by Emily Dalton
You laugh and say,
“It’s my deformed heart.”
And I’m in disbelief—the good kind.
Then you make a joke about how
you never thought you’d be
buying jewelry for a girl
on Valentine’s Day,
as you help me with the clasp.
And it’s weird.
And it’s perfect.
Now here we are surrounded by diapers,
and you’re pouring cheap champagne
into red plastic cups on my desk.
You hand one to me and take
the other for yourself,
raising it up high.
You clear your throat theatrically and make a toast:
“To graduating from Pampers to Pull-Ups.
Babe, my babe, will you be my official babe?”
I roll my eyes
and heave a sigh,
but there’s nothing sarcastic
about the way I kiss you.
YOU’RE FINALLY MY BOYFRIEND
and it lasts about a week.
INVITE ONLY
At the beginning of the week
I help you convert the twin bed frame
in your dorm room into a double
with a large sheet of thick plywood.
We slide Sophie’s donated double mattress
up over the wood and then stretch
your gray cotton fitted sheet around the corners.
The bed now takes up three-quarters
of the tiny single dorm room,
but, “It’s fine,” you say,
because “all we need is this big bed
and each other.”
And then you fall down onto the mattress,
and you pull me down with you into a long kiss.
At the end of the week, we lie in your bed,
side by side on our backs, and we stare up
at the ceiling and grumble back and forth
to each other about how many nights a week
we should be sleeping in the same bed.
“Three nights a week. And it should be
an invitation . . . not assumed.”
You’re telling me how sometimes
you just want to stretch out
like a starfish in your bed at night.
But all I’m hearing
is how
you don’t sleep well
when you have to share your bed
with me.
We go to sleep
without saying goodnight,
and in the morning
I ask you whether we’re in a fight.
You look like you’re sorry,
and I already know why.
“Maybe
I’m still not ready
to be in a real relationship
with you.”
I feel like an idiot for believing
we could finally work, but
it’s easier to be mad at you
than at myself.
WINTER CARNIVAL
Last night, I made out with A.J. Peterson
behind an ice sculpture, and I guess
some people saw.
You and I sit across from each other
at the kitchen table in Palmer, tapping ash
into an old teacup and arguing about
our relationship while a rowdy, drunken snowball fight
carries on outside and “Call Me Maybe” blasts from the
basement.
You like to make up nicknames for all
my exes and flings, and when
you angrily refer to A.J. Peterson as
“Diap-Diap Diaperson,”
neither of us can keep a straight face.
And now we’re laughing hysterically, starting
an ongoing joke about how all my exes have
a Facebook group together and
you and Diap-Diap Diaperson
are the newest members.
COURSE EVALUATIONS
I’m taking Modern Logic because
I need a math credit, and by the time
I’m done with the final exam, my brain
is at one percent battery life.
I’m staring down at the course evaluation form now,
the columns of empty circles lined up behind
bolded words—
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Neither agree nor disagree
Agree
Strongly agree
—my eyes start doing that thing
where the words blur out of focus
and then the world blurs out of focus
because I wish I could give you
an end-of-semester evaluation
to answer on the Likert scale:
I am gay.
I am straight.
I am bisexual.
I am jealous.
I am confused.
I am delusional.
I am in love.
SECOND SUMMER AT THE RANCH
It’s not hard for Val to convince me
to return for another season at the 4UR Ranch—
this time, without my sister.
That’s how I meet Grant.
He’s a twenty-five-year-old ranch hand from Athens, Georgia,
who looks like a dad model in an L.L. Bean catalog,
but slightly sinister,
with his piercing blue eyes
and pointed canines.
Grant has a girlfriend back home,
and there’s something about the way he smiles
at all of the female staff and teases them
that irks me.
So I avoid eye contact when I drive by him
in the housekeeping golf cart
and when he drives by me
on the riding lawn mower.
