Jesse Goolsby - I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

Fahran and his father are off for ice cream in his father’s car. His mother couldn’t take any more of the day and drew herself a bath, put on some Norah Jones, and told them to go celebrate.

Eight at night, the cooling air, and from the car’s radio news of Egypt’s coup and a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan before Fahran’s father taps the radio off. Although he appreciates what his son has experienced, he’s feverish about the five hundred, how he can get new tires on the truck, take Fahran to K-Mart for new clothes, maybe even install a basketball hoop over the garage. They’ll have to wait until after the Fourth, after the parade over in Aztec and the night’s fireworks, but that’s okay, his father says, on the fifth they’ll go and spend it all. Fahran doesn’t dare interrupt him. He’s never seen his father this happy.

They drive down Butler Avenue over to East Main and Fahran rolls his window down. They pass a Wendy’s and a McDonald’s, and the dry night wind blows through Fahran’s hair and over his right forearm. The city lights appear new and clean, and Fahran’s father is now up to a new television with a remote control, a leather couch, a motorcycle.

Fahran waits anxiously, eager to switch the conversation. He wants to get to the point where his father says, “Ask anything,” because he’s ready now. He imagines himself in Kylie’s arms in a dark place, alone, and her voice, “I’m here. I’m here,” the smell of chlorine on her summer body, and he wants to know what he must do to get there, to that place where you finally get what you want.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD MIA IS hung-over from her older sister’s going-away party the night before, so she pops her birth control pill with two aspirins and pours herself Lucky Charms and stares out the square kitchen window at the first swells of the Rocky Mountains. Late July, the time of year when the Torres house needs the air conditioning it lacks, but the high-country mornings are cool enough for her sweatpants and a faded orange Broncos shirt. Her parents sleep in the back bedroom, and Mia figures her sister is screwing her boyfriend, Elliot, one last time before saying goodbye. Unsure of what time the army recruiter is due at their house, Mia figures she has a couple hours before she waves Camila off to basic training.

Mia understands why Camila would enlist. Their father served for a number of years and used the G.I. Bill to obtain a college degree and a job as a motivational speaker. Maybe it’s the perfect time to join — hit the end of the downturn of America’s Middle East adventure and slide into a pocket of peace for twenty years and train your way to medals and rank and a nice rancher outside Castle Rock. Mia’s father smiled when Camila strolled home with the “I enlisted” news, patting her on the back with “It’s your call, honey.”

Mia sits on a worn barstool and spoons her cereal up to her mouth as her mind works, weaving together the previous night’s party. She expects to field questions, and most likely consequences. Her parents hit the tequila hard, and Mia perked up when her mother handed her a Bud Light. It’s not Mia’s favorite, but the cold drink felt good in the party heat of their basement. Five beers later she let a boy with black fingernails fondle her breasts in a downstairs closet next to a broken-down pinball machine. When she opened her eyes at the sound of the closet door, her sweating mother appeared, already in midpunch. Her mother had finished the bottle of Cuervo and missed the ducking boy, hitting a wall stud instead. Within seconds her fist began to swell. In the morning silence Mia considers the irony of her mother swinging at the preservation of a virginity that had been lost two years before on a school trip to Yellowstone.

Camila is halfway down the hall when Mia spots her and shoots a nod, but Camila refuses a return glance and glides past Mia and slips into their mother’s blue Colorado Avalanche jacket.

“Big day,” Mia says. “Could all be downhill from here.”

Camila opens the door and walks out into the clear morning.

Mia rinses her bowl and hears the floor creak. She prays it’s her father. He’ll laugh last night off, but her mother is a different monster, alternately dishing out cruelty to try to save her daughters from themselves and ignoring both of them altogether, as if she’s given up hope. Mia isn’t ready to talk about the boy in the closet — his name is Raul — and if the encounter goes the day without being addressed, it might never be, but when she turns to the sound, her mother approaches with the stern face Mia knows bodes a lecture.

“You don’t know where your sister is,” she says, blowing a toothpaste-Tequila exhalation.

“She went outside.”

“You don’t know where she is.”

“You’re asking me?” Mia says, confused. Her mother leans in.

“I’m not asking. You don’t know where she is. No matter who comes calling. You don’t know.”

“Okay. I don’t know where she is. Fine. She’s lost.”

Mia turns away, but her face tilts back toward her mother.

“Is this about the recruiter?” she asks.

Her mother hasn’t hit her in years, but Mia thinks she might. Her neck veins throb and she grabs Mia’s shoulder, hard at first, but she eases the grip. Her mouth draws tight. She has seized Mia with the injured hand.

“Your sister is an adult,” she says, flexing her fingers in and out. “She makes her own moves.” A breath. “And this is the most important part. She’s not a whore.”

In the future, during rounds of drunken remembrance, Mia will recall this moment and practice strongly worded, clever retorts, but in real time the air leaves her body and she steps back. Her mother stands, morning sober, in front of her. Her eyes lack their usual redness, her body having given up the fight against the hard stuff.

“Is this when we talk about Yellowstone?” Her father’s voice. Camila was the only person Mia told, so her father’s words float in the room a bit before Mia sucks them in. The air thickens around her mouth and nose, and her feet disappear beneath her.

“Yellowstone,” he says, wheeling into the room. “Bears and moose and boys.” He grins. He bleeds through torn touches of Kleenex along his jawline. His hands grip the gray wheelchair wheels.

“I told him the night Camila told me,” her mother says, placing her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “You should know that. It’s what parents do. He didn’t believe it until last night, when I caught you jacking off that freak in the closet.”

The room slants and Mia visualizes the shotgun in her parents’ closet, but she blanks on the case combination. She flashes to the neighborhood park where she told Camila — they were swinging in winter, and Camila playfully placed her ear on Mia’s belly; to her first period, reaching down into her pants in a Safeway bathroom.

“Have you screwed boys in my home?” her mother asks.

Mia has, twice. She stares at the beige tile floor and thinks about Camila and Elliot, the dozens of sexual sessions they’ve had in this very house, on Camila’s pink comforter under the boy-band posters, and then she wonders why she cares if her parents know — she has no moral pretense, no angel reputation, no great grades or letters of recommendation headed her way. Losing her virginity at fourteen doesn’t seem that unusual to her. She knows girls eleven and twelve years old who let the word get out. Mia senses her body folding in on itself, and she angers because she cares what her parents think, and because she still can’t think of the gun-safe combination or anything to say. Again the mental image, the surprise of brownish blood on her fingertips, of the Safeway around the corner, the area next to the checkout where her mother sniffed at a green bottle of Brut aftershave and Mia stepped out of the restroom and ran to her mother to tell her the news, and her mother, near tears, taking Mia in her arms, repeating, “My girl, my big girl,” before they walked together to the maxi pads and Mia pointed to the ones she’d seen commercials for. Was that the last time she was proud of me?