Everything will change in September. You know this, and have accepted that fact by the time you drift through Orientation Day at Seattle University. Boring officials drone on in the background with their cliches about welcoming all of you young people, while you chew your pen cap, tap rhythms on your leg with your thumb, rub your butt against the hard plastic chair, and let the reality of change settle into your mind. You barely notice the clumps of other incoming freshmen who, recognizing you, whisper amongst themselves and gesture in your direction.
You sit on a curb in the parking lot once it's all over, waiting, because Spencer is late again as usual; the concrete burns through the thin fabric of your slacks. You squint against the dazzle of the afternoon and watch the slow tumble of the clouds, and try to think of something interesting to text Sam. A drop of sweat tickles your ribs as it rolls along under your T-shirt. Sunlight glows on your wrists. You still haven't thought of anything worthy of texting when Spencer finally pulls the car up the curb.
He wants to know how it went, and if you think you'll like it, and all the typical things people always ask, and you are so impatient with these motions.
Your attention is on the cityscape flowing outside your window - the shopping centers and department stores with their busy parking lots; the chain restaurants' mascots looming high on billboards in the bright summer air. There are pizza joints and Chinese takeout palaces and head shops along this street, and shopping centers full of nail salons and dry cleaners and comic book stores, and intersections full with the hustle of the city. And when Spencer stops at the gas station, and at Half Eats to get a few groceries, you notice all the girls who'd been working the day shift at the department stores and chain restaurants must've just gotten off work. They're still wearing their black Dickies and colored dress shirts, pumping gas and filling shopping carts, and you bite your lip and watch them. Girls are sexy in their work uniforms, because you know they've been in focus all day, denying all their sensuality, with the tensions of the day pent up inside their bodies; but now they are free, on their way home to relax and relieve those tensions. You stand in the bread aisle, gnawing your lower lip, your hands wrenched on the shopping cart, and try to imagine the world through the girls' eyes, the way it must feel through their bodies, what poignancies they must be aware of in their own lives.
Then your phone bleets, and it's a text from Sam. You open it, and it reads: "Summer is when I come most alive..."
You're laying in bed with cool sheets on your legs, watching old episodes of iCarly on your laptop. It's almost painful now to watch these shows from the first season. Something inside you aches seeing Sam at 13, back when she still dressed like a boy. She's on the screen, throwing ninja stars at raw pork chops. You can see a body still willowy and androgynous, but you can't see the changes taking place inside. You couldn't know of the uterus shedding its lining as the first drops of blood fell, until that night when you both lay in your secret spot in the park, watching sheets of stars fall like a silvery rain, and she leaned in close to whisper to you the secret of her first time. Oh, Sam at 13 - that was the same year her fingers discovered what pleasures her body was capable of; the same year her hips began to flare and her breasts to swell. No one but you would know these things, as she approaches the camera now with her shirt lifted to show the face she drew on her stomach. Her belly button was a shallow wrinkle in a smooth plane that never showed an ounce of fat, despite all the Fat Cakes and bacon she used to eat.
Your nerve endings crackle. You've survived the summer on a steady diet of sushi and strong coffee, and your body thrums late every night with an energy you don't know how to channel.
The air conditioner kicks on, hums in the dark, breathes coldly on your skin. You pull up a more recent episode of iCarly from your hard drive, and the Sam that floats across the screen is older now, all curves and young womanhood.
Your hand is on your tummy, and starting to creep lower when your phone rings on the night stand beside you. You glance at the clock - Sam is two hours ahead of you.
You answer. "What are you doing up at three in the morning?"
"Sitting on the beach," she says, the lows and highs filtered out of her voice, making her sound even more distant than she already is.
"Why?" you giggle.
"Because it's cool," she says, and you know she means physically, because you can hear the wind whipping in off the Gulf of Mexico. "What are you doing?"
"Not much. Just playing on my laptop. Not wanting to go to sleep, you know?"
You hear her sigh from a thousand miles away. "How it's going up there?"
"Everything looks like some artsy photograph. I can't look at a sign in a store window without noticing how the sunlight falls on it. And when I take a shower, I can feel every skin cell in my body. I'm just... aware."
"Now you know why I'm on the beach at three in the morning," she says.
You smile, and wonder how a human being can be as beautiful as she is, and inspire so much happiness just for existing. The energy in your body is stirred up now, simply because you're talking to her. You can feel the energy swirling, looking for a way out, pulsing blissfully inside you, throughout you.
"It's an amazing summer," you say. "I wish we didn't have to spend it apart."
"True chiz." She falls silent for a moment. "Play me some music?"
"Okay," you say, rolling to face the Pear Pod docked on your night stand. You turn it on, wait for it to light up. You have the whole Good Morning, Spider album on the playlist, so you hold the phone up to the speakers and let her listen to Sunshine, Hey Joe, Come On In, and Mary's Little Elbows.
"Thanks," she says when you put the phone back to your ear.
And in between the silences there are long stretches of her talking, and you don't care what she's talking about as long as she doesn't stop. You lay in bed, listening to her, listening to the air conditioner come to life at regular intervals, and soon Sam is describing to you the morning sun coming up over the water, but even then she stays on the phone, telling you of the people out jogging in the early light. She keeps talking even when she walks over to a coffee shop and buys a mocha frap. She brings it back to the beach and talks until you start telling her about the morning light coming through your window.
