The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

  Carly ties the last section of my hair up on itself and sprays my head with a cloud of hair spray that makes both of us cough. She studies me, swishing her mouth from one side to the other. Finally she steps back and nods. “Good to go.” She seems more serious, like whatever was pulling her up has started to wear off. I wonder if it was just adrenaline.

  * * *

  In her car on the way over, she says, “It’s the first time I’ve been out since Rosemary. Since I left Rosemary.” She doesn’t look at me. Eyes on the road.

  “It’ll be fun,” I tell her. “You’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  The bouncer tries to smudge the dates on both of our licenses, but the fixative works. He marks Xs on our hands with a black Sharpie before he lets us in. The ink is wet and cold.

  “What’s this?” I ask Carly, holding up my hand to show her my X, but the music is so loud she can’t hear me. The music is so loud I can’t even hear it. I feel the thumping of bass and shrieks of violin in my body. My ears can’t make sense of it. Carly points at her hand and rolls her eyes.

  The place is packed, and it doesn’t look like there’s anywhere for us to go, but Carly grabs my hand, holds it low. She twists and turns her way through the crowd, pulling me behind her. We sneak between people until we get right up to the stage.

  I think I see the James Dean guy and the girl with the lip ring at the other end of the stage, but everyone is pushing and dancing and they get swallowed by the crowd.

  None of the members of the band look much older than me. I can’t stand the way they sound, but I love to watch them. The lead singer is wearing a yellow dress with drippy black paint stripes. She has a tiny round face and a long mess of bright orange hair. She screams, “I ain’t, I ain’t, I ain’t” into the microphone like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

  The guy playing the violin has this smirk like he knows he’s making painful sounds. When the lead singer screams “You. Ain’t. You!” everyone else screams along with her. Even me.

  * * *

  Four songs in, we’re still right up at the front of the stage. I’ve been staring at the guitar player, watching his fingers, trying to figure out which chords he’s playing and what effect the array of pedals at his feet have on the sound of his strings. He’s wearing a kilt, and by accident, I notice that he isn’t wearing anything under his kilt.

  When I look up at his face, I realize he’s staring back at me. It’s weird, us watching each other. I’d been looking at him like he couldn’t even see me. When our eyes meet, he smiles, slowly, this creep of movement from the corners of his lips. He’s wearing eyeliner. Thick greasy pools of it under his eyes. His hair is long and dark and he has a thick, wide chin with a dimple. They finish the song and start another one. The lead singer screams, “Fuck!” at the top of her lungs about six or seven times in a row and as far as I can tell there aren’t any other words to the song. Every time I look at the guitar player, he makes eye contact.

  At the end of the song, when he changes picks, he looks me right in the eye, kisses the old one, and throws it at me.

  I catch it, which is some kind of miracle, because I’m never that smooth. I slip the pick into my purse. Carly is freaking out. She pulls me through the crowd and into the bathroom to ask how it happened.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I was watching him play and he just started looking at me.”

  “Seriously? Don Dickford threw you his pick? He’s like notably stoic.”

  “Do you want it?” I put my bag on the counter by the sink to dig it out.

  “No! I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you can!” I hold it out to her. “Take it. You love them.”

  She wraps her arms around my neck and kisses my cheek. “I love you! You’re like the best friend ever!”

  Just as she’s pulling away from me to get a better look at the guitar pick, the bathroom door opens, letting in a horrible blast of sound, and Rosemary.

  “Oh, am I interrupting something?” Rosemary says like she’s bored, pushing her way up to the mirror. She pulls a lipstick from her purse and reapplies it to her already perfectly made up lips.

  “Come on, hon,” I say to Carly. “Let’s go.”

  As I reach for my bag, Rosemary knocks it off the counter, sending everything in it flying across the disgusting bathroom floor. Lipstick, eyeliner, wallet, the crocheted tampon pouch Margo made me when I got my first period, buck knife, safety pins, chewing gum—Carly and I scramble to pick it all up as if stuff that’s been on the bathroom floor of a club will be less revolting if we get to it faster.

