Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “So Hailey lost her virginity to Curt Moretti? So what?” Stacey wondered. Not that she was advocating Lisa again become friends with the girl she called “Triple Threat.”

  “Danny’s been my friend since we were little kids,” she said defensively. “Hailey knew how much he adored her even while she was getting it on with Moretti. And I told her, ‘Look, bitch, one day Danny’s going to put on a little muscle, he’s going to finally be able to grow facial hair, he’ll get a better pair of glasses, and he’s going to be killing it at like Cornell because the kid reads more than a librarian, and you’re going to have Curtis fucking Moretti’s little rat-faced teen mom baby to take care of.’ ”

  Skinny and pale with freckles and a scrub of Irish-red hair, Dan Eaton was a sweet-natured kid—kind to the point where he could get trampled, even by his friends. The worst-kept secret of their class was that Danny Eaton had been in love—obsessed might be a better word—with Hailey for as long as he’d known her. Their junior year he’d finally, at long last, worn Hailey down, and they could be spotted in the halls, Dan doting. When Stacey heard he’d decided on the military over college, she was baffled: he’d worked so long to win her. Then to go put it all on the line in the very real stare-into-the-void sense of foreign military adventures—hard-won love wasn’t worth that kind of risk.

  “But so what? She dates Dan now,” said Stacey. “She listened to you.”

  Lisa bit the sleeve of her sweatshirt and stared out over the rain-spattered grass. A morning fog had settled over the fields like their town was passing through the clouds. Lisa spit between her feet and at least appeared to think about this.

  “Naw, she didn’t listen to me. We barely say a word to each other anymore. And it’s about more than that. She and Kaylyn—they’ve got this fucked codependent thing. You know Kay’s back? Dropped out of Toledo. They’ve been hanging out.”

  “I don’t get it, are you jealous?” She hoped the word jealous didn’t sound as jealous as it did to her own ears. Whenever Lisa spoke of a person for whom she carried love, Stacey wanted to attach her mouth to her and siphon it off.

  “Not exactly. Kay was always hanging on Bill when we were dating, always flirting with him like she didn’t think I saw. But you don’t understand, that girl is severely more fucked up than . . .”

  “Right, your brother’s baseball card or whatever.” Stacey was angry—and fearful. Maybe it was irrational, but she wondered if either Hailey or Kaylyn had been with Lisa first. Maybe just a night like their Casablanca night, but it would be more than enough to make her crazy. For some reason, Ashcraft she could live with, but not another girl.

  “No. Not that. I got ahold of this thing.” She hunched forward, sitting like a guy with her elbows propped on her thighs, strands of oil-black hair falling in her eyes. Stacey had the urge to tuck them behind her ear, and it made her stomach queasy with longing. “I just know some bad shit about Kaylyn. It’s been making me a little nuts . . . figuring what to do about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s just a total psycho. That’s all I can think about her anymore.”

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “It’s a videotape. Kay and some guys from the football team. It’s . . .” She hesitated.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “There’s cocaine in it.”

  Understand at the time, this truly was amazing to Stacey. She’d never heard of such a thing in New Canaan. That anyone, let alone her once-close friend, had access to cocaine was beyond wild.

  “Like they videotaped themselves doing it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I have no clue.” Lisa sniffed and stared out over the gossamer fog. Then she said, “Man, fuck her. Fuck Kowalczyk. Fuck Kaylyn. Fuck all these people. Four years from now I’ll be drinking wine in Florence, and they’ll both just be teenage bullshit I’ll barely remember.”

  Almost four years later, when Stacey was home for Christmas her senior year of college, she went to her mom’s gym and bumped into Hailey Kowalczyk in the locker room. They stubbed toes on their hellos, jammed fingers trying to find common ground for the brief time it took Hailey to change from nursing scrubs into workout clothes. Skipped over Rick Brinklan’s parade, which Hailey had attended but Stacey had not. Hailey and Danny, she learned, had broken up, and she was now seeing Eric Frye. Then Stacey asked her if she ever heard from Lisa. It was all they had in common other than middle school basketball.

