Shimmering, Gone

lee palomo

            Whatever our few neighbors thought of us, no one ever bothered Roz and I when we snuck into the boarded-up Thai restaurant at the center of Lula, no matter how often we did it or how obvious we were. By the time our graduation rolled around, we had already broken in enough times to claim squatters’ rights at eighteen. Between then and the age of eight, we staked our territory with signs in our illegible handwriting and a hidden stash that included a radio, books and magazines, flameless candles, and threadbare towels we threw over the dusty tile. On most days, we’d sprawl out like cats in the sun and rifle through our entertainment while we smoked a bowl.

            I had always thought we could’ve claimed the whole of Lula through squatters’ rights. Half of it was a ghost town, anyway, and had been since the construction of Interstate 10 split the city in two halves. The already small populace of the newly-designated south side began to steadily fade away. It was gradual, subtle, at first, until one day the dust clouds drifting over the road dissipated like a final sighing breath, and all the lights of every house and business were snuffed out. Windows that once sparked with hidden life were now sightless eyes, boarded up or punched out. The brittle grass yellowed, trees grew gnarled, and every door was locked shut.

            Until Roz and I got to it, of course.

            Roz has been my best friend since Kindergarten. We were known as “Lula kids” for most of our childhood, since we had to attend a public school one town over with ours having been shut down decades before. We didn’t become friends on our first day of school, but rather the second — I had joined her in hiding under the seats on the school bus in an attempt to try to outfox the bus driver and trick him into taking us back home. We warmed up to each other instantly, and agreed we were exceptional to every rule just as fast.

            Years later, and somehow we were still friends. Roz had blown through breakups, makeups, and mistakes while I spent my free time staring at the knockdown of the ceiling plaster in my bedroom or doomscrolling for hours under blankets. Our life paths reached a fork in road when puberty smashed my face in with a brick, then got confused and put Roz in for the facial reconstruction surgery. We made an odd pair, with my plain, frumpy appearance, and Roz, anything but plain and frumpy, with her short, ruffled red hair and freckled face. She was… radiant. Even though I expected the spike in male attention, it never stopped making me feel defensive. Irritated. Jealous. Afraid. 

            Despite it all, despite her every opportunity, she never stopped being my friend. And I was grateful. I never wanted to know a life without her. 

            But I’m going to have to.

            Tomorrow she’ll be leaving for an out-of-state college. A real college in a real city. Not Lula, which is all but an echo. Not Lula, which is nothing but half of what it once was, split down the middle. Not Lula, where one day I will walk away from and look over my shoulder to see it was all a mirage— shimmering, shimmering, shimmering, gone. 

            It was an overcast Sunday when Roz told me. We were walking back to my house when she stopped me, eyes cast to the ground, that she had accepted a full-ride scholarship to an arts college in California. I said nothing at first, then continued walking. The scuffing sound of her footsteps on gravel dragged slower and slower, and eventually receded completely. I didn’t turn back, then.

            I knew she wouldn’t change her mind, and I wasn’t going to push. We didn’t speak for a few days, until the stab of fear I felt as I struck out the first week of summer brought my walls down. In a way, I understood. There was nothing for us here, as much as we tried to make clubhouses out of Thai restaurants.

            We have today. I’ve been reassuring myself with this thought over and over again. We have today. I mouth it silently now, standing with my feet on the rear pegs of Roz’s bike and gripping her shoulders for balance. She pumps hard on the pedals. The motions are all familiar to me, the sounds too— the click-click-click of the freewheel spinning, the whoosh of the tires as we glide over the sidewalk. We’ve done this countless times. I don’t like thinking about how this might be our last. 

            Flying down B Street, I’m struck by the whirl of memories that flash through my mind. Everywhere I look, I can see echoes of our younger selves: ice cream cones in our hands that are dripping down to our wrists, racing or chasing each other, eating shit when we flop around on roller-skates, skipping and giggling and stopping to tie shoes. It makes me want to laugh and cry simultaneously, so I close my eyes and try to focus on Roz singing to herself, low and under her breath and all but lost to the wind. It’s a tune I don’t think I’ve heard of. It comforts me.

            When I open my eyes again, dusk is falling in slow motion. The blue sky melts into a soft purple, stars shining like the faux diamond studs Roz used to wear, years ago. Stars, I remember hearing in her younger, higher voice, the thing I like the most about where I live is the stars!

            The memory is cut short when Roz swerves into the empty parking lot of the Living Waters Community Pool, the tires chewing up and spitting out gravel in a screeching grind as she swerves into a skidding halt. She jams the kickstand and the bike slouches into the ground, both of us dismounting. I quickly let go of her shoulders, suddenly self-conscious and eager for something else to focus on.

            I let my attention fall to the building ahead of us. It was built in the early 1950s, like most commercial properties in Lula, and indelibly tied to the short period where there was an uptick in population. When that dried up, they took the Living Waters with it, leaving behind a low, flat-roofed cinderblock building and an empty pool.

            A fence ran along the perimeter and came between us and the outside grounds, which were paved with cracked concrete. The only character that remained of the building itself was in the blue trimmed eaves, dark blue accents on the windows and doors, and the mural on the wall facing the parking lot. It’s an image of choppy waves, washed with indigo and white, and a sparkling dolphin arcing with its fin slashing the sea. As we approach, the pool reveals itself: it remains as barren as the last time we saw it, save for trash lining the north edge. As I watch, a breeze invites a plastic bag into the air for a waltz. 

