Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  A few hours later I’m at a round table, surrounded by strangers playing cards in an otherwise stark living room: white tile floor, no sofa, an empty kitchen on the other side of the room. I’m sloppy drunk. We’ve been playing this drinking game since we arrived. I’m sitting next to Mitch, whom I’ve just met. Mitch, with his tight black T-shirt, tattoos, and baby face, who’s teasing me about my outfit, whose bedroom is twenty feet behind us. He’s a line cook at a fancy restaurant on Indian Shores. He hates his father. He’s a year older than me but dropped out of school in eighth grade. He has a way of looking at me sideways that makes me want to impress him, and I can tell he knows this—he wants me to put in the effort. We’re talking about our love of hardcore and post-hardcore. I’m exaggerating my own feelings on the subject. Poison the Well is amazing, I say. I love Atreyu, and mewithoutYou.

  “I need someone to go to the Hopesfall show with me on Friday,” Mitch says.

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  Hopesfall is playing at the Masquerade in Ybor with Every Time I Die, the Beautiful Mistake, and Celebrity. I’ve listened to Hopesfall but not very closely—just enough to put them on a mix CD I made for Jerod last summer when we started dating the first time. They’re a lot like their contemporaries: a blend of emo and hardcore punk with ample screaming. I wear my red University of Hawaii T-shirt with ripped jeans that show off my ass and red Converse, the toes of which feature tiny skyscapes painted by the girl I started dating in rehab, for cutting, the year before. I arrive alone. The Beautiful Mistake is playing. Mitch is standing at the back of the theater near the bar, on a raised area surrounded by a banister. This is our first time seeing each other since his party. He smirks at me.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” he says.

  I smile and turn my attention to the stage. I feel mysterious and sexy. I’ve gotten his attention.

  “Have you heard these guys?” he says, referring to the Beautiful Mistake.

  “No,” I say.

  “They’re great.”

  “Cool.”

  I listen to the band. They’re nothing special. But they’re also not terrible. I bob my head and look interested.

  I’m meeting Mitch at the Steak ‘n Shake with his friends, whom I discover know many of my friends. I’m riding around in Mitch’s truck, listening to hardcore while he pounds his fist on the steering wheel and refuses to change the CD to something less angry. I’m meeting Mitch’s aunt in her salty wooden condo on the beach. I’m taking color-tinted photographs of Mitch from above with my Lomography camera, straddling him on his bed. I’m buying him used copies of Kurt Vonnegut books, encouraging him to read them. I’m watching Harold and Maude on his roommate’s bed while Mitch spoons me, teasing him for loving only hardcore with the exception of Cat Stevens. I’m sleeping with Mitch for the first time.

  I meet Jerod’s mother at his GED graduation ceremony in mid-August. She drives in from Tampa and we convene at dusk in the parking lot of the Bayfront Center arena in downtown St. Petersburg. Jerod’s father and brother have gone inside. I’m wearing the same outfit I wore to Mitch’s party: knee-length, pleated gray skirt and black argyle sweater. I feel respectable. I don’t know what Jerod has told his mother about me; I don’t even know if she’s aware he has a girlfriend. She’s petite and soft-curved with strawberry blonde hair. She hugs me warmly. She smells like peaches.

  Jerod’s best friend from Tampa is here, Desi. I’ve heard about Desi. I once listened to Jerod give her directions over the phone for what to do if she snorted heroin and wanted to throw up (just throw up). She and Jerod have never dated, but they’ve slept together at least once. She’s pretty. Really pretty. Her blonde hair is pulled back so tightly it’s almost sheer. She’s drawn her eyebrows in high and dark, and lined her lips with brown liner, then filled them in with light pink lipstick. She’s wearing cutoff shorts and a skin-tight Bebe T-shirt and running shoes. Jerod’s mother didn’t tell him Desi was coming. She’s a surprise.

  His mother’s also brought another of Jerod’s friends, who’s brought her baby, whom Desi is holding. I know little about Desi, just bits Jerod has told me, but as I watch her making sweet faces at this baby, I think of the one thing I know that stands out: Last year, she was at a party thrown by a close friend. While she was drinking in his kitchen, he grabbed her head and slammed it into the counter, and she passed out. When she awoke, he was raping her.

