Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  ON A JULY EVENING that felt like afternoon, I spent my sweet sixteen in a cemetery. It was Simon’s idea, and I knew by then not to question him. Each time I saw him, he’d fashioned another temporary escape route for the two of us—he, the mastermind, and I, the fledgling actress. I wanted to convince him I could embody his darkest ideas. Throw something at me and see if I flinch.

  “I want to go someplace quiet,” he explained while we were en route. He stuck a freckled hand out the window of the jeep, and his palm bucked against the wind. As was our custom, we said little. Often we spent car rides without speaking, the open windows and wind providing the noise we needed for silence between us.

  “Hey,” he said as he slowed to a stop sign. “Are you afraid of cemeteries?”

  “Nah,” I lied.

  When we turned down a thin, dirt road that led to a small cemetery, I started to feel nervous.

  “Sorry I spoiled the surprise,” he said as he pulled to a stop.

  Even after a month together, my heart still surged at hearing his voice on the phone or seeing the jeep pull around the curve in front of my house. Simon, the Simon, had done all this for the eager girl he saw in me, the girl with so much promise who just needed to be shaped.

  He handed me a thin bedsheet for us to sit on, and he grabbed his mother’s wicker picnic basket out of the back of the jeep. I followed him down the narrow, dusty path toward a spot skirting the edge of the property. A row of trees rose to our right, a legion of tombstones lay to our left. A myriad of Mercury names chiseled in rock—Burk, Burke, Messer, Husband, Allen, Steingrabe. Names of my classmates, their parents, and their parents’ parents. Families, then and now, tangled like vines.

  We sat down near the perimeter of stones, and the grass beneath us gathered in tufts. It had just been mown. We took off our shoes.

  “Beautiful.” Simon said as he leaned back and stretched out his legs. The fair skin on his hands blended with the pale bedsheet, his light eyes squinting at a clear sky.

  I didn’t want to tell Simon that I’d never been in a cemetery before. I knew he liked a bit of naiveté, but I didn’t think he’d like a scaredy-cat. Instead, I focused on the cemetery’s geometry, a pattern of crisscrosses, squares, and diamonds, the stones themselves in varying states of decay. If privacy was what Simon wanted, he succeeded. There was no one around, not even an occasional car on the far road. We were alone.

  In a skirt for the occasion, I sat with my legs folded tightly beneath me. Sweat pooled behind my knees. At the height of summer, the July sun still hung even in late afternoon. I smiled at Simon and tucked my drooping curls behind my ear.

  Opening the flap of the basket, he pulled out a plastic container. Thin driblets of condensation gathered along the rim of the lid.

  “Close your eyes,” he directed.

  I obeyed and heard a pop as he removed the cap. I waited.

  “Open,” he said.

  Inside the container, he’d arranged a fan of cold shrimp around a small bowl of cocktail sauce.

  “Do you like shrimp?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I lied again. I’d never tasted shrimp before, but it seemed like something I should have done already.

  I bit into a piece of shrimp, and its gristle ground against my teeth. When I reached the tail, I lingered. When Simon tossed his shrimp tail into a plastic bag, I did the same. Even in these small things, I mirrored him.

  We sat, saying very little as the sun sank and a humid dusk settled in. Without any wind or music to mask it, the quiet hung around us like a thick blanket. As the heat let up, I relaxed, and he broke the silence.

  “Happy sweet sixteen,” he said.

  Sixteen, such a candy-coated number. I smiled and ran my fingers through my hair. I leaned toward him, closing my mouth on his. I wanted Simon to remember me cast in this haunting frame: his pretty, young brunette, the wind just catching my hair as the sun set, a bouquet of dead flowers lying limp against a gravestone in the background.

  Just before dark, we left the cemetery and headed for Simon’s house. He lived a few miles past the high school on the way out of town, in between the cornfields and farms. His house wasn’t far from the home of infamous town lore, the farm where a trio of unsolved murders was committed in 1943. Three people killed—one found shot in the stairwell, the other shot in the living room. One more strangled in the barn. There had been a love triangle, an angry farmhand, a rich man who mysteriously skipped town. Now, another family owned the property and raised horses there. Driving past it reminded me of the day Nora and I entered the vacant house on Route 44, a house that now owned the ghost story of the two of us.

