Devil’s Lake

It was Melanie and Jeff and Wilson, like always. Jeff’s mom never let them drink in the house, but they could drink on the screened-in porch if they kept it down. Wilson mixed vodka with Red Bull in a pitcher and called it cocktails. He also had a bottle of green-flavored cough syrup for later, if they got desperate. They were sixteen and got desperate about half the time. The other half of the time, the three of them piled into Melanie’s ’95 Civic at night, kept the headlights off, and drove up and down the hills with only the dome light illuminated. It was a different kind of desperation. They called it UFO.

It was two nights after Christmas, cold enough that their breath formed clouds in the air. Jeff’s mom had already taken down the tree, leaving a trail of dead pine needles scattered across the floor. The porch had a wicker couch with stained cushions, a corduroy easy chair, and a mini fridge that doubled as a coffee table. The pull switch for the ceiling fan was broken, so they could either sit in the dark or sit in the breeze. They sat in the dark until Jeff kicked over what was left of his cocktail. “Motherfuck,” he said. He stomped off the porch and returned with a plaid comforter thrown over his shoulders like a cape, carrying a lava lamp. He set it on top of the fridge and they sat there for a few minutes, mesmerized by the eerie blue light, by the pieces of lava separating and colliding and separating again.

Melanie was curled on one end of the couch, wrapped in a fleece-lined hunting coat that belonged to Jeff’s stepdad. It smelled of leaves and sweat and wood smoke. “I wish we could go swimming,” she said. “Last summer we went swimming every day.”

“No we didn’t,” Jeff said.

“Practically,” Melanie said. It had been a mistake to mention swimming. Now he would be thinking about her in a swimsuit, or naked.

“Let’s go to the Highlander,” Jeff said. “They have a pool.”

“They have an outdoor pool. And it’s like eight feet long.”

“So?”

“We could go to Marcus’s,” she said. “Take a dip in the hot tub.”

“He’s on vacation with his family,” Wilson said. “Bermuda.”

“We could still use the hot tub,” Jeff said.

“No,” Melanie said. “Never mind.”

“Hot tubs are full of bacteria,” Wilson said. He was usually one step ahead or behind the conversation, but it was often difficult to tell which.

“You know Marcus has a girlfriend, right?” Jeff said to Melanie. “If you’re not careful, you’ll start to look desperate.”

“Obviously I’m desperate. Why else would I be here?”

They were friends because Melanie never had anyplace better to be, and because even though Jeff was a dick most of the time, Wilson was a diplomat. Because Melanie had a car and drove them places: to the dollar theater, to Biscuitville, and once to the old shoe factory downtown that had been converted into a hotel, where they had lounged around the lobby and eaten peppermints until the manager had asked for their room numbers. Because even though Jeff had tried to kiss Melanie on two separate occasions (once when he was drunk and she was sober, and once when he was sober and she was drunk), she pretended to be ignorant of his feelings, and sometimes she forgot about them altogether.

“Forget it,” Jeff said.

Wilson’s phone buzzed on top of the fridge and Jeff looked at the screen. “Who’s Dana?”

“A girl I met at the Sip ’N Dip.” Wilson was always meeting girls at the Sip ’N Dip. He was not especially outgoing, but he was weird in an interesting way and people gravitated towards him. He was just one of those guys.

“What does she look like?” Jeff asked.

“You’re pathetic,” Melanie said.

Wilson shrugged. “Not my type.”

“Fat?” Jeff asked.

“No.”

It was eleven o’clock. If something didn’t happen soon, they would be cracking open the green-flavored cough syrup and one of them—maybe all of them—would be curled on the floor next to the toilet by midnight. No one wanted it to come to that. “Invite her over,” Jeff said.

*

Dana looked like a girl who hung around the Sip ’N Dip, scratching lottery tickets and flirting for six-packs of Keystone Light. Jeff sat up as soon as she stepped onto the porch. She had long blonde hair and bangs that swept across her forehead and pale, pale skin. She wore an assortment of gypsy scarves and a black sweatshirt and black leggings and black cowboy boots that clicked on the floorboards. She kissed Wilson on the cheek like they were old friends. “Dana,” he said. “This is Jeff and Melanie.”

“Hi there,” Jeff said.

“Where’s your coat?” Melanie said.

“I left it in some guy’s truck.” Dana sat cross-legged on the floor. She produced a bottle of water and a prescription bottle from her bag. “I’ll probably never see it again.”

