Common/Newland

The sound of the lighter, a metallic scratch-and-snap, shocked me out of my panic, and I turned to find that she’d slid down the side of the record store and squatted above the rain-slick sidewalk. With one hand, she took a drag from her cigarette, leaning her head back to blow a smoke geyser into the air. Baby Faithful.

Around us, neon signs created white noise and drew us in subconsciously, city dwellers looking for illumination an hour before midnight. Cars cast our drive-by silhouettes onto the wall and sidewalk; the sound waxed and waned, an irregular rhythm. I joined her then, wading to the wall, immediately feeling the burn in my legs and pull on my high-heeled ankles as I squatted beside her. The rain before had been rough, a sideways rain. The wall behind me felt blunt and grainy, compacted soil beneath my fingers. I could read the street signs then—the intersection between Common and Newland. In front of us, the traffic light turned, bathing the air around us in red. Cars lined up, idling at the intersection. Beneath us, red traveled like electricity through the water, jagged edges distorted by bumps in the street and our own slight movements. I saw pieces of her face in the ruby-and-headlight haze, brown curls turned black by the light.

“So where’s this party, girl?” she asked, tired but still curious. The rain had brought the temperature down twenty degrees. Her soaked skirt skimmed the ground and clung to the curves of her hips and legs. Her wet tank top did what it could, hugging her back, breasts, and stomach into a fluid hourglass. I wondered if I looked like her, underneath day-old jeans and her sweater, which I’d had to change into after the rain turned me into a t-shirted, chattering mess. The shirt sat in the bottom of my bag now, soaking through the already-wet cloth linings, dripping by my side in a heavy mass. Why did wet things take so long to dry? Maybe the world secretly wanted to be immersed in water and people like me were drying up the parade.

“Who the hell knows?” I replied, reaching for a cigarette of my own. “City’s a fucking labyrinth.” I knew I’d made the wrong shoe choice. The acute but widespread protest in the balls of my feet had dissolved into a tender soreness. I slid them off, feeling the pain of relief in my now wet feet. I contemplated sitting—I was already wet. It couldn’t hurt.

“Well, let’s go,” she said, knocking my hand away from my bag. “Let’s find these people.” Behind me, traffic light’s green—I see it reflected in her narrow eyes. Selling ice to a polar bear.

A few moments later, as she’s dragging me down the street (we’d decided on this “adventure” exactly two hours ago, after seeing a flyer on a lamppost), splash-splash-splash, splash-splash-splash, I realize that I love how she’s running in Disney princess flip-flops a size too small. I love that she paints her nails according to her mood (she feels magenta today). I love her after-rain curves and damp-and-strawberry scent of her hair as we nearly collide around a street corner.

She stopped then, so suddenly still I felt I was moving. What law of Newton was that? The first one? I gasped for air, and there was my heart. Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash.

“What’s a labyrinth?” she asked.