by Lisa Super
The argument slid from her mouth without calculation. Her eyes weren’t buried so deep in emotion that she couldn’t see him, like other similarly frustrated females in his life. She wanted to be friends. Nothing more. Now he was embarrassed that he’d warned her off. All along he’d been the one imagining a romance between them. On New Year’s, those delusions had tunneled out from his subconscious and broke free at the front of his mind.
“You’re right. I staged an intervention when you didn’t need one. I’m sorry.”
She nodded and packed the cone with an extra shaving of ice cream.
Oliver noticed the gesture. “That must mean a truce.”
“Enemies truce.”
“Then let’s agree not to truce.”
She held out the cone. As he reached for it, she pulled it back. “You still need to pay.”
Oliver put on a show of reluctance and pulled out his wallet, gladly paying pennies for dollars.
Later that night, he responded to Penny Layton’s invite with an apology, saying he’d been busy. She suggested another meetup. The texts lit up his cell phone without pause. He considered cluing her in that she would read more desirable if she played harder to get. Ultimately, he decided against it, realizing that a transparent Penny was easier than the murky waters he navigated with Daphne. These girls were two vastly different lakes. After the ice cream make-up, Lake Daphne was the only place he wanted to swim where he couldn’t see his kicking feet.
He told Penny he’d text her after the weekend. He expected her to respond with a chipper “Gr8!” and five emojis, or at the very least “ok,” but a response never came. He instantly liked Penny Layton a lot more.
• • •
The weekend rolled around. Oliver waited anxiously for Daphne’s shift to end at Sweetie’s. He picked up his room, rearranged the mess on his dresser. He pulled out the bottle of Jason’s cologne, stored under his workout clothes, hidden from the world by a barrier of mesh and elastic. He sniffed. It smelled like intimidation—the notes held power and strength. This was the scent of a man. Against his nose, the richness made him feel like a boy, unworthy. He had the sudden urge to spray himself, but he remembered his parents were downstairs. He’d need to say goodbye to them on his way out and feared recognition. Oliver didn’t want any questions. He didn’t have any answers.
He contemplated arriving at Sweetie’s early but didn’t want to come off too eager. Playing video games in his bedroom was the best remedy to pass the time, but his thoughts refused to hold still. The only place he could find silence was the point where his stylus met his tablet. He didn’t have any good ideas, so he recreated the Sweetie’s logo with a modern font and a waffle cone with an ice cream scoop for the “i.” While it wasn’t a work of art, the finished product was an improvement over the current design. He might even show it to Daphne. He glanced at his phone to check the time and did a double take. The half hour had passed like a finger snap. He grabbed his keys, wedged his feet in his shoes, and ran to his car.
An hour later, he and Daphne stood on Venice boardwalk. Beautiful people played beach volleyball as an excuse to show off their toned figures. A yoga class namasted on the grass. Muscular bodies that defied human anatomy hoisted massive barbells and grunted with every press.
Daphne set her eyes on the empty beach in front of them. “There used to be a zipline here. Janine and I came down a couple summers ago and the place was flooded with gross teenagers everywhere.”
“You’re a gross teenager,” Oliver pointed out.
“I’m a sophisticated, gross teenager.”
“Yeah, that sounds much more appetizing. Did you go on the zipline?”
She threw him a look of absolute disgust, as though he’d suggested going to Hollywood and Highland, the biggest tourist trap in the city.
“No.” Her defense softened. “We walked up to Santa Monica, ate a funnel cake, and rode the Ferris wheel like respectable Angelenos.”
Oliver watched all the curves and lines in her face, searching for clues to whether she was serious.
“It was fun,” she conceded.
“Did you want to go on the zipline?”
“No.”
Oliver threw up his hands. “Then why are we here?”
“It was the closest thing to skydiving that I could think of.”
“We could try parasailing?”
“It’s too expensive, I already checked.”
“Daphne, do we have the smallest inkling of desire to do anything resembling skydiving?”
“I think we’ve already established that I don’t.”
“Then we agree.”
Daphne sighed, “I feel like we failed.”
“Well, there’s always that one thing on the bucket list that doesn’t get done.”
“Or ten.” She rolled her eyes, more frustrated at herself for making a bad joke than annoyed by his reassurance.
Oliver plodded on with his postmodern optimism. “So maybe this is the one thing that doesn’t get done. And we’re extra diligent about the rest of the list.”
“Fine. Skydiving was a poor choice, anyways.”
“But it brought us here, to this place, to this moment.”
“Oliver the Philosopher.” She drew in a long breath. “You know, there is something I’ve always wanted to do.”
A half hour later they pedaled mountain bikes up the Venice boardwalk, racing the fading sun.
Oliver challenged her. “Bet I can beat you to the pier.”
He pedaled faster, harder. She equaled his speed and force, squealing in delight with the exertion. Oliver caught as many glimpses of her face as he could while weaving around slower cyclists and rollerbladers. This was the first time he identified her as truly happy, all the mystery wiped away, only the sunset bouncing off her cheeks. Seeing this new beauty in her pleased and pained him at the same time.
