One. Carbon.

Cole meets Arvid on the night of graduation.

The summer between high school and college was the epitome of those period of limbo between knowing who I was and who I wanted to be. Everything seemed to be about letting go or holding on. But then I met this girl. “I’m taking a gap year,” she told me. “To travel.” And because she wasn’t going to college, everything was different. All that stuff I’d been so worried about, put into perspective, just seemed silly.

She asked to go on a walk and even though I knew I should say no �" I wasn’t supposed to be at the party anyway and I’d started to feel very guilty for deceiving my parents �" I said yes.

                She said her name was Arvid.

                I said mine was Cole.

                Arvid led me away from the party. I was still in my dress shirt and khakis from graduation. I’d only abandoned my tie. She wore a dress, tight, tight, so, so tight to her body. I felt like until now, I hadn’t ever known what a girl’s body was supposed to look like. Walking along behind her, watching her click, click, click in her heels down the sidewalk, with her black hair swishing back and forth behind her, and that tight, tight, tight dress riding up slightly with every step, I knew. I knew like I’d never known anything else before. With absolute, invariable certainty. It was simply not a fact that could be disputed.

                My palms got all sweaty, and I felt heat rising in my ears and neck just thinking about it.

                We went to the beach, kicking off our shoes at the edge of the pavement. I thought we’d just carry them but she nudged hers under the splintered, weather beaten steps. Despite my better judgment, I stowed mine there as well.

                I wondered briefly, for about the hundredth time, how I had managed to go four years without ever seeing her, only to bump into her the night we graduate. I guess that’s public school though. Seven hundred kids in the class and it’s not hard to miss one or two of fifty. Except that not all of them were Arvid. I would’ve expected myself to notice her.

                She never turned back to me until we reached the water. I was taken aback all over again by her big brown eyes, endearing and intense at the same time. She frightened me. She would have seemed so exotic except that she had definitely lived her whole life in Michigan, and therefore was just as small town Midwest as me.

                Or maybe that was too hopeful. I was white bread with no crust. She was a multigrain loaf from the baker’s.

                Holy camoly, I just compared her to bread. Why am I a person?

                “How do you feel about swimming?” she asked. She was impossibly pretty. I felt impossibly awkward.

                “Uh- I- isn’t the lake still cold? It’s just the beginning of the summer.”

                “Oh shut up,” she laughed, as if I’d just made a joke. I had not. “Take off your shirt, let’s go.”

                “I don’t have- I don’t have swimming trunks on,” I argued lamely. I knew that wouldn’t cut it. She didn’t seem to be wearing a suit under her dress either.

                How wrong I was. Already, she’d begun unzipping the side, letting all those green sparkles slide down her body, until she wore only a bright blue bikini. Like an idiot, I just gaped at her.

                She seemed unphased. “So what? You’ve got boxers, right?” I wished she would turn away again, but instead, she watched me expectantly. I had no choice. When the decision comes down to please a pretty girl vs. don’t please a pretty girl, the path is clear. There could be no backing down.

                Holy. Camoly.

                If my palms had been sweaty before, they were drenched now. Never had I ever imagined I would stand on the beach with the most stunning and intriguing and utterly dangerous girl I’d ever seen and then, just to put the icing on the cake, the cheese on the macaroni, the cap on the bottle, I would undress in front of her. Thank the Lord I didn’t wear briefs.

                She never flinched once. When I stood, already shivering in the cool May night air, she looked me over, never bothering to hide her gaze, then she reached out and smacked my mortifyingly skinny, ab-free stomach with the back of her hand, a smirk on her face. I had no idea what that could possibly mean, and quite frankly, I was too scared to ask. I wasn’t even usually embarrassed by my size. I knew I was kind of scrawny because my best friend Jake Myers never failed to point out his muscles and my lack thereof. I just wasn’t very good at sports. I watched them as much as any guy, but the only one I was halfway decent at was golf.

                She waded into the water, her perfect body dipping and swaying  with the waves, and like a siren’s call luring me, I followed her in, practically entranced.

                “Tell me, Cole,” she began, looking, not at me now �" I counted my lucky stars for this, one-two-three. I could see them in the sky just then �" but at the seemingly endless expanse of Lake Michigan. “What do you consider your greatest ambitions in life?”

                I felt slightly like I’d just stepped foot into yet another college interview.  This question had been asked so many times. “To go to Wooster and graduate with a degree in Economics,” I said on autopilot. I stopped giving it much thought a while ago. The obvious answer was easier. “Get a good job, have a nice house and a family.”

                She sighed, turning around quickly. Water splashed up around her calves, spraying all over me. “No, I mean like… your desires, you know. What do you want to do? What do you want to know? What do you care about?”

                I frowned, stumped by her persistence. Most people just asked what I wanted to do in economics, to which I always said, “Not sure yet, just keeping my options open for now.”

