with Eli Homer-Drummond, I might be an influence!
The choral director felt passionately about vowels. We spent a lot of chorus with our mouths open. We massaged our jaws. We practiced tongue placement. It was the era of Snapchat, which was like texting with pictures instead of with words. In another world, Snapchat might have enhanced our understanding of poetic imagery. In this world, we snuck pictures of our friends and drew penises coming out of their mouths.
The upperclassmen cared about team spirit and group bonding. This made it difficult to analyze social interactions. Did they want to be friends, or were they just being inclusive? They started a group chat so we could plan an apple-picking trip, and also so the cream of the mouth- penis picture crop could be distributed more widely.
The group chat gave everyone access to everyone else’s usernames. Once you knew someone’s username, you could add them as a “friend.” I added Damien. He was a sophomore tenor. No one talked about him, but he existed comfortably in multiple social spheres. He played the drums and did Model UN. In other words, he was a good candidate for a crush. People understood the appeal, but it wasn’t outlandish to hope something might actually happen.
Damien added me back. Since I’d done the adding, I assumed it was up to him to send the first message. He didn’t send anything. I complained about it to Claudia. Claudia was an alto, too.
Then Eli added me. I was in the doctor’s office when it happened, sitting on the crinkly paper of the exam table. The nurse had already come and gone. I was waiting for the doctor to come press on my abdomen and ask if I felt any pain. My phone screen lit up. In the same way that our brains recognize words without looking at the individual letters, I understood what had happened. Eli’s username was something like eliiiiiii14. There were more i’s than it made sense to count. It was lucky they had already taken my blood pressure.
I had to message Eli. It would have been hypocritical not to, after complaining about Damien not messaging me. I didn’t want to be like my mother. I often accused my mother of hypocrisy. In the passenger seat on the way home, I held my phone at my belly button. I tucked my chin down so the skin folded and rolled. My friends and I called this a “thumb pic” because your head and neck blended together into one vaguely thumb-shaped column. I hit send. Even back then I believed in the power of looking bad on purpose.
Eli opened the picture but didn’t reply. On Monday I asked Claudia if Eli had added her, too. He hadn’t. But a story that’s all “he sent this Snapchat, she sent that Snapchat” is no story at all.
Ellie says I asked her if she ever felt the pressure to leave. I don’t remember asking but she says it happened. It wasn’t at the bakery so it must have been on one of our walks. We would have been somewhere between the yarn store and the green house with the orange door. Across June and July, we did that walk maybe three times. Ellie loved a statement door. This one was deep within the network of residential streets behind the yarn store, and the yarn store was halfway between Ellie’s apartment and Jan and Steve’s.
Three was fewer walks than we’d expected to go on. It was what always happened when you suddenly lived close to someone you’d lived far away from. You expected to see them all the time, and then you hardly saw them at all. When they’d lived far away, they could be a priority. Living nearby made a person reschedulable.
I can imagine a few ways I might have said it.
Maybe we saw a hot air balloon and I said, Why do we expect young people to be like hot air balloons?
I would have said it knowing that Ellie would need an explanation, and then I would be able to say what I was really thinking. Ellie would have pointed out that a hot air balloon was not a good metaphor. Hot air balloons always came down relatively close to where they started. The point of a hot air balloon was not to leave, but to get a nice view of where you had been and would be.
Or maybe we were talking about capitalism. People knew bigger wasn’t better, but they needed to feel that bigger wasn’t better. And what about distance, I would have said, don’t you think that’s part of it? Don’t you think we need to realize that getting farther away isn’t better, either?
Ellie might have frowned. She might have thought I was talking about air travel. It was killing the planet. Everyone needed to take local vacations by public bus rather than flying off across the oceans.
But that wasn’t what I meant at all. I meant to ask if she, too, worried that her continued existence in this town was perceived as a “failure to launch.” And was there any truth in that perception? I was working in a yoga studio, and the people in Philadelphia were working in coffee shops. What made it more acceptable to flounder in a new place than in a place steeped with memories?
Maybe Ellie was a little quieter for the second half of the walk. Maybe I told a story about Roger and didn’t notice.
The Eldest Skunk walked, and the walking was different from the walking she had done before. There was no destination. Rain fell, and the earthworms came to the surface. The earth here had less nitrogen, or calcium, or iron. It was sandier, or it had more clay; it wanted to be a hill when it grew up instead of the bottom of a bog. The worms tasted different from the worms the skunk had eaten before, because they came from a new place. The meat was rustier, and the slime was more like a squash blossom. She noticed the difference the way a person notices a stoplight turning from red to green. She was a skunk. She ate to eat, not to pay attention to her eating. The worms slid and stretched apart between her teeth and her pulse beat slower in gratitude.
She slept under a patch of ferns, the leaves arching over her like miniature forsythias. In the morning the sun came out. Her bones forgot their tiredness and remembered their elation. She was in a forest! The squirrels were louder here, away from the people, and the loam beneath her paws felt springy with decomposed moss. The moss had moved on, but it had left the ghosts of its rhizomes to pillow the soil. She moved like a little soap bubble, clean and new.
A skunk has a good sense of smell, and poor eyesight. This may be why skunks get run over by motor vehicles so often. They never see it coming. It’s hard for people, with their good eyes and bad noses, to imagine a skunk’s perspective. It would be better to stick with observable facts. The Eldest Skunk walked six miles from her forsythia. Skunks typically stay within one mile of their home, though males and adolescents sometimes go as far as five. The Eldest Skunk was living radically.
She ate earthworms until she was full, and then ate one more. Her stomach gurgled. She toiled with the shell of a fallen chestnut. Each spine stung the skin around her paws. There was beauty in the pain. The oriole had told her about flying for so long his wings felt like they might fall off, and then flying farther.
No. It’s impossible to know if she was full, or if she was in pain.
Color, shape, patterns of movement. Things we can see.
Maybe it’s deceitful to pretend we understand the skunks, but is there anything wrong with observing them? A person on a porch, looking at a skunk in a lawn, seems permissible. The relationship isn’t parasitic or symbiotic. It’s the one in between, where one party benefits and the other doesn’t notice.
But it’s wrong to look at a teenage girl that way. There are words for that kind of looking: “ogle” and “leer.” The creases in the flesh behind her knees, and the grape tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck—these are things that belong only to the girl. It could be dangerous for someone else to notice them. Not because the girl is delicate, but because it’s terrifying to feel that the world is looking at you closer than you’re looking at yourself.
Is a skunk different from a teenage girl? Is it okay to look?
The first encounter was the squirrels. The skunk was skirting the edge of a cold granite scent. Around her ankles lay whiffs of decomposing birch bark. Every few steps she kicked some of the smell up toward her nose.
Above her scuttered a pair of squirrels. Squirrels talk a lot. They called back and forth to each other about the colors of the leaves, and their hunger.
Green like a frog’s forehead.
Green like a lime who is bracing itself for a career in vermilion to appease its mother.
Green like jumping from a pine tree to a maple.
Brown like satisfaction.
The squirrels have many more sounds for color than people do. For them, it doesn’t take as many syllables to get the undertones across.
I’m hungry.
No, I’m hungry.
Well, I’m hungrier.
From down on the ground, the skunk could not tell the difference between green like a frog’s forehead and green like jumping from a pine to a maple. She placed her forepaws on the trunk of the squirrels’ current tree. In another moment the squirrels would be in a different tree. They wouldn’t see her. But this first tree gave an infinitesimal sigh in response to her touch. It didn’t go in for public displays of affection, but it lived for the moments when the wind nudged its uppermost twigs into the uppermost twigs of the tree next door. The squirrels felt the sigh. They looked down.
A skunk!
They skittered down four branches, and then up one.
Ahoy!
Hello, thought the Eldest Skunk. She thought about how she was looking for something without knowing what it was she was looking for. In a way, she was looking for something to look for. The squirrels wiggled down the main trunk of the tree, freezing when they were a few feet above the skunk. They pressed their bellies into the bark.
I’m always looking.
No, I’m always looking.
The squirrels looked at each other, and then switched places.
We’re always looking.
We’re looking for nuts.
There are two types of nuts, but we don’t know which type we’re looking for until we find them. There are new nuts we’ve never met before, and old nuts that we hid last year and forgot about.
Even when we find them, we don’t always know. We might be mistaking old nuts for new ones. Or vice versa.
The Eldest Skunk pressed her belly into the leaf mulch, because she couldn’t press it into the trunk of the tree. Thank you. She kept walking.
I FaceTimed my mother. She said I needed a haircut. I said how could she tell on such a small phone screen. My hair went past my shoulders. The way I had my camera angled, my face was bottom-heavy. My chin loomed, and she couldn’t see most of the ends of my hair.
When was the last time you got a haircut? she asked.
I complained that she was my mother—shouldn’t she be more concerned with my emotional well-being than with paltry aspects of my appearance? I made it sarcastic even though it was a real question.
A haircut is emotional well-being, she said. I’ll pay for it.
