Emma Rathbone - Losing It

I told him about a cat I had named Smoky who was killed in a car accident. He told me about a turtle he got when he was ten.

“Kitty,” I said, “another cat. Feline leukemia.”

“Brownie, a hamster,” he said. “Death by fucking boredom, I think, I don’t even know.”

“Birdy, a parrot. Flew away.”

“Georgie, my mom’s poodle. Still kickin’ it.”

“Cleary, a fish, neglect. I was ten.”

“Cleary?”

“Yup.”

“Why Cleary?”

“He was see-through.”

“You’re really killing it with these pet names,” he said. “You are trouncing it.”

“Well”—I shrugged—“I’m glad you can recognize genius when it’s just staring you in the face.”

I’d made about five inches of headway into my blue drink and I was just on the knife’s edge of being drunk and I decided to slow down, because I didn’t want to tip it all over the edge. I knew there was a fine line between being pleasantly freewheeling and careening into red, ugly bombast. Also I still needed to drive in a bit. So I took it down a notch and started sipping my water. I peered back outside at the lot. I looked down at my phone. Two text messages from Viv. Jack was telling me about a kayaking trip wherein he found a gold watch. This segued into a story about how his stepfather was a dick. I then told him about my friend Katey, who lived down the street from us in Texas, and who had an evil stepmom who would make us walk very slowly down the hallways because she didn’t want the pictures lined up on the walls to fall askew.

I said I’d be right back. In the bathroom (sticky, cold, dirty clumps of wet toilet paper) I found that my face was a little more red than I thought, and I had the beginnings of some hive-like splotches on my neck. I checked my phone again. Now there were two missed calls from Viv. I had to leave. I would be late, but some plausible excuse would be enough. We’d still have time to hang the plates. Maybe Jack could come with me. Then, afterward, we could go and get another drink.

But back at the table, he had a funny expression on his face. “You want to go to this lake I always used to go to,” he said, “when I was a kid?”

“A lake?” I said. “Right now?”

“Yeah, you’re a swimmer, right?”

“Yeah, but I have— There’s something I have to do.”

“I used to go there all the time in high school,” he said. “It’s not far from here. Remember where Karen lived? There’s this creepy old ice-cream shack. We’d swim out to the water filtration tower, or whatever it was, in the middle. We could race, me and you, to the tower.”

“I mean,” I said, “I will beat you.”

He smiled.

“No, it’s just”—I wiped my palms on my dress—“I can’t really. I have to do this thing. I promised my aunt. She has an art show, at the McCormick Center?”

“It’s really secluded,” he said. “There’s a little beach area. I haven’t taken anyone there since high school.”

Under the table, he put his foot on top of mine.

We stared at each other.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Viv again.

“Who is it?” he said.

I looked down at it. Secluded lake area, I thought. I liked the weight of his foot on mine, and I wanted to keep feeling that weight and to never stop feeling it, and it seemed preposterous that I would be the one to cause it to do so.

“No one,” I said, and turned it off, and put it in my bag. “Is it close? The lake? Should we go?”

He leaned back and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me just get my stuff.”

Then we were walking through the hot parking lot toward his car, a beat-up green sedan. Inside it smelled like weed, and there was trash on the floor. “Sorry,” he said, as I kicked away a balled-up paper bag. “It’s fine,” I said, laughing. We pulled out and started driving on Route 29, out toward Cismont, and then took smaller, overgrown roads. The sun hadn’t gone down yet, and the warm, dusky air seemed to shimmer with magic dust. The trees, the ivy crawling along the power lines, a faded and half-burnt billboard for an old zoo, the sound of the cicadas, it was all humming with possibility. His hand was on my leg, sitting there like a frog. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want it to hop off.

Viv’s face swam through my mind, but I pushed it away. I would make it up to her. Maybe this guy, Pete Wexler, would still be here tomorrow. Of course he would. I would personally take the plates to him, wherever he was. It was all going to be fine. I pictured Viv in the center, looking around anxiously. Something tugged at me and I felt a little sick. But then I took that picture and put it in a box, and put that box in the back of my mind. The alcohol helped, it helped swirl it all away. For now I just had to rest my hand out the window while Jack’s hand rested on my leg, and stare out at the orange sky, and keep shimmying myself into the opening the night was giving us.

We drove in a comfortable, anticipatory silence. It had been about twenty minutes when Jack said, “Uh-oh,” looking at his dashboard. “We are out of gas.” I hadn’t seen anything in miles. “There’s a place coming up,” he said.

After a minute we pulled into an old station with a busted sign and car parts strewn around the lot. In the shop there was someone at the cash register, leaning back, his feet up on the counter. “You have to pay cash first,” said Jack. “I’ll be right back.”

“Sure,” I said, and then watched him go up to the store, swing the door open. I looked to my other side. The trees across the street were filled with darkness. A streetlight flickered on. I watched a pickup truck pull up to the pump in front of us. A man without a shirt hopped out and walked into the store. A child with lank blond hair stared at me from the back window.

Jack was behind a rack of newspapers. Then he walked to the back where I couldn’t see. I looked down and straightened my dress and stared at my nails. I put my hair up, then took it down. After a few minutes, the man without a shirt came out and shook some candy at the kid in his truck. The kid laughed and soon they were gone.

I shifted uncomfortably. It had been fifteen minutes. Without the wind coming through the windows the heat was close and stifling, and I felt beads of sweat forming at my hairline. I opened the door and stepped out of the car. I walked across the lot and went into the store: fluorescent-lit, sticky cold air-conditioning, a few bags of chips on the dingy ground, fallen from a rack. A teenager sat blankly at the cash register. I looked around and saw Jack next to the ice machine in the back. He was standing with someone taller and roughly his age.

“Oh, hey,” said Jack as I approached. “Sorry. This is Scott.”

Scott was tall and had small, dark eyes and looked at me dismissively before turning back to Jack.

“So then JJ is like, ‘Let’s firebomb it,’” said Scott. “And he lights a firecracker and drops it in. And all the fish are like—” Scott made convulsing motions as if he was being electrocuted.

“Oh, shit!” said Jack, covering his mouth, laughing.

“You should have been there.” Scott reached into a glass case and pulled out a hot-pink energy drink and twisted off the cap.

“Tzzzz tzzzz tzzzzzzz,” Jack said, shaking in the same way, imitating Scott’s electrocution.

They both burst out laughing.

Jack’s whole bearing was different. His hands were deep in his pockets and he was hunched over and there was a mean glint in his eyes.

Scott had turned away from me just enough to indicate I wasn’t included. He took a swig from his drink.

“So you’re gonna be there tonight, right?” he said.

Jack’s eyes cut to me for an instant. “Yeah,” he said. “Definitely. Wouldn’t miss it.”