Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  “We used to do that shit back in Tampa,” Jerod says. “Light it up under the tinfoil.” He makes a face.

  “That shit is dirty,” says Sean.

  “I’ve only done it a few times.”

  “It tastes like ass.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Feels good, though,” Sean says. He shakes his head. His hair is thinning. I know nothing about Sean, I realize. I don’t even know his last name, or where he works now. I don’t know that he knows my last name, either.

  Jerod laughs and says something I can’t quite hear. His friends are meeting us at the venue. They’re people I’ve never met, new since Jerod and I were together. Jerod and I are now friends—friends who flirt and sometimes make out—but we haven’t committed to anything serious. We’re both seeing other people. We’re seeing where it goes.

  Sean exits the freeway onto a brick road. He parks on the street near the club and we walk down an alley to Seventh Avenue, which is thick with other club goers. The opening DJ is spinning when we arrive. We push our way to the bar, and then Jerod and I find the dance floor, crowded with bodies. Lasers mounted to the stage slice the air above our heads. Everything is moving. I ask where Sean went and Jerod tells me he’s back on the mezzanine with his other friends. So we dance with our drinks in the air, just the two of us. House Wrecka is spinning house, and everyone is getting hammered, jumping up and down, pumping fists, going hard.

  I’m alone on the mezzanine looking down on the dance floor. Jackal & Hyde are spinning. I don’t know how I got here. I was with Jerod, but I don’t see him anywhere. I remember that Sean gave me Xanax when I was down on the dance floor. I remember taking two. But where is Sean now? How much time has passed? I decide to find Jerod. I follow the mezzanine to the stairs and search the faces of people going down, but none of them is him. He’s not at the bar. Or on the dance floor. Or in the bathroom.

  I find the front door and go out on the sidewalk and light a cigarette. I check my phone. It’s been half an hour. I look up and down the street. He’s not anywhere and I notice that some part of me doesn’t care. I don’t care what happens to me tonight. I don’t care what happens to Jerod.

  I mull this over while I finish my cigarette, then go inside to hear Jackal & Hyde. I decide that I might as well find Jerod, despite how little I may care. I circle the club and find him back on the mezzanine. He’s leaning over the banister with Sean and his friends. Jackal & Hyde are still spinning. I touch his back and he turns to face me.

  “Where were you?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  I get a letter from the college I plan to attend in the fall. It’s a school on Long Island that offered me a humanitarian scholarship for the work I’ve done with my local Food Not Bombs. Now I’m wondering if this was the right decision. They don’t have a good photography program, and I’d like to leave photography open as a possible major.

  The letter contains the names and phone numbers of my two assigned roommates. It suggests that I call them before we get to school so that we can get to know one another and work out living arrangements. I bring it to my room and sit on my bed. First I dial Lauren in New Jersey. I get an answering machine. I hang up when I hear the beep, unsure of what to say.

  I dial Tinsley in Connecticut. Tinsley likes tap dance, she tells me. She loves Broadway music. She wants to major in journalism. She loves Hillary Clinton. I can tell by her high-pitched tone and enunciated consonants that she’s a virgin.

  “Do you smoke?” I ask her.

  “Cigarettes?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Miles moves in with his boss and her son, who’s in a wheelchair. The house is a mile from Largo Mall down Seminole Boulevard, on a shady street behind the Pinellas Trail overpass. His room is to the left when you come inside. He’s furnished it with a queen-sized bed, a dresser, a love seat, and a framed portrait of Derek Jeter, used for snorting cocaine. He keeps a bearded dragon in a tank next to his bongs and a beta fish in a squat glass vase. It’s light outside, maybe five o’clock on a Saturday, and we’re cross-legged on the rug, Ashley, Clark, Miles, and me. We’ve each swallowed two beans and snorted half another. Ashley turns on Corina’s “Summertime, Summertime,” which she prefers to start with whenever she’s rolling. We pass a bowl. Miles and Ashley start kissing. The sun sets.