  I hadn’t visited Simon’s house much. Most of the time we spent together was spent alone, either in his car or at restaurants, an occasional movie in my parents’ basement. He kept me from much of his life—we never went out with his friends, nor did we talk much about his plans for college in the fall. We existed in a deep pocket of time, each encounter an isolated incident free from outside influence. Timeless, you might say, but not forever.

  It was dark by the time we pulled into his long driveway. The trampoline I’d jumped on at his graduation party still sat in the same location, off to the side of the house.

  “I liked watching you jump on this trampoline,” he said. “You looked so . . . young.”

  “Young?” I repeated. “I’m not that much younger than you. Just two years.”

  “More like three.” He put his arm around my waist. “People might say I’m robbing the cradle, but I don’t care.”

  I didn’t argue the point. I knew not to adulterate the very basis of my appeal.

  “You wanna jump?” he asked, pointing to the tramp.

  I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m in a skirt.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Inside the house, I took a seat in his living room. The whole first floor was dark. I knew his parents and his sister Aria were somewhere inside; their cars were in the driveway. I wondered if he’d asked them to stay hidden.

  After putting in a video recording of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet into the VCR, Simon sat down beside me. Close. When the film began, the camera focused in on a brooding Romeo waiting on the beach, a cigarette slipping from his lips as Radiohead sang a jaded melody.

  The thought of dying young aroused Simon. I could tell by his breath’s urgent rhythm, the rapid tapping of his fingers on the nape of my neck. In the film, Romeo’s and Juliet’s eyes first met through a glass fish tank. As Romeo and Juliet kissed for the first time, Simon turned my chin toward him. I could see the onscreen lovers out of the corner of my eye as he worked on my lips. He clutched my waist, squeezed his eyes shut, and puckered his brow in fervent concentration. I kept my eyes open. Simon’s body gave the appearance of intimacy, but he escaped inside himself as we kissed. It was not my body he sought.

  Slowly I pulled away, leaning into my side of the sofa. The bottomless need Simon and I shared had been masquerading as sexual, but the truth was far more insidious. An inescapable vice gripped us both—in the car, at the cemetery, in the movie theater—we both needed to charm the ordinary into the exotic, and we needed each other to do it.

  When the film ended, I checked the time. A quarter to midnight. My curfew was twelve.

  “Simon,” I said. “I have to go.”

  He turned toward me, and that’s when I saw it—something true. Stay, his face seemed to say, Stay. If I fall asleep now, I don’t think I’ll wake up in the morning. Please. Stay awake with me.

  The ferocity in his eyes frightened me, and yet I couldn’t look away. His expression scared me not because it was strange or foreign, but because I recognized it. It was human. It was fear. It was me. As I watched him, I realized I had been fooled by my own reflection. It wasn’t only the girls in Mercury who felt trapped. The boys felt trapped here, too.

  “Simon,” I said again.

  He blinked and then started hunting for his shoes.

  “
Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

  In the minutes before midnight on my sweet sixteen, the night fell cool and quiet as we drove. The subtle terror I felt in his living room eased as the evening wind swept through the car. Surely, we weren’t so desperate, the two of us. Not on a beautiful night, not when we were still so young.

  “Did you see what I did during the movie?” he asked me, taking his eyes off the road to look into mine. “The way I kissed you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Like Romeo kissed Juliet.”

  I paused, trying to remain honest. “I felt like Juliet,” I said.

  He smiled. “Good.”

  Yes, I’d felt like Juliet. Every sensation, every gesture with Simon was cinematic. Every tilt of my head, every cock of my brow. “You’re incredible,” he’d say on the phone, though never to my face. He was teaching me to look underneath the obvious, to seek the longing found in a trembling lip, to sense the curl of his penetrating smile on the back of my neck.

  Simon had become a true auteur, rendering our story through the lens of the world as he hoped to find it. Not once did he compromise. And now, I was his eager ingénue, already primed to feel the sharp edge of his profile when he would turn away from me for the last time.

