The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  “Unfair how?” I asked.

  “Mr. Tipton was supposed to be my secret lover.”

  Abruptly, I stopped, scrunching my face in an attempt to push the ensuing mental images from my head. “That’s disgusting. I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “It’s true. I’ve always thought he was kind of sexy, in this totally geeky way.”

  “Sexy?” I cringed. “Lover? Who are you right now? I want the old Lynn back, because this new version is making me really uncomfortable.”

  “I’m sorry, Susannah,” Lynn droned. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, recognizing the voice from 2001: A Space Odyssey—a movie Nick had forced me to watch during winter break our junior year.

  “I’m afraid the old Lynn has been replaced with a sex-crazed robot, charged with taking over the world one lowly high school teacher at a time.”

  “Please stop,” I said, a cramp forming in my stomach, “before I vomit the nothing I’ve had to eat today all over you. And don’t tell anyone about this, all right? I mean it.”

  “But you feel a little bit better now, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. Lynn hooked her arm in mine and steered us left, up an inclined driveway.

  “Let’s forget all about your mother and Mr. Tipton and my deviant, secret fantasies, and go get ourselves a drink.”

  “Make that a hundred drinks,” I said. “Maybe one hundred and two, after the conversation we just had.”

  Inside, the house was dim and gloomy. The party poured from every crevice—not crowded, necessarily, but always apparent in a cluster of empty bottles and cups on a tabletop, a swell of voices seeping from a dusky room. Some people greeted us as Lynn and I snuck toward the kitchen, but many were already too drunk or distracted to notice. After we each drank a shot, we made our way to the yard.

  Though the air was brisk and the wind biting, the patio was far more crowded than the house. Bodies spilled across the lawn and around the sides of the luminescent lap pool. We spotted Josie’s lavender hair near Gabriel in the back. Behind them, Alex stared past the wrought-iron fence, into blackness—an expansive mass of undeveloped land.

  “He’s brooding,” Josie explained when we approached. She leaned in close to me and put one hand on my arm—maybe for camaraderie, or for balance. “He thinks it makes him more mysterious, though I can’t figure out who he’s trying to impress.” She changed her voice to a mock-whisper. “Granted, half this party wants to fuck him. But I’m pretty sure the other half already has.”

  She pulled back then, suddenly. Behind the wide lenses of her glasses, her eyes were dark and slick as coffee beans. “You’re not trying to fuck him, are you?”

  “What?” At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard right; all the smoke in the yard made me feel light-headed, and the shot—or two, or three—that I’d slung was starting to tingle in my fingers. “Josie, I’d never—”

  Josie erupted in laughter. “Oh my God, you should see your face.”

  “Oh,” I said, and glanced around, waiting for someone else to laugh or tell me that this conversation was normal, but Lynn, I realized then, had vanished. Gabriel and Alex had also shifted into another circle.

  “I was just kidding,” she said. “We’ve been together five years, you know. Don’t believe what everyone tells you.” She paused then, strained her gaze across the pool. “Plus, I know you wouldn’t do that.”

  And though she was right, I would never try to sleep with her boyfriend, in that moment I found myself fostering a surprising thought: Josie didn’t actually know me at all.

  “It’s common knowledge”—she threw back whatever was left in her cup—“who you’re fawning over.” Then she yelled his name: “Cameron!”

  I reached out, trying to stop her from saying something embarrassing. But it was too late. He emerged from the throng and headed toward us, his cheeks pinched with red, a bottle in his hand. When he saw me, his eyes glinted.

  “I didn’t think you were going to come,” he said to me, voice thick and fizzy. He had no jacket either, but seemed unaware of the frigid night air.

  “What made you think that?”

  “Hand that over,” Josie demanded, snatching the bottle from Cameron’s grip. She splashed an inch of liquid into her cup before floating off.

  “You’re welcome,” he called after her.

  But I was grateful to be left alone with him. “Aren’t you freezing?”

