“Oh. Wait—you did?”
“Yeah, I did. But, you know, you can’t date your ex-girlfriend’s friend.”
“Right,” I said, even though Justin had dated Greta and a whole bunch of her cheerleader friends.
“But, I don’t know, I just wanted to tell you that. I never forgot about that night at Diamonds.”
“Me neither,” I said. It made me feel better about everything. About almost everything.
Tommy, in his hippied-out BMW, wasn’t going anywhere but was still pretending that he hadn’t failed his senior year and was heading off for happier adventures. Soo and Justin were getting ready to head to Oneonta in her Le Car.
I stayed in front of Soo’s house with Dean. She came and put her arms around me, one of the only other people I knew who was a tiny little five-footer like me. We were evenly matched, head to head.
“I’m coming back for you, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m coming back all the time.”
“I know,” I said.
“I love you, Carrie. I really do.”
“I know,” I said again.
“You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be great.”
“I know,” I said. “So are you. Would you get in your car already and go to college? And call me the night before you have a science test so I can help you.”
“Always,” she said.
“Always,” I said back.
And then Soo was gone too.
All summer, ever since the kiss—no, ever since I first heard him playing “English Rose” across the fence, before I even knew who he was or what he’d done or where he lived or how fleeting and life-altering his presence would be—I had been dreading this moment. It had lingered over every pinpoint of happiness, I realized, every shock of tumbling into love. Here it was: me and Dean, standing together next to his car, in front of my house, the mansion behind us. Thousands of miles would unfold between us, and two more years before I’d be set free. Maybe the second I graduated from high school I’d hitchhike to Oregon. But the thought wavered even as I considered it; I could see it floating downward, a reddening leaf in late fall.
I had no idea what Dean was thinking. He was looking at his shoes again, and then it seemed like he was looking at my shoes, too, my silly jellies—why did I wear those?—the toes of them against the toes of his.
“Um, this is for you,” I said, handing him the mix tape I’d made for him. He read the cover, nodded approvingly, and I felt so proud and blessed and cursed.
Then he reached into the car and put a plastic bag down on the top of the car, next to my right shoulder.
“What is it?” I couldn’t look at him, the same way he couldn’t look at me when I’d first met him. I just wanted too much from him.
“It’s a mix tape for my funeral,” he said.
“I’m having one of those moments where I don’t know if you’re serious or not,” I said.
“You hate those.”
“I know.”
He could have been the guy who pressed the bag into my hands and curled my fingers around it and bent his knees slightly so that he was eye level with me, one finger beneath my chin to gently lift my face to meet his gaze and then softly kiss me, his lips parted like petals. But Dean wasn’t like that. His hair was a mess, and the bike grease had never come out of his shorts or from under his nails, and he had a stripe of sunburn along his nose, and a few extra freckles where I’d never seen them before, and those freckles would fade, every day as the sun retreated they’d fade further until they disappeared, up there where the sun was watery and pale in middle-of-nowhere Oregon.
Dean pressed me up against the side of the Jeep, sudden and forceful, and the metal of the car was hot on my back and he pressed his mouth against mine and put his hand behind my head and we just stood there together like that: a kiss, melting. And then he got in the car and put my mix tape in the deck—I’d put Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” on there—and I thought I could see a hint of a smile on his face, though he had craned his neck to see behind him as he backed up. Or maybe it wasn’t a smile. Maybe it was a wince. Trying not to cry. Maybe not.
My hands shook as I opened the bag. The tape was wrapped in his rugby shirt, and two years of my tears waterfalled on top of it. Dean’s striped rugby shirt. I was in love with that shirt. I wanted that shirt to be with me always. I felt the sickening and terrifying thud of revelation: I was in love. With this boy. I loved him. For real. And that only made me cry more.
I put the tape in my Walkman and pressed play and heard the first song: Dean singing, with Tiger on drums and Justin on guitar. Give me a girl who wears flannel shirts. Not the kind from L. L. Bean but the kind you find in gasoline stations. Was I going to cry or vomit? Was it happiness or despair? Everything. It was just everything.
