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Lauren and Matty

The woods up here were thick, the understory forbidding, and all the two of them had was a little Maglite flashlight. Matty led the way, because that was Matty—always leading the way. Lauren hated it. And she loved it. She hated that she loved it. She always told herself she wasn’t the kind just to swoon and get giggly over some boy, to be captivated by him, to be in thrall to some dick-having member of the population, but here she was. Her small, soft hand in his, being drawn deeper into the dark forest, like the foolish girl in a fairy tale.

She wondered aloud if maybe they should turn around. “We’re gonna break our necks out here,” she said, laughing, because she was already a little drunk on the pink diabetes wine from Boone’s Farm. “Or wait, shit, isn’t there a cliff?”

“There’s a lot of cliffs up here,” he said ahead of her. No fear in his voice. “We’re on Highchair Rocks, Laur—it’s a hundred feet up on all sides.”

“That means it’s a hundred feet down .”

He just laughed. In the darkness, his voice seemed to fall behind him, like something he dropped, something for her to pick up. “You’re a glass-half-empty type. I love that about you.”

Lauren took a fast step forward and with her free hand smacked his ass. “I thought you loved my sweet sweet boo-tay, ” she said, cackling.

“Oh, I love that too,” he said, drawing her deeper into the darkness.

—

It had started a year ago. Almost to the day.

They were drunk at a party. Well, a “party”—Jeff Warnick had this big-ass open expanse of a backyard and his dad was sorta rich and his parents traveled all the time, so most weekends Jeff lit a bonfire, and whoever wanted to come over and hang could come over and hang. Sometimes it was six people, sometimes it was six teen people, and that day, a Saturday in June, it was close to sixty—all moths to a flame. It was fireworks and keg stands, it was bong rips and diving boards, it was Jeff’s nutso pitbull Murray running around and humping every leg that wasn’t actively kicking him away. There was a fight at one point—a sloppy fracas between Earl Coons and Billy Boback, the two of them punching and pawing at each other like a pair of drunk bears, all over some perceived slight, something about Shannon, Earl’s girlfriend, and something about Billy being a quote-unquote “little pussy bitch pissant pussy.”

Lauren was a little drunk—just fuzzy enough to feel that numb benzocaine tingle in her lips and gums, and she didn’t want to be near the fight in case one of those two assholes accidentally fell into the bonfire and barbecued themselves, or got someone else barbecued by jostling into them. So she wandered off to the edge of the property, near the post-and-rail horse fence.

That’s where she found Matty. He, too, wanted to get away from the fight. And he was a little drunk, just like her. They made each other laugh for a while and then, next thing they knew…

They kissed. Hard. They made out like bandits .

It was the first time, but it would not be the last.

They told each other it wasn’t serious. Just a fling, a stupid physical attraction. And so they found each other once every few months—often outside, because it turned out that the wide open nowhere was a very good way to get away from everyone else—and it always went the same way. Got a little drunk, made each other laugh, and then messed around. But then it was late April this past year when she and Matty got together at the playground outside Minsi Trail Elementary to get busy, but then he said, “You ever notice the pattern?”

Lauren didn’t know what he was talking about. “I notice patterns,” she said. “I’m good with patterns, okay?”

So he said, “You missed this one,” and pointed out that before they got it on, they always made each other laugh first. “I have a good time with you, and you have a good time with me,” he explained to her. “We actually like each other, Laur.”

“Yeah, we’re friends,” she told him, as if to say, Duh .

But she wasn’t getting it. “ Yeah, and then some, which is why we should make this…a thing. A real thing.”

“But we’re friends, ” she said, more dour this time, because to her, that was the most important thing. Their friendship. This hooking up thing was just a side business. As the saying went, friends with benefits.

“Laur, I dig you,” he said.

“I dig you, too.”

“No, I dig you.” Said like someone drunk, or high, except he wasn’t either when he said it. (Matty did get drunk but did not get high. His parents expected a certain level of performance out of him and demanded a particular future, which he was happy to supply. Failing a drug test, he said, would ruin all that. When she asked him if his parents drug-tested him, he laughed it off. But she wasn’t so sure.)

“Matty—”

“I want to do this for real.”

“It hasn’t been real this whole time?” she asked, smirking, and reaching behind and sliding the flats of her hands into the tight rear pockets of his jeans.

“You know what I mean. I want to do us for real. A relationship.”

And that word struck fear and excitement through her like she’d never before experienced. A lightning bolt through her heart—enough voltage to both kill her ass dead and bring her back to life again, reborn. A relationship. Zap.

“I—Matty—we’ll go away to college year after next and—”

“I’m not looking to get married. I just want to make it official with us. No more of this running around behind our friends’ backs. Boyfriend, girlfriend. Holding hands and going to movies and all that cheesy shit.”

“Ugh,” she said, still smiling. She squeezed his ass. “I don’t like cheese.” Lauren tried to be funny and cute because it was easier than thinking about the friends they weren’t telling—which, translation, meant Owen. Owen, who was truly her best friend in the whole world—and the one from whom she was keeping this secret. She knew he liked her. It was obvious. It radiated from him like sunlight off a switchblade—it was so bright it nearly blinded her, even if he thought he was playing it cool. But Lauren thought they were too close. Too similar. They could never. They should never. But Matty…she was close with him but not close- close. Not best friends. Just friends enough to fuck it all up.

“So how about it?” he asked.

“I’ll…think about it.”

“Oh.” It was impossible not to hear the disappointment in his voice. It rang like the peal of a sad, long bell. “All right.” He mumbled something about having to go home, and she spun him around and pressed herself up against him.