  Paul van Dyk’s trance Out There and Back is on the speakers, graceful and persistent like the paths of orbiting planets. The lights are off, and Ashley is coloring on a velvet black light poster with Magic Markers. I watch her intensely while Clark massages my shoulders. I’m benevolent and joyful. Clark’s hands are strong, but he’s being gentle. He works patiently, transferring something of himself into me with each gesture: shoulder blades, rib cage, waist, thighs, waist, shoulder blades, shoulders, hair. I lie back against him and close my eyes. Miles turns on a rotating light that throws colors around the room, and I watch them from behind my eyelids: red, purple, green, blue. The colors want me to love. Clark’s hands move over my breasts and a warm light opens up inside me. I’m moving. I’m dissolving. I’ve entered eternity.

  We’re all on the bed and Télépopmusik’s “Breathe” is playing for the third time: someone’s put it on repeat. Everything I touch is impossibly soft. I’m straddling Miles with his back against the wall. Ashley watches us approvingly.

  “Can I kiss Sarah?” Miles asks her.

  “Do you want to kiss Miles?” Ashley asks me, and I nod. “Go ahead,” she says.

  Miles’s pupils are enormous. I lean into them. Our lips touch and then we’re kissing. His tongue finds mine and moves it in small circles. I follow his lead and then I take over, moving his tongue and then sucking on his bottom lip. He closes his mouth. We linger for a moment. I don’t remember when I took my clothes off, but I’m touching my breasts while Miles watches at me.

  “Can I touch your pussy?” he asks.

  I look at Ashley. She heard the question. She’s waiting for my response.

  “Are you okay with that?” I say.

  “Do you want it?”

  I hesitate.

  “No,” she tells Miles.

  “Please,” he says.

  “No.”

  There’s a man in the room and he’s in a wheelchair. He’s Miles’s age. I’ve never met him, but he looks familiar. He’s parked by the love seat like he’s been in this room before. There’s a song playing that I don’t recognize. I climb off the bed to move closer to the speakers, hoping that will help me remember what it is.

  I’m cold. A window is open, but I don’t see any windows open. I realize I’m still naked. I don’t know where my clothes are. I look around. Miles calls me to the love seat. Next to him, the man in the wheelchair watches me. I lean down to hear what Miles is saying.

  “Do you want to kiss Brandon?” he says.

  I look at the man in the wheelchair. He’s waiting for my answer. Something in him looks lonely and this makes me feel responsible. I lean in and kiss him. His lips are cold.

  It’s nearing dawn. The four of us are on the bed and we’re trying to fall asleep. Clark is holding me from behind. There’s something inside me clawing to get out. It’s coming through my skull; I can’t stand it anymore. I know it’s going to kill me. I moan and Clark squeezes me. I hold my face, cover my head. I dig my toes into the sheets and curl my knees up into a ball. I cry softly until I fall asleep.

  I wake around noon. Ashley sits on the bed next to me, smoking a cigarette. Clark and Miles are sitting on the love seat. Everyone is silent. I sit up and gather my pants from the floor. I find my shirt shoved down between the bed and the wall and I’m digging around for my keys in my purse when I remember that I rode here with Ashley. I ask her to drive me home. As we’re leaving, Clark stops me and tells me to call him later.

  In the car, Ashley asks me what Clark and I were doing.

  “I was crying,” I say.


  “We thought you were fucking.”

  Clark comes over and I lead him past the living room, where my parents are watching television, out to the back porch, where we can be alone. I’ve brought a lime-green binder filled with sticky photo album pages I bought at Michaels, in which I’ve stored the photographs I took while I was in New York City. This used to be the binder I kept for music theory class, but I’ve since thrown away those papers. I’ve decided that I’m done with music for a while.

  We sit on the wicker love seat, smoking cigarettes. I flip through the binder pages, telling Clark the story of each photo. Two days have passed since I learned that we started dating while we were on ecstasy. This is the first time we’ve seen each other.

  “I climbed onto the roof of the hotel to take this one,” I say, pointing to an image I took from the ladder of a water tower, looking down at the street.

  “You should call it ‘Vertigo,’” he says.

  I cringe. “‘Vertigo’?”

  “You know,” he explains. “Like when you look down and get dizzy.”

