Lakewood: An Excerpt
At the party, music was playing just loud enough to smooth out any pauses in conversations. People were passing around bottles of fortified wine. A girl Lena didn’t know was talking about how her vape pen was the best on the market. Try it, the vapor is smoother, she kept saying. Stacy and his boyfriend were quietly fighting over the playlist. You have ho taste in music, she heard Stacy whisper through gritted teeth. Tanya was texting someone. Lena thought that she could be wearing pajamas right now, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, blowing heat off a cup of tea. Two girls from Lena’s How To Write About Art class asked her if she was staying in Michigan over summer break. They were traveling to Montana to learn about rock formations. Everyone was going to summer camps to teach kids archery and how to be away from home. They were going to Senegal to speak intensive French and cry at Goree Island. They were interning for their not rich, but you know comfortable uncles. College where everyone was struggling until suddenly it was summer, and all the worries got smoothed away.
“Lena, come meet my brother,” Stacy yelled.
“Sure, sure.”
“This is Kelly,” Stacy said. His brother was average height, bald, but with a very nice smile. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that had neon paint flecked across it. She couldn’t tell if it was expensive or just the sweatshirt he might’ve worn while painting.
“So, your parents were lazy, right?” Lena shook Kelly’s hand.
Stacy looked confused, but Kelly smiled wider. “Our mom was lazy. Our dad probably still wishes he could name us good, strong man names.”
There was a pause between Kelly and Lena, then the conversation started. He was an MFA student in painting out in the Bay area. He was interested in portraying the environment as it was, as it is, as it should be. Triptychs. She was impressed that he didn’t seem embarrassed about his art. She liked that his tone was soft, not loud enough to be overheard so people would think, oh, wow, an artist is present. People were getting drunk now. Dancing. Tanya was trying the girl’s vape pen and making an unimpressed face.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” Kelly said. “You’re quieter than I imagined based on Stacy’s stories.”
She looked down at her shoes. “Life’s been. Well. This isn’t a party conversation.”
He pulled out a cigarette, his lighter. Gestured toward the door. “Well, maybe it’s a smoking conversation.”
The night was cold. Windy. There were few people out, though it was a Friday. A much louder party down the block boomed out bass. Kelly offered her a cigarette, she shook her head. Just six months ago, Lena knew she would’ve been flirting with him. Or she would’ve been back inside dancing. Or at least would have been drinking.
“Why are you so serious tonight?”
“My grandmother died a few weeks ago. And.” Her throat closed for a second. “Well, she was my grandma, but she was also my mom. Not in like a weird way. She just did a lot of the work in raising me.”
“Is there anything I can do?” He was so earnest, as if he did have the power to make her life much better, all she had to do was ask. The skin on his hands shone underneath the golden porch light.
“Do you want to take a walk?”
He nodded, offered his arm. She put her arm through the crook of it.
“So, why did your grandma raise you?”
“I thought Stacy told you all about me.”
“He did.” Lena was happy she couldn’t see his face. “But I want to hear your version of it. If that’s OK.”
She told him that the first memory she had of her mother was of her having a seizure in their kitchen. Deziree had said something that was wrong right before it happened, and she had said to her mother, “Mom, that’s not how adults talk.” And then she was scared and then she called 911, then she called her grandma. And the people at the hospital told her grandma—and Lena because she was in the room pretending to be focused on her coloring book and she already knew that adults somehow thought kids didn’t care what they did and said—later that it was maybe because her mother fell on the ice earlier that day and something was hurt in her brain. And then maybe it wasn’t that, it was some sort of disease. And then it seemed as if all her limbs were arguing with the commands her brain was giving them. There could be many causes for that. And she might be severely disabled for the rest of her life. And what were her plans? The doctor said it like he was asking them what time they wanted to go get dinner, but her grandmother clasped Lena’s shoulders so hard they hurt, so she understood suddenly that somehow, they were talking about death. Lena wished she was tall enough to look at her grandma’s face, to see what she thought of all this every time the doctors told her essentially, we have no idea what’s going on, but everyone’s life is probably different now. But her grandma kept her quiet tone. Whenever they were alone, she would take Lena’s hands and start praying. Jesus will get us through this. “I guess,” Lena remembered saying back to her grandma. Even though her mother was sick, she kept it secret that they never went to church except for when they were with Grandma. “Sure.”
