2
I notice once I’ve sat up that Miranda’s kicked the covers off the bed. Both sides of the bed are ‘her side' of the bed but on the side she's on right now, her skin’s in the open air. I can hear someone moving about in the hallway and front room of her apartment and try to remember where the bathroom is as I recover my Umbro polo from a stack of clothes on the floor. When I come back, Miranda's on her back, propped up on her elbows, looking out her open window. She's clad only in the Supreme boxer briefs she claimed were from a “lover” as a “gag gift.”
Miranda grunts as I stand sheepishly by the door. “Come on,” she says, motioning me to join her as she takes a swig from her Nalgene and looks out onto the street. “What time is it?”
“8:47,” I say, looking at the digital clock on her bookshelf.
“I think this guy who walks by every morning is gonna be here any second. Down there, I mean.”
I move in a little closer to see the street corner Miranda’s pointing at and she wraps one arm around one of mine and grips my hand.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey.”
Out from an alleyway emerges my uncle Jamie, limping in Puma slides behind two small Malteses. He’s smoking a Swisher Sweet and on the phone with someone, probably my mom, heading in the direction of my apartment.
“I love this guy,” Miranda says, with a glowing, if absent grin. “Every Sunday morning, he’s out there.”
“Jim! Ey, Jim!”
“Joy? What’re you doing up in there?”
“I’m with a friend-a girl-I’m with a girl.” Miranda giggles.
“Oh, aight. You stay safe out here, Joy. They got all types of new diseases-”
“Alright, Jamie, I’ll see you at home!”
“I wanna meet him,” she says, quietly.
I lean back on my haunches. “I’ll introduce you sometime.”
“They don’t have new diseases. They’ve been mostly the same for a while.”
We sit in her breakfast nook with the kettle on and I wave hello to her roommate Katie who is leaving for work. I study the pinboard on the wall by my head. There’s a receipt from Turntable Lab, a letter from someone’s mother and a cat-themed calendar that’s still in June.
“You like being home for the summer?” Miranda’s saying, spreading butter on toast.
“It’s better than being up there,” I say.
“You gonna visit? I saw you up there last summer-”
“For the 4th. I’ve done that twice, to see a girl.”
“Who?” Miranda looks over at the kettle, to her hands on the table and back to me. “Sorry, I’m just curious.”
“Um, I was seeing Olivia Hirsch on and off.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I mean, I’d see you guys around… I thought you guys were dating,” she says through egg and toast. “Someone, someone told me you guys were dating.”
“Sorta.” We quietly evade each other’s eyes for a moment, before she catches me and snorts.
“That’s not funny, sorry,” she says.
“No, I don’t care, it wasn’t really a thing.”
“Is that the longest you’ve been, well, involved with somebody?”
I took a literature class with Olivia Hirsch my freshman year, but we officially met on Tinder, I guess, a semester later. She had green hair and asked me one night if I wanted to 'play Mario Kart.' As a one-time serious Mario Kart Wii player, I figure at the least I could get in some laps. I was drinking some tall boy IPA across campus and as a frequent underage drinker on a campus well-policed by a security team roving about in decaled SUVs ready to write somebody up, I did not take my time getting over there. My friend Tracy was there for a bit when I got to Olivia’s room and they were actually playing some arcane board game and I got really invested in not saying something strange. I desperately wanted this sort of attention. After Tracy left, Olivia showed me all of her knickknacks and this video she’d been working on and told me where her rug and wall tapestries were from and she talked about declaring photo as her major but not really wanting to do it. We left her dorm, the substance-free one, and walked north, up to the empty field behind my dorm that leads down to the river. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I remember being unnaturally easy, going along with everything. I’d look at her eyes and her white legs, sturdy, out of thick-soled combat boots and when I asked to kiss her and she said yes I put a hand on her ass and she pulled back and laughed at me.
Katie leaves and Miranda admits to me that she hopes the two of them can get close as roommates.
