You wiped your forehead with your shirtsleeve, considering. As Blue waited for an answer, innocent and quizzical, there came a swelling fondness. For Blue, and for this place. For the breeze that soothed your salty skin.
Of course I still love her, you said. But the good parts of the story are nowhere near the end.
You decided, then, to go back to the beginning.
*
You first saw Jenny on a warm evening in October.
Freshman year of college, first semester. You were seventeen years old, standing on the quad, unsure as always what to do with your body. You’d arrived at Northern Vermont University on a full scholarship—the principal at your high school had cried with the news. The kids at school had never liked you much, but you had always been good with teachers, counselors, social workers. You knew how to let them feel useful.
It was the same with your professors; you were quiet, hardworking, charming when you needed to be. You buried yourself in lectures and late study sessions, ignored your beefy roommate when he came home puking drunk. You avoided the squawking girls on your dorm hall and the other work-study students at the cafeteria. You bought a pair of glasses at the drugstore, lenses blurry with a prescription you did not need. You examined yourself in the bathroom mirror. You tried to conjure someone new.
The rest of that awful summer had passed in a haze. The baby screamed constantly, background noise, as you scooped cones and listened to the radio next to the cash register. No leads on the missing Girls. You carried those Girls with you at first: they lived and died in your memory as you waited in line at the dining hall, as you raised your hand in philosophy class. They lived and died in the shadows of the trees, as you walked from the library to your dorm in the middle of the night. You wondered if people could see those Girls on you, if you wore them visibly or just internally, like any other secret.
Everything changed, when you saw her.
Jenny sat in the grass on the quad, the late-autumn light glowing everything orange. She wore a pair of nylon pants and tall white socks—her friends cheered as she did a confident backbend, hands planted in the grass. You watched from across the yawning lawn as Jenny’s belly button arched toward the sky, the curve of her like a monument to something holy.
Right then, you made the promise. You would be normal. You would be good. You took the memories of that summer, and you balled them up, shoving them deep into the crevasse of your unruly body. The sight of her arching back would dissolve those Girls, somehow erase them. You would offer yourself up to her sly, teasing grin, her soft fawn eyes—you would hand her the microscope.
You picked up your notebook, took the first step toward her. That was the great power of Jenny: not love at first sight, but some kind of un-haunting.
This would be it. Your last and only Girl.
Hazel
2011
The night before everything changed, Hazel woke to a squeezing in her chest.
The pain was searing, clenched like an angry fist beneath her ribs. She sat up, shrieking a gasp—it was a September midnight, the sort of humid that still felt like summer, and Hazel panted into the empty vacuum of the bedroom, clutching at her chest, the flame already fading.
“Hazel?”
Luis blinked up from the pillow. The room was lit only by the baby monitor crackling from her nightstand, and Luis’s breath was stale, like sour toothpaste and the garlic chicken she’d cooked for dinner. From the street, Hazel heard nothing—their cul-de-sac was still. She’d become used to the epic hush, but nights like this, the quiet inhabited a personality of its own. Nights like this, it mocked her.
“It’s nothing,” Hazel said, massaging her sternum. “Go back to sleep.”
The feeling had already gone. It did not leave a trace—not even a lingering spasm. It was a pain that could have been imagined, the tail of a dream flicking briefly as it whipped out of sight.
*
Hazel didn’t hear her phone, buzzing from the kitchen counter.
Alma had just come home from the bus stop, and she was singing softly to herself as she untied her shoes, the tune drowned out by the tantrum Mattie was throwing from his high chair. Hazel crouched on the floor, wiping a splat of applesauce with a paper towel.
“Mattie, honey,” she begged. “Please just eat your snack.”
But Mattie only shrieked, scattering a handful of saliva-damp Cheerios onto the floor, pudgy fists banging against the plastic tray. Alma plucked a wet Cheerio from the hardwood and popped it into her mouth, grinning as she sang the tune intended to help her adapt to the first grade. The song was so catchy, Hazel had caught Luis humming it that morning as he swiped shaving cream across his jaw. We love to learn, we love to play, that’s how we do it at Parkwood Day!