  “Oops,” Rosemary says, even though she clearly did it on purpose. She bends down and pushes the stuff that’s near her toward me, scraping my lipstick and the crochet bag into the dirty floor even worse.

  “Stop,” Carly says through clenched teeth.

  “Fine. Whatever.” Rosemary stands up. “I was just trying to help.” She walks out of the bathroom with a distracted look on her face like she’s already forgotten we exist.

  — Chapter 27 —

  We run from The Haunt, into the cold air. My boots slap the wet pavement hard, making sparks in my shins. Carly runs like someone who knows how. Like maybe she ran track in high school. Her legs are shorter, but each stride takes her further.

  She grabs my hand when I start to lag and her palm is damp like mine. We both know Rosemary isn’t chasing us, but we need to get away. We need speed so our muscles can work through the itch under our skin.

  We run through The Commons, down the alley next to the movie theater, up the spiral of the parking garage, and I swear I feel the concrete move from the force of us.

  In Carly’s car, we pant and sweat, our bodies fighting against the idea of sitting still. The rush in my veins makes me feel like Carly and I could fly if we wanted to. If we held hands and jumped from the edge of the parking garage, we would probably soar.

  “That’s why John and Lila didn’t wave at me,” Carly says, and I think maybe she means James Dean and the lip ring girl. “It’s fine to be my friend when Rosemary isn’t around, but heaven fucking forbid they choose me.”

  She stares out the windshield, key in hand, not ready to start the engine. “I can’t go home yet.” She looks at me. “I’ll take you home, if you want to go.”

  I hear the plea in her voice and I’d stay with her just for that, but I can’t go back yet either, to tiptoe into Adam’s apartment and lie next to his sleeping self with all this energy unspent. I am mad about Rosemary, but that isn’t all of it. I feel like I am actually here. Like someone dropped my mind into my body and it’s a shock to the system. I think maybe they were only walking side by side before this and now we are here together, both parts of me.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not tired.”

  “Where should we go?” Carly asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  We are fogging up the windshield. Carly cranks her window down. I do the same.

  “It smells like campfire weather,” she says.

  * * *

  It could be the dumbest thing, but I don’t think Tom Bilford will care. I don’t even know if he lives in that cabin once the campground is closed. I don’t think he’ll call the cops if he catches us, and at least I’m not a car thief anymore. I am not wanted by the police or my father.

  “Worst they’ll do is make us leave,” Carly says. “Probably.”

  And I decide not to worry because I want to do it.

  We park in a turnout before the entrance and hoof it in. If we get caught, Carly’s rusty Pacer plays the part of a breakdown well enough to be our alibi. We plan our excuses in whispers as we walk, like someone might be lurking in the dark, waiting to overhear us. It was cold. We couldn’t find a phone booth. We needed the fire.

  The moon shines so brightly off the water that we can see where we’re going. Not a single car drives by. There’s no light in the park ranger cabin, and there’s no truck out front either. The lake is ours. The nigh
t is ours. If there are raccoons in the dark, they won’t want a battle. There are two of us. We are full of ourselves, ferocious.

  The rhythm of our feet on the pavement—Carly’s foot, my foot, Carly’s other one, then mine—is just a little off from a song I can’t quite gather in my head. I work to stay on beat. Carly notices that I’m noticing and holds her pace steady too. By the time we turn into the campground, we’re stomping something complicated. Carly shout-sings “Cecilia!” in her funny gravelly voice. I can’t believe she’s even heard Simon & Garfunkel, but she knows all the words and we sing it together, keeping time with our feet, laughing when we flub a step. I sing around her crackling, off-key melody, and we sound alright.

  We march past my old campsite, moving in further, away from the sightline of the main road and away from Tom Bilford’s cabin, in case he comes back. We find a spot by the water, collect left-behind firewood from the sites around it.

