And She Laughed
by Ruby Fleet
My fifteenth summer was the one in which I fled reality. Missy and I cascaded down the San Franciscan hills of our Nevada nirvana. We were a tangle of limbs and a stolen shopping cart. The tabs on our tongues (procured from a man with a van) took us far away to the place where the sky met the sea. Our sleeves were as free in the wind as our souls, liberated from the confines of the schoolgirl way. We were swallowed by a giant oyster and emerged as priceless, glowing pearls.
Summer was a fisheye lens over our youthful views. We packed away our precious things and poured our Tropicana down the drain, too eager to finish it. Brothers were given hush-money and parents were sedated with promises of letters and time alone. We were just kids, they were sure. We couldn’t go through with it. Missy and I hitchhiked and dreamed our way to the border, recharging our batteries at battered motels; The Fantasy, The Mermaid, The Hollow-Tree-Inn.
My suitcase was filled with chocolate eggs, magic beans (for protein, of course), and paper-route money. Missy’s was heavy with ambition and the seashells from the private beaches where we swam naked and narrowly evaded guard-dogs and their people.
She was really going to run away. I had a future of inherited alcoholism that I couldn’t leave behind. In the moments of those sixty days and fifty-nine nights, though, we were one. A dazed, crazed, teenaged being with four legs and four arms and a casual relationship with reality. Why regret when we could forget?
We broke into a college dorm and planned to marry lawyers; me, reluctantly, and Missy in rapture. She would be saved, she knew, by the blue hues that only her brush could tap into. Her paintings always made people cry.
Missy cried when she thought I was sleeping; I never slept in fear of wasting these short moments of youth. Her dad hurt her bad, I deduced. He stole something that she had wanted to save. Missy forsook Jesus because of that.
He would come visit us sometimes, and we developed a relationship. Jesus would sometimes hook us up with a miracle when we were in dire need, and in exchange he would revoke a couple of years from our lives. It only meant less time being old, so what was the problem? I pictured myself with my mother’s mask of makeup, Chardonnay tears ripping through to the wrinkled underbelly of an aged face, and prayed for another miracle.
I guess that Missy wished for more than I knew about. She had far fewer years left than me. One day Jesus wouldn’t give us anymore miracles and I assumed that we had been too greedy. Really it was because Missy had no years left to loan. I would have screamed if only I’d have known.
We broke free of the confines of a steady home. The dorm grew tired and our loose little brains grew bored. So we ran again, and then, we called the man with the van again, and then we curled up tight under a blanket of stars. Balls of fire sure didn’t keep us very warm in the frigid desert night.
So we went to Sacramento. We said that we were seeing family when really we were trying to see our futures and find out whether families were something that we could have. We burnt our bras to blend with local radicals, and I gave my virginity to a man with a beard in exchange for a case of beer. I knew I should have regretted that, but I liked this freedom from the status quo. Missy had held my hand and puffed relaxing smoke into my lungs the whole time. I could barely feel the man.
Missy and I stole books from the library. Education should’ve been as free as we were, we thought, so we walked calmly past the arthritic librarian as she tried to make chase. I liked animals and Missy liked rocks. She liked that they were solid and cold because that was the way that she hoped to be. I liked animals because they were wild but could be tamed. Maybe one day someone would tame Missy, and then her love wouldn’t be so very fleeting.
I wish I had said more to her. I wish that I had communicated with more than a squeeze of the hand. Though touch meant so much more, it’s Missy’s voice that I miss most. Her silvery, pubescent laugh cut through the murk of my mind long after that summer. The way she squeaked the most vital information, and the useless quips that flowed from her lips like a warm, chocolate river drove me halfway to heaven and halfway to hell. I guess that amounted to tethering me right down to earth, where the two places met.
We met at twelve and she gave me a black eye. I said she was ugly and she spat on my food. She and and Danny wouldn’t let me into their special club behind the school. I hated her guts, but boy was she cool.
When we decided to run away, I was scribbling hundreds of fingernail-moons on my desk. She pressed her palm and transferred the lead. Missy leaned in close as if to bestow the secrets of the universe upon a mere mortal. She pointed to her hand. Let’s go. To the moon was ridiculous, but still I understood, and I said yes because maybe I was her ticket out. Maybe she needed my hand to guide hers on the way. Something in her eyes lacked innocence and spoke of a strange wisdom. It said that the moon was the only place to be. The seed had been planted in me that this girl would move me like a mountain as far as I could go. Missy’s soul was halfway to the moon and she laughed. She would get there because she had already embarked.
So we planned to go far together and we ran and we did not plan a final destination, but I knew that we were almost there in California. We lived like a band of alley cats and made up songs about half-forgotten pasts. We held hands when we went free. Missy seemed to need it now. It was still just fun for me.
When they found her cold and limp I wasn’t even sad. I was uprooted, but could not mourn. I wished though the tears that fell unapologetically to be truly sad. But I couldn’t be. I was happy because I knew that Missy wasn’t dead. Missy had gone to the moon, where I knew she couldn’t take me, but I knew she had to go.
And then I went back to the Nevadan bootleg American dream I was taught was home. I undid my mother’s heart attack and prepared to inherit the family jewels. I bought groceries on sale and went back to high school. I went steady with Danny because I thought he might remember Missy. I broke his jaw when he called her a slut, and went home to cry. And in my tears were tiny vignettes of the heat of summer, the puddle they formed on the table reflecting hundreds of little fingernail-moons.
And she laughed.