He unzipped his jeans and dropped them. Underneath, he was wearing what could have been boxer shorts, or they could have been swim trunks. Carly couldn’t really decide. His thighs were almost hairless – either that or the blond hairs barely showed – and thick and solid, like scaled-down telephone poles. He levered off his shoes and stepped out of the jeans.
Surely he didn’t intend to go in? The water must have been cold enough to kill a person.
‘What are you doing?’ Carly asked, finally.
He grabbed up his fishing pole again.
‘See that rock?’ Dean pointed with the pole. A domed rock formed a tiny island about thirty yards off shore. ‘That’s in much deeper water. I could probably cast almost to the middle of the lake from there. When it’s cold like this, that’s where the fish’ll be. In the deep water.’
Dean took off, running a few dozen crazy steps into the lake. When he got in to about his knees, he dove forward. Disappeared entirely. Then his head and shoulders came up again. He let out the most blood-curdling bellow Carly could ever remember hearing. Horror films included.
‘Oh, shit that’s cold!’
Carly wondered if the neighbors could hear. Probably not. It was a pretty good walk from the cabin to the lake.
Dean kept swimming.
Carly looked over at Hunter.
‘Is that … even …’ But then she didn’t know where to go with that sentence.
‘Sane? Not really.’
‘I think I was going to say “safe”.’
‘Nope. Not that, either.’
‘Think he’ll be OK?’
‘He might be. Or he might get hit with hypothermia before he can even get out to that rock, in which case he’ll sink like a boulder and drown.’
It was more words than Carly had ever heard Hunter string together. And none of them were spoken with much emotion.
‘And another thing,’ Hunter said. ‘He’s got it exactly backwards. When it’s hot, and the lake is warm, the fish go into deep water. When it’s cold, they stay near the edge, where it’s warmer. Gets more sun toward the bottom there, you know?’
‘But you weren’t catching any at the edge.’
Hunter shrugged. ‘Just ’cause they’re there doesn’t mean you’ll catch ’em. And he knows that. No doubt about it. Dean is insane.’
On that note, Dean popped up at the rock and climbed barefoot to the top of its dome.
‘Hmm,’ Hunter said. ‘He made it. I’m surprised.’
Carly watched Dean hold the fishing pole between his knees and rub his own arms briskly. She could see him shuddering even from the shore.
Then he set up to cast. Drew the pole back and then snapped it forward with amazing force, trying to propel the baited hook to the center of the lake. The worm broke free and flew, landing a good twenty feet beyond the spot where the bare hook hit the water.
Hunter let out a derisive laugh. ‘How many beers you gotta drink before you don’t see that coming? And of course he didn’t bring any extra bait. No way to carry it. Stupid, stupid fuck.’
Dean dove into the water and swam back.
He stepped out of the lake, his skin a cross between gray and blue. He looked around as though disoriented. His teeth would not stop chattering.
‘Now we gotta go back,’ Hunter said. ‘Now we gotta get you warm. Stupid fuck.’
‘It’s only about five thirty,’ one of the girls said. Carly didn’t know either one by name, and their names had not come up. ‘And it’s pitch dark. That’s so weird.’
‘It’s the third-shortest day of the year,’ Dean told her. ‘Solstice is day after tomorrow.’
Then everybody argued about whether the solstice was the twenty-first or the twenty-second. Except Carly. Carly listened in silence.
They were sitting around a campfire, a few yards downhill from the cabin. It was a spot with a great view of the lake, but it was pitch dark, as the girl had pointed out, and the sky was overcast. So no stars or moon. So no lake view.
Carly was sitting with her back leaned against Dean’s chest. They were both wrapped in the same blanket. It felt good. That he would be with her that way. Right in front of everybody. That they were together. And it was no secret.
He had only recently stopped shivering.
Both of the other girls were roasting hot dogs on sticks, then placing them in buns and handing them around. No ketchup, no mustard, no nothing. Just hot dogs and buns. No drinks except beer. Carly had already had one beer, and that felt like enough.
Jerry said, ‘Hot dogs are OK and all, but not when you had your mouth set for grilled trout.’
‘Fine,’ Dean said, pretty much right against Carly’s ear. ‘You go catch some trout, then.’
‘Forget it,’ Jerry said. ‘Did I mention the hot dogs are good?’
Dean fished a pack of cigarettes out of some pocket somewhere – Carly could only feel him shifting around – and offered one to her.
‘No thanks,’ she said.
‘Headache.’
‘Right.’
‘Here,’ Hunter said, and handed her a half-smoked joint in the firelight. Carly hadn’t seen it going around or smelled it burning. ‘This won’t give you a headache. Hell, if you got a headache now, this’ll fix it.’
She accepted it from him. Drew in a long hit of the smoke, which was stronger and richer and more tar-laden than she’d expected. She’d smoked the stuff a couple times before, when she was fourteen. Her half-friend/ half-boyfriend Emilio used to have some. Cheap rag weed that didn’t taste like much and didn’t do much. Just made her hungry for potato chips and ice cream.
She passed it to Dean, who was lighting a cigarette for himself, both hands outside the blanket now. It partly uncovered Carly, and made her cold. She missed the warmth immediately.
