Jessa Marsh
“You know what this night reminds me of?” Tom’s voice is shaking already, a memory is stuck, thick in his throat. His laughter is threatening to break free of his stomach, run through his neck, break past his mouth and echo throughout the crisp air of the beach, air that is raising goose-bumps on the skin of everyone gathered around the bonfire. “In high school when Janie here wanted to be a stripper.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Because she was going to turn eighteen before graduation.” Dan laughs into his beer, his shaking wide shoulders covered by an old grey hooded sweatshirt with the high school’s mascot, a lion in red and gold, chipped and broken from seven years of washes.
“Stripper by day, student by night.” Janie said, a lazy smile spread dimple to dimple, her arms dangling over the metal beach chair, her toes so close to the fire that she occasionally draws them back from the heat.
“I think you got that a little backwards.” Janie’s cheeks are pink, not with embarrassment, but with the sun, so visibly pink and warm that if you were to touch them, if you were to graze your fingertips across the skin on the bridge of her nose, then you would absorb the heat of the late summer sun, absorb the memories made underneath that sun. Janie looks the same as she did during her senior year for the most part. Slight laugh lines have grown, as if a pinkie finger dug gently through her skin but the mark never left. The wavy brown hair hangs the way it always did, down past her collarbones, the ends of strands laying on her small breasts. Her eyes are the same dusty blue and they still look just past the person she is talking to at any particular moment, just over their heads, just past where they are standing, just out of reach.
Teenaged girls do this. They spend hours in front of the mirror, sculpting curls in their brown locks, painting their eyelids with blues that rival the waters that wash up on the beach they will go to. They spit on toilet paper, wipe off the makeup, and they start over, they create another face with cheap blush, eye-shadow, lip-gloss. With hairspray and mousse. With earrings and halter tops. With shorts and with padded bras. They give advice to the girls who are less knowledgeable about how to apply foundation or how to talk to a cute boy in their class.
“Remember the night we all got trashed on vodka at Sara’s?”
“Oh, yeah, and Sara said Janie didn’t have the guts to strip in front of a bunch of guys.” A look is shot from Janie to Sara, a recognition flashing through their eyes of the memory that is about to be presented. Oh yeah, this one again is written in blue and green irises.
“And Janie- damn near falling down drunk- starts to give us all lap-dances, stripping down to her underwear even though it was probably fifty degrees out.” Tom and Dan laugh, their faces bobbing, noses reflecting fire, eyes hid in shadow.
“Tom, remember when she got to Zach? How he wouldn’t talk to anyone afterward and he left really early?”
“Yeah?”
“The bastard came in his pants when she was dancing. She didn’t even know it. He went home because he wanted to change. He told me never to tell.”
The laughter breaks harder than the waves, drowning out the smooth constant lapping. Legs are slapped, hands placed on the bellies that have grown over abs in the past seven years, beer that was being swallowed when the punch-line was released is choked down through shaking throats, vibrating stomachs. The laughter echoed through the beach, rung out further than the circle around the fire, entering uninvited, but still pleasantly, to the living rooms of other lakefront properties, exciting in the women and men seated on sofas a calm nostalgia for the times when they too got drunk on the beach each weekend until the Michigan fall set in, when there was still a mystery left in who would go home with whom, when first kisses and one night stands were still to be had.
Now that it has ebbed, the effects of the laughter have set into everyone- they feel lightheaded, more drunk, and younger. They feel ten feet tall and unbreakable, full of the excess energy that causes teens to get drunk, naked, and sweating with the kid who sits next to them in algebra class in their basements, to kick holes in walls, to organize touch football games that always result in a sprained ankle, a broken nose. The memory has brought them back in time to a place where a thin girl with jutting shoulder blades and hipbones crawled on top of them, her skin fresh with goose-bumps, covered only with purple cotton panties, a white bra, and made them feel like they were going to be seventeen for the rest of their lives and they wouldn’t mind much.
Teenaged girls do this. Julie turns on the stereo. The speakers pour out pop music that will someday be as embarrassing as the Lisa Frank stickers of kittens and dogs with anime eyes peeling off the black plastic of the stereo. Chrissie hops onto the counter, her thighs on marble, her feet hanging over, dangling, and her face leaning toward Beth, who slowly, methodically applies foundation over the bags under Chrissie’s eyes, the only sign that the night before they didn’t sleep.
