Page 18 of Forget Me Not

Marcia opened her eyes to find Mitchell staring straight at her, his pupils stretched wide like two gaping black holes.

She couldn’t remember falling asleep. She could only remember lying there, in the back of his camper, a bitter cold as their limbs lay tangled and the dull heat radiating from the surface of his skin like a fire in the wild, her only source of warmth.

“What are you looking at?” she asked as she burrowed herself deeper into his side. Her head felt thick and heavy, swaddled in sleep. Her brain bubble-wrapped in a blanket of fog.

“You,” he replied, his fingers crawling their way up her leg. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

She smiled, thinking back to their first night at the theater.

The two of them strolling down the walk in the dark until they came to a stop in front of her house.

She could practically feel him watching from the street as she snuck back in, the hall cold and quiet as she crept up the stairs.

Silently passing her parents’ bedroom and listening to her father’s rhythmic snores.

Then she had slid into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin. Trained her eyes on the ceiling as she lay still in the dark, her body beating as Mitchell’s voice whirled around in her mind.

You’re very pretty, Marcia. I get the feeling you don’t hear that enough.

In truth, he was right. Rarely had Marcia ever been called pretty.

She was gangly and plain with long hair and an even longer hemline; chewed-up cuticles and a mousy demeanor that made her easy to overlook.

She knew a lot of it had to do with her parents, how strict they were, the whole town of Draper aware of their rules and therefore uninclined to get too close—but at the same time, she didn’t do herself any favors, either.

Instead of attempting to meet people, find some friends, she was like a finicky flower that closed up in the dark.

While the other kids were dabbling in the kinds of things teenagers ought to be dabbling in—sex and drugs, freedom and fun—Marcia kept her nose out of everything but a book.

But it wasn’t because she wasn’t curious about it all. It was because she was Marcia Rayburn, daughter of William Rayburn, and that’s what was expected of her.

It was because she spent her adolescence getting poked and prodded, ribbed and roused, cafeteria boys making fun of her smothering necklines and unshaven armpits.

Her na?veté about the way the world worked.

It was because she wasn’t allowed to do anything to draw attention to herself— Modesty is an attitude of propriety and decency in dress, grooming, language, and behavior —to let in desire or unholy stares…

but instead of pushing back against all those constricting commandments, pushing away, she leaned in to them as far as she could.

She had leaned in so far that she’d disappeared.

“What is it?” Mitchell asked as she blinked back to the present, his expression obscured by the inky black night. “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” she said, rolling to face him. “Just thinking about when we met.”

She could barely see a foot in front of her face, but somehow, she could still sense the intensity of his stare breaking through.

His undivided attention on her making her head spin like that smoke she’d inhaled, her skin static like a crackling wire.

It was the same way he had stared that night in the alley, the same stare that made her feel so helplessly high.

That’s why, when she woke up the next morning, the entire encounter had felt like a hallucination, a wavy mirage, and she was sure she’d never see him again…

but then the next night, something caught her eye through the living room window.

An idling camper just down the street, smoke billowing out from the exhaust.

You’re not from around here, are you?

She remembered squinting in the dark, recalling the feeling of her heart in her throat as she took a step closer, asked him those questions. The tendons bulging beneath the skin of his neck as he sucked his cigarette down.

I’m not from around anywhere.

He had come back for her, she realized. And he had come back almost every night since.

She shivered at the memory, leaning over to grab the sweatshirt she noticed wedged between the wall and the bed.

“What did you study at Berkeley?” she asked, fanning it out as she clocked the word stitched on the front.

Ever since their meeting four weeks ago, she had managed to learn a few things about him—albeit it had been slowly, methodically.

Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, the picture emerging piece by piece.

Most notably, she now knew he lived in that camper, oblong and orange.

The same burnt orange as her parents’ living room couch.

It was an eyesore of a thing, hard not to notice, but she supposed the inside was all that mattered: a yellow plaid sofa and brown shag carpet next to a kitchenette and cubbyhole bathroom. A single bed situated way in the back.

