Kim Church - Byrd

They don’t show up at any of the parties. This ought to be a relief, but Addie is in no mood to feel relieved.

At the last party on the last night, she gets drunk and loses her virginity once and for all, to J.C. Green. They don’t plan it; she and J.C. barely know each other. They just happen to be the last ones still conscious after everyone else has gone home or to bed or found another place to pass out. They are sitting on a gritty sofa in the living room of a big oceanfront house. Someone has left the tone arm of the stereo cocked back and a Doobie Brothers album plays endlessly. Addie doesn’t know why she came to the party at all or why she’s still here. She gets up to leave and staggers, whirly-drunk. J.C. catches her. He’s fat, with a beery, greasy smell, mildly sickening. But his fatness is also a comfort, something to sink into.

Addie lets him hold her. She can feel a thumping through his jeans, like a lowdown heartbeat. She doesn’t care. She lets him turn her around and fold her over the arm of the sofa. She lets him take down her striped shorts and hump her from behind to the beat of “Long Train Runnin’.” J.C. is relentless and annoying, like the song, which she will never be able to listen to again.

She thinks of Roland. This is his fault. Because of him, nothing is special.

All year, Sam watches his sister leave.

He watches her leave for school every morning — the same time as him, but not the same school.

He watches her graduate, orange sash across her gown.

After graduation she leaves for the beach. A week later she comes home sunburned and won’t talk to anyone.

That summer she leaves every morning for her job at the library. She goes out after work every night, he doesn’t know where. Weeks go by when he doesn’t see her at all.

At the end of summer she leaves for college.

“Write me letters,” she tells him.

He does. In the beginning he writes to her almost every week.

Dear Addie, we got a new TV with a remote control. Now Bryce can change his own channels .

Dear Addie, they won’t let me try out for sports .

Dear Addie, I took my bicycle apart, cleaned and lubricated all the parts and put it back together. It flies .

Dear Addie, Bryce fell. In the kitchen. He hit his head on the counter. We picked him up and Claree put a cold washcloth on his head .

Dear Addie, thanks for the sweatshirt. What exactly is a Spartan?

Dear Addie, the Davenports came over for a cookout and Bryce set the poplar tree on fire .

Dear Addie, they have a new rule at school. Everybody has to be in a club. I was in the chess club but there were only two of us and it got boring. I joined the travel club but we never traveled, we just sat around looking at slides. So my friends and I started our own club, the Apathy Club. For homecoming we made a banner, MAY THE BEST TEAM WIN. It won for Most Appropriate, but no one went to pick up the prize .

Dear Addie, this time he fell in the street and Mr. Davenport had to help us bring him in .

Dear Addie, when are you coming home?

Dear Addie, I can’t wait to be the one who leaves .

The university is forty minutes and a world away from Carswell.

A world of books — at the heart of campus is a gleaming new library tower, big as God.

A world of flyers — on every wall in every building, on every telephone pole on every street corner, flyers advertise readings and concerts and lectures and rallies and auditions and art openings and roommates wanted and things for sale, cheap.

A world of rolling lawns and majestic shade trees and people reading, arguing, laughing, making out, working calculus problems, playing guitar, playing Frisbee, playing Hacky Sack. There’s always someone to talk to, someone to go to the new film festival at the Janus with, wander the bars of Tate Street with, smoke pot and eat Mexican food with. Addie is infatuated with all of them. Jimmy the physics major, who cooks her pancakes in his dorm room. Stephen, who does yoga and smells faintly of patchouli. Geoff with a G, who shows her his poetry, which is so raw and wild and charged she decides to give up trying.

No one gives her the deep-down panic of real love, the jolt she always felt with Roland. But Roland would not fit in this place. She thinks of him only rarely, and with only the smallest tug of sadness — for him or for herself, she couldn’t say.

She studies literature — the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, the Germans in translation. She studies history and Latin and logic, which she loves for its perfect reliability. She studies the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of science. All of her philosophy classes are taught by the same professor — a compact, muscular man with round glasses, neatly combed hair, and neatly pressed shirts tucked into neatly pressed pants. He never lectures without a piece of chalk in his hand and never strays too far from the board.

He lectures about retrocausality. He draws pictures of the space-time continuum on the board to show how the future influences the past, except he doesn’t use those words.

“Is it the same as predestination?” the class asks.

The fallacy of that question, he says, lies in the use of “pre-”. There is no before or after, no pre- or post-. No past, present or future. “Every event,” he says, “affects every other event.”

He is intense. When he talks, a bead of white spittle forms in the corner of his mouth. He has hair in unexpected places, on his knuckles and elbows and the undersides of his forearms. He tells Addie she’s the best student he’s had.

She has never felt so important.

Roland, on the road with his band, wonders if he will ever feel important again. He tries to think of himself as an adventurer like Kerouac, fearless and crazy and free. It would help if he could write like Kerouac, though he doubts even Kerouac could find poetry in this cramped, stinking van. Or in guys who are always fucking each other’s women, using up each other’s drugs, fighting over money, which there is never enough of, and never bathing or brushing their fucking teeth.

All he ever writes is an occasional postcard home. He likes the plain black ones that say “Georgia at night,” or “Louisiana at night.” Keep his parents guessing. Sometimes he calls them. Always collect, always from a different place — a pay phone or somebody’s apartment.

He doesn’t think about Carswell. Louise with her allover freckles, or Addie with her long hair. Her green eyes watching him like he was somebody to be watched.

She goes home only when she has to. Once for Shelia’s wedding to Danny Brewster. Shelia and Danny both stayed in Carswell; Shelia became a certified medical assistant and Danny is working as a mechanic at the Plymouth dealership until he can open his own garage. They hold their wedding reception at the brand-new clubhouse of their brand-new apartment complex. Music blares from a boom box — Danny’s wedding-music mix tape. “I hope you brought your suit,” Shelia says to Addie, to everyone, as if she expects them to swim. No one does. People dance barefoot by the pool — hospital people, car people, people Addie doesn’t know. Who would have thought you could find a whole new set of friends in Carswell?

Danny asks Addie to dance and she says yes even though she has a cheap-champagne headache that the song, “Brown Eyed Girl,” is only making worse. But she came to celebrate, and she is genuinely happy for her old friends, even a little envious. “Congratulations,” she yells at Danny over the music. “You and Shelia have it all figured out. I can’t even decide on a major.”