Fans of the Impossible Life (16 page)

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Looking like this?”

“I mean in theory.”

“I don't know,” I said. “A party, I guess.”

“Opening night of some retro club,” she said. “Where they have ironic burlesque acts and a man who eats fire tending bar.”

“Yes,” I said. “That sounds right.”

We lay next to each other in her bed, watching out the window as the early-winter sunset spread along the edges of the trees.
She was trying to do cat's cradle with a long string of beads.

“How did you and Sebby meet?” I asked her. I realized that I didn't know.

“Sebby never told you?” she said.

“No.”

She seemed to consider for a moment. Then she tangled up the beads into a ball in her hand. “It was last December,” she said, “so, a little more than a year ago. We were both in the hospital at the same time. He had to have surgery after he got in a really bad fight with these two guys. He told you about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, when he was in recovery, he tried to steal a lot of pills, and he was going to take them. Like, all of them.”

She handed the beads to me. I looked at them, felt them in my hand.

“He didn't tell you that part, did he?” she said.

“No.”

“Well, they found out about it before he could do it. But a suicide threat gets moved to junior psych. So as soon as he was well enough, that's where he ended up. And that's where I was.”

She pulled up the left sleeve of her dress and turned her wrist over to show me the underside. It was marked horizontally by a long, light scar that I had never noticed before.

“I had a problem with wanting to hurt myself for a little while there,” she said. “It's okay now. But it got bad before it got better.”

I touched the soft skin of her wrist gently.

“That's how you met,” I said.

“That's how we met, “ she said, pulling her sleeve back down. “Cute story, huh?”

She turned toward me and propped herself up on her elbow.

“When we got out of the hospital we ran away,” she said. “Just for a day. It was my sixteenth birthday. We took my dad's car and drove to Provincetown.”

I smiled.

“What?” she said.

“That's where I go. Every summer. With my dads.”

“Really?”

“They own a house on the bay. Sebby told me you guys went there. But I didn't know you ran away.”

“How funny,” she said, lying back down. “We've been in the same place.”

I laughed. “We're often in the same place.”

“But it's like you were there with us. Like we already knew you.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Sebby showed up at her front door the day that he got out of the hospital. It was December, the day before her sixteenth birthday, a month and a half after she thought that she didn't want to live anymore. But she was still here. And for the first time in a while she felt like she had something worth holding on to.

He programmed their destination into the GPS of her dad's car. They did not ask to borrow it. That's not how these things were done.

Mira drove, Sebby in the passenger seat next to her, his bare feet on the dashboard, oblivious to the winter winds howling outside, the highway winding north through dark New England forests. He played his favorite Diamond Rings album turned up loud, rested his feet on the air vent, as if the heat might thaw them into a new kind of summer, one crafted from dreams of beaches and escape.

The farther out on the Cape they traveled, the closer they
seemed to be to the moon, white dunes towering above the sides of the road. Even in the dark they could tell that this place was in danger of simply being washed away.

They tried to think of magic words that would let them pass there. To prove themselves worthy. “We come in peace. We come for love.” Maybe those were enough.

They reached their destination just before ten p.m., an hour after officially splitting from the mainland, and pulled up to a motel on the edge of town. Across the street from the parking lot there was only water. Mira wanted to jump in it like those polar bear people, wrapping themselves in hypothermia blankets afterward. Feel alive by almost dying.

Instead they went inside and asked for a room.

“Water view?”

The boy at the front desk was no older than they were and hardly looked up, didn't ask for ID with the credit card that Sebby gave him with the name Matilda O'Connor on it. This is how easy it was. The boy handed over two keys and a monotone, “Have a nice stay, breakfast from eight to ten.”

The room was on the second floor, facing out to the bay. Tiny lights of life sparkled around the scoop of land that ringed the water, asking them to make their way just a little farther. Not to stop until they found where the land ends.

They brought a single bag that they packed together. Toothbrushes and two sets of stretched nylon fairy wings that Mira had bought on sale at a costume store after Halloween, saving up for future projects.

They sat on the queen-size bed, and Mira ripped open the bag of her wings. A small cloud of glitter settled down on top of them, blessing them. Sebby tore open his plastic and now they were gold and silver sparkles, marked for beauty and greatness.

The outfit that Mira chose for this occasion was the pink fifties party dress that she got during a particularly good thrifting session over the summer. One strap was ripped when she found it and there was loose thread where a flower had joined the two sides of the giant collar. Nothing that she couldn't fix.

