It’ll be a Sad Day in Rim Dorm
Graffiti on the bathroom wall read ‘Crust on the Rim.’ Mia called residents of Rim Dorm ‘Rim Rats.’ I liked to say all the girls in Rim Dorm were drunken sluts who cut themselves and talked about suicide. Or I liked to say the innocent and unsuspecting in Rim Dorm got mugged and raped. Or, I liked to say that at Rim Dorm, we were open-minded and accepting. After a breakout of bedbugs in Mazama Dorm, people living down there were relocated to Rim Dorm. “Send’em up,” I said. “The more the merrier,” I said. “Up here in Rim Dorm, we welcome the downtrodden and contagious, bedbugs and all, with open arms.”
With our symbiotic sense of entitlement, Bridget Barnes and I thought we were better than all of them. Our wit, charisma, and apathetic intellect gave us license to do whatever we damn well pleased. Like a spoiled prince and princess in a walled city of feudal Europe, we exploited the peasants. Like pampered heir apparents on a sprawling Edwardian estate, we terrorized the servants.
All I ever said was that I thought Summer was pretty. Hailing from the island of Taiwan, Summer wasn’t her real name, but an American name she’d taken on because he real name sounded too Taiwanese. A virgin when I’d first made her acquaintance, and not much of a conversationalist, because she couldn’t speak or understand the English language too well. Eight years my junior, she lied, placing her age at six years my junior, as if that made our whole affair less taboo.
She gave me all her trust. She let me have a birth-given innocence valued as priceless across all classes, cultures, and religions through all recorded time. Bridget affectionately referred to it as “a V-card.”
To allegations that I took what I wanted and tossed her aside, I plead guilty as charged. To further allegations that I did so thoughtlessly and shamelessly, I plead no contest, and would like to implicate Ms. Bridget A. Barnes as a co-conspirator. Bridget and I thought we were the epitome of fast, young, Americans, poster children for selfish white devils who’d had all the romance beat out of them by the likes of Brett Easton Ellis and trashy reality television.
All I ever said was that I thought Summer was pretty. And she was, she was very pretty. Standing at around five feet, eight inches tall, top-heavy chest proportions, nice curves at her waist rounding down to her long strong legs, Summer was a very pretty girl. Her eyes were dark brown, so dark brown the irises blended with the pupils, so looking into them was like staring down a black abyss. Her eyes, her body, her long black hair, gave her the sterile and scandalous beauty of a geisha.
I told my friend Sander, “You gotta admit, she is very pretty. I think she looks like a geisha, and that’s fucking hot, man. Do you get what I’m saying? Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“I guess so, if you mean she seems vacant, cold, dead and empty like a geisha would be, then I guess she’s pretty. If you’re into that kind of thing.”
I worked for Xanterra Parks and Resorts, employed as a bellman in the historic Crater Lake Lodge in beautiful Crater Lake National Park. The job title required me to wear black slacks, a white collared shirt, and a maroon vest and tie. None of my previous jobs ever required me to wear a tie, and I thought I looked quite sharp with the addition of this formal fashion accessory in my work uniform. I carried a master key for every guest room in the lodge. Should I be away from the front desk if my services were needed, a front desk agent paged me over the walkie-talkie I kept in my vest pocket. It was my job to load guests’ luggage onto a brass rail bellman cart, wheel it through the halls, and unload the baggage in their room. Other responsibilities included, but were not limited to, sweeping, washing windows, emptying trash cans, making up roll-away beds, and stocking the public restroom with soap and paper products.
I checked in at the H.R. office on May 15th. After sitting through two days of self-serious, yet ultimately time-wasting orientation and safety seminars, the lodge opened and I started work. Hospitality staff at ski resorts, cruise ships, or National Parks, led seasonal migratory lives. Given the remote and desolate location of the workplace, meal plans and housing were provided to the staff for a fee deducted from our paychecks, with some money paid back as a bonus if we completed our employment agreement and worked through our full contracted period of time.
I lived on the second floor of Rim Dorm, a building situated a quarter mile away from the lodge at the end of a narrow one lane road. The dormitory wasn’t much better than a barn that’d been poorly weatherized and hastily divided on the cheap into a sloppy arrangement of rooms. A co-ed dorm, there were separate communal bathrooms for the men and women. The men’s room had a row of three sinks, opposite three toilet stalls and two urinals. The showers were in a tiled enclosure commonly found in prisons, army barracks, concentration camps, or outdated fitness clubs. For the luxury of privacy while showering, a checker board pattern of poles hung from the ceiling and draped down the shower curtains like hanging cubicles.