                “I’ll tell you mine,” she said. “As an example.” She turned back to the lake, wading out deeper. I followed because I had to hear what she was saying, not because I felt at all comfortable with the still icy cold water coming ever nearer my underwear or with the fact my toes were already numb, my skin stinging where the waves hit higher.

                “I told you I’m going to travel,” she said. “I want to know what the world is like. I want to know that people live in a way that’s different from here. Different and better. This culture is like… it’s suppressing, you know? It just sucks out your originality and throws in the blender with everything else and strips you down until all that’s left is a carbon copy of every other person.” Her voice got really passionate all the sudden and she changed tracks completely. I got stuck back on that part for a moment and had to catch up. White bread with no crust, I thought again.

“I want to blast Billy Joel in my living room with the lights dims and dance in my socks. I want to collect things. All sorts of things. Ceramic elephants, starburst wrappers, random people’s phone numbers. And I want someone to help with the collections. I want to have walls covered top to bottom in picture frames, and every one of them full of the things I’ve done, places I’ve been. I want to learn to everything I don’t know how to do. How to flip. How to draw. How to decipher ancient texts and Morse code. Kung-Fu maybe. I want to write a diary. Actually like, every day. But only if I have stories to tell. It can’t just be about nothing. I want to sit on the couch and read books for a date. I want to kiss in a tent, just because it sounds nice. I want to drive through a blizzard, just to get ice cream, or sail when it’s stormy because wouldn’t the waves be like the best rollercoaster ever? I want to-“

And then she stopped. For at least a year she stood there, arms hanging limp at her sides, glossy hair blowing around her face. I waded in further, against the wishes of my shuddering body, so I could get a good look at her face. She turned her head to me, and her eyes were wide and almost innocent. The intensity that had scared me earlier was gone, and I felt like I could know her. “I just want to live, you know?”

“Yeah, I said. Yeah, me too.”

She looked away again, kicking up water for something to do. “So why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Die just like everyone else?”

“I’m not�" I’m not dying. I mean- well we all are, but like… not�"not yet.”

She shook her head. “I mean going through the motions. Doing what you’re supposed to instead of what feels good. We’re like… we’re like only here for a second. And then our time is done. Up. Get out because some new pinchy little baby thing is taking your place so you better make room. And then you’ve wasted all your time. You never did anything. And important stuff doesn’t even matter. I just mean things you feel. Things that matter because you remember them.”

For some reason, this struck a chord with me. “I get that,” I said. “Like those little things that aren’t necessarily a memory like this happened and this happened. But one of those things that you never forget the feeling of. Like the way the air felt and the way the light was.”

As I spoke, I began to understand why she liked looking out at the waves while she told me all this. There was a calm about them, but also an energy. The water was this life giving, life taking force, a sort of two in one. And it made me feel terribly fleeting. I wanted to do something then. Right then. Something I would feel and remember in my senses that way. I thought about kissing her, but then I thought I would save that for another time, assuming, of course, that there would be another time.

Instead, I grabbed her hand, and held it tight without worrying about my sweaty palms. I just felt her thin, soft fingers in mine, and tried to memorize how they hooked around my own hand, surprisingly strong and purposeful.

We walked out of the water soon after and lay in the sand until three in the morning, side by side, never saying a word, never touching. My heart pounded in my chest the whole time, wondering what my parents would think about me getting back so late, wondering what Arvid thought of me. I was inclined not to care, however, because right then, I was feeling something specific, something so impossible to replicate that no amount of nervousness would make me stand and leave.

Author's Note

Does this grab your interest? What do you think of the first impression of the characters? Is there enough or too little about how they end up where they are?

Reviews

[Jarin R. S.]

The long and short of it is that the beginning was stumbling just a little bit, I really had to pushed through the first couple of paragraphs to grasp my attention. However, being the optimist that I am, saving the positives for last. I felt as though the chapter really gelled together perfectly.

Cole, the main protagonist, I didn't enjoy him nearly as much as Arvid
. His thoughts. Insecurities that only a woman would care about. Especially that just graduated high school that care about his large hairy feet. Instead, he should be thinking about girls, video games, sex, school, his friends .

However, Arvid’s character was immaculate. Being the optimist that I am. She really tied the entire chapter together. Because when I was reading Cole's part, I kind of felt detached from the character. However, when I read her dialogue and her philosophy, that really quenched my thirst for a spectacular character. She is shrouded in mystery, abundant in wisdom. And the chemistry between the two was nearly perfect.

If Cole had been a tad more masculine. Then this chapter would have been a marvelous start to a already promising book. What I would do is I would go back and rewrite Cole's insecurities, his thought patterns. You can keep them awkward, but about other things other than his appearance. And then just build the book from here.

[Hailey Bruce]

Thank you very much! I really appreciate your feedback and can definitely see where you are getting that. This is very hellpful