Katherine May

Palos Verdes Blues

Samantha switched on the bedside lamp and watched Laura slip from between the sheets. “They teach that sort of thing at Amherst?”

Laura laughed, clipping her bra on. “Got all that right here in LA County.”

Samantha shuddered at the implication. Had Laura—Little Miss Sunday School—been with a girl in high school? Girls? A fever of embarrassment crept up the side of her neck as she considered whether Laura had seen through the empty bravado she had leaned on all night. If she had, she’d at least had the grace not to mention it. And there’d been no complaints, as far as Samantha could tell. 

But the inevitable dissection of the night’s events could wait until later, when Samantha was alone again in the dark. For the moment, she steadied herself with the pleasant distraction of Laura’s lithe form moving about the room, stepping into her dress, sliding the straps over her shoulders.

Laura came closer to the bed and turned her back to Samantha, jutting one hip to the side. Her spine arced into an enticing S-curve. “Zip me up?”

Samantha drew the zipper of Laura’s dress upward, affixing the metal clasp at the top. Her fingertips brushed the velvety skin between Laura’s shoulder blades, still dewy from their heated exertions, lingering there as though trying to recover the memory of a dream. Moments passed, her thoughts stretching further and further backward, grasping at the edges of a half-forgotten image.

Laura rolled her shoulders as if to shrug off this uninvited metaphysical examination. Samantha flinched, afraid her lazy, searching touches were somehow too intimate—a trespass that might not be forgiven—despite everything they’d just done. But when Laura turned to face her, it wasn’t with the sharpness of reproach. Rather, Laura’s severe features appeared muted, rounded-out.

Though subtle, these changes felt heavy with a tenderness the night couldn’t bear. Everything between them so far had been tangy and bitter, like the savory sting of a paper cut, the whining wail of Billie Holiday’s voice. The sticky fizziness of sparking something passing itself off as champagne. The first acerbic sip of expensive Scotch whisky.

Samantha combed her reservoir of quips for one pointed enough to pierce the encroaching sincerity. Finding it, she let it go on a slow exhale, a hint of her delight playing in the movement of her eyebrows. “You scared the shit out of me in high school.”

Laura tightened her jaw, narrowed her eyes. “And now?”

“More, maybe.”

Laura leaned down and kissed her. “I always knew you were a romantic.”

With a wink, she was gone.

*

Six weeks earlier, Samantha had awakened to the whir of Ruby’s preposterous Peloton. It was Ruby’s most recent obsession, and no small point of contention between them. Groping for her phone, Samantha found it under the sofa and saw the time: 6:08a.m.

She rolled over and watched Ruby pedaling away, mouthing the words to whatever Basic Bitch Workout Remix was blasting through her earbuds. “Do you really have to do that right now?” she shouted, waving her hands to catch Ruby’s attention.

“What?” Ruby pulled out one of her earbuds.

“I said, ‘Do you really have to do that right now?’”

Ruby slowed her pace, frowning. “It’s cardio day. You know my daily workout is essential to my self-care regime. If I skip it, my whole world falls out of balance.”

“Fine. Believe me. I don’t want that. Nobody wants that. But do you have to do it here, where I’m trying to sleep?”

Ruby put her earbud back in. “Need I remind you where you sleep is my living room?”

Samantha closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Wouldn’t be if you weren’t using the guest room as a walk-in closet.”

In high school, if anyone had told her she’d be twenty-three, living on Ruby Henson’s sofa, scraping together an imitation of life with temp work and the vague pretense of “writing a screenplay,” she’d have performed a self-lobotomy on the spot just to forget she’d ever heard anything about it. Every few months, her older brother would call and offer her a job in his office, even help her go back to school if she wanted, if only she’d give up this “aimless lifestyle” and move out to Kansas City.

At times it seemed an attractive offer, but Samantha always got hung up on the thought of leaving Ruby. Naïve, ridiculous Ruby. Her unfettered access to generational wealth made her generous and spontaneous, but also a target. Samantha felt sure if she ever left, Ruby would be taken in by a cult within the first week.

But it wasn’t just for Ruby’s sake Samantha stuck around. Ruby tolerated Samantha’s meanness, understood the razor wire surrounding her cut in as much as out. And Ruby had a knack for deploying her superficiality like a Trojan horse, slipping past Samantha’s defenses with a lightness and charm that could spin unrelenting self-loathing into palatable, pastel fluff.