  “This is really where you stayed?” Carly asks, stacking wood strategically.

  “Yeah.” I pick at bark on a neatly split log as I wait to hand it to her. “But I wasn’t like camping. I just slept in my car.”

  Carly seems to know how to make a fire and I realize that I could have done this out at the motorhome. I could have dug a pit and drug out some old metal truck bumpers from the trash heap down the road to corral the embers. It wasn’t something I needed my dad to do. I didn’t have to ask permission. No one was there to tell me no. I read somewhere once about animals caged too long staying put even when someone opens the door. I spent so much time in that motorhome before I realized I could go, and while I was there, I never saw the ways I could make it better.

  “Shit,” Carly says, and I think it’s about the fire, but then she says, “It’s been way too cold to sleep in a car.”

  I hand her another log to stack. If Matty were banished to the woods, I bet his first act would be to make a fire pit. To burn things for light and warmth and just to play with flames.

  “If I’d known,” Carly says, “I would have— I mean”—she laughs—“Rosemary probably wouldn’t have let you stay, but I could have… I would have found a place for you.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her, and my eyes are stinging, which is stupid. We can’t go back in time so I can stay with one of Carly’s weird friends. And anyway, when Carly needed a place to stay, it was with me and Adam. So maybe the only thing that’s true is her feelings, but that’s still something. “It all just happened the way it happened.”

  I can feel the lake. I can taste it in the air. The way the water laps at the gravel shore makes sense, like it’s part of me. “I feel like this is where I started,” I tell Carly. “Like maybe nothing counted before I got here.”

  “I feel that way about Ithaca too,” she says. She pulls her lighter from her jacket. Dumps her pack of cigarettes into her hand. She keeps one out to smoke, stuffs the rest in her pocket. After she lights up, she sets the cardboard carton on fire, tossing it under the tower she’s made with our logs.

  “You got any paper?” she asks, blowing smoke as she talks. “The leaves are all damp.”

  I offer her a handful of pocket lint and gum wrappers. “Is it enough?”

  “I can make it work,” she says, and even though everything around us shines in the moonlight, covered in condensation, I believe that she can.

  She balls the lint and throws it under the log tower, where it will catch when the flames start to travel. She’s strategic with the gum wrappers, using one after another to keep a flame focused at one small spot.

  “Ha ha!” she says, with the first crackle of wood, grinning, like she knew all along it would work. She’s different here. Her makeup doesn’t shape her face in these shadows. In the moonlight, she’s young and strong, and nothing strange. She watches her tower.

  “Ha ha!” she says again, when the flames break the surface of another log.

  Once the fire is safely raging, we throw damp twigs at it to hear the pop and sizzle. When it gets too warm, we hang our jackets over a tree branch instead of moving further away.

  “What was your mom like?” Carly asks.

  I think about that wedding dress woman and the tickle of her copper hair on my cheek. “I don’t remember enough,” I say, because memories of my mom don’t always come when I call them. “But she was really pretty and people liked her, and she hated waiting for me.”

  “What do you mean?” Carly pokes at the fire with a stick, pushing embers toward the center.

  “Like she’d take me to the playground, but if there was no one interesting for her to talk to, she’d want to turn around and go home.”

  “And she just left?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I’m not sure if Carly meant for good, or from the playground, but it’s true both ways. I remember the shock in my shins from jumping off the swings when I was worried I wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.

  “If it makes you feel any better, it’s not great having a mom who stays when she doesn’t want to,” Carly says. “It’s hard to watch how bad she wants her whole life to be different. How she settles for keeping the peace.”

  Carly throws another bomb of wet leaves on the fire, and we watch the fury it makes.

  “What do you want?” I ask, because I don’t know how a person is supposed to piece a life together. I don’t want to be my dad or my mom or even Margo. I don’t want to be my math teacher, or Matty’s mom, or Irene. I know my life can’t ever look like the people on TV, but I don’t know what there is to want that’s available to me.

