Kelsey Day

Kelsey Day

Her Name Like a Question

She kisses me under a plastic table, our knees digging into the hardwood floor, in the attic of a Baptist church. I am ten years old. In reaching for her, I unearth a scab on my elbow and the heat runs down my arm, but I am too excited to notice.

The tablecloth is cheap, crinkly, a fluorescent green. It blocks us from sight, rippling like a curtain. As my mouth fills with her mouth, shouts crowd the chapel below us. It’s a birthday party, hosted by the church, a common practice in my small southern town.

We are supposed to perform karaoke in a few minutes. I pull away for a moment to remind her that we shouldn’t be late—people will wonder where we are. She sits back, leaning away from me. In the dark, I can’t see her expression, just the uncertain outline of her shoulders. She smells like curling tomato vines, her mouth sour and bright. I want to kiss her again, but I sense the game is over. The blood from my opened scab has dried in feathered lines down my arm. I lick my thumb and try to rub them away before we crawl back out and descend the stairs to the altar.

My microphone is sticky from the last kid’s hands. When I begin to sing, I realize that it doesn’t work. Her voice thunders through the room and makes the walls shiver, but no matter how loud I sing, my voice disappears.

With all these eyes on us, I don’t mind much. She is the loudest person I know. It’s natural to stand beside her, and to let her voice carry us as mine hides behind hers, safe.

When we’re done, I make a joke about the broken mic.

She waves at her parents across the room, her eyes fixed over my head. “What are you talking about? It worked fine. You just weren’t singing.”

“No, I was,” I insist. “It was the microphone. But it’s okay. I liked it better that way anyways.”

“You’ve just got to breathe deeper,” she says. “That makes the sound come out loud.”

We loop arms and go into the crowd together.

* * *

She flirts with my brother when she comes over for dinner. My parents love her, even when she and I argue. Boys at school crowd her during lunch, recess, and the bus ride home. It’s like being friends with a celebrity. She gives off a reckless, rageful light.

In eighth grade, her dad takes her family to Spain for a year. I cry into her neck at the airport, chest seizing, fingernails scraping into her T-shirt. For months, I am inconsolable. School takes on a dull pallor. The lockers slump, lifeless in the hall. My teeth ache with absence.

To fill the hours, I descend into a “relationship” with a kid from a neighboring middle school. We spend most of the day messaging on Facebook about music, writing, and politics. We meet twice in person, at our local library. I am enamored with his smooth legs, his long orange socks, his ruffled dress shirts. He introduces me to Dr. Who, and I watch the weeping angel episode again and again: the demons, locked in stone, only able to move when no one is looking.

He takes me to a theater performance in the nearest city, a two-and-a-half-hour drive with his mom behind the steering wheel. He sits in the middle seat, right next to me, even though he could sit by the window. Our knees don’t knock. Our elbows don’t brush. In the six months we date, we never once touch each other.

When she returns from Spain, her first order of business is dealing with him. She explains her stance as we walk from the library to the cafeteria.

“He’s smart, sure,” she says, swinging her lunchbox. “But I looked at his Facebook profile, and he’s not nearly cute enough for you. I think it’s time you raised your standards.”

A giddy heat creeps up my neck. I look over at her. The corner of her mouth pulls up. Warmth blossoms, takes root in my cheeks.

“He’s going to a high school in Asheville next year,” I tell her. “So we won’t have to look at him that much.”

“Yeah, exactly,” she says. “He’s not even sticking around. What does that say about him?”

She bumps my hip, and I pretend to veer off balance. She snags my hand, yanks me upright.

“You need to break up,” she says, her face close to mine. “I know about these things.”

The same day that she comes home from Spain, I break up with him. We delete all of his pictures from my iPod Touch as we sit on the couch together.

* * *

The summer before freshman year, I chop off all my hair because I want to look like someone from summer camp. I arrive at school with a pixie cut and braces. She meets me in the cafeteria before class.

“John kissed me,” she says, by way of greeting.

The walls crumple in like a tin can.

“When?” I say.

“Last night. We were texting about starting high school, how this is a new era. And he ran to my house, all the way from Council Oaks. Four miles, in the rain.”

“What did you—but weren’t your parents—”

“I met him outside,” she says, and I can see it as she speaks, the horrible romance of it all. Him, soaked through his T-shirt, waiting by the crab apple tree in her backyard. She would have opened the screen door at the back of the house slowly, so the metal wouldn’t squeal. Looking like a ghost, with that perfectly uncareful smile. Her hair, humming quietly against her shoulders. Still damp from the shower. No makeup, no deodorant, just the scent of soap.

