by Lola West
Joe’s song barely earned a glance up from whatever Susan was working on. Pencil in hand and eyes still on the page, she said, “Joe-joe, give Lua a break. Going off to college is stressful, kiddo.”
Joe and I had completed our associate degrees and starting in September I had a full ride to Hamilton to finish my BA. I was a little freaked out. Okay, a lot freaked out. And Joe was not helping.
“Boooooo,” Joe retaliated, heading for the refrigerator door. “Boo, boo, boo. I don’t think she should get to act all Grumpy McGrump Pants just because she chose to run away to one of the country’s bastions of higher learning, binge drinking, and one-night stands.” He pulled the door open and leaned full on into the fridge, bending at the waist so from where I was standing, leaning against the doorframe, he was all legs and a full moon of pink bootyliciousness rising. “Gotta make choices you can live with. Right, Mom? Isn’t that what you taught us?” He didn’t pause for an answer. “What do we want for munchies, Lua-cake? Are we thinking light and luscious, like apples and honey, bebe? Ou… deh-cay-dent? Maybe a little wine and cheese?”
“Cheese.” Given the option, I’m always going to go with cheese.
He finally stood and turned to me. His hands, arms really, were full, goodies tucked tightly against his chest, using his elbows and armpits as pins.
“Just cheese? Please. Where is the charm, mon cherie? The x-peer-ee-ance.” Maybe he just likes to make English words sound French. He smiled, all goofy and toothy. “If all I’m doing today is basking in the sun at the lake, then you better believe I’m preparing a foodgasm.”
It took him twenty minutes to pack lunch and by the time we started the hike out to the lake, the sun was set to broil. I didn’t mind so much. There is something about a hot summer day that makes me feel connected to everything. It’s like my sweat reminds me I’m just another animal, one of many that the sun could fry up quickly, and the thrive is so beautiful in the summer. Everything seems to be alive, so green and humid and buzzing.
It’s not a terribly long walk but to get to the lake we had to go from Joe’s house past the central meeting house and the farming fields and then up an uncultivated hill and a ways through the trees. Basically we had to traverse the entire 350-acre property from one end to the other. We walked in silence. At first there were ambient sounds, the hellos from other thrivers in their gardens or through their windows, the tractor engine, kids playing, and then as we got closer to the lake, the only sound was the scratching of the tall grass along our thighs and the bottom of the picnic basket.
As you can imagine, Joe doesn't do silence that often, but in this instance he did it for me and I knew it. He gave me quiet. He gifts me silence whenever he thinks I need to breathe deep and think. He’d been giving me a lot of quiet lately. He thought I needed to come to terms with leaving the thrive and going to college.
It made sense that Joe thought college was freaking me out. When you grew up like we did, the mainstream doesn’t exactly make sense to you. It’s not what it sounds like. I’m not a freakish loser or incapable of meshing with society. I wasn’t raised by wolves, and we didn’t grow up in a cult or anything. The thrive is an experiment, a community of people with like-minded ideas, in this case equality, justice, freedom, care, and community support. Our parents and the other thrivers decided to live their ideals by separating themselves from the grid and everything that comes with it. We grow our own food; we have a community school; we help our neighbors when they can’t make ends meet. It’s like a huge, open-minded family who lives together and spends their free time fighting for equality in the larger world.
I’m proud that I was raised this way; I’m proud of who I am because of it. I mean, I was at my first LGBTQ pride parade before I could walk. I’ve protested sexism, racism, ableism, classism… When it comes to human equality, I am there. I have carried a picket sign on the Washington mall more times than I can count, and I most definitely have an FBI file. Growing up on the thrive is special. It makes you self-sufficient. I can fix a transmission. I can build a shelter. I can grow plants for eating and for healing. I can recite poetry and play the guitar. In the mainstream, I’m a renaissance woman. On the thrive, I’m normal.
