The Sea of Tranquility

by Katja Millay

Maybe I was just trying to stop her from making enemies of those bitches. Maybe I just wanted Sarah to shut the hell up because I know she’s better than that. Maybe I just wanted the girl to look at me again.

I stop at the end of the driveway in front of a pale yellow house with a brightly lit open garage. I want to look in to see if anyone is inside before I get too close, but my feet won’t stop. The sight of it pulls me in. As soon as I reach the threshold, I am frozen, only one thought forming in my mind. I know this place.

Before he opens the door, he hands me back the tiramisu and then reaches up and frames my face with his hands, gently running his thumbs across the skin below both of my eyes. I think my mouth might be hanging open because I have no idea what the hell he’s doing. “Black shit,” he says, by way of explanation, and I realize that my eye makeup must be running. Then he opens the door for me without another word.

I feel like grabbing my crotch and checking to see if my balls are still there, because I think they may be in her pocket and I need to get them back.

“I could make his year if I wanted to.” Confident girl. Makes me wonder if she can back that up, and I shouldn’t be thinking about that at all. The legs are still swinging and it’s driving me crazy. “Do you want to?” Not what I planned to ask. I wonder how much it would hurt to cut out my tongue. “I’m asking the questions.” “Not to me you’re not.” There. “Do you live here alone?” That lasted a while. “Yes.” “Why were you emancipated?” “Necessity.” “Is it hard?” “What?” “Is it hard to get emancipated?” I knew that’s what she was asking. Really, I did.

“Not my fault that you’re distractingly pretty.” I have to take a minute to confirm to the pissed off part of my brain that still works that, yes, in fact, I did just say that.

“I believe in God, Sunshine. I’ve always believed that God exists,” he says. And what he says next isn’t self-pity or angst or melodrama. It’s truth. “I just know that he hates me.”

Part of me hoped she’d choose the leaving option so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at her in that dress and struggling to keep my dick in check, but she didn’t put me out of my misery. Weeks ago, when I finally accepted the fact that she wasn’t going away, I promised myself I wouldn’t go anywhere near her. I’m not that self-destructive. But on days when she walks in wearing tight black dresses and my work boots, I wonder how long I can keep that promise.

“What is she to him?” I try not to sound jealous or like I’m fishing for information, but I am on both counts. “She,” he says, looking at my chest, because he is still Drew, before pulling his gaze up to my eyes, “is a poor man’s Sunshine.

And then he does something that shocks even me. Josh Bennett, king of the brooding stoics, laughs. Josh Bennett laughs, and it’s one of the most natural, uninhibited, beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard. I know Kara Matthews is watching us and people will talk tomorrow. But right now I can’t even care. Josh Bennett laughs, and for one minute, everything is right in the world.

if it’s just me or if it’s like that for everybody; that every time someone dies you start counting how much time has passed since they’ve been gone. First you count it in minutes, then in hours. You count in days, then weeks, then months. Then one day you realize that you aren’t counting anymore, and you don’t even know when you stopped. That’s the moment they’re gone. “My grandfather’s dead,” I say. “If we had a telescope, I could show you the Sea of Tranquility.” She points up at the sky. “See? Up there on the moon. You can’t really tell from here.” “Is that why you have a picture of the moon in your bedroom?”

“I’d ask you, you know. If I was allowed. I’d ask you a thousand times until you’d tell me. But you won’t let me ask.”

When we reach his truck in the parking garage, he tosses the bucket into the back and then reaches up and cradles my face in his hands the way he did that day on the Leightons’ front porch. “Black shit,”

“I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it’s an impossible wish.” He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time. “It’s not stupid to want to see her again.” “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. “I wanted her to see you.”

Then, without a word, she curls up next to me and that’s how we fall asleep. Her hand in mine. Together.

garage. “Draw one for me.” The words are out of my mouth before I can bitch slap them into submission. “You want me to draw you?” He’s annoyed or disappointed. I haven’t given him the reaction he was expecting. “No. I want you to draw her. For me.” Clay looks a little more pleased with that. “How?” he asks. “What do you mean, how?” I sound pissed and I mean to, but it’s me I’m pissed at. I just spilled my guts all over the floor in art class and now he’s going to kick them around a little bit for fun. “How do you see her? If you want me to draw her for you, it should be how you see her. Not how I see her.” “You’ve drawn a hundred pictures of her. Just draw another one or give me one of those.” I motion toward the portfolio. “When you look at her what do you feel?” “Are you fucking serious? Forget it.” He can kiss my ass if he wants to start talking feelings with me. “You obviously want it for a reason.” “I want a picture to jack off to. What do you care?” I keep drawing so I don’t have to look at him, but I’m mutilating the sketch I’m working on. I’ll have to start over, but I don’t care. “Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?” “Yes.” “Yes, what?” “All of it,” I reply, because I’m all in now whether I like it or not. “I can have it to you in a couple of days.

