Simone

Simone came down the steps into the living room and looked at her parents on the sofa. Her mother's face was red from crying. Her father sat beside her, his spine erect, hardly leaning back at all. Simone guessed that if she used a ruler, there would be a distance of 2.5 inches between his starched white shirt and the back of his seat. His head pivoted mechanically to view Simone standing there and held her beneath his gaze--the insect collector pinning down his prize.
        
"Sit down," her father said, motioning to the maroon arm chair. "We have some news for you, missy."
        
The corners of Simone's lips drew back into a thin, taut line. She sank into the chair, her sacrum tilted by the decrepit cushions. A corner of the upholstery peeled up under her weight, revealing a rat's nest of moth-eaten feathers and moldy cracker crumbs. She shifted her weight and the whole chair jolted back on to its rear legs. Simone had always hated sitting in that chair. She wondered if her father knew this and made her sit there intentionally for all her floggings.
        
"We got a call today from your school," her father said. "Guess what they said?"
        
"How am I supposed to know?"
        
Her father shot to his feet. "Don't play stupid. You're no good at it." He folded his arms across his chest like a plain clothes cop interrogating a suspect. "What the hell were you doing with drugs in school, huh? And wipe that goddamn smirk off your face, wiseass. This is very serious business."
        
Muffy limped into the room, her yellowing coat mangier than ever, and lay down at Simone's feet, tucking her tail between her legs.
        
"It's not my fault," she said. "It was Steve, he gave it to me. I was just holding it for him."
        
"And we're supposed to believe you?"
        
"Oh Simone, this is the worst thing you've ever done!" her mother said. "They want to kick you out of school. They said they could turn you over to the police for the amount they found in your locker--and your father has half a mind to let them!"
        
"Do you know how much we have to pay to send you to St. Stevens? It's like another goddamn mortgage!"
        
Her mother started crying with the kind of big whooping sobs she always used when Simone fucked up real bad. Simone squeezed her fingernails into her palms so hard, she could feel them digging through the skin. More than anything in the world, Simone hated seeing her mother cry.
        
There was a long, awkward silence when Simone looked down at a tiny snow globe on the coffee table, still there from Christmas. She remembered sitting right where she was now just a few months before, and how happy her mother was to be taking her picture for the family Christmas card.
        
"Come on, Mom, I'm too old for this. I'm almost 14!" Simone had said.
        
"Just smile one more time for me, will you? Oh honey, you are getting to be a young woman, already!" She smiled at Simone the way she always did around the holidays, then took another sip of her bourbon-infused
eggnog. "Gosh, time goes by so fast. Before you know it, you'll be driving the boys crazy at school."
        
Simone blushed. "Come on, Mom! I don't even have a boyfriend."
        
"They'll be falling all over themselves to ask you out. Just you wait." Her mother's eyes glistened in the the light of the Christmas tree. As much as she hated to admit it, Simone loved being fussed over by her mother. Christmas was only a few months ago, but it felt like a lifetime.
        
Simone looked up at her parents sitting on the couch.
        
"I'm sorry mom and dad. I really am. I swear, I'll never touch that stuff again."

The New Being

As she stood there on the promontory, the whole of the city at her feet, and then the Bay, and beyond, darkened mountains and a deep lavender sky,  a plane emerged from the left horizon, threading the checkerboard mother-of-pearl clouds, illuminating, dulling, glinting, and then fading, she realized that she, too, had the power to defy gravity, because she truly believed she could, no one having taught her differently, never having anyone in her life at all up to that point, and so she leaned forward and dropped off the red clay jag, falling gracefully 45-feet straight down toward the sidewalk below, and then at the very last second, straightened her neck and with a suppleness native to every single one of her gestures, swooped up across the wide clearing, soared through the air, and alighted, toe-first, on a solar panel atop an adjacent apartment building.

Just then, a door from the building opened, and out stepped a Caucasian man with a long, thin body and a tidy swoosh of black hair atop his head. He was holding a tray of raw hot dogs and a pitcher of frozen margaritas.