Samantha knew this alchemy was a mere echo of what things had been like between her and Beth. But Beth was gone. And Samantha wasn’t about to lose this last reverberation.

The Peloton whirred as Ruby re-upped her pace. “You need to get up, anyway. We have a busy day.”

“Doing what?”

“We need new outfits for the reunion!”

Samantha’s stomach sank. When the invitations had arrived in the mail, she’d thrown them out without even opening them, hoping that would be the end of it. But there they were, smoothed out on the coffee table.

Creased death warrants in fine calligraphy.

*

Samantha held Ruby’s purse for what felt like hours as Ruby tried on the same skintight dress in every conceivable fabric and pattern until she settled on a canary yellow cocktail napkin masquerading as a garment. To make matters worse, Ruby then insisted they stop at Viceroy, a try-hard cafe Samantha avoided like her own reflection. Once there, she slumped into a booth, but Ruby sat at attention, hands folded, waiting.

“You really should have bought a dress,” Ruby said, though her eyes remained unfixed, searching. “I would have covered you if that was the problem.”

Samantha feigned interest in the menu’s familiar details. Mustard Seed Egg White Omelet. Mediterranean Mini Wedge Salad. Kale Tonic. “I’m not going.”

Ruby plucked the menu away. “Is this about Beth?”

“Don’t.”

“Maybe she’ll turn up, right?” Samantha knew this was false optimism on Ruby’s part. They’d done some light digging not long after Beth vanished. And about two years after that, there’d been some medium digging—not to the extent Ruby had been willing to pay for, but enough to make clear Beth either didn’t want to be found, or whatever had happened was bad enough that Samantha didn’t want to know.

Samantha took back her menu and pretended to look over it once again. “Why do you keep dragging me here when you know there’s nothing I like?”

A blond server rushed past without so much as a “be right with you.” Samantha thought she heard Ruby’s thighs clench. “Oh, right. Something you like.”

Sean fucking Cormack. Of all the hipster haunts in Los Feliz, Sean fucking Cormack had to work at the one Samantha could see from her “bedroom” window. Back when he’d been captain of the boys’ swim team, fucking Cormack had been the prototypical “nice guy,” a malignant parasite who sucked the life out of girls who worshipped him just because he had a decent face, showered regularly, and could mimic basic human civility.

Now, though, Samantha could see he was neither scoundrel nor hero. Everything about him had sagged toward the middle. She could sort of sympathize. She’d heard he was “trying to break into acting,” but that looked to be going about as well as her “screenplay.” Ruby’s long-simmering crush on him, once a trigger for Samantha’s resentment and over-protectiveness, now felt like little more than a bad joke.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Ruby said, craning her neck to watch him retreat toward the kitchen.

“Oh, please. You’ve been dying to hop on that ride since ninth grade.”

“Eighth grade.”

“Why don’t you just ask him out?”

Ruby’s eyes stopped roaming and locked on Samantha’s. “I cannot and will not ‘just ask him out.’”

“Why the hell not?”

“You wouldn’t understand. I mean, I know you’ve got issues with him, but he’s still Cormack.”

Samantha gripped her silverware in both hands, barely registering the dull blade of the butter knife pressing into the creases of her fingers. “Get real. He’s a second-rate waiter in a third-rate diner; that’s all.”

The toe of Ruby’s sandal stroked the side of Samantha’s calf. “You’re not jealous, are you, Sam?”

“If this is your way of trying to win me over, you’ve critically misjudged the situation.”

“Just saying. You had your chance.”

Samantha kicked Ruby’s foot away. “You’re disturbed. And fucking Cormack still hasn’t taken our order.”

Ruby sighed and raised an eyebrow. “I heard Laura will be at the reunion.”

“Wow.” Samantha massaged her temples, battling an impending headache. “You’re really batting a thousand today, huh?”

“Now who needs to get real? You still think she ratted you out just because you screwed her boyfriend one time?”

A wave of nausea swept through Samantha, compounding the approaching headache. “That, or because I beat her out for team captain two years in a row, or because I always got relay anchor, or because I got a better scholarship, or—”

“Fine.” Ruby waved her napkin in surrender. “She has plenty of reasons to think you’re an asshole. Who doesn’t? But do you really think she’d do that to Beth, especially knowing what her own parents were like?”