  I know what the word means—I just think it’s a stupid title. I look closely at Clark. He’s come in his work shirt. His chin beard needs trimming. His complexion is shiny. He’s stocky and muscular—not ugly, per se, but there’s also nothing attractive about him.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  He takes the pen I’ve hung from the collar of my shirt, lifts the plastic from the photo album page, and writes “Vertigo” beneath the photo, then lowers the plastic.

  I walk him to the door when it’s time for him to leave. He leans down to kiss me and I step backward, indicating that I don’t want to kiss him while my parents are home, that they might see. He nods in understanding and kisses my forehead instead. That night, I call him to say we’re breaking up.

  I’m leaving for college in a month. I’m in my father’s car with Gisele, and we’re driving around Largo, looking for someplace to smoke this joint. It’s dusk. We pass the Denny’s on Missouri Avenue where we fed our hangovers all through high school. We pull up to a red light on the corner of Missouri and East Bay Drive. To our right is McGill Plumbing with the giant faucet affixed to its roof from which neon drops of water fall, one after another. We turn left down East Bay and pass the glass brick clock tower at the corner of Largo Central Park, and continue on toward the adjacent Largo Cultural Center, where we turn right toward the library and pull another right into the empty parking lot. We climb out of the car and walk toward the park’s public restrooms, which we aren’t aware closed at nine.

  We’re surprised to find that the doors are locked. This throws a wrench into our plans. We walk around the perimeter of the restroom structure assessing our options. There are ventilation slats near the ground but neither of us can fit through them—they’re too narrow. There are more near the roof but they’re too high for us to climb, and neither of us trusts our ability to fit through those, either: they’re shorter, and square. Both Gisele and I are small, but Gisele is smaller and more nimble. We decide the riskiest route is our only bet. I make a cradle with my hands and boost Gisele up to the ventilation window above the door, which is about a foot high and two feet across. She shimmies through it, drops easily to the floor, and unlocks the door to let me inside. I lock it behind me. We high-five. We’re proud of ourselves.

  Lately I’ve been turning my old pants into purses. I cut the legs off and sew up the bottoms, then make straps from old belts and bedazzle the fabric with patches and studs. The one I’m carrying tonight is navy corduroy with a teal canvas belt and red lace flowers on one side. It’s cool because the old pockets become hiding places for things like gram bags and lighters. Right now, I’m carrying two grams of weed as well as the joint I’m currently lighting. Gisele’s walking around the restroom testing the acoustics of different corners. She’s in the process of preparing an audition tape for Cirque du Soleil. She’s singing “Il Sogno di Volare,” which she plans to put on the tape, at the top of her lungs. She sounds terrific.

  We’re finishing the joint when we hear jingling. We’ve been talking and singing for the duration of our smoke-out, songs we sang together four years before in the Renaissance Festival, and songs we learned in choir, for which we harmonize: I take first soprano and she takes second. We shut our mouths and the jingling passes. We let a few moments elapse while we stare at each other, and then we start to talk again, tentatively, keeping our voices low.

  We’re back to singing when the jingling returns. This time it walks right up to the door and knocks on it, three times, hard and demanding like it wants something from us. “This is the police,” it says. “Open the door.”

  Gisele mouths “fuck” and we scramble from the floor. My heart feels like a trebuchet launching boulders against my breastbone. I nearly pass out as I reach for the door handle, my periphery closing in, my face numb, my palms sweating. I’m fucked. I’m so high. They’ll know how high I am.

  Outside, two cruisers are parked in a V-formation barricading us against the restrooms. Four officers stand with their hands on their hips. One holds the leash of a German shepherd. The German shepherd pants, staring at me.

  “Let’s see some licenses, ladies,” says the officer on my left. They’re all young, and white. We reach into our purses and retrieve our wallets, struggling to contain our shaking. I’m paranoid that moving my purse will release the smell of the weed inside it.

  “These restrooms are closed,” says the officer, examining my license. He passes Gisele’s nonchalantly to his left. “What were you ladies doing in there?”

  “We were singing,” Gisele says.

