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twenty-one and over.

Over mussels at Bar Americain in Mohegan Sun of all places Meg and Lisa decide that what I really need to do this summer is write the next 50 Shades of Grey and get rich enough to take us all on a cruise. “Also you can buy a mansion,” Lisa says. Earlier we were drinking Stoli Raz but now we are drinking something else Raz, which the waitress says is better. “The house that porn built.”

It’s Lisa’s birthday so we order chocolate cream pie and more cocktails and look out the window trying to guess which girls are hookers. There’s a bach party across the restaurant and everyone at it has bright blue hair. I’ve never been to Mohegan Sun before and I wonder if it’s a thing you do for fun in central Connecticut, just another Saturday night: downstairs a bull-riding event is breaking up and people start to wander in wearing plaid and cowboy hats, boots clicking across the marble floor. In the middle of the casino is a sculpture by Dale Chihuly. We get catcalled by two men wearing crowns made out of balloons. We share a cab back to the hotel with two wasted girls who turn out to have gone  to my high school; they drunkenly namedrop my eleventh-grade precalc teacher while the hulking neon complex recedes in the distance, everything gone suddenly dark.

“I’d need a pen name,” I say eventually, considering. I wonder who in the world I might be.

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just a whisper of smoke

In her car on the way to an Alison Krauss concert E, who has read nearly everything I’ve worked on in the last two years, says: “Do you actually feel all that stuff? The stuff you write about?” We’ve gotten lost once already–E and I are constantly getting lost, all wrong turns and wrong trains and glancing over our shoulders with confused looks on our faces– and she peers down at the map on her phone, frowning. “I’ve been wanting to ask you that.”

I think about it for a moment as Connecticut whooshes by outside the window, green and fresh. On the train to New Haven all the trees had exploded candyfloss pink. “Yeah,” I tell her finally. I think of that line from Jonathan Safran Foer, the one about beavers needing to file their teeth down to keep them from growing into their faces and killing them.  “Basically I do.”

“My God,” she says. E and I are freakishly similar in taste and temperament, to the point where we are routinely discovering that we have purchased the same articles of clothing on the same day, but this is a point where we diverge fast and sharply, two-roads-in-a-yellow-wood-style. “Isn’t that exhausting?”

“Sometimes,” I admit, because sometimes it is. I don’t know how other people do it, though: how they wrestle their feelings into submission without turning them into a story complete with mood and moral, without clawing for that distance between first person and third–or if maybe other people’s feelings just don’t require quite so much desperate wrestling as mine do. Maybe other people just, like. Feel things a normal amount and move on. “Every once in awhile.”

E is putting her makeup on in the rearview mirror by this point, driving a bit with her knees. “Sorry,” she says, when she catches me watching. “Let me know if you feel, like, unsafe.”

I hesitate for a minute, confused, then burst out laughing. “Oh!” I manage, shaking my head. “For a second I thought you meant, like. Emotionally.”

E throws her head back, cackling. “I mean,” she says, around a giggle. “Let me know that, too.”

At the concert there’s a banjo and a fiddle, some of the loveliest voices I’ve ever heard. I sit in my chair with my knees pulled up to my chest and listen. I got into Alison Krauss in college, Restless on repeat and the soundtrack to everything I wrote the fall of my senior year. I worked like a demon that semester, slamming words upon words upon words down onto the page, a notebook in my shoulder bag and a song inside my head. Five years later, eyes squeezed shut and thoughts stumbling, my fingers scrabble restlessly for a pen.

I think it’s okay, the amount that I feel things. I think it means there will always be more story to tell.

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i would like to think that you’d know your way

i like new purple pens for editing 

i like kate’s super rad awesome blog

i like listening to old jason mraz songs on my ipod and walking through the common with my sunglasses on, 2006-style

i like titanic in 3d and anyone who doesn’t can suck it

i like that marissa is going to be washing up on my rocky shore any day now

i like that it is time to apply to grad school really really for real

i like bacon that comes in resealable packages

i like barack obama

i like your mom

i like a new pencil skirt and turquoise flats

i like a five-year plan

i like imagining something different

i like eric hutchinson, hugely dorky emerson alum

i like solving mysteries

i like not solving them too

 

(tell me what you like today.)