I soon find that I like Miranda. This is uncharacteristic of me. Once I cross the threshold of sex before marriage with someone, the mystique wears off and I find myself attached to a friend I fuck, or, more often, fucking someone I don’t want to spend any time with. But I like her. I like that she uses Dr. Bronner’s for everything and smells great anyway, that she swears by mushrooms for depression, that she drinks coffee any hour of the day and still sleeps well. That she cooks by putting away each ingredient the second she’s done with it, and that she mostly watches independent movies about middle-aged men finding themselves. I envy her work as a DJ, lost in tones and low-end, in crowds and listening rooms. I watch her organize files for hours, digitizing vinyl records and punching up Youtube rips. I watch her FaceTime her mother, with whom she has a healthy, normal relationship. Last night, she showed me photos of her from high school, of a scrawnier, bandage Miranda, and I thought she looked reserved. Not like I know her now. I watch her look at me, and I don’t doubt that she sees something like that past self in me. But you can never really know. That’s why British royalty invented the prenuptial agreement.
I’m out back at Donnie’s waiting for a delivery and Bart and I are texting about internet crushes from the past. i think chloe lmao uses they/them pronouns now, he says.
Good for them. isn't Mike ma like a nazi
Accelerationist raw milk gun guy. Surfer. i read his book
This courier rolls up and hands me a box of garment printing ink. I bring it inside, walking by a couple of the guys I work with skating flat in the back. Trevor asks what’s up and I tell him I’ve been checking out Antiwar.com, because “it’s pretty wild what’s going on in Yemen.” I sit by Rachel in the front and watch a woman and her skinny, box logo t-shirt-wearing son unfold Donnie’s wares. Rachel leans over and quietly says, “I think that’s Uma Thurman,” to which I can only say, “Oh, yeah?” because I’m no good at whispering and don’t want to be rude.
After work, Bart and I sit on stairs at Washington Square Park, smoking cigarettes as we wait for the crowd to thin enough so that we can skate the two steps underneath one of the statues. He continues our conversation from earlier.
“And then I find myself, on the Playboi Carti subreddit, of all places-”
“Uh, huh,” I say.
“Telling these kids that, no, “Pretty Girl” was not written by industry professionals. She made it in Garageband.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What’s up with you, dude? You down on something?”
“I fucked Miranda. On Saturday night.”
“Miranda Greene?” Bart’s face contorts.
“... Yeah, Miranda Greene,” I sputter.
“Of course you did. Dude, you are dumb.”
“Ha ha, whatever makes me feel better, Bart.”
He sighs. “I think you just gotta play it safe on that casual stuff. It’s no good for you.”
“I know.”
“We got to take your dick away from you somehow, like it’s rehab,” he says.
“They have that,” I start. “I don’t need to go to rehab.”
“Anyway, you hear about Yemen,” he’s saying as I spot two women in Allbirds and those destroyed-hem skinny jeans walking towards us.
“Hey, you guys skate,” the taller one says, in a German accent.
“Can we borrow a couple cigarettes,” says the other one.
“Sure,” Bart says.
“You guys like New York,” I say.
“Ya, I like it. The girls so beautiful, but the men are so ugly.”
“Yes, haha.”
“Ah, thanks,” I say.
“Oh, not you. The black men are very beautiful.”
“Oh, thanks, yeah,” I mumble. Bart chuckles.
Later, on the bench outside Rust, Bart is telling me about getting clocked skating a nine-stair handrail in Miami. I’m looking inside and watching Mena mop the floor behind the counter. I don’t care so much about this trick - I’ve seen it on video a hundred times - but I like hearing Bart recount anything
“The girl I was staying with was like why is the ass of your pants drenched in blood-”
Now Mena’s hugging this guy and she looks happy for once and I realize she’s got work friends. Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about her. Not that I do. I’ve never had a work friend. I’ve fucked as recently as two days ago, but I’m still bugging. Touch starvation is a thing I learned about on Tumblr and not from a licensed mental health professional but I’ve constantly felt pangs. I wonder if she feels pangs too.
“I did go back and get the trick though.”