“A bit early, eh?” he said as if he knew her.

“I guess so,” she said.

He shrugged and moved around her toward a grill at the far end of the roof.

“May I have some of that?”

He paused and turned.

“You want a Nick’s Specialty Frozen Silverado Cadillac Jimmy Jam Margarita?”

She looked around the rooftop. “Yeah.”

“First one to the BBQ and you’re already making requests? I like your style.”

THE SURPRISE OF A LIFETIME

It was springtime, but you wouldn’t know if for the weather. Rainy, cold, blustery. It wasn’t the kind of May you enjoy, but that’s global warming for you. I decided to administer a spring cleaning of the apartment anyway. Vanessa was going to be out of town for a week, and since she has always been the messy one in this relationship, I thought it would be a good time to get to work on all the nooks and crannies neglected during the winter freeze. Knowing Vanessa’s tendency to pack rat-hood, it was also a perfect time to get rid of some of the stacks of shit that have been annoying the shit out of me for ages, but I haven’t been able to actually 86 in her presence.

I did the kitchen first because that was the area that is usually the grossest, and I wanted to just get it out of the way. I wanted the wet work done first, so I swept then mopped the floor, even moving the garbage cans and recycling bins to get at all the raisins and onion skins and bottle caps that had been hiding there. When the floor was dry, I emptied the garbage (though it was only half full), tied up the newspapers and US Weekly magazines with twine, and dragged the lot to the curb. Lastly, I lit some incense.

Next stop: upstairs closet. This was the dry work, so I was a bit happier about that. The closet started off being a place to keep sporting equipment, but after my accident last year, I decided I wouldn’t be needing my lacrosse sticks and hockey gear anymore, so I ditched them, and the closet became a place where Vanessa started storing her shit. It started with clothes she hardly wore, and her ever expanding collection of vintage loafers (don’t ask). After a while, though, I noticed she was throwing other random stuff in there, and that’s when I started to get worried. Several times I asked Vanessa to clear out the crap in there, as I was worried it might become a nest where vermin could hide. She consistently ignored me, and the only coherent response I ever got to my plea was, “What for? You don’t have anything to put in there.”

“That’s not the point,” I responded. “That closet is a terrible example for the rest of the storage area in the house. Imagine what would happen if this closet started hanging around with the others? It’d be a nightmare.”

“Your sock draw would be the first to rebel.”

“Look, don’t start with me. A lot of people lay out their clothes for the week.”

“Not a month in advance!”

Bottom line: the closet never gets cleaned. So in I went. I didn’t last 5 minutes before I had to break out the face mask and rubber gloves. Filthy! Wow. I turned up film canisters, medicine vials, clothing, shoes, socks (mostly unwashed by the smell of them), old board games, unopened mail, and a motherlode of pistachio shells. I dumped it all in the trash. Then I got to the stash of Vanessa’s abandoned hobbies: a tennis racket, knitting needles, crochet pieces, even a make-your-own-beer set. It was ridiculous. I didn’t even remember all that shit. I started going deeper and deeper into the closet, not knowing where it was going or how far down the rabbit hole I could go. I was just throwing stuff over my shoulder with wild abandon, like nothing mattered. I tossed that stuff all over. Finally, after toiling thorough what looked like an entire year of tax exempt receipts, I came to a dusty shoebox. I was going to simply throw the entire thing in the garbage without even opening it, but stuck to the top were the disgusting remains of a banana peel—black and shriveled with wild whitish grey mold that, if left for much longer, would have probably taken over the entire closet, consuming it all with its bacterial spray. I almost threw up in my mouth at the sight of it. Not wanting to even have it poison my line of sight any longer, I reached my gloved hand out and grasped it betwixt my index finger and thumb and tossed it into the garbage. The banana peel must have been stuck to the shoe box cover, because in the process of doing this, off it came.