The first month was one of lonely transition. I got sick, with a cough like thunder and congestion like a pound of peat moss on my face. Return employees called it the Crater Crud. All the newcomers got it. The sickness was like a form of christening. The food served in the Employee Dining Room (commonly referred to by the staff as the EDR) was barely edible. 20 feet of snow lingered on the ground. For weeks the weather was consistently gray, cold, and wet. Visitation in the lodge was infrequent. If not shoveling the stoop, I spent my shifts racing guests to the door so I could hold it open and smile. One lady, who’d only come in for lunch in the dining room, tipped me five bucks out of pity.
When the weather would begin to improve and the mid-summer months brought more vacationers to the park, more staff would show up until the whole of Rim Dorm would be filled to its full hedonistic capacity, with four or sometimes five to a room. Arriving as early as I did, I only had one roommate, Aaron, and the daily life in the halls and common room of Rim Dorm was relatively quiet.
Aaron had the pudgy build and soft face of a maniac Baby Huey. Supposedly his résumé boasted of six years line cook experience, but he worked as a dishwasher in the lodge. Through nights of below freezing temperatures, he kept the window wide open, even though I was afflicted with the Crater Crud, and he was fully aware of my illness. Evenings when I was in bed trying to sleep, he regularly invited people in for impromptu parties. Throughout the night, he’d enter the room to retrieve an empty duffle bag, then depart leaving the light on and the door wide open. He liked to do that too when I was trying to sleep. It may sound inconceivable, but after living with him, no doubt crossed my mind when I heard rumors he spent a majority of his waking hours under the influence of LSD.
Laura worked preparing and serving meals to the staff in the EDR. Thin as a string bean, her face was a delicate bird skull of wide forehead and cheekbones. Soft-spoken and coy, she conducted herself with a meek friendliness. In the wee hours of the morning, she slipped in with Aaron. They lay together in his bed. He whispered, “Roll over on your back.” I heard her moan exactly twice.
Laura liked to do puzzles.
She died a few days later.
She passed away in the night and her corpse was discovered in her room in Rim Dorm after she failed to show up for work.
Some unique décor in the lodge’s great hall were table lamps with a wood carved figure of a squirrel as the base. The stone fireplace’s ornamental hearth grill were two squirrel silhouettes. All adorable and cute, the choice of animal seemed strange. I saw plenty of chipmunks. I saw them on a daily basis around the lodge and Rim Dorm, but throughout my whole summer living and working in Crater Lake National Park, I never saw a single squirrel. The great hall and lobby walls were either quarried stone masonry or slats of ponderosa pine timbers. The furniture varied from wicker chairs to deep couches of rich crimson leather. Crater Lake Lodge’s most appealing feature and biggest draw, the veranda, accessible through double doors off the great hall. The porch ran the entire back length of the lodge and provided wicker rocking chairs where one could sit, order a cocktail and some appetizers, and enjoy an unobstructed panoramic view of Crater Lake.
Humans stuck together on top of a mountain can quickly revert to fear and superstition once Death stops by to collect a member of their community. After her passing, Laura’s roommates were quickly reassigned to other rooms. It was as if her death had stained the space with bad luck and evil spirits that would follow any poor soul who willingly continued to slumber there. Tim Mahoney, the Head Xanterra Operations Manager, dismantled Laura’s bed frame and personally loaded it, along with her mattress, in his company truck, and hauled it off to be disposed of.
Then she showed up. I can’t plot out the chronology of our sordid trajectory together. Maybe it was because she lived next door to me. Maybe it was because we had the same days off. Or maybe, as I told myself early on when our new alliance was so fast and strong it scared me, maybe she was only my friend because I had a car and she didn’t.
Bridget Barnes vibrated an electric grit and vitality in her every movement. Coy smiles came as involuntary reflexes for Bridget. Her companionship came as easy, natural, and comforting as putting on a pair of warm socks in the winter. A happy-go-lucky girl, I became enraptured by the slash-and-burn devastation her happiness and luck left in its wake. She had eyelashes like a giraffe, and irises the fertile green color of pond scum on black water under in light of the moon.
