christ

Girl, Interpolated

Excerpt

The come up is always a highlight: a soft boil of giggles gives way to a roiling one. The sun feels like a thousand tiny kisses on my skin as I grow increasingly distracted by the sheer amount of sand it takes to make a beach. In a creative effort, Elle smashes a blueberry into her journal, which leaves us all cackling when none of the blue pigment transfers, leaving her page snotty like the bugs smeared on my windshield on the drive down I-75. Alice swings her blonde curls as she switches to tanning her back, asking Jason to put some lotion on her. He assumes a squatting position—that reminds me of the barre classes I used to take—until one of his testicles frees itself from behind the taught edge of his blue swim shorts. As I struggle to find a delicate way to alert him of this development, words fail to materialize. Neither my eyes nor mouth move until I hear Isaac let out an entertained-but-concerned “Oh honey…” which causes us all to dig our fists in the sand, in an attempt to steady our bodies, shaking violently between laughs and gasps. 

Isaac plays Amy Winehouse’s cover of “Valerie” and Jason plays Kali Uchis’s “In Your Dreams” and I’m ready to prune in our warm glow, wondering for how long I will associate these songs with this moment and the friends who played them. Until I die and then some is the hope.

Before long, Alice is out in the water, vibing up and down the horizon as waves come in and the tide goes out. From this far I can’t tell if she is standing and I feel a bit concerned about her tripping balls in the ocean alone, but more than that I feel the need to join her in the water for sensory purposes. I walk into the sea, the water only reaching my thighs by the time I get to Alice, who is lying horizontally, bobbing with her hands trailing down into the clouds of sand near the floor. I lay down too and we try putting words to all the things we are feeling—falling short but not caring as we return the sun’s smile.

I try telling her about the time I was in the Gulf of Mexico at an all-inclusive resort, swimming with my dad. I’ve always felt like it was the goal to go out where you can’t touch, for that is where the fun is. Dad and I might’ve ventured out too far, or at the wrong time of day or season because the undertow (a word I learned that day) had been especially strong. With my dad holding onto me and both of us flapping our limbs in the lapping waves, I found it hard to tell if we were still having fun. The sense of worry on my dad’s face never found its way beyond his lips. But as the story forms in the air between Al and me, I want to make it clear I don’t feel that panic now, which she quickly confirms before we drift silently. The lateral tide pulls us down the beach and we pass through another group of swimmers in a way that reminds me of how the dudes are aligned on a foosball table.

Later I will describe the primordial process of coming back to land by saying “it was like we grew legs from the sea” to the only straight boy in the condo, his eyes growing wide in the presence of my evolution. As we approach our sandy friends they ask us if we made new friends and we both cock our heads and brows.

“Were you not talking to them?” Jason asks, gesturing to the people we had floated between. And without further explanation, laughter strikes us all as the absurdity of Alice and me passing through without a word becomes evident.

“I, ​for one​, am not interested in talking to new people while on acid,” I say maybe a bit too loudly, looking around for any ears caught in our conversational crossfire. I notice that no one was, in fact, paying much attention to us at all: my main character syndrome acting up.

People aren’t paying attention, which is a relief despite my love for attention, but I disconcertingly catch the eye of a nearby seagull with ease. And then another. Then I silently turn my head one hundred and eighty degrees to (you guessed it) another fucking bird staring into my soul.

“It must be the drugs,” one side of my brain says to the other. I look from a bird to Jason and back again. If he’s worried behind the blue-orange reflection of his sunnies, I can’t tell. I look from the bird to Isaac, who is focused on aiming handfuls of SkinnyPop into his open mouth. When I look back at the birds, my brain conjures up that Wild West instrumentation that plays after a tumbleweed goes by, before the shoot-out begins. This bird is not returning my gaze. It’s looking at Isaac, as I was a moment ago. I see another bird eyeing Isaac, still eating popcorn from the oversized bag in a soft-focus daze. This clamoring is oddly reminiscent of how people gravitate toward Isaac when we go out, drawn in by his dark hair, approachable confidence, and East Coast good looks. Usually he is the snack in question, but today he has simply brought a snack. At the beach, he’s in his most comfortable state (shirtless), which might explain why he doesn’t sense the Hitchcock reenactment about to ensue.

“Isaac...” I say through gritted teeth, keeping my eyes on the closest gull. Everyone goes quiet as Isaac slowly lifts a final handful of popcorn to his mouth, turning past three gulls toward me. Each person takes a moment to look, at their own pace, from me to Isaac to a bird of their choosing. In my naivete, I thought Isaac not eating the popcorn would be enough to defuse this gang, but they seem to be communicating that this is ​their popcorn now,​ zeroing in on the closed bag. Feeling the pressure of their stares and desperate for this stand-off to end, I reach for Al’s flowy pants to conceal the food from the flock. Birds don’t have object permanence, do they?

As I wrap one leg of fabric around the bag—feeling like a fucking genius, I might add—the popcorn shifts within the bag and rips it. A handful of popcorn falls to the sand by my feet, and now I know what it must be like to get a nosebleed in a pool with a great white. We all freeze as the birds flex their wings. I try to bury individual pieces of SkinnyPop to no avail and make the executive decision that it’s time to go.

“On the count of three, everyone grab your shit and run…” I whisper so the birds won’t hear my plan, too scared to look anywhere but down. “One…two…three…”

We all move in unison and in different directions like unrehearsed synchronized swimmers. The space where we had settled abruptly empties itself of bodies and bags and towels, the only remaining items are the popcorn bag…and Isaac’s sandals…and Elle’s journal. The birds close in as Isaac and Elle go back in for the unaccounted-for cargo, but the birds own this beach now. One seagull screams into Elle’s face from mere inches away. She screams back at it and the rest of us scream from ten feet away as the seagulls kick up sand and popped corn.

OK, now, everyone on the beach is looking at us.

Like players retreating to the dugout after a particularly humiliating first half, we decide some privacy and AC might be the move. On the way past the pool my face feels like I’m wearing it sideways. Feeling a bit like Carrie running into Aiden in Abu Dhabi, I see my best friend from preschool laying on a lounge chair by the pool.

“OMG, Lauren?” I ask what could very well be a mirage. She beams me a smile and tells me she’s in town with her boyfriend and some friends, gesturing towards them in the pool. Drugs are wild but real life is wilder. I tell her about the birds (leaving out the LSD), but I assume she can see my face is on sideways.

Back in conditioned air, we roll joints and pop a bottle of champagne. We play “Carmen” by Lana (which Jason tells us was his nickname in high school because he too didn’t have a problem lying to himself because his liquor was top shelf) and “Close Your Eyes” by Kim Petras (I feel it coming on, indeed)​. The Bluetooth speaker gives the air a pulse of its own. Moving through the glass sliding door from the living room to the balcony feels like moving from one world to another. Everything is a hue of blue, like we are living in an Instagram picture with the coolness turned all the way up.

Our bottle of champagne is empty and we want another, but I’m sure as shit not going to buy one. “I’ll do it…gimme a twenty,” says Elle, sounding like she would do just about anything if you give her a twenty, which makes us laugh harder. Eventually I do find a twenty in my bag and pass it to Elle, who looks at me over the brim of her sunglasses like the mad genius I know her to be. Ready to do what needs to be done at the little party store in the lobby, she heads for the door. “And Elle…” I say with the utmost concern as she turns to look over her shoulder, “whatever you do, do ​not​ take off your sunglasses.”

About the Author

Christ is a NY-based transfem writer of nonfiction who prefers to spend her free time staring at the moon. If you cut them, they bleed scallion cream cheese and Azealia Banks.