by Jason Myers
She went, “The only reason why you don’t like them now is because everyone else does.”
No. That’s only kind of true, Laura.
“It’s completely true, Travis. After we watched Garden State, I saw you give all your Shins CDs to your sister.”
That movie sucked.
“I liked it.”
Of course you did. You and every other hipster who thinks that kind of odd, offbeat romance is all super warm and fuzzy.
“And what makes you such an expert?”
I took a film theory class my first semester of college.
Laura rolled her eyes and smiled. She went, “You always gotta be the chillest dude in the room.”
And I went, That doesn’t make much sense, considering how good of friends I am with Michael.
Then I gave her two Xanax and told her to relax, and she swallowed both of them at the same time with her spit.
• • •
After we take our things inside the cabin, I mention that we should probably drive into town and pick up some things like food and booze and smokes before the stores close, but Laura heads straight for the master bedroom and flops on the bed, moaning, “You go, baby.”
Fine, I groan.
And she says, “You can take some money from my purse and use it on whatever.”
Awesome. I get free rein on your purse.
“Just take what you need, Travis.”
Yeah, sure. Do you want anything in particular?
“Just get whatever sounds good,” she yawns, and I shut the door to the bedroom and leave.
• • •
The town my parents’ cabin is in is very small and quiet and doesn’t even have a stoplight or anything. Even in the downpour, the kids here run around as if they have no worries at all in the world, and deep down, I feel a little jealous.
Pushing the grocery cart through one store aisle after another, I toss frozen pizzas and bread and lunch meat and way too much alcohol into it. The girl who is working the register is young and cute and smiles at me and she asks me where I’m from, and when I tell her, she tells me that everyone she meets from the city usually seems impatient and preoccupied when they come into the store.
I pull out my fake ID and cash.
What about me?
“What about you?” she asks.
How do I seem?
“Distant.”
Distant?
The girl nods. “You don’t seem like you’re really here,” she says, handing me my change. And for a moment I don’t move. I don’t say a fucking word. I just stare at this girl and think about what I could do to her if she ever came home with me.
“Hey,” she says, snapping me out of my trance.
I blink.
What?
“You’re holding up the line,” she points out, and I rub my eyes, then tell the girl thanks and drive back to the cabin holding on to the steering wheel as tightly as I can.
• • •
Laura’s asleep in bed when I get back. I try waking her. I shake her arm and say that I got us some food and drinks, and she says, “Give me another hour, dude. Please?”
I walk out to the kitchen and open a bottle of champagne and a jug of orange juice and make a mimosa.
Although my parents have had this cabin for almost fifteen years, I can only remember two times that the four of us—my mother, father, sister, and me—ever came here together, all at once. And even those memories seem hazy. Both times were before I was ten, and neither of them really stands out much. Most of my visits here have come during the past four or five years: me with my friends, me with Laura, me with my father and a few of his college buddies, and once with my sister and two of her friends when I was sixteen and she was twelve.
On that trip, the first afternoon there, I was out jet skiing by myself, and when I came back to the cabin, I found the three of them snorting lines of coke off a CD case in the living room. When I asked my sister, What are you doing? she began laughing in my face and went, “Fuck, Travis. I’ve been stealing the shit from you since last summer,” then chopped off another rail.
The cabin itself is very subtle and casual in the same way Brad Pitt’s subtle with a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel room on some Caribbean hideaway.
Laid out and spread into seven rooms, including three bedrooms, the cabin has been constantly upgraded over the years and is now equipped with a big-screen television, leather sofas, overpriced pieces of art on the walls, marble countertops, black and white tiling in both bathrooms and the kitchen, and a hot tub that sits right outside the tinted sliding glass door on the other side of the living room.
I walk over to that same door and sip my drink and look out onto the lake. It’s completely lifeless. No one’s out at all. In fact the sky is so dark that the only sign of anyone else here is the faded glow coming from the other cabins.
This makes me feel uneasy, and I turn away and move to the couch and try to watch TV, but the clouds and storm are blocking the satellite signal so nothing comes up except a black, empty screen.
Thoughts of Kyle sitting in jail smash through my head. Almost make me sick. And I spend the next hour or so, back in the kitchen, playing solitaire, opening a new bottle of champagne, listening to a Cat Power CD, filling an ashtray.
22.
LAURA EMERGES FROM THE BEDROOM in a pair of ripped jeans and a wife-beater with a silhouette of a girl blowing her head off.
I’ve just finished off my fourth bottle of champagne and am shitfaced, watching as she looks at the empty bottles, the full ashtray. “Looks like someone’s been having a good time,” she says.
I roll my eyes.
Really? Who? Who’s having a good fucking time?
“Oh god, Travis,” she groans. “I’m just trying to be funny.”
Right.
I open another pack of cigarettes.
Funny.
Laura slides behind my chair and rubs my shoulders and asks me what I want to do.
I don’t know. It’s still raining.
She sits down on my lap. “We could watch TV.”
I haven’t been able to get a signal all night.