Faded images popped into Samantha’s subconscious like a sun-bleached cycle of View-Master slides: Laura’s dad screaming at Coach Fields one morning after practice; their teammates whispering that Laura had been grounded from junior prom because her lap times weren’t good enough; purpling finger marks on Laura’s arm at the start of senior year.

Samantha stopped rubbing her temples, ceding control to the migraine. “Do you think fucking Cormack could at least bring some water?”

*

Five years earlier, senior year had passed with the dread-inducing slowness of an approaching wildfire. Things didn’t combust for Samantha until she almost thought maybe they wouldn’t: two weeks before graduation, when Beth’s parents appeared on her parents’ doorstep. In tones meandering from enraged to despondent, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs denounced Samantha as a degenerate, a demonic force, and—perhaps most hilariously—a sodomite. Samantha’s parents offered the sort of full-throated defense of their daughter’s morality and virtue that revealed they had no clue what was going on. In fact, their primary objective appeared to be getting these two maniacs out of their foyer before the neighbors overheard anything unseemly. Even Samantha was relieved to see Mr. Jacobs’ car leave the cul-de-sac. 

She didn’t know her last opportunity to save Beth had already been lost. Her last image of Beth would be a crumpled mess of wet hysterics in the backseat of a receding Lexus. Beth never came back to school. She didn’t come to graduation. Calls to her house went unanswered. The curtains in her bedroom window remained drawn.

No one said anything. Or if they did, they avoided saying it to Samantha. Her own parents never asked her about it. Not that day, not that summer, not ever. It was like Beth had never existed. And if she never existed, there was no one—nothing—for Samantha to mourn. At least nothing she could name. It was enough to make anyone crazy. 

And Samantha might have gone crazy that summer if it weren’t for Ruby, who was the only one to make any effort to engage with her on the subject of Beth during that wildfire summer, even if it wasn’t in the most delicate way possible.

“Sex in the back seat on prom night. Who knew you were such a cliche?” Ruby sat next to Samantha at the pool’s edge and took another syrupy swallow.

Robotripping. A typical Ruby idea. It was gross and stupid, considering the unattended wet bar and multiple medicine cabinets right inside the Henson house, each stocked with untold treasures. But Ruby insisted they had to try it, a “regular” teenage experience, whatever that meant.

And so, the unlikely combination of annoyance, competitiveness, and dextromethorphan prompted Samantha to confess the actual teenage experience that had happened in her car just weeks before. She’d intended never to speak of it, neither to confirm nor deny, no matter what gossip bubbled up in the future. But it felt powerful to say it out loud, to tell the truth, even if it was too late.

Ruby, at first stunned into cross-eyed silence, had become fixated on the details. Knitting her fingers into a curiously lewd configuration, she pressed Samantha for information. “You have to tell me more, obviously. I need specifics. Like—even just logistically—how does that all work?”

Samantha swatted at Ruby’s hands. “Stop that. Are you twelve? I’ll draw you a diagram later.”

Ruby giggled. “Okay. But can I ask a real question?”

Samantha gave a tepid hum, unsure what Ruby would consider “real” under the circumstances.

“When did you start to feel like you were that way?”

Samantha couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t felt that way. There was just the time before she knew what it meant and the time after.

Mostly, she missed the time before. Those carefree middle school days when she’d collected smiles from Beth Jacobs like sparkling pieces of sea glass without stopping to wonder why. Beth just seemed delicate, maybe a bit flighty. Like someone who needed looking after. And looking after Beth made Samantha feel taller and tougher than she suspected she had a right to.

For the longest time, Beth seemed happy to drift on Samantha’s tides. She expressed no agenda, never pushed for anything. Samantha alone directed all those preliminary moves. Gestures that seemed so small in retrospect but felt like depth charge detonations at the time—holding Beth’s hand, resting her head on Beth’s shoulder. Falling in love with Beth had come as innately to Samantha as swimming. A series of long, breathless glides across the water.

But then Beth kissed her one morning when they were alone in the locker room. There was no girlish frivolity in it. No ambiguity. Nothing at all to disguise the hunger. As delicious as it was, Samantha could hardly allow herself to savor it, overwhelmed by the knowledge they had just entered dark waters.

After that first kiss in the locker room, Samantha had treaded water for as long as she could. Negation seemed like their only protection against what Beth’s parents would do if they ever found out. So Samantha spent more than a year telling Beth it didn’t mean anything, or at least, it didn’t mean everything. “We’re just having fun. It’s not serious.”

