The Palmer Pool

28 | Sweep Up

I sat at a small desk in Liz's room and wrote all night. After I purged all of the facts I could come up with into the notebook, I wrote down everything I remembered in chronological order. I began with what was probably my first memory: chasing my brother up the stairs because he'd drawn a mustache on my baby doll with a marker and then slipping and sliding face down on the carpeted steps and sustaining a severe rug burn on my belly and face.

I had a few memories that stuck out from each grade. I wrote down things that didn't seem especially significant, or pleasant even, but I figured if my brain held onto something for years it was worth writing down.

I wrote down the memory- or dream, I couldn't decide which- of falling into the river during a storm and the boy with the blue lips.

I wrote about how my dad made Jason and I spend weekends camping at my uncle's hunting property in the middle of nowhere. We learned how to start fires and use field guides to identify plants, even ones we could eat. He taught me how to load and fire a shotgun, which I did once, cried and then vowed to never do again.

When the flow of ink from the pen slowed, I shook it and tried to scribble, but nothing came out. There weren't any more pens on the desk or in the desk drawer. I pulled out the drawer in the nightstand that Liz had retrieved the notebook and pen from earlier. There was a stack of well-worn spiral notebooks, but no other pens.

"What are you doing?" Liz grumbled.

I quickly shut the drawer. "I need a new pen. The other one stopped working."

"It's a fountain pen," she sighed as she rolled onto her feet. She opened the nightstand drawer and took out a small jar. Then she sat at the desk, unscrewed something on the pen, put the tip of it into the jar and drew ink back up into the pen. She handed it back to me and crawled back into bed.

I wrote about how I became friends with Sophie and Laura on the bleachers in the gym in middle school. I tried to describe some of our private jokes in a way that made sense, while realizing they actually made no sense at all. I wrote about the night I laid on a trampoline sharing headphones with Kaitlin and stared into space and how I felt so very small.

I yawned and decided to give up on the chronological order and write as things came to mind because I'd probably fall asleep face down on the desk if I stopped writing to think.

I wrote about how I met Will at work the previous summer. He didn't live in Palmer, so I knew nothing about him, which was nice for a change. We passed the down time at our crappy fast food job making sculptures out of moistened buns, folding burger wrappers into a flock of cranes that we hung from the ceiling tiles in our manager's office, and writing obscenities on the hot griddle with cheese. At the end of the summer, on his last day of work before leaving for college, we lingered in the parking lot after closing down and he asked if I wanted to celebrate with him.

On a Thursday afternoon, when my mom and Chris were on a trip to Traverse City, and I was supposed to be staying at my dad's house, Will and I sat on the grass in the sun drinking vodka lemonades. We jokingly fought over control of the portable speaker while berating each other's taste in music. I held my phone to my chest and argued that I had the right to enjoy catchy pop music, because it made me happy and why shouldn't we do what makes us happy in this sad world we live in? His fingers pressed against my skin as he tried to pry the phone from my hands, then he stopped abruptly, looked into my eyes and said, "We should have sex."

I laughed a strange sputtered laugh.

"Well," I started, and then studied him as if I hadn't spent all summer covertly doing just that. His black hair was tousled from the ride we took on the jet ski, his brown eyes, which were usually lit up as a mischievous plan took shape in his mind, were placid and vulnerable, his hands, which were nervously picking at the grass, and his bright orange swim shorts, the color of the construction cones lining the Michigan roads every summer. Caution, I thought. Proceed with caution. I smiled. "I'd be on board with that. You got any STIs I need to know about first?"