It was the best mix tape in the world. Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” “Supersonic Rocket Ship” by the Kinks. “Tapestry from an Asteroid” by Sun Ra. Steve Miller Band, “The Joker,” which really surprised me until I saw he’d actually written on the sleeve, This is a joke, but the song is really on here. It had Kate Bush and Patti Smith and Cyndi Lauper singing “Time After Time.” “Across the Universe,” which killed me because John Lennon’s voice, especially from Magical Mystery Tour on and especially “I Am the Walrus,” was one of my favorite voices. For a minute, reading the list of songs on there, I felt better. I felt the arrival of the weird, buoyant thing called hope. And then the second song came on.
If you don’t know the beauty you are, Nico sang, let me be your eyes, a hand to your darkness, so you won’t be afraid.
This was a different kind of sobbing, not one that felt like poison but rather a kind of cleansing, something softer and less sharp. Real heartbreak, not the kind made only of loneliness and self-hatred, was almost kind of sweet. Ah, yes, “Hurts So Good.” Secretly I liked John Cougar, too. But there would be no secrets anymore. I saw my reflection in the smudged chrome of the Walkman, my own hand white against the darkening sky. This was who I was. I was not afraid. I lifted my hand in one last wave, and I was sure, even as his Jeep disappeared around the corner, that he could see me.
Acknowledgments
One day my friend Aimee Molloy told me she’d done the Moth story slam. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” I said, and looked up the nearest and next one. The theme was “Dirt.” I don’t have any stories about dirt, I thought. And then I remembered that summer, the one with the hardhat, the music, and my first love. So thank you, Aimee, for the initial push to get on that stage and tell the story.
Then I turned that tale into an essay for the New York Times’s Modern Love column. So thank you, Daniel Jones, for publishing it.
Then, thanks in part to a suggestion from my friend David Mizner, I (very heavily) fictionalized the story and turned it into a novel. I wrote the ending while on vacation with my in-laws, Marty and Susan Sherwin, who had provided me with the most beautiful writing spot I could have imagined. The indefatigable Hannah Brooks offered the top floor of her home, with Hudson River views, in Newburgh, New York, so I could finish the first draft.
My writing group—Laura Allen, Suzanne Cope, Katherine Dykstra, Elizabeth Gold, Nancy Rawlinson, and Abby Sher—graciously, generously read that and several other drafts, giving me such great feedback, not to mention so much encouragement.
Then I found a wonderful agent, Faye Bender, who sold the book to a wonderful editor, Elizabeth Bewley, both of whom offered the best edits I could have hoped for. This is the kind of team you dream of when you’re imagining the writing life.
Meanwhile, my daughters, Enna and Athena, became obsessed with a song called “Lost Stars,” forcing me to listen to it seventeen thousand times. That ended up being a good thing. My kind and hilarious husband, Alex Sherwin, offered me his full support by way of doing extra kitchen and kid duty so I could type. My mother and stepfather, Helaine Selin and Bob Rakoff, stepped in to watch the kiddo
s while I retreated to the computer.
It was because my father, Peter Davis, and my stepmother, Beverly Lazar Davis, signed me up for that summer construction job that I ended up writing this book. So though I hated every minute of it, and though my teenage years were 72 percent misery, punctuated by 28 percent of music-and friend-filled joy, it all worked out in the end. Thanks to both of you and to my beautiful, wonderful, and, yes, tall sister, Adrienne Davis, for forgiving all my older-sister-failings, especially the really big one. (For the record, none of my parents are anything like the parents in this book, except that one’s a really good musician and one’s a really good cook.)
A few astrophysics types weighed in on the science. Thank you to Dr. Federico Bianco at the NYC Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics; A. I. Malz; and Richard and Sidney Wolff.
The people to whom I’m forever indebted are my friends from those years: Amy Knippenberg, Guy Lyons, Julie Natale, Katie Capelli, Kristin Brenner, Mike Migliozzi, Rachel Kieserman, Pete Donnelly, and Reid Lyons. Thank you for all that adventure, love, companionship, and music, that soundtrack of our teenage years.
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About the Author
Dave Bigler
LISA SELIN DAVIS is the author of the novel Belly. Lisa is originally from Saratoga Springs, New York, where she spent summers playing and listening to music with her (older) friends and riding her bike. She has written articles for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and a very old cat.
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