“This is the longest light in town,” she says, adjusting her helmet. She looks at the grass, which is so dry it’s turned a sickly yellow and crunches underfoot. When it finally rains the trees will fall, people say; there’ll be dead trees strewn everywhere. Beads of sweat well up behind her knees and in the crux of her elbow, improbable places. Finally the man lights up and she gets her pedals into position and pushes off. What scares her about riding bikes is falling—she’s terrified of falling. Other people seem to be okay with the possibility of injury.
When they reach the narrow path, Terry pulls his bike in front of hers abruptly and stops to let a man pass, her front tire bumping his back.
“Big tough guy,” he says, when the guy’s out of earshot.
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
“That guy’s walk.”
“Do you have a tough-guy walk?”
“If you have a walk like that they’ll see you coming,” he says. “You don’t ever want them to see you coming.”
They arrive at the free area where all the dogs are, where people drink beer and only wade out into the water to pee. Darcie misses the three-dollar area, where there’s water deep enough to swim laps. She can see it through the chain-link fence: still green water, people with their colorful noodles and floats.
She spreads their towels on a rock, carving out a little area among all of the other towels, and then sits and opens her magazine. Terry opens his Four Loko and leans back on his elbows, watching her. She can’t concentrate with him watching but she doesn’t look up—she wants to pretend she is self-sufficient, that she would be okay here alone. She reads an article about a man who found a lamp shade made of human skin after Katrina. He sold it at a yard sale and that person sold it to someone else until a journalist got ahold of it. The journalist discovered that a Nazi officer’s wife had a fetish for things made of human skin—she particularly liked to make things out of skin that had been decorated with pretty tattoos. Darcie considers telling Terry about it but doesn’t. He would say he already knows. In prison he read The Diary of Anne Frank four times. In prison he read constantly, everything he could get his hands on, and he hasn’t opened a book since.
“I’m going down the water slide,” he says, taking a long drink. The water slide is a little concrete ditch where the water pours in, but it’s so low the kids have to use their hands to push themselves out. He doesn’t move. She goes on reading her magazine. After a few minutes, one of his friends shows up, a girl named Amber. Wherever they go, he has friends. They’re mostly girls—girls he went to high school with, girls his friends dated, girls who skateboard, girls who are friends with his sister. No matter how many Darcie meets there are always more, and nearly all of their names begin with the letter A—Allison and Alex and Andrea and Anna—and now this Amber, a pretty, ageing blonde unfurling her towel in the spot in front of them.
“This is my girlfriend, Darcie,” Terry says. They shake hands and say it’s nice to meet you and then Amber goes back to her towel and takes off her shoes with her feet. She steps out of her skirt and pulls her shirt over her head. She’s too thin, with colorful tattoos blooming across her chest.
Terry asks about Amber’s boyfriend and she says he’s a great father but a terrible partner—they’re splitting up—and then she’s telling Darcie how he got her hooked on drugs.
Amber gives her the whole story—how they smoked crack on their first date and he said she smoked like a choo-choo train and then they were smoking every day and shooting heroin, too. Darcie looks at the dark lenses of Amber’s sunglasses, glad she can’t see her eyes.
Amber says she’s been sober since the day she found out she was pregnant. Her boyfriend came home and she told him she was carrying his baby and they flushed the crack rock down the toilet together. She was never a crack whore, she tells them, gathering her fine hair into a ponytail. She was almost a crack whore but her boyfriend manned up. She gives Darcie the rundown of getting sober—sleeping for seventy-two hours, shitting herself—and says she still dreams of drugs. In the dreams, she can never get high.
“I dream I’ve got a needle as big as Terry,” she says, “but I can’t find a vein or all my veins are collapsed.” She mimics trying to stick this Terry-sized needle into her neck, lifts one of her legs as if to scout out a vein there. “Or I dream a gigantic cartoon crack rock is chasing me.” She pumps her arms and looks behind her to see if the rock is gaining. Darcie is reminded that she doesn’t fit into Terry’s world, that she doesn’t fit anywhere except maybe at home with her parents, but she doesn’t fit there either. Not anymore. She digs around in their backpack for the other Four Loko. She hates the taste but it has 12 percent alcohol and she can easily get a buzz off half a can.
Amber finishes her story, tightens her ponytail, and situates herself. Darcie watches as she lifts her hips into the air to adjust her towel, and then she watches Terry stand and wade out into the water. He cups his hands and pours the water over his head, rubs it into his face.
On their way home, they stop at Shady Grove. Terry doesn’t want to spend the last of their money on beer when they could buy eggs and tortillas, but she insists. They sit at the bar and she orders a Blue Moon with a lemon while he drinks ice water. They look around at the other diners, mostly overweight tourists and old people at this hour.
Halfway through her beer, the lights go out. Everyone’s quiet for a moment and then they’re loud. Darcie’s excited that they’re finally going to witness a rolling blackout—it feels like the beginning of something, the thing she’s been waiting for. She wonders if they have power at home and then she’s thinking about the tall Mexican candles and the box of Popsicles in their freezer. She imagines standing on the street corner, handing them out to passersby.
She looks around at the other diners, the waitstaff—all of them looking around as if they are finally able to see each other, as if they are finally allowed to look.
“I like to call them roving blackouts,” she says. “It sounds like an eye in the sky, like somebody watching.”
“It’s technically correct,” Terry says, and then he starts talking to a man at the end of the bar and before long a man at a table tells them it’s a squirrel, that a squirrel has chewed through a power line and this blackout may last awhile, until they can string a new line.
At home, Terry takes a joint out of his wallet and presses it into her hand. “Should we smoke it?” he asks.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Amber gave it to me.”