  “We still write to each other every now and then. She’s in Vietnam, working at some hospital running an English-language program.”

  “How is she?” Stacey asked with great effort to keep her voice even. A flare of that old irrational jealousy.

  “She loves it. And I miss her. We kind of had our drifting apart in high school over stupid teenage stuff but . . .” She trailed off. “Want me to tell her you said hi?” she offered.

  She was much taller than Hailey. She wanted to loom over her and say, Why you? Lisa thought you were a fucking phony. Why you and not me?

  Then she was stuck on that bike wondering what Lisa could have possibly been thinking, and if she’d ever tracked down her dad in Vietnam, and of the complex transpositions of history that had likely brought Lisa’s father from that country to Ohio and the daughter he abandoned all the way back to his ancestral home. In all of Stacey’s travels to come, all her notions of wanderlust, she never dared tack her pushpin to Southeast Asia, where Lisa had chosen to make her life. Had she ever harbored any ambitions to do so, they dissipated after her heart was broken by that conversation with Hailey Kowalczyk.

  * * *

  A compact blue sedan idled in the shadows between the streetlights. At the passenger side, leaning in to speak to the driver, was a man who elicited memories of standing in the student bleachers holding Ben’s hand and hurling classist chants at teams from towns far bleaker than New Canaan (It’s all right / It’s okay / Y’all are gonna pump our gas someday). Bubbling up from the depths of memory, his nickname for Stacey popped to the surface: “Little Moore.”

  Back when Todd Beaufort and her brother Matt were friends on the football team, all those intimidating older boys used to call her that.

  Todd spoke to a figure ensconced in the dark behind the steering wheel. The face missing. Buried in shadow. Now he glanced her way, and she almost raised a hand to wave.

  Todd had always been her favorite of Matt’s friends, probably because when Todd came over to their house, he went out of his way to be nice to her. It was likely also how he turned his eye toward Tina. He ended up dating Stacey’s childhood friend for the better part of high school, though by that point she and Tina barely spoke. There was a lot of gossip that the Todd-Tina celebrity dyad didn’t end well. There was a reason she and Tina grew apart, however, and where others saw Todd as the villain, Stacey always saw Tina as more complicit. Sometimes being that beautiful, coveted girl at that age can almost be a curse (she thought of Kaylyn as well). Tina allowed herself to become enveloped by Todd and quit any activity that failed to bow to his wishes. She thought of the time as seventh graders when the two of them sneaked to the edge of the basement stairs to try to hear what Matt, Todd, Curtis, and their other friends were talking about. All they could hear, though, was the air conditioner and the occasional guttural guffaw of older boy laughter. While Stacey made new friends through volleyball, Tina hovered over her new love sycophantically, lost interest in anything else. When they finally broke up, grotesque rumors circulated about her, all of them ridiculous and likely fabricated by the football team, but they made Stacey wary. Tina made an aborted, half-hearted effort to reconnect with her, but by then Stacey had a new crew of friends. Tina retreated from the social scene, lost so much weight that people whispered about an eating disorder. Stacey lost all track of her after graduation.

  Stacey lowered her hand when Todd glared her way. He looked drunk. Not to mention fat and
tired and old. Even more so than Jonah. He turned back to the car without noticing her.

  She’d felt sorry for him then and felt sorry for him now. When she was a sophomore they’d been in the same study hall, and he’d asked her a question about algebra. He was studying for the SAT and absolutely needed a higher score so he could play college football. He showed her what he was having trouble with, a very basic 3x=15, solve for x question. How was it possible that he’d made it to his senior year unable to do an equation he should’ve learned in seventh grade when she and Tina were still elementary school girls spying on him from the basement stairs? Stacey spent most of the study hall that semester tutoring him. He did eventually get the score he needed, although from the looks of things now, it hadn’t led where he’d hoped.

  He popped open the door of the car and climbed inside. When the driver pulled away, Stacey took a step back into the shadows of the alley. She wasn’t sure why. She let the car go by and saw Todd Beaufort’s bleary face beneath a red ball cap, cut through with a wounded, hopeless expression. She continued to the bar.