“Is Mena still seeing that guy from Israel?”
“Nah.”
The next morning I eat a bowl of cereal as my mom buzzes about the apartment getting ready for work. She’s trying to get my brother out of bed for his internship so she’s going to and from the bathroom to his room, calmly cooing “Roger.” Today is July 3rd. I’m going up to Springer to hang out for the 4th, maybe try to barbecue at my house up there. Tracy’s subletting my room to some music kid. And I guess Yura will be there, and that transfer Michael, and Jimmy and Miranda - Whedon, not Greene - and Olivia who I haven’t spoken to in maybe 4 months.
Michael and Miranda W. pick me up at the Metro North station in Poughkeepsie. They’re listening to a Ween single and as we roll out of the little pick up area, Miranda turns around and leans into the backseat, putting a hand on my knee. “How’s your summer been, guy?”
“I’m doing alright, I guess.”
“Do anything fun?”
“I saw Alex G again.”
Michael lights a cigarette at a stop light and says if I want to smoke I should ash out the window. Miranda holds his hand and gazes up at his face. Isn’t love cool?
“I heard you’ve been getting with Miranda Greene,” Michael says.
“What? Joy’s having ‘s’ with Miranda Greene?”
“Yea, we’ve been hanging out.”
“Why?” Miranda, squinting over sunglasses into the rearview mirror.
“What is this, a deposition? She moved in by my mom’s. I ran into her.”
“Weren’t you seeing Olivia Hirsch?”
“I thought it was Olivia Franz,” Michael says.
“No, it was Hirsch,” Miranda W. goes on, “I was talking to her about it at the bar the other night.”
“Oh, so why’d you ask him, then?”
“I wanted Joy’s side of the story.”
I’m looking out past the barrier of the highway, at a general store marked “Marky’s” in neon lettering that’s whizzing by when I turn and say, “Oh, uh, we were seeing each other and then we weren’t.”
“That’s… interesting,” Miranda W. says.
“Knock it off, dude,” says Michael. “Dude just got here.”
“You brought Greene up… Look, Joy, I know stuff was going on in your life but it’s a little fucked up what you did.”
“Can I at least get an hour before we talk about my suicide attempt?”
“We’re not- that’s not what I meant-” I can see Miranda W. wince in the rearview mirror. Michael gives her a look of disapproval.
They leave me outside my house with a see you later and I encounter Tracy and a woman I’ve never met in the front room, watching a Michael Douglas movie. I put my skateboard and bags down by the kitchen and Tracy looks over.
“Joy! I thought you were Zack.”
“What’s up?” We hug and she points to her friend. “This is Jane," Tracy says. "They’re from LA.”
“Hi,” they say. “Just visiting. I go to Sarah Lawrence. ”
“Oh yeah? Cool.” They look at me a little long. “Nice to meet you,” I say.
“You too.”
“We’re gonna swing by the lake later,” Tracy says, “if you’re interested.”
“Yeah, just lemme know when. I’m gonna go to the bakery.”
I begin the walk down the road into town and call Dana because it’s her birthday.
“Thanks,” she says.
“You good?”
“Ugh, well, I’ve been thinking about stuff.”
“What sort?” I say in a tight breath.
“I just don’t really know what I’m doing this summer.”
We should hang out. “What did you think you'd be doing?”
“I figured my internship would be a bit better, and I dunno, I’d like spending time with like, my family or whatever. And this’ll sound childish, but I wish someone would come out, and like, sweep me off my fucking little feet.”
Ok, alright, alright, I get it. Sure. Whatever. “Dana, you’re 22 today, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, I think that uh, when you’re young, we’re young and sometimes things can be boring or even bad but they’ll be worth it sometime soon. But that it’s also alright to be, uh, dissatisfied, I mean, because shit can suck! But you can make a lot out of shit that sucks.”
“Of course, yes, yes.” Business, all business, that Dana. “Do you want to get a coffee or something?”
“That’d be real… nice. I’m at Springer for like, the holiday but I’ll be back in the city this week.”
