Into Dust

Maryn is seventeen.
     She has recently chopped her thick, red-brown hair to just below her jawline, making her wide, circular blue eyes appear even larger. Lately she’s been catching glimpses of herself in mirrors without meaning to: she finds she looks worried, awkward, sour. Sometimes haunted. Her skin is looking different to her, as are her limbs. She feels she is on the brink of something, something extraordinary or awful, she doesn’t know which. She is bored.

    Today is the summer solstice, so blindingly bright and blue that Maryn can barely look outside without squinting. To think that three months ago Kelman was still covered in snow, the lake frozen over, the shops empty. Now the high, aimless chatter of tourists on Main Street nearly drowns out the thrum of mosquitoes.

    Maryn is looking for a car.

    A big car, a white Lexus, the type you’d never see in the winter here in Kelman but that’s commonplace in summer months. A Connecticut license plate. A Greenwich Academy magnet, behind the door.

    Maryn waits, beginning to think she got the time wrong; it is three-thirty, isn’t it? She’s about to give up, about to walk down Main Street and back toward the lake, back home, when she sees the car. It stops in front of her, and before starting again, the door opens and a girl steps out.

    Sophie is wearing sunglasses. Cutoffs and a tank top. Her hair spreads around her back, golden and almost as painful to look at as the sunlight. She is smiling. She is the same.

    She nearly crushes Maryn with a lavender-scented hug. “I missed you,” she says before pulling away, looking Maryn up and down. “You cut your hair.”

    “I did.”

    “It looks good.”

    Sophie says it like an afterthought, but Maryn swallows and pretends to believe her. It’s fine. Maryn likes her hair, she thinks.

    “Ice cream?” Maryn asks.

    Sophie pushes her sunglasses up onto her forehead. Sweat is building, shimmering, on the bridge of her nose. “Of course,” she says.

    The ice cream place is right across the street. It says “Sarah’s Scoops” in a looping red font so faded it almost blends into the pale-pink building. Maryn doesn’t even know who Sarah was; probably the name was created for the alliteration.

    Predictably, the place is packed with tourists who laugh and yell and shake each other as if to stay awake after a long, hot car ride. It’s almost uncomfortably cold in here, a different world entirely from the one outside, the one trying and failing to press at the windows, and Maryn sees girls with their hands in their big T-shirts, biting their quivering lips as if they’ve never felt winter. Maryn sees the hairs on her arm stick up, thin and almost golden. Almost the color of Sophie’s hair. She used to love that, secretly. She used to catalog every part of her that was in some way like Sophie and keep it pressed to her chest, stuck between her teeth.

    Finally Sophie and Maryn are at the front of the line. Maryn orders a cone of mint chocolate chip and Sophie orders a cup of cookie dough, like always. Maryn reaches out to pay for her ice cream, but Sophie stops her with a long, golden arm and a laugh that makes an odd little line quirk up in the corner of her mouth. Sophie’s credit card is silver and she swipes it across the machine deliberately, as if she is not just buying ice cream.

    When they leave the store Maryn almost wants to talk to Sophie about that—the paying for her—but Sophie is smiling, so she doesn’t.

    “I really missed you,” Sophie says as they sit on a bench outside the store. The hot metal burns under Maryn’s bare thighs. She doesn’t care. Anything to escape the tourists.

    “I missed you too,” she says. She can’t tell if Sophie is telling the truth, or if she doesn’t know what else to say.

    Sophie pulls her hair up. Fans the back of her head. Sighs a loud sigh that makes Maryn look away, as if she’s seen something she shouldn’t. “How was your year?” she asks.

    It’s filler. It’s fine. “Fine,” Maryn says. “And yours?”

    “Fiiine?” Sophie bumps her shoulder with Maryn’s. She’s doing Maryn’s voice—quiet, long, each vowel stretched out like it’s difficult to pronounce. It’s a thing Sophie does. Maryn is almost as used to it as her own voice. “That’s all?”

    “I don’t know what to say.” Maryn laughs, even though it’s true. Her mouth feels like sandpaper. She looks across the street, at the J. Crew and the stationery shop, and realizes Sophie is looking at her.