"You probably need to get some sleep," she finally says.
"I probably do," you laugh.
"I guess I can stumble back to the house and try to snatch a few hours myself."
"Okay. Watch out for the joggers."
"It's the bicycle riders you gotta watch for," she says just before hanging up. "They're the crazy ones. They don't care who gets in their way."
You set your phone down, and realize your Pear Pod is still quietly cycling through your playlist. You figure it won't hurt to turn the volume up a bit and listen to a few songs, but you soon realize that's a mistake, and that you should never listen to your favorite music before trying to go to sleep - it will make you feel like you could stay up for days.
You planned this moment - sitting in the car, on the hill overlooking west Seattle. The sky is dense with stars, like a reflection of the city below with its spread of lights. You kind of wish it was Sam sitting next to you, instead of Freddie, because she's the one who mailed you the oldies mix CD with all the Jim Croce and Big Star on it; but you can tell Freddie isn't into this music at all. He sits there with a bored look on his face, watching the lights of the city shift down below. You turn the stereo down, even though you think Big Star's music would be the perfect soundtrack for some ultimate 70s high school movie.
"What is it?" he asks, turning to you.
You shrug. How can you tell him of this new awareness of Time? You know that, some years from now, you'll remember this as the summer you rode around in the car with Freddie two or three nights a week listening to music and discovering the city. Part of you wishes you didn't have this awareness, that you could just enjoy these nights without that distant sadness at the back of your mind.
"I hope there will still be nights like this once we're off to college," you finally say.
He nods, runs his thumb along the steering wheel.
You know, though, that college will be a busy time, and Sam will be back by then, and that Freddie will probably find a nerdy girlfriend in college, and that this tradition will probably end with the summer. You want to remember every detail of these nights, these long aimless drives, because you really do feel a tenderness and affection for Freddie, like you would if he was your brother. It's love, even, though you know now that you probably won't ever feel that way for a guy (that's one of the things you've accepted, too - this new reality, this new awareness of who you are).
"That would be cool," he says, clearing his throat.
Laying in bed, waiting for her to call, listening to Slowdive, with the black lights glowing in your room. The A/C hums and you can feel traces of chlorine evaporating from your skin, even though you took a shower when you came back to the apartment from swimming earlier.
You drift in the dark, planning all the moments you want to have when Sam gets back.
When you went to her house the night before she left she was sitting on her bedroom floor with half-packed suitcases and clothes scattered about, drinking kamikazes and playing her Jaguar along to a Dave Navarro instructional DVD. She'd been obsessed with his playing lately; of course, he got it all from melding Hendrix with Robert Smith, but whatever, it was that moment that stuck in your mind. Her fleet fingers danced across the guitar strings; the muscles in her bare legs pulsed as she shifted her position on the floor. You joined her on the floor and had a drink and watched her play.
So now you want to create more moments like that - you want her to lay here with you under the black lights, listening to trippy music; you want to sit out on the balcony with her and smoke shisha in the night air; you want to drive out into the country and dance to Sparklehorse songs along the side of the road.
But most of all you want the key map to her body - for your fingertips to be able to conjure pleasure from anywhere along the nervous pathways under her skin. This is the truth you've accepted in this long hiatus from Sam.
You answer your phone on the first ring. "Hey," you say, turning down the volume on your Pear Pod, even though Machine Gun is your favorite song on this album.
"Hey, Carls," she says. "What goes on?"
"Eh, went and bought some bowls and plates and stuff for college, then came home and went swimming. What about you? You ready to come home?"
"One more day," she says, and it sounds like such a sigh of relief, like she can't wait to get home.
"Awesome," you say, breathing lightly.
"Hey, listen to this," she says, and you can hear her putting her phone down in the sand as she picks up her acoustic guitar. She starts strumming some happy sounding major chords with her thumb, then sings. You catch a few lyrics about 'coming home,' and 'putting your arms around someone.' The wind coming off the Gulf of Mexico somehow harmonizes perfectly with Sam's voice, like a keyboard pad in the background.
"Whatcha think?" she asks when she's done.
"It's a pretty song," you say, swallowing hard. "Is it about anything in particular?"
"Maaaaaybe," she teases.
"I love it."
"Thanks. Hey, listen, I can't stay on long, cuz the plane leaves early tomorrow, but I just wanted you to hear that before you went to bed."
"Aww, Sam," you say. "Thanks."
And your heart is beating fast, and your mouth is suddenly dry, because there are things Sam doesn't know yet, things that have to get out in the open, to be talked about and resolved. The thoughts are racing through your head, because this is the moment the whole summer has been leading to, and you can never know how someone is going to react to the crushing weight of a truth like this.
But what if she dies in a plane crash on the way home tomorrow? Would you want her to have never known how you feel? This has to be said now.
"What is it, kid?" she asks, and a sense of calm spreads through you. She knows you so well that she can read you perfectly in a slight pause, a thousand miles away.
"You're my other half, Sam," you begin.