I learned a lot from Bridget. She schooled me on the powerful evil magic of amoral seduction. I’d always thought of myself as a man of some integrity. Not much, but some. Bridget proved otherwise. Had I ignored Bridget’s advisement, Summer could have boarded the plane back to Taiwan with her chastity still sealed up tight in its fleshy purse between her legs. Her virginity given instead to a nice boy who wanted to treat her right. Bridget taught me to raise questions like, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’
My second roommate Austin showed up. He cut his own hair, and you could tell by the uneven chip-chops of nicks and cowlicks. I walked in the room after working the evening shift to find him covered in a sleeping bag, wearing all his clothes, resting on a bare mattress.
“Oh, hey, what’s up? You must be the new roommate,” I said.
He grunted an unintelligible response.
“I’m the bellman here. I work at the Lodge. What are you going to be doing?”
“Retail.”
“That’s cool, man. So, I guess you just got in today. How was the trip?”
He responded in an over enunciated and nasally, “I’m tired now and I want to sleep.”
I’ll note this entire conversation was conducted with me standing by my bed, and Austin lying in bed on his side with his back to the room.
“Well, alright. I guess I’ll leave you alone to get some rest.”
Austin turned out to be a creature of compulsive habit. He was in bed before eight o’clock every night, and was up by five every morning. Austin also turned out to be cheap. He never paid for meals in the EDR, opting instead for a constant diet of the free cereal, toast, and salad bar. He kept an outdated Acer laptop locked up in a briefcase under his bed. I’d made the mistake of letting him use my laundry detergent once. After that occasion he helped himself to more anytime I wasn’t around until he’d used it all. He spent his days off walking, sometimes walking as far as Klamath Falls or Diamond Lake. I’d heard rumors he was diagnosed with a mild form of Aspergers Syndrome.
The afternoon I hiked up Garfield Peak was when I first laid eyes on Bridget Barnes. The trail’s close proximity to the lodge and its astounding panoramic views make it a popular one. Xanterrorists and Rim Rats liked to hike up it and smoke pot after work.
In a gulley pitted near the summit, she tossed snow in the air. “We should have brought sleds.” The ringing quality of her voice passed through my ears and bored into my brain. She’d made the hike up with her co-worker Will as kind of like a date. Recognizing them as Xanterrorists, but not wanting to intrude on their outing, I kept my distance and smoked a cigarette before I set off on my lone hike down.
That tricky mistress fate intervened. Bridget began the hike down not long after, and quickly came up on my heels.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“I’m Bridget.”
“That’s a pretty name. It has a nice ring to it. Do you live in Rim Dorm?” It turned out she did. We were neighbors.
“Oh, so you must be the one I always hear through the walls having sex,” she said. “So this is what you look like.”
“It’s not me. Unfortunately, I haven’t known a woman in the biblical sense for almost two years, sorry to say. It must be my roommate Aaron.”
“Oh. That’s okay. From the sounds of things it never lasts long, then I hear the door open and close.”
“I guess I’m just glad I’ve been able to sleep through it.”
Will didn’t say much the whole walk down, and abruptly left, catching the employee shuttle to Mazama Dorm as soon as we returned to the lodge.
“I’ll let you two pass if you want,” I said. “I don’t want to impose on your hike.”
“No-no, that’s okay,” Bridget answered. “The trail has some steep drop-offs, so you can go first.”
I caught glimpses of her walking behind me when I glanced over my shoulder. Deep blue flashes of her knitted sweater. Her curious, mousey hair looped in a sloppy knot on top of her head. The irregular, colorful, stringy designs in the fabric of her pants. “Where’d you get those,” I asked. “From the circus?”
“No. Mexico.”
Mexico? She’d traveled through Mexico?
Yes. Yes she had. And California. And Sri Lanka. And Maryland. She regaled me with the highlight reel of her life for the whole hike down. At one point, when the trail was narrow and slippery, she grabbed my arm and braced herself against me for balance.
Bridget was employed in Crater Lake National Park as a housekeeper for the cabins at Mazama village.
Four guys from Turkey showed up to work. One of them was my new roommate. His name was Mahmet, but another of the other Turkish guys was named Mahmet also (apparently Mahmet is a popular name in Turkey) so to avoid confusion, he asked to be addressed as Bilal. Bilal had dimples, and despite his sun bronzed skin, blushings of crimson often flared through his cheeks. He wore a bright orange windbreaker that I thought looked very snappy on him.