She led him to the tool shed, where her father puttered around on the weekends. She closed the door and turned to him in the dark. It smelled like wood shavings and dust. She could hear him quietly breathing.

“He’s shorter than me, so I leaned against the wall with my feet out, like this.” She demonstrates against the cafeteria wall, into a posterboard that reads GET READY FOR THE SAT’S. As she stretches her legs out, her shoulders sink lower down against the wall. “See?”

“Yeah,” I say.

So she’d made herself smaller, against the rough shed wall. He’d cupped his hand around her neck. Pulled her forward. And then he had kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.

“Too much tongue,” she said. “But still. I’ve kissed someone, now.”

I look at her for a second too long. “That’s incredible.”

“We’re sitting with him at lunch today,” she says, and I follow her instructions.

The lake is black, gaping up at us like an open mouth. We dangle our legs over the dark, never letting our toes touch the water. The air vibrates with moths and mosquitoes. The dock creaks and sways along with the waves and the wind. Freshman year is over, and now we both have boyfriends. She sits with a guitar in her lap, and as she sings I imagine the calluses on her hands, the thin indentations where the strings cut into her finger pads.

It’s a sad song, about lions and empty mattresses, overripe with teenage angst. I lie back on the splintered dock and close my eyes. Nothing is ever sad enough to satisfy us—no tragic novel, no #depression Tumblr post, no emo album. She and I are connoisseurs of misery, competitors in it. The sadder I am, the closer I feel to her.

She sets down the guitar and leans back next to me, under a nest of stars. I can smell her hair, the tart mint shampoo. Neither of us look at one another, keeping our eyes on the sky. But I can feel her next to me as though she is a part of my own body. Her hands, folded on her chest with rings digging down into every knuckle. Her cheekbones, pushing up against her skin. Her bare feet, prickling with sprays of lake water.

I do not look over at her. I think of my new boyfriend, pacing in a house next to highway 421, all his musk and snarl and misplaced rebellion. In cultivating sadness, he has been my greatest achievement.

I do not look over at her. I imagine her shoulders, the tension swarming between the muscles. Her neck, locked and aching. Her mouth, just barely open.

The mosquitos buzz. The water murmurs.

I look over at her, and her eyes shine back. She’s already looking. The moon is bright enough that it reflects silver into her pupils. Her eyelashes cast shadows across her eyes.

I say her name like a question.

She laughs, and turns the other way.

We buy flannels at the thrift shop and spread them over the floor in the basement. Jars of paint glisten like science experiments.

She dips a brush into the neon green and looks up at me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” I say.

The air conditioner holds its breath. She scrawls something suicidal on the back of the flannel, a lyric from a band we both listen to. I angle my shoulders so it seems like I’m not looking. The night before, she texted me that she didn’t want to be alive anymore—that she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills and that she loved me, that she would always love me.

I didn’t call her parents. I didn’t call the police. I stayed awake for the rest of the night, begging her to fix it, to vomit up the toxins, to keep her eyes open. In the morning, she confessed she hadn’t taken any of the pills.

“You’re so dramatic,” she says now, into the silence. “You’re always taking things so seriously.”

I paint a row of flowers down the edge of a flannel sleeve. She drizzles paint over the words she’d written. I stare hard at the flower I’ve drawn. She knocks her shoulder against mine.

“Hey,” she says. “Let me draw one of those on you. Lighten you up, a little.”

She tugs one edge of my tangerine dress sleeve down, over my shoulder. The air conditioner coughs back to life, sends a steep chill through the room. Her hands press against my bare shoulder blade. I can feel the calluses on her fingertips. I keep my eyes open, staring down at the flowers I’d drawn. Their petals look– crooked now.

The cool tip of her paintbrush scratches against my skin.

“So dramatic,” she says again, her voice just above a whisper.

My boyfriend pins me down in a hammock on my sixteenth birthday. I try and fail to evacuate my body. She is the first person I tell.

I keep the details brief, clipped. We’re sitting in the back of an empty auditorium, waiting for theater rehearsal. Her hand finds mine in the dark. Her fingernails bite into my knuckles, holding onto me so tight it hurts.

“And you’re still with him,” she says.

“I love him,” I say.

All through that summer, he and I lay on the library lawn by a dying tulip poplar tree. The roots pressed into our backs. He held my hand with gentle delight, like a nervous child. He burned himself with lighters and told me about it, showed me the rubbery scars on his arms. I kissed him hard, imagining him pressed against the wall of a toolshed.

“He’s a piece of shit,” she says. “I’m going to kill him.”

I pull my hand away.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to stay,” she says.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I say. What I mean is, He is the only proof I have that someone can want me.