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Fiction: Up Late, Listening

People who wander in and order shots at last call on a Wednesday tend to be the kind of people who a) don’t tip or b) puke all over the hardwood, so when the messy-haired guy in the denim jacket slides onto a stool and orders a Jameson, Georgia can’t hold back her grimace.  She’s on her own tonight–Connor knocked off early to meet the hipster girl he’s dating way the hell out in Far Rockaway–and it wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to dodge a drunken game of grab-ass courtesy of the clientele. “We’re closing up, cowboy,” she says in what Mal used to call her don’t screw with me voice, sliding the heavy-bottomed glass down the end of the bar. “So you gotta drink fast.”

“Will do,” he says, and smiles–fast and fleeting and gone. The Christmas lights strung up above the bar flicker pink and green across his pretty face. Georgia’s surprised—first because last-call whiskey-drinkers are not, as a general rule, big smilers, and second because she’s sure as shit seen this particular expression before.

Georgia blinks. For a second she thinks she might know him from home in New Jersey, or the year and a half she spent at college upstate: she slept with a lot of faceless boys right after the accident, all Abercrombie and unwashed sheets. It’s even possible–oh, God—that he’s some old friend of Mallory’s, and she’s wondering how in the hell she’s going to break the news after all this time, when he shifts his weight on the barstool, heartbreaking and familiar, and Georgia realizes she recognizes him from the posters that used to plaster the walls of her bedroom.

“Holy crap,” she blurts, then barks out an idiotic-sounding laugh and claps a hand over her mouth. Somewhere in the universe, her thirteen-year-old self is having a fit. Georgia gapes. He’s got his curly dark head cocked to the side, patient, like he’s waiting to see what she’s going to do next. “Uh,” Georgia says finally. Her heart does a weird thing inside her chest, like something is alive and burrowing in there. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says, smiling again which is what started it to begin with, her ridiculous middle-school love affair with Micah St. John’s smile: his smile and his pop songs and the way he pronounced the letter L. This was before his band broke up and she dropped out of college, before Georgia found herself behind the taps at a dive on First Avenue and Micah, according to an article she came across in People last year while she waited on line at Gristedes, landed in jail.

“Um. Yeah.” She nods and attempts a recovery, going about her late-night routine: settling up with the couple making moon eyes at each other over cheap red wine, nudging a regular who’s fallen asleep in the corner. She puts the caps on the bottles and counts the money in her till and when she looks up he’s just watching her, like he’s curious. He still looks sort of like a girl. “What?” Georgia asks, and it comes out a lot shriller than she means.

“Nothing,” he says, all innocence. “You’re very efficient.”

“I’m closing,” she tells him, but she can feel a grin spreading across her face. Micah St. John, Jesus Christ. There is no one in the world she wants to tell this to more than Mal.

“I see that.”

“Do you?”

“Should I leave?”

“No.” The door wheezes shut behind the others. Micah St. John stays right where he is. There’s frost on the big plate-glass windows, crystals tiny and intricate and sharp. “God,” Georgia says, and it spills right out of her like an overturned glass. “My sister would be apoplectic right now.”

“You want me to sign something for her?” he asks; then, seeing her face: “What, is that lame?” He laughs a little. “Look at you. You think that’s so lame.”

“No, no, it’s just,” and here Georgia freezes: the first moment after a car wreck, silence after the skid. She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again, and there he is. “She’s dead. My sister.”

It hangs there, a physical thing, suspended like a shot of Bailey’s in a pint of Guinness. She shouldn’t have said it. She doesn’t know why she did. Even Connor, who’s the closest thing she has to a friend here, doesn’t know. She wills him not to say he’s sorry.

“I’m sorry,” Micah says.

Well. Georgia shrugs. “She liked the drummer best, anyway.”

“Girls usually did.”

“Do you still hear from him? Paul?” Paul came from Haverhill, Massachusetts, and ten years ago his favorite soda was Tab. Georgia wonders what kinds of things she could have learned ten years ago if she hadn’t been crammed into a single bed with Mal’s enormous feet freezing cold against her calves, their heads bent over a dog-eared, waterlogged copy of Bop. Georgia’s memory is a scattershot affair and her whole life she repeated the important things out loud so her sister could be sure and remember them; twenty-three years old and all she’s left with is trivia from decade-old teen magazines.

“Nah.” Micah shakes his head with a finality that makes her wonder what happened there. His voice sounds different than it did. “What was her name?” he asks.

“Her name?”

“Your sister.”

Georgia looks him over: a certifiable has-been, but still the room seems to orbit around him, like he’s got a perpetual spotlight on him everywhere he goes. He’s never stood on a ticket line or in the audience or next to a casket in a borrowed black dress and Georgia feels, bizarrely, like she’s given him too many things already. It’s been a long time since she said Mal’s name out loud. “So,” she says, a little meanly. “I read about the jail thing.”