“Want my blanket?” Jeff asked.

“Sure.”

He stood and draped the comforter around her shoulders. Melanie rolled her eyes. “Chivalrous. Now you’ll freeze.”

Jeff sat next to Dana and studied the prescription bottle. “Who’s Iola Daniel?”

“My mom does in-home care,” Dana said. “All of her clients die eventually.”

“You stole pills from a dead lady?” Melanie said.

“It’s not stealing,” Wilson said. “It’s not like she can use them anymore.”

Jeff rattled the bottle. “Can I have one?”

Dana opened it, shook out a blue pill, and bit it in half. She handed one half to Jeff and swallowed the other one.

“What’ll it do?” he asked.

“Jeff thinks all drugs make you hallucinate,” Melanie said. “He did mushrooms one time, and I’ll bet you anything he did them wrong, but it’s all he ever talks about.”

“Shut up,” Jeff said.

“It’ll make you feel relaxed and probably tired. No hallucinations.” Dana held up the bottle. “Anyone else?”

Wilson asked for half a pill. Melanie declined. She had decided that it would be a mistake to take anything from the new girl. Jeff’s orange cat padded onto the porch and hopped on the arm of the couch. It stretched forward and dragged its claws back across the wicker. The cat was a girl named Richard and it hated everyone, especially Jeff. It leapt from the couch to the floor, circled Dana twice, and settled into her lap.

*

Twenty minutes later, Wilson was asleep on the floor. He could fall asleep pretty much anywhere. Jeff had inched closer to Dana. “Your hair smells like oranges,” he said. He was always telling girls their hair smelled like oranges.

“My sister mails shampoo from San Francisco,” Dana said. “They sell it in Chinatown.”

Melanie sat alone on the couch. She had decided that Dana was hard to read: she was either indifferent or amenable to Jeff. Maybe she was safely insulated inside the haze of Iola Daniel’s prescription, or maybe she was just indifferently amenable all the time. Dana removed one of her many scarves (turquoise, with an Indian print) and dangled it in front of the cat, which swatted at it with quick, ruthless precision, and then lost interest.

Melanie wished she had taken one of the pills but it was too late to ask, and now all she could do was drink the rest of Wilson’s cocktail and watch Jeff flirt with Dana. It happened every few months: he showed interest in someone else and Melanie started to wonder if he was as good-looking as her friends seemed to think he was.

“How many pills do you have left?” Jeff asked.

“Four,” Dana said. “But I know a guy with, like, a pharmacy. He can give me more.”

“The guy with your coat?” Melanie asked.

“A different one.”

“Do you have friends who are girls?”

Dana cocked her head. “They’re not my friends. They’re just guys.”

“Guys who give you pills,” Melanie said.

“Guys like it if you want something from them. It makes them feel important.” Dana yawned and stretched her arms and the bottom of her sweatshirt rose high enough to reveal a slice of her stomach. “Do we have any pot?”

“We?” Melanie said.

“I have some,” Jeff said.

“This is news,” Melanie said. “Where is it?”

“Alex’s room.”

“Where’s Alex?”

“Out.”

Melanie laughed. “Steal your crazy-as-fuck stepbrother’s weed. Great idea.”

*

It was easier than they would have thought. Dana worked the lock on Alex’s door with her CVS card, and she and Jeff searched the room while Melanie stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, trying to convey disapproval. “Your stepbrother is a sadistic bastard,” she said. “Even Wilson thinks so.” The room smelled like ramen and cigarettes. On the dresser was a lighter shaped like a shotgun, the game Risk, and a Gatorade bottle two-thirds full of a liquid that was not Gatorade. Two posters hung over the dresser: Scarface reclining in a leather chair, smoking a cigar, and Mona Lisa holding a bong. A few years ago, Melanie would have said that boys were mysterious, but that was before she had seen any of their rooms.

Jeff and Dana had looked in all the obvious places when he opened the box of Cheez-Its on the night table and found a Ziploc bag. “Ha,” he said. They returned to the porch and he rolled a joint and passed it back and forth with Dana. Wilson was still asleep, and Melanie didn’t want any at first, but it turned out that it wasn’t fun to watch other people smoke pot. That just left more for them to smoke. After a few minutes, Dana held out the joint and Melanie took it.