She didn’t say these things to be cruel; she didn’t even mean them. It was just that Beth didn’t seem to appreciate the peril they were in.

Samantha saw danger everywhere, but she couldn’t stop kissing Beth anyway. The constant mixing of signals wore on them both until they broke. And into the breach slithered none other than Sean fucking Cormack.

She didn’t really blame Beth for succumbing to his clear and easy charms. But it cut her to the quick to see Beth publicly date, touch, kiss someone else. Even if they looked like a set of creepy Nordic twins.

Samantha did her grieving in secret, sending her regrets off like messages in glass bottles, silently wishing on fireflies and Little Yellows and all other manners of winged creatures. Trying anything she could think of to dislodge the anchor of guilt from her chest. And that’s how she’d come up with the asinine idea of starting a rumor she’d lost her virginity to Steve Hinkley, a guy as bland and harmless as a cardboard cutout. Not to mention Laura’s boyfriend.

It gave people something more acceptable to whisper about behind her back. Gave Beth a reason to hate her out loud. And when Laura slapped Samantha so hard it left a mark on her face—thus validating the whole thing—Samantha felt satisfied, unburdened. Like she’d finally closed the loop on this whole cycle of psychosexual deception.

But not long after, Beth had pulled her into the bathroom at prom and kissed her, crying and laughing and desperate. And Samantha had given in because she was soft-boned and weary. And because she goddamn wanted to.

Still, winding up in her car had been a mistake. She hadn’t been as ready as her hormones had led her to believe, and the whole thing had played out like a badly written comedy of errors.

Worst of all, someone had seen them. Someone had told Beth’s parents.

Now, in the aftermath, there was no easy way to explain any of this to Robotripping Ruby, who had, in any case, become distracted by a dragonfly skipping across the surface of the pool.

Beth had been swept away, swatted off the face of the Earth like an insignificant insect. Samantha felt wrong being buzzed and warm in Ruby’s backyard. She felt wrong being anything, anywhere.

The next day, she threw out all her old medals. She withdrew her commitment to Stanford, declined the scholarship, and started sleeping in Ruby’s parents’ pool house. 

*

Some morning in what could have been July of that summer after graduation, Samantha woke to the thwack of the diving board, splashing, and laughter. The metal frame of the pull-out groaned as she rolled over to look out the window. A blonde head broke the surface of the water. Samantha’s heart caught in her throat.

But the hair was too short, and when the head turned, the face was too angular, the eyes too steely. Not Beth.

Samantha looked away, pulled the blanket over her head, and tried to plunge herself back into the dark; into the only place she could still find Beth, still feel her hands, hear her voice. There, in that not-quite-here place, she would walk along a rocky shoreline, Beth fluttering at her side. In that dark other place, Beth—beyond loving, beyond breathtaking, beyond delusional—would say things like, “Don’t be afraid,” or “It’ll only be a few days (weeks, months),” or “I love you, I love you, I love you,” or “It wasn’t your fault.”

But summertime didn’t lend itself to darkness. With each passing day, it was getting harder and harder to get back to that rocky shore and Beth’s heartfelt reassurances. In the light of day, Samantha could only hear one word: Failure. It resounded as she practiced holding her breath for as long as she could.

Failure. Failure. Failure.

The door to the pool house swung open, sunlight scouring the last vestiges of ephemera from Samantha’s grasp. 

“Not today, Ruby,” she muttered. “And not with her here.”

The mattress dipped. “This is her, actually.” Laura. Samantha peered out from under the blanket and saw her—the back of her, anyway—fresh from the pool, slick and silvery. An ill-contented water sprite.

A drop of chlorinated water dripped from Laura’s hair. It rolled down, down, down between her shoulder blades and slipped beneath the edge of her towel. “I broke up with Steve.”

“Fascinating.”

“I thought you, of all people, would want to know.”

It was a shot so blatantly misfired that Samantha couldn’t help but bite back. “Honestly, you could have kept Guy Smiley for all I care. In case you haven’t heard, he’s not exactly my type.”

“It’s funny you thought that was a secret.”

Samantha’s stomach twisted at a Dutch angle. A brackish film of cold sweat pulsed out of her pores. What was this? A confession? An accusation? A threat? All those years of being careful, of swimming so hard against her own current. Had it ever mattered? Had it all been obvious from the start? Or was this just empty posturing? Salt on the wound just for sport?

