I'll Be Here

  The fire throws off crackling sparks that fizzle in the darkness and float down around the shadowed bodies like fairy dust. I close my eyes and I’m thinking of the time Alex and I went with our moms to that restaurant out west of town where we ordered corn fritters and freshly squeezed lemonades served in chilled mason jars. That was in the summer. I remember that Alex grabbed my hand and led me out on the dock where a crusty old fisherman was gutting his catch. Their silver-blue bodies glistened under the sun and a few fish still jumped and writhed, their mouths forming elongated Oh’s. And then I’m thinking of The Price is Right—and how weird is that? Why am I thinking of that show? And—

  “Faber!” This is some guy shouting.

  He materializes from behind a redhead in a sparkly green top. I recognize him as someone who goes to Bayview. His gait and his beefy shoulders and crew cut scream “football jock.” He’s got a huge smile on his face. He and Alex do a quasi-handshake, slap thing.

  Football guy is named Jonathan and he’s a senior at Bayview this year. Apparently Jonathan goes out with the green-sequined redhead and he’s also responsible for acquiring the keg so “beer is free game” for “Faber and anyone who’s with him.” He gives me a conspiratorial wink and a cocked smile.

  I smile back.

  It remains unclear if Jonathan and Alex are actual friends or if Jonathan is just a bit drunk and happy to see someone that hails from Bayview even if he did graduate two years ago. Jonathan’s hooting and guffawing and when he comes close to my face I find out that his breath is sweet and sticky.

  The redhead appears over his shoulder with a darker haired friend and Jonathan launches into the introductory spiel and now I know Alicia and Lauren. Lauren, who I learn graduated last year, asks Alex about school and it’s clear that she knows something about him. As I stand there and watch him interact with these people I realize that I never think of Alex as being friends with such normal people. When we walk away a few minutes later I say something like this.

  Alex laughs. My stomach flips over at the sound.

  “What’s normal?” He asks.

  “I don’t know exactly but you’re not it.”

  His expression is amused. “I’m not?” He shakes his head. “It must be the facial piercing and the strange music. Is it too much?”

  I laugh. “No. I actually like the eyebrow ring.” His lips form a smirk as I reach up to brush his brow with the very tips of my fingers. “When did you get it?”

  He looks slightly apologetic and I don’t understand why. “Last summer when I was in Atlanta. Between us, I’d had too many beers and I barely remember it.”

  “Well, it’s hot.” My eyes widen when I register that I said out loud the words that were in my head. I bite down hard on my lip and wonder if burying myself in the sand is out of the question. But then Alex gets this pleased look on his face and I think that if I could bottle it and hold onto it forever, I would.

  He leans down so that he’s close to my ear and his breath pushes down my neck in threads that caress my skin. “And you don’t even know about the tattoos…”

  My bottom jaw falls and Alex laughs with his head back and his face parallel to the stars. Then he grabs the sleeve of my borrowed jacket and pulls me far enough away from the fire so that the smoke doesn’t dry out our eyes but still close enough that our faces are lit by the tangerine flames. I can’t help but think that if he moved his hand just a bit we would be touching skin to skin.

  Alex settles on one of the pieces of driftwood that has been positioned like a bench. I sit down to his left, careful to be close to him but not too close. A knotty lump of wood cuts into my butt cheek and I have to shift twice to get comfortable.

  I’ve always liked watching people and Alex has found a perfect spot for one of my favorite activities. We begin a game. We imagine what the clustered people are talking about and we create amusing dialogues to accompany the stories.

  I explain to him that the sallow-faced girl sitting on the blue cooler is actually a diplomat’s daughter and the young man to her left is her hired bodyguard. They were having a clandestine affair but have recently ended things due to an argument.

  He turns to me, his head tilted to the side like a bird. “What was the argument about?”

  “The argument,” I say on a breath, “is over a pair of underwear.”

  His eyes crinkle with skepticism. “Underwear?”

  “Don’t look so unsure. Undergarments have put many decent relationships asunder.” I pause with exaggerated reverence. “For years his deep, dark secret has been that he loves to wear girl’s panties underneath his clothing.”

  He’s grinning. “Interesting... And the diplomat’s daughter discovered this weird fetish of his and decided that it was too much for her to cope with? ”

  I tap my leg. “Actually no. She doesn’t even mind that he sneaks into her room and wears her underwear. She’s forward thinking and progressive.”

  Alex inclines his head. “Clearly.”

  “The thing that drove them apart is that she discovered him in possession of someone else’s underwear—a lacy pair of hot pink cheekies. He claimed that they belonged to her and that she had simply forgotten about them but she knew that was a lie because she’s been strictly a bikini brief kind of girl for years. So much better for circulation.”

  This surprises a loud laugh out of him—a golden thing that fills the space around me and transforms his face. I catch myself staring a little too intently at the creased skin around Alex’s eyes and the curve of his upper lip so I force myself to look instead at the shifting shadows thrown by the fire.

