It was the third weekend in August. The night before they found Jamie’s little car flung into the ditch off Highway 2. Before she was ripped up, dolled, wrapped in dressings, and buried two weeks later.
It smelled like rain that night. The mud was thick as pig shit. The earth was bubbling open. The guys divided into two jagged camps, like a split-through log, and built fires from abandoned pallets, conjuring a party.
Danny, like always, brought a generator for his speakers. He pointed, bragging, at some weird druggy girls he’d picked up hitchhiking. I unloaded a flat of beer from my truck.
The wet soaked my shoes, waterlogged my socks. Jamie was already fucked up and not just with booze either. Something new. There was another layer to it that night.
“I just want to get naked in the trees. Come on. Come dance with me.”
I pushed her away, and my face turned red-hot where she’d touched me.
“Not out in front of everybody. Jesus.”
I saw Danny across the clearing, leaning against my truck, smoke coming out of his mouth. The bottle-blue sky was draining into night. I wanted to forget about Jamie. I looked at the other girls, the one in the black skirt swaying to the Metallica song blasting out of Danny’s speakers. Some Kind of Monster. But Jamie was always there on the outskirts of my vision, caught like a barb.
I went to grab another beer. Jamie stood looking into the trees. Her eyes were like dark glass, hard liquid. I put my hand in front of her face.
“The hell are you looking at?”
“Why can’t you just be happy?”
“Come on, don’t do this right now.”
“Why can’t we have a good time?” Jamie giggled.
“I’m trying.”
“Do it harder.”
I took her wrist in my hand. I could feel her pulse racing up into her thumb.
“Take it easy,” I said and put my finger over her lips.
One of Danny’s ecstasy witches leaned against a tree, trying to resurrect her phone. The screen flashed white light across her face, then went black. A bundle of twenties, profits from mushrooms, resin, and pills, glowed inside her purse. Her friends sat in a circle, fascinated with each other’s hands, their voices bubbling beneath the music.
I could feel her looking at me. The hair on my arms pricked up. She walked over and took my beer bottle out of my hands, swaying into the space between our bodies.
“Did you just see that owl fly into the trees?” she said.
I watched her eyes, going off into the dark behind me somewhere, maybe the same place as Jamie’s.
“I’m more interested in what’s going on here.” I sounded like a dick. But she just laughed and swallowed my beer.
Her name was Carrie. She was selling some herbal shit in bottles she’d made in her bathtub back in the city. She wanted to be a massage therapist, maybe. Costs money to get trained, though.
I nodded, played interested. She didn’t ask much. When she went to kiss me, I kept my eyes open, looking for Jamie. Dancing by Danny’s bonfire alone.
We ran over to my truck. Danny nodded, approving, when he saw me pull out with Carrie in the passenger seat. I drove to the truck stop off Highway 88. A cop passed us, and I held my breath until the white cruiser disappeared. Carrie didn’t eat, just drank a Caesar and watched the burger grease run over my knuckles. She came home with me that night and didn’t leave. I avoided my brother, waiting until he left for the lumber yard in the morning to take a piss. Carrie would lie in my bed, her red hair all over my sheets, until my shift at the Honda shop started. He must’ve heard her laughing, talking through my door.
A few days in, Carrie asked me if I knew the girl who died in the car crash.
“She’s strange,” I said. “She was.”
“Oh,” Carrie said and looked at herself in the hallway mirror, the one we got from Grandma’s trailer after she died. “Do you want to smoke a joint?”
Danny called me after Jamie’s funeral. Said it was fucked up that I didn’t come. I’d tried, but I couldn’t walk up the steps to the church. Sat out in my truck across Main Street instead. He asked me to come over to his place for a drink. Said he had something to talk about.
“Like what?”
Danny’s voice had a little bend in it. I could almost smell the sweat on the back of his neck.
“You know Jamie. She always got what she wanted.”
I dropped the plastic receiver into the phone’s cradle and ran to my truck.
About a month after we started up, Carrie left while I was at work. She sent me an email last week. After, what, seven years? Said she found me on the hockey team’s website—took me forever, Mr. Coach. She was coming back to town. Smiley face. “I don’t check my email much,” I told her. “And I don’t live there anymore.” She asked about Danny. I didn’t answer back.
Nobody’d heard from him since that October, anyway, since the day I went over with a case of beer. They’d stopped looking for him years ago.
That last night in August, Carrie and I drove off from the party with our windows down, her hand snaking up my leg. I turned up the radio, some country song she liked, but we could still hear Jamie behind us, yelling out to no one, her skirt covered in mud. In handprints.
“You guys, time is running out.”
Her voice bounced off darkening spruce.
“Why am I the only one who dances anymore?”
[Image Credit : Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash]
by 
L.M. Moore
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