It was dark in that rear corner of the closet, but enough daylight reached in to glimpse a flash of reflected color. Curious, I pulled the box out of the corner and shed light on it. Inside was a pile of glossy photos, faded with rounded edges, 70s style. Most of them were from Vanessa’s college days, long before I knew her. Wow, they were something. She was thin back then! And sexy. There was something curious about the nature of the photos, though. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But the more I stared at the photos, they more it made sense to me. There was something about Vanessa—an essential essence to her that was gone. Something different abut her. She seemed so much more… I don’t know. Studious, different, more serious. Something about that young girl with crazy curly brown hair and paisley dresses… it just seemed like a woman that I didn’t know.

I kept going through the photos and I came across one that made me stop. It was a photo of Vanessa holding an infant child, which wasn’t too extraordinary—she was the oldest of a large family. But what made me stop was the crucifix I saw around her neck. I had seen it before, and that’s exactly what scared me

I pulled out my mobile phone and dialed her number. Though she was probably partying with her girlfriends for the bachelorette weekend, there was a chance she would answer, and I needed to know the answer immediately. To my surprise, she picked up. I described the picture for her and it took her a while to place it.

“Where the heck did you find that?"

“In a shoe box in the junk closet.”

“Interesting. So what?”

“Well, it’s the crucifix around your neck. I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

“I’m not technically. I was given that cross by a friend. She got it for me while I was traveling.”

“She didn’t happen to be travelling in Egypt, was she?”

“How’d you guess?”

I sighed. IT was a bad sign. A very bad sign. The cross itself was not a Christian symbol at all, but rather something that was used in a satanic mass in the 3^rd Century A.D. in the Egyptian deserts, near the Fertile Crescent, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers co-mingled, and humanity supposedly was born. Legend had it that it wasn’t just humanity that was born there.

“Vanessa, I just need to ask you one more question: where is that necklace now? Do you still own it?"

“Yeah. I think it’s still in my jewelry case. Bottom shelf. I hardly ever break it out, but it’s still oin there.”

My heart began beating faster. “OK honey, thanks. I’ll let you go now. Sorry to bother you over the weekend. Have a good time with the girls, k?"

The phone clicked off and I walked into the bedroom. It was quiet in there. Deadly quiet. I tip toed over to the jewelry drawer. Opening slowly, I heard a sound that was ungodly. I rifled through and found the cross. It looked evil. I smelled it. IT was evil. It chopped off my hand, and here I am today, an amputee.

I’m sorry my penmanship is so bad.

Terrence the Terrible Roommate

Oh my God—you want to hear a fucked up story about that guy?

His name is Terrence. OK, I used to live with him, like, for a semester when I was studying in London. It wasn’t my choice—I wanted to live with these two guys I knew, but the school stuck us together because he didn’t know anyone on the trip. Whatever. So we lived together. We actually had to share a room, which was fine for the most part. He pretty much kept to himself; didn’t really hang with us too much. Once in a while he would smoke a joint with us or something, but that was it. I mean, he was a nerd, but I guess he was pretty cool. He really liked to read comics…

Oh my god--you’ve heard about that thing with him and the goat, right? Oh man. Different story. In a nutshell, Terrence went to India with these two kids I know, and like, they went into this village and there was this really poor family, and they had this goat, and that dude, like, killed the goat. I don’t know. It’s fucked up. I think maybe he was on anti-depressants, or maybe he stopped taking them. Alls I know is he killed the goat. Yeah.

Anyway, back to London. So this one night my friends Billy and James and I go out to this bar, Ricky Tiks. We liked to go there on Thursday nights because we had a short day of classes on Friday, and we would either sleep through it or go to the pool hall at UCL and get caned or something. So we saw Terrence out at Ricky Tiks this one night and he looked pretty wasted. He was hanging around with these American girls we went to school with. They were losers. So we leave that place—it used to get overcrowded with Yanks by like 10:30pm—and go home.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I know, I wake up on the couch, Billy and James are gone, and Terrence is walking in with some chick. They come in and sit down in the living room and start chatting just like we’re all old friends and we do this all the time. So I’m half asleep, just trying to get my bearings, and I notice this girl is kind of… like, a little weird. She was this Asian chick and… she was kind of cute, but also like… kind of busted.