I’ve developed this theory that anyone who is unable to sleep unless an upright fan is running, no matter the temperature or the season, at their bedside every night, that person probably grew up in public housing or a trailer park. Aaron kept an upright fan running at his bedside every night.
A flare up in uneasy roommate relations happened soon after Bilal’s arrival when he closed the window above Aaron’s bed, turned off Aaron’s fan, and cranked up the baseboard heater, before crawling under the sheets of his own bed. Aaron, probably all strung out from an acid trip come-down, burst in. Displaying all his usual behavior, he flipped on the light, stomped through the room, and left the door wide open.
“Who closed this window? Who turned off my fan? Why’s the heat cranked up? It smells like Turkish asshole in here.”
How did Aaron know what that smelled like, and why did he make the comment with such authority?
He pointed an accusing finger at me. “Did you do it?”
“Nah man, I didn’t touch any of that shit over there.”
Not only was Bilal suffering the stress of transitioning into a new job in a strange land, he had just recently caught a case of Crater Crud. “I closed the window.” He sat up in bed flailing his arms in anger as he spoke. “I turned up the heat. It is cold outside, and I am sick.” I’ll say here, that for a non-native speaker, Bilal had a masterful command of the English language.
“I have the fan by my bed,” Aaron countered with his infantile diplomacy. “The window is above my bed. The baseboard thermostat is in this corner. This is my corner of the room. All this stuff is in my area, so don’t touch it.”
Bilal jumped from his bed and continued to flail his arms in anger as he spoke. “You are not the only person in this room. There are three other people who live here. I am not used to the cold and I became sick from it.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to America, bitch.” With that, Aaron grabbed an empty duffle bag and stormed out of the room.
From that day forward, Aaron and Bilal were no longer on speaking terms, which, as you can imagine, made the mood in our room a tense one. If Aaron was brought up in conversation, Bilal identified him as ‘fat ass.’ “I do not care about that fat ass. He is a fat ass.”
I liked Bilal. Bilal was my friend, even though he had a confrontational arrogance and stubborn entitlement that often ignited uncomfortable situations, I still liked him. He was my favorite roommate.
He got the real run-around and had a rough time trying to buy a 12 pack of beer in the Klamath Falls Wal-Mart. When asked for ID, he produced his passport, which should have been a perfectly acceptable form of identification. The cashier was unsure, and had to check it with the head cashier. The head cashier was leery too, and he asked the front end supervisor. The front end supervisor brought in the assistant store manager for a second opinion. Soon four members of Wal-Mart leadership stood in the 12 items or less lane, engaged in deep discussion over the matter.
“Look at them,” Bilal said. “They are all idiots. One person is an idiot and doesn’t know what to do, then he calls over another idiot for help. Then a bunch of idiots are standing up here having a meeting of idiots.” Eventually they let him buy the beer, even though he called them all idiots well within their range of hearing.
Then a bunch of kids from Taiwan showed up to work. They arrived in waves over a two week period in late May. Some worked as campground attendants in Mazama. Some worked as housekeepers at the Lodge. Most of their smiling wholesome faces were put to work behind the sandwich counter or cash registers in the Rim Village café and gift store. I can’t speak for the whole nation, but I will vouch for the hardy militia of Taiwanese Rim Rat Xanterrorists living in Rim Dorm and working in Crater Lake. They went about their jobs with the humility and good humor of monks. Always smiling, they made sandwiches, rung out souvenirs, and counted out change with exacting professionalism and patience. In an onslaught of bigoted irritable tourists all through May, June, July, and August, our Taiwanese counterparts got the job done, one task at a time, without even breaking a sweat.
I was smoking a cigarette out front of Rim Dorm. Perhaps because I’m tall, speak with a deep voice . . . and I’m white, the three Turkish men trusted me as an embodiment of American strength. Arhkahn, Kumal, and Mahmet tried to ingratiate themselves by offering me some sunflower seeds. After my daily excesses of coffee and cigarettes, the last thing my sticky mouth needed was sunflower seeds. Yet they kept insisting, so I obliged.
