We never told anyone about the dead dog in the driveway or what happened the day that Cole was admitted to hospital after being found somewhere at the foot of Tarantula Hill, bleeding on the insides. It was the summer of 1998 and I'd forgotten everything I’d loved because during the stretch of weeks before our summer holidays, I had met Michael Trent. Everyone at school looked up to him and he knew it. His girlfriend Marianne knew it. And she had a cluster of pretty friends who would move around as if in an orbit with Michael’s prettier friends. They didn’t talk to me the year before. It wasn’t because I’m poor. introverted and painfully inept when it comes to social interactions, or even because I was on the debating team and enjoyed time in the library and playing the flute. They simply didn’t see I was there, blended into the backdrop of their lives. They looked right through me, as if I was just the air they were breathing. Something changed when the season’s did and autumn came, and it had something to do with a house party.
I won’t go into it, but a girl- one of Marianne’s friends- was drunk and she’d found her way to a high window, opened it, and was sitting. swaying on the sill. She was crying and saying she was ready to jump. I only happened to be in the vicinity because I had gone upstairs to the top floor bathroom to vomit the beer I’d been endlessly gulping just to calm myself down. In the cabinet over the sink I looked for some mouthwash so I could rinse the stench of regurgitated alcohol off my tongue but instead found a prescription pill bottle with the name ‘Steiner, Janet’ printed on the label. I figured out that it must have been the mother of Garrett Steiner, whose house it was, and he was Marianne’s ex-boyfriend. I swallowed the pills and went out of the bathroom and that’s when I saw this girl I recognised from mental images I had of Michael surrounded by a crowd of faces at school- faces heavy with ennui but somehow shimmering in the light of his halo. People got wind of it very quickly and started to freak out, making it worse. She had crossed the threshold of drunk into something horrible and worse, something familiar to me, but then and there I told myself- whatever- I’d always imagined this kind of over-emotional yet totally empty dramatic performance as a regular occurrence within this social circle. I talked to her and I don’t really remember the specifics because the pills had kicked in, interacting with the beer in my stomach, and everything in my memory is wrapped in this filmy glaze. I must have said something coincidentally and exactly right or just what she needed to hear or maybe I said a bunch of things, but she literally stepped down, weeping mascara all over my t-shirt, and held onto my unsteady shoulder, suffocating and tight. She went on to spread the word to her friends, including Marianne and Michael, and said I’d saved her life, which isn’t technically true or true in any other respect as I’m not sure it was ever in danger. After that, back at school, it was instant. They saw me, they waved me over to their table at lunch, they chatted to me behind the backs of teachers in classes we shared and suggested hanging out on Tarantula Hill when school was over for the summer.
They were very interesting people, it seemed, and all very special. I was only just getting to know them and spend time in their orbit and everything was different. I’d known Cole for at least eight years and he wasn’t even in the same solar system. I guess we used to be what you’d call best friends, but so much changed. I wanted to change with it. Marianne was a hand model and her family owned half the property in Prague or something. The suicidal roof girl was involved in countless activities and clubs- her list of interests would be pages long-but she apparently wrote a lot. Poetry, prose, creative non-fiction, and all that. She just didn’t show it off or let anyone read it, which I could understand. Her boyfriend, Joey, was from a family whose house could contain at least five the size of the one I live in, and he collected various athletic trophies. Garrett was the drummer in a band with one girl and two other guys, and they performed live every so often at a local venue where I occasionally bought coffee. These people- it was as if they were so distant and different compared to me, like they weren’t even human, but something that transcended me and everything about life as I knew it. So enviable, so enigmatic; they were extraordinary people in my eyes, and when they glanced my way and beckoned me over, I felt special too. Or at least like I could be, someday.
Then there was Michael. I fell in love with Michael Trent last summer. He stood at six feet and two inches, just one inch short of me, with chestnut-coloured hair and shoulders strong enough to hold up the sky and shrug at the same time. Even the lilt of his voice was mesmerising. I was captivated by the cadence of his words, regardless of what he was saying, and when he spoke it was sometimes with lopsided lips, smiling; sometimes from behind a heavy frown, his features turned inwards as if to protect him from affection. Back then, I barely knew him but I knew I was in love. I came to know him so well and he came to know me too. Realistically I was more eager to learn about him than he was to learn about me, so maybe he didn’t really know me at all. Whatever, the love is still there. We just never talked about some of the things that happened last summer because it wasn’t worth discussing anyway, and I can’t remember most of it. Not accurately, anyway. We smoked a lot of weed and drank a lot of anything with alcohol in it so I’m hardly a reliable eyewitness to the series of events that nonetheless leave me with a cold chill that rushes like sweat down my back and then my head starts to hurt. Maybe I need glasses.
