Invincible Summer(53)

Not that I know what’s in mine.

But it’s not this.

I walk around town a lot, just to get away from the silence and the ocean. I walk past where I used to work and go inside and buy some chocolate turtles. I really hope, for some rea-son, that it will be Joanna working the register. I can imagine it’s a million years ago and I’m staring at her ass while she bends over to refill the drawers with fudge.

The girl who serves me a quarter pound of chocolate marshmallow doesn’t look anything like her. I sit outside in the sun and eat it, slowly. I’m thinking about Melinda even though I don’t want to. It’s that I don’t even know how to think about her anymore. The sex, not liking the sex, not needing the sex, all feels like something that touched a very different person. It’s hard to imagine having sex. I guess I’ll have it in college. I wonder if it’ll hurt.

I can’t really hear the ocean from here, but I imagine it’s there. I convince myself that what I think is the wind is actually the ocean, and it’s whispering.

I go out farther into the outskirts of the town where the vacationers don’t go. The speech therapist’s office was around here, but their office has closed. The city has started redoing some of the buildings, and it’s funny how much I feel for the ones that are still unfixed, the ones that look old and run-down. They’re not; they were fine last year, but they look old in comparison to their new and shiny neighbors. Like they were formed from driftwood.

I hate myself for feeling this way. It’s just that, it turns out, I was right all along. There’s nothing that’s happened to us that these summers can’t explain. I’ve lived a life of sun and sand and Camus and ocean, for better or for worse, and it wasn’t always perfect but it was always sub-stantial. That’s a life that’s not really here anymore. Even looking back, everything I did and thought was important feels stupid. Writing my name in the sand. Playing tag with Claudia. Tossing a Frisbee with Shannon. What the hell was the point of any of it, in the long run? It was all just to lead me here.

I read my age in the faces I recognized without being able to name them. I merely knew that they had been young with me and that they were no longer so.

The people I associate as being my age couldn’t be older than fifteen. I want to tell them not to work at the Candy Kitchen.

There are houses here, farther from the beach, that have lawns and wind chimes and such, like they are actually places to live. I take my time to walk by them, walk through their yards. I imagine them watching me through their windows and wondering what the f*ck I’m doing.

The sun gets really annoying after a few days of malcontented wandering, especially since I’ve been refusing sunscreen. I don’t know why. I can’t stand the smell, I guess. Claudia’s been applying it so liberally that most of her spray tan is gone, as if the SPF will protect her from other things.

If I had lifescreen or suckscreen or deathscreen, I would give it to Claudia, no question. Claudia or Lucy. Lucy’s small.

Maybe they could share a bottle. Noah wouldn’t take it from me, and at this point I’m not sure I should protect Noah from anything. After all, wouldn’t that just be robbing him of his education?

Our favorite sno-ball place is having a sale. Two for one.

Sno-balls are like sno-cones except that they’re a million times better and only served here. Noah and Claudia and I used to all get different flavors, and we’d stand in a circle and spoon out bits of ours—I’d give mine to Noah, he’d give his to Claudia, she’d give hers to me. By the end we all had a little bit of each other’s, as Claudia’s would sneak its way onto my spoon before I could pass mine on to Noah, and Noah’s would sneak onto hers, and we mingled.

These kids are all jumping up and down in front of it.

Maybe they’re about nine years old. Their bathing suits are shiny but grimy with sand. Water is pooling in their ears, making it hard for them to hear. Every once in a while, one of them will shout, “What?”

Laughter’s absolutely pouring from their baby mouths.

I stuff my hands in the pockets of my jeans—no bathing suit for me—and walk away. I don’t know what I was expecting to find here. Everything here suggests the horror of dying in a country that invites one to live.

I get to the playground, where Noah and I once screamed about speech therapy. And he’s there, sitting on one of the swings, scraping his heels in the dirt.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

“Looking for you.” He reaches out and touches my arm.

I don’t know what to say. Noah and I haven’t talked much since we’ve been here. We’ve barely even touched in months, since the funeral, where we were overheated twins in our black jackets, the arm of my suit glued to the arm of his.

I say, “Did you want me to pick up something for dinner?”

“No, Chase. Goddamn it. I wanted to talk to you.”

I breathe out slowly and tilt my head farther and farther back, slowly. My eyes are full of sky.

I say, “Talk about what?”

“The year.”

I hate the year.

“How have you been?” he says, softly.

We talked every day, but we never said anything of consequence. He told me about the physics they were using in his classes, I told him about my unsurprising decision to choose, like him, a school close to home. We talked about Lucy’s teeth coming in. And Camus.