            Roz moves past me. At the fence door, she stoops forward and pulls out a golden-painted key from where it’s looped around her neck, fitting it into the lock and twisting. Of course, it wasn’t the original lock. We’d taken care of that one after our first visit. I had swiped a pair of bolt cutters from my dad’s tool shed, met with Roz at the fence, and with the force of both of our grips on the handles, snapped it in two. In its place, Roz produced a heavy-duty lock that I’d never seen before with a smile and showy flourish. I remember our conspiratorial smiles as we split up on our way home, Roz lifting the necklace out from under her shirt and wagging the key at me, pointer finger against her lip.

            In the present, she glances at me over her shoulder. I go for a smile. The glance turns into a look.

            I want to say something to her, I realize. I want to say this is my worst nightmare, this is my worst fears realized, this is too much for me to handle. I want to say something, but nothing comes out, and I only nod. Neither of us need to speak to know what’s wrong. 

            There’s still enough light to see her expression shift into one of understanding, eyes shaded with a melancholy I recognize though her lips form a tight smile. She opens her mouth like she might say something, thinks better of it, and simply grabs my hand.

            I pray to God that she can’t feel the rapid pace of my heartbeat through my fingers as she pulls me along through the threshold. My eyes fall onto our shadows, stretching and in our closeness becoming one, and the thudding of our disjointed footfalls makes me imagine us as just one misshapen animal.

            Her hand slips from mine as she turns to lock the gate once more, and I mourn the absence, then feel guilty for the longing. I dismiss myself with a nod toward her that is more assured than I feel, and retreat to the sandy outcroppings past the cracked concrete. I kick around in the dirt until my foot connects with something solid, then drop to my knees. I sweep my hand over the dirt until I uncover the army green strongbox. Another sweep and the sand storms off in a miniature storm. I flip the latch and take out the hand crank flashlight. Six cranks and a beam slices through the gloom.

            In the time I was gone, Roz’s thrown out two beach towels, one of which she’s sitting cross-legged on as she types away on her phone. The stomping of my boots connecting with the ground makes her snap her head up. I’m careful to maneuver the flashlight in my grip to keep from blinding her. There’s a beat where we make sharp eye contact, like two strangers sizing each other up for the first time. I look pointedly at her phone and sigh dramatically to break the tension, and she rolls her eyes with a quirk of her lips and sticks her phone in her bag. 

            Sitting down across from her, wringing my hands together in my lap, I start to question why we came here. Rule-breaking was our favorite pastime as kids, but we’re eighteen now. I don’t have the mind for play-pretend, or the carelessness to start fires small enough to stomp out, or to add to the words graffitied on the walls around us. Hell, we haven’t set foot here in ages. There’s nothing in this moment except for us, and everything in between.

            “Do you remember what we left in the time capsule?” She asks, breaking the silence. For some reason, it only registers to me now that these are the first words either of us had spoken since I hitched a ride on the back of her bike. 

            “No. I still don’t,” I replied, shaking my head and feeling dumb for it. We had buried a time capsule here, in fact, before the strongbox. Fifth grade, I think, because I remember Rosemary complaining about her new braces as we struggled to strike the ground with the heavy shovel. “You’re thinking about it?”
            “Yeah,” she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, cradling her jaw in her hands. I couldn’t read her expression. “I wish we’d found it.”

            “Yeah, me too. If only the rain wasn’t so bad.” The memory plays before my eyes. We were on the edge of sixteen and grappling with it, struggling to reach back inside to the kids we once were. Rain pelting our backs and thunder cracking distantly, loud enough that it felt like the air ruptured. We threw down our tools and cried, because for some reason losing the time capsule hit harder than any number of candles on a birthday cake. Thinking about it now, my face crumples.

            “I’m sorry,” she says, so softly I doubt for a moment that she’d said it at all. I can feel her eyes burning holes in my head but I refuse to look her way. I feel like a wad of tissues has bubbled up into my throat, and I’m swallowing around a buoy, and once the floodgates open I’m not sure I can close them again. I don’t want her to see me like that, even though I know that’s irrational. She’s seen me crying, laughing, screaming, and I’ve seen her just the same. Now, though, I tip the flashlight over so the beam stays projected away from me.

            “Are you…?” 

            I want to say a hundred million different things. I hate this. I hate knowing my only friend will be hundreds of miles away. I hate that there’s nowhere we haven’t been, that everywhere I’ll see us together somewhere in time. That we won’t listen to music at a head-splitting volume when her parents weren’t home. That we won’t meet at the park to do nothing but talk for hours. That everything hurts. I’ve never known a life without her, and I don’t want to. We’re two, as inseparable as lungs. We fit, as a heart muscle contracts, effortlessly and subconsciously and automatically. Being without her would be like missing a limb. 

            Instead I say: “I don’t want you to go.”

            My voice cracks on the last syllable and it’s all gone from there. Tears pour out from my eyes faster than I can blink them away, and a painful sob rips out of my throat as I lurch forward into Roz’s embrace. With a sort of slow, disassociating recognition, I feel her shoulders shaking as she holds me. Both of us are shuddering as we cry together, loud and disruptive. Like kids, in Kindergarten, who had no one else. We were five years old again, clutching onto each other.

            We stay like that for what feels like hours. After we’ve huffed out the last choking breaths, we rearranged ourselves so we’re cross-legged again, knee to knee.I can’t see her face. 

            She puts her left hand on my shoulder and leans in. I mirror her, and our foreheads knock together.

            “I know,” she says soothingly. She takes my hand in her right. I breathe in, out. I let go.