“Huh.” She kisses me. “We could play some cards.”
I’ve been playing cards since we fucking got here. I’m kinda over it. I don’t wanna play cards anymore.
Laura stands up and slides behind my chair, running a hand across the back of my neck. Then she moves to the fridge, pulls out a can of club soda, then grabs the bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label I picked up and makes herself a drink.
“I brought the first season of Arrested Development on DVD with me,” she tells me.
Let’s watch that, I say.
“I also brought a gram of blow with me.”
I swing my arm back.
Awesome.
So Laura goes into the bedroom to get the DVD and the coke and I walk into the bathroom to piss. Leaning over the toilet, I wrap my piece in my hands and stare at my reflection in the mirror—the dark bags under my eyes, the stubble on my face, the way my hair is all bunched up from continuously running my hands through it.
Laura’s cell phone rings. It’s sitting on the sink top next to me, so I pinch off the rest of my pee and look at the caller ID.
It’s Cliff.
What’s up, dude? I answer.
He doesn’t say anything.
Yo, Cliff. Are you there?
“Who is this?” he asks. “You’re not Laura, why do you have Laura’s phone?”
It’s Travis, man. Laura and I are at the cabin.
“What? No. Don’t fucking lie to me.”
Cliff. What the hell’s wrong with you? You sound weird.
“No!” he screams. “You’re the one who’s weird. Why do you have Laura’s phone?”
Are listening to me, Cliff? We’re at my parents’ cabin.
Pause.
From the other end, I hear a lighter click and the sound of him inhaling something.
Cliff, I bark once more, and he says, “Fuck off, man, whoever this is. Laura didn’t go to any cabin with anyone.”
He hangs up.
I zip my pants and walk back out to the kitchen and Laura goes, “Did my phone just ring?”
Yeah. It was Cliff.
“Oh,” she says very slowly. “What did he want?”
I have no idea. He was wasted and got mad at me for answering your phone.
“Weird,” Laura blushes.
I wonder why he called you.
“I have absolutely no idea why he would. . . . It’s pretty weird.”
I don’t know about him right now.
“Then you should forget about him.”
I can’t. He’s really messed up right now. He’s fucked himself on heroin. I don’t even think he knows what he’s doing sometimes.
Laura reaches around my waist and pulls me into her. “Which means you shouldn’t believe anything he does or says. Ever.”
I really don’t.
“Good.”
She kisses my cheek and leads me into the living room and I put in the first disc of the first season and sometime into the third episode, and after we’ve finished the entire gram, Laura goes, “I hung out with David Cross and Janeane Garofalo at a party back in April when I was in Chicago.”
How was that? Pretty cool?
“I guess so. They weren’t like famous people, ya know? They were real. Not all conceited and stuck-up.”
You’ve been around, haven’t you?
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she snaps.
I light a cigarette.
Dating Bryan with a y, the so-called King of the Hipsters, and hanging out with David Cross and Janeane. Kicking it backstage at Björk shows. You’re like a little social butterfly. A little Paris Hilton.
Laura jumps up from the sofa we’re sitting on and goes, “You can be such a dick sometimes, Travis.”
Oh, calm down. I’m kidding.
“No, that’s bullshit. You’re not joking. You said that because you wanted to rip me. You wanted to hurt me.”
So what?
Laura chucks her arms into the air, above her head. “So what?”
I was joking again. You’re coked out of your mind. Sit down.
She flips her right hand around and gives me the finger.
Yeah, that’s real nice.
“Asshole,” she snaps, and stomps into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
• • •
After Laura and I have apologized to each other some hours later and popped some Xanax, we discuss it and we decide that we should fuck, being how it’s been since Christmas and all and the fact that she isn’t on her period anymore.
It begins next to the dresser and moves quickly to the bed, Laura in a pair of light blue underwear and me in a pair of black sweatpants. The lights are off and the only light we have to guide us is the small sliver of moonlight that’s laid itself out nearly perfectly across the room and bed, despite the thunderstorm.
We strip each other down and she bites my neck and bites my chest and I lean over her sweaty body, and slide myself inside of her. She’s superwet and moans loudly while I maneuver her arms underneath mine.
“I’m still in love with you,” she whispers, digging her nails into my back. “I always have been.”
I cover her mouth.
Let’s not talk now.
“Okay,” she says, closing her eyes. “Whatever you want.”
I wrap my hands around her neck.
23.
I GET OUT OF BED the next morning and stand in front of the large mirror attached to the big red oak dresser across the room, thinking about this girl Erin I occasionally hooked up with in Arizona, who asked me this one time, while I was staring at myself in a mirror behind this bar we were at, “Why do you always look at yourself in mirrors? Are you that self-absorbed?”
And I turned to her and went, “I just want to make sure that I’m still here. That’s all.”
She smiled and kissed me and we never went out again.
I slip on a pair of jeans and white T and walk out to the living room.
This is where Laura is.