  “We’re singers,” I explain. I say it before I realize I’m saying it. Something about the way they’re looking at me makes me want to tell them everything. I feel my purse inside my hand. I avoid looking at the dog.

  “How’d you get inside?” he says. He passes my license to the officer on his left, who takes both of our licenses to his cruiser. I watch him walk away.

  “Through the window,” says Gisele.

  “You climbed through the window?”

  We nod. He looks at us.

  The other officer returns. He shows my license to the first one, who looks at it again, more closely. They look at each other.

  Here’s where I should explain that my mother is at this time a city commissioner. She was elected first when I was fifteen, and to a second term earlier this year. She became involved in local politics while working for the Largo Police Department as a victim’s advocate, a position for which she was hired shortly before I was born.

  The first officer hands our licenses back to us. We replace them in our wallets and await his verdict.

  “The park restroom closes at nine,” he says.

  By the end of the summer, Jerod and I are officially back together. I’ve decided that I love him but that this relationship won’t last after I move away. Besides, he’s been doing too many drugs. Last weekend, he went through thirty-nine nitrous poppers in a single night with two of his friends: I told him I was surprised he was coherent the next morning, but I didn’t tell him not to do it again. I’m afraid that if I said this he’d call me a hypocrite. He’d be right. I do drugs, too. But there’s something different about the way he does them.

  Gisele and TJ have been dating since last summer. Tonight he’s throwing a party at his apartment at which he’ll be spinning, and he’s also invited Jerod to spin. When we show up it’s still light outside and we find him spinning with no one else in the apartment except for Gisele, who’s in the kitchen fixing herself a drink. TJ shares an apartment in unincorporated Pinellas County with a guy named Geronimo who’s rumored to be some kind of guru. Geronimo is our age, and Peruvian, with hair that curls down to his shoulders and a way of leaning in while you talk that makes you feel like you’re saying something deep and soulful. Their unit is on the second floor of a building in a new complex, and has a balcony that overlooks a pond inhabited by alligators. I sit on the n
ew couch, waiting for the party to start, and it strikes me as I sit there soberly that this, this silly party, is the thing I’ve arranged to do with my evening. I wonder what else I could be doing.

  Jerod and TJ talk over the turntables. They’re comparing the strengths of electro versus breakbeats when TJ pulls a DJ Baby Anne record from a crate at his feet and sets it spinning on one of the turntables, turned all the way up so that I can’t hear what they’re saying anymore. I watch their lips moving, and I imagine that the sound between us has become a wall, a wall they’ve erected to keep me out.

  Geronimo comes home and stands in the hallway entrance. He’s bobbing his head with the music, and as I watch him, the music comes into focus and I hear Baby Anne clearly. The Bass Queen. Electro, funk beats, and Miami bass: this is what Florida breakbeats is all about. Generally I like Baby Anne, but not right now. Right now, the sound is wrong. The pressure of the bass makes me feel as if I’m sinking, and the deeper I sink, the lonelier I feel. I don’t want to roll tonight, I think. I want to go home.

  The song ends and Geronimo steps into the room. “Who else is coming?” he says. “Let’s eat these beans.” So we do.

  My oldest friend, Kelsey, invites me to a party near my parents’ house in Largo. I’ve known Kelsey since we were two. We grew up a few streets away from each other. As a kid, I spent almost as much time at her house as I did at my own. Kelsey’s family is my family; her brothers are my brothers. She’s the closest I’ve come to having a sibling.

  The people throwing the party are her friend Logan and his roommate, a guy she’s never met, but Logan is cool, she says. It’s a small group. Real chill. She picks me up in her gold Jeep Cherokee. I wear a knee-length, pleated skirt paired with a black argyle sweater vest, gray flip-flops, and heavy eye makeup. I’m looking like a de-virginized schoolgirl. The night is hot and sticky. We drive to a dead-end street off of Walsingham Road, near Heritage Village, where we ate raw sugarcane on field trips in elementary school. There are no curbs on this street; the concrete mixes with grass in a jagged line ending at three red diamond-shaped signs, where cars are parked in the grass near a beige duplex. This is our destination.