After we hung up, I found Jan and Steve’s kitchen shears and went to the bathroom. I pinched a piece of hair between my thumb and index finger. I moved my fingers up and down the hair. One inch? Two? Four?
Finally I let the scissors take a bite—an inch and a half from a single lock in front of my ear. Then I put the scissors back in their drawer. Lawn mower noises floated in the window from across the street. I got on my bike and pedaled to the hair salon.
At the front desk, I asked if they took walk-ins.
Yes, if I could wait twenty minutes.
They asked what I wanted. A trim, a blowout, a dye job?
I told them I would know in twenty minutes.
I flipped through the magazines. Some of them were about hair and some of them were about famous people. The skin of the hair models and the famous people didn’t look like skin. It looked like pieces of computer-generated fruit. My mother was right. Haircuts helped people feel that who they had been yesterday didn’t have to be who they would be tomorrow.
In the corner chair, a smock-draped client waited. There was a line of foil down the back of their head. What did the foil mean? Dye, a perm, deep conditioning? I made a deal with myself. I would have whatever the person in the corner was having. It wasn’t a real deal because I had never been brave about hair decisions—I didn’t expect myself to follow through.
I shut the magazine. I opened and closed a few apps on my phone.
When I looked up, the smock was being lifted; the chair was being turned. A middle-aged woman with masses of black hair stood up. There was a single white stripe down the center of her head. Her hair had the sort of volume mine had only dreamed of. It danced around her face. My breath stopped.
I pulled out my phone and typed i think im hallucinating into the box meant for drafting messages to Ellie. Then I deleted it. Our generation had cried wolf with words like “hallucinating” and “crazy.” She wouldn’t grasp the severity of the situation.
The hairdresser, who introduced herself as Shelley, was ready for me. She leaned my head back into the sink and asked if my neck was comfortable. I said yes. My neck hurt. The water and Shelley’s hands were a lullaby. My follicles were a million little rocks in a million little brooks.
What are we thinking today? asked Shelley.
Just a trim, I said.
After the haircut I made sure not to look at myself in any store windows until I was around the corner from the salon. Then I stopped and studied my reflection in the glass over the menu for a Chinese restaurant. My hair looked flat. People talked about smoothness and shine as if they were desirable hair traits. When my hair was smooth and shiny, my face looked lonely in comparison.
Hey, said a voice from behind me. It was Eli. It was too much. Still—the downtown was small. To be in town was to be near the bakery. The run-in wasn’t that unlikely. My subconscious might even have plotted it.
Hey, I replied.
Have you never been to this restaurant? he asked.
What?
Eli gestured at the storefront beside us. I mean, he said, you’ve been looking at the menu for a long time.
I blushed. Did the fact that he knew I’d been looking for a long time mean he’d been watching me for a long time? I admitted I hadn’t been looking at the menu—I’d been looking at my new haircut.
Eli barked his bark-laugh. Once, in high school, I’d told him he seemed like a golden retriever person. Like, if he’d been a type of dog, he would have been a golden retriever. He’d been insulted. He’d said he was a cat person. He probably didn’t remember this.
No shame, no shame, said Eli. Isn’t it sort of the same length, though?
Was he admitting to having paid attention to how long my hair was, before? For a second I considered explaining: I’d attempted adventure, but the skunks had brought me back to myself. I needed a deep breath, not a quarter-life crisis.
It was just a trim, I said.
Eli nodded. Then he said he was glad he’d run into me. His house was having another little cookout thing on Friday. Did I want to come? It was very chill. I should bring a friend or two.
Oh! I said. Yes. I mean, thank you.
Sweet!
Then he was gone. He sort of bounced when he walked. Normally I didn’t think of bouncy walks as attractive. He hadn’t said what time on Friday, or where his house was. He was such a golden retriever.
I had a decision to make. It took me the whole bike ride home to decide: I would wait until Thursday—it was Monday, now—to text him about what time the cookout started. At home I lay on Jan and Steve’s couch and scrolled back in my messages with Ellie. I tried to count how many times each of us initiated things. I often made this calculation in my messages with other people but had never done it in my messages to her. It turned out I initiated more of our text exchanges, and she initiated more of our in-person hangouts.
On Wednesday I texted Ellie about the cookout. Did she want to come?
She did.
On Thursday I texted Eli about the cookout. What time? What address? Should I bring anything?
Seven o’clock. 73 Bayberry Circle. Nah. There would be veggie burgers in case I was worried about that.
Ellie drove to my house, and I drove both of us from there. The need to conduct ourselves as a unit felt like high school, except that we hadn’t gone to high school together. She wore a long flowered skirt with a sweatshirt from the local community college over it. The shapes weren’t meant to go together. It made her look like a grown-up.
She angled her knees toward me from the passenger seat. She wanted to know what the game plan was.
I kept my eyes on the road. Eat veggie burgers? Pray they had s’mores?
Oh my God, said Ellie, oh my God. Can we stop at CVS on the way? I really need marshmallows now.
I mean, I said, they might already have them.
So then we’ll have extra marshmallows.
We went to CVS. At the self-checkout, I asked Ellie if she knew that a baby skunk weighed the same as ten marshmallows. She stopped typing her PIN into the machine and turned to look at me. No, she said. Really?
The parking lot was starting to remember about sunset—that it existed, that it was on its way. The air was thinking about blushing gold. It was already 7:30. The rule was that you had to be late to parties if you didn’t really know the people.
Take a picture of me with the marshmallows, said Ellie. She held them aloft like Simba in The Lion King. I took a photo.
So this is like, four baby skunks, she said.
She looked happy in the passenger seat. The skunks had been in my head so long, it was strange to hear someone else talk about them.
There were already three cars in Eli’s driveway. A fourth car would have fit, but not without blocking the other three in. The house was yellow. It was one of those houses that’s a ranch from the front, but sits on a hill so it becomes two stories in the back. I pulled onto the side of the road behind a telephone pole.
But seriously, said Ellie, where are you and Eli at these days? Does he know I know you guys hooked up? Are we allowed to joke about it?
No!
I tried to pull the key out of the ignition. It was stuck. I tugged and tugged.
We absolutely cannot joke about it, I said, still tugging at the key. I don’t know him at all! I don’t even know if he’s dating anyone right now! Maybe his girlfriend is even here, at this cookout—or his boyfriend! Maybe he has a boyfriend!
Ellie frowned. She pointed at the gearshift. We were still in drive.
I shifted into park. The keys slid out.
Okay, said Ellie. Noted.
In the backyard there was a cinder block firepit, a charcoal grill, and a circle of people in camp chairs under a big tree. The circle was its own thing; it wasn’t arranged around the firepit. There were more people than camp chairs, so some of the people were sitting on the grass.
Isabel! said Eli, turning. He was one of the people on the grass. He looked at Ellie. Wait, he said, fuck, I know your name. Strawberry Rhubarb Bar Girl.
Ellie beamed. Something twinged in my small intestine, like there was a cube of bread stuck there and someone was poking at it with a fondue fork. Eli was good at making people feel special. I already knew that. Seeing it in action still reminded me of my own un-specialness. It wasn’t chemistry if he made everyone feel this way.
Ellie, said Ellie. Is my name. And your name is Eli, which is like, all the same letters, so you ought to remember.
Suddenly Eli and Ellie were having a debate about E’s versus L’s. Eli liked E’s best. He thought that because Ellie’s name also started with E, she would agree. Ellie felt more connected to L’s. There were two L’s in her name, right next to each other, as if they were good friends, and you had to say L out loud to pronounce them.
We joined the grass-sitters. Someone said we should do names and pronouns. We went around the circle and said names and pronouns. The only ones that stuck were Brynn (she/her) and Rachid (he/him), who didn’t count because I’d already met them. Rachid looked less intimidating when he wasn’t standing behind an espresso machine. I tried to decide if Brynn was actually a bitch, or if she still just had really good hair. She sat leaning back on her hands. Every so often she would move her knees from one side of her body to the other. In the Pilates classes I’d been listening to, this was called a “windshield wiper.”
A boy whose name might have been Carl or Kyle told a story about a customer at a bike repair shop. The other half of the circle discussed local politics. There was drama on the school board. An election loomed. This half of the circle felt it was their duty to participate in local democracy. But they wondered if, having no school-aged children, they should abstain from the vote about who would chair the school board. In fact, they had sworn an environmentally motivated oath to never have children. What would an ideal system look like? Would parents’ votes be weighted more than non-parents’? Would the non-parents’ votes be further broken down into prospective parents and non-prospective parents?
Kyle or Carl had finished his bike repair story at this point. He cared about politics, too. He felt that categorization was the greatest evil facing mankind.
The greatest? said a girl in a camp chair. What about global warming?
Everyone laughed. The laugh didn’t mean they were amused. The laugh meant they wanted a new subject of conversation.
A mosquito landed on my arm. I slapped at it. It flew away before my hand got to my arm.
