Until I met Marc. He had four older sisters and was oblivious to the stigma of girl cooties. Best of all, he shared my fascination with Star Wars and Middle-Earth, spaceships and dragons.
Marc had been my best friend. We stuck together, even after I moved in sixth grade and had to transfer to another district. Then, in high school, I met Natalie and Eliot. Marc had reservations when I invited them to our Saturday gaming sessions. So I was delighted when Natalie and Marc hit it off so well. But also a bit resentful, jealous even.
Those uncomfortable feelings of insecurity had spurred me to kiss him during a stolen moment, just Marc and I, romantically lit by candlelight. I hadn’t loved him, not that way. I loved him as my closest friend, the boy I’d grown up with, but not as a boyfriend, a lover. The kiss was awkward and messy — a banging of teeth, tongues everywhere, noses in the way. After that, our friendship took on a new, uncomfortable intimacy.
We submerged in each other, lost in the novelty of it. I enjoyed the attention, but it always felt forced, unnatural. It wasn’t until years later that I understood why.
Natalie was the first person I told, and she astonished me by bursting into tears. Our first friction, mended when she and Eliot began dating.
The summer of our senior year, my mother found the pot and the half-empty packet of contraceptive pills in my backpack. In the fallout, I ran away, and Natalie went with me. Solidarity. We didn’t run far. In the candlelit shadows of the Center of the Universe, giggling to cover our dismay, I realized I loved Natalie, truly loved her, the way I didn’t love Marc. I kissed her, and wondrous of wonders, she kissed me back. We made love on the tattered sleeping bags.
Marc found us that evening, both of us blinking at his flashlight, our eyes dilated from the dark when the candles burned away. Before Natalie or I could speak, he dropped the flashlight and fled.
Accusations and recriminations followed. We all made up, although it was never the same after that.
Closing my eyes, I remembered Marc’s thin smile, the way he used to hum when he didn’t know what to say. Instead of dust and mold, I smelled the Dial soap he always used. How could he be gone?
“Oh, Marc,” I whispered. “What happened to you?”
“I was waiting. I knew I could count on you.”
I blinked. Marc stood there, luminous in the darkness. He wore corduroy pants, the cuffs frayed and the knees worn threadbare. He’d always hated jeans. And he had on his favorite shirt, the one with the African weave and the flared sleeves.
Except how could I see him in the darkness, without candle or flashlight? And he was dead, gunshot-wound-to-the-head dead.
I turned away, frightened, groping for the box of matches stored under the strut beside the lintel. I forgot that over a decade had passed since this had been my home away from home.
“Kimi, don’t you want to help me?”
No matches, of course. It was an alien claustrophobia, the darkness pressing at my back. Marc waited for me to turn and confront his ghost, or admit I was going mad. Paragraphs from my Abnormal Psych. textbooks: trauma from grief and mourning, psychotic triggers.
I groped along the wall, frantic to find the doorknob. My hand hit a metal box. With a switch. I flicked it, and three dim bulbs lit, sluicing the attic with comforting incandescence.
“They installed lights while you’ve been gone.”
I yelped.
“Sorry if I startled you.”
My heart still lurched in my chest, but I was no longer terrified. “Eliot?”
“Natalie said you were at the reunion. I wondered if you’d end up here.”
Eliot stepped out of my memories and the shadows that lined the catwalk. He hadn’t changed as much as Natalie. His hair remained long, past his shoulders in a riot of tight curls. If it was thinning and more limp than wild, I overlooked it. He was heavier too, in his face and gut. But it was Eliot. In the reality of his presence, I convinced myself that Marc’s apparition had been my imagination, maybe the wine I’d drunk.
“You look good, Eliot. I was hoping to get a chance to catch up with you this weekend. Didn’t expect it to be here, though.”
His grin was tentative, front teeth bunched together and crooked. The acne scars on his face were stark in the harsh light. “Aside from the lights, they also paneled and painted the walls. ‘Course, our stuff is gone.”