  We were broken before we ever began. He wanted to employ me as he saw fit, and fleeting was the half-life of our unequal duet. But even this, I would learn to use. Even as I depended on him, I was learning to look out for myself. Simon, in all his tricks and riddles, was not just preparing me to be left. He was teaching me to leave.

  But I was too caught up with Simon, my heartless addiction, to learn the lesson he was trying to impart. Later that summer at camp on Lake Erie, he ignored me for the first five days and nights. His behavior suggested he didn’t want Cara, his homecoming dream, to see us together. I refused to ask Simon about it for fear he’d tell me the truth.

  On the final night of camp, he decided to take notice of me. I told myself that if he paid me any attention I’d make myself unavailable. The mind was willing, but the heart was weak. When he approached me at the campfire, even as I stood next to Aaron in a crowd of people, desire tempered my resolve, and I found myself unable to say no.

  “Let’s walk to the beach,” he said. I could barely hear him over the din of the fire, the kids, and the waves.

  Beside me, Aaron raised his eyebrows. I looked away.

  The rocky path leading to the beach was dimly lit, and after escaping the campfire clamor and scrutiny, Simon took my hand as we climbed down the stone trail. When we reached the end of the path, he put his hand around my waist and we sat on the last step of the walkway before the rocky beach hit. Surrounded by litter, driftwood, and dead fish, the water looked dark and beautiful, slick like oil, the light of the moon sliding against it.

  Sitting on this beach at night, summer after summer, always put a lump in my throat. Long ago, I’d fallen in love with this place, even though—or perhaps because—it was dirty and rotting and disregarded. This was one of the only places I came where I didn’t want to escape myself. I didn’t want time to pass, and I didn’t ever feel the need to leave. I could turn infinite just by sitting on these blanched rocks, watching the tide come and go, bringing in debris and washing it away.

  Beside me, Simon fidgeted. I could tell he wanted to kiss me. He had that look of getting lost in his own head, as he often did before making his move. His mind’s eye had already conjured this scene on the midnight beach before he’d asked me to join him. But he said something first.

  “Take off your glasses.”

  I brought my hands to my face. I didn’t often wear my glasses because I hated how I looked in them. That night, smoke from the fire had stung my eyes and my contacts had gone dry. Camp, I realized, was the only place I let anyone see me in my glasses.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I like you better with your glasses off.”

  Sudden regret hit me as I lifted the lenses from my face. Complying with his demand felt like an admission of an intimate fault. It had been confessional, my letting him see the girl I kept in my bedroom. With my glasses, I had been naked. Now, with them cast aside, I was clothed again.

  “That’s better,” Simon said as he tucked them in his pocket. “You are so beautiful.”

  We began the first in a string of vacant kisses. It wasn’t me he was kissing, but his starlet, the one he’d imagined. Searching Simon’s mouth for some kind of oracle, I found it empty.

  I turned away from him for a moment and looked out at the water, though I couldn’t see it. I loved the sound of Lake Erie at night, the roar of the waves creeping up the vines on the cliff where others gathered by the fire. The twisted, sun-bleached pieces of driftwood resembled the soft arms of ballerinas extending from the sand.

  “You know,” Simon said. “Back in school, all those cold winter nights after the basketball games ended, I always went home by myself.” The water rushed in. “I just wanted someone to drive home. I hated being alone.”

  “Me, too.” I watched him, almost forgiving him for removing my glasses. His hair looked like copper in the moonlight.

  He looked at me. “I wish I’d known you then.”

  He touched my jawline and kissed me. I wanted to get lost in the moment, lost in him, to find some kind of rush to sustain me through fall, winter, and spring until I’d return here again. Just before I shut my eyes, I heard a rustle of leaves coming from the back trail. I could see the path, thick with trees, from where I sat, and squinted as the figure came into dull focus. Even without my glasses, I could tell that it was Aaron, walking by himself in the dark.

  When he saw us, he came to an abrupt stop and his head leaned to the side. I didn’t need to make out the features of his face to feel the tilt of his head admonish me: don’t you see what he’s doing to you?

