I woke up on my couch sweating, with hair stuck to my forehead. My tank top was like a second skin against my ribs. My 13" TV flickered, throwing out the only light into the apartment. The four local channels only showed informercials this late at night. My laptop, open on the coffee table, had shut itself down. I had a headache, and couldn't go back to sleep - even with the ceiling fan set on 'high' it was too stuffy and humid inside my apartment.
I pushed my body up from the couch, slipped on my All Stars and pushed the laces up under the tongue. A mens' western shirt with blue and brown stripes laid across the coffee table. I'd bought it off a clearance rack at Ross for 3 bucks. I put it on but left it unbuttoned, then grabbed some change and my keys off the counter.
I walked a block down to the all night convenience store on the corner. There was no traffic at this hour. The streets laid dark and silent. The wind coming off the bay lifted the tail of my shirt, blew my hair around. The Mini Mart sign glowed in neon red and yellow at the end of the road. I crossed the highway and walked into the parking lot, stepping carefully over a fresh oil stain. The ice machine hummed dully next to the door. I ducked under the swirl of insects drawn in by the sodium lights.
"Hey, Sam," the clerk said when he saw me. He sat on a stool behind the counter, reading a curled up Maxim magazine.
"Hey, Chuck," I replied. He was in his 50s, with a missing front tooth, and faded tattoos hidden in the thick hair on his forearms. He always wore white dress shirts with yellow stains around the pits and the neck.
I bought an orange push-up ice cream pop, a bottle of water, and a pack of Marlboros. Chuck had his little TV behind the counter turned to the cartoon channel.
"Want to stay and watch Family Guy?" he asked as he slid my change over to me.
"Sorry, I gotta get back. Expecting a phone call."
As I walked back outside, I wondered if he wondered who would be calling me a 3 in the morning.
I glanced to my left, where the state highway ran south out of town and into the darkness of the night. There was nothing out there to the south but the marshlands and the rice paddies, and more alligators than people. This part of Texas is so flat, with nothing but fields of rice and coastal grass rolling for miles inland. On nights like that, with no moon or stars in the sky, it felt like it was at the end of the world.
I walked a ways down my street, then veered right toward the city park at the beach. I'd finished my push-up pop by then, and dumped the crumpled cardboard into a rusty oil drum that served as a trash can by the entrance of the park. I licked the sticky ice cream trails from my hand before fishing the cigarettes out of my shirt pocket.
A wooden bench was bolted into the concrete sidewalk next to the pier. Years' worth of carved or inked graffiti covered the entire surface of the bench. I sat, lit a cigarette with my dad's old Zippo. On some nights there would be old timers fishing from the pier, but not this night. Houston, an hour to the east, glowed low in the sky, a light purple. To the south there was only a solid darkness; I could not see the horizon where the bay met the sky. Beyond the bay the Gulf of Mexico rolled, deep and dark and powerful.
I was alone. I was haunted by a girl I'd never met.
I sat for hours in the steady roar of the surf and the wind, chain smoking, hoping the dark waves out there would bring me something like peace.
They didn't. I couldn't stop thinking about that night.
It was still dark when I got back to the apartment. On the local ABC affiliate a man was selling kitchen knives that would never go dull for only $14.95. I sat on the couch and thumbed on the blue and white Christmas lights I'd strung up around my living room. They bathed the room in an eerie blue glow. I powered my laptop back up and spent a while finishing the article I'd been working on. I was tired again by the time I was done; I saved the article, decided to proof read it the next day.
I stood in line with Jason at the Burger King. He was my landlady's son, home from Lamar for the summer. Tall kid, with short red hair, kind of scrawny and pale. He drove up and over to Baytown five days a week to work at the Sears in the mall, selling power tools and washing machines.
"You have magic hair," Jason told me while I scanned the dollar menu.
"Thanks," I said over my shoulder; to the cashier, "I'll take the chicken sandwich."
We sat in a hard orange booth by the window and waited for them to call our numbers. A green, two ton dually was parked right outside our window.
"So..." Jason began. "How did you end up here in Anahuac?"
I shrugged. "I came out here last year to write an article about the Gator Fest. I just stayed."
"You dropped out of college to stay here?"
"I was wasting time in college anyway."
"Yeah, but, this town is literally at the end of the road. It's a piece of crap," he laughed nervously, keeping his voice down so as not to offend any local farmers who might be hovering nearby. He picked a piece of lint off the collar of his brown polo shirt.
"I like these out of the way places," I said. "No one pays attention to them. They're full of stories no one's heard yet."
I sipped my water through a thick yellow straw. They brought our food to our booth. Between mouthfuls of burger, Jason asked, "But you grew up in Texas, right?"
"Just north of Houston," I said. "My mom moved us to Seattle one summer, but then she came back here."
After eating we took my Camry to the dollar store. Jason seemed oversized in the little seat. He drummed his fingers on his knee and looked out the window.
He stayed behind me inside the store while I hovered over the frozen food bin and dug out microwave dinners - boxes of chicken fried rice and alfredo pasta.
"These are $1.29 now," I said.
Jason grunted. "A couple of months ago they were 99 cents."
The girl who checked us out kept her eyes down as she scanned the TV dinners. Her yellow uniform shirt was tucked loosely into her khakis. She was pale, with long dark hair. I wondered if Carly looked anything like the check out girl. Carly had told me how she looked, and how sometimes people mistook her for Asian or Hispanic. I told her she sounded hot, but she insisted she was too skinny, with a weirdly shaped mouth.
The sun was going down outside. The sign for the dollar store lit up bright yellow against the pink in the sky. All along the main street the video stores, restaurants, and gas stations were flaring to life in crisp neons.
Jason set my groceries in the back seat. "I guess you got to get these back before they thaw out."