Kumal couldn’t speak much English. The most I ever heard from him was “yeah, okay, hello, what’s up, buddy?” From what I could tell, Mahmet couldn’t speak any English at all. Sucking a cigarette in deep angry drags, while he threw his arms in wild gestures, and ranted off something in Turkish, was the only way I’d ever seen him communicate. Arhkahn spoke English pretty well, so that left him as the translator.
“So do you like it here?” I asked, after I’d choked down a mouthful of sunflower seeds.
“No. Trees, mountains, it’s all boring, man. Fuck that. I like to go out to the clubs at night. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York. I like to go to the clubs to fuck girls. All the girls here,” he paused to scrunch up his face in disgust. “Ugly. I would not fuck them.”
“Umm, you got a job in the wrong place, I guess. Sorry our girls aren’t better looking for you.”
“One night, in Amsterdam, I have sex with two girls from Lithuania, and one from Poland.”
“Wow.” I tired to suck down my cigarette as fast as I could. “What do you think about Americans? Are they treating you okay up here?”
“Yeah,” Ahrkahn got distracted and broke off the conversation to rattle some Turkish with Kumal and Mahmet.
“What? What are they saying? What are you guys talking about?”
“They say, in America, one thing they do not like here. In Turkey, it is very important to love and respect the mother. Mother very important in Turkish culture. In America you say ‘mother fuck,’ ‘fuck your mother,’ ‘mother fucker,’” he paused again to scrunch his face in disapproval. “It no good.”
I later found out from Bridget that Ahrkahn once had sex with a transvestite prostitute because he didn’t find out the prostitute was a transvestite until after he’d already paid.
My roommate Bilal, either by circumstances or by choice, was black balled from the Turkish trio. His rare interactions with Ahrkahn, Kumal and Mahmet were brief, removed, and strained. I figured it was because he was smarter than them, which may have been part of it. The underlying reason, he explained, he was a different kind of Muslim than them.
Bilal expressed an interest in the plight of Native Americans in our country’s history. Only he called them “Indigenous People.”
I laid in my bed reading. Bilal sat in his bed, sending text messages to friends in Turkey. Through the open window above Aaron’s bed, I heard a heated argument of voices speaking in a foreign tongue float in from the parking lot below.
“Bilal, can you understand that? Are those the other Turkish dudes?”
“Yes I can. Yes it is.”
“What is it? What language are they speaking? Hindi? Arabic?”
“No. It’s Turkish. It’s the language we speak in Turkey.”
“What are they saying?”
“It is nothing. They are acting like children.”
“Why? It sounds like they’re arguing? Are they arguing?”
“Yes. It is embarrassing.”
“What are they arguing about?”
“One is like, ‘Oh, how could you do that, man? You know I like her.’ Then the other says, ‘She came to me. She was talking to me. I cannot help that even if I know you like her.’”
The argument bored me after hearing its translation. “Oh.” I’d hoped it be something with higher stakes. Like maybe one insulted the other’s mother or something like that.
Bilial got out of bed, crossed the room, and leaned out the window to join in the conversation. The three yelled back and forth like that for a while until things quieted down.
Aaron burst in to retrieve an empty duffle bag. He stormed out, making sure to leave the light on and the door wide open.
So she took a ride with me. She took lots of rides with me. She took rides with me all over Southern and Central Oregon. I even once took her for a ride across the state line into Northern California.
“Hey, Bridget, you wanna come take a ride with me?” I asked her.
We drove around the Rim Drive. The twilit sky was purple and orange.
She told me she once worked on a baby elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka, so I asked, “Sri Lanka, eh?”
“Yup.”
“Baby elephants. That must have been pretty intense. What’d you do around them?”
“I fed’em. Mostly I just cleaned up their poop. It was some program I found on the internet.”
“Why Sri Lanka?”
“I wanted to go to another country someplace far away, but a country nobody wants to go to. Sri Lanka seemed right. I mean, have you ever heard of anyone going on vacation to Sri Lanka?”
“No. Except you, just now.”
“I was kind of seeing one of the local guys there. Then I found out he was married with kids.”
“Then why’d you go with him.”
“I didn’t know he had a family. The town was so small, and I was the only white girl there, I didn’t even want anyone to know I was going out with him. He had some cover story where my name was saved in his phone as some girl he worked with.”
“You were a li’l home wrecker.”
“The orphanage I worked at was kind of shady. I was supposed to live there, but they didn’t have a room for me. So I slept at some woman’s house, and it was so small that her kids had to sleep on the floor in another room so I could get the bed.”