“It’s not complicated,” she says. “He hurt you, and he doesn’t deserve you. Break up with him.”

“I love him,” I say again.

“That’s not good enough,” she says.

She takes my hand again. My throat closes, but I don’t cry. The empty stage watches us. I cling to the weight of her hand, and imagine that our palm-lines match up perfectly as they press together—that if a fortune teller were to examine the roots in our skin, she would gasp, find them identical, wonder at how any two people could fit so closely together.

“It’s going to be okay.” She leans against me, her mouth pressed into my shoulder. “I love you. I love you so much,” she says. “Fuck. I love you.”

She holds me, and holds me, and holds me.

I break up with him in the spring. The tears melt his eyes into a wash of gold.

She convinces me to go on a school-sponsored camping trip over spring break—a community service trip in Savannah, Georgia, with a group of people I don’t know. It’ll help to clear my head, she says.

She introduces the strangers to me on the six-hour bus ride. I tug at a crack in the leather seats, foam spilling out. They draw me into word association games, blast music off their phones, bellow out laughter loud enough to break the windows. Outside, the landscape bends from mountains to coast. The trees thin out, and take on a wobbly, flexible posture.

It’s raining when we arrive. Clouds snarl overhead, the air loose and unspooling. We set up the tent a ten-minute walk from the beach, unpack our equipment in the rushing blue twilight. I lie down next to her in the tent, both of us wearing only T-shirts and underwear.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

I turn on my side, facing her. The last dregs of sunlight are muted against the red plastic of the tent.

“Better,” I say.

Rain splatters against the tarp ceiling.

“See?” she says. “I told you so.”

She turns on her side, away from me. White light bursts out from her hands as she checks her phone, texts her boyfriend goodnight. I lie beside her for hours without sleeping.

We go on a walk with a girl named Daisy the next morning, when the rain has lifted. Daisy has been an object of her obsession all year. If I can be her friend, I can get the lead in the musical. If I can be her friend, I can hang out with the other seniors. If I can be her friend, I can do anything I want.

“Have you had sex?” she asks Daisy as we walk.

The ocean growls, early and bright. I shoot her a look. She has never been good at filtering her thoughts. Daisy kicks a shell into the waves.

“Dylan and I have been together for two years. So.”

“So have you?”

“Yeah,” Daisy says.

“What was it like? Was it what you were expecting?” she says.

“It was…veinier than I thought it would be,” says Daisy.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, it…he was…I don’t know. There were more—veins. Than I thought there would be.”

“Like, in his penis?”

“Jesus Christ,” I say, breaking in. “Daisy, you don’t have to answer that.”

“Are you going to stay together after you graduate?” she pushes.

“I don’t know,” says Daisy. “Just because you’ve been together a long time, doesn’t always mean it’s a perfect relationship.” Her eyes meet mine. I look away. “He’s not always—I don’t know.”

We walk in silence for a moment.

“I get that,” I say, at last. It’s strange, being the one to break the silence. “It’s hard to leave. People always complain about how much it sucks to get broken up with. But I think it’s harder to leave.”

Daisy watches me.

“I just got out of a bad relationship,” I explain.

Daisy’s expression softens. She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “Hey,” she says. “It’s how you learn.”

“I don’t think she learned much of anything,” my friend says, laughing.

Both of us look at her. She is smiling, but her eyes are set on the place where Daisy touched my shoulder.

“What do you mean?” says Daisy.

“It’s different,” she says, nodding to Daisy. “When you know it’s over, you’ll end it.” She turns her eyes back to me. “But she just wasn’t strong enough to leave.”

I stop walking, but they don’t slow down. Wind gusts around me, disassembles me from every angle. Daisy looks over her shoulder, once, as they keep going.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says as she unzips the tent. I am lying on my sleeping pad, facing the wall.

I don’t answer. I hear her kicking her shoes off. She smells like sweat and ocean.

She touches my back.

“Hey,” she says. “I said I didn’t mean it.”

“I heard you.”

“I’m sorry. And you know I hate apologizing. So can we just forget it?”

“You were a dick.” I sit up and turn to face her. “That was a dick thing to say, and in front of someone I didn’t even know. What the fuck was that? Were you trying to impress her or something?”

“I don’t know why I said it. Sometimes I just say things, and it doesn’t mean anything.”

“No.” My voice rises. “Okay? No. That’s not a good enough excuse. You can’t just—”

Her phone rings. Her eyes flick down to the screen. When she looks up again, I already know what she’s going to say.

“I’ve got to answer this,” she says. “It’s John. Look—I said I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I heard you.” She crawls back out of the tent.

