Now the sky is blue-ing and the water is blue-ing. The computer in my hands. So smooth and metallic. Me cocking back my arms. The rower looking confused, a hand to her head like a scout’s as she battles the sunlight.
A ripple moves over the surface of the lake. My computer whipping through the air like a square Frisbee, and landing, where it splashes, dies, and sinks into the murky depths with only the smallest of air bubbles. The way my shoes look running down the dock toward the water. The moment where I leap above the water and see it underneath me like a shiny marble floor.
A shout from the rower. The cold water, cloudy with eyesopen. Total dark with eyes closed. My arms pushing through the lake water in slow motion. The weeds against my shins. Then the blinding white sun when I kick my legs and break to the surface, screaming so loud that my lungs feel like they might combust.
This is it.
What I’m seeing without you.
3
The only time I met him in person, he had a patchy teenage beard.
It hid his top lip and made his expressions hard to read. It also made him look extra boyish—a kid playing grown-up— when I saw him on the porch of the farmhouse last fall. We were both at a party thrown by college kids from the nearby university. They lived right by my school in a run-down house, complete with a chicken coop and a rusty grain bin.
“Trust farmers,” some of the girls called them. They were rich kids playing good country folk, all the way down to the chewing tobacco and seed caps. It wasn’t so different from what we were doing at Quaker school, but at least we knew we were ridiculous. These guys took it super seriously. They wore overalls and bandannas. They spoke in reverent tones of keeping bees.
And yet:
I snuck out and went to their party. I did this because I was lonely and I wanted to drink beer without paying for it. One of my classmates, a kid named Satchel, told me about the party in art class. “There’s going to be apple bobbing!” he said with such a rapturous look of joy on his face, anyone might have thought he was talking about skydiving into Stonehenge. And I wondered: Could anyone over the age of eight actually be that excited about dunking their head in a tub of cold water?
I received my answer upon arriving. One of the first things I saw was a gaggle of bearded boys submerging their faces into an old basin. There seemed to be some kind of drinking element worked in, too—shots of whiskey pre- or post-bob—but I couldn’t quite understand, so I walked past them and spent the next hour filling and refilling my plastic red cup from the barn keg.
“Do you know what kind of beer this is?” a girl in line asked me at one point. “Free,” I told her.
I saw Jonah right around the time I left the land of buzzed for the uncertain waters of Drunk-as-Hell. It’s hard to imagine our meeting in any other way. Since arriving at Quaker school in the fall, I had been experiencing some immobilizing social anxiety for the first time. High school in New York (where I spent the year before living with mymom) hadn’t been a cakewalk, but I had a few friends.
Gradually, I’d learned to dole out my “real” personality in small, safe doses to avoid scaring people away. Since I’d been here, however, I had felt myself pulling back, saying things in my head instead of out loud. Smiling less. I got tension headaches after class sometimes. It was odd, and inexplicable, and the only cure seemed to be the newly discovered one of alcohol.
I was standing on the porch of the farmhouse, feeling some inexact measure of shame and longing, when I saw a farmer boy lurking near the tub used for apple bobbing. He peered inside at the bitten red apples, an odd half smile on his lips, and I felt a quick welling of anger.
“Can you please explain it to me!” I shouted.
The guy turned around, surprised, but too far away to see clearly.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
He had a low voice, and there was a surprising warmth to it. It nearly halted my momentum. But my tongue had been loosened, and its lashing was not to be denied!
“What is with the farm fetish?” I said. “I really want to know.”
I stepped closer to him. He didn’t speak. Instead, he adjusted his glasses.
“I mean: I get the desire for authenticity. We all want to feel connected to something real, the loamy dirt or whatever. But pretending you’re inThe Grapes of Wrathwhen you’re actually a Media Studies major from Boston is not the answer, my friend. You’re not Amish! You’re not raising a barn tomorrow! Just give it up, okay?”
I could have said more. I very much wanted to say more. After speaking no more than a word or two the entire evening, it felt amazing just to talk again. Unfortunately, right after I spoke my last word, I realized that I was incredibly nauseous. The feeling hit me like a sucker punch, and before I could excuse myself, I was already launching into a wobbling sprint to the edge of the porch.
Then I was vomiting in the bushes.
Continuously. Heaving and hiccupping away, like a deranged beat-boxer while strangers watched in horror. In no time, I had emptied everything from my body. My entire being, I’m pretty sure, was now in the shrubbery. My legs teetered beneath me, but instead of tipping off the porch, a hand appeared on my side, holding me in place.
“Come on,” said the hand. “This way.”
I followed the trust farmer attached to the hand. It seemed, suddenly, like the right thing to do. I followedhim to the kitchen where I took little sips from a tumbler of cool water. Glorious little tumbler sips. I swished the water in my mouth and spit it in the sink like a boxer, tears streaking down my burning cheeks (when exactly had I started to cry?). My farmer led me to a couch and had me lie down with a foot on the floor to keep the room from spinning. Just one foot. Then he spoke in his low voice:
“I’m Jonah, by the way. I don’t live here.”
I was not technically drunk anymore. Nor was I technically sober. I was in a place between the two that didn’t leave much padding between thought and speech.
