Ch 1

        I am a nineteen years old, I am white with blonde hair and blue eyes, I am male.  But I am not a man.  I am loved by my family.  I am not rich but I have clean water and none of my young middle class friends are dead before they should be, I have no right to complain.

   But I am not myself. 

      I am a man waiting at a bus stop.  Behind me is a plastic bench with graffiti on it where homeless men, and hookers, and sweat old ladies who refuse to move out sit and wait for the bus.  It is a squealing mumbling thing that lumbers in with moisture dripping out the back end, and graphics on the side that read: “Jacksonville City Orchestra: Your Orchestra.” The letters come in crossways under a particularly dynamic shot of a man with white hair.  Something about him reminds me of a vampire. 
      Behind me there is a young lady on the phone.  “No, I understand…Mmhm…no, exactly, I agree.”  Whoever she is talking to is probably in an office, I can hear the disrupted rhythm and strange patience in her voice.  “I was just wondering if…Yes?  Okay, yes, I’ll do that, of course…”  Across the street some children play with a jump rope, they’re singing sounds like an ice cream truck in the summer air, chiming and promising infinite adolescence.  “Anyway I just wanted to ask…No, no, the forms should already be there now…Sandra Hough” The rope’s plastic schoolyard ringlets clack on the pavement rhythmically.  “…451-3222...”  The littlest of the children, probably a sibling of the others, is knelt over the side walk tracing her finger along the cracks, every now and then she laughs, I can’t quite figure out why though.    “Yes, I’ll hold.”  The driver of a white Lexus, cruising along behind shaded windows, looks away from me as if I’m homeless.  He stops at the red light and flicks a cigarette.  I can hear the hold music behind me, then a ring tone.   The girl answers her phone: “Yes?  Who is this?”  The hauling jittering bus obscures the rest as it comes to a stop in front of me.
       The bus is never empty, even earlier in the morning there were passengers.  The ride might have smelled of baby food and coffee, of diapers and unexpected responsibilities, the sound of pages being turned and the silence of desperate expectations.  The residual lights of the night city would pass through the windows like a Xerox machine and the suspension would strain and squeek over speed bumps.  A conversation may have started: -I like your shoes---Hmm?  Oh, thank you.-Where did you-?--Oh, just K-Mart.------Well I like them.------Do you-go to school there or-?--What?  Oh yeah!  Forgot I put my keys on there.--Hahaha---Haha---ahhh---ha--Yeah, we just can‘t afford to keep going the direction we‘re going,-one of us needs a degree of some kind.--That’s the way it is now.---Exactly.  That’s the way it is they would say under the night school florescent lights and then they would nod and look out the windows at the sunrise before it had even begun and think about how it was. 
      But it is not early morning, it is mid morning and the sun has already begun to turn the city orange against it’s will.  The bus smells of cigarette smoke and acceptance, and it is deadly quiet.  There are no sweat mothers in their mid thirties, nurses before they graduate, wards of children on free lunch programs and the awkward shame of a grown man who feels he has failed.   Instead there is a teenaged boy leaning on one of the poles flipping through his music with a mouth like a mule, bobbing his head like a bird.  The overflow of ambitious aggressive sound from his ear buds merely frames the silence in contrast, shows it for what it is.           
   The bus stops.
   Four men in hard hats load on, dust puffing off of their jeans and smoke puffing from their mouths, simmering like a mirage from their cigarettes.  They slap each other with newspapers and blow smoke from their noses with coarse laughs that make them cough.  They sit next to me.  -Hey pal, who’s the lucky lady?- I look up and say I’m just going to visit a friend, they cough dust.  -Dressed up like that?--I ain’t never given flowers to just a friend.--The others snort ashes as their leader nudges them, innuendo gleaming in his old tired eyes.  I pretend to laugh and hope they will get off soon.  When they do they slap me on the back, plaster evaporating into the air at the point of impact.  They say “Go get ‘em,” and other things that miss the point and then after the door whines shut and the brakes hiss lazily the bus is quiet again.
     The twitching machine chugs on past empty crosswalks and pairs of seagulls that flap off in annoyance.  Past buildings that look too short to be in the city and the broken glass and liter that prove that they are in the city nonetheless.  The bus drives on, mounting speed bumps and edging curbs along the way.  The bus stops again and the young man gets off, it is also my stop. 