“I think I need your insight, or whatever.”
“That’s really cool.” I notice a red Toyota - Olivia’s car driving by and there’s a dog leaning out of the window and it barks at me. Olivia doesn’t look in my direction; she’s listening to “Sittin’ Sidewayz,” so she’s probably occupied.
“You there? I gotta go, but let’s hang out sometime.”
“Alright, happy birthday, bye.”
I walk back over to my place and Todd is on the porch with Jimmy. I greet them both with a handshake and a let's get a beer and step inside.
“This isn’t even one of his ‘fucking’ movies,” Tracy says.
“God, you know he fucks like a mad man,” Jane says.
“You’d fuck him,” says Tracy.
“Shut up, you bitch!” They laugh.
I feel like a robot as I sit down by the coffee table. “What’s this one,” I say, crossing my legs on the floor.
Jane perks up. “So, Kathleen Turner, her sister’s been kidnapped. And, uh,-”
“Chandler’s mom… Oh, fucking, uh, Romancing the Stone?”
“Yeah,” they say, sorta wistfully, which I find confusing.
“You like this movie a lot?”
“Yeah.” Jane pushes their hair back with one hand. "Yeah, I really like it."
Tracy drives us to the lake in Livingston which I’m thankful for because it’s only ever locals and Bard kids over there and I don’t want to run into anyone from Springer.
“His name was Gunther Verner and he was racist, Tracy,” Jane is saying, about some dude they know from art camp.
“That’s like, not even a German name.”
“What does that have to do with him being racist? And it so is.”
“No, if it was like, a German-German name, it would be at least three names, stuck together.”
“You didn’t say that, you just said German.”
“I hate you sometimes.”
“You said Yura was here,” I say, looking out the back window over the lake, looming behind blurring trees and other cars.
“Yea, she is,” Tracy says. “Hey, can you play that song?”
“What song?” Jane says. “I need a name. You’re like my mom.”
“The Chameleons side project song you played for me when I picked you up.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” and now they’re scrolling through a playlist on their phone.
Once Tracy’s SUV is parked, Jane leaps out, hanging halfway out of her bathing suit, skipping down the hill with a bundle of towels. Feels kinda dark to write but she's got a druggy vibe, or maybe that's what white kids from LA seem like. California has like 80 different groups of white people who came over at different times and they all hate each other and then pass that on to their children and their children. Tracy turns around, pulling her seatbelt off. “You should fuck Jane,” she says, like it’s a secret. “If you want.”
“They seem-”
“They’re down.”
“… Cool, I guess.”
One morning junior year I woke up to a weepy FaceTime from Olivia Hirsch. Through that compression artifacted videostream, she turned her phone to her laptop and showed me something I’d posted on a forum the night before. This forum, dedicated to a podcast this celebrity NYU kid does, often delved in issues facing its few dedicated users. She herself would post sometimes. Bart and I got into it freshman year. In a thread about relationship troubles, I’d related to another poster, who complained that girls he dated were “maybe beyond repair” by describing my relationship with Olivia with a BBS-formatted table:
Pros: PTSD pussy they love you Cons: PTSD pussy babysitting an adult woman
She was heartbroken that I’d treated her utmost secrets with such nonchalance. She’d trusted me. I was just posting, I said, but I knew that didn’t mean much. That it was an insane excuse. She said she’d thought about bringing it up earlier, issuing some ultimatum, but had reasoned against it because she’d trusted me. I was mostly mad that people from my personal life were reading my posts. I would later find out it was Tracy who told. It took me nearly a week to fully fathom how insane I was being. The internet helps you not think about people if you’re already not thinking about people. Olivia wouldn’t talk to me at a party so I took the bus home and bought whippits and a six pack and tried to hang myself from my closet doorknob. I was listening to the first Adult Mom record on earbuds and after a couple tries I pulled the belt from my neck, doubled over and cried.
Apropos to that situation, I stopped posting, and turned all the way into my journal to record my thoughts, as people have done since writing's invention. That did not end the bad times with Olivia; I went on to make a series of bad decisions.
