That was the summer we spent lovesick, drinking screwdrivers in the kitchen at two in the afternoon, our hands shaking by dark. We were college roommates and then just roommates and then something else. Our dishwasher was stocked full of the coffee mugs we used for our liquor. The handles chipped by July. We cut our thumbs and bandaged them and kept drinking.
We were formerly Most Likely to Succeed, formerly Homecoming Queens, girls once guaranteed to melt even the strictest mother’s heart, girls who kept their K-12 report cards in plastic binders. We came home by curfew, parallel-parked, didn’t go too far because nice girls don’t. Our fathers held us by the shoulders on graduation night and said they were proud, so proud, their shirtsleeves blooming dark with sweat, and we let them struggle for different words.
In Morgantown we had an apartment by the river, dark and full of soft water sounds, and we slept in every morning until eleven. We didn’t call our parents or remember to take out the trash. When we were still undergraduates, we stacked our dishes in the sink until we were forced to drink cereal from shot glasses, but we were older now, twenty-two, eager to take up the entire world in our thin arms. This was a test. This was a reckoning, an adventure. We stuck bills to the refrigerator with magnets, hoped desperately to remember.
We were five-seven in bare feet, and we were always in bare feet. The kitchen floor grew sticky under our toes. We leaned against kitchen cabinets to talk, swung skinny hips against silverware drawers and dishwasher doors. Sometimes our hands grazed and other times we sat laughing on the floor, someone’s arms around someone’s waist, always joking, always a joke. We took photos in the living room, someone curled on the couch like a model, stretching out her hands toward the camera. Our negatives came back overexposed.
That was the summer we slept in the same bed when we were afraid of the broken lock, and when we were afraid of the dogs outside, and when we felt alone. We woke in the morning with our legs tangled, our hands in each other’s hair. We dressed without comment. At lunch we did not mention cold feet, warm breath, soft skin. We ate our soup while it was too hot to taste. We circled job listings in the Dominion Post, held the red pen in our mouths, accidentally stained our teeth with ink like blood. Our applications went unanswered. Our diplomas languished in the closet behind the ironing board, a collection of things we hadn’t figured out how to use.
We were guaranteed good times, the girls who came to parties at exactly the right moment, who never stumbled in their cheap heels. We knew how to lick the salt from margarita glasses. When we were undergraduates, we cultivated a circle of people who believed in our legend. We came as a set. We left as a set. There was no room for anyone else.
In Morgantown we stopped buying groceries when the money ran out and survived on leftovers from our mothers. They sent us worried notes, first class mail: Are you okay? Dad hasn’t heard from you for weeks. You know you can always come home. The lasagna rotted in the fridge because we were afraid to eat it and be hungry again. We forgot to call our sisters on their birthdays and forgot to call our grandmothers on their anniversaries and forgot how to speak on the phone at all. Our tongues were dead birds. We kept our teeth together so no one could see.
That was the summer we were first alone, when all of our friends moved to cities visible on children’s maps of America.
We were formerly Most Likely to Get Paid, formerly spelling bee queens, girls who knew how to get blood out of wool skirts, girls who kissed boys well and hard and often. We were lost without our plastic trophies. We sold our skirts at consignment shops so we could go to Kroger.
In July, we smashed the tumblers and swore never to drink again. In this brief, panicked sobriety, we went out to a concert as two and came back as three, one of us exiled for the first time to the sagging futon. There was a sound of hands from under the bedroom door. There was a razor in the sink the next morning, an aftershave smell in the air. No way around it. We split the difference, avoided each other’s eyes, were finally you and me.
That was the summer we watched movies every night until we didn’t, shared clothes until we didn’t, smoked cigarettes behind the fire escape until we didn’t. The phone rang and you started answering, dragging the cord over the hallway, sat whispering into the handset as if that made it secret. On Friday nights and Monday nights and then every night the bedroom door stayed closed, the light inside hazy and sweet. I couldn’t remember the smell of your hair.
We were on the mailing lists for People and Glamour and New York Magazine and papered our living room with fashion spreads. We left torn pages as truces under each other’s pillows. Emma Watson held her arms open to us. Ellen Page just wished we could talk like we used to. Carey Mulligan tossed her hair, said You’re always so busy, said Don’t let me stop you from having a good time.
The mall wasn’t hiring but the shops on High Street were, and we got jobs with all the wrong hours. I worked in a specialty food store, ringing up wine and German cookies more expensive than everything I was wearing, and I thought every shadow in the doorway was you. The air conditioning only worked at the highest setting. I couldn’t be heard. I screamed over it until I was deaf and raw and the manager came over to tell me to take a break, smoke a cigarette or two.
That was the summer I sat in the parking lot and cried into my knees and then never again. I was made of rock salt and stale chocolate. I was bitter to the touch.
At lunch we ate our soup in silence when it was too cold to taste. We did not mention stray touch, late night, closed door. Sometimes our hands grazed, and this was an accident, and sometimes our eyes met, and this was an accident too.
In Morgantown the students moved in during the second week of August when it was still humid, the sweat running down our spines, the fans aimed at our throats. We had jobs we hated and kept them because there were no other jobs, not with thirty thousand undergraduates around, and I learned to say the names of every Italian cake I sold. We paid our rent on time for the first time since June. Our mothers called and we answered, we listened to their worry. Well, okay, they said. But what will you do next?
That was the summer that began by the river and closed with you carrying boxes out to the car, where he was waiting. You weren’t leaving, you said. Well, maybe you were leaving a little. But you’d just be on the other side of the river, in an apartment with bright windows and slick cats. It was so exciting, being in love, you said. Knowing there was someone at home waiting for you, their arms aching for your weight. How had you lived so long without it?
We were formerly college roommates, then just roommates, then something else. This was a reckoning, an adventure. This was a test we were failing. I made a drink in your favorite mug and swallowed it whole while you checked the back seat for loose paper and possible projectiles. I squinted at the sun. I threw the mug down the road at his car as you drove away, pitched just like a grenade. The china exploded. The birds exploded from the trees. Some valve in my heart exploded too.
That was the summer we were formerly nice girls, formerly legendary girls. We slept in the same bed when we were afraid of the broken lock or when I needed to be close to you, breathing your hair like a drug. At lunch we did not mention the vagaries of touch, the implications of sleep. We came as a set, we left as a set. There was no room for anyone else on the double mattress, not when we held each other like that.
In Morgantown I sold good wine to your boyfriend and thought every shadow in the doorway was you. That was the summer it wasn’t summer anymore, when you took your soup cans and red heels and went somewhere else, took your sweet soap smell and soft neck, the corners of your mouth. We were something else. I stood in the road watching you leave me. And even afterward, when it was just me and the patient sound of water, I could not look away.
Nina Sabak lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Collision, Three Rivers Review, Plain China, and the Pittsburgh City Paper’s Chapter & Verse. She has also published a chapbook of poetry, Naming the Mountain, through the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.