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by Stephen Markley


  That night Lisa also schooled her on condoms. When Stacey mentioned Ben wasn’t using anything, and she wasn’t making him, Lisa slapped her forehead and then pulled her cheeks down exposing the gross intake of her eye sockets. “Staaaaaaacey. No, no, no, no.”

  “He takes it out,” she explained. It was the first time she’d felt truly naive around them.

  “No, no, no. Common misconception. You can still get pregnant even if he just gets a splash in you. Even if it’s just the pre-cum.”

  “The what?”

  “Body’s natural lube.” Lisa sat up, clenching a fist. “See, this is Ben’s beautiful, gigantic dick making you want to have unprotected sex. During this part, before he comes, there’s some lubricant that comes seeping out, which is nature’s way of greasing the pole.” Kaylyn was cracking up, but blinding horror had descended upon Stacey, convinced she was already pregnant. They’d just had sex at the Brew the night before, her sixth time total, a count she would keep with obsessive specificity. “So because evolution is so clever, it’s like, ‘Hey, why not make this lube have some little hot Ben Harrington babies in it too? Then give those babies gigantic staffs, and let’s keep the ball rolling.’ Get what I’m saying?”

  She did not. She still thought evolution was a conspiracy theory, but the next week Lisa gave her a ride home after volleyball practice and tossed a box of Trojans at her. “From now on, wrap it up, Miracle.” And that’s what Lisa called her from then on, “Miracle.” Because Ben never got her pregnant.

  Good girl that she was, Stacey truly could not recall why she let Ben deflower her. Somehow she justified and compartmentalized it, and then put on an abstinence play for her parents, youth group, and church while sneaking off to sleep with her boyfriend on the reg. Not that you really need an explanation. That’s just being a teenager. Were He to exist, God would still have no power over the hormones, the longing, the urges that carpet-bomb you at that age. What could be said about her first time except that it hurt like hell, and she was mortified that she got blood on Ben’s sheets and further embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of that? They made the decision quickly, his parents and sisters still out for ice cream after his basketball game, thinking Ben and Stacey had gone to the dance. Stacey likened losing her virginity to getting her hand slammed in a car door: abrupt, shocking, painful beyond your ability to anticipate while causing no real lasting trauma (most of the time). Like they tell you, though, with practice it gets better, and before you know it, it’s pretty much all you want to do. Then your young life becomes a fretful logistical equation of spatial and temporal factors to determine when you might next find the opportunity. It helped that Ben was more or less the perfect boyfriend for a sexually inexperienced nascent lesbian unaware or in denial of her own dyke-ish desires: easygoing and considerate in a way that many teenage boys cannot summon. Like so many men, he had an uneasy relationship with his father and therefore an uneasy relationship with himself. He was a fantastic musician, spectacular on the guitar, which he could complement with a soulful voice that now reminded her of Amos Lee or Josh Ritter. His father, Doug Harrington, was this old-school chauvinist who measured his own child’s worth in feats of athletic performance and his ease or unease at wielding power saws or hunting rifles. Doug saw Stacey as the distraction that kept Ben from achieving on the court, but it was the other way around. For two years Stacey didn’t do much besides hang out with his son.

  It was hard for her to say what they spent so much time talking about, but she liked to remember it inaccurately, to recall the two of them pondering philosophy and literature while he plucked at guitar strings. Maybe he wasn’t the love of her youth, but Ben Harrington had what her mom called a “great big heart.” Even though she knew her relationship with him was part of her own inability to understand herself, and every sexual encounter had a claustrophobic quality—watching a frightening, beautiful alien planet from within a small glass box—she didn’t regret a moment. They broke up when he went to college, but at that point her mind was already elsewhere. She saw him only once after he graduated but kept a close watch on his music career. He even put her in a song. Pretty, sad girl / on her way to somewheres better / pretty, sad girl / she’ll take you the next planet over if you let her. A reference to what he said the first time they had sex stoned, which admittedly, really blows your hair back if you’re not used to it. “I think I just woke up on a different planet,” Ben said, and Stacey laughed and played with his beautiful sweaty blond hair.

  She never saw what was coming.

