Adam Gnade

“It was a long time ago.” I kneel on the carpet next to Maggie and take the photo and stare at Allysia—15 years old, pale skin and bare shoulders, flat chested, her green formal dress, cranberry-hair parted down the middle and pinned to the sides with yellow plastic barrettes. I try to remember her—sitting on the boardwalk at night under the street light pretending I was drunk so I could get away with trying to kiss her. And her looking up at me and how beautiful her eyes were. And kissing her and it was our first kiss, my first-ever kiss (not hers), the thing I’d waited for for so long. I see her terrible baggy jeans, her flannel shirts with the cuffs over her hands, her retarded brother Maury with his gentle, cow-eyed stare. “Sistuh!” he would say. “Sistuh, bring me hugs!” Sweet kind little Maury. Gone four years now. Four years under the ground in the Sherman cemetery. Their mom a year later. Breast cancer. It all happened so fast.

I remember the smell of her room. The horrible sour cheese and dog poop smell of her sneakers the day I picked her up from school in the rain. The ripe tomato smell of sweat. The salt-chlorine smell of her on my fingers the first time I put my hand down her pants.

I hear Allysia’s mother cooking dinner in their kitchen, greasy vegetable soup, a steaming clattering pot, her little sister sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, small and longhaired, singing along with a car advertisement on the TV—Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan moves youuuu.

I see Allysia sitting on the edge of her tiny bed, fully dressed again, tying the laces of her shoes after we’d fooled around for hours, hours of kissing and at the end just down to her panties and socks and nothing else, her bra off finally after weeks of dreaming of it and then the sadness and a shock to see her back in clothes and knowing I had to leave. The singer on the radio singing, Oh my life it’s changin’ every day, every possible way. I see her clunky pink phone and answering machine next to the bed covered in cartoon cat stickers and I see her drawings of angels on the walls, her school books in a colorful stack by the door—some of them with covers made from brown grocery bags. One of them with my name and hers in Crayola marker—curled together with green marker ivy.

I see her and I feel nothing. I was so in love but she’s a ghost to me now. Someone I saw on TV and knew as a character. A face in the newspaper.

“I think she goes to art school in New Hampshire. Or Vermont,” I say. “Yeah, Vermont. Vermont. I barely remember her.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Maggie says playfully. “She’s cute. She looks like a little field mouse. You guys look happy.”

“We were. I mean, for a while we were. You know how it is.”

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)