Chrissie talks while Beth does her makeup, saying “I thought that Sam really liked me. I thought we’d make it to senior prom.” And while the girls erupt into a chorus of He wasn’t good enough for you and You’ll find a hotter guy, Chrissie lets out a few of the kind of tears that only teenaged girls can muster, fat and hot, streaming down her face and creating a mudslide of brown eye-shadow, black mascara, tan bronzer. Why am I crying? she thinks, imagining him.
Chrissie closes her eyes, puts her forehead on Beth’s shoulder and she sees the look on Sam’s face when they fooled around in her basement, the door locked and the TV playing South Park reruns playing loud so that no one heard a noise. Not that I ever made a noise, she thought. She sits back up, blows her nose, wipes her cheeks, and Beth reapplies her makeup. When they are done, five pair of sandaled feet leave the bathroom, flip-flops clomping on tile floor.
Next to Janie sits Charlie, who stares with intensity at the fire, his spine straight to his shoulder blades which hunch in sharply, his body creating a makeshift obtuse angle. Conversations break off- Dan rants about how mad he is at his girlfriend for wanting to move to the city; Tom’s story of going to work still drunk from the night before; Sara remembering the time she and Janie skipped school and got their belly buttons pierced. Charlie is staring down at the embers, glowing white, blue, orange; branches breaking and falling when their middles burn too thin; watching for the sticks that pop, the leaves that crackle, and as he watches he tries not to imagine Janie, a younger Janie, a drunk Janie, a naked Janie, in some basement that reeks of pot with some guy who grew his hair too long and talked with complete sincerity about how he was going to get the fuck out of this town once he got a football scholarship at a state school. Charlie tries not to think about this guy pressing his hips against hers and the bored yawn that escapes her lips before she unbuttons the fly on his worn jeans. The images keep rising above the embers, the phoenix that ruins Charlie’s ability to enjoy the night. Janie on a couch, passed out with Dan or Tom or Jake sliding off her pants anyway. Janie being fingered under the bleachers while the cheerleaders kick and tell the team to Be Defensive! Be Defensive! Janie kneeling on the carpet of her mother’s van’s floor. Janie drunk in the girl’s room at school with one of the guys in her history class, nearly gagging while she gives him head. Janie wiping a glob of cum off her bottom lip.
Charlie does this a lot. Nearly every night, when they are at home, in between the sheets, exhausted and hot, their bodies stuck together with the glue of sweat, her voice will rise from their covers, inane pillow talk about her parents, her older brothers, her friends, high school, the parties he missed, the sights that he didn’t see. He listens, quietly, answers when required, and he seethes at the casual mentions of the party days that they didn’t share.
He fights his imagination and attempts to prevent it from conjuring elaborate scenes during all the baby talk and tickling and hypothetical questions about which of her friends he would fuck. Still, he sees the girl who used to saunter down the hallways in school, eyelids heavy and voice loud and bouncing off the lockers. He sees the quote under her senior picture, the one that he set up in the yearbook layout, that he pasted under her tan skin and her sun-bleached hair, One of the Guys! He imagines a world where the party girl never calmed down and started cohabitating a one bedroom apartment with the guy who had existed quietly in front rows of classrooms while she shouted rude comments to the teacher from the back row, her bra straps hanging off her shoulders, her lips pink with gloss, her body smelling like smoke and sweat.
Teenaged girls do this, they pile into Corollas, Escorts, and Pontiac Sunfires. They turn the radio on, loud, louder, too loud, and they drive slowly, with windows down and five off pitch voices blaring out onto the streets, slipping in uninvited to the cars next to them at stop lights. They pack into the cars, three in back, two up front, thighs touching thighs, necks craning to bring mouths close enough to ears to whisper secret jokes, bracelets jangling whenever the car lurches over a speed bump.
They turn down the radio and start a game of truth or dare while they drive. Becky dares Julie to moon the high school when she drives past and Julie laughs and hunches up to the open window, pulls down her pants and screeches. Tina snaps a photo, yells “I see London I see France I see Julie’s big fat ass!” and Julie yells “Fuck you!” but doesn’t stop laughing, starts snorting, starts choking a little, and waves her hands in front of her face, trying not to laugh, trying to breathe.
Charlie digs his beer out of the sand by his chair and drinks it slowly. It’s warm, the can covered in condensation, the bottom thick with sand. Janie occasionally reaches over and grabs his hand. For the most part, he tries to bore into himself, like an autistic kid in a crowded cafeteria, creating escape routes and tunnels to retreat into. He imagines he is watching the bonfire from a high tower buried deep within his skull. But he still feels when Janie’s fingernails trace their way along his arms, up towards the nap of his neck where she bends forward and kisses him softly. He doesn‘t see when Sara mouths What is his problem? and when Janie shrugs her shoulders, but he sees them walk towards the shore together, their bare feet creating temporary crescents in the wet sand. Regardless of the crisp air surrounding him, the voices of Janie’s friends are suffocating him. He gets up, turns his head, setting his dark brown eyes on the dunes.
