Chapter I
I don’t go to graduation. I work brunch and dinner at High Five and get out at midnight.
My housemates are having a party. I have a beer on our porch and take their ribbing about having not actually lived there this year.
Carson is the only one leaving. Starting in June I’ll pay eighty-eight dollars a month to have the room to myself.
I tell them they’ll be seeing a lot more of me now.
I leave Carson and Jenny making out on the porch swing, which surprises me and makes me feel the distance between us.
I haven’t been around enough lately for her to tell me about this development.
I go to my room and feel the floor shuddering from the music and the dancing in the living room where Mavis used to be.
I stand at my window looking out at the street, watching the steady stream of students and parents come down the hill from campus toward town.
The parents try hard to blend in and some of them are just as drunk and keyed up as their kids, but their bodies move differently.
I wouldn’t have asked either parent to come and they wouldn’t have offered, and I see now that that would have been painful, not to have family here this weekend.
I doubt I’ll stay for the ceremony in December, so I won’t have to deal with it.
Not graduating now was a good decision all around.
I stand there for a long time. I recognize a few people under the streetlamps: Mark from my psych class sophomore year, Ryanne and Landry who lived on my hall last year.
Then I see Brent and another friend of Sam’s named Cole—and Yash.
He walks slightly behind. I haven’t seen him since the semiformal.
I don’t know how it went with Lara. I think about opening up the window and yelling out to him but instead I pull back a bit.
What was he like with other people, not me and Sam and Ivan?
He’s never been here, probably doesn’t know which house I live in.
He’s talking and the other two are laughing and I wish I could hear what he’s saying.
When he’s alongside the house he looks over at the people on our porch, then directly at my window.
I stay still. I don’t know what he can see. He moves on.
Carson leaves with her family the next morning, a three-car caravan back to Brooklyn.
I hug them all on the sidewalk, Carson the longest. Jenny comes down the steps with a coffee cake just out of the oven.
I’m surprised by their tears. We wave them off and I go back to my room.
It feels enormous, and empty. Only now can I see how absent I was for our senior year.
We moved in at the end of August and it was roasting hot and we lay on our twin beds cooling ourselves off with ice cubes, talking and laughing before sleep.
We’d lived together starting sophomore year.
She knew everything about my family, kept track of every detail even though she never met any of them.
She had a mad crush on my brother. She didn’t care that he was gay.
She said once that if she ever met my father, she’d kick him in the balls.
Her family came to visit twice a year. Her parents had gotten pregnant with her in eleventh grade and her father freaked out and fled to Texas and her mom had the baby and mailed him a photo.
He was at the door less than a week later, pleading for forgiveness.
Their parents helped with Carson, they finished high school and got jobs, bought a home, and had four more children.
They were much younger than Carson, her siblings, and they worshiped her.
They’d come screaming out of the car and glom onto her.
They stayed in our room, all four of them fighting about whose turn it was to sleep on the bed with Carson.
This past August, when they’d driven her down, the youngest, Meg, had asked if she could sleep with me.
I scooted over. She told me I smelled good—she did not, she smelled like burnt licorice—and fell asleep nine seconds later.
‘I know her,’ I said.
‘Know who?’
‘Listen.’ I turned it up.
Carson fades after that. Everything dims a bit. What happened? I went to the funeral. I met Sam. I met Yash. It got cold.
I get back into bed. Carson and her family will have reached the highway by now. It’s eleven thirty in the morning. I’m tired to the bone.
I come home that night to a box on my porch filled with things I left at the Breach: a few T-shirts, Cosmos, a hairbrush that’s not mine. At the bottom there’s a note from the little notepad by the door, folded in half.
I’m sorry about our fight—we both can be pretty stubborn sometimes.
I’m taking off in a few hours. I guess we’ve reached the end of our road.
What a long strange trip it’s been, no? Yash’s dad called a while ago and he asked how my love life was going.
I told him and he said that Jordan sounds like the kind of girl you divorce.
I know you’ll take that the wrong way. However, it helped me to see we didn’t have to be together.
I didn’t have to fight for some polysyllogistic fallacy of my own making.
Don’t forget to graduate someday!
Cura ut valeas,
Sam
I’ve never burned anything anyone has written to me in my life, but I take that note straight to the gas stove. I light it and watch it curl and blacken in the sink. I wash the flakes of ash down the drain.
Still, the words reverberate. Jordan sounds like the kind of girl you divorce.
What hurts the most is that it’s probably true.
