Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  “I’m not going to sleep with you,” she said.

  “I know it,” he said but imagined what that might be like. He was still a virgin. “But you will drink with me, won’t you?”

  “I will,” she said.

  “And you’ll watch out for me?”

  “I can.”

  Another skid was placed on the fire, and red sparks lifted above the flames, twisting and winding up into nothing.

  “Eighty degrees out and we’ve built a fire,” Wren said.

  “You can’t have a party in a field without a fire.”

  “We’re like cavemen,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gotta have a fire. Gotta have light.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. She sipped from her drink.

  He didn’t bother explaining. “You look empty,” he said. “Let’s get you a refill. A small one.”

  They walked to his car, a beat-up Buick sedan that had been his mother’s for ten years before it had been his. He popped the trunk and pulled out the jar from the wheel well of the spare. When he turned she was right in front of him. She stood so close the fabric of her tee shirt brushed the backs of his fingers with each rising breath. She said nothing, and he felt the electric pulse of sex between them.

  “Let me see what you have,” she said. She took the jar in her hands, the red nail polish fresh and glossy, and swirled it around. “Watch,” she said and came beside him, holding the jar up to the light. “When there is only one bubble left that’s called the bead, and the longer the bead lasts before it bursts, the stronger the liquor.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “There’s a whole world of things I know, Asher.”

  “Will you share them with me?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But not tonight. That’s all you get.” She twisted open the mason jar and handed the ring to Wren, then pried off the sealed cap. The whiff of grain alcohol burned his sinuses and nearly made his eyes water.

  “I’ll go first,” he said.

  “The hell you will,” she said. “Ladies first. And not too much for you, either. Take a small sip now and then another later.”

  The jar seemed to tip itself to her lips. Her eyes were closed and she didn’t even make a face when she swallowed, but she did immediately take a sip from her own cup to cut the burn. “Your turn,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re going to take a drink.”

  “First time for everything,” he said.

  The liquid was clean and clear at first but seemed to sear his esophagus as it made its way toward his stomach, where it formed a small stone of heat. “One more,” he said and quickly took another shot.

  “Well, I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “No, but you are.” She laughed. “Let’s head back.” She grabbed his hand and led him toward the fire. Sweat was already on his temples, and the music was loud. No one spoke. They all stared into the fire, watching its moves, its hues. This is what he had been trying to explain to her minutes before. The fire was the big show that over the course of a hundred high school parties, in fields just like this one, there had always been a moment when everyone shut up and simply watched a fire burn itself up, the movement of flames, the melding of orange and red and blue. He would tell her later, when they were alone, he thought. The night sky was filled with more stars than he could ever remember, more than he thought were even possible, and he had spent many nights like this outside his house looking up to them, dreaming of the worlds beyond earth and the towns and lives past Fordyce. Lucinda leaned against him and pitched what was left of her drink against a burning skid, and he watched the Styrofoam melt in seconds and the watered-down alcohol expel a few puffs of fury.

  “I’m not sleeping with you,” she said.

  “I’m not sleeping with you, either,” he said. He put his arm around her shoulders. Her body felt as if it was a thousand degrees, and the small blonde hairs on the backs of her arms were bronzed from the fire’s glow. From across the way he saw someone give him a thumbs-up, but he ignored it and concentrated on the smell of Lucinda’s hair, the rhythm of her breathing beside him.

  “You should have another drink, Asher,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  “You’ll be able to keep it up longer.” She laughed and he did too.

  “We’re not sleeping together,” he said.

  “But you will with somebody someday,” she said. “I won’t always be here to teach you everything.”

  “Why does it have to be that way?”

  “We both know it will be,” she said.

  “Do we?”

  “I do.” She hooked her arm through his. “I feel warm.”

  “Me too.”

  “Let’s go sit in your car with the AC on.”

  They walked back through the field, leaving the party behind. He opened the door and helped her inside the car, and she clutched his arm for balance. She seemed to have gotten very drunk very fast.

  “I had a few shots before I came over to you,” she said. “I’m almost faded.”

  “That explains it,” he said.

  “Will you drive us away from the noise?”

  “You want to leave?”

  “No. I just want to be away from the noise.”

  He moved the car closer to the road they had come in on. This was someone’s hunting camp. Two hundred acres out in the county somewhere. The translucence of the fire was visible from where they sat, just over a small hill. The air conditioner cooled the car down quickly, and Lucinda put her head in his lap and let her sandaled feet hang out the window.

  “What do you think those girls will be like at Harvard?”

  “Smart, I guess. Boring,” he said.

  “Am I fun to be around?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “Then I must be stupid.” She smiled up to him, eyes closed.

  He pushed the hair from her eyes and feathered her cheeks. “There won’t be anybody like you up there.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say. You watch too many movies.”

  “You don’t watch enough.”