“Why does it mean anything to you?” “Because she’s mine and I don’t want you touching her.” I’m a five-year-old fighting over a toy. I feel like an idiot as soon as I say it, but it’s said and it’s true. And I don’t want it to be. “I know,” he says arrogantly. “You know?” “I’m not stupid, Josh. The two of you have been eye-fucking each other since the beginning of school. I wasn’t going to do anything with her and she was never going to do anything with me.” “Then why all the bullshit tonight?” “Just wanted to hear you say it.” He smiles and heads back toward the house. I’m too relieved to be pissed at him. “What’s with you and Tierney?” I ask when he gets to the porch. “Trying not to screw each other. Trying not to kill each other. Same thing that’s always with me and Tierney.”

“I lied,” I say, even though I’m lying now. “I told him you were mine.”

“Just so you know,” she says, her smile fading as her eyes lock onto mine. “You didn’t lie.”

“You know I meant it. I am human. And male. And not remotely blind. Do you want me to say it again? You are distractingly, even-if-that-is-not-a-real-word, pretty. You are so pretty that I bullied Clay Whitaker into drawing me a picture of you so I could look at you when you aren’t around. You are so pretty that one of these days I’m going to lose a finger in my garage because I can’t concentrate with you so close to me. You are so pretty that I wish you weren’t so I wouldn’t want to hit every guy at school who looks at you, especially my best friend.” I stop to catch my breath. “More? I can keep going.” I can keep going, but even as I say all of this, I know it’s not quite true. She’s not just distractingly pretty. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, and I want to touch her so badly right now that it’s almost impossible to keep my hands from reaching out and doing it.

How is it that with everything that’s happened in my life, this girl is going to be the thing that undoes me?

It’s bad enough that my brain is a cesspool; I can’t imagine the hellhole my heart would be if he wasn’t in it.

“What about Josh?” I think there’s more to that question than she’s letting on but she’s testing the waters. Salvation I write. She looks at the word and nods.

“You look different,” he says, repeating the same words he used the first night I ended up at his house, and I smile because it’s exactly how I’d like to look tonight. “And distractingly pretty,” he adds softly, his lips turning up just slightly.

As soon as my lips are on his, his hand is at the back of my neck and he’s pulling me against his chest like he’s been waiting for this forever and he’s not going to let me get away.

He’s kissing me. And when he does, part of me is lost. But it’s the part that’s twisted and mangled and wrong, and for just that moment, with his hands in my hair and his lips on my mouth, I can pretend that it never existed.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a really long time, I just wanted to do it again.” “How long?” “Since the first night you walked into my garage.” “I’m glad you didn’t,” I confess. “Why?” “I had just thrown up. I think it would have ruined the moment.” “As opposed to this moment, which is now full of romance.

And with that, he backs his truck out of the driveway, and we go home.

“Josh isn’t in love with me and I’m not in love with him.” “Sell it to someone who’s buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?” I’ve seen the way he looks at me, but I don’t know what it means. “Like you’re a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition.” “So he looks at me like I’m furniture.” “Exactly. See? You know what I’m talking about.

“Just so you know,” I inform him, “one day, I’m going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I’m going to make you choose.” “Just so you know,” he mimics me, “I would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.”

“I can’t use any of it.” “You can use some of it,” I say, because I want the smile back and because it’s true. She can do more than she thinks she can. For some reason, she just won’t try. “And I can be your other hand when you need it.

It shouldn’t be possible to be this close to another person. To let them crawl inside you.

I want to tell her that I don’t remember what it’s like not to want her, that maybe there isn’t anything else I do want.

You wanted to be ruined? Well, you did yourself one better because you wrecked me, too, Sunshine. Now we’re both worth shit.

“It’s not a good enough reason.” “You are the only good reason.

I’m not sure how long we sit in Josh’s truck, holding hands, surrounded by darkness and unspoken regrets. But it’s long enough to know that there are no stories or secrets in the world worth holding onto more than his hand.

There are so many things that can break you if there’s nothing to hold you together.

All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I’m holding the one who’s left.

“What is she to you?” she whispers. The real question and I know the answer even if I don’t know how to say it. Drew’s muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond. “Family,” he says. And he’s right.

“You were really good,” he says, his voice faint as it breaks the silence. “I was fucking amazing,” I try to joke, but it just comes out sad. “You still are,” he responds with quiet conviction, piercing me with his eyes the way he does when he wants to make sure I’m listening. “Every way that matters.

maybe I’m a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennett is kind of like being saved. It’s a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories.

“Emilia,” he says, and when he does, it warms me to my soul. “Every day you save me.”

when I look at her now, I think, for just one second, that God doesn’t hate me so much after all.

“I love you, Sunshine,” I tell her, before I lose my nerve. “And I don’t give a shit whether you want me to or not.”

And then he kisses me. Tentatively at first, waiting for something, but there isn’t any need. I would kiss him forever. I will kiss him forever. I know it like I know my own name.

Instead he wipes the last tear away with the back of his fingers. “No black shit,” he says. And I smile.