  “Like really want? Like in all of it?” She takes the last drag, tosses her cigarette butt into the fire.

  I nod.

  “I don’t know,” Carly says. “I think maybe it’s not a thing I want to be or stuff I want to have. It’s like—I just don’t want to feel wrong, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I think I do.

  “Rosemary always made me feel…” Carly pulls a loose cigarette from her jacket pocket, holds it between her fingers as if she’s already been smoking it. “I don’t know. She made me feel like she would love me completely if I were just a little bit better than I am.” She holds the cigarette with the tips of her fingers and sweeps it at the flames, pulling it back to her mouth fast, puffing furiously to get the light to take. “News flash! This is the best I’ve got.” She looks sad. Disappointed in herself, the way I was every single time I thought I could win my dad back from Irene by memorizing Dylan songs or sewing the loose buttons on his work shirts.

  “I like you this way,” I say, and the words make me nervous, because they are the most I have and maybe she won’t want them. I like her more than anyone I’ve ever met.

  “I don’t feel wrong right now,” Carly says. “I don’t feel wrong with you or Adam.” She pokes at the fire again. “Maybe we’ll be friends for a really long time.” She smiles at me, looks away. “I don’t even feel wrong with Bodie.” She laughs. “I just feel… bossy.”

  “He needs it,” I say.

  “He does.”

  We’re sitting too close to the fire. My face feels chapped and hot. “Maybe we can come back and have campfires here,” I say. “Like even years and years and years from now.” And I try to picture it. This little bit of future that could be mine. A friend and a fire and no one feels wrong. It’s the first time I’ve ever thought of getting older in a real way, where I can picture myself as someone different, not just me right now in a different situation. There’s a new person waiting for me to catch up, and maybe she’s happy. Maybe she belongs right where she is.

  “You know what I want?” Carly says. “I want to jump in that lake.”

  I look around like someone might be watching.

  “It’s fine,” Carly says. “I swear.”

  And it’s what I want too.

  We strip to our underwear. The tentacles on Carly’s neck belong to a giant octopus that stretches to the small of her back. In the flicker of firelight, with the movement of her bod
y, he’s alive. One of his wavy tentacles is wrapped around her ribcage, under the band of her bra, curling up over her heart.

  “It’s to remind me,” Carly says when she catches me staring. “Don’t let it pull you under, you know?”

  “Yeah.” I study the lines, the way it makes her body into something otherworldly. And maybe I don’t know what it really is, but I feel like I do.

  “Ready?” she asks, and I nod.

  We make a mad dash for the lake. When the water hits my ankles it is so cold I want to scream, but I run harder, faster. Carly’s wake crashes into mine. We dive in at the same time, plunging into the blackness. I kick my legs and fight to stay under, to feel the cold seep in. To feel every inch of my body. I will be warm again, by the fire, in Carly’s car, in Adam’s bed. Cold isn’t my enemy anymore. I open my eyes and look to the surface. The moon is split to pieces by the water. I hold my breath until I feel like I’ll burst.

  Carly comes up sputtering moments after I do. We laugh and shout and it echoes across the surface. It doesn’t matter if anyone hears us. We are part of this wild.

  We dive and surface and dive again, until our teeth chatter, and then we walk from the water like creatures of the deep. Carly has a string of pondweed wrapped around her ankle, a tattoo come to life.

  “It likes me,” she says, unwinding the weed from her leg. She has rings under her eyes from her makeup and I’m sure I do too. We are becoming raccoons.

  We keep the fire going so we can dry off, jumping around in a crazy dance to get our blood flowing. Carly twists the pondweed into a crown and drops it on my head. It smells like mud in early spring. I howl at the moon.

  Carly laughs. “If someone saw you,” she says, “they’d think you were raised by wolves.”

  “I wish,” I say, and she laughs even harder.