   I am headed for the beach.  Past the statue of a surfer kneeling to polish his board with a face I suppose his creator meant to look hopeful.  He looks up at the bright blue sky with lips parting reverently and his hair dynamically curling across his face.  His eyes are crossed.  He is a joke to passerby who pose with him and breath alcohol onto his face, some of them press their crotches into him and laugh about how hilarious it is.  But those things happen at night when the corridor of pubs butting up against the tall dunes where the beach meets the road are lit up and colorful like a young woman’s throw up.  Now they are tall tombstones with cracks painted over with blues and yellows.  I have never traveled to the end of the road there so I do not know where it ends. 
   I pass the Freebird and cross a bridge over the thorny bushes that line the beach head, I can smell the nicotine in the air from the night before when teenagers on the verge of graduation ran full tilt into the infinite darkness of the sea before them.  Taking the shuddering shivering water up to their shins before turning back for fear of pneumonia they laughed about the freezing water and damp jeans.  They laughed about the stars out of reach on the other side of the ocean and the sky, about the way they were hidden in the flat obsidian limbo of the beach unless they stood against the bright yearning wilderness of city or sea.  Waves unfurled provocatively for them and resort towels waved meekly from underwhelming hotel balconies.  Barefoot they stood in the toe sucking sand choosing how to leave each other. 
   Now the sands are crowded with obese women and their bored children.  From far away the little movements and adjustments each towel kingdom makes causes the entire scene to seem vibrant and alive, but as I focus on one lounging largess at a time I see that the sedate slumbering sands shift with more purpose than the midmorning mothers. 
   I remove my dress shoes and sink my feet into the warm sand, the grains tug at my feet as I make my way through the colonies with their ambitious sand castles and kites, I am looking for Anne.  I spot her down a pass between two battlements and make my way cautiously to her royal lounge.  I seat myself and she greets me in her usual manner, her tongue sticks out conspicuously when she pronounces the “L” sound, she does it on purpose I think. 
   “You might not see me for a while.”  I’m looking at both of our feet, hearing the fuzzy crashing waves in the distance.  The clouds pass over them like shadows of sturdy neighborhood Monkey Oaks under the evening sun.  Like shifting gears the monotonous rhythm of the crashing waves churns hypnotically, it reminds me of Nichole laying beside me humming something sweat like an ice cream truck.  The waves aren’t blue like in a children’s story, like Nichole’s eyes.  I feel Anne looking at me, her eyes are marine, natural, harsh, apathetic green eyes that embarrass like a dare, they force me to look up at them.  “I don’t give a s**t.”  She says it with an understanding.  Knowing she is suspected of committing cliché, her eyebrows raise as if to say “…And you better f*****g believe me.”  I do.
   Her shadow stretches out across the sand, piano wire tendons drawing themselves tight.  Like a cat arching it’s back her hair glides against my neck and I feel the churning purr of respiration beside me; inside of her.  Her shifting flesh tricks the mind with nimble prestidigitation.  She seems tangible, but somewhere in her shadow, lying disproportionate in the sand like an art piece, she mocks me half lidded.  “Of course you don‘t,” I say.  There is a tone of irreverence in my voice because I know she enjoys that.
   She turns away from me to look out at the gulls gathering around a recently vacated plot.  “I’m not trying to convince you of anything,”  her hair tickles at my lips and chin, it is salty and there are a few grains of sand in it that stick to my face, I wonder how long she has been here at the beach.  I lay down on my back and feel the sand depress through the towel, she stares on at the birds squabbling and picking at the scraps left over by one of the whales. 
   “Except that you don’t mean to convince me.”  She turns her head back slowly and looks down at me.  She leans down to kiss me.  She does not tuck her hair behind her ear it is smothering me and whispering windy words into my ears, pooling up around my neck and flowing over my chin.  She pulls away.
   “When you leave.”
   “Yes.”
   “Don’t come back.”
   She lays down next to me and, I think, closes her eyes.