  I did see. I was an actress—no, worse—I was Cara’s understudy in a romantic memory Simon was filming in his mind. I didn’t have the strength to call it what it was. I wasn’t what Simon wanted, and no amount of manufactured illusion could change it. I suppressed the realization because it echoed too loudly of the night I found out I wasn’t good enough to stay on as one of Mr. Lotte’s prized students—the first time a man had ever broken me down so mercilessly.

  On the beach, Aaron and I locked eyes, though I couldn’t see him well with Simon’s face on mine. I watched Aaron’s hazy silhouette become a dark blur as he turned around and went back the way he came.

  Soon, we grew bored but didn’t want to go to bed, not yet. Simon stopped kissing me and we just sat, side by side, as the waves took the beach.

  On his last night in town, Simon took me to his favorite Mercury spot, a place called Big Bear not far from the interstate. Though it was one of our town’s mythic landmarks, I’d never been there. It was a quiet, sulky night, and the August heat bore down. The trees, bushes, and weeds along the highway seemed to turn away from us as we fled away from town.

  The wind thrashed through the jeep’s windows as we drove, a little too fast, down the empty stretch of highway. Beside me with eyes straight ahead, Simon ruled the driver’s seat. His trusted companion, the jeep always headed somewhere as he delved inward, escaping to places I could not follow.

  After we flew down the highway, Simon hooked a strong right turn down a dirt road almost hidden by brush and low-hanging tree branches. He pulled the jeep to a jagged stop and hopped out.

  “This is it?” I asked.

  “This is it.”

  Big Bear was a skinny one-lane bridge with a fine trickle of water running beneath it. The road disappeared after the metal siding arced down to the ground. A soft patch of grass lay beyond it, undisturbed.

  “Why do people come here?” I asked.

  “Just because,” he answered. “It’s something to do.”

  “Why is it called Big Bear?”

  “Just because.”

  The dull metal clanged under our feet as we cro
ssed the bridge. We were barely able to see each other, the only light coming from the far-off interstate, I-80 that would take us east to west, and even farther, I-79 that would take us south to Pittsburgh. On the outskirts of the Steel City, the Paris of Appalachia, the earthen point where the tired Monongahela and Allegheny rivers still joined like a tailbone at the rise of a woman’s legs, Simon and I stood still, peering down into a sinking crater of mud.

  When I’d first met him, I thought Simon and I complemented each other. He had flair; I had poise. He was effervescent where I was reserved. His spontaneity countered my focus, much like Nora’s had. But I had never met anyone else whose fears more closely matched my own—we were both scared to death of being bored for the rest of our lives.

  We’d never move to California or visit the coast. We’d never start over in New York City, or so we thought. If we wanted to succeed, the sure bet was to stay local. Work in an office of a manufacturing plant. There was good money to be made there, we were told, and tempering our dreams was the only way to fend off inevitable disappointment.

  Standing on the bridge, Simon and I tried to say goodbye and failed. He removed an imaginary top hat from his head, bowed, and extended a hand toward me. I took it, and he twirled me beneath his arm. We tried to laugh, but the soggy ground beneath us sucked away the sound.

  “Don’t forget me,” I joked.

  He gasped. “Never.”

  Simon created in me a sensation I couldn’t equate to love. It was too hungry and debased for that. He made me feel exhilarating dissatisfaction that led to hot longing, not for him, but for his cinematic recasting of the quotidian into the gothic. Now he was leaving, just when he’d made me his junkie. We remained on the bridge a few moments too long, not holding each other, staring at nothing. I didn’t dare ask if he loved me, because I knew that he didn’t.

  Each year when autumn arrives, the men in western Pennsylvania—our fathers, uncles, teachers, and policemen—rise early to hunt. Find the slick rifle slung next to his thick red-and-black checkered flannel, his bright orange hat and vest caught on the coat hooks by the back door. Smell his coffee brewing in the dark of the kitchen on the first day of buck season. Sit with him as he drinks it—black, as always—before the sun is up.