I think there was a time that Cole reached out to me specifically, around the time I was getting to know all these new people. I don’t remember what it was about exactly. It might have been that he was going through some family matter- at the start we had bonded because my mother is a recovering addict and his father is a functioning alcoholic, but his parents are still together, unlike mine. It wasn’t the one thing that made us close for a time but I used to be able to tell him about what was going on in my head or at my house, and he could tell me about his parents and how all he wanted was for them to get a divorce. We shared other interests but, like I said, things change and people change and I was spending my time trying to get to know Michael and his friends. Cole and I didn’t speak for a long time but not because I didn’t want to. He stopped smiling at me, stopped all interaction eventually. Looking back, I think he got the impression that I wanted new social experiences. I did, but not at the expense of our friendship- I just never told him that. It was easier to fit in with a new crowd without him being there, having to fit him in there with me.
It wasn’t just Cole. During the summer I neglected everything else I used to do just to be around Michael. I never wanted to wash my clothes when they held the scent of Michael’s sweat and spliff and hair wax, mixed in with Marianne’s body spray. I remember the day after the thing happened with Cole on Tarantula Hill, I was in his bedroom, lying on his stinking, dirty carpet and loving it. I remember that we’d just shared a spliff and I was being dramatic, sprawling on the floor and asking him to take my pulse because I thought I was dying. The crazy thing was, I did really think I was dying sometimes, when I was around him. The pain of being around him was slow and gradually worsening- my mind felt like it was collapsing, deteriorating, the longer our bodies were kept apart, but I knew I could only be close to him by keeping just the right distance. He was laughing- he didn’t take my pulse, but he told me not to be a coward and then said, “Remember that time you said God works in mysterious ways?”He shot me this look, a sidelong flicker of his eyes, and it’s hard to explain but with every look he gave me, there were volumes of words unspoken, and there was no way of knowing what those words were. But he was always saying cryptic little sentences, some of them platitudinous, or throwing rhetorical questions into the ether. Though if written his words would carry little weight, if any at all, it was the way he looked at me when he said them. There was no way of knowing there were any words at all behind his eyes. All those glances could have been empty. The language of his body and his facial expressions down to the most inscrutable movement could have been completely meaningless, or simply random, and I filled in those empty spaces with only my own interpretations, my skewed and desirous perceptions. When he looked at me, every glance bestowed me with worth and importance; carried with it a secret ciphered message that not I nor anyone else could ever decode. When he spoke to me, it all sounded like serendipity. He could deliver those words with his eyes, the language of his body, and make them sound like everything you wanted to hear. In response to his comment on God’s mystery, whether or not it was laden with innuendo, all I could say was yeah and something else about how everything with a halo looked like him. He lapped it up. He loved it. and he knew we were his ever-loving, ever-learning disciples.
He knew he could get a kick out of describing his sex life with Marianne to me because I’d try not to show how upset it made me, and the attempts I made to adjust the look on my face, trying various expressions of nonchalance, were futile. I could not fake it. I was transparent, so much so that my pretences themselves were complete giveaway, my genuine feelings and reactions utterly obvious. It was a pretence that backfired. He knew I wanted him but I’m not sure if he knew that in the same way that I really did love him, to some extent he must have also loved me- we went through too much together. Michael knew that his followers, friends and me had collectively handed him our puppet strings and that we had to be grateful because none of us would ever have known what it feels like to shatter the speed limit in the suburbs after a house party; or spray paint the facades of empty buildings under a dome of stars; or share in a memory, a moment between just you and him that can be shared all over again with only a flicker of his eyes; or to completely abandon oneself and throw every caution and thought of consequence to the wind, if it wasn’t for him. Before the night we talked about halos, I remember visiting Cole in hospital and telling him that I didn’t know about the plan, I hadn’t known. He looked at me with tears blurring his eyes and an expression that made me feel like I was going to throw up. A machine attached to him released another beep. and he said, “Why is Michael so cruel”- and it wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer him either way and must have walked around with stars in my eyes for weeks afterwards, thinking singularly about God’s mysterious ways and divinity.