“Who cleared it out?” When we’d splintered, I stopped going to the hangout, abandoning the dog-eared copies of my Elfquest graphic novels and my TSR Player’s Handbook with regret.
“Nat grabbed some stuff. She came up for my bong and stash, dragged down her parents’ old sleeping bag. When she left for college, I kept meaning to come back to dismantle the rest but never did. We came on her Christmas break, but the place was trashed — the candelabra smashed apart, the posters shredded. The scrapbook, you remember the one we filled with pictures of us and our writing? It was torn to bits. She thought it was you.”
“You thought I’d want to wreck it? Why?” I’d always assumed one of them had retrieved the album, at least.
“Nat wouldn’t talk about what happened between you two.”
“You could’ve asked me.”
Eliot shrugged. “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It was done.”
It always irritated me — in the end, infuriated me — Eliot’s passive aggression.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I’m glad.”
We exchanged smiles.
“Hey, you want to come back to the house? Have a beer and a toke, like old times?”
Did I? Yes, I did. But—
“Nat and I had a bit of a clash at the reunion,” I said. “Not sure if she’d welcome me.”
“It’s my home too.” That surprised me. Eliot always kowtowed to Natalie. Another exasperation, how she manipulated him and took his submission for granted. “Besides, she told me about it. I could tell she felt sort of bad.”
That was more like Eliot.
“Where are you parked?” I asked. “I’ve got a rental in the museum lot.”
“I didn’t drive. We live in the same house. I walked.”
We left through the inside of the museum. The door in the middle of the catwalk only locked going into the attic. From within, the knob turned easily, leading to an echoing stairwell. We’d propped the door open to smuggle in the larger furnishings, things we couldn’t lug up in backpacks. That door and those stairs had probably saved us from injury or other tragedy, giving us a safe alternative to scaling the outside fire escape drunk or stoned, in snow and thunderstorm.
Eliot flipped the shiny new switch as we left.
The drive was short. I’d been to their house once, a place they’d moved into after Nat returned from college. Eliot directed me to the slanted driveway.
It was as I remembered it, with its front lawn overgrown and a pair of bicycles leaning against the porch. It wanted a paint job and a good cleaning. But then, who was I to pass judgment? I hated housework, paid a set of women to vacuum and dust and had a guy come round when the grass got too long. If my Nazi homeowners association hadn’t griped about it, my place would probably look as unkempt as Eliot and Natalie’s.
The porch was raggedly screened, and spiders spun their webs among the dim light fixtures. The front door squeaked.
“Nat,” Eliot called, “guess who I found at the Center of the Universe?”
He led me past the kitchen and into the living room. I recognized the sofa from Natalie’s parents, the futon from Eliot’s old apartment. The stereo was new though, a cluster of polished black components on a rickety shelving unit. Peter Gabriel’sPassion murmured from the speakers. Candles illuminated the room in mirrored wall sconces and a bright cluster on the coffee table. The burning nib of an incense stick wafted patchouli-scented smoke to mingle with the haze of an elusive, troublesome sense of déjà vu.
Natalie had Eliot’s bong in hand, the same black cylinder with the jutting pipe bowl from high school. It
even had the same Grateful Dead sticker on it, although the brilliant reds and blues were faded, muted by time and handling. She exhaled a stream of blue smoke.
“Hi, Kimi.” She handed Eliot the bong and a plastic lighter. “Have a seat, have a toke. Help yourself to anything in the ‘fridge.”
We were back to a truce. I liberated a Samuel Adams from the kitchen and snagged an extra for Eliot.
In the living room, Eliot’s cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s as he held smoke and breath. We traded bong for bottle, and I sat across from them on the futon.
I hadn’t lit up since college, another contentious topic between Natalie and me. She’d taken my abstemiousness as a personal criticism of her habit. My personal choices offending her when they differed from her own was the last in a long series of wedges between us.
A lungful of smoke seemed a small price to keep the peace.
Eliot lifted his bottle. “To Marc, happy trails wherever you are, buddy.”
We clinked bottles.