Did you know, said Ellie, that a newborn skunk weighs the same as ten marshmallows?
She was still holding the bag of marshmallows. Her legs were crossed and the marshmallows were in her lap. Every so often she turned the bag over like she was fluffing a pillow.
Rachid whistled. Ten marshmallows?
Brynn windshield-wipered her knees to the other side. Now she faced Ellie more directly.
Kyle or Carl said he couldn’t tell if ten was a lot or a little.
I should have seen it coming: Ellie ripping open the bag, Ellie handing the bag to Brynn, Brynn holding the bag while Ellie counted out ten marshmallows. She had to hug the already tallied marshmallows to her body with one hand while she counted with the other.
The marshmallows—the baby skunk—got passed around the circle. Ellie was on my left, and Eli was on my right. The marshmallows traveled clockwise. I would be last, and Eli second to last. Everyone’s hands would touch them before mine did.
But a newborn skunk is smaller than this, right? asked Eli when it was his turn. He had both hands cupped in front of him. Everyone nodded. Eli thought this wasn’t a good model, then. He pushed his hands together, compressing the marshmallows down to a more scientifically accurate size. They kept springing back.
There’s only one option, said Eli.
Hold these, Isabel, said Eli.
He dumped nine marshmallows into my lap, grazing my thigh with the side of his palm. They bounced all over. There were marshmallows in the grass. There were marshmallows next to the crotch of my shorts. The tenth marshmallow, which Eli had kept, went into his mouth. He chewed. He didn’t swallow. He spat it back into his hand. And it worked—the marshmallow was smaller and denser than before. His hands would have room for nine more.
Next, he said, opening his mouth wide and turning to me.
I put another marshmallow in and he chewed. He spat. He opened wide.
I couldn’t look away from him. It was performance art. Eli chewed and spat. My arm moved from the grass to his lips. In his hand, the pile of slimy, white, sugary gelatin grew.
By marshmallow four, our audience began to shrink. Someone referenced the Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin stuffs his whole lunch into his milk carton. Brynn and Ellie started listing their favorite Calvin and Hobbes moments. I understood. Sometimes during makeover montages in movies, I stopped watching and scrolled around my phone. Once you understood what trope was being played out, there was no reason to look up until it was over.
Like, everyone touched these, didn’t they? said Eli, between marshmallows, wiping his mouth on one wrist. He said it mildly, like he’d just realized he’d forgotten his umbrella, but it was okay because it probably wouldn’t rain.
I said some of the marshmallows probably had my leg sweat on them.
No one mentioned that Calvin stuffs his lunch into his milk carton because of Susie. He wants to gross her out—he has a crush on her. No one wanted to talk about how Calvin and Hobbes upheld the patriarchy.
The spat-out marshmallows had teeth marks in them. I thought about dentists making retainer molds. I thought about how, in the black-and-white panels, Hobbes is a black-and-white-striped mammal. If there was meaning to this skunk parallel, instead of just coincidence, I didn’t have time to decode it.
Last one, I said to Eli. It was the last marshmallow.
He chewed and spat. He looked at the glob in his hand. It was still larger than a newborn baby skunk. He squeezed the glob. A drop of saliva fell to the grass.
I expected him to ask if I wanted to hold it. The question would be joking and daring. If I said no, I would seem vanilla. If I said yes, I would seem desperate.
He didn’t ask. He unfolded his legs and bounded over to the trash cans by the side of the house. Without any eulogy for our baby skunk, he threw the marshmallows in.
Coming back to the circle, he said he would never be able to eat a marshmallow again, ever in his life. He needed to, like, take a shot of mustard to get the taste out of his mouth.
I tried to decide if he’d sat down closer or farther away from me than before. Maybe farther away. Was it on purpose?
Try water? I suggested.
I took my water bottle from my bag and offered it. He took a swig. As in the moment in Jan and Steve’s kitchen, earlier that summer, we couldn’t be remembering the same thing. There was nothing very memorable about a post-hookup glass of water. I only remembered it because it had been my first.
Six years ago—in bed, in the sewing room, on top of the covers—Eli had said, “Do you want a glass of water?” He’d said it to break the silence. Before we’d kissed, I’d been the one less comfortable with silence, but after it was over, the roles reversed. I’d felt the sort of freedom that came with the last bell of the school day: my job was done and I could do as I pleased.
The Glass of Water had surprised me, as a step in the process. How many more such glasses would I drink in a lifetime? It had the intimacy of any ritual. It both moved you beyond the act, by washing away the flavor, and extended it by reminding you there was something to wash away. After I drank, I wished I’d waited. The flavor had been a new flavor, and now it was gone. I hadn’t had time to come up with words for it. To understand what had happened, I would need to try again.
The water had been in a plastic souvenir cup from The Lion King musical on Broadway. I’d been grateful for this detail. It made everything easier—funnier, more irreverent—to explain to Claudia later.
Eli turned to ask Rachid if they should start grilling. I put my water bottle back in my bag. It was all coming back to me, now. There had been a book on Eli’s nightstand, a title I’d heard of but hadn’t read. I’d seen it before he kissed me, but only in the after-freedom had I been able to ask about it: Was it his? Did he like it?
He’d said it was good, so far. Had I read it? No? I ought to. Then we could talk about it.
On the drive home, I’d stopped at the library and gotten the book. I liked books, and I’d liked the idea of knowing what I was supposed to talk to Eli about. But in chorus on Monday, he hadn’t sent any Snapchats. Or in chorus on Monday, I hadn’t sent him any Snapchats. Either way it had been impossible to read the book. I’d returned it to the library unopened. Reading it would have been admitting I liked him more than he liked me.
At the cookout, we ate veggie dogs and drank blueberry hard ciders. The drink choices were blueberry hard cider or beer. I didn’t like beer. When my second cider was halfway gone and I was sitting alone in a camp chair, peeling at the bottle’s label, it occurred to me that I didn’t like the cider either. It was sickly sweet. Why had I picked it twice? Was it truly the lesser of two evils, or did it have to do with sexism? Had sexism made me keep choosing the sweeter drink, or made me regret adhering to something “girly,” or both? The questions got tangled inside my brain. I let them go.
Ellie asked me to go to the bathroom with her. In the bathroom, she wondered out loud why there wasn’t any bath mat. I said maybe they had put it away for the party because they didn’t want people tracking mud on it. Ellie said I was always making excuses for boys. It hadn’t rained in days. This was hardly a party.
I got mad at her for the next thing she said, but maybe it was really the making-excuses-for-boys comment that I was mad about.
The next thing she said was that Brynn was really hot, and could I ask Eli if she was single, slash, maybe get her number?
I frowned at myself in the mirror. Normally Ellie didn’t include me in her romantic life. Normally she would mention at the end of a phone call that some girl had crocheted a shirt for her, and then a few months later she would text me a picture of the shirt with the caption would u wear this? because she and the girl had broken up. Maybe that sounds like involvement, but it wasn’t. I never got to give advice.
Can’t you ask her for her number yourself?
Part of Ellie’s magic was her up-frontness. It didn’t make sense for her to use interlopers.
Well, obviously, she said, pulling up her underwear. I was just giving you an opportunity to flirt with Eli by being joint wingmen. Jeez.
She hip-bumped me away from the sink so she could wash her hands. I stumbled into the shower curtain. We hadn’t been drunk together before. Drunkenness was something that happened with school friends, and she’d always been my other friend. My school friends had measured how well they knew me by comparing how well they felt they knew her—the girl they met only through my stories. None of them would have recognized this Ellie. The Ellie they knew wasn’t shiny or spiky. She didn’t pursue hotness.
Ellie wiped her hands on her skirt. How many ciders had I had, she wanted to know.
Two.
She pursed her lips. Drink some water. You’re driving.
Even Ellie was disappointed in me for being a lightweight.
We left the bathroom arm in arm. Either we had wordlessly made up, or we were adhering to the feminine pact about keeping whatever is said in bathrooms mysterious.
I wanted a graham cracker. I didn’t want a s’more, only a plain graham cracker. No one else had thought about s’mores. By the fire, there was only our bag of marshmallows, with ten fewer marshmallows than it had started with. There was no chocolate. There were no graham crackers.
Inside, Eli was rinsing out red Solo cups in the kitchen sink.
We reuse them, he said. The environment. You know.
You don’t have any graham crackers, I said. Do you?
He shook his head. Wheat Thins?
I thought about Wheat Thins. They weren’t graham crackers, but they were surprisingly similar on an emotional level. I nodded. I said Eli owed me ten Wheat Thins, because of the ten marshmallows he’d chewed.
Okay, he said, but I can’t feed them to you. My hands are wet. They’re in the cabinet left of the fridge. No, the lower one.
Was it flirtatious that he’d brought up the possibility of feeding me, or was it unflirtatious because he’d said he couldn’t? I left the kitchen once I’d counted out ten Wheat Thins. I didn’t want to seem like I had any motivations beyond food.