Yura and I walk down Broadway, towards the west end of Dealership and the river. Ahead and behind us are groups of other Springer students, trading in newly discovered ‘hard seltzers’ and a tested batch of cocaine that’s new to town. We do not dwell on how our Junes were; instead, we discuss a sex scandal at LREI, a K-12 we know some kids from.
“Where should I finish,” I grunt.
“Anywhere,” Jane whispers. We’re on a couch Yura’s mom gave us so I pull out and try to aim for their stomach. “If you wanted it in my mouth... let a bitch know first! Christ.”
“I’m so sorry, it’s been a minute. I'll go get some paper tow-”
“Nonononono, wait, stay here a minute.”
“Okay.” I try to curl up beside them and watch as they lick semen from around their lips.
“You were… backed up, it seems. Do you want to lick it off my tits,” Jane says. “My yiddies?”
“Huh.”
“What, ‘yiddies?’ It’s a colloquialism.”
“Okay.”
We lie beside each other, steadily breathing in the cool air of this early morning, the AC chugging quietly. I know why I did this. Coming up to school in the summer with nothing lined up made me really anxious. Not pit-in-my-stomach, ugly-cry scared, but uneasy, unwelcome. There’s never much to do. Jane is nice. Druggy? What an asshole I am. Clearly just a depressed person. They're really gonna hate it out here. They know Michael from when he went to Sarah Lawrence. They like Sarah Records bands and other things, also. We didn’t get that far. I thought the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on their stomach was interesting. I realize now that it’s the Death in June totenkopf and I don’t remember if that’s Nazi stuff or just some weird pagan thing. There’s a Celtic cross on the hanger of my skateboard’s trucks. I can make out Jane’s grin in the muted glare of the streetlight through the curtain, their face dappled with my jism, and can’t help but grin myself.
“You can go grab those paper towels, if you want.”
“Sure,” I say, rolling off the couch.
“You didn’t take too long, if you were worried about that.”
“I mean, I wasn’t,” I say, kneeling.
“You weren’t too fast, either. Like, I didn’t mind it. Don’t feel bad, you’re alright at this stuff.”
“Yeah, I mean, you said you like, didn’t want to come.”
“Yeah, and I was so gracious you even asked.” They cup my chin and look at me with doe eyes.
"Something funny happened to me on the subway- or I guess I noticed something funny," Bart is saying. We're out in front of Brooklyn's Borough Hall, eating meatball subs. It's a midsummer Thursday afternoon, and as such my shirt is stuck to my back and stomach, my suede Converse plimsolls are probably emitting noxious fumes, and the soles of my fresh white dollar-store socks have probably been blackened with sweat in the 6 or so hours I've spent skateboarding. I woke up early, for a day off work putzing about my apartment as I dirtied probably every pan in the kitchen making a paint-by-numbers omelette. The wifi speaker my younger brother caterwauled my mother into buying on her Walmart credit card is frustrating to use, but I got it to play a mix Miranda sent me a few nights ago. "I recorded this right off the mixer," she said, detailing over the phone how her set had gone at a club I can't remember the name of right now. "I can come play it for you, if you want."
"Um, I think I have to get up kinda early, but I'd like, love to hear it," I said.
"So, there was a cat in a bag," Bart says. He's put his sandwich down, leaning back against a metal fence with a look of satisfaction, which I figure must be an expression of some sort of self-fulfillment. He called me this morning, and among other things, like, "I think Mena made a pass at me," and "My parents have been working on this movie in Australia for like a month and it's getting lonely, just me and Tanya" [his maid, old babysitter, and friend of my parents], said he'd crook shuv one of those lime green metal chairs some enterprise puts out at Borough Hall in some sort of nasty High Line-esque public/private effort. I figured, sure, dude, whatever it's a nice day and my therapist rescheduled I'll come out skating with you. And when I emerged from the green line station and rolled up the hill, he was already trying, and sticking it. It took him like four tries on camera, and then he spent like a whole hour egging on my varial heel on flat, nollie backside heel down a curb (which became a nollie back 180 as I grew frustrated later on), and switch ollie a little flat gap line. I felt pretty supported and he seemed just stoked to be doing all this. "The cat is softly meowing, dog, and I swear to God, smiling at me."