The pot made another round. I had become a lightweight. Two hits left me detached, hovering with an analytical air in the space above my body. This was why I’d stopped smoking. I hated that padding in my head, the barrier that made it hard to think. It also scoured my throat raw, despite the cooling length of bong.
“So what did the police ask you?” I heard myself say.
Eliot took another swig of beer and avoided my gaze.
Natalie capped the bowl, snuffing out the red ember to conserve leaf.
“Can’t you let it go?” she said.
“Doesn’t it bug you not knowing what happened?”
She scowled. “The night he died, we got into a fight,” she said. “About you.”
“Me? But I haven’t talked to Marc in years. We exchanged Christmas cards and stuff, but I haven’t seen him for nearly as long as—”
“As long as you haven’t seen us,” Eliot finished. He’d always had an unnerving tendency of finishing our sentences, Natalie’s and mine, especially when we were all high.
“I thought you guys stayed close,” I said.
“We did,” Natalie said. “We hung out all the time. Most evenings Marc came over and we chilled.”
The déjà vu, formless and ambiguous before, intensified, goaded alive by the alcohol and THC. The darkness, the music, the intimacy, and now the shared inebriation. This place felt like the Center of the Universe. Natalie and Eliot had remade our sanctuary. There was only one thing missing.
As though I conjured him with my thoughts, Marc materialized beside me, seated with ankles crossed. He reached for the bong and sucked up a lungful of smoke through the bubbling water.
Neither Natalie nor Eliot responded, and the pot made his apparition soothing instead of upsetting. I’d had my share of drug-induced hallucinations; one more wasn’t going to faze me, even one of Marc.
“We fought,” Marc said, “Natalie and me. I wanted her to invite you down for the reunion. Thought it was well past time to patch things up.”
“Nat didn’t want to call me, did she? And you pressed her.”
“Not me,” Eliot said, “Marc.”
I didn’t correct him.
“He really missed you,” Eliot continued. “Whenever we got together for holidays, he mentioned you.”
Marc nodded, smoke issuing from his nostrils. “Ask them if they missed you.”
I started to, but chickened out. “Do you ever wish for the old days?”
“Do you?” Nat’s tone was less languid than mine.
“I did for a long time. Then I moved on.” I was lying. “Faye, my ex, you never gave her a chance. We were good. You never saw it. I used to wish you had. She was really good for me, taught me a lot about myself, about living.” I was babbling. Another effect of the pot.
“You broke up,” Nat said. “Guess she stopped being good for you.”
The bludgeon of her voice hurt. Defensive hackles lifted, old habits. But I wasn’t seventeen anymore. Faye had been more than good for me; she’d been healthy, the healthiest relationship I’d ever had. And what she’d taught me about honesty and openness revealed the truth to my pot-addled mind. Natalie had been jealous of Faye.
“It was me that wasn’t good for her,” I said. “I criticized her all the time, couldn’t stop myself. Seemed like no matter what, she couldn’t make me happy. So I called it quits.”
Marc nodded. “It was for the best.”
“I figured she’d be better off without me.”
Natalie reached for her beer, clung to the glass. Her hands shook as she tipped it to her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
I’d never heard her apologize. In all the years we spent together — weekends, summer holidays, and sleepovers — not once had Natalie admitted fault for anything.
“What are you sorry for?” Eliot asked.
“I used to get on Kimi about everything,” she said.
I gulped some beer and discovered I’d finished the bottle. “You were right, most of the time,” I said. “It was your grilling that got me questioning and thinking. I’d be a devout Jesusfreak, probably pregnant with a dozen kids, popping antidepressants, and wondering what the hell was wrong with me if you hadn’t got me out of that rut.”
“Eliot and I went to marriage counseling, y’know. The therapist told me I had self-esteem issues.”
“We all did,” I said. “We were in high school.”
“I harp on Eliot like I did you. It made me, makes me, feel better.”
The Natalie I’d known would have given up teeth, eyes, and tongue before admitting that.
“I wish you could’ve said that a long time ago,” I said. “I wish we could go back and fix what happened.”