Outside, Rachid had produced a guitar. The circle had reformed, this time around the fire. I asked Ellie if she wanted to leave. She nodded. We both felt that things were becoming too picturesque. Nothing unexpected could happen once a guitar came out. She picked up the leftover marshmallows and we walked away. In the safety of my car, she asked if I’d gotten what I wanted from the night. I couldn’t answer. The streetlamps passed us off down the road like a fire brigade. Where one circle of light left off, the next began. I could never tell what I wanted. Ellie rolled down her window and the night air shuddered in, hot and muggy. What did I want? If I thought about it enough, the answer always seemed like “A Husband.” As an answer, “A Husband” had no sense or dignity—I had no interest in sharing a bed or a mortgage with anyone—but if you said it with the right tone of voice you could make people laugh. Ellie wouldn’t have laughed. This was both her blessing and her curse.
At home, in bed, I texted Eli. I was cultivating a feeling—the feeling of being on your phone when your parents thought you were asleep. Setting was everything in theater.
I sent the message in three pieces:
hey thank you thank you for the invite! it was v fun!
and
sorry we didn’t say goodbye. ellie was being impatient
and
also Ellie wants Brynn’s number lol
The detail about Ellie being impatient was a lie. That was what friends were for. They didn’t mind being moved around for the sake of the plot.
I put my phone on vibrate under my pillow. Twice I found myself drifting off, and then pulled out the phone to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t.
Eli sent me Brynn’s number, and I forwarded it to Ellie. Four hours later, Ellie replied lol I already have that. Then our messages went like this:
! and?
and what
have u guys been talking
yeah
and??
wdym?
I stopped replying. I lay on the kitchen tile with my notebook. Dear Ellie, I wrote. Did you want me to ask more about Brynn, or not? By not asking, am I being self-centered, or am I giving you privacy? Jeez. Sometimes I want to be a better person. Sometimes I want to slap you across the face.
Evening light fell in stripes across the grouting. These were the sorts of things I could say to the Ellie in the notebook. I’d swept earlier in the day. Sweeping hadn’t made me feel like an adult. It only reminded me of Cinderella. Real adults used vacuum cleaners.
Everyone seems to have a problem with the past or the future, I wrote. I mean everyone is always looking for ways to feel new—haircuts and chest-opening yoga poses and fresh coats of paint. Does thinking about Eli mean I’m stuck in the past? Or am I thinking of him because of the emptiness of the future? Why am I supposed to get over him? What about reducing and reusing and recycling? Shouldn’t we try to make something worthwhile from the things that are already in front of us?
Sweat collected in the channel of my spine. If the mind was a sponge, then higher humidity decreased its capacity for further absorption. I couldn’t tell if the metaphor made any sense. My shirt was scrunched up between the tile and my belly. The house had air conditioning, but Steve taught environmental science. Obviously use the air conditioning if you need to, Jan had said, but try to be sparing.
I rolled onto my back. Why was I here? The question tugged at my heart like the sleeves of an impractical blouse. I was so frivolous. Each evening, I opened all the windows. In the mornings I closed them, tugging the blinds to cover every possible inch of solar gain. This was to keep the house cool without technology. I was battling the climate crisis. I had so much time.
Ellie wanted to have a picnic. She said she would assign me what to bring. I was supposed to bring hummus and vegetables.
Only carrots? she said, peering into my bag.
We were in the woods, at the rock where I always went with Cecelia. Since Ellie had picked the menu, I got to pick the location.
You said hummus, I explained. That means carrots.
Carrots were my favorite vegetable to buy. They were the least expensive. They were what I already had in my fridge.
I said vegetables! That means cucumbers! Bell peppers! Celery, if you must!
Ellie was irate.
Ellie had brought goat cheese and fig chutney and a loaf of bread that echoed when you knocked on it. We straddled the rock and arranged the food between us. The bread was like taking a bite from a living coral reef, decadent and spongy.
Ellie said she hadn’t brought a knife on purpose—tearing tasted so much better. She said it with her mouth full. It was one of those statements that everyone our age made, but made me think this is why we’re friends when it happened to be my friend saying it.
Ellie asked if I knew what I was doing in the fall.
It had been a while since I’d been asked the question. I’d kept my shoulders turned away from it. That was the purpose of boys: they gave you something else to think about.
I said it looked like I was stuck here. This had been true since I took the yoga studio job. They needed someone through November, and I only had Jan and Steve’s through August. I would need to find other housing, and most leases were yearlong, and at some point, things stopped being what you were doing “for now” and became what you were doing.
A glob of hummus fell from Ellie’s carrot onto the rock. She swiped it up with her finger and put it in her mouth.
Interesting, she said, okay.
She dipped the empty carrot back into the hummus. This time it made it to her mouth all in one piece.
But, she said, couldn’t you just stay at your dad’s for two months? If you really wanted to leave? I mean, even the job. It’s just a yoga studio. They could get someone else. If there was something else you wanted to do instead?
I shrugged. If. If there was something else.
Ellie wrinkled her nose at me. You goose, she said.
The sun lowered itself slowly onto its sofa at the end of a long day. Ellie was facing east, so the wisps of hair around her face went all Renaissance filigree. I was facing west, so my wrists, spreading goat cheese on a hunk of bread with a jammy spoon, looked smooth and tanned.
We talked about other things, and then, after we closed the hummus, Ellie asked about my love life.
I said I was trying not to think about boys as much. A big part of New Year’s resolutions, I had read, was not getting discouraged by relapses.
Ellie laughed. What do you think about instead?
I almost said “skunks,” but then Ellie suggested “girls?” and it was my turn to laugh.
She frowned. No, it’s a serious question. Would you date girls, do you think?
I crossed my legs. Yes, no, maybe. I’d considered it. But it hadn’t happened—there hadn’t been any concrete possibilities.
Ellie frowned deeper. That seems untrue, she said. That seems more like you failing to recognize concrete things as possible.
Maybe my silence made Ellie feel bad, because then she said it didn’t matter. All she meant was that girls could be nice. They planned cute dates. They gave you things. I could be getting fresh crusty bread for free, too! I needed to put myself out there.
What?
She waved what was left of the loaf of bread in the air. It was from Brynn, obviously! Or had Ellie not told me that Brynn worked at the bakery with Eli? She was forgetting how much I knew.
Maybe I didn’t put enough goat cheese on my next bite, or maybe the bread tasted worse after that.
It’s always a choice—what to count, and what not to count. The skunk walked onward. The wind exhaled, and a single maple seed that had withstood the winter’s gales and the spring’s blizzards fell down. She kept walking.
I biked to the library and checked out a copy of the book that had been on Eli’s nightstand six years ago. The cover looked different from how I remembered Eli’s looking. It showed a floating top hat. I couldn’t remember what Eli’s had shown, only that it hadn’t been a floating top hat.
Standing in the silence between two bookshelves, I flipped through the book. The spine was in that rare flaccid condition of being equally happy to flop open to any page. No past reader had made more of an impression than any other. The book wasn’t always trying to return you to here.
On my way out of the library, I paused by the stairs. This was the library I’d grown up with, not the one in Jan and Steve’s town. There was a small art gallery on the top floor. My father never went to this library without visiting it. He used to lift me up so I could stare at the paintings straight on. Remember, he would say, no art is above you.
I took the stairs two at a time. Today the gallery was filled with pen-and-ink sketches. The one to the left of the door showed a laundry line with a disproportionate number of bras. Then again, maybe the garments on the line were only the ones that couldn’t be tumble dried.
I backed up and skimmed the ABOUT THE ARTIST brochure on the stool by the door. The gallery only ever showed local artists, which meant artists that had day jobs. This one was a bank teller. Maybe bank tellers wore bras more often than yoga studio receptionists. Still—no one I knew washed their bras with any frequency. Maybe the drawing showed a special occasion. The bank teller wanted to signal a new beginning. She would wash all her bras at once and start anew.
I planned to walk quickly around the room. Lingering in front of artwork was almost always performative. At the second to last drawing, I stopped. This one was larger than the others. At first it seemed to be a Noah’s ark variation. Animals flooded a living room. Two owls roosted on the top edge of a flat-screen TV. Bats hung from the ceiling fan. A bear in an easy chair opened a picture book so that everyone could see. The piece was titled Story Time. Coming down the stairs at the side of the room was a single skunk.
The universe shook its head at me in disapproval. I left the library without looking at the final drawing.
At the grocery store, there was a sale on grapes. The sign had a big yellow number printed on it. I thought it was the price per bag. At the register, watching the numbers come up on the screen behind the cashier, I realized it was the price per pound.
Actually, I said, no grapes. I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry, is that totally annoying?
The cashier assured me it wasn’t annoying. She put the bag of grapes on a small counter behind her, canceled the transaction, and started again on the items she’d already packed into my shopping bag. Milk, eggs, carrots.
The buttons on the PIN pad blurred. There had been no reason not to buy the grapes. Eli hadn’t contacted me since the cookout. I was used to feeling like the things I wanted were bad for me. I blinked furiously.