  Maybe I should consider this plan again. It’s one thing to use Alex to get back at Dustin. It’s an entirely different thing to fall for Alex a second time and have my heart smashed all over again. That’s the very last thing I need right now, yet here I am, sitting on a salt-dried log next to Alex Faber while my stomach flip-flops and I try my damndest not to think about what he looks like without his shirt on or where the placement of the alluded to tattoo may be.

  Alex’s laugh fades to a smirk and he taps my arm playfully with his elbow. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” I say though I’m anything but sure.

  Alex tilts his head to one side. “What exactly are cheekies?”

  This question throws me and I feel simultaneously embarrassed that I ever brought up women’s underwear in his presence and pleased that he doesn’t seem to have a lot of working knowledge about lingerie.

  I am building up the courage to explain what “cheekies” are when I feel the prickling of a hundred tiny bugs scurrying across my back. I recognize the tingling sensation as a sort of radar I’ve developed recently. Laney told me that it was in my imagination. “You can’t sense your ex-boyfriend,” she’d said as she bit a moon-round bite out of an apple. I disagreed and Dizzy backed me up. She told me that she experienced the same exact thing for exactly two months and four days one time. It made me wonder what happened after two months and five days but I didn’t get the chance to ask because the class bell had rung and we’d scampered in different directions so that we wouldn’t be late.

  Tonight the awareness makes my chest hurt. I turn my head and there is Dustin filtering through the knotted people with his hand on the back of Taylor’s neck. I recognize the gesture because he used to touch me the same way and with the awakened memory I can practically feel the warmth of his hand on my neck, his fingers twirling absently in my hair.

  Taylor is wearing a tightly fitted cream colored short-sleeved sweater and tall shoes. I want the shoes. They are made of soft caramel colored leather and they look expensive. The heels are at least three inches and I wonder if I could even pull off high-heeled boots. I’d probably end up falling over. And actually, high-heels seem like a stupid thing to wear to the beach, right? I bet she can barely keep her balance on the soft sand.

  Dustin is wearing jeans that fit the way jeans are supposed to and he stops when he sees me.
His feet come to a halt like they’ve taken root and even across the distance and the shadows cast by the licking flames I can see the corners of his eyes turn down in disapproval. I glance away quickly hoping that he didn’t see me notice him.

  There are fifty witnesses to the moment when Taylor realizes what has caused her boyfriend’s abrupt change in posture. She stares me down with a look that I swear could cause a puppy to have an aneurism.

  Alex is looking at me also. I can feel his pupils zeroing in on the pores on the side of my face. My nose probably looks huge from that angle and I want to pull my hair forward and hide behind it like a curtain. Or maybe I could evaporate like water and become part of the atmosphere. I’m staring down at my shoes trying to force back the tears that are burning the backs of my eyes. Crying, I tell myself firmly, would only make a bad situation worse.

  Blink.

  Swallow.

  Count slowly.

  Swallow once more.

  Repeat.

  This is the rhythm that I’ve developed.

  Blink.

  I am about to swallow when I feel something solid at my waist. Alex has scooted in and his chest is tilted toward me. He brings his strong arm up and around my body. The gesture is not friendly. His hand settles on my hip below the waist of my jeans an inch or so away from my bare skin.

  I don’t know what my face looks like but his whisper is gentle in my ear, “This is what you wanted, right?”

  And when I sit up straighter, our irises lock and I see that his eyes are as bright and shiny as mine.

  And this is the room

  One afternoon I knew that I could love you

  And from above you I sank into your soul

  Into that secret place where no one dares to go.

  ~Neutral Milk Hotel

  “King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Later, as he drives to my house I am trying to think of what to say but I’ve got nothing. I’m like a hard drive that’s been wiped. Must. Reboot.

  Alex talks for me.

  He says, “This is a great song,” and adjusts the volume on the car stereo.

  It’s an old song that’s been remade. I can’t place the original but I know the lyrics and in my head I sing along for a bit. Not out loud. I don’t want Alex to suffer any more than he already has.

  The song ends as we turn onto my street. Time is almost up and I’ve said nothing about what happened at the beach. But Alex doesn’t turn into my driveway. He takes us down the street and makes a right on Windsong Terrace.

  Now I know what he is thinking and I can’t help but smile. He parks on the shoulder and I step out of the car onto ground that is part grass and part knee-high sticky weeds. I grunt as I brush the nettles away from the legs of my jeans.

  “Hey, remember when we accidentally let the Finkin’s Persian cat out and she came back covered in these things?”

  Pushing through a particular tall patch of the offending weeds, he stops and looks over his shoulder. Behind him the silver moon looks like an enormous winking eye.

  “Of course I remember Willow. She screamed at me like it was my fault her cat couldn’t compete in that cat show and she claimed to my dad that I’d cost her thousands of dollars in breeding money.”

  He bends a slender branch away from our path with an outstretched hand. “Who has ever heard of cats competing in a pageant anyway?”

  “It’s ludicrous,” I agree with a grin. We’re almost there.

  “That cat should have thanked me when it wasn’t whored away to some shaggy male tomcat for the purpose of making expensive kittens”

  “It was an ungrateful thing.”

  “It was.”