As she spoke, Lena was pleased that she didn’t sound like crying, that she was matter of fact: this is me.
Lena and Kelly walked to the all-night diner across town and ordered hash browns with feta cheese and onions and tomatoes and coffee. Bacon on the side. And they were talking about tacos and she knew she liked him because when he said it was impossible to get an actual good taco in this state, she didn’t want to slap him, only gave him a look that said do you hear yourself right now? And he smiled. And they talked about the most beautiful thing they had ever photographed. She, joking at first, a pile of French toast with syrup and powdered sugar at brunch. And then, sentimental, her family laughing together. Him, it’s a cliché but a sunrise over the ocean.
A song by Davon came on about champagne and missing the girl who was sitting right next to him. Lena bopped her head a little bit to the beat.
“Please tell me you don’t like Davon. He’s such a…”
“I like him because he’s good at making you think you’re the one who could change him. 2) He is cut. 3) He is perfect gossip. You can ask almost anyone alive, ‘You hear what Davon did?” And either they’ll tell you everything or be like, ‘No, tell me now.”
She was laughing. Everything she ate, especially the unasked-for rye toast on the side, tasted good. Kelly’s eyes were dark and his eyelashes were so long, it was rude. And it was more rude that despite the fact that he had drank and smoke, she still thought he still smelled good. The diner was filling up with punk kids showing up from the clubs down the street, talking loudly about the show, touching their dyed and bleached hair, and showing off the x’s sharpied on the back of their hands. Kelly paid and they walked back out into the cold night. All the bars were closing in the next half hour, so the sidewalks were busy again with drunk people finding places to find food, tramping home, holding hands. The streetlights were orange toned and made everyone look more dramatic. Snow flurries took bites out of everyone’s hair and cheeks. The apartment buildings and stores and courthouse looked taller in the semi-dark.
“This is my nightmare,” Kelly said trying to wipe snow off his head, as Lena asked, “So, I heard you do research studies.”
“What?” He turned and looked at her. “Oh, right the contacts.”
“Is it uncomfortable? Or weird?”
“Only when they do experiments where someone else has to take the contacts out of my eyes for me. Other than that, they pay pretty well.” He blew out a breath and the tiny cloud of it hovered and then fluttered away. “Why do you ask?”
She told him about the letter in the mail.
“That’s not too weird. It means someone probably just referred you or maybe you signed up for a list or something and just forgot.”
Lena shrugged. They were back outside Stacy’s house. The party was still going inside.
Kelly paused. “It was nice meeting you,” he said to Lena.
In response, she smiled, leaned in, and kissed him. His lips were soft against hers. Lena had kissed enough people to know that kisses rarely said anything more than please like me, or I like you, or let’s have sex. But she hoped that somehow, he could feel the thank you for helping me not worry, to not grieve, for a few hours.
“It was nice meeting you too,” she said when they stopped.
Inside, everyone was still drinking fortified wine.
“It’s great,” Tanya said, “You can drink a cup and stay drunk for the rest of your life.”
Lena nodded. Someone asked her again, well, what are you doing this summer. It had been only seconds, but Kelly was swallowed up by the party. I’m figuring it out, Lena said. She leaned against the wall for extra support. The wine was turning the insides of everyone’s mouths black, despite the liquid being pale yellow.
Tanya pointed out her tongue to Lena and said it reminded her of when she was a girl, a little white kid kept asking her why her teeth and tongue weren’t black. Shouldn’t they be? He kept asking. And did anything like that happen to you? Lena rolled her eyes. “Probably, but I’m happy to say I forgot if it did.
“We’re dying,” Stacy said, staring at himself in the long mirror next to the front door. His voice was pay-attention-to-me-now excited. “We’re dying.”
Tanya cleared her throat and he automatically apologized to Lena. She pretended to be confused about why he was apologizing to her until he stopped.
“Let’s take a picture,” she said. Lena posed and stuck her tongue out as far as it would go.
Megan Giddings is the author of Lakewood. This is the first time she's gotten to write that for a publication! More about her can be found at www.megangiddings.com