  “What was that?” she sings to the baby, raising her eyebrows. “What happened?”

  That night, Jerod calls me to say he needs a break. “You’re leaving,” he says. “It’s too much for me.” He’s crying.

  “You need some time?” I say.

  “I do.”

  “How long?”

  “Two weeks,” he says.

  I calculate forward. “I’m leaving in two weeks.”

  Ten days go by; I’m leaving for college in three days. I’m lying on Mitch’s bed in his dim bedroom. The closet doors are open, revealing duplicate black and white T-shirts, the only colors he wears. Band posters hang on the wall. An electric guitar leans against a stand. It’s after midnight. I’ve told my dad I’ll be home by one o’clock, so I ask Mitch to take me. Instead, we continue talking, which leads to kissing, which leads to his hand in my pants. He begins to take my pants off.

  “We don’t really have time for sex,” I say. “I have to go home.”

  “We can do it fast,” he says. He continues taking my pants off. I say nothing. We start making out. Soon, he’s on top of me. He has his hands on my shoulders.

  “I need to go home,” I say.

  He kisses me. I kiss him back. Then he’s inside me. He’s thrusting.

  We’re having sex for a minute when I say it again. “I need to go home,” I say, pushing his shoulders. “Stop it. Stop.”

  He doesn’t stop. I look up at him. He’s looking directly at me. There’s no way he doesn’t hear.

  “Stop,” I say. “I need to go home.”

  He continues to ignore me. His expression is intense, unflinching. I push his shoulders away and lift my knees, put my feet on his hip bones, and kick hard. He falls backward. I scramble upright.

  We’re silent on the way to my house. Mitch stops at a red light in front of the pizza parlor where I worked until recently. I look over at him and he looks back at me. I feel like I should say something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what just happened.

  “I would never have done that if I’d known,” he says.

  That night, I start a new diary in the book Ashley gave me when she learned I was moving to New York. On the cover is an illustrated picture of a lady in a short red evening dress leaning on the hood of a taxi with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The red dress is filled in with shiny red beads. The image is reproduced in the lower left corner of each pink interior page. “I’m not sure if you would consider it rape,” I write. “By definition, I guess it was, but it wasn’t exactly how I imagined rape.” I write three more pages, telling the story of what happened, and then I realize I left my cell phone at Mitch’s house. “Shit. I’m going to call him,” I write.

  There’s an ellipsis; then I return: “He said he was sorry and that he ‘didn’t mean to force anything upon’ me. I know I’m going to sound incredibly weak saying this but his behavior after what happened portrays an extreme sense of remorse. I really think that he didn’t realize what he was doing when that happened.”

  The next morning, I drive to Mitch’s house on the way to Jerod’s. The front door is unlocked. Mitch pokes his head out of the bathroom when he hears it open. He’s holding a comb in his left hand. We stare at each other. I walk silently past him. I find my cell phone sitting on the dresser in his bedroom. I leave without saying good-bye.

  It’s the night before I leave Florida for good. I’m stoned and sitting on the driveway with five of my friends, including Ashley and Gisele, and we’re talking about sex and where we’d like to have it. Yesterday, I went to Jerod’s ho
use. I cried, and so did he, and then we fucked, and then I left, and that was that. Now I’m saying I’d like to fuck on a pile of clean laundry in a Laundromat at midnight with someone I just met. Ashley wants to do it onstage at a strip club. Gisele wants to do it in the woods on a bed of roses.

  Mitch was supposed to call me tonight on his way back from the Shadows Fall concert, but instead, he explains later, he fell asleep. He had wanted to talk before I leave. I’m not mad about it. I have a picture of him in my diary that I plan to tape to my wall when I get to college. That night, I write: “I was thinking the other day about how humans, to my knowledge, are the only living things that intentionally mark time. We create tactile memories for ourselves with photographs, music, memorabilia, and in my case, cutting. Perhaps that’s another reason why we’re a superior species. Or perhaps, that’s why we’re not.”