The night's accessories were a wide red patent-leather belt, slouchy gray boots, and a perfectly faded jean jacket from her favorite Goodwill that closed down when she was still in middle school. Back then the jacket was big on her. Now the sleeves were snug and it didn't button shut.

The past couple of years had brought this newly womanly body along with them. Mira only wore skirts now as a rule because pants made her feel stuck into someone else's idea of a shape. And her shape often felt like a fluid thing, this way one day and something else the next. She wished that she could pin it down, the watery and unmanageable way that she was growing. She wondered if other people felt solid in their skin.

Sebby had on his traditional white T-shirt and khakis worn thin from overuse. He carried a Sharpie in his pocket at all times for moments of inspired defacement, and now he took his shirt off and lay it on the bed in front of him, spelled out the word
Twink
in wobbly block letters, finishing it with a little lopsided star. He thought this was funny. She did too.

His bare torso was so white in the dim light of that room that she thought she could see through him, see though his scars to the places where things had been fixed. She wondered what was on the other side of her scars. If there were things in her that were still broken.

The clock on the nightstand in the room clicked to 11:50 as they pulled the elastic straps of the Halloween-store wings on to each other's shoulders carefully, knowing that all they needed was a little human warmth to bring them to life, to make the humans wearing them a little less corporeal, a little more of the air.

Mira opened the door out onto the balcony to breathe in the bay wind. It froze their cheeks and made the wings flap impatiently on their backs. It was a week before Christmas, and the wind was daring these impetuous tourists to find this land hospitable. Out of respect, they crushed the delicate wings under their winter coats before they went out, tripping down the string-light-lined street with a secret under their clothes.

Earlier in the day they would have found bundled families wandering from hot chocolate to hot chocolate, children staring skyward, wishing for snow. This was beach town transformed into provincial Christmas Walk. Nothing like the sweaty crowds of summertime Commercial Street, buying their two-for-ten-dollars T-shirts, serenaded by roller-skating drag queens hawking for their shows. This was a well-crafted winter peacefulness. A Currier and Ives picture lovingly assembled through the efforts of a hundred years of gay New Englanders,
for the benefit of all.

But at midnight on a Wednesday this place belonged to those who did not turn to hot chocolate to keep warm on long sea-winded nights. Softly glowing windows lining the narrow streets were home to the human versions of the strange, wave-rocked formations that had washed up on the beach when there was nowhere else to go. When the only alternative was spinning out into the open sea.

The Pilgrims had unceremoniously rejected this land when they found that nothing would grow here, hoping the “great Pilgrim cover-up” would hide their rookie mistake, those fruitless months spent on a swirl of glorified sandbank, Plymouth Rock the centerpiece of an elaborate fiction crafted for posterity. But once the undesirables in the bunch began to show their true colors, they sent them back, out onto that twist of land. The outcasts would have to learn that not everything grew in the ground. Life could form on the surface, sprout up into giant, colorful shoots and twist itself around other like-minded sun seekers, holding on tight. Holding each other up.

Mira and Sebby took it all in with puffs of freezing air, gleeful in their freedom. They could go anywhere. Just try and stop them. They could do anything.

Even the bouncer at the door of the Governor Bradford seemed to sense it, looking for only a moment at their fake Hawaiian IDs before waving them in with a sigh. Sebby declared this to be their destination when he saw the sign for Drag Karaoke and the pleasing white clapboard shabbiness of the building.
Boats anchored in the harbor across the street. They imagined whiskey-starved fishermen stumbling inside.

Instead, a group of drunk, forty-something lesbians sat around the small karaoke stage. Their compatriot was serenading them with a tipsy but soulful rendition of “Constant Craving,” her Red Sox cap pulled down tight over her eyes, her bulky frame rocking in her salt-stained Timberland boots.

Mira ordered two whiskey and sodas at the bar, her dad's drink, and the only one she could say with a straight face to the bearish bartender. This was her first taste of alcohol, and the inedible gasoline tang of it felt like a magic potion. Sixteen was only an hour away, after all. It was time to learn some new things.

Dana, the drag queen host of Drag Karaoke, was done up in full Billy Idol lady glam, bleach-blond hair and combat boots with a leather mini and fishnets. She sang “White Wedding” to the delight of the assembled lesbians, Idol sneer and impressive high kicks inserted at key moments. Even at a quarter to midnight on a Wednesday in December, on the cusp of falling off the cliff of holiday spirit into the abyss of a Massachusetts winter, Dana presided over her kingdom.

