“He’s making up for something.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My father did the same thing. Except it was fish instead of guns. He was always off on his boat. Then he drowned at the Banks, because he went out in a storm when he shouldn’t have. My mom says it was because of the fish. But the guy just did whatever the hell he wanted. We got evicted from our apartment, and my mom was on tranquilizers for over a year. He never thought about what it would do to us.”
The wind blew harder, and the pamphlets Marshall was supposed to be handing out began to fall over the edge. Loo and Marshall watched them go, the paper spiraling to the ground, then Marshall snatched the rest and stood. He wound up like he was throwing a baseball and pitched the whole bunch of them off the boulder. The pamphlets unfolded in the air, taking flight in the breeze. Some dropped onto the grass, some got caught in the branches of a maple tree and some blew across Dogtown and were eventually shredded by birds and chipmunks and squirrels and groundhogs and used to line burrows and nests.
Marshall was breathing hard, his body blocking the sun.
“Finish the picture,” Loo said.
“I’m out of paper.”
Loo put her head back down on her folded arms. She pulled her T-shirt up so that her lower back was uncovered. The space just above the belt of her jeans. The place Marshall had his hand before. “You can draw on me,” she said and then she closed her eyes. She did not want to see his face if it was saying no.
A flock of geese passed overhead. She could hear them honking.
“What should I draw?” he asked.
“How about Neptune,” she said. Every muscle in her body was now on alert. A chill spread across her skin. Loo realized this was what she had been thinking of since she woke up and felt his hand slip away. She’d been looking for a reason to make him touch her again.
The pen was like a needle being traced along her skin. Marshall started in the middle of her spine, hesitant but soon pressing harder, sliding carefully over each vertebra. The lines went up her back and then began to spread out, first in one direction and then in the other. He drew Neptune and Saturn and then the rest of the planets. He pushed up her sleeve for a cluster of stars, then pulled open the neck of her shirt to draw an asteroid. He crawled over, the weight of him brief against her legs, and then the pen began tracing the side of her ribs.
“Try not to breathe for a second,” he said.
Loo pressed her forehead against the stone. There were flecks of mica and quartz embedded in the rock, catching the sun. She stared directly at these tiny points of light, until she felt her body start to come loose beneath his pen. An unsettling sense of vertigo flooded her mind, just as it did whenever she stretched out on her roof at night and stared at the stars for too long, her body spinning upward into the depths of a velvet sky, until up was no longer up and down was no longer down and she wasn’t a single, tiny, insignificant being anymore but the entire earth, hurtling through space, tilting past comets and meteors and blocks of ice that fractured into crystals and left streaks behind in the darkness. Then this understanding began to slip away from her, and she fell back into herself, until she was nothing but a girl stretched out on a hunk of rock with a pen pushing against her ribs.
And then even the pen was gone.
Marshall shifted back onto his knees. He put a hand on either side of her waist, his fingertips below her shirt, his palms along the edge of her jeans. He bent down and started blowing, drying the ink. His breath came out in a stream, cool and direct, following her spine and then circling her skin, until the lines were set. She felt his lips hovering, and then they came together and kissed the base of her spine.
“I’m finished,” Marshall said. Then he pulled her shirt down over the drawing.
—
BY THE TIME they left the woods the sky was turning dark. Loo eased the Firebird out of the parking lot and drove slowly past the edge of Dogtown. Her lips were swollen and her cheeks were scratched from the stubble on Marshall’s face. She’d thought she’d known everything about him, so it was surprising that he even had stubble, or that his body could find so many ways to cover hers. All she had done on the rock was turn over, his kiss still warm on her back, and everything else had followed. Now they sat beside each other in the car grinning, as if they’d been caught for something they were not sorry for and would gladly do again.
Marshall had not taken his hands off her. As they climbed down from the rock, as they made their way through the forest, he kept touching her arm, her wrist, her neck, her waist, and then apologizing, and then touching her again. His hand was tucked underneath her leg now, his thumb pressing the outer seam of her jeans.
“I don’t even know your name,” said Marshall. “I mean your real name.”
“It’s Louise.”
“Really?” he said.
“My dad was the one who started calling me Loo. I think he wanted me to be a boy.”
“Come on. Loo is nice.”
“You’re just saying that.”
Marshall rolled down the passenger side window, and in an instant he had pulled his body halfway through, his feet on the seat, his butt on the sill, his upper body wrapped around the metal frame of the car. He knocked on the windshield. The car sped along and he started screaming her name.
“Looooo-ooooo-ooooo-oooo!”
He flattened his nose against the glass, his shirt flapping behind him like a flag. Then he crawled inside again, his hair wild, his face flushed red, and pressed the back of his cold fingers against her neck.
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re pretty.”
“I’m not,” said Loo, though it thrilled her to hear someone say so.
Marshall tucked his shirt back into his pants. He tied his tie and pulled the knot close to his throat. And then his hand was sneaking back across the seat, tapping her belt, slipping around her waist. Loo had never felt so happy. And then she looked in the rearview mirror and saw the lights.
The police car had been following them for a block, maybe two. The siren wasn’t on but the red-and-blues were flashing. Loo slowed and pulled to the right, hoping that the driver would go around, but instead the squad car stayed close, and when she came to a stop at the side of the road, it parked right behind the Firebird, high beams flooding the interior.
Loo rolled down the driver’s side window, then slid her hands to the top of the wheel to 10 and 2. In the side mirror, she watched the policeman get out and slowly move alongside the Firebird, checking the backseat with a flashlight, a hand on his gun holster. He was close to her father’s age, his hair cropped short and his uniform tight.