going by the usual definitions. But Matthew’s house—small as it was—was always warm, packed full of kitschy objects from his parents’ pasts. They had all the clay pots he had made in a childhood pottery class lined up on one of the windowsills, even though they were glazed in garish colors and deeply, deeply lopsided. On the wall above them were his mom’s needlepoints, stitched with rhymes about home and blessings and family.
My house—coming up on our right—was stately, spotlights illuminating its white sides, pillars out front like someone was trying to create a miniature Monticello. I remembered, somewhere buried inside the memory, that feeling of dread I had felt as we pulled in the driveway. I hadn’t wanted to go in. I didn’t want to go in now.
For a while I sat and listened to the second track—“Inertia”—which was one of the only love songs on the album, about inertia carrying the guitarist toward his wife. The first time I’d heard it, I’d thought about how unromantic a sentiment that was—like he had only found her and married her because some outside force hurled him at her and he couldn’t stop it. But now I heard in it this sense of propulsion toward a particular goal, like everything in life had buoyed him there. Like even his mistakes, even his darkness, had been taking him toward her.
I blinked tears from my eyes, despite myself.
“What are you trying to do, Matt?” I said.
He lifted a shoulder. “I just want to relive the good times with my best friend.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then take us to your favorite time.”
“You first.”
“Fine,” I said again. “This is your party, after all.”
“And I’ll cry if I want to,” he crooned, as the car and its cracker smell disappeared.
I had known his name, the way you sometimes knew people’s names when they went to school with you, even if you hadn’t spoken to them. We had had a class or two together, but never sat next to each other, never had a conversation.
In the space between our memories, I thought of my first sight of him, in the hallway at school, bag slung over one shoulder, hair tickling the corner of his eye. His hair was floppy then, and curling around the ears. His eyes were hazel, stark against his brown skin—they came from his mother, who was German, not his father, who was Mexican—and he had pimples in the middle of each cheek. Now they were acne scars, only visible in bright light, little reminders of when we were greasy and fourteen.
Now, watching him materialize, I wondered how it was that I hadn’t been able to see from the very first moment the potential for friendship living inside him, like a little candle flame. He had just been another person to me, for so long. And then he had been the only person—the only one who understood me, and then, later, the last one who could stand me. Now no one could. Not even me.
I felt the grains of sand between my toes first—still hot from the day’s sun, though it had set hours before—and then I smelled the rich smoke of the bonfire, heard its crackle. Beneath me was rough bark, a log on its side, and next to me, Matt, bongos in his lap.
They weren’t his bongos—as far as I knew, Matt didn’t own any kind of drum—but he had stolen them from our friend Jack, and now he drumrolled every so often like he was setting someone up for a joke. He had gotten yelled at three times already. Matt had a way of annoying people and amusing them at the same time.
Waves crashed against the rocks to my right, big stones that people sometimes spray-painted with love messages when the tide was low. Some were so worn that only fragments of letters remained. My freshman year of high school I had done an art project on them, documenting each stone and displaying them from newest-looking to oldest. Showing how love faded with time. Or something. I cringed to think of it now, how new I had been, and how impressed with myself.
Across the fire, Jack was strumming a guitar, and Anna—my oldest friend—was singing a dirge version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” laughing through most of the words. I was holding a stick I had found in the brush at the edge of the sand. I had stripped it of bark and stuck a marshmallow on it; now that marshmallow was a fireball.
“So your plan is to just waste a perfectly good marshmallow,” Matt said to me.
“Well, do you know what a marshmallow becomes when you cook it too long?” I said. “No. Because you can never resist them, so you’ve never let it get that far.”
“Some questions about the world don’t need to be answered, you know. I’m perfectly content with just eating the toasted marshmallows for the rest of my days.”
“This is why you had to drop art.”
“Because I’m not curious about charred marshmallows?”
“No.” I laughed. “Because you can be perfectly content instead of … perpetually unsettled.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you calling me simpleminded? Like a golden retriever or something?”
“No!” I shook my head. “I mean, for one thing, if you were a dog, you would obviously be a labradoodle—”
“A labradoodle?”
“—and for another, if we were all the same, it would be a boring world.”
“I still think you were being a little condescending.” He paused, and smiled at me. “I can give it a pass, though, because you’re obviously still in your idealistic-adolescent-art-student phase—”
“Hypocrisy!” I cried, pointing at him. “The definition of ‘condescending’ may as well be telling someone they’re going through a phase.”
Matt’s response was to seize the stick from my hand, blow out the flames of the disintegrating marshmallow, and pull it free, tossing it from hand to hand until it cooled. Then he shoved it—charred, but still gooey on the inside—into his mouth.
“Experiment over,” he said with a full mouth. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
He didn’t answer, just grabbed me by the elbow and steered me away from the bonfire. When we had found the path just before the rocks, he took off running, and I had no choice but to follow him. I chased him up the path, laughing, the warm summer air blowing over my cheeks and through my hair.
Then I remembered.
He was leading us to the dune cliff—a low sand cliff jutting out over the water. It was against beach rules to jump off it, but people did it anyway, mostly people our age who hadn’t yet developed that part of the brain that thought about consequences. A gift as well as a curse.
I watched as Matt sprinted off the cliff, flailing in the air for a breathless moment before he hit the water.
I stopped a few feet from the edge. Then I heard him laughing.
“Come on!” he shouted.
I was more comfortable just watching antics like these, turning them into a myth in my mind, a legend. I watched life so that I could find the story inside it—it helped me make sense of things. But sometimes I got tired of my own brain, perpetually unsettled as it was.
This
