U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  The thing is, I wasn’t scared of you rejecting me, I was worried that you just wouldn’t process what I was saying to you, and being left in a stasis, with no “yes” or “no,” with just this being emotionally dismissed. I can handle being rejected, but I can’t handle you pretending this isn’t happening.

  Tell me yes or tell me no, just tell me something.

  Nozlee

  Next to me, Noz shifted in her sleep, made noises. She loved me, she had loved me. I tried to stay with that feeling and I tried to understand what I was feeling in turn. Safety, maybe, and a little bit of joy that was corrupted by anxiety and regret.

  I wished Noz and I had been able to begin with no history, no baggage, but that would’ve been impossible even if Ezra had never existed because we’re all carrying our damaged pasts with us like snail shells; if it wasn’t Ezra it would’ve been something else. This new dawn would break hot and ragged, and we’d slather on the fifty SPF sunscreen and sunbathe in the desert.

  I was terrified that I would lay awake with racing thoughts, but everything inside me calmed, actually; I fell asleep fast under the same covers as Nozlee.

  Sunday, 9:26 a.m.

  Maybe if I didn’t move, then nothing new would ever happen and time would stop and the world would forever be the time before Nozlee woke up and I had to look at her and think about what we’d done. I felt the place where she’d bit my lip when she came. I was completely still, aside from my tongue prodding at my lip, and Nozlee woke up anyway, and I felt her body start to move.

  The night we swam, we hadn’t slept at all, so there hadn’t been a jarring moment where we woke up and in waking up, everything changed. Instead, we had slipped neatly from night into day; once we saw light in the cracks between the curtains, we had gone to the kitchen to make fizzy mimosas that were more orange juice than prosecco. While Nozlee peed, I’d crept into the boys’ room and petted Ezra’s hair while he slept. When he stirred, I fed him a bit of my mimosa.

  “How was your girls’ time?” he’d asked.

  “Perfect,” I’d said.

  Miggy had slept through the whole exchange, he’d never had problems falling asleep or staying asleep.

  Nozlee and I had passed out in the same bed plenty of other times, once or twice after a night out in New York when it was easier to get to her apartment in Williamsburg than my stupid rat-hole in DUMBO, and in Los Angeles, on Miggy’s big couch bed that he’d inherited from a younger but richer boyfriend, or in hotel rooms in Koreatown and Palm Springs.

  But never before had I been interested in the way her body moved as she woke up. I felt for the twitch and stretch of her arms, I wondered if she’d curl her body, but instead she stretched. I wanted, suddenly and very deeply, to know what her neck smelled like and to memorize the shape of her toes. Ezra knew both of those things; the knowledge rotted. I imagined I had a pit like a peach, but instead of a healthy core, my pit was toxic, it was burning me up, and getting all over everyone I loved, and everyone could smell it.

  “Hi,” Nozlee said, her voice croaky.

  She couldn’t have had any indication I was awake, I had been very, perfectly still.

  Nozlee rolled, pressing the front of her body against the back of mine, she let her feather soft lips tickle the side of my ear. “Eve, I know when you’re pretending to sleep.”

  “No.”

  She laughed, it was so loud.

  “You better get up and face it,” Nozlee said, stretching some more. “Today’s going to be awful.”

  Yes, but she didn’t have to just say it. I was afraid that being kind to her meant I would never get to be friends with Ezra again, and without alcohol making me live in the moment, I started to sour on the whole situation.

  “You seem happy,” I said, finally turning over so she could see my face and, with it, my little breasts and all of my naked stomach. “I guess getting what you’ve been craving for so long really burns away the guilt of fucking over Ezra.”

  Her face turned. I could see her get mad at me; I could see the dozens of angry things she wanted to say back to me. The question she—we were both—trying to answer was: Is Eve trying to ruin it because she doesn’t want it or because she’s scared and a bitch? I guess it’s true that I’m like an animal, I bite when I’m afraid. I didn’t want to lash out at her because I was scared of what I had done, but I had done it before I knew what I was doing, before I could help it.