So we’re talking, she’s from out of town, just visiting some friends or something… seems pretty keen. And I’m like, hey this is cool, this dude is about to score. So we keep on talking, and then all of a sudden I’m thinking, “wait a second... he and I share a bedroom.” But then I was like, “oh, it’s cool. I’m sure if anything goes down, it’ll be out here in the living room.”

So we’re talking and talking… and as the conversation goes on, I start to realize something’s… a little off. I mean, I was half asleep, but even in that state of mind, I could tell that this girl should not be with this guy. Something was weird. Like, she was wearing this really strange Marilyn Manson t-shirt, and a really short skirt… and he’s like sitting there with tortoise shell glasses. It’s takes me a minute to put two and two together, but once I do, I’m like, “shit, I got to go to bed. I don’t want any part of this.”

So I say good night and go to bed. As soon as my head hits the pillow I’m thinking, “Crap, I hope I didn’t leave nothing out there.” Like my wallet or phone or something. God only knows what those two were up to.

So I fell asleep, and it must have been about an hour later, I wake up, and guess who comes sneaking into the room with the hoe in toe. Oh my GOD. I was thinking, “WTF is wrong with you, bro?” I mean, for the first 5, 10 minutes I was like, “this is not happening.” I was in a serious state of denial. I mean, she must have not even known I was in there because she was saying all this shit to him, giving him a little strip tease… Dude, I don’t even remember, but shit was getting gnarly for a second. They were getting ready for the deed.

So finally, I had to put my foot down. I just said out loud, “Yo, this shit is not cool!”

Dude. She freaked the fuck out. She like, jumped 10 feet off the bed! And he was just like, “uhh, OK,” and walked out, just leaving her in there with me. I mean, I felt bad, but… what the fuck do you say? “Yo, sorry my roommate’s an asshole…” You know? It’s funny in retrospect, but that shit’s just rude.

I was sitting in the bar on a Tuesday night in December when my old friend Billy walked in. He had been away for the past three months. His skin tone was sun-kissed, and his hair had the frail look it gets after too much time in the pool. I greeted him, bought him a beer, and we took our usual spot in the dark corner of the establishment.

“So,” I said, “how was Bali?”

“Totally overdeveloped and commercialized. It sucked. But. The little island just south of it, Lombok, was awesome.”

“Really?”

“Just off the coast of Lombok,” Billy said, “there are three small islands: Gili Trawagan, Gili Meno, and Gili Air. Small, cylindrical islands you could walk around in about an hour. Very rustic. I stayed on Gili Air in this tiny shack that barely had electricity. There was a single light bulb in the bedroom that cast this gnarly, axe murderer vibe in the place.”

“A stabbin’ cabin.”

“Totally. It was frightening. But I loved it.”

“Good snorkeling?”

“Incredible snorkeling. I met this Italian guy with the most ridiculous accent. He was trying to start this psychedelic trance scene there, which strangely works with that type of landscape.” Billy started making trance music sounds.

“That’s hilarious.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “He had these mushroom chocolates. I took the littlest bite, and oh-my-GOD. I mean… the sunset was bleeding, my eyes were bleeding… I was bleeding out of my eyes and my asshole. I fucked a cow. I fucked a goat. I tried to fuck a sand dune. I got stung by a manta ray…”

“Holy shit, you got stung?”

“It was the most primordial scene you can possibly imagine. There were pagan sacrifices occurring before my very eyes. I was weeping at the savage beauty and utter brutality of it all. Weeping.”

“Sounds intense, man.”