It was a good book. It grabbed me. I carried it places—except “places” only ever meant “the yoga studio”—under my arm.
The book was about a man who had relations with women. Some of the women were his friends. One of the women was his wife. He was in love with the wife. The relations were all sexual. His wife was sincere and distressed by infidelity. She was the sort of woman you were supposed to avoid becoming. The friend-women were more likeable, though they didn’t get the guy. I wondered if those were my two options: single and happy, or partnered and distressed. But no—that couldn’t be true. What the women wanted mattered more than what they had. I could desire a relationship and be unhappy, or not desire a relationship and be content.
While the Pilates students rolled up their mats, I placed the book face down on the desk, open to the page where I’d left off.
Stacy came out of the studio last. She set her water bottle next to the book. She rooted through her bag for a comb, squinting at the cover. A comb, a bottle of dry shampoo, a hair tie, and a compact mirror migrated from her bag to the desk.
Isn’t that book supposed to be sort of misogynistic? she said, spraying a cloud of dry shampoo onto her hairline.
What?
Stacy shrugged. She thought she recognized it from one of those fuckboy starter pack memes. But she was old. She didn’t understand the internet.
Oh, I said. Maybe. I’m not sure.
She combed her hair into a fresh ponytail with tiny strokes, then picked up the compact mirror to inspect her work. Next came lip balm, which had been hiding in a secret pocket of her leggings. She said she used to read books. She said I should try to avoid growing up. Now that her lips were moisturized, she could leave. She hoped I would have a good weekend.
I wheeled my swivel chair out from behind the desk and over to the box fan. All the students were gone. Stacy was gone. It was time to go home. Had the lip balm been the last step in her post-workout beauty routine, or was she even now swiping mascara on in the front seat of her car? I picked up the book and kept reading.
Another difference between the friend-women and the wife-woman was that the wife was a virgin before she met the man. The wife stood naked in front of him and he felt responsible. He felt excited to guide and protect.
I hadn’t lost my virginity to Eli. He’d only guided and protected.
I wondered if how the man in the book saw the world was also how High School Eli saw the world. In high school, maybe I’d seemed like a wife-type. That was why he’d had to turn away. He hadn’t been ready for that kind of responsibility. Now I was getting invited to barbecues. What did it mean? Was it possible to cross over? Could I have become a friend-type? Or was he ready to settle down?
I understood my problem. Then and now, I was a wife-type trying to pass myself off as a friend-type. It was a problem because I never knew if I’d succeeded. Maybe Eli hadn’t considered his actions a “turning away.” If we’d only ever been friends, nothing had begun or ended.
I put away the box fans and went home. Before, I would have described the book as “honest,” but maybe Stacy was right. Maybe the word I was looking for was “misogynistic.” I was eating it up.
The second obstacle was a mushroom and a violently blue butterfly. They existed as a unit. It wouldn’t make sense to think of them as separate obstacles.
The mushroom was shaped like a folded parasol, tall and narrow. It wore the butterfly like a hat, and the butterfly wore the mushroom like a plinth. Neither moved a muscle. Even if it had been part of a stop-motion movie of fungi blossoming, the mushroom would have sat still for as long as the butterfly cared to stay.
The skunk looked only for a moment. She couldn’t go over it, and she couldn’t go under it. She backed up. Once she was far enough away that she wouldn’t have been able to feel the breeze created by a flap of the butterfly’s wings, she turned north and moved forward again. She walked a wide arc around the spot where she knew the woods were already full.
Cecelia’s family returned from Maine. Jon opened the door with his headphones around his neck and his glasses perched in his hair. He looked older and younger—tired and inspired. It was great, he said.
They’d gone on a whale watch and Cecelia had been all confused about why the whales didn’t look like her whale stuffed animal. We should have warned her they weren’t going to be orcas, he said. Anyway, she’s in the TV room.
Jon and Amelie kept the TV in the guest bedroom, away from the living area. Cecelia lay on the bed on her stomach. She was watching a program about anthropomorphized trains.
Okay, I announced to the room, Isabel’s here, no more TV.
I always felt like a substitute teacher when I talked about myself in the third person.
Cecelia shook her head. Her eyes didn’t move from the screen. The episode isn’t over, she said.
I put my hands on my hips. Then I put them back at my sides. For a second, I tried to tune in to what was happening in the show. The trains were singing. One of the trains needed a part replaced, and the other trains were going to work together to help it. From previous arguments with Cecelia, I knew that every episode followed the same format. Right now, the trains were racing along the track to find their missing friend. That meant it was less than half over.
Okay, I said, but you can finish it later. Haven’t you seen this one before?
She didn’t respond.
That’s the rule, I said. No TV when the babysitter is here. I’m sorry.
She kept looking at the TV.
I’m going to turn off the television now, Cecelia.
I clicked the power button on the base of the TV set. Cecelia screamed and planted her face in the blankets.
I sat down beside her.
Do you want to read a book? Or go to the stream?
You’re mean, Cecelia said into the mattress.
I sighed and picked up a picture book from the bedside table. In general, I believed in no mercy. There was psychology behind it: something about kids needing structure and strict boundaries in order to feel safe. The picture book had a lobster boat on the cover.
Is this new? I asked. Did you get it in Maine?
Cecelia scooted away from me.
I read the book out loud. Even though the main characters were the fishermen, all the lobsters had smiley faces. I found this disturbing. Weren’t we supposed to like the fishermen? Why were the illustrators emphasizing the subjectivity of the protagonists’ victims? Was it meant to prepare children for the real world?
Cecelia turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, heaving great sighs every minute or so. The book ended. I put it back on the side table and resisted the urge to take out my phone.
Okay, I said, we’re going to the park.
I left her in the TV room while I packed the snack bag. In this instance, I believed in the healing power of a change of scenery. At the park, Jon would be out of earshot. There would be no audience for my weak attempts at discipline.
But Cecelia followed the rules. She Velcroed her shoes by herself. She took my hand when we got to the crosswalk. Her palm, in my fingers, stayed limp.
I asked about the vacation. Had it been fun?
Yes.
Had she gone swimming?
Yes.
What was her favorite part?
Ice cream.
What flavor of ice cream did she get?
Lobster Tracks.
What was in Lobster Tracks?
She didn’t remember.
Normally, when Cecelia and I hadn’t seen each other for a while, she would turn up taller and tanner and more talkative than she’d been before. A few weeks mattered. Time was moving forward, taking her with it. Like always, I could see that she was older. This time, though, the differences weren’t physical. This time she had learned to hold a grudge.
She climbed up the slide, ignoring the ladder, and slid back down. She did it again. And again. The slide was in a spiral shape. Each time she climbed up, she placed her feet in exactly the same spots along the plastic curve. I sat down on the center of the seesaw. Déjà vu and vertigo were cousins.
The hours passed. When it was time for me to leave, Cecelia watched Jon count out the cash from his wallet and hand it to me.
Can I watch TV now? she asked him.
Jon rubbed the bridge of his nose.
I shut the door behind me. It was the time of year when you could see just by looking who watered their lawns. Jon and Amelie’s grass was brown. Across the street, little red flags with danger symbols marched around a crisp block of green. I wished I’d biked instead of driven. I never biked to Cecelia’s. There were too many hills; it was too far. As I drove, the car radio told me about the stock market. I didn’t register if the stock market was going up or down, only that the reporters were using their stock market voices. When I turned off the ignition at Jan and Steve’s, I realized I’d forgotten to buy milk. That morning, I’d used the last of it, thinking I would stop and get more on the way back from Cecelia’s. I put my forehead on the steering wheel and sobbed.
That same night, Jon and Amelie sent a text asking if I could babysit on Friday evening. The independent cinema was having a Fellini retrospective. Their first date, back in college, had been to see a Fellini movie. Today the film was online. Anyone could rent it and watch it on their couch, but Jon and Amelie wanted to experience the magic of a large dark room. And to support local businesses, if I was free.
Really though, they said in a separate text message, only if you’re free. It’s a Friday! You’re young!
I tapped on the oval where you were supposed to type replies. I hovered my fingers above the keyboard, then set the phone down.
On my computer, I navigated to the cinema’s website. Tickets were twelve dollars. I watched the trailer. A man spoke in Italian. White letters superimposed across the bottom of the screen spoke about wanting to create a perfect film. For the white letters, perfection meant truth. I didn’t like the man. It was so typical of him to equate truth and beauty. It also explained why all the women around him wore dark eyeliner. He was clearly the type to fall for it—to think that was really what their eyes looked like.
I put a single ticket in the virtual cart, then closed the window without paying. Jon and Amelie might have other babysitters up their sleeves. Or they might not, and then I would be alone in a movie theater with no intrigue.
I told Jon and Amelie I couldn’t do it.
It had been kind of them to think I might be busy. I didn’t need to shatter the illusion. Besides—telling Cecelia to stop watching TV frightened me. It frightened me both when she didn’t listen and when she did.