Teenaged girls make up bigger dares- jump out of the car while we are driving slow; they make up bigger truths- who was the first guy that fingered you? The car gets quiet during the truths, and if they are sad answers, everyone is quiet until the girl smiles and picks the next girl- “Tina, truth or dare?” If the truth is mean, then everyone yells “You bitch” but the burn of anger in their ears only lasts for a moment, because this is Julie and Julie has been friends with them since grade school and who cares if she kissed Ed at the dance, because now she is here, and Ed isn’t worth much thought anyway.
Teenaged girls do this. They pull up to the parking lot behind the dunes, spot the older guy with beer and they shout “DARE! I dare you to kiss that guy Beth!” And they giggle, thinking “She’ll never do it. She’s way too shy.”
“Going to go get some more beer from my Jeep, guys.”
“Okay Char.” Tom mumbles, waiting for Charlie to walk far enough away that his ears won’t pick up the noise of his voice. As soon as that distance is achieved, Tom breathes a sigh, shakes his head, and starts to speak.
“I am so glad Charlie is gone. I have to tell you a story about Janie that would have him totally freaking out.”
Dan laughs a little, a chuckle, shifts his weight to the edge of his seat, waiting for the story.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Well, did I ever tell you about the time that Janie blew Ryan?”
“No. I heard a rumor, but I thought it was the urban legend of our grade. She didn’t seriously?” Heads bob back and forth from the shore, where Janie and Sara stand, to the dunes, where Charlie is.
“She did. And he told me all about it. So one day Ryan is at work at the pizza place. He was the only one there because the manager didn’t show up that day. He had a key, so he opened the store. And he’s still the only one in there when Janie comes in to order a pizza.”
“Uh oh,” mumbles Rebecca. “I remember this story- keep in mind this was two days after Mike broke up with her for that slut Ann. She wasn’t herself.”
“Bullshit she wasn’t herself. Janie is wild,” Tom interjected. “Anyway, at least let me tell the damn story.
“So she walks in, and according to what Mike said, she was looking pretty drunk, already, even thought it was probably around three in the afternoon.”
“That’s Janie for you,” Dan nodded his head as he spoke.
“So he’s just shooting the shit with her for a while, ignoring the phones. No one else is there, and after a bit she starts getting really flirty, saying how cute he is and all that.”
“Ew. Ryan, cute? I beg to differ.” Rebecca laughed, “Didn’t he have a harelip?”
“No, that was Ryan Bradford. I’m talking about Ryan Jewell. Let me finish. Jesus.
“After a few minutes she leans right over the counter and asks Ryan to kiss her, which he does. She tastes like whiskey. And then she pulls herself over the counter, goes to the other side, where she immediately starts pulling down his pants. He’s just standing there while she starts blowing him, and just about as soon as she starts this guy comes in and orders a pizza.
“So Ryan is trying to keep his cool, not make any sex noises or faces while talking to this guy. But Janie doesn’t even notice, just keeps going down on him, giggling every once in a while, and Ryan sees this guy looking around to see where the giggling was coming from.”
Teenaged girls do this. They laugh at the face Beth makes when she sees the man in his Jeep, sitting in the open hatch, his eyes closed and his hands wrapped around a beer.“But he’s so oooooold!” Beth says, shaking her head.“He’s not that bad looking though. Maybe he’ll give us beer if you kiss him. You never know,” Julie says, nodding, egging Beth on.“Fine, fine. I’ll kiss him. Then I’ll give you the worst dare in history.”Beth walks towards the Jeep, her flip-flops clomping on the cement of the parking lot.
The Corolla pulls up, music blaring, giggling mingling with bass, guitars. Charlie pulls his beer to his lips and watches from the corner of his eyes as girls pile out. He imagines Sara and Janie. He imagines himself at seventeen, slightly overweight, the acne that didn’t clear up till two years ago. I’d probably be at home now, sitting in the living room with my grandmother, watching Wheel of Fortune while Janie got smashed and gave a blow job to one of her friends he thought.