  He moved closer. “We can keep each other warm.”

  When he laced his fingers through mine, my heart surged. Our hands were fully visible. We were fully visible, but of course no one else was paying attention. Still, my nerves twitched, our proximity unbearable. Like that night in the ocean—we were so close, and yet I’d never felt more aware of the distance between us.

  My brain spun. I didn’t know how to traverse that final inch, how to make my body say all the things my mouth couldn’t. So I slipped the bottle from his hands, and drank.

  “You know,” I said finally, my throat on fire, “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I laughed, and hit him playfully on the shoulder.

  “What were you thinking?” he urged.

  “I was thinking that we should write again. A new song.”

  “You got some ideas?”

  “Tons.” I smiled. “And maybe . . .” I willed my body forward, just a fraction, a centimeter. “Maybe I can sing more, too.”

  “I’ll have to talk to the guys,” he said. “Alex is really the singer.”

  “I know. I don’t want to change that. I just want to be more involved. I thought that because ‘Don’t Look Back’ was so successful—”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “By the way, I think I might have found us a gig at the Troubadour.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t know.” I grinned. “Maybe you’re trying to put me in a good mood.”

  “I’m not trying to do anything,” he said. “Not even this.”

  And then he kissed me, right there on the deck, in full view of whoever wanted to see. It must have only lasted a few seconds, but those seconds felt suspended, floating above the grasp of the party. Everyone else drifted away, muffled in some other reality that was less real than the heat of Cameron’s hands as they crawled beneath the hem of my shirt, my skin prickling like a current of static air—until a burst of white brightened my eyelids, and suddenly, too suddenly, we pulled apart.

  My eyes flapped open to a camera. Behind the lens a guy with shaggy hair turned to capture some other moment with somebody else. There were always a handful of guys like him around, bringing their expensive camera equipment to shows, perusing the parties after to snap “candids”—though it was obvious that people hovered in the photographer’s periphery, always turned to their best angle, praying to be preserved with that perfect, practiced expression. Before, the desperate way people paraded themselves in front of the lens always made me uncomfortable. But now that the camera had been turned to me, I felt suddenly proud.

  “Let’s go inside,” Cameron said, and he led me through the mob, past the kitchen, down one hallway and another. He opened one of the doors and my mind reeled with questions. I did not ask any of them.

  We found each other easily in the dark, in secret—the place where we felt most comfortable. Cameron kissed me hard. His hands navigated the hills of my body. I stumbled backward, gripping his hair. Maybe, I thought, this was also the place where everything started.

  Briefly, my mind flashed to New Year’s. I was glad this wasn’t my first time, that I knew now what to expect, what I wanted. And I wanted this. It didn’t matter that he was drunk, or that I wasn’t drunk enough. All that mattered was what happened next.

  “Wait,” Cameron said, pulling back.

  “What?” My breath was heavy, my heart rasping.

  “Not like this.”

 
It was the most steady his voice had sounded all night.

  “Like what?” I asked, though of course, I already knew. “It’s kind of exciting, though, isn’t it?” I offered, remembering Cody, the sliver of light that splashed in from the yard and the barrage of high-pitched voices just outside the room. The way it felt to be that connected to another person.

  “Not like this,” Cameron said again, peeling away from me. “I’m really drunk.”

  I nodded pointlessly.

  “My head is spinning.”

  “Want me to get you some water?” I asked.

  “I just need to lie here for a minute.”

  I nodded again.

  “I’ll meet you back out there, okay?” He plopped back onto the mattress.

  As I groped my way to the door, a wave of disappointment dizzied me. I didn’t understand. Hadn’t he wanted this? Hadn’t he kissed me in the backyard, led me to this room, stretched his hands across my bare skin? A lump unfurled in my throat. I inched open the door, glancing back, but there wasn’t enough light to reveal anything more than a silhouette. When I finally slipped into the hallway, I was so consumed by confusion that I nearly slammed into someone.

  Luke.