On Friday evening I picked up my phone. It was 6:47 PM. It was only four minutes later than the last time I’d picked up my phone. I lay on the carpet with my ankles underneath my knees and peeled my spine off the floor one vertebra at a time. I am young, I said out loud. I am young.
At 7:23, I had a sudden desire to go Night Swimming. Night Swimming was something people always pronounced as if it had capital letters, as if it were separate from normal swimming. At first, my desire embarrassed me. Probably I didn’t want to swim at all. Probably I only wanted to feel bleak and romantic. I got on my bike.
The roads to the pond were empty. The sky was gray-orange, like Cecelia’s playdough after she made “pizza,” not realizing the colors couldn’t be unstuck. I tried to keep the wheels of the bike in between the two yellow lines. It worked better when I was looking ahead instead of at the lines—but of course this was hard to verify. If I was looking ahead, how could I be sure of where the wheels were?
It wasn’t a good pond. To get in you had to wade through a ring of mud. I sat on the log where people always left their clothes and waited for it to get dark. At least I didn’t see any high schoolers. That had been another reason not to come. The pond was—or used to be—a popular party spot. I’d never gone to the parties, only seen the videos on social media the morning after.
In high school, I’d assumed teenage boys got less scary once you were older than they were. But the reverse had happened. Now they could wield their youth over me, too.
The clouds reflected in the water turned from flat and orange to shiny and deep. I took off my clothes. I’d been coming here since I was small. Ellie’s and my parents used to stay on the shore while we swam. We’d debate which inch of skin was most sensitive to the first lick of cold water: the backs of our knees, the upper inner thigh, the belly button? Then we’d dive in and practice wiggling our spines like the mermaids on that show about Australian mermaids.
I dove in. That was something that deserved capital letters: Swimming Where You Got the Top of Your Head Wet versus swimming where you didn’t. There were other words for it: Total immersion. Baptism.
In one morning-after video, Eli and Damien had stood waist-deep in the water, howling at the moon.
Tonight, the moon looked down at me like a nanny from another era. It had lots of children to look after, and I could become an astronaut if I had anything important to say. I tried to howl, still doggy paddling. It came out shivery and thin. This had less to do with the doggy paddling and more to do with being a girl. I couldn’t convince myself to let go and make noise. Then I got embarrassed about not being able to make noise. Then I realized the anticipation of the embarrassment was one of the things holding me back in the first place. Most things worked in circles.
Back on shore, I jumped up and down to shake off the water before putting my clothes on. The bushes rustled. I froze.
No one appeared. I put my shirt on, keeping my elbows close to my body. My hair dripped metronomically down my back. The bushes rustled again, farther away. The rustle was larger than a squirrel but smaller than a human. I let my elbows get farther from my body. Why had I assumed the noise came from a human? There were other active beings exerting their wills on the world. There were possums and raccoons. On the walk back to my bike I turned my phone flashlight on, examining the plants by the trail. Poison ivy; Virginia creeper; winterberry. There was no skunk cabbage in sight, but the smell was in the air. Could it have originated with the animal rather than the plant? It seemed like too much to hope for. I’d read articles about trees communicating through their root systems. Did skunks have root systems, too? Could a skunk in a yard and a skunk near a pond agree that they had seen the same girl?
I couldn’t avoid Cecelia forever. Jon and Amelie asked if I could help her sort her stuffed animals. She was getting a new bed. The big-girl bed took up more space and didn’t have a railing. To make room for maturity, she had agreed to cull some of her belongings.
Jon gave us two big boxes, one labeled KEEP and one labeled TOSS. Cecelia couldn’t read, but she knew which was which. She knew K and T.
I picked up a stuffed llama. What about this guy? I asked.
She snatched it out of my hands.
I can do it myself, said Cecelia. I have a system. And Llamalina is a girl.
Llamalina went into the KEEP box. So did a pig and a Winnie-the-Pooh. A unicorn and Caroline, the orca whale, went into TOSS. Cecelia worked quickly, never hesitating once she’d picked someone up. I felt almost insulted on Caroline’s behalf. It was one thing to be tossed, and another to be tossed with no regrets. Two years earlier, Cecelia hadn’t been able to fall asleep without her.
I fingered the whale’s flipper where it hung over the edge of the cardboard. The plush had been worn down into solid nubbins. Are you sure about Caroline? I asked.
Cecelia nodded. Yes, she said. It’s my system.
A dragon with reflective wings went into TOSS.
When all the animals were sorted, I asked what the system had been. How had she known where to put everyone?
I kept all the real animals, she said. Duh.
Cecelia stood up and moved two of the KEEP animals—the pig and an owl—back to their spot on her bedside table.
What do you mean? I asked.
All the animals that really exist, Cecelia repeated.
I stared at the boxes.
What about Winnie-the-Pooh? I asked.
He’s a bear, she said. Bears are real.
But Cecelia, I said, whales are real, too. Caroline is a whale.
No, she said, she’s an orca.
And orcas are a type of whale. They’re real.
Cecelia put her hands on her hips. Isabel, she said, you don’t have to pretend. I’m a big girl now. I know orcas are fake, like Santa.
I made her sit down on the small-girl bed with me.
Who told you orcas are fake?
She hugged her knees to her chest. Daddy and Mommy. On the whale watch. We only saw other kinds of whales, and I asked why, and Daddy said because the orcas live far away, like at the North Pole and stuff. And the North Pole isn’t real. That’s where Santa and the elves and the pretend things are.
She’d tilted her chin down so she was looking up at me even though we were pretty much level.
I crossed my legs so the other one was on top. I opened my mouth, and then shut it. It seemed like a moment when I could justify exposing her to technology. We started with a map of the world, huddling together over my phone. The area at the top, I explained, was the North Pole. It was a real place, but the reality of the thing was different from the way people sometimes imagined it to be. There was a lot of ice and cold water, but no elves or toy workshops. And in the ice and water, there were sometimes orca whales.
I pulled up photos of the whales, as well, but somehow those were less convincing. Something about the crisp black-and-white lines over the aquarium-blue water looked computer-generated.
I took Caroline out of the TOSS box and handed her to Cecelia. She wiggled the dorsal fin back and forth without looking at me.
We can go ask your dad, if you want, I said. He’ll explain. I think you just misunderstood. But it makes sense why you thought that. I liked your logic.
She shrugged.
I stood up and pushed the boxes to a strip of bare wall by the door. A pair of footie pajamas lay crumpled on the dresser. I tried to straighten them out, but the footie parts wouldn’t stay folded.
Isabel, Cecelia whispered, what about the skunks?
I turned to face her. She was holding Caroline tight to her stomach, her mouth all pinched and serious. My fingers tensed involuntarily on the pajamas. What do you mean?
Are they real?
She blinked at me, twice.
Yes, I said, skunks are real.
Cecelia threw Caroline to the floor and lay back on the bed, hands over her face.
I don’t get it, she wailed. Why did Mommy and Daddy eat the mustard?
The night of Skunk Christmas, they’d set out the cards and the plate of mustard on the porch, just like they set out cookies and letters for Santa. Cecelia hadn’t been able to sleep. She knew she wasn’t supposed to peek, but she couldn’t help it. She got out of bed and looked out the window. And there were her parents, eating the mustard that she’d left for the skunks!
I know they eat the cookies for Santa, she told me, because Santa doesn’t exist, so he can’t eat them himself. But if the skunks exist, then why would they eat the mustard? Why didn’t they leave it for the skunks?
Oh Cecelia, I said.
She sat up and looked at me, eyebrows all scrunched together. I reached out one finger and ran it down her forehead.
Do you want me to braid your hair? I asked.
She frowned. A beat of silence. Can you do a French braid?
We got her Little Mermaid hairbrush from the bathroom. Ariel’s face had almost worn off the plastic handle, but it was the only brush she’d accept. She sat on my lap, facing away.
I tried to explain that things didn’t always act the way you wanted them to. We couldn’t control other people, let alone skunks. Skunks probably didn’t like mustard. Out of all the things her father had told her, that was the only lie.
She nodded slightly, the hair between my fingers going taut then slack. There were tangles at the nape of her neck, a collection of knots like little burrs. I would just braid them in. It wasn’t a moment for pulling.
At the pond, the Eldest Skunk had her third and final epiphany. The pond came to her like the evening, gradually and then all at once. Suddenly she recognized the smells that had already been in her nostrils. There was mud, and skunk cabbage, and the dissolved egg jelly the tadpoles had left behind. A pond. Not knowing the name “skunk cabbage,” she felt no affinity for the plant. She drank. The skunk in the water drank, too.
Mud nestled between the pads of her feet. She wanted to tell the oriole that the skunk in the water had followed her. Would the oriole call it failure or success, to find the familiar so far from home? Was it a comfort, or a rendering moot of her journey?