She doesn’t come back—not for the day of community service at a park nearby, not for the grilled cheese roasted by the beachside. I wander from stranger to stranger, making stilted small talk. Several times, I catch Daisy watching me.

The campsite is barely a campsite; it’s a five-minute walk from a public bathroom, ten minutes from a laundromat. When night falls, I walk half a mile down the coastline, searching for her. I check each stall in the bathroom. I clamber onto the bus, check under the seats. It’s raining when I get to the laundromat and find her sitting on top of a washing machine. Her knees are drawn up to her chest. The anxious lights buzz overhead. The door slams shut behind me, muffling the rain.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I say.

“Good job,” she says. “Game over.”

We are the only people in the laundromat. The machines all look slightly surprised, their doors propped half-open. My wet hair sticks to my neck and my T-shirt is soaked. I feel ridiculous, dripping in the laundromat, furious with her yet somehow still not having the upper hand.

“Have you been here all day?” I demand.

“I got lunch someplace nearby,” she says.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? I’ve been worried about you. We’ve all been worried about you. Why would you just—”

“John broke up with me,” she says. “Okay,” I say. My anger deflates a little, but I try to hold onto it. “Well, that doesn’t give you an excuse to—”

“He broke up with me,” she says, “because he found out I’m bisexual.”

I stare at her.

“You’re bisexual?”

She starts to cry. I cross the space instinctively, to the machine that she’s sitting on. I wrap my arms around her dangling legs. I press my face against her kneecaps.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Her hands claw into my hair. She cries harder. I press my lips against the fishhook scar under her knee, the one she got from a bike wreck in third grade.

“It’s okay,” I say again. “It’s okay. How did he—”

“My brother told him,” she whispers. “I told my brother I’d been—and he told John, and John—”

“He broke up with you for it?”

She shakes her head, eyes squeezed shut. “Not because I’m—that I thought I was bi. But because I didn’t tell him sooner.”

“That’s bullshit.” My arms tighten around her legs. “That’s fucking bullshit. You don’t owe him that. You don’t owe him anything. You’re better off without him.”

“I need him,” she says.

“No. You don’t.” And as the words come out, I realize that I have been waiting for this. That every time I’ve followed her orders, I have wished that I had the same power over her. That I could tell her to leave someone, and that she would listen. That she would choose me over everyone else.

“I’m going to convince him to take me back,” she says. “I know I can. I just—I hate having to beg.”

“Then don’t,” I say.

It’s unnatural to imagine her begging for anything. Even now, I have to crane my neck to look at her, sitting above me, always above me.

She drags in a shaky breath. “Yeah, well,” she says. “What else am I supposed to do?”

And the words are in my mouth. My arms are around her legs.

And I almost say, Be with someone who knows you.

And I almost say, Be with someone who is in love with you.

And I almost say, Be with me.

And I can feel the rain outside, how it throws itself against the roof. I can feel the ocean half a mile away, the ceaseless drowning. And I don’t say any of these things. I say, “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

And she sobs with her whole body, while I bury my head between her knees.

We walk back to the camp in silence. Ghostly palm trees moan in the dark. When we arrive, shoes caked in sand, we find our tent door billowing open like a flag. I’d forgotten to zip it shut.

She elbows past me, crawls in. “God,” she says. “It’s soaked. Everything’s soaked. Did you do this?”

“It’s—I was rushing, looking for you, and I must have—”

“Everything is ruined. We’re going to have to sleep like this.”

I follow her inside, the sleeping bag squishing under my knees. “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything. We sleep facing away from each other, itching under waterlogged blankets. Anger builds in my skin, gnaws like a fever behind my eyes. I want to wring out every centimeter of cloth. I want to squeeze every bit of longing from my body.

We drive back the next day. She sits on the opposite side of the bus with her hood pulled up. When we get home, she deletes the pictures of us from her Instagram. My anger twists. I refuse to crawl back to her, but what if she needs me? What if I pushed her too hard, edged her too close to the truth? I feel contaminated by regret, wondering if the night at the laundromat really happened.

On Monday, I set out to demand an explanation. But when I arrive at the cafeteria, she’s sitting at our table with John.

Understanding spreads through me in prickling roots. I sink into the seat across from her. A few friends at the table welcome me, but she doesn’t look up.

When she finally speaks, she says that she doesn’t want to associate with me anymore because I left the tent door open and ruined her things. My carelessness proved something she has suspected for a long time: I am a selfish, impulsive person.

I listen to her explain this while John scrolls through his phone, his other hand holding hers under the table. The friends sitting with us laugh, assuming that she’s messing with me. But I don’t smile back.

I pack up my lunch and stand to leave. I meet her eyes one more time, a silent question in my gaze. She looks away, never answering.