  “Jesus,” I gasped. “You scared me. How long have you been there?”

  He examined me with sullen detachment. I felt myself blushing beneath his stare. Luke and I had only had a couple of one-on-one conversations, all of which had been brief and band related, and it felt strange now to have his eyes on me. Gratifying, but also unnerving. The rest of party seemed impossibly far away.

  “It’s never going to be enough,” he said.

  A dangerous feeling lodged in my chest. “I don’t know what that means,” I said through a smile.

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, but he was already stepping past me, walking further into the depths of the house. “Luke?”

  He disappeared around a corner—a habit of his, I realized with a start. I rushed forward, trying to catch him before he was gone again, but found only another dreary hallway and a series of closed doors.

  I retraced my way back to the yard.

  “Susannah,” Josie yelled, parting the crowd to approach me. “You haven’t seen Lynn, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I swear, that girl is Houdini incarnate. At least I’ve got you. Smoke?”

  Staring at the gleaming turquoise pool, I drew from my cigarette while Josie talked. When necessary I nodded or shook my head, smiled blankly while trying to trick my thoughts away from Cameron and Luke. I didn’t even want to think about Alex then, and all the girls he may or may not have slept with. Gabriel, however, was still safe; he’d never attempted to be anything other than exactly what he seemed: sweet, aloof, defined by his persistent sideways grin. When he came over to borrow a light from Josie, I rested my head on his arm, allowed myself to imagine standing onstage at the Troubadour. He combed his fingers through my hair.

  And I thought maybe there was just something in the air, putting me on edge—something about the peculiar angles of the wind-rustled trees, or the sky that had filled up, threatening to spill over. Almost a year had passed since the last rainfall, and even then it was more of a mist, the kind that floats in over the Pacific and speckles the lawn like crystal dust. Most people would probably praise the storm as a miracle, considering the severity of our drought. But I sensed something different stirring.

  Though outsiders always assumed Southern California is perpetually soft and subtropical with the perfect beach breeze, that sweet lick of sunshine, I knew the truth. The real Southern California exists in extremes. It’s a place of spontaneous wildfires, and Santa Ana winds, and droughts that turn lakes into craters, splintering the earth like pottery that has crazed. It’s a place of storms that transform streets into oceans, and I had no doubts now: the rain was coming.

  But the foreboding feeling that had bloomed behind my rib cage remained—even when Lynn finally appeared, saying she’d been in the kitchen the whole time, that we must have walked right past her, and once we traced back through the sleeping hills to Vivian’s house. When the sky finally broke with a crackling sigh and the first drips of water splattered ceremoniously on Lynn’s windshield, I thought I’d feel better, but I didn’t. She dropped me off down the street as usual and I ran the half block home, crept up the driveway, the quickening raindrops catching on my eyelashes and arms until I climbed in my window. Peeling off my clothes, I crawled into bed.

  For a long time I lay awake, wondering what was wrong with me. I wanted to believe Cameron was waiting for the right time, that not like this meant later, a promise for the future. And yet, even then, a nagging, irrepressible piece of me had already accepted that belief changed nothing. Hope changed nothing. All that mattered were the choices people made: what they did, and what they didn’t.

  Nineteen

  AND IT RAINED.

  Hurricane winds hurled in from the tropics and the clouds burst open, sparking vines of lightning through the low-hung sky. All weekend I stayed indoors, watching the torrents pummel the pool, listening to the drumroll on the roof. I used Vivian’s computer to scour the web for the photograph that had been snapped of Cameron and me mid-kiss at the party, scrolling through every photographer’s site I could locate and every social profile that flaunted images from Friday night. I clicked and clicked and somewhere along the line, I started to understand why people needed the proof. But I never found the photo.

  During those long, anxious hours, I wanted to text him. We hadn’t spoken since I left him alone in that bedroom, and I was afraid of how much I wanted him, how badly I needed everything to remain the same between us, even if we never existed in public. And yet, I was more afraid of revealing this. So I texted Nick instead.