  Alex finds the spot with his shoe and we both bend to the dirt in a practiced way to clear off the edges of the board. When the perimeter is free, we each take a side and lift. As the quarter-inch plywood board comes up sandy dirt spills over our feet. A rush of cool air hits my face. It smells a tad musty. Our eyes meet and I can’t help but feel a little giddy.

  “Have you been back here much?” He asks.

  I shake my head. “The cave didn’t feel right without you.” That’s the truth and I can’t help but feel glad when he looks happy about my answer.

  We sit on the edge of the gaping hole for a moment. Alex slides in first and then in a practiced way, reaches up to help me down. Over the layers of shirt and jacket his fingers dig into the soft skin beneath my rib cage.

  My feet greet the ground and his hands slide to my waist and I think that they linger for a beat longer than they should. Or maybe that is my imagination.

  Alex grabs a flashlight from a small cranny in the dirt wall and switches it on. I hold my hand to my face to shield the glaring white-blue light.

  “Sorry,” he says and shifts the beam downward. The hard-packed dirt walls are about five feet high and I would guess that the space extends a good twelve feet behind us until it narrows into a tiny passageway that empties near the beach. Alex has to bend his knees and head to fit. “God, this place seems a lot smaller than it used to.” He laughs.

  We are in a hole/cave hybrid. This large parcel of land, situated between two houses at the back of my neighborhood was once owned by a builder who planned to construct a four story residential quadruplex but was stalled by a legal dispute between himself, his insurance company and the city government. The end result was that the city ended up purchasing the land well-below market value and the spot was zoned “unbuildable” due to low elevation and flooding concerns.

  Jake told me that in the late nineties there was talk of bringing in more dirt and transforming the space into a playground but an environmental group battled it because at one point there were some gopher tortoises that used it as their home base. They asked Jake to assist the cause but he had to admit that he really didn’t know much about gopher tortoises. No one wanted to deal with the controversy and the plans were scratched, the land forgotten, left to grow wild with sea grapes and palmettos.

  Five summers ago, before we knew about the cave, Alex and I surmised that the vacant land would probably provide us with a shortcut to Shell Beach which isn’t much of a beach but when you’re under the driving age anything will do.

  While Brooke and my mom played Scrabble on our porch and listened to Miles Davis, we pedaled down here—me on my lime green ten-speed and Alex on a blue monster of a thing borrowed from Jake.

  Sam Allred was emerging from the tangled growth at the same time that we were dropping our bikes and entering it. I knew Sam from school. He was a year older than me and a well-known stoner.

  Sam stopped and stared at us. His brown eyes were rimmed with red. “Want to see something?” He asked finally.

  I actually didn’t want to see anything that Sam Allred had to show me but I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do and Alex and I followed Sam over the weeds and a rocky patch of ground that dipped into a shallow puddle. I looked away when Sam’s shirt lifted and I could see the soft rolls of his back. I wondered what someone so chubby and clearly more comfortable on the couch was doing out in nature. I was about to ask when we came to this spot.

  “It was here before I moved into the neighborhood,” he said, gesturing to the warped wooden cover that didn’t cover the gaping hole all the way.

  At first glance it didn’t seem like much—just a hole in the ground about four feet across. But when the flimsy board was pushed aside I could see that the hole wound back under the ground. It was lined with dirt and jagged rocks and in one corner stood a life-sized cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise in his Mission Impossible ensemble.

  “We stole that from a store,” he responded to my unasked question about the Cruise cutout. I didn’t ask how he’d managed to get such a huge piece out of the store without getting caught. Some things are better left a mystery.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t really know. Maybe they built it to put a septic tank in or cons
truction posts or something. Who knows.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Sam looked us over—up and down like we were under inspection. “There are only three rules. One is that you always leave a flashlight on that ledge down there. See it?”

  He leaned forward pointing to a small space wedged between the dirt and rock. “Two is that you tell someone else from the neighborhood if you’re leaving.”

  He stood up and adjusted the waistband of his shorts. I noticed the dark red marks the shorts left on the pale skin of his stomach. “I’m leaving for a new school and that’s why I’m telling you guys.”

  When he looked out over the green space to the edges of sky, I suppose that he looked as depressed as someone like him could get. “My parents found some of my stash so they’re sending me away to a boarding school.”

  “Oh,” I muttered awkwardly. Alex was looking at the small pile of ash and paper on the ground near his feet. Clearly the remnants of Sam’s “stash.”

  I sat down and let my feet dangle into the shadowed air of the hole. “Is it safe?” I asked.

  “Sure, sure.” Sam shrugged. “Julian Mills showed me. And his dad was a builder you know. And this place is manmade so…” he said it like it was a qualification. “It opens up down there just under those big rocks.” He pointed to a spot about fifteen feet away.

  “Look… I’m sure it’s safe,” he continues. “But I wouldn’t mention it to your parents because then you’ll get a bunch of people down here and that’s not what you want.” He said it like he knew what Alex and I wanted.

  Standing beside me, Alex wasn’t saying much. He just had his head cocked to the side like he always did when he was thinking. He only asked one question. “What’s the third thing?”

  Sam looked confused for a minute.

  “The third rule,” Alex clarified.

  “Oh yeah.” He smiled then. Conspiratorially. “No sex.”