But the thrive also makes you a total weirdo once you’re old enough to join the mainstream which for both Joe and I was when we started classes at the local community college. We were the first of our tribe, so to speak, to get old enough to need to go to school outside the commune. Can you say culture shock? I mean, neither Joe nor I saw a television until we were in our late teens, and even then, it wasn’t like we had one in our houses. When we began our collegiate journey, our entire community of one hundred and fifty-three people had seven computers and one building with Wi-Fi. Sure, we knew all the best campfire songs, had a well-rounded knowledge of feminist theory, and could raise our own livestock, but we’d never heard of a text message.
The learning curve was fierce. We made mistakes. We thought people our age would understand our perspectives, our openness, our sense of community, and our belief in equality for everyone. We had weird clothes. We hummed and whistled. We thought that the average college freshman would want to talk about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. There was some bullying, particularly, once people realized we were from the thrive. And then there was also a lot of condescension from so many, including our professors. We would try to explain that computer access was complicated, or that we didn’t have personal emails or phone numbers, and people just looked at us like we were crazy. Eventually, we convinced our parents that any child of the thrive that chose the college route needed a smart phone, a laptop, and access to Wi-Fi. Joe and I also host this whole “intro to college” party every semester to try to prepare the others, but it’s still a struggle.
So yeah, Joe thought I was freaked out about going to college because I’d have to start over and be the weirdo again, which was true, and when I got around to thinking about that, I felt totally freaked out. For sure. But honestly, since Bonnaroo, I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead, I was fixated on the guy. I hadn’t really told Joe about him, which was weird because I told Joe everything. Well, I told him that there was a guy who was out of it from drugs or something and I tried to help him, but I kind of left out the whole moody seduction, soaked panties thing. Not that I wanted to keep it a secret, though on some level I was completely mortified. Honestly, it was just that my obsession with the guy from Bonnaroo was effed-up and I wasn’t ready to admit that out loud to anyone.
I knew it though. I knew I was obsessed with some nameless guy. A nameless guy with incredible shoulders, huge grabby man hands, and great hair, but nameless all the same. From the minute I saw those jerks tormenting him, it was like I had lost my mind. First of all, I know the statistics. I am well versed in the reality that young men, particularly in groups, are not to be trifled with, and this is even more so when you're a woman, alone. And yet, I couldn’t stop myself. It was like I was possessed by the ferocity of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” I think I would have killed them, those jerks who were tormenting him, clawed their eyes out with my fists and teeth.
Literally, I couldn’t remember another time in my life where I went all super mama lion on anyone. I was a pacifist, for Christ’s sake. I had a vegetable garden and read the works of Mahatma Gandhi. I bought hook, line, and sinker into the slogan “make love, not war,” but in that one moment, I was willing to do anything to stop them. I didn’t even consider what they could have done to me. I just jumped. Walked right into the fire with him, and strangely, I was proud of what I did. I felt the rightness of it deep in my intestines. Admittedly, I didn’t bite off any earlobes or pull out any fingernails. I squelched the situation peacefully, but I knew that if my “negotiation tactics” failed, I would have devolved into something violent, and for some illogical reason, I couldn’t bring myself to begin to feel any shame about that.
Furthermore, and I hate it when people refer to the
mselves in the third person, but honestly, Lua Steinbeck does not make out with strangers that she found passed out in the dirt. Next to his vomit, I might add. Gross. And yet, when I closed my eyes, I could still feel his hands on me. With no rhyme or reason, my mind drifts to my moments with him. The expanse of emotion that flashed in his eyes when he blamed himself, the heat of his chest against my face, his aching gaze as my hand touched his jaw, the flutter of his lips against my neck, the explosion of desire as his mouth found my ear and oh God… those few seconds when he crushed my body against him and rolled my hips so that everything hard and soft about us caught fire. This memory just flared up and repeated on me like I’m a skipping CD trapped in some cosmic game of infinite repeat. Honestly, it didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing. I was constantly plagued by the feeling of him. It was a visceral need. I ached for him, a stranger who had “dickhead” scrawled on his forehead when I met him and never actually kissed me, like lips to lips. Effed-up.
