In the summer I am seventeen and naked in James’s bed.
It’s July and two A.M. in his tiny apartment in Dupont Circle and his chin is scratchy against my chest. The room is lit in flickering yellow and the sheets are gathered around our hip bones, the cat walking across our calves.
“Listen, Bennett: I want to take your picture,” he tells me. He reaches up to run his fingers through my hair.
In the summer Anna and I are seventeen in my ’88 Honda Civic.
Velocity Girl is buzzing on the broken speakers, a scratchy tape Anna made for me. Doing 75 on the Beltway and her singing along with her bare feet against the windshield. The windows are rolled down and her hair’s burning white under street lamps and I am thinking she is like maybe some kind of highway mermaid. A dangerous, stranded thing. Take a picture, quick.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.
At seventeen, Anna is tall and gangly and blonde and ridiculous, always wearing some insane outfit that involves things like Spandex biker shorts and shower shoes and cheap, ostentatious jewelry. In the best picture I have of her, she’s painted her eyes with liquid eyeliner in elaborate curlicues that stretch to her cheekbones and she’s wearing a pair of dangly plastic earrings shaped like pterodactyls with—I swear to God—little hot dogs hanging from their stupid plastic-dinosaur wings. In the photo, Anna is sitting against a brick wall outside the high school, staring at the camera, dead-on but inscrutable. There is something about Anna that’s locked away; something about her that she herself is afraid of. We’re the same like that.
Anna is beautiful, but she does her best to conceal it. When supermodels talk about how they were ugly ducklings in high school, I never believe them, but if I were to believe them, it would make me think of Anna, whose beauty is awkward and almost repellent, like a wounded bird. Walking through the halls with her, I notice that people keep their distance, and I like it. It feels good to be in the strange dazzle of her shadow.
When we’re seventeen, Anna is kind of like my girlfriend except that mostly we just hang out and watch movies and drive around with no destination. We make up pointless, self-aggrandizing stories together and we convince each other that they’re the truth. But Anna doesn’t know about James or Mike or Sam or any of them. Actually no one knows about them. Sometimes I think I’d like to tell Anna everything, but what’s the point of the truth, when the lie is so satisfying? It seems like it would change things to let her in on the secret.
And sometimes I think I’d like to kiss Anna. But that comes later.
I am in love with her. I mean, really in love. I’m not at all in love with James or Mike or Sam or any of them, even though several of them have claimed, at various points, to be in love with me. It would be nice to love one of them back but they’re all losers and really should be in love with someone who is out of high school. In my opinion.
Being a teenager is supposed to involve certain things. Things like listening to loud, annoying music, lying in your bedroom popping gum, and talking on the phone forever while twirling the cord around your finger; things like learning to smoke cigarettes and drinking your first forty at a bonfire party on the beach on the last night of the school year. Getting wasted, getting high, making out behind the bleachers with the girl you barely know from geometry class. But I’m sort of afraid of cigarettes and I don’t live near the beach. I rarely go to geometry class.
Instead, I am watching myself divide and divide into a series of unmatching pieces. Here is the naif. Here is the schoolboy. The libertine. The prig. The one who does his homework and the one who doesn’t. Here is the grownup and the child. And the something in between. The pieces are suspicious of one another and don’t get along. The one who does his homework is easily bullied into submission.
And certain nights in the summer, minutes after I go to bed, another unnamed version of myself wakes up and crawls out of my body and takes the car downtown. He stands in corners in dark bars where he is probably drinking beer, maybe even smoking cigarettes, and is almost certainly doing who-knows-what with disreputable older men who may or may not be Republicans, or “in finance,” whatever that means. He entertains the idea of falling in love with any or all of them. Eventually he slinks back through my bedroom door and the next morning I wake up with a headache, thinking, A Republican? Or, Was it all a weird dream? Or maybe I don’t remember any of it at all. The next night, repeat. I tell no one.
Here is where it began:
Mike had just dropped out of law school and wanted to be a sportswriter and was the first person I ever kissed. Me a newish fifteen on summer vacation in Chicago. The night I met him, after we had sex, he drove us to the lake, where we sat and looked out over the water. What I remember best from that night is the spiky shock of his stubble there on the rocks and how familiar his arm felt around my shoulders even though it wasn’t hard to figure out that he was too old.