As the blood pounded in Samantha’s ears, she spun through a number of interpretations of that single sentence. But Laura had said it so plainly, not even facing her. There was no way to be sure of its intent.

In the meantime, Laura was saying something more, and Samantha had to steady herself to hear it.

“… and you don’t have to believe me now, or ever, I guess. But I thought you should hear it from me at least once. Whatever there’s been between us, I would never do anything to hurt you like that.”

“Um. Didn’t you slap the shit out of me not that long ago?”

“About that. I’m so embarrassed. You know me.” She stopped, took a deep breath. “Well, maybe you don’t. But I’m not like that.”

Samantha snorted, unconvinced. “All I know about you is you’re a self-righteous bitch.”

Laura gave an inscrutable half-shrug that sent further rivulets streaming down her back. Samantha watched them branch into tributaries as they rolled into the unknown. Her skin was so pale; too pale for summer, really. 

What did she even know about Laura? Her vociferous piety and prudishness had never failed to grate, yet there was something enviable about her stillness. So often she seemed to be a mess of acute angles, collapsing herself, skewering others. It made Samantha wonder what she would look like—be like—relaxed, unfurled, extended.

Wait.

The violent sting of bile burned the back of her throat. Beth was gone. And here she was, transfixed by the first bare skin to come within reach. 

Samantha needed out—out of this conversation, these thoughts, her own skin. She slid back down into the safety of her blanket. “Well, look, don’t waste any Hail Marys over it or anything. You hit like a girl.”

*

In the main ballroom of the Terranea Resort, Laura was wearing a black dress, which felt appropriate under the circumstances. Because Samantha had refused to buy a new outfit for the reunion, Ruby had stuffed her into a tube of blue sequins, the hem of which kept inching higher.

Of course, Ruby had disappeared into the throng within minutes of their entrance. Samantha felt hard-pressed to recognize a face among the crowd. Maybe it was some sort of trauma response, this group-specific face blindness that rendered ninety-nine percent of her former classmates into a homologous, artificially tanned mob.

But Laura stood out in her pristine paleness, her black boat-neck June Cleaver dress, and her black heels that exaggerated her already imposing height. An elegant, lean line, she stood like a misplaced exclamation point, scanning the crowd with a generic smile directed at no one until she spotted Samantha. Then, her headshot expression tensed, her shoulders sagged, her arms folded.

Taking stock of her limited options, Samantha lifted her hand in a vague gesture of recognition, grabbed two glasses of champagne from a nearby tray, and crossed the ballroom, slouching to prevent the hem of her dress from creeping further upward.

She offered Laura one of the glasses. “Drink this before you say anything. And remember, nobody else was talking to you before I walked over.”

Laura swept back an errant lock of her short, yellow-white hair before taking a long sip of champagne. “Well, that’s obviously Ruby’s dress.”

“Of fucking course it is. Although I appreciate you not jumping to the conclusion I’m a high-priced call girl.”

“Economy plus, I’d say. Though you’d look prettier if you’d smile, sweetheart.”

“Shut up and finish your drink before I finish it for you.”

“Fine, fine.” Laura lifted her glass with its remaining swallow swilling at the bottom. “Cheers to your not being a hooker, I suppose.”

Samantha lifted her near-empty glass as well. “And cheers to your transformation into a full-blown WASP. I mean, pearls?”

Laura chuckled, reaching up to touch the delicate strand. “These? Complete fakes. That was our school mascot, wasn’t it?”

Samantha smiled despite herself. Laura swayed for a moment as if there were some drop of enjoyment to be had in the loud pop music and ever louder self-aggrandizing surrounding them. She took a deep breath before saying, “Should we tell all the horrible things we’ve heard about each other over the last five years?”

This piqued Samantha’s interest, a game she could definitely play. “Well, you quit swimming and dropped out of Amherst after two years, which just so happened to coincide with the release of some trust fund cash and, or, a sex scandal involving a psychology professor. You’re studying architecture at Penn now, and clearly your life is boring enough that you came to this. Alone.”

Laura, in typical fashion, didn’t react beyond a few tilts of her head, which could have meant anything or nothing. “And you blew up the Stanford deal and muddled your way through Cal State LA. You’re Ruby’s assistant, or fuck buddy, or charity case, depending on who you ask. But Ruby says you’re a writer, and she’s your investor, which is probably the kindest way of saying you’re doing nothing and she’s bankrolling it. Although, you know, if you’re going to live like a kept woman, it’s a shame you’re not getting laid.”