  Sitting in the kitchen while Vivian chopped vegetables for a beef stew, I asked, “Should we be preparing or something?”

  A small TV perched on a shelf near the cabinet of wineglasses, and I’d been watching the footage on the news: roofs collapsing in San Clemente, power lines torn down by ferocious winds in Garden Grove.

  “I am preparing,” Vivian told me. “I’m preparing dinner.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She said, “We’re on high ground.”

  I wondered if she had seen the backyard lately. Outside, the world had been repainted in grayscale, filtered through fog. Water from the overflowing pool lapped across the patio, closer and closer to the house. Even my mother, who hardly batted an eye at that autumn’s fire, seemed affected by the storm; she’d been in bed for two days, her nose red and skin pale. She said she thought she might have the flu.

  “We need this,” Vivian affirmed, nodding to herself as she sliced a carrot into smooth, even slivers. She dropped the pieces in the pot and began rifling through the cabinet. “Susannah, have you seen the cabernet? I just bought a brand-new bottle for this recipe, and now it’s not here.”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?” She turned around, eyeing me sternly. A sudden sharpness tinted her voice. “I won’t be mad if you took it. Just tell me the truth.”

  “Why would I take it?”

  “Why have teenagers been smuggling family liquor since the dawn of time?”

  “You probably just forgot it, like the Pepto-Bismol.”

  “Pepto-Bismol?” Her brows knitted together. “What are you talking about? I haven’t bought that in years.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me, young lady,” Vivian warned.

  “I’m sorry,” I said through my teeth. “But I promise you, I didn’t take the wine, okay?”

  After that I left the kitchen.

  In my bedroom, I picked up the Martin. A fine fur of dust coated the varnish, and I wiped the body clean with the hem of my shirt. I wanted to write a new song, to have something ready when Cameron broke the silenc
e between us—but my fingertips hurt from disuse, and for some reason the only chords I managed to form were the ones that made up “Love Honey,” the only sounds I could glean the howling wind and ravenous rain. Baritones of thunder echoed through my head. I sighed, put the guitar down, and grabbed the Endless West’s CD.

  Glancing at my bedroom window, I tried to gauge how drenched I would get in the short distance across the driveway to my mother’s car where I always practiced vocals, but all I could see was the rain battering the glass. And what if she decided, beyond all logic, to go somewhere—the store, perhaps, for medicine? Vivian wouldn’t leave, though. Not in this weather.

  I headed to the garage.

  I’d only been shut inside Vivian’s car for a moment, had not even managed to slip the CD into the player, when I noticed the smell. Something rotten. I crawled into the back, peered over the last row of seats, and there, slumped in the trunk, was a forgotten bag of groceries. Nestled between Greek yogurt and a pint of strawberries lay a dark bottle of red wine.

  I hesitated, unsure of what to do. My mother had explicitly stated that Vivian did not want me to know she might be ill, or to treat her as such. Besides, if I brought in the groceries, then I’d have to explain why I’d been in the car. So I left the bag where it was, the yogurt curdling, the fresh fruit growing fuzz. I snuck back into the house, and knocked softly on my mother’s door.

  “Mom?” I said through the crack when she didn’t answer. “Are you asleep?”

  I could hear the bed creak as she rolled over. “What is it, hon?”

  “I just . . .” A knot yanked in my throat. I inched into the dark room and lowered my voice. “I just wanted to ask you about Vivian. Is everything still okay with her?”

  “Did something happen?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and looked toward the window, where a tunnel of rain was no doubt drowning all the plants and crops we had hoped it would save.

  “No. Well, sort of. She just accused me of stealing some wine. I didn’t, though,” I added quickly.

  My mother sat up. The dim light of the TV splashed across her face, soaking her skin in a strange shade of blue. It was disconcerting to see her like that—eyes puffy, nose rubbed raw. We were safe inside our house, on high ground, and yet I felt like the world around me was slowly sliding apart.