  Epilogue

  I last see Jerod five years later, soon after graduating college. He messages me on Myspace. It’s pure coincidence that I even see the message: I’ve long since stopped using Myspace and have signed in to hunt down an old picture. He’s included his phone number in the message, so I invite him to see a movie with my friends and me that night.

  I drive my gold ’93 Cadillac DeVille to his dad’s house, where he’s living in an apartment above the garage, to pick him up. He’s been out of prison for a few weeks following his third arrest, for trafficking cocaine, and he shows me around his small, dim space. He has a beige sofa and beige carpet, a wooden coffee table, a two-person Ikea kitchen table, and a set of turntables—he’s still spinning. It’s impeccably clean. We sit at his kitchen table drinking water, and he tells me about his other two arrests: the second for possession of Oxycodone, and the first for domestic violence. He’d been living with a girlfriend, he says. She cheated on him, and his friends had to stop him from hitting her. Even though they stopped him, the police arrested him anyway stating that he would have hurt her if they hadn’t.

  Standing outside the theater later that night, I learn that he’s dating a new girl. She’s currently in prison. They were arrested together for trafficking cocaine, and she took a fall for him because he’s still on probation for his last arrest. He hadn’t asked her to do that. His guilt is overwhelming. He gazes across the streetlamp-lit parking lot, shaking his head. My friends have gone inside, but we don’t care. He doesn’t know what to do, and I don’t know what to say. Knowing Jerod, I’m sure this isn’t the end of the story. I’m sure that, like me, he’s going to take it as far as he can, but I can’t tell him that. So I say it will be okay.

  After spending five years with Miles, from ages seventeen to twenty-one, Ashley enlists in the army to get sober. She hates every minute of basic training. She writes me letters in which she describes the terrible food and the grueling schedule. She misses her mom and her freedom. She’s made a mistake.

  Two months after enlisting, she cracks her pelvis during exercises and returns home to recuperate. She takes up partying again right away, drinking and doing pills while her mom spends her final weeks in bed. One night, she climbs onstage at a strip club and dances naked with a tampon string dangling from her vagina. Weeks later, just days before her twenty-second birthday, Ashley calls to tell me her mom has died.

  Later that month, when I’m home for a long weekend, I pick her up in my mom’s red Corvette and we drive to the state fairgrounds, eating candy straws on the way. As soon as we arrive, we buy margaritas. We go on the Zipper, the Hurricane, and the Gravitron, twice. We puke into trash cans, laughing at the messes of ourselves.

  Ten years later, Ashley lives in Largo. She’s training to be a nurse. Her daughter is four. She’s clean.

  Gisele spends the years after high school learning to dance with fire. She apprentices with fire dancers she meets down on the beaches. They teach her poi and flaming rope, hoop and fan. She moves to Orlando, where she attempts to make a name for herself. She marries; then she divorces. She moves back to Largo, where she joins up with an acrobalance troupe, with which she still performs. She works for an electrical engineering company. She plans to return to school to study physics.

  Eight years after leaving Florida, I pass Mitch on the street. I’m living in New York. I’ve just finished a master’s degree and am working at a bookstore and writing a novel. I’d heard a rumor some time before that Mitch was moving to the city, but I haven’t looked into it much—I try not to think about him much these days. Now he’s standing ten feet away from me, outside of a tattoo parlor in lower Manhattan, smoking a cigarette. He waves me over. He’s apprenticing here, he says, but he plans to move to a new parlor as soon as possible. His arms are now covered in tattoos. He’s muscular beneath his shirt.

  We’d kept in touch a bit while I was away, and after my new boyfriend cried when I told him what had happened between us, I’d come to the conclusion that it was insignificant and that I should not make a big deal out of it. So I’d told no one else. Not even my husband.