“You offering?” Whatever boldness Samantha had felt in asking the question fizzled as soon as she looked up and saw Laura’s unmoved expression. She was used to talking only to Ruby. And she was used to talking to Ruby that way. Their meaningless flirtations provided the empty calories she’d lived on for years. But this wasn’t Ruby. There was no reason to expect Laura to flirt back just to boost Samantha’s ego.

Samantha’s heart hammered in her ears, crying out for oxygenated blood. Blue sequins bit into the skin of her trembling legs. All the while, Laura’s face betrayed nothing. She might have stayed there, stock-still and tranquil, letting Samantha slowly implode. But instead, she set aside the champagne glasses and took Samantha’s hand. “I think we need something harder.”

*

There was slightly more air on the terrace, but it may have only felt that way because Laura had drifted away momentarily to place an order at the outdoor bar. String lights illuminated the sagebrush and lemonade berry, separating the brick terrace from the wide lawn leading to the bluffs. Beyond that and below, the dull roar of the Pacific maintained its rhythm, a constant reminder of that other place.

Beth was out there in that darkness, yet Samantha caught her gaze wandering toward Laura’s moonlit silhouette. Just like she’d zeroed in on Laura in the ballroom when Beth might have been there the whole time.

Failure. Traitor. Apostate. 

“You know you can’t save her, right?” Laura’s voice plucked her from her thoughts.

“What?”

“The Rube.” Laura smirked and handed her a glass of honey-gold liquid. “Glenlivet. Drink up.”

Samantha sighed, relieved she hadn’t become completely transparent. “Oh, Ruby. Yeah.” She took a long swallow from her glass without even tasting it.

“She’s probably bought into a non-existent timeshare in Nevada by now.” Laura sipped her drink with the delicacy of a Junior Leaguer. “I’ll bet at least three people walk out of here tomorrow with her Social Security number and her mother’s maiden name.”

It was funny, or would have been, if Samantha hadn’t felt so unfocused. The sound of the unseen ocean continued to tug at her, the blunt drop-off of the bluffs, the salty-sweet air she could practically taste. 

A cluster of nobodies stumbled outside, laughing loudly. They made Samantha’s stomach turn. Or perhaps it was the Glenlivet. She felt suspended somewhere in the middle distance—halfway between an abandoned dream and a surreal reality. 

That last morning, she hadn’t run after Mr. Jacobs’ car. Hadn’t even tried to go outside and say anything to Beth before they took her away. She’d just stood there and prayed for the shouting to stop. Prayed for it all to be a dream. Prayed to become invisible. 

I shouldn’t be here.

Laura’s hand on her shoulder felt like a bee sting. Nauseated and angry, Samantha pulled away. “I never understood how everyone just kept going. Like it never happened. She was so kind and beautiful, and then she was just gone. And nobody said anything. Didn’t you care?” A smattering of searing, acid tears burned her cheeks.

Unchastened, Laura stepped closer and handed her a cocktail napkin. “I did try to talk to you that summer, you know? But you were so hell-bent on being angry.” A man came by with two more glasses of Glenlivet on a silver tray. Laura smiled and passed him a little cash before taking them and handing one to Samantha. “You weren’t the only one trying to survive something then. But not everyone gets the luxury of a breakdown. Some of us had to just keep our heads down and get out.” 

The washed-out image of bruises on teenage Laura’s arm reappeared in Samantha’s mind. And then something else. That morning in the pool house. She’d been so intoxicated by the water rolling down Laura’s back that she hadn’t stopped to wonder why she’d never got a good look at Laura’s face. 

But what did it matter? Samantha refused to feel sorry for this cryptic sylph who had traded her rosary for fake pearls. Who dressed like a virgin and ordered glasses of whisky at thirty dollars a pop. Who recited Bible verses at school assemblies and then ran off to Massachusetts and screwed herself out of Amherst and into an even better school. Who walked out of every mess she found herself in, every mess she ever made, and somehow came out the better end of it.

She wiped her eyes and swallowed back more whisky, trying to burn out the things that were threatening to consume her, like memory and feeling and so many goddamned unanswered questions.

Laura’s hand was warmer now, touching her elbow this time. “Do you think Beth was stupid?” 

