She threw her cigarette into the fire. It landed a bit outside the flame, and shriveled slowly.
“I would invite you to hang out sometime, but you’re tainted now,” she said.
“Enjoy your drugs, crackhead,” I answered, showing her my teeth.
*
I don’t remember everyone coming back from the beach. It’s all snapshots. Ryder fanning his wad of bills after Micah and Chelsea and their friends left, Ryder and me sitting on the floor, leaning against one of the sofas, passing a bottle of something warm and pine-tasting back and forth. Like mouthwash made out of a Christmas tree, how his lips moved when he laughed at me saying that, how I wanted to touch the dark line between every single one of his teeth, how funny it was that spaces could be so small. To get upstairs, where I knew the food was, I had to hold on to the railing and use it to keep my spinning head from sending me backward. At the top, I saw them. Even in the darkish room, the spotlights turned to dim, I could see my brother and Marlena in the kitchen, Marlena sitting on the granite counter, the top of her body tilted toward him, her legs wrapped around his waist. Her braid had mostly fallen out and hair kept unhooking from behind her ears. Jimmy swept it back into place over and over again. I couldn’t tell what their mouths were doing. There were a million bedrooms in the house, a million walk-in closets, a million window nooks and studies, a million, trillion bathrooms. Why would they be making out there, in the plainest view? I swayed, took a few steps closer, not sure if I should stop them, feeling like it was my right, wondering if what I was seeing was what love is, two people in love, hadn’t I already learned that one of love’s side effects is turning off your fear of consequences, is making you do things you’d never do? On my way back downstairs I fell painlessly, and there were hands on me, putting me on the couch, a blanket over my chest. Outside they were talking; the wind came in through the door full of cigarette smoke. She drinks too fast, someone said, and someone else, a boy, maybe Ryder, I can never decide if she’s cute or weird-looking. Then mumbling, laughter. Marlena, I try to be nice but sometimes I’m dying to just scream, get over it already. She’s the baby of the family, Jimmy said. Or maybe it was, She’s a baby. I wanted to get up, to explain to them that it wasn’t about the divorce, it wasn’t about that at all, but the blanket was too heavy. The problem was how nothing, no one, ever, told the truth.
*
I woke up in the basement, all the lights off, my head sunk into the triangular seam where the armrest met the seat and the back of the couch. Through the French doors, now closed, the sky was timelessly dark. Basketball players as big as me dribbled a ball across the huge TV screen. Ryder was on the couch kitty-corner from mine, watching the game, sipping something from a mug.
“You can turn on the volume,” I said.
“She’s awake!”
“I’m sorry for the party foul. I hope I wasn’t a huge mess.”
“It’s fine. Marlena took care of you.”
“What time is it?”
“One oh three in the morning, and everyone is already passed out. Some party.”
“I’m not.”
Ryder fished around at the bar for something “low-key,” deciding on a fifth of Malibu that tasted the way body wash smelled. Outside it was cool enough that I was glad for my sweatshirt, but not quite cold. We passed the bottle back and forth as we walked to the beach, slipping off our shoes when the grass turned to sand. The sand against my bare feet made me shiver, and Ryder cupped my shoulders with an arm. That woke me up, but it was a funny kind of awake. I was drunk, probably, from before, plus the sugary Malibu was reactivating all the old drinks still in my bloodstream, but I felt sharp and myself underneath the alcohol. Like wearing a too-large glove and going to pick something up, how you have to navigate the extra fabric, adjust to the thing you’re wearing. I twisted away from Ryder and ran toward the lake, my feet skimming above the ground, until a wave slammed against my shins, so cold it reset my heart. I lifted my skirt and went deeper, the lake eddying around my knees, droplets and goose bumps condensing on the insides of my thighs. Far off in the distance, the lake met the sky, and that was the horizon—you could tell where it started because of stars sitting right against the water, how they weren’t wavery like the ones glinting off the waves, made of moonlight. Michigan was all lake and sky and stars, and I thought back to Marlena asking me that question about dying and still agreed with the answer I’d given. There would be beauty to drowning here, to living your whole life in this place, to never knowing the uglier world outside.
Ryder was sitting in a beached rowboat. I hoped he’d been looking at me, at the picture I made in the water, but when I reached him, climbing into the narrow boat and settling myself against his side, his expression didn’t change.
“What’s wrong with you lately?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“I won’t tell.”
“You will.”
I folded my knees to my chest and covered my bare legs with my sweatshirt. Ryder hugged me to him. How many hundreds of times had I imagined myself being touched by a boy? Especially Ryder? His body was so warm—it must have been two thousand degrees warmer than my own. It was not how I’d imagined it would be; somehow it was both better and also deeply anticlimactic. As he traced the swell of my calf under the sweatshirt I relaxed, slumping against him, letting my head tip against his collarbone. Wherever his hand went, a tingle followed, and I was delirious with the pleasure of it, being touched by someone. There was no transition between kissing and not kissing—I looked up at him as he swigged from the nearly empty bottle, his throat paper white, my teeth a centimeter away from his jugular, and then the bottle was in the sand outside the boat and he had my bottom lip in his mouth, and I had no idea what to do.