Congratulations dude.
Thanks. Going up to Bo for the night. Probably gonna camp out. Good?
Yep. Just don’t drink too much and DO NOT DRIVE.
Got it.
We stop at the grocery store in town for lunch items: hard rolls, cheese and salami, salt-and-pepper chips. I get a Sprite and Hannah crinkles her nose at me, setting her kombucha on the counter.
“Don’t do that,” I say, reaching out a finger to push on the freckled end of her nose. “Or I’ll make you drink it.”
She makes a fake choking noise and watches as I take cash out of my wallet and set it down.
“You guys are disgusting,” Jake says. He is clutching an armful of Hostess CupCakes against the front of his UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt. Jake is white, with pale, freckled skin and strawberry blond hair.
“Disgustingly great,” Hannah says, lacing her fingers up with mine.
We walk down to the end of the road that leads to the beach. I carry Hannah’s surfboard and she carries the food. We find a spot and spread out a big red-and-black quilt, our toes digging down into the dark brown sand that’s always a little bit wet, even when the sun is out. We put sunscreen on our arms and ears and noses. It’s too cool out to have much more skin exposed than that. Hannah and Jake head down to the water and I lie back and try to read a book about Sun Ra and the Arkestra, the sound of the waves and the soft but relentless breeze rushing in my ears.
I can’t focus for long because of the fact of this day: the last day of high school.
I’m done.
I have a scholarship to Cal State East Bay, and my first semester starts in less than three months. Everything is starting. Everything is good. The future is waiting in a neatly wrapped and labeled package. But for some reason I can’t really feel it. I never can.
I put down my book and watch Hannah and Jake bobbing up and down in the water like seals. Everything is backlit and the top halves of their bodies are two irregular black shapes, in steady motion on the dark sea.
Hannah is going to school in Ohio, and we are deep into negotiations about what that will mean for our relationship. At any given moment either of us can be found on either side of the argument. We’re circling around something inevitable, but no one wants to be the first to let go.
The shadows get longer and longer until it’s time to get out, get dry, head to Blake’s cousin’s house. By the time we park the pickup on the dirt road out front, kids from school have already started gathering.
The house is a California-interior-style wet dream, everything wabi sabi, weathered, reclaimed, decks and steps everywhere.
Ceramic sculptures. Glass doors. Cool grass in the twilight, fruit trees sagging under the weight of ripening apricots and plums. It’s the kind of house Dad builds for people who have a lot more money than we do.
“I’m hungry,” Hannah whines from where she sits on a wraparound bench on the back deck. She’s wrapped up in lavender fleece, white leggings, and Uggs, shivering with wet hair.
“I’m pretty sure Connor is bringing pizza,” Jake says, adjusting his baseball cap.
“Yup,” I say, “and here he is.”
“Hey, bro!” Connor calls from across the yard. He ducks under the crooked branch of a live oak tree, balancing the pizza on one hand. There’s lots of hugging and backslapping as we all greet each other. Something about it feels disingenuous, every single time.
More and more kids come, and I start to worry that this is more like a party than a hangout, but by that point the beer is surging through my veins and I feel good. Light. Free. This is the way I should feel on the last day of school.
Hannah is over talking to a group of her friends. After a day outdoors, she is this shade of golden pink that is completely enticing. I walk up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist, kissing her neck.
“Excuse me, everyone,” I say, winking. “I need Hannah for a minute.”
I pull her up the stairs into a bedroom that looks like a perfect replica of a fisherman’s bunkhouse with old glass floats and porthole windows, and she pushes me down onto the bed and takes off my glasses and we tangle ourselves up in each other until we get right up to the edge of the line that we are both, for some reason, hesitant to cross. For a while, I lose myself until I’m completely gone, in a way that makes every voice, every thought, everything that isn’t the soft blur of Hannah, recede.
Afterward, when we are strung out, breathless, lying limp on our backs, Hannah turns her head to me and says, “Today was the last day of high school, ever.”
I nod, slow, rubbing a long strand of her silky hair between my fingers. “So weird.”
Suddenly, her aquamarine eyes are overflowing with tears. “Everything is going to change, isn’t it?”
The past half hour in this tiny room has sobered me up, made me thoughtful, and for a few long minutes her question swirls around my brain.
She leans over and kisses my shoulder.
“I’m really going to miss you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m really going to miss you too.”
But there’s something empty about the words because I can’t imagine what it would be like, really missing anyone.
• • •
Later, we are back downstairs. I’m loose in a good but dangerous way. Like everything might fall apart at any moment and I might not mind.