  The last time I saw Mitch was in the summer before my sophomore year of college. He’d come to pick me up at my parents’ house one afternoon when the sun was blistering. I had taken to wearing a different knit beanie every day, regardless of the outfit—something of a security blanket. My beanie that day was sky blue and furry, the yarn shimmery. I’d paired it with a pink plaid dress over ripped, drawn-upon jeans and backless black-and-white Converse All Stars.

  We stood on my parents’ new hardwood floors with the front door open, his truck idling in the circular driveway. He appraised my outfit.

  “Why do you insist on making yourself look like shit?” he asked.

  I stood there stunned. He faced me, waiting.

  “Actually, I don’t,” I finally said. I told him to leave. Even now, I think of his face as he turns toward the door. The effect of his words washes over him and becomes real. His expression changes from amusement to remorse. The words “nice guy” spring to mind. I resist this.

  Talking to him outside this tattoo parlor in New York, I remember the watercolor sets in his bedroom and his designs for future tattoos. They were graphic and haunting, drawing upon his metal aesthetic, his propensity for aggression.

  “We should keep in touch,” he says. “Maybe hang.”

  I nod. We finish our cigarettes. I leave.

  A year passes, and I decide I want to cover a friendship tattoo I got when I was twenty-three, with a friend I don’t speak to anymore. We met in fifth grade, when I transferred into her school to enter the arts program. She was freckled and blue-eyed, like me, but more outgoing. We hated each other at first—we were always competitive. Then Mrs. Dorff sat her next to me during an art lesson and she asked to borrow a glue stick. After that, we became inseparable. We remained best friends for seventeen years before our latent animosity raised its head.

  The tattoo is two-parted: a drawing on my right hip of two stick figure girls holding sticks of dynamite, identical to the one on her left hip. Beneath hers, the word “Forever”—beneath mine, the words “& ever.” I no longer want to face daily this consequence of our reuniting after one of many periods of not speaking to each other. It’s too painful. I ask Mitch to cover it up, thinking that he’ll give me a good deal. I’m also curious to see what the dynamic between us will be. I have yet to define for myself the nature of our last sexual encounter.

  I’m meeting him at his new tattoo shop. I’m seeing, for the first time, the tattoo he’s designed for me, and I don’t like it. I asked for an elephant, but I wanted something subtler than what he’s drawn: I want black and white with shading. Minimal lines. High detail. Something soulful, gentle. I want to cover the dead thing up with something living. I think to myself that I should have remembered his style: hard lines, bright colors, high contrast. He’s drawn me a cartoon. I don’t know what to do now. I blame myself for failing to foresee this.

  I’m saying yes anyway, not wanting to insult him. I’m lying prone on the chair. I’m feeling the cold of the alcohol cloth he u
ses to sterilize the area. I’m smelling the burn of the fumes. My pants are unbuttoned and pulled down below my hips along with my underwear. My shirt is above my waist. I’m still. My husband sits on a chair next to me but a few feet away, out of reach, out of sight unless I crane my neck.

  Instead I watch Mitch. I feel Mitch’s breath on my skin as he leans close to me. He touches me with warm black-gloved hands and pulls my skin taut. When he brings the tattoo gun down on my hip, it stings and I wince. He looks up.

  “This is a tough spot,” he says.

  I want him to show me he cares about my pain by looking sorry. To shake his head and apologize, rub my skin to help the pain disperse outward. I want him to ask me if I’m okay. I want him to touch me again with the gun.

  We take a break midway through to smoke a cigarette out back. My husband comes with us. I won’t tell him about our history for months, and then he’ll ask why I got the tattoo. I won’t have an answer.

  We go back inside and finish the tattoo. Mitch asks me what song I want to hear, and I ask him to put on Social Distortion’s “Ball and Chain.” I hum along with Mike Ness’s folk-punk melody while thinking about his lyrics: A plea to take away a lifetime of suffering. An admission that wherever he runs, he finds himself. Mitch fills in the shadows between the foliage around the elephant with thick black and green geometric blocks. He tints the elephant’s trunk with a baby pink tip. The eye is a blank white circle with no expression. The elephant leaps and smiles. Mitch stops to wipe the blood periodically when it trickles down my side. He lifts the gun when I’m hurting too much.