    Maryn is hungry, and she needs a distraction from Sophie’s ever-wide eyes, so she eats her cone quickly, licking all around it first. Like she used to do it, when she was little. Like a dog, Sophie used to tell her. Maryn never disagreed.

    When Maryn finishes, half of Sophie’s scoop remains, turning to soup in her paper cup. The sun’s reflection spreads languidly across its shadowy depths, almost as hard to look at as the sky itself.

    Maryn finally realizes something different about Sophie. She only realizes it now because she had resisted looking anywhere but Sophie’s face. But now, despite the part of her gut that always screams at her, she notices Sophie’s legs. Gone is the golden, spilling curve of thigh that made Sophie ever more soft, ever more womanly than Maryn, along with her curves and the pillowy slope of her shoulders. She was always free of sharp edges, which Maryn had envied until last summer, when she noticed Sophie pinching her thighs where her cutoffs dug into them.

    Now, Sophie’s cutoffs seem to breathe across her legs, which have small, almost innocent curves of muscle. Maryn wonders what Sophie has done. Maryn doesn’t want to know.

    “I think I’m done,” Sophie says, putting down her cup, and Maryn feels a strange sinking feeling, like part of her is running away, ripping itself from her stomach. She notices then that a green line of mint ice cream is running down her forearm, and she begins to lick it, mostly to avoid responding.

    “You’re disgusting,” Sophie says, laughing. “Here.” She takes a wad of napkins and runs them up Maryn’s forearm. Maryn can almost feel Sophie’s fingers, hot, against her skin, and a strand of golden hair drapes itself across Maryn’s wrist.

    Maryn wants to tell Sophie that finishing the ice cream won’t kill her. She wants to say that Sophie was prettier before. She wonders if any of that is true.

    Maryn remembers selkies, how they shed their slippery skin to come out at night and dance, sand between their toes, real sand. How sometimes a human takes a selkie’s skin and the selkie is forced to remain on land, changed. Beached. Forced to shed the mistiness in her eyes and become human. Humanlike. Maryn’s father used to read to her about them, on late summer nights when the AC wasn’t working.

    Maryn watches Sophie, face full of sun, and sees that she, too, wants. She wants, like Maryn, but she is not afraid of it. She wants to change, she has changed, she will keep changing. Maryn leans back and puts her palms against the hot bench, remembering when she was young enough to believe in selkies. Wanting to stay the same.

    The houses in Sophie’s side of town smell of lilies. Maryn knows because her head grows heavy from the surprise of it every time she walks into Sophie’s foyer. When she gets home, she can never stop smelling her wrists and hair and clothes, wanting the scent to stick to her forever.

    Maryn used to think that if not for her and Sophie, Kelman would break apart in the summer. That it would become two towns, officially, because there was nothing to connect each side of the lake anymore. So when she saw Sophie with girls who lived to the east of the lake, more frequently every summer, something thick would grab at her throat and she would pretend it was just because she was afraid for the town. Somehow that was easier.

    Maryn has never been to a party with Sophie’s friends, but Sophie has been to the bonfires on the west side of the lake. There, people call her Sofia Coppola and she corrects them, telling them to call her Romy Mars. They’ll laugh at her and some of the boys will maybe even kiss her as the night wears on. Kissing always happens on bonfire nights—the inside of people’s mouths taste better than smoke. Maryn, however, is not kissed and doesn’t kiss. It’s an unspoken rule, she supposes; don’t kiss Maryn. She doesn’t want it. Maryn laughs at the irony; how badly does she want it, how badly every nerve inside of her is screaming to be kissed. Just not by any of the boys from her town.

    Sometimes after a bonfire, Maryn wants to tell Sophie not to walk to the other side of the lake. To stay with Maryn. For the night, for the summer. Maryn wants to wake up with Sophie’s hair across her pillow. She wants to fall asleep listening to Sophie breathe. But Sophie will hug Maryn, and plant a beer-scented kiss on her cheek, and strangle Maryn’s words.

