He didn’t answer.
“Brad?” I owed him the truth.
“Yeah?”
“It’s not that you’re not perfect, because you are. It’s just that I’m . . .”
His eyes widened. He looked both scared and frustrated, which reminded me of how I felt about him the night he jizzed on my leg.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he said, holding up his free hand, “but you don’t have to say it.”
I stood there staring at him, squeezing my fist into a ball to keep the tears in my eyes from spilling over.
“See you around,” he said, pulling Stinky Lewis toward the parking lot.
As he walked away, I thought he looked so small, and in the wet, salty air, the smear of his red coat was like a painting.
The Horseshoe Crabs
It really seemed like she wanted me to kiss her,” I said to Corvis. I was driving us to Provincetown. Spring break, and we were both stuck in Hopuonk, just like everyone else except Heather, who was in the Bahamas.
Corvis had her feet propped on the dashboard. Her parents were away at a conference, so she wasn’t worried about taking the day off.
“Well,” she said, “of course she did.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Curiosity,” said Corvis. “It’s really common.”
“I think my heart is broken.”
Corvis stretched her arm out of the open window and flicked her cigarette.
“I would say more like painfully chipped,” she said.
It had been more than three months since the night in the fort, and Susan still wouldn’t answer my calls. I called less often than before, but only out of embarrassment. At least three times a day, I dialed almost all of her number, then hung up.
That morning, I showed up at Corvis’s house and demanded that we go on an adventure in Provincetown, now that it was getting warmer. Since we still weren’t hanging out in public, I figured we’d better go somewhere else. Provincetown didn’t go exactly how I imagined it would last time, and I thought Corvis would have something to add.
Corvis had been to a couple of other places. Disney World, for one, which she hated. Also, London and California. Her parents were the traveling kind of parents, not the kind whose family lived in Hopuonk their entire lives.
They were from Michigan. They chose Hopuonk because they thought it was bucolic, which means, like, pastoral and quaint—a place that makes you think of shepherds and things. Man, they had it wrong.
“I have dreams,” I said. “Like, Susan and I will be in a rowboat or somewhere, and she just, like, jumps out. Or disappears, or turns into Leonardo DiCaprio.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Corvis’s mouth set.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Why am I telling you this?”
Part of why I wanted to go to Provincetown today had been to give myself some time away from the telephone, which was starting to seem like a monster. I spent too much time picking it up, putting it back down, and just sitting there, waiting.
“I guess because you’re scared,” Corvis said. “Which is okay. I am too.”
“Of what?”
“What if I think college is going to be so great and it’s not? What if I’m the dumbest one there? And then there’s Kristen.”
“What about Kristen?”
“She wants to come with me to New York,” Corvis said. “She says she’s in love with me.”
I kept my eyes on the road, which was getting twisty. My Volvo protested, and I pressed the gas harder. Corvis sighed.
“She’s not gay,” she said.
I thought of Kristen’s interaction with the Hot Topic kid at the mall. She looked at him the way Susan looked at Brad.
“But,” I said, “you’re always holding hands in public.”
“She’s not gay,” said Corvis. “She’s fat.”
“So?”
“So she thinks she can’t have a boyfriend because of it. Once she realizes she can, it will be different. She’ll get married to a guy one day. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
“But do you love her?”
“I mean, yeah,” said Corvis.
At least half of Corvis and Kristen’s friends were in accelerated—headed to college, or at least community college.
“Which is why she can’t go with me,” said Corvis. “I can’t just keep waiting for her to figure everything out.”
Corvis kept speaking, looking out the window instead of at me.
“You and Kristen—you’re opposites, but you have the same problem,” she said. “You both let how you look dictate how you act, who you can love. And that haircut? Not the answer.”
“So how do we stop loving them?”
“We can’t,” she said. “We live with it. I feel like shit, and I can’t do anything but feel it.”
“We did more than kiss,” I admitted. “I’m not exactly sure, but I think we went all the way.”
“Well,” she said, “so have we.”
“Does that make it better or worse?” I asked.
Corvis flung her cigarette out the window, a bit too forcefully. It almost blew back into the car with the wind.
“Fuck if I know,” she said.
* * *
—
We wandered along the empty streets—even though rainbow flags lined it, Provincetown was still mostly closed-up. Maybe summer was a better time to be gay.
We ducked into a convenience store, where an ATM was lit by a giant rainbow. You couldn’t tell if the person behind the register was a man or a woman, and they didn’t greet us with more than a half smile before returning to their magazine.
A sign on a spiral staircase indicated that there were sex toys upstairs, and I tugged on Corvis’s coat to follow me.
There were only a few aisles, but they were crammed full. My heart pounded, looking at the displays of objects that advertised vibration, or had strings or spikes attached to them for uses I couldn’t even imagine. There was even a section for butt plugs.
