“I’ve tried. Every time I bring it up, she says that there’s nothing wrong with her.”
I could feel him getting tougher on the outside. I took his other hand so that he’d know I was there, which made it hard to walk. He seemed like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the hands away from me or not.
We walked in quiet for a while, until we got into a nearby neighborhood where the houses start to get bigger. We passed by the golf course, and Sky asked, “Do you ever jump the fence?”
I hadn’t yet, but it seemed like a good time to start. I smiled and looked at him over my shoulder and started climbing up. My tights got stuck on the wire at the top, the part above my thigh, and Sky had to pry them loose. He followed me over the fence onto the damp brown November grass. The fall geese that had settled there for the night just kept standing about, seeming not to mind us.
I had taken Sky’s hands again, and since I had them, I said, “Spin with me.” I think that’s the kind of thing that boys like to do but won’t do unless a girl asks them to. We spun and spun and spun until we fell down in a heap, laughing. But for some reason, on the perfect cold night grass next to the geese, my laugh just turned to crying.
“What’s wrong?” Sky asked. I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know where to start. Sky held me against his chest, which made me push harder away from him into whatever the crying was for. But when I got quiet, I was glad to be with him. I didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did he, but it was like we both knew what it meant to be there.
When we got back to my house, Sky tiptoed into my room with me. We sat on my half of the disassembled bunk bed that got split apart when May started high school and moved into her own room. I’d never really put up posters or pictures on the wall the way May had done in her new room, so it looked pretty much the same as it had when we were kids. Pink walls, gauzy curtains, dried flower crowns draped over dusty stuffed animals that looked out from a hammock in the corner, wands made of ribbons peeking out from the top of a pencil holder. I felt self-conscious and flipped off the lights, and plastic glow-in-the-dark stars shone down on us.
Sky and I started kissing. We kept kissing, and kissing, and his hands were everywhere on me, and everything inside of me was hot, like pavement on a summer night. A burning you can’t stop. When Sky paused and asked, “Are you okay?” I noticed how fast I was breathing. I remembered, in a flash, what it was like those nights at the movies, and I thought for a moment that he could see it. That he knew, somehow, all of the things that I’d let happen. That he could tell. But then I saw him just staring at me, worried. “Laurel?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. It’s just … intense.”
He’d never have to know, I thought. I could be new. I would be May, the May who was brave and magical. I wouldn’t be me, the one who let everything go wrong. I focused so hard, until Sky was all that I could see. And then I got this feeling that I needed to be so much closer to his body. I wanted our skin to stop keeping us apart. So I kissed him harder, and he kissed me harder, and my clothes came partway off, and he touched me everywhere. It was then that all of the sad things inside of me turned into hungry things.
Finally, after we’d made out and gotten quiet and made out again, when the littlest bit of gray light started to leak in through the curtains, Sky tucked me under the blankets and started to sneak out of the house through the window, so Dad wouldn’t hear him.
“Sky?” I said as he was leaving. I was half-asleep, but I didn’t want him to go. As the night air rushed into the room, it seemed like it could swallow him up and take him from me.
He turned back. “Yeah?”
“You’ll still be here, right? Tomorrow?”
He smiled and kissed my forehead. “No,” he said, “I’ll be at home.”
“But, I mean, you won’t leave me, right?”
“Right.”
When I woke up today to the memory of Sky’s body, all of the sad things in me were still hungry. They started to take everything in—the rain streaking in the sky, the spill of light on the table, the tiniest drops of water clinging to a pine needle on a tree outside my window. Maybe that’s what being in love is. You just keep filling up, never getting fuller, only brighter.
I looked you up, and I found out where the name of your band came from—from this quote, written by a poet named Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” I’ve been thinking about that. About what it means to see the endlessness of each moment, of each piece of it. I want to be cleansed—I want to burn away all of the bad memories and everything bad inside of me. And maybe that’s what being in love does. So that a life, a person, a moment you need to keep, stays with you into infinity. May smiling back at me. The two of us as little girls at Fallfest, with parents who danced. Your song playing into eternity. The night leaves on the cottonwood trees catching the white lights. And every little star that burns hotter than we could know.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Janis Joplin,
Kristen’s parents have money, but she drives a super old Volvo anyway, because she thinks it’s cool. She has a bumper sticker on the back of it that says I’M NOT TALKING TO MYSELF … I’M TALKING TO JANIS JOPLIN. When she and Natalie and I were driving to Garcia’s Drive-In during lunch on Friday (Kristen never ditches classes, only lunch, because she’s a good student and keeping her grades up for college applications), of course we were listening to you. Since Kristen loves you so much, she knows all of your songs, not just the most popular ones. You were singing “Half Moon,” and Kristen turned to Natalie and said, “Did you know that Janis had women lovers, too?” Natalie shook her head no. Kristen continued, saying, “She could have been singing about a woman when she sang this,” as you crooned, Your love brings life to me.
Natalie looked off and said, “That’s cool,” trying to sound like she didn’t care. But by the way her face spread with a little smile, I could tell she did think it was really cool. I think Kristen was trying to make Natalie feel like she knew about her and Hannah. Like it was okay.
Hannah got another boyfriend. She has two right now, counting Kasey and the new one, whose name is Neung. She met Neung at Japanese Kitchen, where he’s a busboy and she’s a hostess. Yesterday, we went to his house, Hannah and Natalie and me. It was Sunday, and after we opened the fourth day of Aunt Amy’s advent calendar, I’d asked her if I could go to Dad’s early in the day, so that really I could go and hang out with Natalie and Hannah.