when she disappears, sober her up enough to make it home, cover for her when she’s too fucked up for school. Maia loves her, loves us both, but if she were running the show we’d probably both be dead.
“I should see if Aurora needs any help.” I move my arm in a vague gesture that I hope conveys helpfulness.
“Of course, sweetie. Come back and talk to me later.”
When Aurora sees me, she hugs me tight, and I smell her skin: vanilla and patchouli and cigarettes. She is already drunk. From the edge of her garden I can see the still-lit windows of the office buildings far below us, and past that the bay. The moon’s reflection glimmers on the sound, a silver road on dark water. When we were little Aurora and I thought that path of light would take us to some distant, marvelous country. I assume this party will be like every other one of Aurora’s parties, but that’s where I’m wrong. This is the party where we meet Jack, and nothing will be the same again.
In the telling, I want to make up some sign, but the first time I see him is only ordinary. I know right away that he’s beautiful, but there’s no violin swelling, no chorus of stage-left witches spelling out our future when our eyes first meet. He’s leaning on a crumbling stone wall. Long legs, torn jeans, a shirt worn thin enough that I can see the outline of his body through the fabric. His skin is darker than Aurora’s and seems to catch and hold the light that drifts down from the lanterns. His hair snakes in coils to his shoulders. Dreadlocked, I think, but when I get closer I can see it’s hundreds of braids. There’s a guitar next to him. A cool breeze comes up behind me and hisses in my ear. A loose half-circle of people has formed around him, holding their drinks and gossiping idly. “Come on,” Aurora says.
“Who’s that?”
“We’re going to find out.”
We sidle between a couple of dudes in high tops and flannel, identical manes of long brown hair. The boy with the guitar touches the strings, and a hush falls across the garden. And then he begins to play.
A single note, faint and sweet, travels all the way from the stars to fall lightly to earth, and then another, scattering soft as rain. His music is like nothing I have ever heard. It is like the ocean surging, the wind that blows across the open water, the far call of gulls. It catches at my hair, moves across my skin and into my mouth and under my tongue. I can feel it running all through me. It is open space and mountains, the still dark places of the woods where no human beings have walked for hundreds of years, loamy earth and curtains of green moss hanging from the ancient trees. Salmon swimming against the current, dying as they leave their eggs, birthing another generation to follow the river back to the sea. Red-gold blur of a deer bounding through the woods. Snowmelt in spring, bears lumbering awake as the rivers swell, my own body stirring as though all my life has been a long winter slumbered away and I’m only now coming into the day-lit world. As he plays the party stills. Birds flutter out of the trees to land at his feet and he is haloed in dragonflies and even the moonlight gathers around him as though the sky itself were listening. The music fills every place in my body, surges hot and bright in my chest. At last he stops. Aurora’s mouth is open, her cheeks flushed. One of the flannel shirts is weeping openly. I can’t catch my breath.
A stranger is standing beside me now, very still. He is tall and so thin he’s just a rattle of bones wired together. He’s dressed in elegant, close-cut black clothes and a long black coat despite the summer heat. He is staring at the guitar player with a fixed intensity; not the awe or sorrow marking the faces of everyone around us, but something that looks more like hunger.
“That was beautiful,” I say to him, wanting to acknowledge somehow what we’ve witnessed even though the words feel worse than inadequate. He looks down at me and nods. For a moment I think there is red fire where his eyes should be, burning in the sockets of his cadaver’s face, and I bring my hand to my mouth in shock; but he blinks, and then he is human again. I back away from him, into Aurora, and he smiles a smile with too many teeth. He looks past me, sees Aurora, and his eyes widen. That same hunger, but even more focused. He nods at me again, and then he turns away from me and walks back across the garden.
“Whoa,” Aurora says. “Do you know that guy?”
“No,” I say, shaken. Around me the party slowly comes to life again, people shaking themselves and blinking, dazed and forlorn. Aurora takes my hand and leads me closer to the guitar player. He puts the guitar away in a battered case, stands up, stretches, sees us.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Aurora says. “We’re your future. I think you should tell us everything.”
His name is Jack. He’s come here from somewhere in the South, he won’t say where, and he thinks the summers are nice here but the winters are too cold, and he’s lived all over, and he plays for money wherever he goes. Sometimes the money is good. Most of the time it isn’t. He’s here to take his chances with the big leagues, like everyone else who got off a bus downtown in the last few years. He lives in a little house in town, washes dishes all day to pay the rent, plays every night until the stars begin their long fall into sunrise, does the whole thing again. Aurora is standing like a colt, one foot turned inward. She looks at him through the white curtain of her hair, which has come loose from its knot and hangs around her like a cloud. “Come away with us.”
“Right now?” he asks. She nods. “Isn’t this your party?”
“These people,” she says, contemptuous. “They’ll be fine.”
Aurora’s too drunk. “I’ll drive,” I say. She pouts, but she gives me the keys. We roll down all the windows in her car and let the night in. He sits in the back, leans his elbows on the headrests of our seats. His mouth is inches from my ear. I take us to the park Aurora and I loved best when we were children, rolling grassy hills at the very edge of the water, next to an abandoned factory surrounded by a chain-link fence. The buildings loom alien and strange in the moonlight. We walk to the place where the grass ends in a thin strip of sand at the edge of the water. Aurora collapses gracefully. I follow, less so. He lies between us in the grass. My skin hums electric, so close to his. Some key connection shorts out in my head and my brain goes dark, neatly wiped of reason. I want to roll over and take a bite out of his shoulder. Pummel him with my fists. I can hear the beat of his heart, I swear. The fabric of his shirt whispers as he breathes. All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north. I could do anything, anything, anything, wonderful things, terrible things, all the things. Hit him, grab him, kiss him. Smell him. Eat him. Seize his hands and drag him off into the night. Put my head on his shoulder and sleep there until the sun rises and makes the world real again. Does he want to touch me? Is he trying to touch me? If he were trying to touch me he would touch me. If I moved my arm a hair’s breadth it would be touching his arm. Should I move my arm? If I moved my arm would he know it was on purpose or would he think it was an accident?
“We could live here,” Aurora says sleepily, “and never go home. We could sleep inside a velvet tent and have midnight picnics.” Jack strokes the inside of my wrist with his thumb and I nearly startle out of my skin.
“A velvet tent wouldn’t be much good against the rain,” he says. My fingers rest in his broad palm, and I feel the charge running between us.
“Wherever I go,” she says, “it’s always summer.” After that we are quiet. For the first time in my life I wish Aurora weren’t here. I wish I could straddle him, tear off his clothes. Chew away the flesh to the muscle beneath. Rip him open, take him inside. Nothing I have ever felt in my life has readied me for hunger like this. I can smell him: wood, earth, smoke. The stars wheel overhead in their quiet, orderly way. Here they’re veiled by the nightglow of the city, but you don’t have to go very far out of town before they blaze white and thick across the sky. I want to do everything, everything, everything, but I leave my hand in his and tamp all that desire into a hot coal at the center of my chest. If I never see him again I will definitely go Juliet. Knife to the chest, fade to black.
When I was smaller, sometimes I wanted my life to be normal. Mom, dad, puppy, two cars. Goldfish in a bowl. Home videos of my first steps. A baby book with my first words written down. School pictures on the fridge, brothers and sisters, curfews. Grandparents. Thanksgiving with a turkey and everyone getting too drunk and
