Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

She didn’t. “Fine. Later.”

They listened to him leave, and for a while there were still four of them, the girls and Simon and the sound of Manny walking out.

“It’s cool you guys have jobs,” Simon said. “I want a job, but, I don’t know, you need experience it seems like. Like, how do you get the first job if they always want you to have experience? It’s a total catch twenty-two.” Catch-22 was a thing he always realized too late that he might not be using correctly but never remembered to look up later.

Teagan picked a cuticle. Laura stayed with her chin on Teagan’s shoulder and began to blow smoke out her nose. Simon finished his beer and it didn’t make him feel anything. Maybe he should have been going. He’d only just gotten there, but he’d delivered himself, or some version of self, and they were not interested.

Then Laura said, “Actually, Teegs, I gotta go too.” She hoisted herself out of the hammock and into the same sneakers Teagan had had on before. She dropped her cigarette into the tub and Us onto the floor, where the cover flapped off at the staple. “I gotta be at that thing really early.”

“Boo,” Teagan said, but the way she said it and the way she threw herself lengthwise along the hammock made Simon wonder if it was at all possible that she could want to be alone with him.

Laura walked out along the wraparound porch, the same way that Manny had gone before. Now Simon’s only questions were (1) was this on purpose? and (2) or should he leave?

Teagan dug her bare feet deeper into the hammock’s open netting, toes curled around its strings. “So.” She looked at him. “Are you going to ditch me too?”

“I don’t have any things in the morning.”

“Ha.” She spun herself around, tried scooting out from the middle of the hammock, which she could not do well. It was the lowest point and where gravity wanted to keep her.

Simon left his beer bottle to buoy with the cigarette butts and, trying hard not to seem brave, sat down beside her. So that he became the hammock’s lowest point, so that Teagan rolled a little onto him and for a moment their legs pressed.

Smiling, she asked, “Want to see something?” and stuck her tongue quickly out at him.

“What?” he said, not daring to laugh. She did it again, slower this time, and Simon could see a hole where she’d had it pierced. “Whoa, that’s. When’d you get that?”

“A while ago. Manny did it for me. He’s an idiot. Anyway, my mom made me take it out.”

“That sucks.” He thought for what else to say. “Do you get, like, food stuck in it sometimes?”

“Gross,” she said, but laughing. “Sometimes. My mom’s a bitch. Well, we’re Catholic.”

“Yeah, if I did that, my mom would be all,” but he didn’t know what she’d be.

“But you live in New York.” She said it like it was worlds and not an Amtrak ticket away.

“It’s not that great.”

“Have you been to the Chelsea Hotel?”

“No. I mean, I’ve seen it. But I think it’s being renovated or something.”

“I just used to watch this movie a lot about Sid and Nancy. It’s stupid. Do you like them, the Sex Pistols?”

“Sure, yeah. I mean, I’m not, like, super into them.”

She nodded. “Anyway. My mom wants to move, but it’s like, to her sister’s in Providence.”

Even in the shade, with the sun mostly gone from the sky, her skin held the summer in it. He saw that her blond hair was lots of blonds, a banana when it is first peeled and then at intervals after, as the air rusts it brown. Warm came off her shoulders, smelling like smoked suntan lotion.

“Tell me something,” she said, though for a minute it had seemed they might do without talk, without anything to remind them that they were strangers to each other.

He asked, “What should I tell?” and she said, “A story,” and he said, “About what?” and she laughed and said, “Anything,” so automatically he started to tell her Everything, why they were in Rhode Island really, his dad’s affair and the box he’d found (in this version he had found it).

“I thought that guy at lunch was your dad.”

“Who, Gary? No, he’s my mom’s — I don’t know. I barely know him.”

And No, he had no idea what was going to happen, only it was Good for Them to Get Away, good for his mother and his sister, to get perspective (and, he didn’t think he’d meant to, but the way he was telling it made it sound like a decision he’d made for them, as man of the house, which actually he kind of was).

The sky and Teagan’s face got dark listening to him. She looked worried, a little impressed by what he had gone through, and it was pretty much exactly the reaction he’d been looking for in people, this, except then, when she asked where his father was now and he said “Who knows?” he might have given her the wrong idea, based on what happened next, which was, she touched his back and said, “I don’t know where my dad is either.”

This, where they were sitting, was her grandparents’ porch, her grandparents’ house where her mother had grown up. She had an older brother, Brady, in the army. Only twenty but married, with a daughter who lived with his wife’s parents, in another town. “We don’t get on, though. My mom calls Vanessa ‘the mother and the whore.’ ” Men passed through from time to time—“like your Gary”—but never stayed. Her father, she said, had been gone forever already. Since she was seven.

“But you remember him and stuff?”

“Duh. You remember seven.”

He wasn’t sure. The years all fused together without major milestones. Seven might have been the age he went to the set of Sesame Street, where his father’s friend designed Muppets. Simon remembered that Oscar’s trashcan, from which he’d hoped to collect souvenirs, had been trash-free and carpeted, also that Mr. Snuffleupagus was kept hanging from the ceiling.

So, seven.

Teagan pressed a pointed foot against the porch floor and started them rocking. She had a small, white scar on her chin, and he asked her where it was from.

“A swimming pool one time.” Another kid had pulled her under.

“Ouch.” What little space there’d been between them subtracted itself. One or maybe both leaned in, he knew only that first the space was there and then it wasn’t, as if God or someone had pressed the delete key, and when they kissed it was the only sound, the suck of air as their lips arranged themselves against each other.

He was observing more than he should, sitting outside himself and trying to drum up a laugh when there was an especially loud smacking, or when her top teeth tapped his lower ones, which happened. The laughing was to show he knew when things had not gone the way they were supposed to. But she seemed to want him, this perfect girl. She wanted him. She had her reasons. He did not know them.

He thought if he told someone about it, it would not have sounded like much, just kissing, but it wasn’t just. Already hot, they became sweaty. He was learning what he had never known about girls’ bodies, that there was so much more there than the parts that get talked about. A whole person around those three or four places you were supposed to focus on. A neck that pulses under his thumb when she angles her head to kiss him there. A hip, where it is sharp in front when she is on her side and where it gets softer, further back, making him think of a pitcher’s mound, the way it fills his palm. There are places that flutter and flex and so much symmetry.

They pushed and pulled at each other in the hammock that drew them both together, and the world turned blue around them. When the yellow light ticked on in the living room, Teagan fell apart from him, saying something about having to start dinner. She walked him out along the porch that was like a moat around that house, and Simon had to be careful not to trip into pots and vases in the tall, black grass.