His eyebrows arc up, a guarded amusement. “Did you.”

“Sorry,” she says immediately. “That was awful.”

Micah laughs. “Kind of.”

“I’m nervous. I’m blurting.”

“You don’t have to be nervous.”

“I’m not, usually.”

“It wasn’t jail,” he tells her. “It was mandatory drug abuse rehabilitation.”

“Aren’t you not supposed to drink once you get out of mandatory drug abuse rehabilitation?”

Micah shrugs. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“So then what are you?”

“That,” he says eventually, “is a really good question.”

“No kidding.”

He sits there. She breathes. On the bar a white votive candle sputters; some half-forgotten lyric surfaces and sinks at the back of her head. She’s always been useless at learning the words, so it’s practicality as much as anything else that makes her tell him. “Mallory,” she says, so he’ll know and remember. “My sister’s name was Mallory.”

“Mallory,” he repeats, thoughtful. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah.” Georgia swallows, then:  “So do you want another drink, or what?”

“I thought you were closed.”

“I am.”

“Are you gonna have one with me?”

“A drink?”

“A drink.”

Georgia hedges, or pretends to. There’s an ache behind her ribs. “I…could be persuaded.”

“Well.” He smiles again, the slightest quirk at the edges of his mouth. “Good.”

She turns around and reaches for the bottle. She hums a song under her breath.

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back in new york, starting a rock band

Two weekends in a row in New York is always one too many–leaves me feeling anxious and bewildered, like I need to be hosed down and filled with leafy greens and put to bed in a quiet room for twenty hours to regain my equilibrium. In this way, Boston has made me soft.  Still, there are concert tickets burning a hole in my pocket and a lady scientist with a sublet deep in Brooklyn and we wander the streets of the city and drink enough beer to float away. We ride the train in the wrong direction and cover an enormously wide rage of conversational topics ranging from Ann Taylor pants (surprisingly awesome) to chronic mental illness to Leelee Sobieski’s boring-looking new cop show, which of course I am going to watch. The tomatoes on my poppy-seed bagel are delicious and shockingly red.

We’ve got shows every night, our own private festival: Drew Holcomb is lovely and the Head and the Heart busts my ribs right open, as always, although their opening acts are putrid and weirdly racist both and I edit in my brain to pass the time, shifting my weight in my uncomfortable new shoes. I yawn. Hunter Parrish sits down right beside me at Godspell and it takes takes every ounce of human restraint on my part not to poke him in the side. (“Did you poke him?” Jackie asks immediately, when I tell her over brunch.) We ride the Staten Island Ferry and eat guacamole at Rosa Mexicano, where there is a man sitting behind us with one of the best laughs I have ever heard. At Lincoln Center a little boy leans over the edge of the fountain, curious, his chubby starfish hands reaching forward. “Jacket or no?” we ask each other every morning, then invariably decide to go without.

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just a body in the world moving forward

I go to New York to meet with with my editors, because apparently that’s a thing I do now: I go to New York to meet with my editors. We eat hummus and talk about Revenge and the ALA conference and whether or not I’m on Twitter. We Discuss My Future. Afterward I wander up 5th Ave to meet Tom, who has been at the NCAA tournament all day and is therefore cheerfully drunk. “You’re fancy, Kate,” he keeps saying. “You’re legit.” It’s sixty-five degrees outside, and the sky is very blue.

I sold a book. I sold two books, actually, to a company you have probably heard of, and I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out what exactly to say about that: what’s the cool-kid way to tell people when your dream, quite literally, comes true? I’m stupidly, fall-on-my-butt happy. I’m humbled, which sounds lame. I’m weirdly embarrassed, I’m a nervous wreck, I still get coffee for middle-aged lawyers at work every day and in that way my life has changed not at all, except that my emotions are more out of control than they’ve been in years and years and I find myself doing things like crying at the Glee version of “Unpretty” when it comes on my Pandora on the bus. It’s good. It’s amazing. It’s just, like. Really new and scary.

On Friday night Sierra takes me for pickles and biscuits and the book club girls roll into town; we stay at a hilariously baroque-looking hotel in Midtown where a humorless man named Piotr checks me in. We wander Chelsea Market before breakfast and sit on the High Line for a while, tipping our faces up toward the sunshine. Lisa gives me party hair with the curling iron. Abbey buys four of the largest donuts I have ever seen. Meg spills blueberry juice all over her suitcase and we cram ourselves around the world’s tiniest table on Bleeker Street to listen to Hazmat Modine; there is a twenty-something girl trombone player in that band who immediately becomes my new hero, and I sit quiet and spellbound with my ankles curled underneath my chair.