  In 2009, she got an e-mail forwarded to her from her dad, originally written by Doug Harrington. It said: Respectfully, would you please ask your daughter to stop sending Ben money. She wrote back to her father to say she had no idea what Doug was talking about. She hadn’t spoken to Ben since they’d gotten lunch in 2005. That was the last she heard from him until the fall of 2011.

  She’d just arrived in Ecuador and was taking some time to travel the country before she began teaching in Quito. It was in a hostel in the north, this small, out-of-the-way town called Cayambe, where she logged on to a computer with its greasy keyboard to check her e-mail. Her mom had written to tell her that Ben had set fire to his apartment in Los Angeles. Rather than reading the despondent obits on music-nerd sites—inflating Ben far beyond the reality of his lackluster career, Stacey found herself poring through pictures of the two people he’d killed: Christina and Eduardo Zayas, both twenty-nine, newly married. She bit into the side of her tongue as she scrolled past a picture of Christina rock climbing and one of Eduardo angrily jabbing his finger at another actor in the play Wait Until Dark.

  * * *

  She realized she had no quarters. While she waited on a waitress to come back to the cash register, she brought up the last e-mail Lisa ever wrote to her. Back in 2004, she’d said: I’m sorry about everything. Be well.

  How hard her heart had beat, how she’d broken a sweat like a fever, how she’d wanted to scream and throw her laptop through her dorm window when she read that years ago. Even if she took Janet’s advice, she couldn’t reply to this. She opened a fresh e-mail. She didn’t type Lisa’s address. She mostly just wanted to stare at the white space.

  The young man at the counter was still staring at her. He was short and wore an unruly beard like a stage prop, a greasy head of hair combed straight and humorless with a sheen that caught the fluorescents. He was dressed like a skateboarder or a grunge rock bassist, badly but unassumingly. While she tapped her dollar bill against the counter and worried over the blank screen, he simply stared and stared, and she resisted the urge to snap at him, What’s the problem here, bro?

  “Can I help you?” The waitress appeared, and she stuffed the phone back in her purse and slid her dollar across the counter.

  “Just four quarters.”

  She was older, gray hair and a haggard, drooping face, skeins of weariness embedded in deep wrinkles. She click-clacked away at the register until it popped open. Scooping out the quarters, she nodded at Stacey’s arm, “That’s a nifty tattoo.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “It’s from a poem.”

  The cursive script ran up the inside of her forearm from the spot where the Romans put the nails in Jesus’s wrists to just short of the elbow pit. “ ‘All dreams of the soul end in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body,’ ” the waitress read. “Sexy.”

  “I thought so. It’s Yeats.”

  “Can’t say I know that one. You ever read John Hardee?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “ ‘While hollering and breathing so long so deep / Memory came on and dove down to my sleep / Dreaming this memory of space all around / Silence becomes breath becomes thought becomes sound.’ ” She winked. “Look him up.”

  “Shit.” And she was filled with that sensation of interconnection, of Deep Time and all the myriad notions of wonder it promised. “I will.”

  The waitress hois
ted a coffeepot and walked away.

  * * *

  Lisa had been her classmate since the sixth grade, but Stacey was sure they had not spoken more than ten words to each other until she joined the volleyball team in high school. Along with Kaylyn and Hailey Kowalczyk, Lisa was an Elmwood kid, and over at Grover Street Elementary Stacey and Tina had deep reservations about the trashy cliques from Rainrock Road. (And don’t even get eleven-year-old Stacey started on what “jerkstores” they had at Rutherford Hayes Elementary; if you told young Stacey she’d grow up to date a cocky Hayes boy, she would’ve threatened to puke on your shoes.) That’s how the social taxonomy of small-town high school works. You can know of a person for years without actually knowing her. Though they’d grown close through volleyball and their boyfriends, the second semester of their junior year both Lisa and Stacey took Mr. Masoncup’s notoriously easy earth science class, where they learned all about dirt. Studying for one of Mase’s exams was how Stacey discovered Lisa’s obsession with popping zits.

  “You have one on your back,” she told Stacey gleefully. “I saw it at practice when you were changing.”

  “Perv.”