But I can’t always avoid interactions
with him because one day I need to radio him
to bring a cot from storage to a guest room,
and the next day to set and check mousetraps in the lodge,
and a week after that to help a few frantic housekeepers,
caught in an afternoon downpour,
get the back wheels of their cart out of the mud.
And then, at a staff bonfire down near the Rio,
I’m sitting next to Val, drinking a Corona,
when Grant lunges in front of me and knocks
my beer bottle into the grass, sloshing foam
all over my T-shirt and jean shorts.
“What the fuck, dude?”
Before I can say anything else,
Val shrieks, and one of the waitstaff guys
down near the riverbank shouts out an “OH MY GOD”
that echoes against the ridge beyond the bonfire.
Grant stares into my eyes as he gets up
and dusts himself off, and it’s now registering
that while he did just forcefully push me
and spill beer all over my clothes and his,
he also just jumped in front of me
to keep a speeding soccer ball
from hitting me
square in my face.
HARD TO GET
Now there are whispers that Grant
has broken up with his girlfriend, and
wet, hot steam tumbles out from the
stainless steel panels of the industrial dishwasher
as he walks into the Dish Pit kitchen
where I’m rinsing soup and salad dressing off
the first round of
dinner plates.
At the end of our shift, Grant catches me
stealing a cookie from the guest cookie jar, and
my heart pounds in my chest as I mutter,
“Just making sure they’re stocked.”
And then he sits down at the table
across from where I’m eating dinner.
“So, why do you hate me?”
He sounds genuinely hurt, and I realize
how childish I’ve been acting . . .
being mean to a boy to get him to like me,
like a little kid shoving her crush in the sandbox.
I accuse him of being a tease to all the girls,
and his response makes my heart beat faster.
“The only girl I actually want
to flirt with here won’t
give me the time of day
unless I corner her while
she’s stealing cookies.”
I don’t know how to react so I roll my eyes
as he moves closer and leans against the wall.
“I even saved her life once. Jumped in front of a bullet for her.”
A BOW ON TOP
At the end of the summer,
Grant and I go for one last hike together, and
it starts to pour just as we’re nearing the top
of the Palisades.
Thunder and lightning and mud and fog
land us beneath an apocalyptic sky.
We’re not sure whether it’s worth carrying on . . .
and then, suddenly, the gloom disperses,
clearing to majestic wisps of cloud
below the peak, and
the longest, fullest rainbow
I’ve ever seen in real life
stretches directly overhead.
I’m standing under the colored arch of mist,
hand in hand with a guy who reminds me
that relationships can be easy
and simple
and normal.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END: SENIOR YEAR
It’s the first party of senior year.
I haven’t seen you,
or even talked to you,
in three months.
You stand in the doorway with a beer;
I’m sitting on the couch.
As soon as our eyes meet,
I get up and step over all
the legs to get to you.
You meet me in the middle of the room.
We stare into each other’s eyes a moment
before hugging, and I feel
suddenly
like a different person—
the person I had missed being all summer with Grant.
“Hi, Maxwell,” I whisper as we embrace,
and it hurts so good to remember all over again
how perfectly we seem to fit in each other’s arms.
“Hi, Daltwell.”
Joanna joins us as we reminisce about
all the silly things that happened abroad,
and as the three of us stand there,
drinking and laughing,
I feel pangs of nostalgia for when
we were all best friends.
Then Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids”
bumps over the speakers.
I slink to the beat,
leading you with my eyes
to an open space in the crowd.
We dance and laugh
and dance some more,
just like the old days.
The next morning, we wake up
together and spend
the day showing each other
new music and funny videos
and rolling around in bed.
You’re kissing my torso,
and we’re both giggling
as you reacquaint yourself
with the three moles speckling
my stomach and ribs.
You used to refer to them
as the Jonas Brothers,
and now you’re renaming
them Harry, Ron, and
Bilbo Baggins.
