I’m heeling it up a steep wooded bank into the clearing of our small town cemetery, tar balanced between my lips. I’m feeling dejected, as Zoë’s ditched me to hang out with her city-Jacks this afternoon and, while I declined her invitation to go with, I’m still managing to feel left out.
As I walk, I practice dragging without using my mitts. It’s beat when the paper sticks to my lips and hangs in this slick, film noir way. I come to my favorite spot, in the far corner of the cemetery, where a large oak stands and pushes its thick, gnarled arms to the sky. There’s a stone bench under the tree’s muscled old limbs and I sit, lean back my head, listen to nature’s clicking, singing, whispery murmur. The ground under my feet begins to dry as the sun’s rays arc through the sky’s cloudy canopy. I push my hood off and roll up my sleeves and bathe my white winter-bleached skin. I even pull off my navy knit sailor hat and stuff it in my pocket, flick my tar to the ground, stomping it out with my boot. I lean into the tree—my tree—eyes closed to soft spring air, and will the sun to pull the heavy, liquid sadness from my core.
When our (my) beloved, elderly K9, Saxby Meredith-Jones Butler the Third (though she was really only the first), was suddenly hit and killed by a neighbor’s car, Marta and I heeled it up here after the traumatic, too-real trip to the vet. Dad was outta town with Miles, so us two betties had to deal with it on our own. The hard glare of surgical lights, the sting-smell of antiseptic, the needle sinking into Saxby’s dark blue doggy vein. It was last spring, a mirror day to this one. And Marta and I sat on this very same stone bench and I sobbed and sobbed, sad to my rotten core. Marta sat quietly and it was beat she was there, but part of me wished I could just cry alone.
But then she got all massive philosophical, saying, “It’s so flip, Lu, ’cause the last time I came up here that’s exactly what I did.” And I actually believed she had, though I couldn’t imagine what she had been so worked up about. I wanted to ask, but never did.
I haven’t felt close to my sister like that since, or really before. She’s kind of a deadbeat, when it comes down to acting like a human being.
I’m thinking about her up in her dorm, blazing high I’m sure, wondering if it’d be massive weird if I dialed her up, see what’s the beat, when I’m zoomed back into the present, voices cutting through my calm quiet. I freeze where I am against the big tree, careful not to move an inch. I watch as a shaver and betty, hand in hand, heel it along the opposite side of the graveyard, light glinting in shards around the edges of their silhouettes. They go for the obvious spot in front of the view and set up a blanket by the bench overlooking the rooftops and hills of the town below. She’s giggling and his deep voice comes in short, amused bursts.
I’m invisible. My back morphs into the grooves of the tree and bark crawls up my skin and I watch, unseen, as all trees do. Together, they make the perfect picture-that-comes-in-the-frame-when-you-buy-it couple and the whole thing’s just too Hallmark for me to handle. I’m about ready to stand and make my escape when they start getting all frisky, swapping spit. They slump back onto the grass and the guy’s hand goes sliding up the girl’s loose shirt. And then her dainty hand starts working its way over the crotch of his expensively faded and torn jeans and I’m paralyzed, mortified, an animal, caged.
I look to my left, then to my right, plan my getaway in my mind—through the baby graves, under the canopy, over the bramble pile, down the hill. I stand, crouched low, ready myself to bolt, Flash-style, total-stealth. But just as I’m picking my first, tentative steps up and over the gnarled roots of the towering tree, the girl turns her head and she scopes me. I slow to a crawl, suddenly caught in an atmospheric patch as thick as blackstrap molasses, and I watch her eyes squint and then widen as she recognizes me. I recognize her, too, see she’s the brown-haired Pretty Penny, one of Eve Brooks’s doting minions and besties forevs. I freeze, realizing just how massive Ophelia I must look crouched there, hair all mussed up, rain boots up to my knees, a smiley-faced whale raincoat rolled up to my elbows, just staring.
Then the shaver-Jack, caught in the act of pulling his shirt over his head, turns, and I see it’s none other than the enigmatic Nate Gray in the flesh—literally. And me, I’m beyond gone and I don’t look back. I heel it down the slanting path, slipping on last fall’s wet, rotten leaves, hating the flip out of everyone, and all that’s wrong in this world, and myself and my crank awkward alwaysness.
“Lucy Butler?” I hear him yell. “What the—?”
And I’m running, chugging along, the back of my throat burning and aching. I fall, get up, fall again.
I am the Loser Express. Choo choo.
I get home, rattled to my core, and see there’s a note from the remaining two residents of the Butler abode saying they’re out for the night and the place is all mine. There’s even money for a pizza. I order delivery, do about ten thousand crunches, three hundred jump ropes, fifty or so (not in a row) legit, flat-backed push-ups. I pump up the tunes in the living room and rattle our McMansion with switch, swashbuckling beats until the grub arrives and I stuff my face and play video games till my eyes go blurry.
I decide I never saw what I saw, and then I decide I did, and I’m gonna tell Eve. She deserves to know, and I’m gonna spill. I sneak sips from a fifth of gin in the cupboard and dance till I’m slick with sweat, honing my skills in the reflection of the porch’s darkening double doors. I recover. I bounce back.
I’m gonna call Eve and I’m gonna tell her what’s what. And she’s gonna cry and ask me to come over, and cry some more in my arms. It’s totally maybe gonna happen. It totally maybe could.
I collapse into my bed, an entire small veggie pizza pie shifting around happily inside my gut, thinking about Eve, Ms. Ancient History, with my phone—my six-shooter—lying ready at my side. I recite her digits in my head, and the moments tick by and my heart beats faster, faster still. Until, until, until, I’m running out of steam, the night blanketing down around and over a moment that’s fading away. Gone.
I lie in my now-dark room, listening to the quiet, gurgling murmurs of my digestion, and think about Eve, and how totally Ophelia it would be for me to call her, dish it all. I won’t do it. It wouldn’t be right.
I pocket my pistol and curl up into a ball, falling asleep with the soft, oval pucker of Eve’s strawberry lips lingering on my wayward mind.