My knowledge of the city is barely passable on a good day. I’m perpetually walking a block in the wrong direction, getting turned around and searching desperately for a landmark, wondering how on earth people managed before GPS. “You’re doing fine,” Meg promises, although I spend the entire weekend convinced I’m going to accidentally take everyone to dinner by way of Staten Island or wind up in Canarsie by mistake. I hold my breath every time we climb the stairs up out of the subway, gaze darting around and thinking as fast as I can:

where next where next where next?

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walking toward the sound of your voice

At an indoor flea market in State College, Pennsylvania, I buy a set of antique green glass measuring cups, a smutty novel by Anne Rice, and a roughly hewn bar of Amish lard soap that smells distinctly animal in nature but promises to clear up both my face and any poison ivy I may ever get. R doesn’t buy anything, although she comes close with a box of dinosaur jelly jars from the 80s. R is getting her doctorate in psychology at Penn State, and she is absolutely bonkers for dinosaurs.

We do a 12-hour pub crawl with the people in her program, who are lovely, all of them from places like Memphis and Michigan and wearing funny hats, which is the theme. They’re impressed that we’ve been friends for as long as we have. “She was a bitch in high school,” R tells them, which is true. She hands me her beer to finish. “But she’s nice now.”

“Significantly less putrid!” I promise, although I’m actually not. I order a giant plate of nachos to compensate, both for the lie and for all the mean stuff I did when I was fifteen.

Back at her apartment she makes me a turkey sandwich with cheddar cheese and hummus and tells me she’s sorry I got hit in the boob with a flying quesadilla, which is a thing that happened during Hour Eleven. I don’t particularly mind. “You know what my favorite part of going out is?” I ask her, sitting on her futon in my pajamas and my spex, Netflix glowing red on the TV. In the four nights I am with her we manage to blow through the entirety of Party Down, which does weird things to both of us in terms of getting crushes on Adam Scott and needing to say are we having fun yet? as often as possible.  “Coming home and eating a turkey sandwich.”

On Monday we get tattoos in a shop we have researched not at all, which is either brave and spontaneous or extremely stupid. Happily, neither of us get blood poisoning. The guy who inks a quince below my collarbone is named Justin and absolutely refuses to be charmed by me, which I take as both a challenge and a personal affront. “How do you practice being a tattoo artist?” I ask him. His face is very close to my face. “On like, an orange or something?”

“An orange is nothing like human skin,” Justin says. Still, he smiles at me before I go and I think: victory.

Every morning R makes a pot of coffee and sits on the chair next to the futon to talk to me, like we used to debrief in the hallway before homeroom. The sun comes in through the sliding doors.

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Fiction: Ferris Wheel Kid

Some poor slob pukes corn dogs all over the giant swing ride, so Trevor’s got some time to kill while the maintenance guys hose it down. He shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and wanders the bright crowded length of the midway to the trailer where Rue is selling candy apples, looking bored. Rue always, always smells like candy apples. “What are you doing here?” she asks, leaning out the window and peering down at him, raising her voice so he can hear her over the cheerful electronic racket of the water gun game. She’s got a couple of sprinkles stuck to her arm. “Did somebody yak?”

“Yeah.”  Next to the Gravitron, the swings are pretty much tops when it comes to average rate of gastric upset per rider. It’s bad luck Trevor got stuck running it this year, but he’s fifteen and the youngest and he has to pay his dues. “Not even a kid, either. An old guy.”

Rue shakes her head in contempt. “People should know their limits. Hey Ma,” she calls over her shoulder, toward the back of the trailer where Leanne is working the fryer for funnel cake, her capable hands speckled with burns. “Trevor’s got a barf break. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Take twenty dollars out of the box and see if you can’t find me some singles, will you?” he hears Leanne say; then:  “Hi, Trev.”

“Hey.”

After a minute the door screeches open and Rue hops down, shoving the money into the back pocket of her fraying denim shorts. “Where we going?” she asks. Trevor shrugs.