“Psychology,” he said after a beat of silence.

“Psychology,” she repeated, still slightly enveloped in the miasma of sleep. She hadn’t known he had gone to college, though she had been curious about the camper’s California plates. Found herself rapt by the tales he’d told about the opposite coast.

“People,” he clarified, his fingers twisting through the fine strands of her hair. “I studied people.”

She scooted in closer, her skin tingling with warmth, with want, with whatever was inside those cigarettes she always found him rolling himself.

It had surprised her, at first, how quickly he was able to open her up.

Ger her comfortable enough to try new things, his fingers caressing her body with such delicate care she felt like a piece of glass, fine and fragile and easy to crack.

He was patient with her, though. Gentle.

He walked her through it, coaxing her slowly out of her shell until she found herself yearning for him whenever he was away.

All day, she thought about when she would see him again: sitting at her desk at school, staring out the window at the bleak, gray sky.

“I wish I could go to college,” she said as she imagined him with a backpack slung over one shoulder, sauntering his way into some class.

She often found herself feeling envious of the experiences he had that she would never get to share, but at the same time, fantasies of some other life had always consumed her, long before the two of them had met.

She always thought about moving away, finding a job, but it felt so foreign, so impossible to grasp.

Her life had been on the same set path since she was a child, almost as if her parents had twisted a crank in her back and simply set her down, her feet programmed to walk in whatever direction they wanted her to go.

She wasn’t capable of pivoting on her own, of turning herself around and forging a new future.

If they had it their way, which they always did, she would be married before she turned twenty-one.

Probably someone from the church, someone her father would pick.

She wouldn’t be surprised if he had picked someone already, and Marcia suddenly imagined herself growing old like her mother, a dish towel permanently flung over one shoulder as she stood in the kitchen, a pinched smile on her lips.

“You don’t want to go to college,” Mitchell said, his voice breaking the thought like a snapping twig. “College is a scam.”

She twisted her neck, straining to see his expression in the dark. That sounded like something her father would say.

“You can learn everything you need to learn out there,” he continued. “Out in the world.”

She was quiet, teeth digging into her bottom lip as she thought of just how little she knew. It was embarrassing, really. Her lack of experience. Her entire existence whittled down to this one small town. All the same people in all the same places.

“Society is a trap,” he continued, eyes on the ceiling. The ripping fabric and smears of black smoke. “A cage they use to corral and control. Independence is the only true form of freedom. You know that, right? You understand that?”

She thought of her parents, her teachers. The passages she recited like clockwork each night, all of it beaten into her as indisputable fact.

“Of course,” she said, immediately hearing the uncertainty in her voice.

They both fell quiet, no movement between them except for the occasional plume of warm, thick breath. Then she heard him sigh—a deep, disappointed sound—before he reached out his hand, trailing his finger across her cheek.

“I’ve known so many girls like you. Girls who are lonely, girls who are lost.”

She felt a catch in her throat, ashamed he had picked up on it so easily. The very essence of her as something aimless and adrift.

She hadn’t known it was that obvious.

“But I see you,” he continued, his hand moving down her throat before pushing a finger deep into her chest. “I see who you are. At your core.”

“I know you do,” she said as she felt a sharp pain between her ribs—but it was a good pain.

The kind of pain she sometimes felt when they came together, an aching pleasure that felt so intense, she thought her body might tear in two.

She had never known anyone like him. He was a mirror, a pane of smooth glass that reflected back her own insecurities.

Liquid smoke that seeped inside her so quickly, filling in her hollow grooves.

Marcia squeezed his fingers, watching as Mitchell smiled in the dark. His breath warm as he leaned in close. Then he cupped her cheek with his free hand, his thumb rubbing against her smooth skin.

“You’re ready,” he said, a conviction in his voice she didn’t quite understand.

“Ready for what?” she asked, eyebrows bunching as she watched him turn back around, staring at the ceiling as if talking to himself.

“To meet the others.”