by Meg Haston
Ana slides her hand over the console and rests her palm on my thigh. I think about saying screw it and taking her to the beach.
“Down this way,” she says without hesitation, and I wonder if every girl I know has fooled around with Buck Travers. But when I look over, I see the glow of her iPhone and realize she’s just looking up directions.
I turn where she tells me to, and soon we’re coasting down a street lined with parked cars and pickup trucks.
“If you want to leave, we’ll leave, okay?” Ana fixes her gaze on the house.
“Thanks.” I smile and put my hand over hers.
We park as close as we can get to the house and walk. The party is every high-school party: loud music with a bass so deep it rattles you, a couple of guys puking their guts out in the shrubs, too-sweet air. The front door is wide open, so we just walk in. The place is enormous, and everything is white: the walls, the couches—even the painting over the fireplace is white canvas, which is probably supposed to mean something.
“This place is huge,” I yell over the music, accidentally kicking a red Solo cup under a round entry table.
“Huh?” Ana shouts.
“Huge!”
Ana smiles and nods back.
“Ohmygod, you guys came!” Emilie Simpson bellows, looking up from a game of flip cup on the coffee table.
“Give me just a second,” Ana yells as she waves at her friend. “I’m gonna go say hi.”
“Sure.”
I push my way through the house by way of the kitchen, waving and nodding when people call my name, grateful for the loud music. If it was quiet, I wouldn’t know what to say. There’s a patio out back that looks over a lake, and there are a few tiki torches stabbed into the grass. Three or four kegs litter the yard, and a girl is doing a keg stand in a jean miniskirt. I look for Bridge because I can’t help it.
She’s just across the patio, only a few bodies between us, hanging on Leigh. My eyes adjust to the low light and I watch her. Her body’s not her body, and she looks like she’s learning to walk for the first time: these jerky, unsure baby-deer movements. I’ve never seen Bridge this drunk. The sky must be spinning for her.
“I got it, I got it,” she slurs. She pushes Leigh away and tries to stand on her own. Her eyes roam the yard, sweeping past me and then returning.
“WilohmygodWil.” She takes a step forward and trips, falling to her knees in the grass. I’m on my knees next to her without even thinking about it.
“Don’t!” The word bursts out of her. “Don’t. I’m okay.”
My heart is going to explode. I want to get her out of here: take her home and tuck her in.
“I got her.” Leigh kneels next to us and pulls Bridge into her lap. Bridge’s skirt sneaks up her thigh. I look away.
“I’ll carry her to the car or something,” I tell Leigh. “Are you driving her home?”
“Later. She needs to lie down for a while.”
“You needa lie down for a while.” Bridge’s eyelids flutter.
“Here.” I scoop her up and stand, holding her head against my chest while her knees flop over the cradle of my elbow. This is why! I want to scream. This is why I wanted to hang out in the workshop, with the goddamned lights!
I carry her back into the house and up the carpeted stairs, Leigh trailing behind me. And I know people are watching us, but I absolutely do not give a fuck.
Bridge fights me the whole way, pushing against my chest, telling me to leave her, leave her, she’s fine without me. I clench my jaw so tightly, my skull could shatter at any second. Leigh scopes out the bedrooms and finds one decorated in too much pink. Definitely not Buck’s room.
In the dark, I lower Bridge onto a single-sized bed with lace pillowcases and teddy bears piled at the headboard. I brush her hair away from her face while Leigh brings a trash can from the bathroom.
“Commere,” Bridge orders, and slings her arms around my neck. She pulls me in with a strange kind of drunk-girl strength. “I’m so sorry, Wil. I fucked up and I’m so sorry and I fucked up.”
I pull away.
“Don’t leave her,” I tell Leigh roughly. “Do not leave her up here by herself. Got it?”
She nods. “Got it.”
I close the door behind me and take the stairs three or four at a time, flying back into the blur that is the party I never wanted to go to in the first place. I almost knock Ana over on the last step.