“It was. I missed dinner. The thing is, on this island, if you don’t eat dinner by 9:00pm, that’s it. You missed it. Because after that, everyone goes home. Everyone closes shop.” Billy took a sip of his beer. “So I’m walking down the beach, feeling like a schmuck, thinking ‘oh man, I’m gonna have to wake up early tomorrow to eat,’ you know. All of a sudden, I see a bonfire in the distance. And I’m fucked. I’m like, ‘I’m going to that bonfire.’ I get there and these native Indonesians are chilling like… they just looked like the most hardest, crustiest, old school fuckers you ever saw. Their faces were just these curled up, gnarly ass, wrinkled prunes…”

“You sure that wasn’t the mushrooms?”

“It could have been the mushrooms, but these guys were dug in, man. Deep. And I’m just walking by, and one of them came right up to me like, ‘do you want a sweet potato?’ Just like that, in that funny voice. And I was like ‘yeah,’ and they gave me a potato. They were all smoking these cloves. Damn! I wish I brought back these clove cigarettes they all had. They were so fucking good! So I’m smoking a clove and eating a sweet potato, and I’m like, ‘I hope they don’t think I’m looking at them weird because I’m so fucked up.’ So we’re smoking, we’re eating potatoes, I give them some of my water, they dug that. I say, ‘Hey, you want to smoke some weed?’ I don’t even know how we were communicating, to be honest, because they couldn’t speak English. I think the mushrooms actually allowed me to speak their language. Anyway, so we smoke some weed… Then all of a sudden, this little kid runs out of the woods screaming. Turns out, the kid’s father was stung by a manta ray as they were prawn fishing. These people just walk along the sand bar with a lantern and a net at night, and the prawn are attracted to the light, so they scoop them up. Thing is, the manta rays embed themselves beneath the sand so you can’t see them until you step on them.

“That’s crazy.”

“So this kid’s screaming, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m about to split out the backdoor, kind of backing away little by little. Then all these people look at me and they are like, ‘you come with us.’

“So we go with the kid, and the father is lying on the beach, has a hole in his ankle from the manta ray the size of a dime, bleeding profusely. He’s covered in sand and seaweed and salt water and shit... I am like, ‘Oh my god, this is way too visceral.’ But I have to help out, so I pour some of my fresh water on it, which was good. They liked that. Then they all start speaking fast to each other, and the kid go running into the woods. He comes back a minute later with this mixture of like, plants and mashed up leaves and vines and shit, and they put that on the wound.”

“Some crazy jungle medicine,” I said.

“Yeah. So then we just kind of sat there for a minute. The dad seemed to be OK, and I was just like, ‘Ho kay, I think it’s my time to turn in.’ And that’s when this guy’s daughter comes out of the tent.”

“What?”

“Yes! This girl comes out of the cabana looking like fucking Pocahontas of Southeast Asia. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I wanna marry you.’”

“Holy shit, man. That’s crazy,” I said. We sat there in silence for a moment, and then I felt like I had to ask. “Did you fuck her?”

“What? No, I didn’t fuck her. Her fucking father is right there with a fucking hole in his ankle the size of a goddamn nickel. You think that’s the right time to proposition a girl to make mixed race babies? But they did give me this little wooden amulet here.”

Billy held up the modest medallion, which looked like the sort of cheap trinket native people sell to tourists.

“What’s the amulet do?” I said.

“How the fuck should I know? Probably nothing. But it got me back here safely, didn’t it?”

“Indeed it did.”

“Indeed it did. Cheers.”

Just Another Jerk in the Coffee Shop

I was sitting in a coffee shop on a frigid Sunday morning when I noticed a middle aged man hobbling to the counter to place his order: small coffee, milk and three sugars. On his wrist he had a black plastic brace, and he leaned heavily on a cane. He appeared to be in his 40s, but his gait was that of a man far older. He was shabby in dress and affectation, and bore dark, wiry hair and a pencil thin mustache. When the barista had filled his order, he sat down across from me and commenced having a conversation on his phone in such a lusty tone I couldn’t help but overhear.