It was good weed. Melanie curled on the couch and zipped up Jeff’s stepdad’s fleece-lined coat. They should invent fleece-lined houses, she thought. Person-sized, fleece-lined houses that smelled like wood smoke. She would buy one and Wilson would buy one and they would be neighbors.

Melanie watched as Dana stretched across the floor on her back. The cat stepped back and forth over Dana’s legs, as if learning a line dance, as if cats learned line dances. Then Jeff stretched alongside Dana really close, and Melanie turned to face the back of the couch. She pulled the coat’s fleece-lined hood over her eyes.

A room felt a particular way when two people were kissing, especially if they were half-trying to be discrete about it. Melanie sighed and shifted on the couch. She told herself to think about something else, so she thought about her skin, which was hot and prickly, and how it would be nice to unzip and step out of it, like a coat. She thought about shedding clothes when it was hot out, and about the blue and white striped bikini she had worn to the pool last summer, hanging it to dry in the upstairs bathroom of her mother’s house. She remembered the pool had closed permanently in August, after a little boy drowned. There had been a thunderstorm, the sky bruised and the pool evacuated, and Melanie had raced to the car barefoot with her cutoffs unbuttoned, her skin slick with rainwater and chlorine and coconut-scented lotion. But the boy had returned to the vacated pool while his mother changed in the locker room. He wanted to go swimming, even in a thunderstorm. When they found him, he was still in a pair of deflated flotation devices. Melanie imagined that they were blue, with green frogs.

She heard the freight train on the bridge half a mile away, and then she became aware that whatever was going on between Jeff and Dana had stopped. She adjusted the hood on her coat and turned to look at the floor: Jeff and Dana were apart, their backs to each other. Dana had bundled her scarves into a pillow. Melanie turned back to the couch and closed her eyes.

Dana would leave soon enough and probably never show up again, and the rest of them would pretend like nothing had happened. If she ever came up in conversation, Jeff would pretend like he couldn’t remember which girl they were talking about. It was easier that way.

*

The screen door banged shut and Melanie awoke in time to see Wilson bolting upright, the cat darting behind the corduroy chair. The porch smelled strongly of weed. Jeff’s stepbrother stood by the door. He was two years older than Jeff and three inches shorter, a fact he seemed to take personally. His dark hair was bleached blonde, a color that did not suit him. He had stopped going to school in October, and even though he wasn’t a drug dealer—he never had any money—he was often mistaken for one. But the most alarming thing about Alex was that he was eighteen and could technically do whatever he wanted and, nonetheless, chose to live at home.

“Weirdest thing.” Alex bent down and picked up the pack of rolling papers Jeff had left on the floor. “My Cheez-Its are missing.” No one said anything. Alex walked to the couch and sat next to Melanie and she pulled her legs to her chest, trying to make herself as compact as possible. He was like an animal in the wild. It was important to avoid sudden movement and direct eye contact, to conceal vulnerabilities.

He cleared his throat. “You’re new,” he said to Dana. “Do you like Cheez-Its?”

“I have money,” Jeff said too loudly. “I’ll give you whatever.”

Alex peeled away a sheet of rolling paper, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it at Dana. It landed somewhere in her lap. “Whoops.” He turned to Jeff. “However much you have,” he said, “it’s not enough.”

“It’s enough,” Jeff said.

“I was supposed to give that weed to Butcher,” Alex said. “What do you think he’ll do when I tell him you smoked it all?” For a moment, Melanie was certain that Alex was going to do something violently unhinged, and that she, Wilson, and Dana would have to sit and watch it because what else could they do. She’d heard that Alex pissed in things. Beds, lockers, water bottles. She’d heard that pissing wasn’t the worst of it. She thought of the shotgun lighter on his dresser, and then she thought of all the things someone could set fire to.

But then Alex tossed another balled-up piece of rolling paper into Dana’s lap and grinned. “What’s your name? I’m Alex.”

Dana smiled with her mouth closed and looked at the floor. “I know your name.”

“Hey Jeff,” Alex said. “Does your pretty friend have a name?” He leaned back on the couch, still looking at Dana. “Does your pretty friend want to see my room?”

“She’s seen it,” Jeff said.

“Maybe she wants to see it again,” Alex said.

Dana stood up. “Sure,” she said.

Alex rose from the couch and Dana followed him across the porch. Her boots were heavy on the floor, the sound concrete in a way that she herself was not.