  Nozlee’s anger settled into something much worse. “Don’t do that to me right now,” she said. “Today’s going to be bad enough as it is.”

  I wanted to hug her and I gave in to the desire.

  “You need to do some real thinking,” Nozlee said into my ear during the hug. “You need to figure out what you want or at least what you might want. You need to figure it out pretty fast.”

  I didn’t say anything but I initiated a de-hugging. Noz’s eyes were a bit wet and so pretty.

  “You should go soak in the tubs.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go to yoga,” Noz said. She got off the bed and started pawing through her bag. “There’s a class in the Celestial Dome.”

  “I can’t soak. I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said, being obstinate.

  She put on a pair of neon green stretchy athletic shorts. “Don’t be shitty, you would never drive to the desert without a swimsuit.”

  “What if I was too overwhelmed to pack correctly?”

  “You weren’t.” She had her sports bra on and a shirt that she would probably take off during the class when she got hot. “You go soak and try to access your fucking emotions, okay? At least enough to stop being a bitch to me.”

  She left, but did the thing from the movies where she stopped in the doorway to say one last thing: “And you should look for the shaman.”

  * * *

  —

  On the way to the tubs, I passed a small, freestanding hut that Two Bunch used as its reception area. Taped to the door was a list of the daily programming for guests: Yoga and Pilates, and Meditation sessions with names like “Creating a New Book of Life” and “Shaman Blessing Honoring Your Dreams” and “Revealing Your Strengths.”

  “10:15 a.m., ‘Balancing Your Chakras to Your Destiny:’ Learn how your energy field plays a key role in your health and relationships and how to know if your energy is out of balance so you can rebalance and align with your destiny. Led by our resident shaman. Meet us in the Garden House.”

  “Where’s the Garden House?” I shouted through the open doorway of the reception hut. The receptionist, and the guest who was checking in, both jumped; the receptionist glanced at the guest then at me, wanting to help but not wanting to shout. Would I help him by walking closer? I guess I would.

  The receptionist gave me detailed instructions on which paths through the resort ground to take to the Garden House and, after following them, I found a room made of glass, built in the middle of Two Bunch’s dense undergrowth. A collection of people were already waiting for the session to begin: a woman about my age wearing a thick blue robe who I maybe recognized from the failed Bravo reality show Gallery Girls; a shaved-head guy with a butterfly tattoo between his shoulder blades, shirt off, who looked like a queer punk type of which there was a semi-robust subculture back in LA; a couple in their early forties whose chairs were close together but whose hands weren’t touching. Thankfully, the vibe was silent and internal, everybody on their own journey; they barely smiled at me and nobody wanted to talk. I was anxious about the noise my metal chair made against the concrete floor when I sat down. The vines were crawling up the glass, I tried to access my fucking emotions. My anger was a smoking volcano, so I closed my eyes and visualized the smoking volcano; I visualized it erupting and wondered when it would erupt. I visualized my friends covered in my lava. I didn’t think this was what Nozlee wanted from me.


  When I opened my eyes, the shaman was staring at me, and I remembered that the shaman was Colleen, I’d forgotten completely. Another person I owed an apology to. I felt exhausted by the prospect.

  I interpreted her look as one of mild horror. I waited for her to unload on me, which was an idiotic thought, because she’s a shaman and she doesn’t unload; but based on my experience, she wasn’t above being a petty bitch.

  She jostled her head like she was clearing away a fog.

  “Step outside with me,” she said, her voice kind of scratchy and her tone authoritative.

  “What, no ‘please’?” I said, after not moving for an uncomfortable amount of time.

  “Please,” she said, surprisingly submissive.