“Ooh! There you are.” She holds onto me for balance and doesn’t let go. “What’re you doing up—”
“We have to go,” I tell her.
“You okay? You’re sweaty.” She slides her hands over my damp T-shirt.
“Yeah. I’m good. I just need to get out of here. Want to get something to eat? Nina’s or something?”
She smiles. “Nina’s? Yeah, I guess.”
“Or wherever you want. Just . . . anywhere but here.”
“Okay.” She slips her hand into mine, which is humiliating because mine is drenched with sweat. Still, she doesn’t pull away. I hate leaving Bridge here because she’s not okay. She is so obviously not okay. But I can’t help her. I can’t save her from drowning under a spinning sky.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
“LEIGH,” I say into the phone. I’m a thousand shards, a useless broken pile on the sidewalk in front of Nina’s Diner. The sun is close, the air salty and thick even though it’s only April. “Leigh.”
Inside, Leonard waves.
“Oh, honey. I hear a blocked heart chakra.”
“He hates me.” My face is swollen and hot, but I can’t cry. Crying would feel too good. I pace the bricks, trying not to see KYLIE MITCHELL or DAN & NATALIA. I walk from Nina’s to the Surf Shop to Big Mike’s bar and back again. People pass with their coffee and dogs and kids and they know the kind of person I am, somehow. “We had a fight and it’s so obvious—he hates me, still.”
“He’s hurting,” she says simply, and I remember the millions of reasons I love her, all at the same time. She doesn’t ask what happened or what I said or what he said back. She doesn’t need the details. She knows they don’t matter.
“Yeah,” I whisper. I stop in front of Big Mike’s. Somebody posted a flyer for a Bob Marley cover band on the door. The neon beer signs on the window bleed red and blue. “I could really use a drink.”
“Nope,” she says. “We have other plans. Don’t move.”
I hang up and plant myself outside the door to the bar. If I really needed to, I could get inside in two seconds. It’s dark in there. I could probably order a beer and get away with it.
I ran into Wilson in this exact spot, a little more than a year ago. Not in the bar. Outside of it. The sky was bruised a deep purple. Wilson’s face looked cartoonish under the neon beer signs. I saw him before he saw me.
“Wilson?”
“Mackinac!” he said, but the word tripped over itself to get to me and it sounded all wrong and we both laughed. “What’re you doing here?” He squinted into the streetlight above us.
“Takeout from Nina’s. Mom’s working late.”
“Huh.” He bobbed his head. “You coming around anytime soon? Got a new client. Start the work next week.”
“I would, it’s just—” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. It’s just that I ruined us? It’s just that booze makes me stupid? It’s just that I’m tired of Wil not wanting us back as much as I do? “How’s he doing?” I didn’t mean to ask.
Wilson exhaled and leaned against the door to the bar. “Studying for some test at . . . a friend’s place.”
The way he said it told me almost everything I needed to know. “Oh.”
“You know, Bridge, we’re not the things we do.” Wilson’s voice sounded heavy enough to sink him. “We’re not our mistakes. We’re more than that.”
“Tell that to your son.”
“Believe me.” He cleared his throat.
I waited for him to finish, but he didn’t. He looked
too tired to say anything else, old under the dirty yellow pools of light.
“Well,” I said. “My order is probably getting cold. Where were you headed?”
“Nina’s, too.” He forced a smile. His skin was chalky, reminding me of one of Leigh’s pastel sketches. He looked like he could be erased with a single stroke. He followed me into the diner and waited with me at the counter while Leonard tossed extra ketchup into the plastic takeout bags. There weren’t any bags waiting for Wilson. I didn’t mention it.
“Oh, good. You’re not bombed yet.” Leigh is standing next to me, smelling like coconut oil and a little like the incense place around the corner. “Drink.” She hands me a Big Gulp Slurpee with a neon-pink straw.
I take a long sip.
“Here’s the plan.” She presses her hand into the small of my back and marches me toward Iz, who is idling lazily in the middle of the street. “We’re going to school.”