The worst part about my endless distraction was that I knew nothing. Literal dickhead guy could be anywhere, anyone. The likelihood of us crossing paths again was slim, a million to one, more, a needle in a haystack, a galaxy in the universe, a singular atom in the wide Sargasso Sea; and yet, I thought I’d see him again, which is ridiculous. As absurd as Joe’s swimsuit. Inane. Ridiculous and downright juvenile. And somehow, I still felt all romantic-y, which made me want to vomit. Destiny was not something I bought into and soul mates, please. I had things to do, college to prepare for. I couldn’t constantly be drifting off into the land of unrequited orgasms and achingly sexy sorrowful eyes.
And so instead of sharing, I was silently walking with Joe, who seemed to be getting huffy. He started throwing sighs and grunts of aggravation. In just a few more steps we’d be able to see the lake and he wanted me to talk to him. This was part of our friendship. Joe gives me just enough space to think, and then he forces me to talk. When we broke through the tree line, Joe dropped the picnic basket and started running.
He pulled his shirt off as he went and once he’d discarded it, he turned so he was facing me, and running backwards, he hollered, “Last one in has to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” He’d cheated. There was no chance that I’d catch him before he hit the water, but that was the point. I quickly dropped the towel and tore off after him.
The water was dark, cool, and green, exactly how a lake is meant to be. We’d been acting like goofy kids, splashing and ducking each other for at least fifteen minutes before Joe swam toward the shore and situated himself so that he was sitting cross-legged in about a foot of water. I stayed out where it was waist deep, not wanting to spill my guts just yet. He beckoned to me, “Come on in, Lua.”
“Not quite ready yet,” I whined.
“Fine. Be a petulant child. The longer you stay out there, the more time I have to truly appreciate your rack.”
He was teasing me, forcing me to swim in and silence him.
“I mean, that is a shitty swimsuit and still your tits are perfect.”
I was on the move. “Cut it out, Joe.” As it got shallower, I moved faster, planning to dive at him.
“Honestly, you are so gorgeous, all round and deliciously fleshy; it’s just too bad your snatch is…”
He didn’t get to finish because I clobbered him with my full body weight and pinned my hand across his mouth.
“My snatch is what, Joe? Huh? What nasty thing were you planning to say about my snatch?”
He gurgled from behind my hand, and I could feel him smiling against my palm.
“If I remove my hand, will you tell me what you were going to say?”
He nodded his head up and down, but I didn’t let go right away. He was lying back propped up on his forearms so that his head didn’t submerge, and I was straddling his waist.
“In this position, I could easily drown you,” I threatened.
He nodded his head a little more vigorously and the dark wet strands of his hair flopped about, shaking drops of water onto my face. I closed my eyes for a split second and Joe took the opportunity to try to drown us both. He flattened out his arms, and we went crashing into the water. There was some tossing and turning, and then we were all laughter and giggles again.
When the silliness subsided we got out of the water and lay out on one of gray rocks that was situated at the water’s edge. This was normal. Joe and I, eyes closed, side by side on the rocks, baking in the sun.
I reached for his hand, wove my fingers through his, and said, “I’m gonna miss you.”
“You’ll be fine.” He turned his head to face me and I did the same. “You’re not even that worried about that.”
I felt my face fall. How did he know?
“Come on, Lua. I’ve been your best friend since before you could talk.” His voice was soft and sweet. He wasn’t angry. “I know what your fear looks like. This isn’t fear.”
I felt my face puckering because I was going to cry. And then I was crying, not like sobbing, but all drippy. I sniffled, sat up, wrapped my arms around my shins, and rested my head on my knees. Joe rose next to me and put his hand on my back.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be. You’re allowed secrets, Lua. We’re all allowed secrets.”
“It’s not really a secret.”
He was looking out at the lake. He found a pebble with his left hand and threw it, starting a ripple of ridges in the water. “Tell me if you want to, or don't. It’s up to you.” He threw another pebble.