  I thought of Nozlee doing yoga in the Celestial Dome, an instructor telling her to lift her arms and take a slight back-bend and Nozlee lifting her arms and backbending slightly. I remembered the two of us sitting around Witch Colleen’s low table, shaking hands as we first met, shaking with excitement at meeting someone so new and yet so familiar. She’d set me up to go see Colleen because she thought there was something for me here. I realized that on the night we swam, if Nozlee had kissed me, I would’ve kissed back.

  I stood up, almost tripping, and followed Colleen out of the Garden House. She led me a few feet down the slate rock path, until we were out of earshot of the others gathered.

  “You owe me an apology for acting like a child and scaring my dear friend,” she said, unconsciously turning her wrists so her palms were facing upwards, a gesture of asking. And maybe, dramatically, she channeled her power through her palms the way I did.

  “I behaved badly,” I said, the most I could muster.

  “That’s not an apology,” she said sharply enough that I could see that vindictive streak rise up again in her, but this time she was able to squash it down. “I’ll admit I created a negative atmosphere by coming at you so harshly. In my defense, I’d had an unusually terrible day and you must know how bad your energy was when you came into the meditation. I’d always thought of you as one of my best students, and you came to me ragged and broken.”

  “Well, what if I hadn’t known that at the time?” I bit back, but a little less sharply than intended, in fact not sharply at all, but with a warble of barely repressed sadness. I hadn’t known anything at the time. “In my defense, I’d also had a really bad day.”

  Colleen gestured to the greenery around us, the comforting setting, the safe space. “Justify your actions, then.”

  “One of my best friends had decided not to talk to me for no reason—what I thought was no reason—and it was simultaneously the anniversary of the day my other best friend killed himself,” I said.

  Colleen softened towards me, then, and I didn’t understand. And then she said, “You’re Miguel’s friend?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “I’ve seen him around the grounds. Hold on for a minute. I’m going to see if someone else can cover the chakra workshop.”

  She pulled out her phone and bowed over it and texted. It was the first time I’d seen anybody on their phone on the grounds of Two Bunch.

  I lingered awkwardly while she texted, feeling unmoored at even only ten seconds without a clear thing to do.

  “Okay, good,” she said finally, perhaps twenty seconds after she’d pulled out her phone. She tucked it back into the back pocket of her linen pants.

  “Okay, good,” I echoed. “I’m feeling a little unmoored here?”

  “I’m going to cleanse you.”

  “What if I don’t want to be cleansed?”

  “I’m not going to give you a choice,” she said.

  “I’m not sure if I can afford a private session from a shaman here, actually,” I said. “I’ve heard you’re super expensive.”

  “This one’s on me,” she said, then gave me a mean little smile. “Sister to sister.”

  I shrugged again and let her lead me down the path. She went into a hut and made me wait outside. Through the window I saw the hut’s walls were lined with wooden shelves, and the shelves were stuffed full of witchy supplies: colored candles, peacock and hawk feathers, chicken bones, logs of Palo Santo, baskets full of incense cones, jade beads, chunks of white and rose quartz and black tourmaline, abalone shells for smudging, lighters and matches and charcoal and plates to catch the incense ash.

  “After this, you must promise me you won’t take Cascarilla anymore,” Colleen said.

  I stood awkwardly while she pulled items from the shelf: A large ceremonial fan used for cleaning, a packet of dried herbs, a heavy-looking chunk of milky white quartz. Colleen made me turn around while she used the fan to scrub at my aura, chanting in Sanskrit and stomping on the ground to punctuate and evoke her incarnations. I felt a bit of my blackness fall away like I was a dusted shelf.

  Eventually, she let me come inside the hut and told me to lie on a low cot in the corner and at her urging, shut my eyes and put my hands over my throat chakra. “You’re completely blocked here,” she said. “And I’m going to unstick you.”

  For an hour she chanted over me, moved the quartz around to various spots on my body to help channel energy into my throat, and gently massaged my neck and shoulders. Without meaning to, I relaxed into the drone of her voice, into the smell of her incense, into the fire-pricks at the top of her white candles. I felt my frantic thoughts soften away, and instead of finding the pain I was so scared to encounter there, I felt so deeply cared for. I felt love coming towards me so bright and huge that I couldn’t keep myself from finally crying at the beautiful weight of it.