She’s sitting on the couch, rolling a joint, watching a Saved by the Bell rerun, the one where Zach and Screech find an old radio station in the basement of Bayside High and talk Mr. Belding into letting their entire gang broadcast their own shows. Only it turns out that AC Slater isn’t much of a radio guy. He’s really awful and quits when he finds out that the rest of his so-called friends think so as well. But when the radio station gets pushed to its limits due to a lack of funding, Slater makes one more bold and courageous move and single-handedly saves the Bayside radio station by energizing the dedicated people still listening at one in the morning.
Laura pulls her eyes off of the joint and says, “There’s no way Slater could be that good all of the sudden. I mean, he sounded so fucking stupid and bad at the beginning of the show that I almost turned the channel because I was so embarrassed for him.”
I sit down next to her.
The whole show really isn’t that realistic, sweetie, so to them it makes perfect sense.
“You’re probably right,” she smiles, handing me the joint along with a pink lighter. “Do the honors,” she says.
I light up.
Inhale. Exhale.
I hand her back the joint and ask her what she wants to do.
“I think we should go down to the beach. It’s not raining anymore.”
Then the beach it is, I say, leaning over and kissing the corner of her mouth.
• • •
So Laura and I spend the entire afternoon at the beach, lying around, her in a red and white two-piece suit and me in my black trunks. We drink all the beers from the cooler we packed and eat the sandwiches she made and smoke the other two joints she rolled. A few times, we go into the dark blue water, but even though the sun is out, the water feels too cold to both of us and we stay on the beach after that. We listen to some old tapes I find in the back shed behind the cabin—tapes from years ago:
Guns N’ Roses Lies
Faith No More Angel Dust
Nirvana Bleach
Dr. Dre The Chronic
The stereo we brought down is very old, though, and the batteries run out, and neither of us wants to walk back to the cabin to grab more, so we let the wind and water and faraway screams and laughter of kids with their families be the soundtrack for the rest of our day.
At some point, when I can’t see anyone even remotely near us, I roll over and grab Laura. I run my hands along her sandy thighs. I kiss her. We make love.
An hour later we make love again.
An hour after that we make love once more.
We do this under an extra beach towel. Our warm, dry bodies pressed together. The scent of fresh water, of stale beer on our breath, of suntan lotion flooding our nostrils.
We do this until the clouds roll in, and we end when Laura, who’s just finished sliding her bottoms up, checks her cell phone and says, “It’s almost five, baby. We need to get moving if we’re gonna make it to the restaurant by seven.”
Okay. But, Laura.
“What’s up?”
I love you.
“I knew it! I love you too. So much. I’m so glad we’re back together.”
Me too.
This is how the two of us spend the afternoon of the Fourth of July.
24.
WHILE LAURA AND I ARE waiting for the drinks we just ordered with our fake IDs, Laura starts pressing her neck, wincing every time her fingers jab against it.
I light a cigarette and ask her what’s wrong. “I think you fucked up my neck while we were having sex earlier,” she tells me.
I didn’t mean to be so rough. I’m sorry.
“Don’t apologize, Travis. It’s okay. It was good. I enjoyed it immensely.”
Inhale. Exhale.
Laura says, “It’s always good to get it a little rough,
ya know. That’s how you like to screw me. You always have.”
I try to smile.
Then Laura goes, “You look a little tense.”
I’m just thinking about Kyle. I’m superbummed about it.
I take another drag.
Plus Claire called me the day after it happened and lost it on me and I feel bad about that. Emily and her were pretty close.
“I tried calling her,” Laura says. “But she didn’t pick up. I don’t think she likes me anymore.”
Our waitress returns with our drinks—two Bloody Marys—and when she splits, I ask Laura what happened between her and Claire.
Laura lights a cigarette. “Nothing specific,” she says. “All of a sudden she was like too cool for me. She started chillin’ with new people and not returning calls. We drifted apart. It was bound to happen, I guess.”
That sucks.
Laura shrugs. “Whatever.”
Our waitress returns again to take our orders, and while we’re waiting for our food, starting in our second round of cocktails, these two guys—a little older looking, wearing long Khaki shorts, sandals, and polo shirts—walk over to our table and say hi to Laura.
“Oh,” she says, darting her eyes at me, then back to them, then back to me, then back to them. “Hi, Bruce. Hi, Greg.”
The Bruce guy leans over. He gives Laura a hug. “Fancy seeing you up here,” he says.
Both dudes look at me and Laura goes, “I’m up here with my friend, Travis. We’re here for the holiday.”
Both of them nod at me and Bruce says, “Hey there, buddy, I mean Travis. Nice to meet you. I’ve not heard one good thing about you.”
His friend starts to laugh. I say, To be completely honest with you, man, there’s really not a whole lot of good shit to say about me.
“You’re probably right,” he snaps back.
“Bruce, don’t start,” Laura says.
No, no. Don’t stop him, Laura. It’s fine. Let him keep talking. I don’t mind at all. He’s pretty funny.
“Shit,” Bruce says, looking at his friend. “I told you I was funny.”
“This guy doesn’t know shit,” his friend says, pointing at me.