“Do you need anything specific?” Corvis asked. She did not whisper.
“Shh.”
I crouched in an aisle full of strap-ons of all colors.
“What are these for?” I whispered to Corvis, running my finger along a shiny purple one.
“What does it look like?”
“But, like”—I spoke very softly, hoping Corvis would catch on and copy me—“is it if you want a penis? Do you want a penis?”
“No, I don’t want a penis,” she said, still not whispering. “It’s just a role. Here, I’m getting you one. You can read the instructions and try it at home.”
“Try it on who?” I asked.
“You can use most of these things by yourself,” Corvis said, as if I were an idiot.
“Do you and Kristen use these things?” I asked. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
Corvis picked up a solid-looking cream-colored one.
“This one’s nice,” she said. “It’s German.”
She carried it downstairs to the register and set it on the counter. It was sixty dollars, which seemed incredibly expensive, but Corvis didn’t seem to think so.
“We’re gay,” I told the checkout person.
“We’re not gay together,” Corvis added.
“Right,” I said. “Just next to each other. At the same time.”
They gave us a strange look, and I saw Corvis’s jaw clench. She shoved the bag into my chest, and we found ourselves back on the street.
“You’re so awkward,” she told me.
“Funny,” I said. “That’s what I was going to say about you.”
Then I saw what I’d come here for—I just didn’t know it yet. On the next corner, there was a tattoo parlor, and miraculously, it was op
en.
“Tattoos,” I said. The strap-on touched my chest through the bag, and it made me feel powerful. “We’re getting tattoos.”
Excitement pulsed through my body, not just at the idea of getting a tattoo, but because Corvis and I had snuck away from Hopuonk in the first place and gone somewhere we weren’t supposed to be, or at least somewhere my friends would never go.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her down Commercial Street with me.
* * *
—
I snuck out to Humming Rock Beach during the eye of Hurricane Bob when I was nine. I wanted to see what it was like, the calm part in the middle of everything. Everyone’s power was out, and Sandra was holed up in her bedroom. All I had to do was walk out the back door.
After so much wind, the air was still and silent, but not the least bit peaceful. Stepping outside, I felt like a girl in a horror movie, singing in the shower, happy, just before the killer bursts in.
Down at the beach, the waves were bigger than I’d ever seen, like the ones in the paintings of shipwrecks everyone had in our houses. Usually, Humming Rock was more rocky than sandy, but this time, the shore was brown, moving. I remember it this way—every last inch covered with small bodies.
I squinted.
They were horseshoe crabs. Hundreds of horseshoe crabs were crawling back to the water after the huge waves had carried them all the way up the beach. They looked like walking helmets.
I’d seen them before, but usually only one or two at a time.
I was alone on the beach, except for a small figure in the distance. A girl in a red raincoat with a matching hat, kneeling in the sand.
She saw me and stood, cupped her hands over her mouth, and called, “Hey!”
It was Corvis.
Part of me was relieved—it was scary out on the beach alone, with the hurricane threatening to pick up again at any moment. The other part of me was irritated. I wanted to feel like an explorer, like sneaking out was mine alone.
Corvis jogged over to me, awkwardly jumping to avoid the horseshoe crabs, and met me at the seawall.
“Taylor,” she said, out of breath. “What are you doing here?”
“I snuck out,” I said. “You?”
“I saw them out my bedroom window,” she said, gesturing at the bodies. “I’m going to save them.”
I asked Corvis if they were made of armor. She didn’t answer, but she did say that they had five pairs of book gills behind their appendages, which were meant for breathing underwater. She said that they could only breathe on land for a short amount of time, and even then only if their gills remained moist.
“Will they all die?” I asked her.
I was conflicted. These creatures were terrifying, like little aliens, but I didn’t want to see them suffer. I didn’t necessarily want to touch them either.
Most of them walked real slowly, tripping on rocks and getting trapped in the netting from dismantled lobster-trap carcasses. Their legs were so short that it didn’t seem to matter how many of them they had.
“Not if we save them,” she said. “Will you help me?”
I nodded, waiting for her to tell me how, but she didn’t say anything. She just took off running, scooping up six horseshoe crabs at a time, piling them in her arms until they reached her chin. Her figure shrunk as she neared the edge of the water, her hat like a bright-red flame. I saw her open her arms and let them loose into the ocean, their legs waving goodbye to us.
“Save them!” she shouted at me, bounding down the beach and filling her arms with another load.
I froze.
“They can’t breathe!” she called, but I just stood there without blinking as thunder started to roll again. The hurricane was moving back.
I squatted and picked one up by the tail, but then I saw its belly: a mouth centered dead between all the eggbeater legs, the bulbous claw, five pairs of eyes scattered throughout its body. An involuntary scream came out of me, and I opened my fist, flinging it away.