“Never!” She leaned forward and surged ahead of him.
The night sky oiled over the remaining purples of the sunset. Bikes returned, they strolled along the pier past the cacophony of the arcades, the click and swallow of inserted quarters rising above the black noise.
Daphne scoured the beach. Oliver turned in the same direction, meeting her focal point. A ball of orange glowed in the darkness.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She whipped her head around to face him. Her eyelids were weighed down without appearing tired, and her eyes shined extra bright with a new idea.
“Let’s go check it out.” She was ten feet down the pier before he could answer.
As they approached, the orange glow dimmed, shielded by the crowd of one hundred gathered around it, blocking the light from spilling onto the beach. A hailstorm of drumming poured from the center of the circle: kettle drums, snares, buckets, anything in the vicinity with a flat surface that would produce sound. The rattle of a tambourine slithered in and out of the beat.
“Sounds like a good time,” Oliver said.
He would’ve been happy standing on the outskirts, catching glimpses of the fire inside when enough people shifted a couple inches to the left or right at the same time, revealing keyholes of orange between the seams of their bodies. By now Oliver knew the bold quiet of Daphne swam straight to the mosh pit at concerts. He wasn’t surprised when she stuck her toe into the bonfire crowd and began wading to the front of it, pushing against and floating with the current. He drifted into her path before it could close behind her.
The intense heat of the giant bonfire held the circle at bay. The nine drummers were all men, teenager to gray with wrinkles. The blaze illuminated parts of their faces and covered other parts in shadow. A flurry of callused hands pounded without fatigue. Closest to the fire, dancers shuffled their feet in the sand, offering their rhythm up to the night with the rising smoke and embers. Of course, Daphne wanted to dance. She gyrated into the dancing donut hole and thirty seconds elapsed before she flung her head back toward Oliver. He stood motionless on the donut’s
edge.
“Come on!” she shouted.
“I don’t dance without alcohol.”
“Oil to your machine,” she laughed. “You’re human. You can dance whenever you want to. It’s the benefit of having a soul. And not living in a dystopia.”
“Okay, then. I choose not to dance.”
“That I can respect.” She turned her back to him and kept dancing.
The beating of the drums hammered through Oliver. He’d expected Daphne to beg him to dance with her like many of his previous dates, bestowing him with gratitude when he finally surrendered. But this wasn’t a date, he reminded himself. Daphne didn’t play by the same rules. She didn’t have any rules, which was unsettling. He didn’t know her game, so he didn’t know how to play her, or how she was playing him.
All of a sudden, he longed to be sitting in Joe’s garage drinking a sixer, listening to Mitch and Joe talk about all the somewhat-real-but-mostly-fake sex they were having. He wanted someone else’s problems to be larger than his own. He wanted to be in the backseat of Penny’s Mini Cooper, hushed and unbuttoned.
A crackling snapped him out of fantasy. One of the logs had disintegrated, failing like crushed bone beneath the burning matter. The fire’s foundation shifted down and to the left, spewing embers in a sigh of smoke. Something in his own foundation was shifting. Daphne was the first person he’d encountered who had the ability to make him feel excluded. She’d challenged him to dance without directly challenging him. Now he wanted to meet that challenge.
Oliver stepped into the donut hole, swaying over to her. He braced himself for Daphne’s teasing. So, you changed your mind, or some other quipping. I was right, and you were wrong. But the I told you so never came. She simply danced with him, satisfied for him as much as herself.
He never touched her. He didn’t want a repeat of New Year’s, but this dancing was different from that night. As they slowly circled around the fire, she never moved into him, never asked anything of his hands. Oliver surveyed the faces surrounding him. Everyone was a stranger. Seeing Daphne’s face full of orange and sweat, even she felt like a stranger. He threw his hands up and out and danced freely in the closed circle of anonymity.
Hours later, on a deserted patch of beach with the drum circle as a lamp in the background, Oliver and Daphne collapsed on their backs into the sand, an arm’s length between them. Oliver liked this distance. It was close enough that he could reach out and touch her. Not that he wanted to, just that he could.
The sun had been under the horizon long enough that the sand beneath their bodies had cooled to the point of feeling wet. Oliver burrowed as deep as his limbs would pull him down. He glanced over and saw Daphne doing the same, her shoulders shifting back and forth, heels pressing up and down, making a well for her legs. The sensation of cold cement crept up his arms and around the sides of neck.
He stared up at the sky. “Nice night. Wish there were more stars.” At times, he spotted pin pricks of light poking through the black expanse above him. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he had only seen stars because of how badly he’d wanted to believe they were there, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
“What would you wish for?” Daphne asked.
“I don’t know. What would you wish for?”
She’d been to this rodeo before and tossed his question back at him like a bucking bronco. “I’m not the one wishing for stars.”
“I would wish for world peace.” He kept a straight face.
“There are two kinds of wishes in this world, the attainable and the implausible. I prefer mine attainable.”
“A wish is a wish because it’s unattainable.”
“You wish for things that you know you’ll never have. A wish for you is a fantasy. I wish for things I can actually accomplish.”