I’ve never known a happy marriage. My mother was miserable and left my father for the cantor, who seemed like a good guy, but he died before they could marry.
I don’t think she’s had a relationship since.
My father married Ann, a neighbor who stood by him when he got fired for drinking with the high school boys he coached and showing them the peepholes in his office that looked into the girls’ locker room.
He treated Ann worse than my mother. My brother said recently that Ann had called him from the closet where she was hiding from him.
She wanted to know what would happen if she called the police. She didn’t want him to go to jail.
I probably am the kind of girl you divorce.
At least Sam is gone. I don’t know if Yash has left yet for Knoxville for the summer.
I walk to the library. It’s empty. All those seniors who packed the place last week are gone forever.
I find ‘The Last Fall’ by Ray Hart in an old New Yorker, make a xerox, and walk to the Breach.
Yash’s car is still there, his bedroom light on.
I go quietly around back, slide the pages under the kitchen door as far as they’ll go, and flee.
Two days later his car is gone. There’s a wheelbarrow filled with soil in the driveway, two fat azalea bushes wrapped in burlap beside it. The backyard has been mowed and the air smells sweet and like the past.
I apply for a new loan and get a few dinner shifts at Chantal, the most expensive restaurant in town. Only six tables and no entrée under fifteen dollars.
After my first night of training there, I walk home and pass the apartment building where I lived for those three weeks with Cyra.
I stop and identify our door on the second floor.
It bothers me how little I remember, how distracted I must have been.
How unfriendly maybe. She was alone. Her friends from freshman year weren’t back yet.
She never put anything in the refrigerator.
I remember that. All that was ever in there was the stuff I brought home from the restaurant in the afternoon in aluminum containers with cardboard tops.
Did she even know how to cook? Did I ever offer her my leftovers?
The place looks like a cheap motel, with its balcony that stretches the length of each floor.
There are people outside partying in different spots.
It must have been like that last summer when I lived there but I don’t remember it that way.
This must’ve been where she met that boy next door, and his roommate, out on the balcony.
It feels like one of my jobs, to remember her.
How had the university buried her story?
I remember she leapt like a fawn across our living room.
I stand there a while, then head toward home.
At the foot of Pye Street is a laundromat called Bubble Time.
I stop there next and look through the windows.
It’s a funky place with good music and a café, indoor and outdoor seating.
The walls are psychedelic colors and the machines are painted, too, each one a different animal.
You feed your clothes into the mouth of a lion or an orca.
I’ve heard it’s hard to get a job here. They pay over minimum wage, and there are tips from the café plus the tip jar at the register that’s always overflowing.
Supposedly the couple that owns it sells drugs from the shed in the back parking lot.
It’s quiet when I go in, two people reading on a couch and the owner—Lorna—beside the register.
She doesn’t look up. She’s swirling a paintbrush around in a glass of green water.
When I get to the counter I can see her painting, a centaur holding a piece of fruit—a female centaur, with long hair, bangs, and breasts.
‘That’s lovely,’ I say, because it is.
She looks up at me.
‘Are you hiring?’
She holds her paintbrush up like she’s outlining my face. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Bubble Time is where I meet Claudette. Claudette is an incorrigible flirt.
She’s most of the reason for the stuffed tip jar.
There are always guys hanging around long after their laundry is done.
Her other job is at H?agen-Dazs. I meet her there when she closes at eleven and we eat mounds of ice cream, lock up, and go to Don’t Answer, an outside bar with picnic tables and kegs along the fence.
With Claudette you always met a guy, a fellow sidekick.
I dance with them on the hardpacked dirt and go home alone.
I like my room on Pye Street. I push the beds together and keep a stash of books beside me and read late into the night and early in the morning.
I start reading Don Quixote for Dr. Gastrell’s seminar in the fall.
I take notes. I write a short story, only five pages, the first one I’ve written that was not for a class.
I like it. It has a different flavor somehow. It feels entirely my own.
There’s an oversized astrology calendar on the wall behind the counter at Bubble Time.
Inside each day’s box are suggestive planet positions like Wet Venus in Aquarius or Sextile Jupiter in Scorpio.
I flip past June to September 3, a Tuesday, the day I would have the first class with Yash.
Mercury-Saturn Square, it says, unsexily.
I keep my eye on that calendar. I note the day Sam flies to Barcelona. He is gone. He’s left the country. Claudette and I go to Don’t Answer that night. They’re only playing Prince, and everyone gets up on the picnic tables for ‘1999.’
The next morning there’s a note pushed through the nail on my door:
Yash called