I gave a theatrical shudder, and Corvis looked back at me with drowning eyes, her raincoat blowing open at the throat.
It was a futile effort—one girl against a hurricane. No amount of determination would save every single one of these little dying aliens, but Corvis had to try.
Hurricane Bob would be one of the most damaging hurricanes ever to hit New England, and one of the costliest. Massachusetts was damaged more than anywhere else. Scottie’s house was destroyed; same with lots of kids in my class. Both my house and Susan’s, luckily, were on top of a hill. Most people evacuated Cape Cod, leaving the Sagamore Bridge completely blocked.
The storm traveled north to Maine, then New Brunswick, finally dissipating somewhere off the coast of Portugal.
It turns out that horseshoe crabs aren’t even crabs. In fact, they’re not even crustaceans—they’re more closely related to spiders than lobsters. They can swim upside down, and, best of all, the females are larger than the males.
I didn’t know any of this at the time; I only knew that the waves were angry, white-capped, and that horseshoe crabs were dying all around us. And, unlike Corvis, I could not touch them, because I was afraid.
* * *
—
Now, at the tattoo parlor, we thumbed through binders of images—mostly red and black, or bright blue—of hearts, anchors, women who looked like pinup girls, dolphins, and symbols for love and peace in other languages.
“I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” Corvis admitted.
The place was owned by a lesbian who was twice Sandra’s age. I could tell she was a lesbian by her haircut, which was different than mine but, somehow, really gay.
“Are you looking for anything specific?” she asked. Her neck was covered in a primary-colored map, and she had an anatomical heart on her forearm.
I looked at her.
“Why did you put an organ on your arm?” I asked.
“It’s a muscle,” she said. “The heart is a muscle.”
“It is?” I asked. This was a comforting thought.
“You didn’t know that?” Corvis shot me a look.
“Shut up, Corvis,” I said.
Realizing that you were supposed to be eighteen to get a tattoo, I told the woman, “I’m looking for something new for my twentieth birthday. Something to remember being a kid.”
Beads of sweat gathered on Corvis’s forehead.
I looked at Corvis and thought about how grateful I was that she was back in my life, and I thought of her that day during Hurricane Bob, her red hat bouncing in the still air.
“I know,” I said, pushing the binder away from me. “A horseshoe crab!”
The needle felt amazing as it poked into me. I loved the pain of it. I looked at the woman’s neck—like a map to find treasure—and watched the heart on her arm move. She didn’t even ask for my ID.
After about an hour, I had a bloody horseshoe crab on my forearm. I ran my fingers over it, even though the woman had said not to touch it. Next, she covered it in ointment, then a plastic square, and told me not to get it wet for a week.
When Corvis’s turn came, she shook her head.
“I can’t do it,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “You’ll love it. It’ll feel awesome to start college with a tattoo.”
She backed away, looking faint.
* * *
—
Corvis and I lay side by side in the folded-down back seat of my Volvo, passing a bottle of Jim Beam back and forth. We were both too exhausted to drive home, and there was something pleasing about sleeping near the water with the windows open, listening to the waves dragging themselves up and down the sand.
“I feel like we’re supposed to kiss,” Corvis said into the darkness.
It’s weird when you’re right in the middle of a moment you know you will rem
ember. Most things you forget. Meals, conversations, even moments that are really fun and amazing, but then there are these times—like when you’re next to someone you love and won’t see anymore, when your forearm is sore because it was poked with needles—that you know you will remember even as they happen.
“I know,” I said.
“If it were a movie,” she said.
“Actually,” I said, “if you’d gotten a tattoo with me, and we had this, like, crazy experience together.” Then there would have been no other way to extinguish the excitement.
“I guess so,” she said.
“I wrote to my dad,” I said.
“You found him?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, maybe.”
“Did he write back?” she asked.
“He never used to,” I said, “but I have a feeling he will this time.”
“I think he will too,” said Corvis.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go through with the tattoo.”
I meant it when I said it, but I was also glad, in a way. I touched the plastic square and felt a pleasant twinge of pain.
“So,” I asked, in the foggy moment just before sleep, “do you feel like you belong here?”
“No,” Corvis admitted. This time, she whispered.
“Me neither,” I whispered back.
I knew I might never use the strap-on, but I also knew that I would open it every few days and hold it in my hands.
Remember? it would ask me.
It made me feel older, like I had more experience. I was a lesbian with a tattoo and a German sex toy.
“Corvis?” I whispered into the darkness just before I fell asleep.
“Yeah?”
“Is scissoring a thing?” I said. “Asking for a friend.”
“No,” she said, rolling over. “It’s definitely not a thing.”
* * *
—
“Wait,” I said, on the drive back to Hopuonk. “So you, like, love Kristen Duffy?” I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
We Were Promised Spotlights Page 14