“At last,” Marc sighed. “I’ve been waiting for so long.”
The tangled ropes of smoke thickened, turning murky and heavy. The tendrils of pot congealed against my face. They strangled the candles, dimming the yellow of their light to brassy shadows. The ringlets of smoke transformed into soft arms wrapping me close, holding me. Years dissolved away, and the forgotten, suddenly remembered, feel of a woman’s lips pressed against my mouth. Natalie’s tongue was dry against mine, rasping in our shared cottonmouth. I giggled and she tweaked my nipple. It was too much. I burst into peals of laughter, tipping backward to flop on the pile of sleeping bags. Distantly, I knew I should’ve been troubled, but recollections of futons in living rooms became misty and vague, like a dreamscape or a remembered LSD trip.
“I love you, you ninny,” Natalie said.
“I know, I know,” I said, gasping to catch my breath. “I love you too.”
“We’ll always be together won’t we, Kimi? All of us, Eliot and Marc too. After we graduate, we’ll get a farmhouse, live off the land and off the grid.”
“I want nothing more.” The solemnity of the moment chased away the giggles. This was our dream, move away from it all, start a commune, be free and happy, and most important of all, together.
Sweaty and peaceful, we lay entwined, my head nestled on her breasts, her arm draped across my hip. Sleep tugged at my eyelids, although I knew if I surrendered to it, I would wake to Marc’s flashlight and the beginning of our estrangement. As consciousness reeled away, I wondered how I knew.
*
I heard Marc’s footsteps on the catwalk. The blanket-curtain parted. But it wasn’t one beam that sprang through it, but two. Marc had brought Eliot.
That wasn’t right; it wasn’t how it had happened. As the thought surfaced, it faded. Going. Gone.
I sat, clutching a fold of sleeping bag to my chest.
Eliot’s face was a mask of shock, consternation. Marc’s wasn’t. There wasn’t a trace of surprise to crease his brow or drop his jaw.
Beside me, Natalie stirred.
“Mind if we join you?” Marc’s question was somber, deadly serious.
Natalie smiled and cuddled my hip. “Take off your shoes first.”
I relaxed, releasing the breath I’d bee
n holding. “You heard her,” I said. “Off with your shoes.”
Inhibitions were tossed aside, left with the shoes and clothing kicked outside the blanket curtain. Sometime during the day, Marc refreshed the candelabra with new candles so we might see which hand pressed against whose flesh, know who we kissed before we felt and tasted lips and tongue. Breathless and panting, we parted so Natalie could switch on her boombox.
Marc said it even as I thought it. “I wish it could always be like this.”
“Me too,” Eliot said.
“It will be,” Natalie said. “I’ll always love all of you. We should live together like I was saying to Kimi.”
“We’re growing apart,” Marc said. “You and Kimi are going to different colleges. I’m staying here for university, and Eliot—”
“I’m not even going to college,” Eliot said.
“This is the best it will ever be.”
“Don’t say that,” Natalie said. “Of course we’ll change, in good ways. How could anything come between us?”
But the mood was broken. We assembled our clothes as Eliot rolled a joint by glimmering candleshine. On an impulse, I shouldered the topmost sleeping bag. We emerged from the Center of the Universe to discover the sun had set as we loved. A slender sickle of moon gleamed, waited upon by a smattering of stars.
I flung the sleeping bag on the fire escape ledge, the best view of sky and campus skyline. We sat close but not touching, passing the smoldering joint from hand to hand.
“Why can’t we stay like this?” There was resentment and grief in Natalie’s question.
“People change,” I said with my new, mysterious wisdom.
“There is a way to stay here and now,” Marc said. He stood, his arms wide as though to embrace the night.
“Get down,” I said. “Someone’ll see you.”
“Stay with me,” Marc said. “Promise you’ll stay with me.”
Before any of us could stop him, he jumped, flinging himself into empty space. For a moment, he seemed to hover, as though unsure whether to float or drop. Gravity decided for him. His body crashed through leaves and air.
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