    Maryn will watch Sophie walk away, across the beach that is really sand and mud and dirt, her blonde hair a halo around her head. Maryn will think of Sophie one day dyeing her hair like her mother does, and she will feel profoundly sad.

    “So, what now?” Sophie asks, and Maryn realizes with panic, or some sort of fleeting hope, that Sophie wants to spend more time with her. Even though she has friends with long nails and white houses. Even though Maryn licks ice cream off her own arm.

    “My house?” Maryn asks, and Sophie is already standing, beaming in a way that looks real.

    “Yes, please,” she says, and they throw out the dregs of their ice cream and walk toward the harbor. Past the town and its muggy throng, closer to the cloudy blue lake and Maryn’s house. It should be empty. Her father and brother are probably in the public area, renting kayaks and canoes to tourists like they do all summer. In the winter, they rent skis.

    It only takes ten minutes or so to get there. It usually takes around seven, five even on a good day, but today it feels that the heat has sunk into Maryn and Sophie’s limbs, turning them languid. When they come upon the house, Maryn watches Sophie look at it and wonder what she’s seeing. The chips in the red paint where dirty beige peeks through, the splintering wood on the porch, or the swing where she and Maryn used to topple each other, the oak tree in which they’d build fairy houses?

    “I missed this place.” Sophie says it almost mournfully, as if she is not standing at its doorstep.

    “Well, come in.” Maryn tugs on Sophie’s wrist, almost forgetting how odd it is nowadays to touch her, how strange and slippery her skin has become. Maryn opens the door that is never locked and they step into her dark living room. The only light peeks out through the maroon shades, slightly pulled to the side to reveal a cluster of trees blocking the lake and, in the room, a slice of Maryn’s brother’s blond hair that has grown raggedy. He is here after all, cutting open a package with an X-Acto knife.

    “Sophie.” He says her name in a rush, as if he hadn’t known she’d be here. Maryn remembers the two weeks last summer when he’d kiss her in town, in the water, in her house, everywhere that people could see and comment. Sophie had told Maryn, at the end of August, that it was over. That she felt bad. For what, she didn’t specify. Jack, now, watches Sophie with wide eyes. Lustful eyes. Maryn’s stomach clenches.

    “Jack.” Sophie says it with a laugh. She outstretches her arms. Jack drops the knife and walks toward her, like he’s making a conscious effort not to run, and she hugs him with relish, even though he’s shirtless and sweaty. Maryn focuses on the whirring ceiling fan, the soccer game playing silently on the TV. She drowns out their voices and prays, which she doesn’t do much, only when she’s too tired or too angry to think anything else. But now her prayer comes from somewhere else, somewhere deep and roiling inside of her. Please, she asks, please please please God, don’t let Sophie love him.

    There isn’t a bonfire that night, that first real night of summer, but Maryn sees Sophie again, even after she’s gone up the hill and been with friends and likely drunk something. Her hair is tousled, half out of a ponytail. She’s barefoot. She runs when she sees Maryn sitting by the lake, her feet digging into the sand and mud and dirt they all call a beach for the tourists.

    “Hey!” Sophie calls.

    “Hey, yourself,” Maryn responds, like she used to say when she was younger.

    Sophie settles down next to her. She’s wearing a hoodie but her legs are bare, and she hugs herself, tucking her chin between her elbow and knee. “You should’ve come earlier,” she says. “When I left.”

    “No, I shouldn’t have,” Maryn says. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

    Sophie doesn’t even try to deny it. Instead she stares at Maryn. She picks her head up and stares like she did earlier, in town, except this time her eyes are wider, her head hung back slightly. Maryn sees her open mouth, a sliver of lipstick on her teeth, and feels a stirring in her chest.

    Sophie finally speaks. “This summer isn’t going to be like last year, okay? With Jack. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about that.”

    “Don’t be,” Maryn says. “You can be with who you want.” She knows how unconvincing she sounds. She’s done with this topic; she never wants to hear Jack’s name come out of Sophie’s mouth again.

    “That’s not true.” Sophie says it like it’s obvious. “That’s not true at all.” She laughs a little, then scooches closer to Maryn. She really does sound different while drunk.