About two weeks later, or maybe less, there was a house party at Julia Doherty’s because her parents were away at a conference in the south of France that had something to do with wine. Their house had an enormous wine cellar- when the claustrophobia of crowded rooms set in, and this other unnamed, unidentified fear that creeps up on me more lately than ever before, I ducked into the cellar to get away from all the people. I saw all their racks of wine bottles, untouched and unopened. some even blanketed with a layer of dust, I imagined what it would be like to have something you believed was so precious, you could obtain it and keep it for decades, and simply owning it would be enough. I wondered if my memories of Michael and all those precious feelings would store themselves somewhere in the corners of my mind, collecting dust yet still of such value.
Michael brought pack upon pack of beer bottles to Julia’s and for a moment I wished that Cole could be there just so there was one person to turn to who didn’t completely confound me, but I smacked that thought away. I hadn’t thought about him at previous parties or on other days or during those evenings I spent staring at Michael’s ceiling as if I was looking at heaven. But after that night on Tarantula Hill, the thought kept intruding, pushing its way in. Finding something to sniff or swallow always helped. No one had asked Michael or me about the scratches on our hands that looked to me like the cracked paving stones leftover after a little but brutal earthquake hit the towns north of ours- there was some structural damage but no fatalities. I kind of liked the way those streets looked in the wake of it- a small-scale disaster, fracturing the stone and rattling the steel, cracking the earth underneath open like an egg.
Michael and I both cut through the rest of the summer with our hands in our pockets. In the bathroom I found Julia’s grandmother’s pills. I’d learnt that older people are often holding prescription pills that they never use, either from ailments in the past or because they don’t find in them the same recreational or mind-numbing value that myself and some of my peers did. It’s become a habit- foraging for other people’s pharmaceuticals. I can’t stop myself from taking them if they are there, and now I always look. I guess I take after my mother that way. She didn’t go to any AA meetings during that summer and I didnt even notice. I’m ashamed to admit that. I know it’s not my fault she’s drinking again but I could have paid more attention and now we are living in our own worlds, our own addictions, mine being Michael, and I didn’t want sobriety. Without him, I would have nowhere to look to find purpose, to find perfection. My mother probably feels the same way about whiskey. I go home as rarely as I can to avoid my guilty conscience. It tangles itself into knots before I can blink and the world suddenly becomes so overwhelmingly loud, and so unbearably close.
But anyway, at that party, Michael didn’t say a word to me all night. I don’t know why and he never explained it but it was unbearable. It got to about 2am and Michael was too drunk to stand or speak coherently, but he put his arm around me and was slurring about what a cool guy he thinks I am, and I didn’t care that he was so drunk he’d never remember that he had no intention of kissing me because then I’d have to think about it. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I remember being excited because we were going to leave the party alone but together and go back to Tarantula Hill. I was behind the wheel and as we pulled out of the driveway I saw something small flash across my rear view mirror and then heard the thump. Julia stood there crying and picking at her manicure; she wailed, “What did you do?” Michael was abruptly sober and his eyes looked like magic eight balls, with huge black pupils, his irises gold. I was saying it was an accident and he yelled at me to shut up and so I did. Then we reversed back over the dog- I threw up violently into my lap but it was likely the beer and Vicodin- because there was nowhere else to go. In the end I wrote Julia a note- I’m sorry, I’m sorry- and put it through her letterbox a couple of days later. That was when I found out that Cole was home, because he lived just opposite Julia’s house where we’d run wheels twice over the dog. He’d gotten out of hospital and I hadn’t seen him.
Nobody saw much of him for the rest of the summer or asked any questions, but I think he knew. The headaches and insomnia became so unbearable that I asked Garrett's bandmate to hook me up with some oxycodone. I could afford it at first, but after a while I learnt that there are certain compromises that have to be made to get what I need, and I also learnt how to shut off my thoughts with their sharp peaks and descending spirals and do what needs to be done, as if I can operate my body from the outside, like a piece of machinery. All I do is imagine I'm with Michael. I remember that Cole and I used to be close and spend time together but I can't remember why or what we did. I don't know much these days except that I'm in love and in pain at the same time, and that I did a terrible thing. That terrible thing happened not because I was in love but if I hadn't been, maybe it wouldn't have happened. I can't think about that- all those other possible consequences and outcomes, the butterfly effect. I've taught myself not to look at my hands and wonder whether something took control of them, or whether they are weapons. I needed to teach myself to think in certain routes because the truth will never be spoken of.
That was, of course, the first fear. That Cole would tell. He had no loyalty to me anymore, so he could have. He was probably encouraged to, demanded to. We waited with our hands in our pockets, nails cutting crescent moons into our palms, but nothing happened. Nobody knocked, nobody called, nobody said anything, not even us. Cole never said anything, not to anyone at all. But every time I drive down that street I get the feeling that someone is watching me.