That night, I had my parents’ camera with me. I’d just finished ninth grade and photography class and I took these pictures of the water, the reflections, stuff like that. It’s possible that Mike got a few shots of me—us, even. But early the next day the camera was stolen with the film still in it. My parents never bought another camera. You have to know my family to understand, but this is why there are hardly any photographs of me past fifteen.
A few summers later, I’m seventeen and naked in the apartment of a near-stranger, this guy who wants to take my picture. I’m prickly when I tell him to wait for me to put my clothes on. I roll onto my stomach and he reaches over and rubs my shoulder blade, offended.
“That’s what I meant. Just a picture of you. Nothing to do with sex,” he says. James is twenty-three—a little older, but not too bad, especially considering that he acts like a child. He has lit candles around the room. Don’t think I’m dorky for this, he’d warned me as he’d done it. Now he is dragging his finger along my chin and staring me down. I realize that I hate his haircut.
“I have this thing about pictures,” I tell him. He kisses me.
“The summer is ahead of us,” he mumbles into my ear.
“Pictures are bad luck, kind of.” I kiss him back. “You can’t try to capture it. It fucks things up.”
“I just want to remember how this is. Take a picture, so no matter what—you think that’s weird?”
“Kind of,” I answer, standing up and putting on my pants.
Seventeen and buttoning my jeans in a strange boy’s apartment, I am of course thinking of Anna and when I am dressed I flop back on the bed as James snaps a photo of me, then another. Hair messy, half smile, eyes heavy-lidded.
The shutter snaps. And the image is sealed, a splinter of myself that takes off now for its own life. Someday I will wish I had copies of these pictures, to remember what it felt like to exist in this instant. To be this person, in this body. But right now it’s summer, I’m seventeen, and I can feel the thing that was here floating away, frightened by the flash. I never talk to James again.
When we are seventeen, Anna and I put some miles on that car of mine, just driving around the Beltway in circles, headed nowhere in particular. Midnight and the Mormon Temple rising above us on the highway’s oily coast. Going for coffee, going to the diner. Mini-golf, 7-11, video arcade, buy some comics. Just spin the tires, turn that radio up. We like the sad songs best. Shattered harmonies that scratch deep.
One night, we go to the roller rink. When we skate, we have a rare velocity. Anna shows off, mercilessly lapping all the little kids even though they are eight years old and she is six feet in skates. Grabbing my hand, Anna pulls me to the center of the rink. This whole Rockville crowd, these sixth-grade girls with their cutoffs, their waterfall bangs, I just watch them hypnotized as Anna kaleidoscopes around me, feet flying witchy, arms in the air. Casting a spell. Whoomp there it is pulsing and the disco ball, oh yeah, the disco ball. I just stand there. Ridiculous grin.
The next week I’ll see James—remember James?—out of the corner of my eye while I’m making out with a stranger in a bar. When James and I glance at each other I close my eyes because it is rude to look at one person while you’re kissing someone else.
Later I’m in my car giving head to this guy named Sam when he tells me he sees a cop car. He’s in the passenger seat, I’m in the driver’s, a parking lot at one in the morning. When I jerk my head up, I see flashing red lights in the rearview mirror, pulling up behind us. The only reason we don’t get arrested is because Sam’s a firefighter, and there’s some kind of fraternal code.
Soon it’s fall. At the senior homecoming dance, Anna is sticking her tongue out at the yearbook photographer: her arms thrown around my neck, eyes smeared in green and purple, and her hair towered into a ridiculous tiara. She’s sparkly and Las Vegas in voluminous white and the shutter snaps and she slouches into me, eyes closed, and lets her hands fall to my hips. “Even though you’re a mean person who doesn’t like nice things or Africa,” she says, “you are nice when it matters, which is what I know.”
Anna prides herself in never saying quite what she means. She believes that a truer version of the truth can most honestly be located in an elegant obfuscation.
The dance is winding down, and I’m the only boy whose date’s hands start bleeding spontaneously. This happens to Anna now and then, and no one can decide whether it’s because she’s a saint or an elaborate faker. I suspect a combination of the two. Maybe she just needs some moisturizer. Either way, that night, while we sit on the bleachers, blood starts to trickle from Anna’s fingers. She knows it is supposed to be from her palms but come on, she says, close enough. Under the streamers in the dim, dusty light of the gym she holds out her bleeding hands to me and says, “Jesus fuck, not again.” You think I’m making this up, but it’s the truth.