“Hey, hey Ma? Yeah, it’s me… Yeah. Sorry to bother you again. I just wanted to tell you how it went with the lawyer… Oh he’s a reeaaal shitty son of a gun. Well, he told me… yes, the other tenets are getting paid for their suffering, but he doesn’t know that I know that. He told me that if I want to get my money, I got to go to small claims court to do it myself. Yeah… he’s real shitty. But he doesn’t know what this other guy told me, that the other tenants are getting paid for their suffering, but me, I got to go to small claims court and do it myself… I don’t know.

“But this other guy who lives down the hall, I talked to him and he says, ‘yeah, tomorrow when you go to church, I’ll go talk to him for you.’ I just came back from church. He didn’t go. He’s still sitting there in his pajamas. Yeah… So that’s it. That’s it. From now on, I just got to go do it for myself. From now on, I’m on my own. Yep. But that guy, he’s always so drunk anyway...”

Just then, he must have seen someone he knew out on the street, and he began banging on the window to draw his attention. Then he said, “Ma, I got to go... Yeah, but you are still staying over with me on Tuesday night, right? I said, you’re still coming over on Tuesday and staying with me, right? OK, good. OK… OK see you. Bye.”

With that, he got up, grabbed his cane, and made his way out the door, leaving at the table a mess of napkins and coffee cups.

Shere in the Beginning of the End

We come back from the beach around 4pm. I’m tired, so I go into the bedroom and take a nap. I wake up about 30 minutes later, Shere licking my ears. I grab her, twisting around, and we begin wrestling. Her smell is all over me, her silky hair brushing my bare chest. The grasping becomes softer and softer until it’s little more than gentle groping: bare arms and legs, hands clasping, wet lips, breath. I give up and lay on my back. She puts her head on my chest.

“I can hear your heart,” she says. “It sounds big.”

“It is big. You could fit your whole head inside it. Then again, you do have a bird head.”

She slaps my chest, and though I can’t see her face, I can tell she’s smiling.

“I don’t have a bird head.”

“Fine, you don’t have a bird head. It’s more like a squirrel’s actually…”

Another slap.

A breeze comes in off the water and the cream-colored curtains breathe. Outside, the sun is reflecting off the bay, giving the water a shimmering, disco reflection. The silhouette of a sailboat drifts in the distance.

“What do you want to do for dinner?”

“I was thinking of making those sausages,” I say, “tomato-basil salad, greens.”

“Mmm.”

“Mmm-what?”

“Just mmm. Sounds good. Wine?”

“Do we still have that Barolo?”

“Drank it last week.”

“I think you’ll have to go get some then.”

She turns over and kisses my chest, then my neck, cheek, hair, ear. She really goes to town on my ear because she knows it drives me crazy. I start breathing heavy. My hands trace the length of her body. Pulling up her dress I see that she’s wearing no underwear.

*

Half an hour later, Shere takes the car to get some wine, and I light the grill on the deck, then go inside to start chopping tomatoes, red onion, and basil for the salad. I’ll need some red wine vinegar and olive oil, and when I go to the pantry, I see we’re running low. I call Shere to see if she can drop by the market. In the distance, I hear a phone ringing. I follow the sound to her handbag, which she left in the bedroom. I pull it out to see it reads “4 missed calls.” I usually don’t pry into Shere’s private stuff, but for some reason, I feel compelled to cycle through the missed calls. The first, of course, is mine. The other three are from a number I don’t recognize. It’s called “Secret.”

*

We put on some Alice Coltrane, open the wine, and throw the sausages on the grill. Sitting on the deck, watching the sun melt into the ocean, I can’t think of a single place in the universe I’d rather be. Still, “Secret” is lingering in the back of my mind… I push it out as much as I can.

“I was reading this book today that said that there are a million possible futures,” I say, “each co-existing in parallel dimensions. As we move forward in time, we close off each of the futures, collapsing dimensions, until we end up with the one true path we actually follow.”