Warmth was always a hard thing to come by. In any form.
Then he mostly wrapped them up again, just his one hand with the cigarette poking out. Carly watched the tip of the cigarette glow in the dark. She could hear people talking, but the words refused to penetrate. Like she’d lost the ability to either hear or understand. Also the ability to tell hearing and understanding apart.
Then the joint came back around and she hit it again.
A few seconds later, the top of her head suddenly threatened to come off. Her senses felt heightened, so much so that it startled her, and the physical sensations were unbearable, and it was all too much.
She sat as still as she could, focusing on making it stop. Over and over she thought, How do you turn this off? How do you go back again? But in the under-current of her mind, she knew you didn’t. It had to wear off on its own. And she was still getting higher.
She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
She struggled out of the blanket and made her way to her feet. The world did not hold still as she did so. The ground did not stay level, and neither did she.
‘Hey, hey,’ Dean said. ‘Where ya going?’
She heard someone distant say, ‘Not feeling so good. Gotta go lie down.’
A few steps later it dawned on Carly that the someone had been her.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
He caught up with her and put his arm, along with the blanket, around her shoulder. Wrapped her up again and supported her as she walked.
That felt better.
‘You OK?’
‘I need to lie down.’
‘No problem. I’ll show you where we’re gonna sleep. There’s only one bedroom in the cabin. Guess who gets it?’
They stood before the three steps up to the cabin’s back porch. Carly looked at the steps, vaguely unclear as to how one surmounted such an obstacle.
‘Who?’ she asked.
It was coming on stronger now. And it was way too much.
‘Whose dad owns the cabin?’
‘Oh,’ she said. Grateful for a riddle she could solve. ‘You get the bedroom.’
‘We get it,’ he said. ‘An
d everybody else has to fend for themselves.’
A few light, dry flakes of snow began to swirl. Carly watched in fascination, wondering how to tell if they were real or if her imagination had created them.
‘Ah, cool,’ Dean said. ‘Maybe we’ll get snowed in.’
He walked them up the stairs together. It was easy. It went OK. Carly thought, I have a boyfriend now, to help me do hard things like that. Maybe now everything will be fine.
He walked her into the bedroom, where she slid out of the shared blanket and sat on the edge of the bed. She wasn’t sure for how long. But when she turned around, Dean was almost entirely out of his clothes. He had his thumbs in the waistband of those boxers – or swim trunks – and was about to take them down.
‘Oh,’ Carly said. ‘Wait. Whoa. Whoa.’
The words sounded weird to her. She wondered if they sounded weird to Dean. He came and sat on the edge of the bed with her. Put his arm around her. Leaned his mouth close to her ear.
‘What? What’s wrong?’
It seemed if she willed words, they failed. If she let the far-away Carly speak, that worked better. So she waited. To see what that other Carly would say.
‘We don’t even know each other,’ it said. ‘We said, like, ten sentences to each other before you asked me to come up here. And maybe another ten today …’
She couldn’t pull all that into a conclusion. She hoped he would.
A long, long silence. It felt like more time than should have existed in the world. Or, at least, more than ever had before. And she was still getting higher.
‘You’re right,’ Dean said.
‘I am?’
‘Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. We’re up here for days, and I’m rushing you. Why am I rushing you?’
He took her gently by the shoulders and lifted her to her feet, then pulled back the covers and laid her back on the bed. Still fully dressed.
‘Shouldn’t I sleep … I don’t know … somewhere?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You should sleep somewhere. You should sleep here. I won’t do anything. Not if you don’t want.’
He got in beside her and tucked up close behind. Still in just those big shorts. But the top half of him was closer than the bottom half. She felt him shift his bottom half even farther away.
‘Yeah, that won’t work,’ he said. ‘That’s not a good idea at all.’
He rolled on to his back and draped one big hand casually on her hip.
It struck Carly that it was probably not bedtime yet at all. But here they were. And Dean was asleep – or passed out – in a matter of minutes. She could tell by the rhythm of his breathing.
She lay huddled that way, on her side and close to the edge of the bed, for most of the night. Wide awake. The thin mattress made her hip ache. But she didn’t roll over. Because she didn’t feel she had a right to displace Dean’s hand.
Hours later, when the high had almost worn off, leaving her feeling like herself again, but more jangly and unsettled, she looked over at him in the mostly-dark. And she thought, This is what it’s like to have a boyfriend. A real one. Not a half one.
Oh, there had been a couple of others. But they didn’t seem to know how this being-a-boyfriend thing was supposed to be done.
Dean seemed to know.
Cradle Lake, the High Sierras, 20 December
Carly woke, surprised she had ever been asleep. She guessed she might have dozed off for maybe forty-five minutes. Dean’s hand was gone. She rolled over, easing the pressure on her screaming hip. The mattress was about as comfortable as sleeping on the ground.
Dean was not in bed with her.
‘Hey, you,’ he said.
She sat up. He was standing in the corner. Dressing. In the dark.
‘What time’s it?’ she asked, the grogginess of the words surprising her.
‘Four.’
‘Where’re you going?’