I’m sitting on a camping chair next to the fire when I see Sydney Greenfield drifting across the firelit lawn like a fairy. Her black hair is braided into a crown on the top of her head and she’s wearing an old black T-shirt that’s full of holes and a giant black old-man’s cardigan sweater. She’s holding hands with a guy I’ve never seen before. He’s white, skinny, and scruffy, and looks like he doesn’t belong at a high school party. He tugs her along, both of them looking cool and disinterested. A cigarette dangles between her fingers.
I first met Sydney when we were eight years old, after Dad and I moved from Oakland into the house next door to hers at the end of a dusty cul-de-sac. For years, I followed her everywhere. She introduced me to music and made me dye my hair black and dared me to do a hundred stupid and dangerous things.
But at some point Syd and I drifted apart. Sometimes it felt like she was still and I was moving, and sometimes it felt like I was still and she was moving. Now here we are, on opposite sides of a gigantic ocean. It’s weird because for so long she was my twin, the other half of my brain. Sometimes I still wake up at night and expect to find the lump of warmth that is her body in my bed.
The older guy stops for a second to talk to a friend, and Syd stops too, turns her head, looks at me, stares. Her eyes are like exploding stars, the way they suck everything inward. For a second I feel this great missing, this frustrated longing. They pull me in, her eyes, like a swamp.
And then she looks away, turns back to the guy, moves along like a fish in a stream until she’s out of sight.
2Sydney
THIS PARTY IS STUPID. IT’S FULL of the worst kind of normal kids reminiscing about high school. Everyone is singing along to bad music and hugging each other, and all night Robbie’s been looking at me in this way where he’s trying to tell me that he wants to have sex.
And me? I feel like I’m a human paper cut. There’s a sting under my skin that I can’t get rid of today.
I look sideways at Robbie, his round blue eyes half hidden under dark, shaggy hair. He’s been drinking and smoking pot all afternoon and he smells sad. He’s talking to Rich about music in this way he has, basically saying that anything he doesn’t approve of is utter trash, and I know he’s just moments away from diverting off into a long diatribe about Pantera.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, dropping his dead-fish hand.
“ ’K, babe,” he says, kissing me on the forehead.
Suddenly, the earth tilts, just a little. That’s how I know it’s coming. I turn away fast, making my way through the shadowy trees to the back gate, wiping the sweat that’s already beading along my upper lip. When I’m out of the yard, in the utter, inky darkness of the street, I sink down to the edge where the curb would be if there were curbs here and let my head fall down between my knees.
My lungs begin to feel like they are full of water, so I concentrate on the feeling of the hard gravel on the backs of my thighs. Three in, six out. Four in, eight out. Six in, twelve out. I do the breathing exercises my therapist showed me in her moldy office. I take two puffs of my inhaler and try to tug the helium balloon of my brain back down to earth.
Then an idle part of me wonders if this isn’t really a panic attack at all, if the tightness in my chest is actually killing me. Young people can have heart attacks, right? Every once in a while, it happens. I could die tonight, at this stupid party, on the side of the road in front of some rich hippie’s house.
Once, when I was lucky-number-seven years old, I did almost die. At the beach, sucked out too far, my struggle for forward motion turned to a defeated up-and-down bobbing of my body in the ocean, and the waves washed mouthful after mouthful of salt water down my throat. I felt real terror and then an alluring calm
right behind it. I knew that it would feel good to surrender. But then my dad yanked me out by the back of my bathing suit and I threw up all over the sand.
I wait for that calm feeling of near death now, but it doesn’t come. I can’t die tonight. I have to work at Amoeba tomorrow. I have a sound internship at the Fox that starts July 15th. I have a plan. So I draw circles in the dirt with a long stick until the blotches on the backs of my eyelids start to fade. I count and breathe, in and out, again and again.
When I can hear the night birds over the hum of the party, I know I’m going to be all right. I stand up on wobbly legs and start walking.
It’s three long, dark blocks to the edge of the mesa, and I pass the time by humming the Roches and rhythmically crunching my feet in the gravel. I light a cigarette and inhale deeply. Something about smoking makes my aloneness feel somehow more alone. Better. Even though the first drag always makes me cough and wheeze.
I crush out the cigarette halfway through and slip the butt into my back pocket. I never, ever litter. Then I walk right up to the edge of the mesa, the edge of the earth, and look down at the calm, moonlit sea, far below in the bay. And I wonder how this perfect calm can be a part of something so turbulent as the ocean.
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