A line of ducks arced across the water. Mother and babies. Counting still wasn’t instinctual for the skunk, so she didn’t notice how many there were. The mother duck floated, while the ducklings attempted to float and became frustrated when it came out as paddling. Their tails gave them away, vibrating above the water. They couldn’t hide how much hard work went into moving forward.
The mother dove straight downward. She did not say “Wait here, darlings.” The ducklings knew to wait. They might have waited forever and not noticed. Their mother might have been eaten by a snapping turtle at the bottom of the pond, and the ducklings would have stayed. To a duckling, there is nothing embarrassing in waiting for something you love. The point of something you love is that it will come back.
The mother duck returned, and the ducklings broke formation. They paddled around her like ants celebrating a stale breadcrumb. The mother distributed pondweed.
The skunk rested her chin on her paws, but kept her haunches raised. The oriole used to distribute earthworms to his children like that. How many of his children were still alive?
The ducks fell back into line, and the skunk remembered to count.
One.
It wasn’t the oriole that she wanted. The oriole was far away, and skunks do not wish for sunshine when it’s raining.
Two, three, eleven.
It was time to go home. The Eldest Skunk ran as if there was a bear chasing her, even if it was a bear she’d left her house explicitly to find. Eleven, eleven, eleven!
I picked up my phone from the nightstand. There was a text from an unknown number. The text had been sent at 11:12 PM. From this, I knew the sender had something I didn’t: a reason to stay awake in the evening.
hi Isabel. hope you’re doing well. was wondering if you would want to get coffee sometime? and gossip etc?
I brushed my teeth and racked my brains. Yes, I’d imagined writing my name and number on countless receipts. I’d picked out people on park benches that I might give the receipts to: the one with the Goodnight Moon tote bag, the one using a copy of The Bell Jar as a sun visor while they watched their friends play tennis. I’d never done it.
At 7:27 AM I replied.
Sorry, who is this?
I took a sip of instant coffee. It needed a half splash more milk. I crossed to the fridge. By the time I was back at the table, there was a new notification.
brynn lol
i thought Eli had given u my number
oh well!
So Brynn had reasons to be awake in the morning as well as in the evening. Maybe I’d already known that—she worked at a bakery. In what context had Eli told her I’d asked for her number? He’d sent me the number, but I hadn’t saved it in my contacts. Brynn was for Ellie.
Oh! I typed. It was too late to pretend to be someone who didn’t start sentences with capital letters.
Yes, sure, what day?
I hovered over the send button. Then I deleted what day? and replaced it with maybe Saturday? In Brynn’s world, I could still be someone with a busy schedule.
Athena meowed.
You’ve already been fed, I told her.
She meowed again. I picked up her water dish and dumped it into the sink. The inside of the bowl felt slightly slimy. I ran my fingers around it under the faucet until it felt clean. What did that word mean—gossip? It meant something to do with Ellie, I decided. Brynn would want to know what her deal was, or if she was looking for a relationship. Ellie hated to be talked about.
On Saturday, there was a ring of condensation on the table left from the last customer. I ran my sleeve over it. I’d worn long sleeves in preparation for the air conditioning.
The Black Sheep had been Brynn’s choice. By choosing it instead of the bakery, was she avoiding the politics of giving me free food, or avoiding being seen by Eli? When I questioned men’s motives, the options were either a) the reason I thought they had done something or b) the reason I hoped they had done something. But Brynn wasn’t a man. I honestly didn’t know what she wanted. She was harder to predict, or I had fewer preferences about her feelings.
I got there first and claimed the booth seat. Across the room, a teenage girl lifted her phone to take a photo of her friend. Then she lowered the phone. She rearranged their coffee cups. The cups were tall and iced and green. The friend moved her own phone off the table and undid her ponytail. They tried again.
It was four minutes past the hour Brynn and I had agreed on. Picking up my phone to check the time felt like asking your parents “Are we there yet?” on a long car ride.
I hadn’t told Ellie I was meeting Brynn. Without knowing Brynn’s motives, what was there to tell? That was the excuse I rehearsed in my head. Maybe I was being selfish. I wanted to pretend the meeting was about me, not about Ellie.
At eight minutes past, Brynn pushed open the door. She didn’t have a bag, or long sleeves. She stood behind the chair across from me and bit her lip.
Do you want to go someplace else? she asked.
What?
I don’t know. Ice cream? She crossed her arms. Rachid isn’t here, and I only picked here because I thought he might report back to Eli. And then it would be, I don’t know. Drama. It’s too late in the day for coffee.
Across the room, the phone girls scooted their chairs next to each other. They leaned in, inspecting the photos. With their heads right next to each other, you couldn’t tell where one girl’s hair started and the other’s began. They were both blonde. Brynn and I left the café.
In the car, with her feet flat on the floor of the passenger side, Brynn was surprised I hadn’t taken a Pilates class. She used to date a Pilates instructor.
You should try it, she said. It’s good for you. Not the exercise, but the experience. Like going to a restaurant by yourself.
In line for ice cream, I asked what she’d meant about Rachid, and Eli, and causing drama.
Shh, she said. She kept her eyes on the list of flavors. Cookie dough or purple cow. Cookie dough or purple cow?
She said it twice, like the names might reveal something.
Hanging pots of mums decorated the eaves of the farm stand. We were still in line. Which one is your favorite? she asked.
I pointed to a pot of yellow mums at the end of the row.
Hmm, said Brynn. Yes, that one is very you.
We took our ice creams to the picnic tables behind the farm stand building. Brynn had grown up in Albuquerque. Her two little brothers still lived there with her mom. Sometimes she missed the pesto rolls from the city food co-op, and the little brothers. Her dad had come here first. He’d taken an administrative position at the university, which meant she could follow him here while pretending it was only because of the free tuition. Now he was off at Stanford. Brynn was twenty-four. She ate her ice cream slowly, with the tip of her tongue. She didn’t know if she would move back to Albuquerque in one year or in ten.
When I finish my ice cream, she said, we’ll talk for real.
I liked her talent for suspense.
And until then?
Tell me a story.
I was halfway done with my cone. She hadn’t bitten into hers. There was still a smooth hemisphere of purple cream rising above it. There was still a tiny spot of gluey paper stuck to the bottom of mine. I took another bite.
Hmm, I said. Once upon a time there were three skunks.
A toddler at the next picnic table screamed. Their ice cream had fallen from the cone into the gravel.
William! said the adult who was with them. This is why I told you to get it in a bowl!
William sobbed harder.
Brynn and I watched in silence. The sun went behind a cloud and the hairs on my arms stood up straighter. I felt full of love for these people, who were putting their lives on display. We were all William—choosing wrongly, even when others warned us it would lead to despair. We were all adults—wringing our hands at youth.
And? said Brynn. What were their names?
Whose names?
The skunks.
Oh. Skunks are very private about their names, I said. They don’t tell just anyone.
Brynn nodded. That makes sense.
I’m sorry, I said. I don’t know what happens next.
I meant in the story she’d asked for, but maybe Brynn understood my words differently. She tucked the bottom half of her cone into her napkin, uneaten. I guess, she said, we need to talk about Eli.
I thought I’d misheard, or she’d misspoken.
About Ellie, you mean?
Brynn frowned. She turned toward me on the picnic bench so she was sitting crisscross applesauce.
No, she said. Eli. The tall one with curly hair. The guy we’re both fucking?
I tore off a corner of a paper napkin and stuffed it into the space between the boards of the picnic table. Three Canada geese flew overhead, honking, though it wasn’t the season for migration. The pieces of the world were up in the air, waiting to rearrange themselves before falling back to earth. Where would they land? What was happening?
I’m not fucking Eli, I said.
Oh.
Brynn got up and put her ice cream in the trash, then sat back down.
I guess I just assumed—
She closed her mouth again.
I shook my head. In high school, I said, once. But not now.
Welp, said Brynn. Now I look like a jealous not-even-girlfriend. God.
Brynn had met Eli when he started working at the bakery, when she was still dating the Pilates instructor. At first they were just coworkers. They had a running argument about if Brynn got more tips because she was a better barista or because she was a girl.
That’s the thing about Eli, said Brynn. He sucks, but I like him anyway.
Then the Pilates instructor told Brynn she wanted an open relationship. Brynn agreed. Brynn and Eli had sex. A month later, the Pilates instructor changed her mind. She brought Brynn a bottle of wine and said let’s be monogamous. Brynn said no, it doesn’t work like that, you can’t just go back and forth. Polyamory agreed with her. So Kendra—that was her name, the Pilates instructor—felt like Brynn was prioritizing Eli over her. Kendra and Brynn broke up.
Brynn still felt bad about it all. She’d told Kendra the breakup didn’t have anything to do with Eli, but maybe it had. Maybe Kendra had been right.
I had a whole row of napkin pieces stuffed into the crack in the table at this point. A sunburn whispered at the back of my neck. I didn’t want to make any sudden movements. Keep talking, keep talking. I prayed like I was praying for a stoplight to stay green.
Brynn didn’t know why she was telling me this. It wasn’t my problem.