There was a party going on upstairs. I sat on my couch in the blue and white glow of my Christmas lights, with my TV throwing staticky shadows out into the room. My laptop was open on my coffee table, and next to it a roadmap opened to Montana. I should have been writing an email, but instead I was eating a cup of ramen and thinking about Amber.
She was the closest thing I had to a friend in high school. She looked just like the girl who played Sabrina in Dazed and Confused. I talked to her on the phone every night that summer I lived in Seattle. Once I moved back she started staying at my house every weekend. Her mom was even worse than mine, so she didn't mind being at my place. We would spend nights out in the little camper that was set way off by the fence line in my back yard. We would lounge around in tank tops and shorts, sweating, smoking pot and stolen cigarettes, drinking Boonesfarm, and watch movies on my Playstation. Some nights we would climb under the barbed wire fence behind the camper and sneak into the cow pasture to look for 'shrooms.
I honestly believe I would have been an even worse delinquent then if not for her. I tried my best to keep her out of trouble. I knew she was giving it up to different guys; I used to hate hearing her talk about boys. She would always drink and smoke more than me, and pass out before me. I always had to lift her up and put her in the bunk at the back of the camper.
One spring day in our junior year, after lunch, she ate a whole bottle of aspirin and passed out in the baseball field during P.E. I never saw her again after that.
My phone started vibrating, sliding around my table. I picked it up, flipped it open, answered it.
"Hey," Jason slurred on the other end. "You gonna come up to the party?"
"Maybe in a little bit. I gotta finish writing this email."
"Who you gotta email this time of night?"
I put the empty ramen box down and lit a cigarette. "I'm trying to get this magazine to pay for me to go to Montana. It'll be like a photographic expedition among all the little towns in the eastern part of the state."
"What all's there?"
"Nothing. It's just a bunch of small, old west towns and Indian reservations. And miles and miles of open highway."
"Huh," he said.
"I told you, I like those out of the way places."
He was quiet for a minute. "Something else bugging you?"
I sighed. "I found an old friend from high school on Splash Face. This girl I knew named Amber."
"You gonna message her?"
"Nah. It's been five years. It would be too awkward now."
After I hung up I pushed my cigarette down in an empty soda can. I studied my map of Montana, looked at all that empty space. I tried to imagine, somewhere in that vastness, there must be boys and girls who stayed up all night communing with the clear summer sky; boys and girls who'd paint snakes out on the highway in front of their house; who'd ride the long highways for hours and hours at night with their friends, because they were young and it felt too good to ever stop.
The bass from the rap music up stairs was really annoying. I plugged my headphones into the side of my laptop and opened up my music library. I had over 10,000 tracks on it, but I'd only listened to about half of them.
Jason followed me into the Mini Mart on Sunday morning.
"Pedialyte is great for hangovers," he said.
Jason went looking for headache medicine while I walked down the candy aisle looking for Fat Cakes. A trio of teenage girls walked over from the beach and into the store. They were barefoot, their hair damp, with their swimsuits clinging to their bodies. Chuck leaned over the counter to get a look at their backsides as they walked to the cooler for drinks.
Jason paid for my Fat Cake, and we walked out into the blinding sunlight. I drove us down to the beach, and we got out and laid blankets down on the hard sand. Jason drove a green beach umbrella into the sand so we'd have shade. I could feel the sweat evaporating along my ribs as the breeze blew in off the water.
"I saw a UFO once," Jason said as he laid down on his blanket.
"Really?"
"At my dad's place up in Arkansas. I used to go up there every year to spend the summer with him. It was the summer before 10th grade when I saw it. Me and my stepbrother Rodney went out back one night to check on the horses, and there was this light up in the sky, over the trees. Three lights, actually, like a triangle. It just hovered there."
"Did you get pictures?"
"Nah. By the time Rodney got his cell phone out to tape it, the thing took off really fast. So who knows? I guess it could have been aliens."
"Hmm."
He was quiet for a long time. The only sound was the waves crashing into the shore.
"What's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?" he finally asked.
I took a deep breath. "This girl called me one night."
He waited a moment before asking, "What's so weird about that?"
I rolled to my side to face him, lifted my hip to free the loose end of my shirt. "It was just over a year ago, right before I moved out here. I was chilling in my room one night with my Christmas lights on, just playing music. I was almost asleep when my phone rang and I answered it even though I didn't recognize the number. It was this girl looking for some guy. I told her she had the wrong number, but we kept talking anyway. She said her name was Carly and she lived up in Seattle. I guess it was a little after midnight when she called, and we just kept talking all night, about everything, until the sun came up. She told me about how her mom had died when she was a kid, and I could relate because of my dad. I told her about that summer I lived in Seattle, so we both knew some of the same landmarks. We even both knew this same girl up there named Wendy. We both liked the same bands and the same movies. We just talked for hours."
I reached out and scratched a deep furrow in the sand with my finger. "It was like I'd met my soul mate."
"So what happened?" Jason asked quietly. "Did she turn out to be crazy or something?"
"I don't know. She said she would call me again, but she never did. I waited a day and tried to call her back, but it kept saying that the number was no longer in service. I never did learn her last name, so..."
"You tried to look her up?"
"I still get on Splash Face sometimes and try to search for girls named Carly in the Seattle area, but so far nothing. I even tried to find Wendy to see if she knew this Carly chick, but I couldn't find her either."
He laid there quietly for a long time. When he finally sat up, the took his shirt off and asked me to rub sun block on his back.
"You're very pale," I said as I scootched closer to him.
"I know."
A spatter of freckles covered his shoulders. I squeezed the ribbed bottle of sun block, squirted some of the lotion into my palm. It smelled like coconut. I spread it lightly, my fingertips grazing along the surface of his skin, as if touching him would hurt.
"You'll burn too easy," I whispered.