  “I’d really appreciate it if you let me take a crack at it.”

  She protested, and the conversation brewed into a healthy argument, their memorization of mycelium and other dirt components entirely forgotten.

  “It’s big, it’s white, it’s right on your shoulder blade. I need it. I want it.”

  “You’re disgusting. And strange. You’re too strange.”

  She twirled a finger at the sky. “Look, Miracle, you can act like a little muffin crumpet all you want, but I’m not helping you pass this test till I get at that sweet zit.”

  “Muffin crumpet?”

  Even stones get run down by flowing water, though, and eventually Stacey caved. She sat with her shirt off, hunched forward to stretch her back skin per Lisa’s instructions, and she could see her face in the dresser mirror, zipped tight with concentration.

  “Han, you look like a psycho.”

  “Just hold still.”

  The knobs of her spine each looked like a knot in a rope, and she felt self-conscious about the size and number of moles that peppered her skin. Lisa bore down on it with two thumbs, and Stacey felt that little pop, even heard it, and cried out.

  “Oh yeah,” Lisa breathed, examining the pus on the tip of her thumb.

  “You’re so weird!” But she was laughing.

  “Holy shit.” Lisa stared at her back with a particle physicist’s sense of wonder. “Look at that fucking thing bleed.”

  Stacey had always noticed women physically, but this didn’t seem aberrant. She was self-conscious about her own awkward frame for long enough that her gazes felt like jealousy, not longing. By the time summer rolled around, after their respective breakups with Ben and Bill, Stacey was spending almost all of her time with Lisa. They might have shared a conversation about the dual solace they could provide now that their boyfriends had graduated, but if so Stacey couldn’t recall it. They both had summer volleyball, trekking all over the state to play in scrimmages and tournaments. Lisa was the best setter on the team, could deliver a meaty ball into Stacey’s palm right at the height of her jump. This was when Lisa began badgering her to read more. She and Dan Eaton were little bookworm neighbor friends from childhood. Then she and Ashcraft had traded tomes (though Stacey remained convinced he didn’t actually read anything—he just liked upending his jock stereotype). Lisa hated having people in her orbit who were not readers. At that point Stacey had no idea she even liked literature. Other than the Bible, The Baby-Sitters Club novels, the Left Behind series, and the first couple of Harry Potters, she never picked up a book outside of class (this now seemed as incredible as the fact that she used to blow a boyfriend). Then Lisa got ahold of her that summer. Even though Stacey wrinkled her nose at the weight and length of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, she finished it in three nights, and Lisa rolled her eyes like No shit.

  Lisa began eating dinner at Stacey’s house. She knew this was partly because of Bethany; Lisa never made it a secret that they had been at odds ever since she started dating Bill, and Lisa wanted out of the house. Meanwhile, Stacey’s parents loved having her. Partially they were relieved that she was spending so much time with a girlfriend instead of sneaking around with Ben, who’d graduated and who—as good of a guy as he was—just had the slick, honeyed look of a kid trying to fuck your chaste daughter.

  Lisa could also set her charm wattage to “parent” better than anyone. She called Stacey’s dad “Moore’s Law”—not for any computational reason (her dad worked with mulch), but because Lisa told him, “We have to get Hollywood to green-light a sitcom about you, and it’s gotta be called Moore’s Law. It just has to, I’m sorry.”

  Stacey’s father was the kind of buttoned-up Eisenhower-era holdover who loved nothing more than hard work and hustle, which for him were interchangeable terms. When he coached her sixth-grade YMCA basketball team, which consisted of her, Hailey Kowalczyk, and a bunch of girls who couldn’t dribble, his most enthusiastic and frequent compliment was, “That’s good hustle! Love that hustle.” So when Lisa bopped out her sitcom music for Moore’s Law, Stacey’s mom would find it hysterical, and her dad, who had no sense of humor or irreverence at all, would always make the same joke: “Far as I can tell, it’s just a show about Lisa Han eating my food.”

  Her mom, on the other hand, was a total goofball. She could scat off puns at a worrisome, embarrassing clip. During the avian flu scare of 2004: “Stace, have you been to the hawkspital yet? Owl always worry about you, even though I know you’ll survive on a wing and a prey-er. No egrets, right? Boy, this dinner is parrotdise.” Her dad laughed at most of these, which might have explained their entire marriage.