“Each decision is a thousand renunciations,” Shere says staring out into the water.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see into the future and choose which one best suited your tastes? Better yet, clone yourself, send the clones into the future to experience each of those possible futures, then report back on which path is the best to follow. That would be rad.”

Standing still in the fading light with her Wayfarers hiding her eyes, Shere looks like a Terminator. “Sure,” she says without a hint of emotion, “but that’s fantasy.” She sips her wine. “Each of us has to make decisions without pre-cognition; without clones. The definition of maturity is someone who can make a decision that they know to be the best, and then stick to it, whether it feels good later or not.”

Shere can be such a realist sometimes. Such a buzz kill.

When the food is ready, she pours us more wine. We eat, chat, chill, laugh, and enjoy each other’s company.

*

After dinner, I’m sitting on the deck, spacing out. Shere emerges from the bungalow with a joint. It’s dark, but the horizon is still emanating an indigo glow and the water reflects the light in cool tones of blue and violet. In the distance we can see squid boats, their underwater lights attracting the evening’s catch. We go down to walk along the beach.

“Nights like this make me wonder if there’s anything in the world we can ever truly know,” Shere says.

“Hmm,” I say, “interesting.”

“Is there anything in the world you want to know?”

“Many things,” I say, “but tonight, I’m just going to ask you one thing: you don’t keep secrets from me, do you?”

She looks at me, hurt. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“I don’t know. No reason. Just wondering, I guess. Wondering what’s next… Where do we go now?”

“What do you mean?” she says. “Why do you want to ‘go’ anywhere? Things are cool right here, right now, aren’t they? Can’t we just ride for a while? Isn’t this enough?”

I smile, knowing she is right, knowing it was a mistake to bring it up. But Shere won’t let it go.

“Why did you ask me that?” she says after a tense silence. “If there’s something on your mind, just say it.”

I’ve seen her like this before and it worries me, because when she gets like this, she can go really weird. She has the potential to go ballistic. I judge it best just to tell the truth.

“Look,” I say as sweetly as I can, “I looked at your phone and saw that you had some missed calls from… a number I didn’t recognize. ‘Secret.’ I guess it just bugged me out a little.”

“You looked through my phone? What the fuck? That’s not cool.” She walks ahead of me on the beach, then turns around, her face twisted with fury. “Shit. Why the fuck did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I called you when you were out and you left your phone upstairs. I went and looked at it, and then… I don’t know.”

“’Secret’ is my mom’s home line, OK? She lives in Secret Glen, that’s why. It’s not… whatever you thought it was.”

“I’m sorry, Shere. I guess I just… I wonder sometimes. But not because of you... it’s me. I’m just an insecure asshole. I’m sorry. That’s the truth.”

“Just…” She shakes her head, trying to blow it off, but I can tell it really bothers her. “It’s fine… just relax, OK?”

I feel terrible. The damage is done. This is the moment, I think, praying I’m wrong.

*

We go back to the house and watch a movie. It isn’t great. I fall asleep in the middle, and when I wake up, Shere had already gone to bed. The TV is a blue screen and I’m sprawled out on the couch in the dark. I get up, go outside and smoke a cigarette. The ocean is quiet. I can feel something in the air, a secret energy. The wind is changing.

*

That was the calm before the storm. Before everything changed. Shere got her contract with Ford in September, and we broke up soon after that. She would move to New York to start her career as an anorexic cokehead, and a beautiful one at that. I would move to Nepal to teach English for a year, then… well, that’s another story, I guess. But I often think back to that summer at the beach house. Those were good times. Magical times. What could have happened if I never looked at her cell phone while she was out? What would have happened if I never brought up the “Secret?” What if we decided to just sit up there on the deck instead of walking down the beach? If we never went down there, maybe I would have forgotten about it completely. Maybe.

So many maybes.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is our destiny. We are all where we are meant to be, no matter how many different ways we try to look at it.

Now is all we have to argue with.