“On a Saturday? Leigh—”
“We’re going to school, and you’re gonna help me with the first step of my senior art project, which has to be done by Monday. Call it free therapy. And you’re gonna tell me what happened or you aren’t.” She jerks open Iz’s passenger side door. “After you, m’lady.”
“I guess you decided not to paint the overpass.” I settle in and Iz’s beaded seat cover pinches my thighs.
“Nah. You were right.” She leans in the doorway and glances over the top of her mirrored sunglasses. “Principal okayed the school project, and I decided I don’t want to end up in juvie yet.” She slams the door.
“Yet?” I pull down the visor. My warped reflection is pale and sweaty in the cracked mirror, a pathetic Picasso.
Leigh coaxes Iz toward school. Wil is in the all details of this town: in the palm tree he climbed on a dare in sixth grade, and in the beach access parking lot where his dad caught us making out sophomore year. I close my eyes, but he’s there, too. He’s everywhere but here.
“There’s something he’s not telling me.” I wipe a thin layer of sweat from my forehead with my open palm. Another layer surfaces.
“Any idea what it is?” She jumps right in. I like that I can start in the middle with Leigh and work my way out to the frayed edges.
I shake my head. “He just kept saying that there were things he wanted to talk to me about—big things—but he couldn’t.”
“Because you guys weren’t talking then?” she asks.
“I guess.”
“So that’s what he’s pissed about. Not the B-word.” She raps an offbeat rhythm on the steering wheel, then whips into the school parking lot at the last second, like it’s an afterthought. The lot is empty, except for a father running behind a daughter on a bike. Leigh runs Iz onto the curb in front of the school and kills the engine.
I roll my eyes. “You can say it. Buck.” I taste warm Slurpee syrup.
“I choose not to.” She gives Iz’s console a pat and tells me to grab whatever I can carry from the backseat. I lug a bucket and broom and a bunch of scrub brushes, and she brings dish soap and a paint roller and a couple of paint cans. “Courtyard.”
When we get there, I collapse onto one of the benches and Leigh sits next to me. She holds my hand, pressing her fingers between my fingers. A fat tear runs down my cheek and I miss her like hell even though she’s not gone yet. I look at the sky, at the shattered white cloud glass littering the blue.
“He asked me to stop, last year. He asked me to leave him alone, to stop apologizing. So I did,” I say, resting my head on Leigh’s bony shoulder.
“I remember.”
“And he’s so . . . angry, you know, that I did. When really, I thought I was doing what he wanted. I thought if I did what he was asking me to do, maybe it would give us a shot later on, you know? Because I’d listened and given him space.”
Leigh rests her head on my head. “Space blows.”
“And this time he asked me to go again, and I left again. But this time felt different.”
“How?”
“If I didn’t leave—” I stop, not sure how to finish the sentence. I don’t know what would have happened. He could have hurt himself, could have destroyed the wall or his dad’s treasures.
“If you didn’t leave, what?” Leigh looks at me expectantly.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Please. You know Wil Hines better than you know yourself.”
“The thing is, I don’t. Not anymore.” I wriggle away from her. “Ever since—I can’t read him like I used to. He’s all—I don’t know. Cloudy.”
“You’ll figure it out. Keep shaking that eight ball.”
But I’m not sure. I know this: Sadness can make a person strange, unknowable. When Micah’s dad left our mother, he broke her, literally—her skin split into rays around the eyes from all the crying, her shoulders knotted. Her brain emptied itself of important details, like how Micah’s dad was kind of an asshole who only had a job sometimes and didn’t like any of us very much.
I didn’t blame her. She was only twenty-four and she was alone again. She was sad and angry, and she felt sorry for herself and for us. Two kids, two dads, and she couldn’t seem to pick a good one. Sometimes I’d hear her say under her breath, when she thought no one was listening, “What’s wrong with me?” and it felt like my insides had just been ripped out.
Back then, I had this recurring dream: Adult Me in a white coat, surgically removing her grief. It was a shiny black blob that tried to sneak its way back into her again and again, but I was ruthless. I wish I could do that for Wil.