  I reemerged from my meditative state as she was blowing out her candles.

  “Am I fixed now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes hard with the back of my hand. They were burning; I’m sure they were red like I’d just taken a too-big hit off a never-washed bong in some smelly boy’s dorm room.

  The shaman took my hand and looked at me the way a nurse practitioner would before she told someone the chemotherapy wasn’t working. “Your aura’s pretty well patched up. You take to the cleansing and repairing really well, you don’t fight it at all. I think that means you want to get better.

  “But your aura didn’t get full of tears by accident or by circumstance. Nobody hexed you, nobody degraded your aura with a toxic personality. You put the holes there yourself, and unless you change, you’ll do it again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  She tilted her head. “It would be dangerous for you to be alone right now. Are you here with anyone?”0

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here with my best friend.”

  Sunday, 11:42 a.m.

  When I saw Nozlee again, on the back porch of the suite, she was covered in a fine layer of sweat; her ass looked fantastic in her green stretchy shorts.

  “I’ve been healed!” I lifted my arms above my head and back bended in a performative, exaggerated way.

  Nozlee laughed, and I laughed with her.

  “But really,” I said. “I was.”

  “Really?” She pulled out the second chair. The legs scraped loudly against the concrete. She sat. Unbothered by the noise, she scooted her chair closer to mine.

  “Sort of,” I said. “For now. I’ve been putting holes in my aura.”

  She raised an eyebrow skeptically, “Are you saying you’ve found a magic reason for all your bullshit?”

  “No, actually, I’m saying there’s a magic symptom based on my underlying problem.”

  “And what’s your problem?” she asked.

  “Boundary issues. Obviously. I mean, I don’t have specific words for it yet, but you must have a sense of it. You’ve been here this whole time.”

  Nozlee twisted her neck like it was bothering her, but it wasn’t bothering her, it was just something she did to fill time while she was thinking about what to say next. I
remembered she had twisted herself like that whenever Witch Colleen asked her a difficult or obtuse question. Maybe she didn’t even know she was doing it, but I could see it. There were probably things about me that she could see that I couldn’t. We’d spent so much time looking at each other, and I was only realizing it now, I was catching up.

  I grabbed her wrist and she gasped a little, I hoped in a good, sexy way.

  “I love you, and I like you, and I think you’re sexy,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” she said, teasing. Her eyes were bright and the sun was making all of her so shiny. She let me lead her to the bedroom, and under milky sunlight, I got to spend time with her body. I watched a heavy droplet of sweat drip from the dent at the base of her neck down to the bone ridge between her breasts, and curved and moved my fingers until I found her g-spot and pushed on it.

  After, we put on our bathing suits, my black one-piece that I absolutely of course had packed; hers was red-striped and purchased from a company that advertised on Instagram. We went down to the hot springs; we didn’t hold hands as we walked but all of a sudden the idea of hand-holding loomed.

  The deck chairs that surrounded the bigger pools were already mostly claimed; I looked around for a spot and saw first an empty wooden tub with empty chairs nearby, then saw that Miguel was there, sort of sitting on a chair, sort of floating. He was busy rolling a ghostly joint.

  “Oh good,” Miggy said, when he felt us approaching. “I’ve been saving this tub for you guys.”

  “You can fill it,” Nozlee said, dropping her sunglasses on a nearby chair. “As hot or as cold as you like.”

  “Ooooh a private soak,” I said, testing the faucets. The water ran out of old pipes fast and hot; it didn’t smell but I could feel the magic radiating out of it, a psychic stink.

  “I had to do a lot of work to keep this prime spot open for you,” Miggy said. “It takes a lot of energy to repel people here, it’s not easy to project bad vibes.”