The summer she was without anyone
and I had just left the other girl
in Jersey City,
Molly and I kissed at her house. We were adults
who lived with our parents. She seemed like a
wanderer from
a different moment in
the cosmic melt. Or something. I dunno. I mean that she
was out of place and it seemed
like she should be somewhere else
instead of the places we’d been
all our lives. Somewhere else doing something.
We kissed at the movies. Neither of us
really liked it much.
We did it because we were there
and because her wet hair was
heavy in my hands
and something about her
made me forget that I’d
dropped out of everything
I’d ever dropped into,
and she didn’t care that
I took my pills in front of her
every day when we’d eat Taco Bell
at the Taco Bell on the far side of town, by the head shop,
the one that rose monolithic like a dull god before us
in its soft yellows and motherly purplish hearth,
its light spinning slowly
en pointe
above the flurry of everything else,
after we smoked in her car
as I drove us,
loud and ugly and
with my knees out through
the syrupy black woods up by the air strip
where my headlights pick up the dead deer
smeared wine stains in the frosted dirt fields,
until Molly would have to drive
because I was too high
to do anything but tear up
and drift off
and play shitty old Weezy songs
in the otherwise-standstill catnap of the night.
We did this for months.
Everyone else we’d ever kissed
was away at some school doing
some thing. We made out. We
worked—not enough, but
did it. Kissed in this
vacuum. In theory, we
aged.
The last day of July:
the heat was wet in the smoky van
and I reached for the porcelain
of her thigh
as she drove us
out away from any houses or people,
way back behind neighborhoods where
we would burn tires in quiet late-day circles
and leave our exhaust shimmering
like a mirage, sharpened
in the milk-thick air,
and she pushed my hand away—
gently and without eye contact, yes.
She had the Crunchwrap Supreme and
Diet Pepsi;
I went wild
on the Cheesy Gordita Crunch;
Baja Blast fuckin’ everywhere.
When I tried
to kiss her,
she moved her hair
to block my greasy lips
and I apologized.
I blamed it on the
weed, but
I think it was the sweet
beef and
wet cream and
mousse of beans
resting so elegantly
on the sweaty corner
of her
apple-red
regal mouth
that did it
for me. Or the night
like so many nights—
shapeless, vacant.
Or maybe
it was because
she was the only
star left in the
movie I was convinced
I’d start living
soon enough, that
thing that was supposed
to have been happening all along.