Years later I’ll look at the picture from that night—me and Anna at the dance—and I’ll see something that I missed. The ghost of an image on top of the one I remember. It’s nothing much, just the suggestion of a frown laid over her clownish, carefree grimace. A harsh twist of the eyebrow; a hovering suspicion. Double exposure. But has she guessed my secret or her own? And what do the bleeding hands have to do with any of it?
It is pretty early when I drop her off at home after the dance. I watch her run up the lawn in her fucked-up Cinderella gear. “I love you,” I call out the window. Or do I forget?
“I love you,” she shouts back. I don’t question whether she actually means it.
Then I’ll go out. It is a Saturday night. Take Piney Branch to Military to Nebraska, then on down Connecticut and into the city, where I’ll toss my tie and too-small jacket under the dashboard and unbutton my shirt halfway down my chest.
A long, moping year goes by; it’s another summer, and I’m eighteen. Anna and I spend the night at Lisa Roth’s house. Lisa’s parents are in the Bahamas and she makes us what she calls Long Island iced teas. Really, they’re just powdered tea and vodka. It’s August. Lisa, Anna, and I will be heading for college within the month, but we pretend that things haven’t changed much. Things have changed. Things will change.
That night, Anna, Lisa, and I snap pictures on a disposable camera. We stumble around thinking we’re much drunker than we really are, because we’re secretly not so used to drinking and we don’t know any better. Anna, Lisa, me, music blaring, sunglasses indoors, the two of them biting my ear and making faces for the camera. They try to dress me up like a girl, but I just look like an asshole. Hours later, Anna and I will kiss for the first time on Mr. and Mrs. Roth’s bed.
I kiss Lisa first is actually what happens. Her and me and Anna on her parents’ bed together. We have collapsed, laughing, and then there is quiet. I am looking at Lisa. She looks at me. This is her fault, I am thinking. This was her intention from the beginning of the night. And then a kiss. It may be a joke. But when it’s over, Anna is crying so I kiss her too and here is where it all comes apart. There is no picture of this.
In August, Anna is crying, so I kiss her.
I kiss Anna because the day I met her we were twelve and she shot me with a toy pistol, right in the chest. “Murder,” she said before tossing her hair with a smirk and running away. Flip-flops and leg warmers disappearing down an empty hallway. That night I kiss Anna with the knowledge that we will never be finished.
The next morning, I wake up as she’s getting dressed, and I watch her. A toss of blonde hair before she pulls her shirt over her head, and when she turns to face me, she’s just blazing with this ravenous, limitless brilliance. When our eyes meet, I’m afraid for a second that I might turn to stone. But I don’t, and Anna turns again and leaves the room.
Those late nights in the summer, that year, I can feel the city bursting inside of me. Walking alone down 17th Street it’s the lights and the pavement and some crappy beat tripping from an apartment window, the peak of the Washington Monument just visible but miles away and I am supercharged. Strolling past the bars, the eyes of those guys are on me. Chlorine sizzles.
“People say fish have really short memories,” Anna had told me, one night at the roller rink after we were tired out. “Like, three seconds. People say, ‘Who cares if you flush your fish down the toilet, it’ll forget all about it after three seconds.’ But a starfish remembers where its arm once was. It remembers it so well that it grows back. And let’s not even start on jellyfish.”
“How can a starfish remember anything?” I asked her. “I’m pretty sure they don’t even have brains.”
We were sitting on the bench on the edge of the wooden rink; the night was almost over. We rolled our feet back and forth, feeling our wheels catch on years of spilled Pepsi.
“Starfish have photographic memories,” said Anna.
The summer I am eighteen, I am all best intentions. Every kiss is spinning with the odds of love. Anna, Lisa, James, Sam, the rest. With every kiss, I think, This might be it. And like on Wheel of Fortune, “Big money, big money, big money.” But Lisa will be sleeping for a while still, and Anna has finally burst into something both more and less real. Like she opened the yearbook, flipped to her page, and was surprised to see no starfish but, instead, a true and distant sun.
James and Sam and all of them I blow off one by one for no offense other than the fact that they take me seriously. It strikes me as pathetic. Luckily, there are plenty of guys on 17th Street who don’t have names yet. For now, that’s enough.
That summer the beer they buy me is cold and I can feel my heart expanding and expanding. Anna and I will meet again, now and then, in the edges of photographs. Smile, flash, blink; a flicker of infinity. The shutter will snap. This is how we used to look.