Page 35 of Even After Sunset

“Yes,” she huffs. “I’m fine.”

See?Like I said.

I’m about to turn away again but notice three bright words written in bubble letters across the ass cheeks of her yellow striped panties. I squint, trying to make out what they say.

And then I chuckle: “Wait… Do your underwear say—”

She whips around and catches me checking her out and plunges back into the water so quickly that it actually makes another loud splash, cutting me off mid-sentence.

Then she glares at me as she gets settled a few feet to my right, against the same smooth rock I’m resting my arm on.

“You go girl.” She finishes curtly for me. “That’s what it says on my underwear, okay?” And then she adds: “And I thought you promised not to turn around until I was sitting in the water.”

“Well, I didn’t realize you were going tocanon-ballyour ass in here.”

Her cheeks redden. Man, she embarrasses easy.

“I didn’t cannonball,” she says indignantly. “I fell.”

I tilt my head from side to side, like I’m pondering the legitimacy of her statement.

“Okay, fine.” I concede. “But if we’re gonna get all nit-picky, then I believe the sentence on the back of your undiesactuallysays: ‘you gogrrrrl’.” I growl the last word, drawing it out. “A bunch of ‘r’s. Totally not the samething as ‘you go girl’.”

Jackie rolls her eyes, her cheeks still as red as the lobsters that never even made an appearance at yesterday’s Lobster Festival.

“It’s a moot point,” she says. “Because you weren’t supposed to be checking out my butt.” And then she adds pointedly: “Remember?”

I laugh.

“I couldn’t evenseeyour butt because of the novel written across your underwear.”

She rolls her eyes. Again. She laughs though and slaps my arm playfully, like she used to do when I told a raunchy joke when we were kids.

We both sit in silence after that, looking up at the waterfall just a few feet away. The sun is getting lower and the light that filters its way through the leaves shimmers off the surface of the water. It’s honestly one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Even the sky beyond the leafy trees above us is a soft, cloudless pink. And in this moment right now, I am happy.

I can’t even remember the last time I was happy.

Jackie trails the tips of her fingers slowly back and forth across the water and it makes tiny ripples.

“So… what do you think of your first waterfall?”

“I love it,” I say, before I can think to filter the raw-ness of my response.

Her eyes go wide and the corners of her lips lift into a full-face smile that makes me glad I was honest.

“Me too,” she says. “It’s really beautiful here.”

After a while, the air gets cooler—still warm but not scorching like it has been all day. And the sky is going from pink to soft orange. ‘Peach’, Jackie calls it—because even with colors, she is precise and categorical.

My mind inevitably returns to the shit that went down last week, and the fact that I’m kicked out of my house and stuck in this temporary baby-sitting situation with Jackie. And while most people probably think about dinner plans in the evening, or tv binging or something mundane like that, my mind instinctively shifts to liquor. I’m not proud of it, but it’s become part of my routine. It’s the only way I can get any sleep: by dousing my conscience withenough liquor to drown out any of the nightmares that usually wake me if I try going to sleep sober.

The silver lining is that my memories will probably be so pickled one day from all the alcohol that I’ll have no trouble sleeping at the drop of a hat once I hit my forties.

Like I said before, I’m not an alcoholic or anything. It’s just a coping mechanism I stumbled across a couple of years after my parents died, when night after night of being woken up by nightmares had me screaming into my pillow and wiping my hands over and over against the sheets because I wassurethere was still blood on them. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I started staying later and later at friend’s houses or going to parties—any outlet that made it easier to push sleep later and later. And once I passed out after my first real bender when I was around thirteen, and woke up after almost five straight hours of sleep without a nightmare, it was a game changer. I’d found a tonic to cure my diseased sleeping pattern.

It was harder at Trenton. At first. But then I found three or four guys who became my “suppliers”. They hooked me up with a steady influx of rye and vodka in exchange for favors I’m admittedly not proud of. Namely, I was their muscle: if they needed someone roughed up (or several people roughed up), I was the one to do it. Which also meant I took the fall a lot of the time when shit went down. It’s the reason I went in to juvie for seven months and came out after more than two years.

Like I said: I’m not proud of it, but I needed the liquor. It worked. And it still does, when I can get my hands on something.Anything. Although ironically, it’s been harder to get a steady supply since I’ve been out of juvie. So most of the time, I walk around like a goddamn zombie, caught between wanting desperately to give in to the fatigue, and fighting it other times with every bone in my body.

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