"That sounds really cute," I say, gazing at a white Brooklynite walking with a bundle of packages, I guess from the Post Office. A luxury sedan is easing its way through the plaza, and an assemblage of skateboarders part to allow it by. An older man smokes a cigarette right by his kid.
Later, as we roll down the hill towards the subway station, off in different directions, me to a date and Bart to a show, he strings three sloppy nollie flips together, before looking back at me for a second. I give thumbs-up and wonder what movie his parents are working on.
"There's nothing wrong with having depression," Jane's saying, poking through the user interface of the digital jukebox of a Bushwick dive bar, in context of the Elliot Smith song they're searching for. "I just don't think just anyone should just get to die like that. Save early death for firefighters, cancer patients, pet monkeys who've learned too much about human society."
"Why should they get the privilege?" I say.
"Sacrifice. Suffering."
"What sacrifice does a pet monkey make?"
"You think they don't know they could just tear off the next human face they see and get tossed in a sanctuary? They're insanely powerful. They turn 6 and figure out they’re being patronized.”
"I don't think it's that simple... And depression is suffering."
"Sure," they say, turning back to the LCD screen. I swig my Brooklyn Lager and think quietly.
"The lowest I've been in a while," I say, "was somehow the quietest month of life so far, probably."
"Uh huh?"
"And I thought about it-"
"Who doesn't," Jane says.
"Not sure what side you're on anymore."
"..." They look up at me, eyebrows tilted, tongue placed between lips as if my next words were a problem to solve. But I don't think they're listening, really.
"But I figured I might feel better some other time, and people, like, loved me and shit. And I heard a joke," on a podcast, "proposing, like, fucked up Make-a-Wish wishes, like smoking a pack of Reds, or eating someone's pussy. Like a dying kid's dream being, like, a Tuesday for an non-dying adult. And I thought, man, if I stick around, I can see a whole lot of Tuesdays."
"Geez, Joy," Jane says, after a beat.
"You know, you're, like, not an empathetic girl," I say.
"Not a girl, and trying to kill yourself is bad shit."
"Sorry. That’s why I don’t want to," I mumble.
“What song do you want to hear?”
“The only Elliot Smith song I know is 'Coast to Coast.'”
Jane leans into the tall LCD screen of the jukebox, grinning. “That one’s almost upbeat.”
I go back with Jane to their mom's apartment, a two bed in Chinatown rented during a messy divorce. Jane's mom was transitioning from film finance stuff to good ol' finance stuff, and moved across the country. Proximity to Sarah Lawrence lends Jane convenient visits, often after club nights reach mid-morning or Tinder dates go sour.
"I'm sorry I said that stuff," they're saying, slicing a lime for their G&T. "I wouldn't like it if you died."
"That makes me feel a little better."
A photograph of Central Park in winter hangs over in the hallway right outside the kitchen.
“Do you still want to hang out?”
“Yeah, Jane.”
“Do you still want to fuck me?”
“Actually, no.”
“Was it something I said.”
I laugh. “That’s a joke.”
“Oh, you’re rude.”
We then sit in silence for a moment, Jane's got their legs curled up on my legs and I am absentmindedly poking at the hole in their chinos.
“You know,” Jane starts. “Tracy warned me about you.”
“Really? That’s surprising. What about?”
“Well, I don’t know why you’d be surprised, like, you know what you did.”
“Ugh, no, well, yes, I just thought Tracy was backing us hanging out.”
“Not really.”
I am a little surprised.
“Tracy isn’t, uh,” Jane starts, “the most upfront person. She said you have a penchant for, what, oh - casual cruelty.”
Chapter 3 is below this line. Feel free to shoot me five dollars to read it early.