  The music roared again, and the party was gathering its second wind. “Should we go back?” he asked.

  “No. I like it here. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

  He took in the muscled contours of her legs and the clasped hands on her stomach. He’d not known what he should do with his own hands, so he found himself gripping the steering wheel and feeling like an imbecile. She opened her eyes. “Here,” she said and reached up for his hand and placed it on her stomach, under the waistband of her jeans shorts. “That’s better,” she said.

  “For who?”

  “Both of us.”

  She’d always had boyfriends, mostly boys from the nearby college, but he had never even been on a date. He was always too afraid to ask. She scooted herself up so that his hand went lower into her pants. She unbuttoned her shorts, and then she took his hand and showed him how to stroke her. The music from the party seemed to move away from them, and the car grew darker as a cloud passed over the moon.

  She sat up and pulled her shirt off and unsnapped her bra, and then she unzipped Wren’s shorts and took him in her hands. “Push the seat back,” she told him, and he did. Then she straddled him and guided him into her. “Breathe,” she said. “Try not to think about it too much.” She smiled. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  He could only nod. Her movements told him she knew he’d never done anything like this before, and he felt embarrassed and excited at the same time. “It’s okay,” she said. “Go ahead. I’m on the pill.” He had a hold of her waist. He was looking up to her face, to the hair cascading down and covering her breasts. He thought he might not ever see or feel something this magnificent ever again. She raised herself just slightly and then came back to him in a soft, barely perceptible stroke, and he felt the surge inside of himself. She pressed herself closer then
. “That’s it,” she said. She rocked herself forward, once, twice, and then he couldn’t hold on any longer.

  He felt his whole body spasm, and his toes curl inside his tennis shoes. Nothing had ever felt so warm and so tingly. That was the word that came to his mind, and this made him feel even more inexperienced than the act that had just occurred. She slipped off of him and back into her seat. She opened the glove box, where she knew he kept extra napkins, and handed a couple to him and took some for herself.

  “I couldn’t let you go up north without doing the deed,” she said. Her face was flushed, and she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Now you won’t fall in love with the first girl you take back to your room,” she said.

  “I already know that won’t happen—”

  “Don’t start on saying you love me. We’re friends. Nothing more.”

  “Because you won’t let it be anything else.” This was not the first time he’d tried to tell her.

  “I don’t like you that way.”

  “What way is that? The fuck-me-and-then-tell-me-you-don’t-like-me way?”

  “Something like that.” She grinned. He only stared hard into her face. “I’m kidding,” she said. “It’s a joke.”

  “Not this time,” he said. “It’s not a joke to me.” He wanted to be happier. He’d just lost his virginity to a girl he’d pined after so long and so hard his friends had shook their heads in pity at him. He’d thought things were turning.

  “For all I know, I’m never going to see you again,” she said. “In fact, I know I won’t.”

  “How do you know so goddamn much?”

  “You know it too,” she said. “You’re just trying to act like you don’t. You’ve been wanting to get out of here ever since we were kids and you’re the only one that is.”

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  She huffed. “Asher, you’re arrogant. You think you’re better than everybody else.”

  “I do not,” he said.

  “You do,” she said. “All you ever talk about is life away from here. When we were in New York you acted like you knew everything about the city, but you grew up right here like the rest of us in this shitty little ass-backward town.”

  “I don’t think of it that way,” he said. He had once only thought of living here, of going off to college and coming back to coach the football team. He had told his father of these plans, and his father, with nearly the same anger Lucinda displayed now, had snapped his fingers at the boy. “You’re not going to do that.” Wren asked why not, and his father replied, “You’ve got a brain. Go use it.” His father had never said anything like that to him before, and when he told his mother about it, she had agreed. They raised him to leave.

  Lucinda came at him again. “Except for the ones going off to the army, you’re the only one in our class who won’t be living in Kentucky next year. Think about that.” Her voice was softer on the last sentence. Then she said, “I wish I could go with you.”

  “You can. You could.” He thought of her with him in Harvard Yard and the small restaurant where he and his mother had pizza after his visit. But those were the only places he could envision her. The thoughts of him alone there, of Boston winters and no one sounding a thing like him, were private fears he harbored, that he would never share with anyone for years to come. The music from the party still reached them and he heard a loud shout, a teammate from the football team, a wild child through and through who would probably take over his father’s car lot one day. She was right about him. He was arrogant. He had already mapped out most of his friends’ lives, but he also envied how easy the future seemed to be for them.

  “I’m gonna go to UK,” she said. “Get my accounting degree, and that’s all my imagination can conjure.”

  How could he tell her she could be more than this? That her life, like so many others, didn’t have to feel like it was closing down on this night? In four years they’d be into a new century, the Twenty-First, the century of science fiction. His mind was focused on the future, always it seemed on that and not much more, but now Lucinda was beside him, buttoning her shorts back up and brushing out her hair with her fingers, and he wanted to stay in the present longer, wanted to imagine this night catapulting the two of them into more nights just like it.