“I said I’ll think about it, Pouty Pete,” she said, not knowing what that corny shit even meant. Didn’t matter. She pressed her mouth against his, and they both breathed in sharply through their nostrils and then it was on .

—

Today, out here in the woods, she was going to tell him yes.

Yes, she’d be his girlfriend. Yes, they could be together and tell the whole fucking world about it. She’d never quite tell him she needed him, because Lauren would tell him and tell everyone that she didn’t need anybody. Not today, not ever.

But she wanted him, and that would be enough.

Though sometimes she wondered whether or not she wanted him, or simply didn’t want to be alone. Maybe it didn’t matter. She promised him she’d think about it, and she thought about it, and she wanted to be with Matty.

End of story, game over, fuck it.

—

They pressed on deeper and deeper until a break in the darkness of trees gave way to the bright indigo nothing of open sky. A half-moon looked down. A wind stirred, restive. He said, “The cliff’s edge is just over here—”

But she didn’t want to get that close, and by now, her impatience was burning her up like a bad case of the flu. She planted her feet and pulled him toward her—he oof ed and chuckled as she kissed him long and hard. So hard their teeth clacked. So hard she knew they might each have brush burn around their lips afterward, skin reddened like smeared lipstick. So hard that for a half second, she was able to convince herself that they had actually, literally, honest-to-fucking-god become one person. But then she pulled away, gasping as if she’d just resurfaced from beneath the surface of a churning sea.

“Hey, I wanna tell you something,” she said, wiping her mouth.

“Okayyyy,” he said, expectant.

“First, though—”

She dug a little tin case out of her pocket. An Altoids tin. She held it out for him gently. Not for him to take, but instead, she rested the tin on her palm—an invitation for him to open it. Like a little treasure chest.

“Go on,” she said.

“Is this a ring?” he asked, playfully. In a higher register, he asked, “Gosh, am I the luckiest girl in town?”

“Just open it, you goon.”

So he did. Inside, two white cubes awaited—the size and shape of six-sided dice, but without the black dots. “What am I looking—” he started to ask.

“Sugar cubes,” she answered, by way of interruption.

“Am I a horse? Is this my treat?”

“It’s a treat, all right. These were hard to get.”

“Okay, now I really don’t follow you.”

“Sugar cubes, yes, but dosed with acid.”

“Acid.”

She shrugged and offered a Cheshire cat grin. “LSD, dude.”

Matty laughed, but in a hollow, awkward way. “Are you serious?”

“Serious as the star.”

“You don’t mean—Laur, I can’t drop acid.”

“Sure you can. It’s easy. Just pop the sugar cube in your mouth. Yum.”

“No, I mean—I don’t do LSD, I can’t—”

She rubbed his arm to comfort him, but also, okay, in a condescending way. You poor sweet fool, she thought. It was so cute. He had no idea. So she explained it to him: “It’s fine. LSD doesn’t show up on a normal drug test. I know your parents make you get tested—but this only shows up in the hair, and someone’s only going to test that if you want, like, some classified job in government. Besides, I want us both…to be open for this. Wide open, all the way. Like, a commitment of sorts.”

The moon behind him drew a bright line around him. Painting his edges, like he’d become a doorway, a portal, through which he wanted to escape. Man, you’d think I was already on acid, she thought.

“It’s not just that, Laur. You hear stories, you know? Like that guy who did acid and then believed he was a glass of orange juice and if you moved him, he’d tip and spill himself and die. He ended up in an insane asylum—”

“That’s a bullshit story.”

“And they say if you take acid X number of times, you can be declared legally insane, even if you don’t think you’re a glass of OJ.”

“Dude. Matty. C’mon. Those are—that’s just propaganda. Government propaganda, CIA nonsense, to get people to not take this stuff, to not open their minds, because when they do, it changes them. And that’s what I want for us tonight—this stuff is special for me, and I want us to take it together, and then you and I will be —”

Together, she was about to say, but Matty pulled back for real this time.

One hard step in reverse.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Oh.”

Now: her turn to be disappointed, it seemed.

He said it again—

“I can’t, Laur. You might be okay with this sort of thing, but I have a future to think about. I really—”

This sort of thing, she thought, repeating his words again and again in her head.

“Really what?” she asked, words tinged with bitter root.

He sighed. “Hey! Let’s head back to camp. They’re probably wondering where we went and, um, we can tell some pretty killer ghost stories, right? C’mon.” In his voice, she heard something, though—a sudden distance, like they were two different people now.

No, like I’m someone different now, to him.

He moved toward her—

(Her heart quickened.)

—then past her.

Brushing his hand against her arm, her back, as he went.

Fuck, she thought.

Her disappointment gave way to anger.

You might be okay with this sort of thing—

I have a future to think about—

What, like she didn’t? She wanted to scream at him: I’m ambitious, too. I’m smart and I get what I want. I don’t need you, Matty Shiffman.

I can do this all myself .

She let the anger have its moment, then she hit it over the head and threw it in a deep grave, and from that earth she grew a garden of vigorous indifference.

Can’t hurt me if I don’t care, asshole.

“Fuck it,” she said to herself in a happy-bitter voice. She took both of the acid-drop sugar cubes and popped them in her mouth. She let them melt before crunching the last of the sugar granules between her teeth. Lauren imagined them as tiny bones. Matty’s finger bones, she thought, and it was a dark, insane, totally fucked thought, and she loved it. She laughed like wind chimes in a hurricane and then followed him through the woods, back toward camp.