‘Hunter and I are going hunting. Funny, huh? Hunter the hunter. He says it’s the role he was born to play.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘When we’ve got a deer strapped to the hood.’
‘Oh,’ Carly said.
Then, without realizing it, she must have drifted off to sleep again. Because when she opened her eyes, it was light. And Dean was gone.
Carly stepped out into the main room of the cabin, still blinking, and noticed two girls sitting in the kitchen area. Thing is, they were not the same two girls as last night, as had been on this trip with her all along. They were Janie and Heather, girls who were in a lot of the same classes with her. Girls she actually knew a little bit. But not really in any very successful way.
‘There’s coffee,’ Janie said.
It sounded friendly enough, so Carly walked over and sat at the table with them. But the minute she did, Heather jumped up and flounced away.
‘Sorry,’ Janie said, when Heather was out of earshot.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
It was a question Carly would normally have thought but not asked. But since Janie was actually talking to her, she experimented with actually talking back.
‘She thought Dean was up here alone until we got up here and heard about you.’
‘Oh.’ Which led Carly back to the fact that they hadn’t been here before. ‘When’d you guys get in?’
‘Last night. Late. We came up in Heather’s car. We got completely lost. Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not leaving ’cause you got here or anything. But I’m gonna go look for Hunter. You know where he is?’
‘Off hunting with Dean.’
‘That’s funny. Hunter is hunting.’
‘The role he was born to play,’ Carly said.
‘Yeah, huh? That’s bad, though. Because I’ll never find them.’
‘And if you did, they might accidentally shoot you.’
‘I’ll just go down by the lake with Heather. There’s toaster waffles in the freezer.’
She rose from the table. Stretched as if just now waking up, showing a bare midriff with a silver belly button ring. Then she wandered away.
Carly ate two toaster waffles with artificially maple-flavored syrup. She drank two cups of coffee. No one came around. She had the place to herself, which felt like a relief.
She staked out a spot where she could sit in the sun to keep warm, and see the lake if she looked down, and see the road to the cabin if she looked up. That way she would know when Dean came back.
Trouble was, the sun moved directly overhead, then slanted distinctly to the west, and still Dean did not come back. And still Carly sat. For lack of any other ideas.
It was only about an hour before dusk when she admitted to herself that she had never in her entire life been so thoroughly bored.
Dean and Hunter came back at early dusk. Carly watched them drive in. Watched the plume of dust the SUV kicked up on the long dirt driveway.
There was no deer strapped to the hood. Carly felt a clear sense of relief.
She got up, brushed off the seat of her jeans, and walked up the hill.
Jerry was out in the driveway when she got there, raising a fuss over their coming home empty-handed.
‘Hot dogs again,’ he said.
Dean held out the keys to the SUV. ‘Go shoot a deer, Jerry.’
‘Did I mention the hot dogs were good?’ Jerry asked.
Carly shifted slightly, and the movement caught Dean’s eye.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Just who I wanted to see after a lousy day.’ He reached into the back of the SUV and pulled out a stiff tan blanket. ‘You can be the only good thing to happen all day. Let’s go for a walk by the lake.’
Dean held Carly’s hand on the walk down. It felt good. Then he let go, and Carly had no idea why. And she couldn’t bring herself to ask. A moment later she felt his hand slide into her back jeans pocket. She smiled to herself and returned the gesture.
When they found a nice spot to stop – private, and in the trees �
� Carly expected him to wrap them up in the blanket. The way he’d done the night before. Instead he spread it on the ground.
‘What are we doing?’ Carly asked.
‘What do you think we’re doing? We’re lying down.’
‘Oh. OK.’
She settled herself on the blanket. Well, physically settled. Inside, she felt more than a little unsettled.
Dean lay down beside her. But less than half a minute later, he rolled on top of her, his full weight resting on her. He didn’t even kiss her first. He had never kissed her.
‘Wait. Whoa,’ she said, wondering if that had even been enough volume to get his attention. It was hard to talk with a big guy resting on your chest.
Carly felt him back off her some. She heard the zipper of his jeans come down.
‘Wait!’ she yelled.
This time she had her lungs back, and the volume was strong. Too strong. Carly wondered if a wandering neighbor might have overheard.
Dean climbed off her and sat up. She sat up beside him and looked at his face in the dusky light. His eyes were closed-down and dark.
‘What is your problem, Carly?’
She received it the way she absorbed tongue-lashings from her mom. Like a blow. She didn’t feel the urge to cry, because it felt more like a physical wound. Like he’d punched her in the gut. With a knife in his hand.
‘I thought we agreed we didn’t even know each other.’
‘That was yesterday,’ Dean said, not one tiny scrap of friendliness left over in his voice. Not one.
‘Yeah. Exactly. That was yesterday. I said we’d barely said twenty sentences to each other. You thought I meant I wanted to wait a day? I haven’t even seen you today.’
‘I didn’t think you were so high maintenance.’
Carly sat and breathed for a minute. Thinking about transporting herself home in some magic way. But then the minute was up and she was still at the lake with Dean. And she had to say something. So this is what she said.
‘I always figured it would be … you know … more … special.’
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