They weave through the crowd toward the edge of the fairgrounds, past the bandstand and the trucks and the huge humming genny, cables snaking out every which way . It’s August in Oklahoma, and hot. Trevor stops to smile at some pretty girls who are checking him out, cutoffs and flip-flops, one of them holding a puffy blue cloud of cotton candy. Rue rolls her eyes.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

It’s the end of the summer, getting dark a little earlier now, the sun going down pink and purple over the flashing neon spokes of the ferris wheel.  Soon they’ll head south to Texas and Florida for the winter: Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Christmas in Spur. They’ve been fair kids their whole lives, him and Rue. There’s a rhythm.  “So,” he says, dropping down in the grass near the tree line, digging a cigarette out of his jeans.  “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she replies, sitting beside him and nodding at the lighter. “Did you steal that from your dad?”

Trevor doesn’t answer. “Tell me again where this place is?”

Rue eyes him, patient. “Massachusetts,” she says, which he already knows. “Boston.”

“And tell me again what exactly you’re going to do there?”

“Trevor,” she says, flopping backwards onto the dry, weedy grass, her sneaker-clad feet flying briefly in the air. He’s acting stupider than he is on purpose, and they both know it. “Come on.”

“What?”

“Cut it out. You know what.”

“I really don’t.”

“Uh-huh.” Her hair’s spread all around her, a curly blond halo around her heart-shaped face. When they were younger, folks around the fair all used to call her Shirley Temple, until she got old enough to tell them to go screw. “It’s a good school, you know.”

“Do you hear me saying it’s not a good school?”

“It’s a real school, not my mom in a trailer trying to teach us plane geometry before we get to Euclid and have to unload for the week.”

“Your mom’s a good teacher.”

“My mom never graduated high school!” Rue huffs out a short, noisy breath. “Do you really want to do this your whole life?”

Trevor considers that. “Well, no,” he says eventually, blowing smoke rings up into the air. He’s been practicing all summer–Joel, who works the carousel, taught him how. “At some point I’d like to run the scrambler. That’s where the real money is.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“Trev,” Rue says softly, and she just looks so sad for a minute, eyes dark and cloudy, like she’s already a million miles gone. And whatever, maybe most of the places he’s been to he’s only seen in passing, always on the outskirts of town, but Trevor knows how the world happens and he knows that if she gets on the train tomorrow then that’s just–that’s it. Show’s over; carnival’s gone. So he does the first thing that pops into his head: he leans over and kisses her, just for a second, soft. She tastes like caramel and wax.

Rue blinks. “What, exactly, was that?” she asks.

“I mean–”

She throws her head back and laughs–not mean at all, that’s not what she’s actually like, not really–but like she is so on to him. She always has been, he guesses; they’ve known each other since they were three. “Did you just kiss me?” she asks, like she can hardly believe it. “Did you think that would make me stay?”

“I don’t–shut up,” he says, shaking his head. Jesus Christ, she really is a pain in the ass.

Rue takes the cigarette out of his hand, inhales. “Creative,” she says thoughtfully.  “Would have worked when I was thirteen, maybe.”

Trevor looks at her with some interest. “You had a crush on me when we were thirteen?”

“I said maybe.”

They lie there for awhile, side by side in the grass. The sound from the midway drifts palely back, shouts and music. “What about your mom?” he asks. He feels like a piece of shit for saying it because that’s her Kryptonite, that’s what’s going to make her feel two inches tall, and he knows it and he says it anyway. “What’s she going to do without you?”

“Oh, okay. We can be done now.”  Rue shakes her head a little and gets to her feet, brushing dirt off the back of her shorts. “That’s mean, Trevor.”

“I know,” he says immediately. What an asshole he is. “I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously, that sucked.”

“I know.”

He grabs her hand, tugs. “Don’t–I didn’t–Rue.”

Rue sighs again, but she doesn’t let go, which is something. Her grip is warm and damp. And God, he doesn’t know why he’s being such a loser about this–why he can’t just throw her a high-five and say see you when I see you. He guesses he’s used to going, is all. He guesses he’s not used to being left.

Rue hesitates for a moment. She’s still holding onto his hand. “You could kiss me again if you wanted,” she tells him finally. “You could, you know. Kiss me goodbye.”

Trevor blinks. ”Goodbye,” he repeats, like it’s a word he’s never heard before, like it’s regional slang. “So you’re seriously–this is it. You’re actually going.”

Rue laughs a little, quiet, like she almost can’t believe it herself.  “Yeah, Trev,” she says, and her fingers lace between his like a promise. “I actually am.”

So he climbs to his feet and he does it, two hands on her tan, smooth face. The cigarette smolders on the dusty ground. The carnival flares in the distance.

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