Sebby responded by doing his best rendition of “Dancing With Myself,” pulling Dana into his routine, not one to be stopped by the logic of the lyrics, grabbing her hand and spinning her into a twirl that he was not yet tall enough to complete.

“Happy twenty-first birthday to the prettiest girl in town,” he said when the song was over. “You don't look a day over
sixteen.”

Dana fanned herself in a joking swoon as he handed the mic back to her.

“I didn't know the theme tonight was jailbait,” she said in her best Catskills comic voice.

The lesbians laughed and sent over another round.

Mira sang “Dream a Little Dream of Me” at Sebby's insistence. Her voice faltered on the high notes, but she was feeling good on that stage in front of their friendly audience. Their only meal that day consisted of rest-stop soggy fries and megasize sodas that tipped the car cup holders, and she could feel the whiskey warming her from the inside out, making things feel fine in a new way. In a way that made it okay to sing in public.

Dana left for a cigarette break and Sebby threw back his drink and pulled Mira toward a thumping beat rising up from a stairwell in the back of the room. Downstairs they found disco remixes and unintelligible house music blasting through a room of packed bodies. Men in tight T-shirts or no shirts showed off their carefully sculpted stomachs, a well-placed Santa hat here and there making an attempt at an excuse for such festivities. Those with less to show for themselves looked on from the bar.

Sebby grabbed Mira's hand and pulled her into it, the small crowd parting enough to watch these two winged fairies go by. They took up a spot to show off their highly original dance moves, perfected over hours of practice in the hospital. This one was called “Taking a Book Out of the Library.” First put on your invisible glasses. Admire the invisible spines. Select an
invisible volume.

“I like your wings.”

Through the shroud of hazy improvised club lighting Mira could barely make out the features of the man shouting into Sebby's ear. Sebby flashed a grin at him, grabbed Mira by the waist, and pulled them both into the stranger. She followed his level of boldness, thrusting pelvises forward but keeping hands to herself, head turning from side to side as if the last person she wanted to look at was the one right in front of her.

House transitioned back to disco, and she shouted to Sebby that she needed to find the bathroom. There was only one, supplied with two urinals and one stall, and she locked herself in the stall, wondering if she was expected to have stayed upstairs with the other ladies, crooning k.d. lang into the wee hours of the morning.

At the bar she decided it was time for another drink. The warm hug of her karaoke buzz was starting to wear off and she didn't want to think too much about what they were doing there.

The bartender handed over the drink with raised eyebrows.

“You better keep an eye your little boyfriend there,” he said.

She looked back to the dance floor, where their old partner was dancing behind Sebby, navigating around the wings.

“That'll be twelve dollars.”

She brought Sebby the drink and he took it gratefully, grabbing her around the waist, dispersing his fan club.

“Let's go see the water,” she said in his ear.

Outside they spotted Dana in a leopard-print coat. A man
in leather lit her cigarette. She inhaled and let out a grateful cloud of nicotine.

“Sleep tight, jailbait,” she called after them.

They walked along the beach back to the motel, the lights of the mid-cape just visible along the horizon, an unwelcome reminder that there was always a path of return. In one of the houses along the bay a Christmas party was winding down. Men sang “Silent Night” in harmony on the back porch, throwing cheer to the wind.

Back in the motel room, they lay tangled in the drunken bedspread. Sebby wrapped himself in the fabric of her skirt, the wings crushed under them both like neglected moths or forgotten limbs. Mira felt like a newborn with some vague memory of reincarnation, who understood that, when it finally took its first steps, it would recognize the sensation from another lifetime.

“Do you feel older?” he asked her in the dark.

“I feel the same. I feel like I'm seven years old. Like I'm five.”

“You were drunk when you were five?”

“Shut up, Sebby.”

“You're mean when you're sixteen.”

“I'm older than you now.”

“I'll never be old. I'll sell my soul. I'll die young.”

“I thought I would feel different.”

“Sweet sixteen.”

“I'm not so sweet.”

“You're sweet to me.”

“You're silly.”

“I am. This is true.”

“Happy birthday to me.”

“Happy birthday to you, babes.”

They rolled up the maps of their bodies until they were two continents of interlocking roads and rivers and dreams, and she thought,
This is how I will learn to live again.