    “The truth is,” she whispers, looking at Maryn conspiratorially, “I don’t want to be with Jack. He’s a bad kisser. A messy one.”

    Maryn laughs, finally, loudly. “I’m not surprised,” she says. “He can barely eat a sandwich without getting it all over himself.”

    “You know, it’s a shame you’ve never been kissed, Maryn. You’d be a much better kisser than him.”

    Maryn hears her breath hiss out of her mouth, almost stuck in her teeth. “Why do you think that?” her voice is choked.

    “You have pretty lips,” Sophie says. She is looking at Maryn’s lips.

    “Do I?” Maryn isn’t sure how to say it. She doesn’t know how to flirt. Should she flirt? She and Sophie used to say things like this all the time, when they were younger. They’re the type of things young girls say, as jokes, without meaning them. Maybe Sophie still doesn’t. She is drunk, after all.

    “Yes. You do,” Sophie says, and kisses her.

    Maryn had known none of it, not these lips or any lips at all, not what Sophie’s darting eyes all day had meant. Her lips are soft and taste like a drink Maryn doesn’t know the name of. They taste like lake water and dirt. Maryn kisses her back and feels something rushing inside of her, something spilling over.

    Maryn does not yet know that Sophie will pull away. That she will touch Maryn’s hand, that Maryn will feel a pulse and not know whose it is. That she will walk away and say goodnight. That she and Maryn will kiss again, and again, in the bathroom of the country club where Maryn works and Sophie dines with her parents and her bleached-blonde friends. That they won’t talk about the kissing, won’t talk about a scary word that starts with an L, even though it’s always about to slip from Maryn’s lips because of course, of course that’s what she is. That after they’ve left the stall, every time, Maryn will adjust her polo, smooth her hair, blink the wild shining look away from her eyes. That Sophie will watch her, in the bathroom and all throughout her shift. That Sophie will never stop watching her until one day in late July, when the summer has already begun to feel overgrown. The blue drowning out of the lake, the sunflowers straining towards the sky, everything wanting to leave.

    By the third week of August, Sophie can tell summer is ending. The sun hangs lower in the sky, its glow amber, not yellow. Not blinding. Sometimes she wakes up and the air smells like fall. Sometimes she sees an orange-red tip of a leaf and feels something burning up inside of her, orange and red and spreading, then shoves it away.

    She sees Maryn at the Saturday farmers’ market. It is the last Saturday before Maryn goes to school—Sophie knows this because she has ridden her bike past the high school and seen the sign imploring students to enjoy their last week of summer. Sophie is wearing a white top with buttons and trying to ignore the sweat pooling in her armpits. Maryn is wearing overalls. Two braids. She looks thirteen. She looks pretty.

    She taps Maryn on the shoulder when she sees her, bent over boxes of strawberries for sale, and at first she regrets it. She thinks Maryn will walk away. She thinks Maryn will look at her, her eyes dead. Instead, Maryn smiles. A real smile. A wide one. Sophie imagines smiling like that, and it makes her cheeks hurt.

    “Hey, Soph,” Maryn says. “I missed you.” She doesn’t say it sadly. She says it as if Sophie is just someone she hasn’t seen in weeks, a friend she doesn’t really miss.

    “You, too,” Sophie says.

    “When are you leaving?” Maryn asks.

    “In a week,” Sophie says.

    Maryn nods.

    “Well, I guess I’ll see you,” Maryn says. “Hopefully before you leave.”

    “Hopefully,” Sophie responds, but Maryn is grinning already, and leaving. Sophie feels her hand touch her own mouth, run over her lips. She fears she will make a sound.

    Sophie bikes home fast, so fast she feels her muscles sting, so fast her chest heaves. She remembers Maryn’s fingers skimming over her skin. She remembers Maryn laughing into her mouth. She did it once, maybe twice. It felt like it lasted forever.

    Sophie’s house is dark and it makes her feel mournful, even though she knows her parents are in there and that William is a few houses away, waiting for her to come to him. She sees the trimmed yard, the grass that is turning brown. The hydrangea petals that are curling and falling into the dirt.