Samantha pulled away again, stepping through the garden and onto the grass leading to the bluffs. Sagebrush scratched at her shins, but she didn’t care. She wanted to see the ocean, to see Beth’s forgiving face in the dark. But it was Laura’s face that appeared at her side, terrifyingly sharp and radiant in the moonlight.

“You thought you were so sly. But I saw you. I saw the way you treated her like a porcelain doll. Don’t get me wrong, it was sweet. I always thought you were so sweet to her. But Beth wasn’t a child, and she wasn’t stupid.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was supposed to be redemption in the dark, not more accusations, more sins to repent. “What’s your point?”

“I just mean, do you really think she didn’t know what might happen? Do you think her parents never threatened to ship her off somewhere before that summer?”

“What is this? You fuck one psychology professor, and now you think you’re qualified to dig around in my head? In my life?”

“There you are. Even in that awful dress. Same angry little viper. Aren’t you tired?”

Samantha swallowed hard, clenching her teeth. “I’m really happy you moved past your bullshit and became all evolved, or whatever. But I don’t get to be tired. I don’t get to be over it. I don’t get to be anything.” 

Laura laughed. Actually laughed. And all Samantha could think about was getting to the edge of the bluffs. So be it, if that was the only way out of this conversation. But then Laura stepped in front of her.

“I spent years being made to repent things I’d barely thought about, much less done. The kind of penance I wouldn’t have wished on anyone. Not even you.” This time Laura’s laugh was more tepid, a polite brushing away of unwanted memories. “Anyway. I guess I’ll never understand people who choose suffering. Especially when they don’t deserve it.”

It was getting to be too much. The obvious, driving, bass pulse of the music in the ballroom; the alcohol sloshing in her empty stomach; the violent crash of the water against the rocks; and now this unrelenting onslaught. Why couldn’t Laura just slap her and walk away? That had been so much easier than all these words.

“Don’t I deserve it, though?”

Laura’s reply came in an unexpected whisper. “What happened was horrible. Not just to her. But to you. And if you really still think I had anything to do with it, I’ll walk away right now. But it wasn’t your fault, Sam. And you’re alive. And you get to be whatever you want.” 

Laura was even closer now. Close enough for Samantha to see her chest rising and falling deeply, despite her smooth demeanor. Close enough that she came within a breath of pressing her lips to the corner of Laura’s vicious, beautiful mouth.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Laura blinked, her eyelashes fluttering. “What do you want?”

*

When Ruby had insisted on booking them separate rooms “just in case,” Samantha chalked it up to another case of Ruby’s ridiculous wishful thinking. But now that the twenty minutes Laura requested when Samantha had given her the extra key to her room had come and gone, Samantha was grateful for the solitude. She didn’t need a lecture. Or a pep talk. Didn’t have the energy to decide how she felt, much less explain it to Ruby’s satisfaction.

Alone in her hotel room, she’d cast off the sequin swatch of a dress, pulled her hair back, and scrubbed her face clean. Maybe Laura had lost her nerve. Or maybe she had never intended to follow through in the first place. Maybe Samantha didn’t care. She flopped down on the bed in an old pair of gym shorts and faded Creston Prep Swim shirt, ready to forget the whole thing, when the electronic lock clicked open. 

Laura swept into the room, every bit as put together as she’d been downstairs. “Nice jammies.”

Samantha jumped to attention as though a physical show of readiness would somehow overcome the pitiable visual she otherwise presented. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Part of me thought you wouldn’t really show up, but mostly I just couldn’t be in that dress anymore. This whole situation.” She gestured at her attire with a limp hand. “Not very sexy, I know. Not that I assumed we were going to—”

Laura’s mouth, hot and insistent against her own, caused something in Samantha’s inner framework to flip. It was like being the passenger in your own car for the first time, out of place, out of control, and confronted with a point of view previously unconsidered. 

Pulling back for a gulp of air, Samantha smiled. “Tell me you never wasted all that on poor Guy Smiley.”

Laura laughed and buried her head in the crook of Samantha’s neck. “You sure have a way of making a girl wonder whether you’re worth the effort.”

Samantha cupped Laura’s cheek and kissed her with renewed confidence. “Oh, Laura. Let’s not kid ourselves.” She sighed, reaching around with her other hand for the zipper of Laura’s pretentious frock. “We both know I’m not.”

*

Daylight jackhammered its way into Samantha’s brain until she was irrevocably awake. 