But what’s happening now? I asked. Why did you think Eli and I—?
Brynn looked me up and down.
I’m sorry, she said. I’m confused. Like, if you and Eli aren’t hooking up, are you friends? Am I making weirdness for you two by telling you all this? Is what I say here going to get back to him? Would you admit it if it was?
I lifted my hands, helpless. How could I explain to Brynn that I felt loyal to her in a way I would never feel toward Eli? She was a girl who liked pesto and missed her father.
Eli and I don’t really know each other, I said. We have, like, context without substance.
What does “substance” mean?
Any real knowledge of each other as people? Chemistry?
You have chemistry, said Brynn. Trust me.
At the start of June, Eli told Brynn that a girl he’d gone to high school with would be house-sitting for his parents. He said it when he and Brynn were lying naked in bed. He’d orgasmed, but she hadn’t. He talked about the house-sitting in terms of his relationship with his parents, and belonging and approval. Then he asked if Brynn still wanted him to go down on her. Or was she all set?
She was all set.
The day after the cookout, when they were alone together in the bakery, he told her he’d hooked up with me in high school. Brynn was cleaning underneath the rack of to-go cup lids. Eli was behind the register, working on a crossword.
Did I ever tell you, he said, that Isabel and I hooked up in high school? Yeah. Anyway. Seven letters, tired. Any ideas?
It was the fact that he’d kept it a secret so long that made Brynn suspicious. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know why he’d suddenly decided she needed the information.
Oh, Brynn said, stacking the lids. She seemed cool.
Eli looked up. Sorry, what?
She seemed cool.
Who?
Isabel.
Oh! Yeah. Yeah, she is.
Eli went back to his crossword.
I didn’t know how to say anything else without seeming suspicious, said Brynn. You know? But I was suspicious! Or frustrated, or unsatisfied, or something. He never tells me things. But I didn’t know if my annoyance was justified. Sometimes there’s nothing to tell. So finally I was like, okay, if I want to know more about Isabel, I should talk to Isabel.
A family that had ordered multiple banana splits arrived at the edge of the seating area. The children hadn’t been allowed to carry their splits. Adult hands held the paper sundae trays aloft. The children trotted beneath like dogs at puppy kindergarten. Unlike William, they wouldn’t make their own mistakes.
Brynn and I ceded our table.
Since we’d driven from town in one car, and since the sky was the blue of a free-range farmers market egg, we didn’t say goodbye. We started discussing where to go next without asking the question. Brynn said I was the local guide.
Surprise me, she said. It’s your turn, though.
So I told her my story.
He was a bass and I was an alto. I added Damien on Snapchat; Eli added me. There was a party at the pond, and a video of Eli and Damien howling at the moon.
After chorus that Monday, Eli caught up with me in the hallway. He’d never sought me out in public before. Damien’s into you, he said. You should go for it.
So the next weekend I hooked up with Damien. It sounds oversimplified, and it felt that way in real life, too. There’d been so many years of kissing feeling like an impossibility that could only happen to other people. Then, suddenly, it was something that could happen very easily. It didn’t make sense.
That’s exactly how it was for me, too, said Brynn. Can I turn down the air conditioning?
I nodded. She reached for the dial.
Damien and I did things besides kiss, too, mostly because they offered a clear ending point. An orgasm was a way of knowing when the interaction was over without having to speak about it. While I put on my clothes, he told me about the pond conversation. Before or after the howling, Eli had apparently identified me as “pretty hot.” Months later, I hooked up with Eli. But that hookup didn’t matter as much. Eli had already changed my life.
Driving home from Damien’s house in my father’s car—I’d borrowed it claiming I was going to Claudia’s—I felt like a little soap bubble. I didn’t know anything more about sex than I had two hours before, but now I would be allowed to talk about it as if I did. I called Claudia on speakerphone. She cried. I’m proud of you, she said, I just expected to be first.
On Monday, I understood the full extent of the change. Danny Gonzales nodded to me as I was putting my coat in my locker. Danny Gonzales hadn’t previously acknowledged my existence, though our lockers had been next to each other all year. Hey, Isabel, he said. Did you have a good weekend?
Brynn slapped her knee. That is so classic, she said. I mean, that is straight out of a movie.
At lunch, all my friends reported being asked by their friends to confirm or deny the event. Damien hadn’t hooked up with anyone before, either, so it was big news.
I considered driving to the pond, but I wanted a place untainted by history. I picked the shoe store. It was next to the supermarket. You parked on the same ocean of pavement. Seagulls roosted on the lamp poles, and the sea was hours away.
Does this place have cheese samples? Brynn asked as we pulled in.
I don’t think so, I said. But we’re here to look at shoes, not food.
She laughed. I forget, she said, that girls are so much more creative than boys. Not to stereotype. But Eli would never do this.
Being compared to Eli made a small butterfly land between my shoulder blades. I tried not to notice it. Chewing up ten marshmallows seemed like creativity, but maybe it was something else. Maybe it was just a toddler’s instinct to stick everything in their mouth.
Neither of us needed new shoes. We made up pretend reasons to shop. I was moving to a small town in northern Italy, and she was attending a dinner party at NBA star Jimmy Butler’s house. I needed something elegant and understated; she needed to be tall enough to talk to professional basketball players. We found shoes for Italy in the men’s dress aisle. That’s where they put all the good leather, said Brynn. In Men’s. The shoes were gray, with seams that curved like liquid eyeliner. Tiny holes patterned the sides like bouquets of baby’s breath.
Brynn’s boots were in Clearance. It was know-at-first-sight. They were teal. From the toe to the top of the calf, they were made of shiny rain-slickerish plastic. The heel was like a brick or a can of beans. Above the plastic there was a section of quilted snow-pant material, with a drawstring to keep it cinched over the knee. Wearing the shoes, Brynn was taller than me. Our faces were suddenly very close together. She had both hands on my shoulders to keep from falling over. The kiss, when it happened, was more like a salad than a baking project. I closed my eyes to pay attention to the separate parts as well as the whole. Here was a mouth; here was another mouth moving a little bit faster than the first mouth; here was a mouth observing and slowing down.
Brynn pulled back. So, she said, good boots?
Good boots.
We stuffed the crinkled paper back into the toes of the shoes we’d tried on. It was a way of assuaging the guilt of not purchasing them. Our love for the shoes was real, but there wasn’t space for that love in real life. We said we should check for cheese samples. In the supermarket, a tower of limes greeted everyone who passed through the motion-activated doors. The limes were green and priced by the pound rather than individually. We walked up and down the aisles. Brynn had grown up eating Maria and Ricardo’s tortillas, but now preferred Mission brand. There weren’t any samples, of cheese or otherwise. I drove her back to her car in the center of town. When she was standing on the pavement with the car door still open, she asked if we were going to tell Eli about this.
I didn’t know Eli very well. I said it was up to her.
Brynn flipped her ponytail from one shoulder to the other. She nodded. So basically, she said, this is a line, not a triangle. Thanks for the ride.
I clicked through radio stations in the empty car. One played an ad for Jan’s solar company. Another didn’t think we should trust the polls about the upcoming elections. Another sang a love song. What had Brynn meant about lines and triangles? It didn’t matter. This not-mattering seemed to be the main difference between boys and girls. I wasn’t worried about not understanding her. I wasn’t sure if this meant I liked girls more than boys, or less.
That night, I woke up three times to pee. I woke up more than three times, but only three of the times were for peeing. Once, Athena was on my chest. She leapt away when I fluttered my eyelashes in the dark. In the bathroom I avoided the light switch. There was a moon of one shape or another—not full, not new. The shower curtain hung inky; the toilet paper glowed charcoal. I wasn’t wearing underwear. Contentment was a new feeling. I could sit down all in one motion, without the interruption of pulling anything down. There was porcelain under my thighs and cotton T-shirt bunched in my armpits. These sensations felt like steps toward the future.
After the third pee, I checked my phone. It was 5:47 AM. No notifications. Soon the sun would rise. I walked to the master bedroom and took Jan’s bathrobe off the hook on the door of the walk-in closet. It was pink terry cloth and ended above my knees. I padded down the stairs and onto the porch.
The moon and sun hid behind their respective horizons. The sky was like someone had taken a dried-out eraser to black construction paper. The crickets held their breath. In the middle of the lawn stood a small skunk.
The skunk no longer looked like an adult in miniature. It had grown over the summer, and now it looked like an adult. Its fur was sleek and shiny. Was it an adult? Were there variables besides scale?
I stepped into the lawn. Each step felt like wading deeper, though the grass was all one length. The skunk kept its nose down, snuffing at something. Like a person treading water, it moved without moving. I stopped three yards away.
Hello, I said.
My voice tripped on the word. It was the voice of someone who hasn’t spoken that day, who hasn’t brushed their teeth.
The skunk froze. It lifted its tail slowly, like blowing up a balloon. I drew in a quick breath. The skunk turned and ran away.