  The Lincoln Lounge was one of those sad dips in the dunes of the rural-industrial Midwest: wood paneling reflecting dim bulbs and LIGHT/LITE beer signage. A few tables scattered around a dusky green pool table, and a TV playing West Coast baseball. Battered old men huddled over beers at the bar while a few younger ones clacked pool balls around half-heartedly. She’d gone to high school with the bartender, she was sure, but couldn’t summon her name.

  “Did you have a guy in here tonight,” she asked the bartender. “Tall, black hair, cocky looking?”

  “Have to do better’n that.” She had a sharp nose that had looked prettier in her teenage days. Large breasts threatened to burst from the U-cut black shirt she wore, the cleavage vibrating in a gelatinous way as she poured whiskey and snagged the hose that dispensed soda.

  “He was probably with Jonah Hansen?” Stacey tried.

  “Oh. And Beaufort and all them?” She pointed her eyes at the door where he’d just departed and shook her head distractedly. “There was a fight, and they left a while ago now.”

  “Any idea which direction?”

  She shrugged to indicate she didn’t know. “You go to New Canaan?” she asked.

  Stacey hesitated. “No, just trying to catch one of them.” Outside, she felt a momentary chill and looked up and down the street before venturing farther. For some reason, she was sure the blue sedan would have circled the block, and the driver would be waiting for her, the passenger seat now empty. Like a hearse, all of this car’s passengers only took one-way trips, and now the driver would be waiting to pick up another lost traveler.

  * * *

  She tried to remember if in that year between 2003 and 2004—in Lisa’s bed beneath the covers or in her own basement, the blanket of rocket ships drawn around their legs and tucked beneath her bottom—if Lisa talked about leaving. Once, she expressed the thought to Stacey, but she dismissed it the way you dismiss such talk from a seventeen-year-old: as an idle fantasy, a wishful what-if scenario.

  “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” A dumb high school girl question like that.

  Lisa traced her fingers along Stacey’s belly, the tips grazing from her navel up between her breasts and then drawing cylindrical patterns.

  “Springfield, Ohio,” said Stacey.

  “Seriously.”

  Lisa had felt far away all night. They’d eaten dinner with Stacey’s parents and then retreated to the basement to “watch a movie,” which meant jacking up the volume while they took care of each other and muffled noises in pillows. Even during this she could sense something troubling Lisa.

  When Stacey didn’t respond, not out of cruelty but because she was afraid of where this conversation was going, she felt Lisa’s cheek rise from the nook in her shoulder.

  “Hey, wake up. I’m like trying to . . .” She propped herself up on her elbow. It was hard to find her eyes in the dark.

  “You’re trying to what?” she demanded. “Ask me if I want to run away with you? We both know that’s not happening. Why talk about it.”

  They were whispering even though her parents’ room was on the other end of the house.

  “When we started this, I thought it was funny,” Lisa said. “I thought, ‘Well, this’ll be a good story for college.’ ”

  “Glad I could be a good story.”

  “Stacey, shut up.” Lisa blew a frustrated breath of mint toothpaste into her face. “Fucking fuck, I’m trying to tell you something.”

  She was quiet for a while, and Stacey waited.

  “So. Okay. When I dated Ashcraft, we used to tell each other, ‘I love you,’ right? Which was obviously ridiculous—I didn’t love Bill Ashcraft. I mean, yes, I cared about him. But I was not in love with him. The way I feel about you has been—I don’t know—unexpected. And it’s been different—and not because you’ve got a beautiful little pussy. Part of that difference is, you know, I love you. I’m in love with you. Whatever that means. Or whatever it is. Jesus Christ, I’m awkward.”

  This was February, the darkest month in the Midwest. There was thick, week-old snow outside and ice coating every surface. It caught all the light of the stars and glittered in shifting, restless arrays. It captured the errant glow of a streetlamp and reflected it, silver and blue, through the blinds. It had been about six months since Casablanca. Two months since they went shopping at a thrift store in Columbus and Lisa spotted a dress, white with blue flowers, and judged it Stacey’s size, her style, her “swag.” It was four months before Lisa would leave.