“Dana,” Melanie said. She could hear the blood rushing in her veins and was aware that something was happening, that she and Dana were suddenly on the same side, if only because they were two girls in a room with three boys. “Don’t go if you don’t feel like it.”

“She feels like it,” Alex said. “Don’t you Dana?”

“Yeah,” Dana said.

Alex opened the door to the house and Dana stepped through it, pulling it closed behind them. Melanie, Wilson, and Jeff listened to the sound of her boots on the linoleum in the kitchen, then fading into the hallway.

“Why’d she go in there?” Melanie said.

“She wanted to,” Wilson said.

“No,” Melanie said. “She didn’t.”

“She said she wanted to,” Wilson said. “That’s all that matters.”

Jeff pulled his legs to his chest and rested his head on his knees. It occurred to Melanie that she and Wilson would go home soon, leaving Jeff to witness Dana slinking out of Alex’s room, flushed and disheveled. Leaving him to deal with Alex alone.

As if on cue, Wilson stood up and said he was going home.

“I’ll drive you,” Melanie said.

“Thanks,” Wilson said. “But I feel like walking.”

“It’s like two miles,” she said.

“He feels like walking,” Jeff said. “Let him.”

*

After Wilson left, Melanie and Jeff sat on the couch and watched the shadows from the lava lamp drift across the ceiling. It was late and neither of them talked for a while, which was fine. They liked each other more when neither of them talked. “We should build a fire tomorrow,” she said. “I could bring marshmallows.”

“It’s the same every time,” Jeff said. “Wilson sets his marshmallows on fire. He forgets that he hates the burned ones.”

“I liked the burned ones.”

“You only want a fire because you don’t have one right this second.”

Melanie sighed. She was the kind of tired that made it hard to distinguish between a good decision and a bad one, tired enough that the distinction itself seemed irrelevant. She noticed a hole above the right knee on Jeff’s jeans and reached over, sticking her hand inside it. The fabric around it was soft and threadbare, like the t-shirts she wore to bed, and his skin was warm.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Seeing how far my hand goes.” There were worse ideas than kissing him. He would taste like smoke and Red Bull. They would kiss for a while, and then she would push him until he was flat against the grainy seat cushions and she was on top of him, her chest pressed to his, her legs on either side of him. It was a lesson she would learn over and over again: sometimes anything was better than nothing.

“Seriously,” Jeff said, and his tone caused Melanie to pull her hand away. For a few seconds, there was just the sound of them breathing. The sound of them breathing, and the cold, sobering air moving through the porch. “You think you can do whatever you want just because you’re bored,” he said.

She looked at Jeff, who looked at the lava lamp.

“You think you’re the only one who cares about things,” he said. “But you don’t care about anything.”

*

Melanie left the fleece-lined hunting coat on the porch and drove with the windows rolled down to keep from falling asleep. By the time she reached her mother’s house, she was so cold that she cold barely feel anything. Inside, she kicked off her shoes, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and peeled off her clothes in the bathroom. The tiles were freezing. Her stepfather had started to replace the insulation before he was officially her stepfather, but he had stopped in the middle a year ago, and now everyone pretended like he had never started. He wasn’t a bad guy—he just lost interest in things. Anyway, Melanie and her mother had gotten used to the cold.

Tucked behind the bathroom mirror was a snapshot of Melanie when she was maybe two, the edges of the photograph curled from moisture. Her hair was lighter, nearly blonde, and she sat in an empty bathtub wearing a blue raincoat and sneakers. She smiled the way little kids smiled, with all her teeth. In the corner of the picture, her mother leaned over the tub, her dark hair cropped, looking incredibly young, if not happy.

Melanie turned on the bathtub, setting the temperature between hot and scalding, and climbed in. Steam clouded the shower curtain, which displayed a map of the world, each country shaded green or purple or yellow or orange. Her mother had chosen it, even though she’d never left the country, and even though the map was outdated.

The tub filled with water. Melanie watched as the skin on her breasts and stomach and feet turned from white to pink. She reached for the body wash on the corner of the tub and poured it in the water. It smelled like coconuts, like a distant, tropical place. She closed her eyes and pretended that it was summer, the days hazy and indistinguishable. The smell of smoke in her hair was chlorine. The tub was concrete. The water pouring from the faucet was artificially, brilliantly blue, warm from the sun, perfect for diving.