When I tell you how
I always used to want
to get those moles removed,
you cluck in disapproval
because you love them
in a way that makes me
like them, and nothing
can touch this
perfect moment
until
you catch a glimpse of my phone—
the background of me and Grant—
and you grow quiet,
and minutes later,
you’re gathering up your things.
ROYAL BALLS
The truth is
I haven’t even spoken to Grant
on the phone since I left the ranch
a month and a half ago,
and as I drive to the airport late
on a Friday night to pick him up,
I feel the same old nervous jitters setting in again—
the ones that make me feel
like I’m disguising myself
as a female stereotype,
passive and delicate.
But it’s exciting.
Joanna and Sophie buy a bunch of liquor and beer,
move my speakers
from my room to the back porch of our house,
and invite all of our friends over.
I sit on the kitchen counter drinking Coronas;
Grant stands next to me, making conversation
with Theo and Paul about being from the South . . .
Meanwhile, you’re all
alone
in the big house on Dub Street,
losing your mind, feeling
like all of your friends have gone
off to the royal ball
and left you
in a sullen pile
of shattered glass slippers
and spliff ash.
TO KILL CHIVALRY
All weekend Grant is such a gentleman—
holding doors for me,
pulling my chair out at dinner,
and carrying my backpack on a hike near campus.
But the more chivalrous he is,
the more I long for
shoe-shopping in Europe with you,
or binge-watching episodes of The Bachelor,
or you accidentally slamming a door in my face
and then laughing at my scowl.
And the truth is,
it’s almost a relief,
two days later,
when I drive Grant back
to the Burlington airport
for his flight home.
ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM THE AIRPORT
It’s dark.
It’s been raining all day,
and my mind is ready to curl up
and disappear into sleep.
I think about reaching out to you,
if only to apologize for the party
you felt you needed to avoid.
About halfway to campus, I descend
a back-road mountain pass,
the drowsy fog clouding my thoughts,
and it feels like my car is floating.
And suddenly the car fishtails,
swerving back and forth, like
a bottle revving up for the spin
at a middle school make-out party.
I panic and stomp on the brakes.
The tail end whips forward.
The tires lift off the road,
and the car flips clockwise
/>
over the passenger side,
tumbling twice down the decline,
landing right-side-up
perpendicular to the road
on the inner shoulder
closest to the mountain.
In those elongated seconds, I feel
like I’m bent backwards, hovering
beneath a limbo stick—
unsure whether
I’m about to fall.
I’m facing the steep incline of the mountain.
A loud whirring of white noise
emanates from the static radio,
its buzz filling the empty silence.
All the lights are on inside the car,
illuminating the sparkling, granular crumbles
of tempered glass that litter the floors and seats.
The windshield is smashed in,
ripped from the seal at the top,
pushing the rearview mirror
down toward the center console.
A Macintosh-scented car freshener
that my dad got me for Christmas
dangles just over the gear shift.
My seat belt is tight across my body.
Then all at once, the rest of my being
comes crashing into real time.
The searing memory of what just occurred
jolts through my mind in a rush of adrenaline.
Feeling more awake than I have in months,
I look around at the crumpled windshield,
the concave roof, the missing mirrors,
the broken glass everywhere,
and understand that I really am still here,
still living in the middle of it all,
without even one tiny scratch.
I click the seat belt loose
and turn around to survey
the back seat, also glittering
in granular glass.
I sit in the car, processing the scene,
the odd sight of the keys still in the ignition,
the gear shift still in drive, and
the glowing blue dashboard screen
still showing the current station,
as if I can just hit the gas again
and continue driving.
And then I’m shaking like
I’m about to erupt,
and I don’t feel real
even though I know I must be,
and the most unsettling part is
the mere sight of these things,
being able to believe in them,
realizing that they would
still be here to be seen
even if I
wasn’t
here
to see them.
BACK AT THE HOUSE
The girls sit with me
in the living room
as I relive the accident.