From the bedside table, her phone glowered at her with an abundance of missed notifications. Amid a flurry of missed calls and increasingly insistent texts from Ruby regarding her whereabouts, Samantha spotted a message from a number she did not recognize:

Still not entirely convinced. But honestly better than I thought you’d be.

A three-star review. Still, it was less insulting than cash on the nightstand. And there was something appealing about the unflattering honesty of it. But that was Laura for you. Damn it.

She hated how much she liked the way Laura looked at her, spoke to her. Hated even more to admit a part of her had always liked it, always wondered.

The night before, when she had been pinned to the bed like a specimen under glass, Laura had husked in her ear, “I always knew we’d do this someday.”

Had she not already been rather pleasantly restrained, it would have stopped Samantha in her tracks. There was something sacrilegious about it, the suggestion of a future, a past—a life—without Beth. Maybe that’s why Laura had said it. Not because she really meant it, but just to get a rise out of her.

After all, Beth had been the only girl Samantha had ever loved, the only girl she’d ever imagined loving. And they’d be together now if not for what happened. Wouldn’t they?

Then again, there was something to what Laura had said earlier in the night about how Samantha had cared for Beth like a porcelain doll. Like a child. It made her think maybe she hadn’t treated Beth very well after all, hadn’t really known her as well as she’d believed. Maybe she’d used Beth as a canvas to project her own immature ideals. And maybe Beth had let her. But that didn’t make it right.

Laura would never have allowed such treatment. Not even back then. She’d always stood solidly, almost aggressively, on her own two feet. She’d lived by her own rules, even if that had meant just biding her time, enduring whatever horrors she faced at home until she could make her own way. She didn’t need anything from Samantha, nor would she have taken anything unless she wanted it.

And if she really had been with a girl in high school and gotten away with it, maybe there was an alternate timeline where they could have been happy together, and then Beth could have been spared.

It was dizzying to consider all the possibilities, all the new ways to feel guilty, to feel like an irredeemable person. She made her way out of bed, thinking she might vomit. Before that could happen, though, she caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. Caught sight of the mark Laura had left near the base of her throat.

It was unmistakable, brazen in its depth and visibility. And Laura had left it there—she had let Laura leave it there—without concern for whether it could be concealed. And it had felt good. Not just the sensory delight of it, but the exhilaration that came from being unafraid.

Maybe Samantha would never feel fully redeemed from the sins of the past. But for the first time in five years, it didn’t hurt to feel something else.

*

The stench of exhumed histories permeated the outdoor cafe where breakfast was being served. Samantha took a moment to survey the smattering of dark-sunglassed reunion goers who had managed to crawl out of their rooms. Laura was not among them, nor had Samantha expected her to be.

Ruby sat alone, chewing her cuticles at a table littered with crumpled paper coffee cups. Samantha was more than ready to hit the road, but she needed to conjure a little more energy before taking on whatever Ruby was fraying from. She poured herself a cup of lukewarm coffee from a sideboard and gulped it down before pouring a second and taking the seat across from Ruby.

Ruby frowned and folded her arms across her chest. “So, you do still exist.”

Samantha just smiled, bemused. “Can I help you with something?”

Ruby’s phone dinged, and she tapped out a hurried message before setting it back down and picking at the raspberry scone in front of her. “I sincerely doubt it.”

“What’s that about?” Samantha jutted her chin toward Ruby’s phone.

“None of your business.” Ruby seemed determined to pout, and Samantha knew she’d have to let her have her way until she tired herself out. “You and Laura sure looked chummy last night.”

Samantha looked down into her coffee cup. “Well, you definitely misread that situation,” she tried.

“Really?” Ruby raised her sunglasses and glared at her. “Because that hickey suggests otherwise.”

Samantha took another swing at impassivity. “I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, Ms. Henson.” But the fidgeting fingers at her collar gave her away.

“Oh, just leave it. A little happiness looks good on you, believe it or not. Weird, incredibly crass, but good.”

An unexpected warmth bubbled up in Samantha, and she felt the sunlight on her face; she tasted the salt in the air, suddenly unmuted. She was here, now. It made her want to go for a swim. It made her want more. 

Ruby’s phone dinged again. She looked at it, sighed, and passed it over to Samantha, who read the latest message on the screen:

From Sean: I’m sorry.

Shaking her head, Samantha handed the phone back to Ruby. She straightened her spine and reached over to take a bite of Ruby’s scone. Under the table, she brushed her foot against Ruby’s calf.

“Fucking blondes, am I right?”