I was absolutely going to tell him, but I didn’t speak right away. I was trying to find my words, but he was impatient.
“Oh my God, are you not going to tell me?” he said, utter shock in his voice.
I know he tried, but he couldn’t help himself and it totally lifted my guilt.
“No worries. I’m gonna tell you.” I laughed.
And I did. I told him all about Bonnaroo and literal dickhead guy. I told him how embarrassed I was that I was still thinking about it, still daydreaming that I might see him again.
Joe was pretty positive about the whole thing, offering, “Listen, if nothing else, you’re hot for someone who is not Lucas.” Lucas was my ex. He also grew up on the thrive. When I was little, I thought I would marry him someday. Lucas and Lua. I used to make Joe officiate at our fake weddings. Lucas and I started dating when we were sixteen. We were together almost two years, but as soon as he mainstreamed and went to the community college, he dropped me like a hot potato. I was pretty devastated, and since then I haven’t dated much. Even though our breakup was two years ago, Joe still hasn’t said a word to Lucas, like not one, and they were close. It was messed up.
“I’m over Lucas. I keep trying to tell you that.”
“I hear ya. But he’s an ass and honestly, I haven’t heard you get excited about anyone since then except Mr. Nameless dickhead from Bonnaroo. So, I love nameless dickhead.”
“It’s literal dickhead, Joe. Get it right.” He smiled at me but didn’t laugh. It’s tough to get Joe to laugh. I was trying to accept Joe’s positive viewpoint, but I couldn’t quite seem to get there. “I guess you’re right, but I mean, come on. I don’t even know his name.”
“Perhaps you do,” he teased. “Perhaps his name really is Literal Dickhead.”
I sucker punched him in the upper arm. “Ouch.” He stood. “What are you hitting me for? I’m not the one who left you all worked up and unrequited.”
“Jerk.” I stood too, brushing my hands across my bottom and legs so that the little grains of pebble that had adhered to my skin fell away, leaving little pink impressions in their wake.
“Foodgasm, now?” Joe queried as he pulled me into a hug. I nodded against his chest.
An hour and a half later, I was once again waiting around for Joe. We had eaten everything Joe packed. Mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil with olive oil and crusty bread, home-cured meats, olives, nuts, dried apricots, a generous slice of leftover veggie lasagn
a, and two huge brownies. Exhausted and stuffed, we decided to head back to my house to nap, but Joe didn’t quite make it. As soon as we reached the edge of the hill that leads down toward the thrive’s farming fields, Joe dramatically collapsed in the tall grass, complaining that he wasn’t going to make it. To be honest, he did look like he was in actual physical pain. He was lying on his back, knees pulled into his chest, groaning. Drama queen.
“Why did you let me stuff myself, Lua? Why?”
“Please, you are uncontrollable. Don’t blame me.” I plopped down next to him and watched the grass blow in the wind. After a few more groans, he rolled on to his side, facing me, and started to twist a strand of my hair around his finger; it was something he’d done since we were kids, and I found it endearing.
Without warning, he bounced back to our old conversation. “Maybe we can look on the Bonnaroo website, at the photos from the festival, and find his name in a caption.” It was a thought. It was more proactive than I had been. I’d pretty much been on a media diet since Bonnaroo, wanting to soak up the thrive before I left for Hamilton.
“Maybe,” I replied.
He popped up so fast he startled me. All goofy and gangly, his feet bouncing, he grabbed my hand and took off running, leaving the picnic basket behind us.
I was heavy behind him, not quite prepared for our movement, and then suddenly he stopped, and I kinda tripped forward, still caught in his inertia.
“What the hell, Joe?” I said, backing away from him. He didn’t respond. Instead, he quizzically stared ahead in the direction of my house. I turned to see what he was looking at and there was a van in my driveway, and not like a regular van; it was a news van, complete with a station logo and a satellite dish.
Joe started to speak. “I wonder…” But as soon as he started speaking, he stopped because he noticed another van crunching its way down the gravel road that wound through the thrive. Their presence made me uncomfortable.