It happens quickly, more quickly than any first kiss that Charlie has ever had. A girl, her brown hair dried out from chlorine and sun, her eyes dark with eye shadow and eyeliner, her lips slightly chapped, her hipbones jutting out above the jeans she wears with just a bikini top, breaks from the pack of girls and asks for a sip of his beer. He concedes and as soon as she swallows a mouthful of the beer she asks his name.
“I’m Char-” And that quickly she’s up on her tiptoes, her lips on his, her tongue darting in his mouth, her arms around his neck. He, for once, doesn’t think, and kisses back hard until one of the other girls coughs and her face pulls away.
“Well, nice meeting you,” she says. They run off to the beach, laughing, pushing each other, looking back at the older guy in his Jeep, alone with a beer in a parking lot. When they walk down the beach, past the fire, they laugh and wave at the group around the bonfire, mocking the old high school T-shirts and sweaters, yelling “Go Lions!” with pep-rally voices.
“Are they making teenaged girls hotter now?” Dan says, his eyes faraway, as if he’s just realized now that he’s officially too old to be visible to girls that young.
“Dan, we haven’t even had our ten year reunion yet. Isn’t that a bit premature?”
“What is premature?”
“The woe-is-me-they-make-better-toys-nowadays stuff.”
Charlie, his hands in his pockets, walks back, his arms empty.
“Charlie, where is the beer?”
“Oh, I forgot,” His cheeks turn pink and he turns around sharply, heading back to his car.
Voices hush while Charlie leaves. Eyes burn into his back.
“What the hell is wrong with that kid?” Tom shakes his head, recalling a Charlie that he had known in second grade, one who cried in the boys’ bathroom because he didn’t make it to the urinal, refusing to wear the spare pants that the office offered, just waiting in the bathroom until his mother came to pick him up.
“He’s fucking weird.”
“What do you think he was doing up there?”
“Jerking off?”
“No way. A guy like that doesn’t get erections.”
“Sure he does. Just to really neat elevator music.”
“Especially when the saxophone kicks in.”
“Oh, yeah, soft jazz gives him a chubby.”
“Soft jazz gives who a chubby?” Janie and Sara have walked up, the soft sand hiding the sound of their footsteps.
“Your boyfriend.”
“Oh shut up and leave him alone. He’s just a little awkward with you guys.”
“He’s awkward with everyone,” Sarah mumbled.
“No, he’s awkward with you guys because you were all jerks to him in high school,” Janie said, slumping into her chair. “I just wish you’d all give him a fucking chance. You know, it’s hard enough for me to find a guy in this town who doesn’t instantly think I’m a giant slut because of high school. I don’t need you all poking fun at him just because he was the shy kid when you all were doing keg stands and barely avoiding alcohol poisoning.”
“Jesus, Janie,” Sara sighed, “The kid is a walking social anxiety disorder. He’s begging for it.”
“But at some point, don’t we have to become old enough that it is just embarrassing to do this routine any longer. For fuck’s sake, we are in our mid-twenties already. At some point I’m not going to be party-girl Janie and Charlie isn’t going to be the nerd anymore. And I’m okay with that. But what are you all going to be- still working for your dad’s and in hardware stores on Main Street? Are you okay with that?”
“Hey babe.” Charlie is back, a case of beer in his hand, an uncharacteristic smile on his face, as if they had traded personalities- Charlie the brave, cool, collected one; Janie the shy, scared one judging everyone with each word uttered around the bonfire. He leans down over her chair, kisses her on the top of her head, and a quick flash of that Janie smile crosses her lips. I wonder if this is what they are really like, Sara thinks at the sight. I wonder if this how they are at home. She imagines Charlie and Janie behind closed doors, without a crowd of strangers staring, laughing, remembering all the things that must get under Charlie’s skin.
“Hey sweetie. Where were you?”
“Getting beer.” He sits in his chair, drops the case of the beer on the sand, and reaches his hand over to Janie, takes her hand in his. “Wanna go home soon?”
“Sounds good.”
Teenaged girls do this. They wait until the crowd of older people leave and then they wander over, looking into beer cans, holding them up to their eyes, to see if anything is left. They share a stolen bottle of Boone’s Farm from Julie’s older sister’s room, each one wiping the rim with her sleeve before drinking. They talk, quiet, slow, about college, which school has the best parties, which school is the easiest to get in, how much cheaper it would be to stay home, to go to the community college. They sit on the rocks that surround the dying embers of the abandoned bonfire, and they are quiet, still, when they think of how exhausting the future sounds.
–
Jessa Marsh is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Word Riot, decomP, Storyglossia, PANK, and Knee-Jerk. She is the web editor of Monkeybicycle.