  Her mom thought Lisa was a total firecracker. Once, memorably, the two of them got into an argument about senior pranks. The class of ’03 held a milk-chugging contest in the cafeteria. Supposedly it was physically impossible to drink a gallon of milk in an hour, which, based on this experience, seemed accurate. All participants failed, vomiting dueling blue-white jets into nearby trash cans.

  “It sounded like a plane landing on an aircraft carrier,” Lisa told Stacey’s mom, recounting the incident from the previous spring. It was one of the last times she found herself missing those friends: Bill, Rick, Kaylyn, and Ben. “Most unbelievable throw-up noise I’ve ever heard.”

  “Lisa, I’m so disappointed in you.” Despite her mom’s middle age, she still had eyes that somehow looked years younger. Bright and pale blue, they glittered when she smiled. As a child, Stacey envied her elegance, but as her mom aged and put on weight, Stacey felt herself wanting to stall time, to preserve her mother’s joyous beauty in amber. “That’s not even clever. You know what we did my senior year at Massillon? We found the frame for the make and model of the principal’s car, and the boys assembled it on the roof of the high school. Not the whole car, mind you. Just the frame with the right paint color. Then my boyfriend at the time, he broke into the principal’s car with a coat hanger, popped the brake, and we towed it to someone’s house to hide it. The whole town thought we’d disassembled and reassembled the principal’s car on the roof, and no one had any clue how we pulled it off. Then the next day we put his car back. How’s that? Now that’s a prank.”

  “Sounds like real braking news,” said Lisa. “It must have been the torque of the town, huh?”

  Stacey’s mom threw her head back and positively howled.

  * * *

  The game was called Clawmaggedon. Quarter already deposited, waiting for her to smack the START button, Stacey instead held her phone and stared at the blank e-mail she’d opened. She tried typing: Listen, I’m about to see your mom in New Canaan. I was wondering about you . . .

  And she quickly deleted it, the letters vanishing one at a time and then in wordly chunks.

  She tried: How have you been? So I’m in New Canaan because Bethany man
aged to track me down . . .

  And deleted it just as fast.

  She tried: You fucking cunt, hope you’ve had a splendid nine years . . .

  And deleted that as well.

  She set her phone aside and slapped the START button. She crept the joystick to the corner as the timer began. There was one prize no one could ever get, these big stuffed lobsters that dwarfed the other toys. They were too big to grasp. The claw’s pitiful tripod digits would close around the blue fur (like the lobsters were choking) and barely budge the behemoths. The only person she’d ever seen lift one out of the scrum was Rick Brinklan, who’d been preternaturally skilled at the game. He used to get a prize from the pit to the chute nearly every time for Kaylyn.

  Rick had been the subject of one of her early fights with her brother, Patrick—although Patrick never really fought. He presented very cogent arguments in as agreeable and pleasant a manner as he could summon. He was polite and kind in his argumentation. She’d decided not to come home for Rick’s funeral or parade. She’d stayed in Springfield for the summer, already researching teaching-abroad opportunities for when she graduated in a year, and the truth was she didn’t feel like she still knew this person or owed him anything. More importantly, at that point in her life, she wanted to avoid the people she might see there. It was hard to describe to her brother when she finally did come home for Thanksgiving break.

  “We weren’t that close.”

  “You knew him from the time you were in sixth grade,” he scolded in his reasoned, nonjudgmental way.

  “It’s just death, Pat. We’ll all be there soon enough.”

  They were in his kitchen, and she remembered he was making her and the girls each a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her nieces ran amok in the living room, spazzing out over some kind of pink plastic toy with blaring, tinny speakers. As soon as these words left her mouth, she felt terrible about them. When she’d first started dating Ben, Rick had welcomed her to the group in his own Rickly way: by making it a running joke that she was too pretty, too smart, too good to date a “bubblegum airhead like Harrington.” He got a lot of mileage out of that, and it wasn’t so much that it made Stacey laugh as it made her feel comfortable around all of these older kids.

 

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