Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

Elise lifted her sunglasses and said, “Hi, y’all,” in a ridiculous accent.

“You guys aren’t from here,” said the blond.

“That’s right,” she said.

“We’re from Montgomery,” I said. “Alabama. We don’t really talk like that.” I smiled and he smiled back. It was crooked and made his eyes disappear. Unlike nearly everyone, he was more attractive when he wasn’t smiling. They introduced themselves as Erik and Gabe, and said they had a cooler full of beer if we wanted to join them.

“Maybe in a minute,” Elise said, her voice normal again.

They went back to their table and their other friend laughed and tossed a can at them. It went into the pool and the father threw it back.

“We don’t have to go over there,” she said. “They’re clearly assholes.”

“I kind of liked the blond.”

“Just listen to them,” she said. They were laughing, probably at nothing. No matter how smart boys were, they always seemed so dumb.

“We don’t have anything better to do, and the blond’s cute.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you don’t have to drink.”

“I know.”

“Drinking doesn’t make you cool.”

“Am I in a public service announcement right now?”

“That’s funny, a public service announcement.”

I stood and slipped on my dress. “Weren’t you the one feeding me straight whiskey last night?” I asked.

“There was ice in it.” She kept lying there, her ribs and pelvic bones on display, the baby hidden neatly inside. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—how no one knew, no one could see. If I hadn’t found the box, if she hadn’t wanted me to find it, I wouldn’t know.

She waited a minute before following me over to their table.

“Hey, girl,” the blond said to me—Gabe. His hair was so pale it was nearly white, his chest smooth and muscular. The popular boys in my class were scrawny; it wasn’t cool to go to the gym. It wasn’t cool to appear to be trying to be anything.

The boy we hadn’t met introduced himself as Charlie and got up to grab another chair while Erik passed around beers. They were so cold and everybody was so good-looking I felt like I was in a commercial. I pretended to take an interest in the father and son. The father was swimming laps while his kid sat on a step. I wondered if his mother was waiting in one of the rooms, but more than likely his parents were divorced and the man only had his son a few weeks every summer. To make things exactly even, they drove the same number of miles and exchanged him in the middle, which happened to be this shitty little West Texas town. It would explain why they were so disappointed in each other.

Elise took a Marlboro out of somebody’s pack and lit it with her bedazzled lighter before any of the boys could reach for their Zippos. I pressed my finger into a tiny flower on the table. It stuck and I thought about making a wish, but I’d been making a lot of wishes lately and they were the same generic wishes I always made. I was going to have to start being more specific. Gabe, I thought, blowing it off. I want Gabe.

“What are you guys doing here?” Charlie asked.

“We’re going to California where we’re going to witness the Second Coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In Pacific Time,” Elise said. She told them we were the chosen ones, that they were going to suffer through terrible fires and earthquakes before the earth exploded into nothingness.

“Stop,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re making a joke out of us.”

“I’m not making us a joke,” she said. “I’m making them a joke.”

“But we’re here, too.”

“We’re kids,” she said. “All we can do is act like jerks.”

“You do a good job of that,” I said.

She blew smoke past my face, rolled her eyes.

“She believes in it,” Elise said, and the boys looked at me with half-smiles.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “I might be agnostic.” I liked the way it sounded. I took a sip of beer, which tasted a little less awful than it usually did because it was so cold. Like Elise, I sat in church and felt nothing. I memorized Bible verses same as I did Robert Frost poems in school. But I wanted to believe. I really wanted to. If the rapture was coming, I hoped our parents’ belief would be enough to get us into heaven, like Noah, whose family had been saved because he was a good man.

Charlie opened another beer, placing his empty on the stack. “Every group has its own eschatology,” he said.

“Its own what?” I asked.

He took off his sunglasses so we could see his eyes. “It’s how we deal with death,” he said. “It’s human nature to want the world to end when we end.”

“Hey, girl,” Gabe said, “you want another?”

“Keep ’em coming,” I said, though my beer was still half-full. I liked how he called me girl , as if there were too many girls to remember, as if the names of girls would take up too much space in his head. If he liked me, maybe I could become pretty girl or even my girl . But for this to happen, we’d have to fast-forward past all of this getting-to-know-you business. We’d have to pretend we already knew each other. People were so similar once you got to know them.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his body in constant motion—an ankle bouncing on a knee, his hand lifting a can to his mouth. I wanted to feel his body move over mine. Before leaving home, Elise and I had watched a religious documentary that was streaming on Netflix. In it, all of the girls said that they very much wanted the rapture to come, but would prefer if it waited until they had husbands. They didn’t say sex . They said marriage, husband . They said their parents had gotten to marry and have children and they only wanted the same opportunity.

“He should take that kid home,” Gabe said, gesturing to the man, who was holding onto the side of the pool and kicking, telling the boy how easy it was.

“I know, right?”

“I didn’t learn how to swim until I was fourteen,” he said.

“Really?” I took a larger swallow than I’d intended, and it sat there, pooled at the back of my throat, before I could make myself choke it down.

“My dad died in a boating accident when I was two and my mom was afraid of water after that. She thought I’d drown if I went anywhere near it.” This story made me think he could love me. He wasn’t just a cute boy—he had problems.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged and said it was okay. “Do you know how to swim?”

“I was on the swim team at the country club for years,” I said. It was actually only two years because my grandfather stopped paying our dues and we couldn’t afford it after that.

“The country club,” he said, “how fancy.”

“Not really. It was the old people country club. My grandparents golfed there and made us eat Sunday dinner with them every week.”

“You any good?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “I only got pink and purple ribbons.”

“I didn’t even know they had those.”

“I was a little better at relay. I swam so hard because I didn’t want to let anybody down.”

Elise opened another beer, lit one cigarette off another. She was unhappier than I’d seen her since the trip began, which was saying something. I wondered if she didn’t like seeing me have fun, if she didn’t want to see me happy.

“Come on,” Gabe said.

I took off my dress and we walked over to the deep end. There was a NO DIVING sign, a shadow man hitting his head with an X over it, but Gabe dove in anyway and came up, flinging the hair off his forehead with a flick of his neck. Boys made everything look easy; it made me love them and hate them at the same time. I jumped in straight so I wouldn’t make too much of a splash, touched the bottom, and pushed up hard. The father switched to breaststroke and swam around us.