After a long moment, Leigh stands up and stretches. “We interrupt this depressing-as-hell programming to bring you backbreaking labor in the name of graduation credits.” She hands me the broom and tells me to sweep. While I drag dead leaves and cigarette butts to the edges of the concrete slab, she pulls the blow-up pool into the grass. It takes both of us to move the stone benches. Leigh fills the bucket with water from a spigot on the back side of the building while I target the spray with my dish soap. We dip the scrub brushes into the bucket and the colors swirl in the soapy water: mauves and yellows and turquoise, the color of Wil’s eyes.
“Just scrub the slab down first.” Leigh rolls up the sleeves on her T-shirt. “We’ll prime it after it dries and I’ll start painting tomorrow. You can come, too, if it’ll keep you out of dive bars.”
We kneel next to each other and she sloshes water on the pavement. I scrub as hard as I can, as angry as I can, as sad as I can.
“I think this might be it.” My muscles sting, and I scrub harder. “For us. Between us.”
“Okay.” Leigh stops scrubbing and pushes her dreads out of her eyes. “So what if this is it?”
“What do you mean?” I sit back on my heels. Hearing her say it is ten times worse than saying it myself.
“I mean, what if this is really it between you and Wil? What if this is the end of your story? What if you were only supposed to come into each other’s lives for a certain period of time?”
“Bullshit.” My voice cracks. “If we were supposed to come into each other’s lives for some big karmic reason, this would be that reason. This time, right now. He needs someone now, someone to help him pack up his father’s . . . books . . . and spare change . . .” I swallow a sob. “And someone to help him take care of his mom. He needs—”
“You,” Leigh says.
“Me.” I breathe. “I love him.” My lips form the words silently, again and again, a pleading prayer to the water and sky. “I’ve tried not to, but it’s fucking useless.” I wait for the pinch of surprise. It doesn’t come. I have always loved Wil Hines and I always will, and it’s no surprise to anybody.
“Of course it is.” Leigh sighs and falls back on the shiny, wet concrete. I lie down next to her, and the warm water soaks the back of my T-shirt and gives me goose bumps. “Completely fucking useless. Are you saying you want to be friends again? Or you want to get back together?”
“I don’t know,”
I say, even though I do. “He has a girlfriend. A nice one.”
“Fact.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I stare at the sun until my field of vision is nothing but gold.
She rolls onto her side. “You can love him from far away.”
“I don’t want to,” I say.
She sighs. “You might have to, though.”
And she’s right. I know she’s right. But I know this, too: I know that Wil and I are bigger than one night on a dock. I know that we’re more than a few damn good years. We go longer, farther, deeper. We are not finished yet. We can’t be.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
I don’t fall asleep that night until the sun peeks over the water. I dream about Wil, swimming out far past the breakers, and me behind him, screaming his name, begging him to come back. But he keeps swimming, until he’s nothing more than a dot or a piece of driftwood or a lost seagull.
When my eyes snap open, the house is quiet. My skin is damp. The room is hot and the sun is too low. I check the clock. Sunday, almost four P.M.
“Oh my God.” I sit up and press my feet into the ground. “Mom? Micah?”
Silence.
Downstairs, the light on the coffee maker is still green. I’ve told Mom a million times she’s going to burn the house down one of these days. I pour myself a cup.
I take my coffee to the front stoop and watch barefoot middle-school girls in triangle bikini tops and cutoffs racing up and down the streets on their bikes. They leave the air smelling like strawberry gum and temporary tattoos.
On instinct, I reach for my phone. Nothing from Wil: no apology texts, no calls.
“Hey. Sleeping Beauty!”
Leigh is leaning over the front gate in a black bikini and a gauzy long caftan. Her dreads swing just above her shoulders, and she’s wearing purple hippie shades and carrying a giant straw tote. She looks smiley and a little high.
“I just woke up,” I admit, raising my coffee mug.