  She continued. “Before all this started, all I wanted to do was get out of this town and get away from my mom and Bob and Alex, but now I’m thinking about leaving and what that actually means. Since we’ve been hanging out, I just find myself . . .” A pause. “Unable to stop thinking about you. Like totally incompetent about anything except wondering when I’m going to see you next. And I know”—she gestured to Stacey’s naked torso to indicate the activities that went beyond friendship—“sometimes I treat it like a joke. But I don’t think it’s just screwing around. At least for me—like . . .” She kept getting lost, and Stacey could feel her face growing hot. “You’re a crazy-gorgeous, dreamboat bitch, you know? If I was ever going to have a partner to travel the world with and help me raise Darkheart McStabababy it would be you.”

  Stacey laughed less at what Lisa said than at her inability to say anything sincere without injecting her particular brand of absurdity. And then on the next word Lisa’s voice cracked.

  “But really.” She sucked on her cheek, which made a squelching noise. “It’s because you lift my heart. You make me insanely happy to be alive. So I don’t know what happens after this, and I know you still think we’re both going straight to hell, but that’s why you need to know. I’m fucking out-of-my-mind crazy about you.”

  There was a period of her life after she graduated from Wittenberg and started traveling in which Stacey tried to render this moment inert with both reason and irony. They were just children, she told herself, imitating emotions they didn’t yet know anything about. That’s why teenagers are in love with pop idols and think it would be fun to shoot bows and arrows in futuristic dystopias. She’d look at pictures of herself in high school—her button-nosed face and bob of blond hair, the way she slouched, perhaps because she subconsciously wanted to be shorter—and think, Look at this awkward teenage baby! She can’t feel anything real yet! If she now heard a woman stammer on like Lisa had, she’d be embarrassed for her. So much Hollywood rom-com drippy bathetic nonsense. Yet the feeling she had back then always returned to her like a ghost; her face would go iron-hot and that pebble in her throat would exert its pressure. Because irony, distance, perspective would all eventually fail her—because that’s the kind of shit you lived a lifetime to hear. And something only a seventeen-year-old actually has the courage to say.

  She snatched Lisa’s face out of the dark and kissed her
. When their cheeks glanced off each other’s, they were both slick. All dreams of the soul ending in a beautiful woman’s body.

  * * *

  On the walk back to her car, she passed an older black man in shorts and sandals as he came around the corner. She recognized him as her high school music teacher. After the surprises of Jonah and Todd she was out of bewilderment to find Mr. Clifton snatching open the door of the Lincoln. It was clear to her why New Canaan wasn’t the magical realist space she’d imagined, the same reason it always took her mother two hours to shop for groceries: in a small town you just ran into a hell of a lot of people you knew.

  He didn’t look Stacey’s way even though she was the only person out on this bare rock of street. She called to him using the honorific in front of his last name, a habit difficult to break with old teachers.

  He turned, let go of the door, face puzzled and assessing her blankly.

  “It’s Stacey Moore,” she said. “Class of oh-four.”

  His eyes bugged in surprise, and finally the broad, familiar grin broke out. “Stacey Moore,” he cried, hurrying over, taking her in a semi-awkward, hunched-at-the-waist embrace. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Are you going in?” she asked.

  He looked almost embarrassed by his need for a drink. “Felt like a night to get out of the house.”

  “Mind if I join you for one?”

  * * *

  Lisa got off easily and loudly. The night of Jonah’s vodka aside, they rarely fooled around in Lisa’s house unless they were sure Bethany, Bob, and Alex were out because all three rooms were clustered together at the end of the hall. There was an odd, musty smell to the place that had nothing to do with the tacky floral-print wallpaper, yet seemed related. It was a low, dark house with sticky surfaces and ugly shag carpet in the bedrooms. Stacey had never liked being there and knew Lisa felt the same.