Freshwater(24)

“Listen to this,” he said, and played her some Amos Lee. Ada wrote down the name of the song and then Ewan kissed her cheek and left.

In the evening, she went to a final exhibit for a photography class because she’d modeled for one of her friends in the class and she knew Juan, another of the photography students. He was from Mexico, slim and brown and beautiful. He used to live in the house down the hill with Luka, and he burned packs and packs of India Temple incense. One evening, he and Ada had sat together and talked about how amazing it would be if either of them could play the violin. Juan had laughed and tilted his head back. “I’d just sit on my porch with a bowl of weed and play it all day, man.” He’d held an imaginary bow and moved it against imaginary strings, and Ada had wished that all of it was real, that she was on that porch with him and the music and nothing else.

At the exhibit, when they lifted up the first of Juan’s prints, Ada nearly choked. Every photograph was of Ewan.

The air around her thickened. As they placed each print on the lighted ledge, a weight began to press on her, crushing her with colors and reflections and textures. She remembered everything she thought she’d forgotten from the previous nights: the scarf around Ewan’s neck with the forest-green clover in the corner, smoke wreathing up from his mouth, the taste of it from his lips and tongue. She glanced around the room, wondering if anyone could tell how affected she was by the photographs. Ewan had left for the winter break already. He was gone, and now she was left behind, asphyxiating on his image.

Much later, I would discover that Ewan always tasted like a drug, even in his absences. But that night, it was Ada who lay on her bed in her dorm room and let the rush of him stretch out her veins. Ewan felt like a better madness to her than anything else had before. She rolled over on her stomach and pulled out her diary to write to him, since he was not there.

“I’m returning to sanity,” she wrote, “to the real world. But I will never forget how it felt to be overwhelmed by your beauty. You made me feel so alive and so right, and I know that in the real world, I will feel nothing for you and I will move on, and we’ll follow these rules because when it comes down to survival, we have to. I envy your girl, the one who holds your heart. If you ever need to take a break from this world, call me. I will come to you in a heartbeat and we will steal time.”



Ewan didn’t come back the next semester.

Ada e-mailed him through his school e-mail and, after weeks, gave up on him replying. Classes began without him, the parties thudded through the houses and he wasn’t there, and quickly enough, everything she’d felt with him stopped feeling even faintly real. You can’t really sustain a madness like that without its object’s presence. Ada soon had other problems to deal with anyway. There was Soren, and then there was me, my loud birth, the summer in Georgia, and then we all came back to Virginia. The August heat was beating through the glass windows of the school gym when Ada saw Ewan again. I was inside the marble room when I felt her heart shake and I turned my head sharply to look at him.

“Wait,” I said. “Who’s that?”

“Nobody,” she said, smiling as she said hello and walked past. “A ghost. Don’t mind him.”

I looked back at him as we walked away. “You know you can’t lie to me. Is he important?”

Ada took a deep breath. “We’ll see.”

I was curious. I went to her memories and looked up everything I needed to know. She didn’t think much of his return, that part was true. Too much had happened, too much hurt.

But that Saturday, Ada was at Gilligan’s and Ewan stopped her on the dance floor, drunk, his accent tumbling out with force.

“You’re the classiest person I’ve met at this school,” he said. “Come by the house. We’ll listen to music again.”

Ada watched the back of his head as he left. She was thoughtful. By then, she was more used to me, since we had just spent our first few months together. I liked that because with me there, it meant that she was less alone. “What do you think?” she asked me.

I didn’t even need to consider it. “Oh, I think we should go,” I said, a bit selfishly, since I just wanted to see for myself if that chemistry in her memory was the real thing, if the two of them could make it happen again. Anyone who felt like a drug was a person I was interested in. Ever since I dropped the one with the thin penis, I had been so bored. I missed having toys to play with.

A few days later, we walked down the hill to the house Ewan had moved to, up the street from Luka. Ada was nervous because she wasn’t exactly sure if she would be welcome there. Ewan had been drunk when he invited her—maybe he hadn’t meant it. At the house, the boys had just come back from practice, rackets and sweat everywhere.

“Oh god,” Ada whispered to me as we stepped through the doorway. “What am I doing here?”

“Hold on,” I said, pressing against her eyes. “There he is.”

Ewan looked up from the couch he was on and sprang to his feet, welcoming Ada with a surprised smile. He hadn’t expected her to show up but was clearly glad that she did. I watched, fascinated, as they left the house and walked to Main Street, down to the coffee shop, where he and Ada sat as she played him Nina Simone through a shared set of earphones. The mountains were tall and green around them. I sat in Ada and didn’t interfere, minding my own business for once.