“That’s a goal, not a wish.”
“It’s all semantics.” She shrugged her shoulders into the sand.
“So, what’s your wish?” he asked, again.
Her words were automatic, no thought required. “To get into Berkeley, and then Stanford law.”
Though new, these wishes were unsurprising. Jealousy prodded him between the ribs, how she could envision her future with such conviction. “Well, your semantics expertise will do well there. Plus, you’ll be closer to Emily. The symbolic Emily buried in San Fran.”
Daphne pressed her neck deeper into the sand. “Hmm. I never thought of that. I will be much closer to the symbolic Emily.”
Oliver worried that he’d pointed out the single flaw in her master plan. He’d reminded her that she couldn’t escape the past, no matter how many counties she removed herself. He’d also reminded himself.
Daphne laughed softly into the night. “I could celebrate her birthday again. And the Day of the Dead. Might be soothing.”
Sand tickled the base of Oliver’s neck as he nodded. He carried out the hypnotic motion again and again, long past being a mere response. He was lost in the uncertainty of his own future, so he turned to the uncertainty of someone else’s past.
“Why didn’t they leave a note?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the point of suicide? You have nothing left to say.”
“I mean, do you think they planned it? Or was it spur of the moment?”
“I’ve thought about it. A lot. I don’t know what I want to believe. The evil premeditation or the hopeless spontaneity.”
“You think they wrote the list near the end? Maybe they were trying to talk themselves out of it.”
“I like that. I’m gonna keep it.” The exertion of the fire had stripped Daphne down to nothing but her truth. “Do you ever get scared that you’ll get it? Mental illness, depression, go bipolar. I mean, I know you don’t catch it like a cold. But it’s genetic. I feel like it’s inside me and someday it’s going to take over. One day, the darkness could settle, and I won’t be able to escape.”
“I think about it sometimes. But there’s help. You know the history. Our families know.”
“But help wasn’t enough for them.” Worry strained her voice.
He wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t comfort himself.
Oliver wipes the midnight sleep from his eyes and stumbles into the bathroom. Jason stands over the toilet, sprinkling pills from a white bottle. He and Oliver both jump, startled by each other. Jason drops the bottle into the bowl and fishes it out.
Oliver says nothing. What could he say?
A great number of things, turns out.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay?”
Oliver says nothing.
“Oliver, okay?” Jason demands.
“Yeah, okay.”
He’d kept his word. And now they were here. Oliver turned to her, his ear against the sand. For a moment, he considered confessing the middle-of-the-night pill run-in with Jason, but she might not forgive his silence as easily as his parents had. Plus, there was another truth to tell. “You know they went off their meds, right?”
The parting of her lips turned his question into a revelation. Her voice was weak. “No.”
“They stopped taking their medication months before. There was no trace in their toxicology, and my parents found full bottles of Jason’s pills. I always assumed they quit together.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They were in their love euphoria, I guess. They thought they didn’t need the meds, so they stopped without telling anyone. And they came crashing down.”
“Why didn’t my parents ever tell me?”
“Because you’re fine.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Daphne cackled at the sky. “You’re fine. There’s some more semantics for you.”
Oliver laughed with her until calmness set over them.
“It’s getting late,” Daphne said to the absent stars.
Oliver didn’t want the night to end, and he wasn’t tired. “Yeah.”
Neither of them moved, staring up into the dark abyss, now lightening to blue at the corners.
“What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” What was he asking? How had that question escaped his lips?
“Are you asking me to spend Valentine’s Day with you?”
He didn’t know. Did he want to date her? He deciphered nothing from her question. No delight, no distrust, no anger. She would be completely blameless in any misinterpretation. It all rested squarely on his shoulders.
“No.” But he’d expelled his no in a guilty laugh. It had been a yes. What was happening? He’d asked Daphne Bowman to hang out with him on Valentine’s Day. Nothing good could come from that. It would only make everything more confusing than it already was. The imaginary stars above him spun around the sky.
“I have plans. Watching a rom com with Janine that we both pretend to hate but secretly love. Probably The Notebook.” She’d saved him. And she knew she’d saved him.
“Gosling is hot.” It was his best attempt to smooth the situation.
“So is McAdams.”
After that, Daphne went quiet. They still spoke, but there was no more discussion of semantics or philosophy. She was inside her own head, and Oliver was annoyed at himself for sending her there. The birds had begun their song when she opened her mouth to speak. He knew she was going to say something that made everything okay.
“Thanks for dancing with me, Oliver.” Sleepiness weighed on her vowels.
“Any time.”
One thing he knew for certain: he liked dancing with Daphne Bowman.
The Sahara Desert
Oliver Pagano had kinda/sorta asked her out on Valentine’s Day, and she had said no. As she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, that fact grated her like scratches on a turntable. She tried to convince herself she’d done the right thing by shutting him down. He hadn’t exactly asked her out, anyway. His no had sounded like a yes to her, but a no was still a no. Either way, she felt manipulated. If she’d accepted, he probably would’ve recanted and given her another speech about how she shouldn’t fall for him.