  “I could stay,” he said. “I could go to UK and then we’d have the summer.”

  Her head snapped straight. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to …” but he did not finish the sentence and say he didn’t want to leave her.

  “You’re not going to give up Harvard for me. I don’t want that kind of pressure.”

  “It’s not about you,” he said. He lied. Of course it was. Of course everything was. Nearly every decision he made as a teenager had been about her, and she had to know it or, at least, sense it.

  “I’ve never wanted you that way. I never will.”

  “But we just—”

  “Had sex and that was it,” she finished. “I wanted that. I don’t want this.”

  He was crushed, and yet he couldn’t show this to her. He didn’t want to be vulnerable in front of her. He steadied his hands on the wheel to keep them from shaking. He did what he had always done as an athlete and channeled his pain into anger, gripping the wheel tight, flexing his forearms so that the veins rose and marked his forearms like small streams. He said nothing else.

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “Don’t—”

  “I’m not,” he said, taking his turn to cut her off. He parked the car back in its original spot.

  “Wren—”

  “Asher,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You always call me Asher. It sounds weird when you call me by my first name.”

  “Asher,” she said, softly. “I’m sorry. Let’s go have a good time. We graduated today.”

  “We did.” Everything had changed. He knew he couldn’t really consider attending UK, but he wanted it to be a real consideration. He wanted her, for once, to look at him for who he was and what she meant to him. He was young, but he knew what he felt and what he wanted. He also knew her mind was made up. He had to reconcile that.

  He pulled the mason jar out from under the seat. “One more for posterity?” he asked, holding the jar up to her.

  “Not for me,” she said, “and only a small one for you.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said, but he did listen to her and took only a quick sip and closed up the jar.

  “I am going to miss you, Wren,” she said. “I’ll miss you more than anyone else.”

  Why had she wasted these last four years with other boys when they were so clearly good together? He wanted to remain angry with her, but he could not bring the heat of anger when it came to her. He forgave her as he always had, writing it off as an unknowable trait of the heart. He did not reply to her remark but instead gave her a nod and opened the car door.

  They stepped out and rejoined the party, noticeably thinner now with folks having paired off and moved to their own cars. The fire was dimmer but still burning. The music had been turned lower, and Wren thought if he looked hard enough to the east he might see light on the horizon. They sat on a couple of wood stumps, and Lucinda curled next to him again.

  “Are you scared to go away?” she said.

  “Some,” he said. “But when I told my mom I was scared she looked at me crosswise and said, ‘Boy, I moved five thousand miles away from my family and to a different country. I think you can move to Cambridge for four years.’ ”

  They laughed. “Your mother is awesome. So tough.”

  “She’s the toughest,” he said, and he tried to imagine her at his age leaving Korea and heading off into some great unknown. As he got older he would wonder more and more how she had done it, how she had worked up the courage and fought through her loneliness and isolation, but right then he only marveled in it with Lucinda. He took up a stick and poked at the fire, watching
its tip blacken.

  “I don’t want this to be the last night I ever see you,” she said with a suddenness that surprised him.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “I can come back to visit. You can fly to Boston.”

  She didn’t respond. She took up her own stick and poked at his. “You are arrogant but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire that from time to time. I won’t ever leave this place,” she said. “I know I’ll end up right back here.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “How can you know that about your future? You sound so defeated by it too.”

  “I know it the same way you know you won’t ever come back. The same way you knew you could get into Harvard.”

  “But I didn’t know that, and I don’t know the future.”

  She turned to him. “You tried. You had the guts to try. Think about that. Look around us,” she said. “No one else here lets themselves dream past a year. You’ve got a whole life planned down to the final detail, don’t you?”

  He didn’t. But ever since his father talked to him, when he imagined life, he had not thought of Friday night football in Fordyce or taking his children to Cable Hill for sledding in the winter anymore. He had some ideas about a city—any city—tall buildings, cabs, public transportation. But in every version of the dream there was a woman like Lucinda, tall and athletic, hair that shimmered under the light, hands that reached for him in the night as hers did now and held him close. She had been both the only clear and murky thing in his life until now.

  Within minutes she was asleep, and he was left watching the fire alone. The people were gone. The radios had silenced. It was only Wren and the yellow light and its dying heat suffocated by dew. He picked Lucinda up, cradled in his arms, and carried her back to his car and set her in the passenger seat. He grabbed his graduation gown from the backseat and placed it gently over her and then kissed the top of her head. He went to the back of his car and sat on the trunk and turned east. The stars began to fade, the sky lightened, birds began to call, then the earth was filled with light, and behind him the fire was in smolders.