“That didn’t bother you? Displacing her children and taking their room.”
“The whole thing was shady because the mahouts – that’s what they call the people who take care of the elephants – everyone in town knew they were alcoholics. The orphanage was shut down after I left because one of the elephants was beaten to death.”
“At least it didn’t happen on your watch.”
I took her for a ride up to Newberry Volcanic Monument. We stopped at Paulina Lake Lodge, which had the blue collar charm of dated motor-inns: little cabins, peeling paint, outboard motor boat rentals, and a store with overpriced beer and fishing caps. The men’s room had a metal tough for the urinal. The women’s restroom was a wooden hut with a screen door. Two housekeepers wearing spandex and sweatshirts stood outside with their cleaning carts. They asked Bridget if there was enough soap in the dispenser. It’d been running low last time they checked, and they were about to fill it up again.
“Oh, no, it’s fine,” she answered smiling. Then, feeling some housekeeper solidarity, she added, “You’re right. It is starting to run low, but don’t worry. There was enough left for me to wash my hands.”
We walked through mounds of obsidian rocks on a hillside of obsidian rocks in a place called obsidian flow. She received a text message.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“This guy. I met him is Sri Lanka.” After their tryst, he’d taken a vacation to Vegas. He paid for Bridget’s ticket to meet him there. He paid for her hotel room. “He’s all a serious Muslim that didn’t drink or gamble, so I’m like, ‘why come to Vegas?’ right? Plus, he was there with his brother who couldn’t speak English, and he didn’t want his brother to know that we were having sex. It was all awkward and kind of boring since I couldn’t gamble or drink around him, because he was all Muslim. But at least he paid for everything. That’s mostly why I went.”
“It sounds like you were his ticket to citizenship. He probably wanted to marry you to escape his shithole life in his shithole country.”
“Yeah, that was probably his plan, but, whatever.”
“Two guys in Sri Lanka? One with a wife and kids? Another who paid for your trip to Vegas?”
“They all liked white girls over there. So it was easy.”
I took her for a ride down to Ashland. We drove through the forest on Dead Indian Road. We stopped at a farmer’s market. Bridget liked those because she ate all the free samples. I bought fajitas at a food cart. The cashier was a tremendously beautiful redhead. The cups and straps of her bra were plainly visible under her loose fitting halter top.
“You like dirty girls, don’t you?” Bridget asked. “You like dirty hipster girls.”
We drank Ashland’s famous mineral water from the fountain in the square. I liked it. “That stuff’s good. Make a cocktail with that mineral water and some gin, and I’d drink that shit all day.”
We walked through Lithia Park. A group of young nuns sat in a semi-circle by a pond. They prayed in unison with their heads bowed. Then one played an acoustic guitar and they all sang a hymn.
We took a ride down to Chiloquin. We missed the turn off and Bridget proved to be a terrible navigator. “Just keep going, and we’ll see a sign,” she kept saying until we reached upper Klamath Lake.
I pulled to the side of the road. “Here, Bridget. Use my phone. Plug it into the GPS.”
“Does this thing have Siri?”
“I’m not sure. If it does, I’ve never used it.”
“Siri,” she demanded in a chirpy voice. “Siri, Siri . . . Siri. Siri. Siri . . . Siri . . . Siri. I can’t get it to work. Siri . . . Siri . . . Hello, are you there, Siri?”
“Bridget, you don’t need god damn Siri. Leave her alone. Do it the old fashion way with your fingers.”
I took her for a ride around Lake of the Woods. We turned off into Rocky Point. The narrow road decayed to potholes and gravel. We drove up steep hills and around sharp curves, past the cabins and covered boats and hitch trailers.
I parked my car by the boat launch. Bridget and I walked to the end of the dock. I took a sip from my water jug and lit a cigarette. She took pictures of the lake and the sky and the treeline.
“This kind of reminds me of Minnesota,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s the land of lakes, I’ve heard. 10,000 of’em.”
“In high school, I used to bone my boyfriend at boat launches. His parents didn’t like me. They didn’t want us having sex, so we had to screw in secret.”
At boat launches?
The evening began its early stages of twilight. Green water lapped against the dock pontoons. A woman walked by and stopped to take a picture. I waved and said hello. She said hello and waved back, then continued on her evening stroll. The cloudless expanse of sky was a soft hot-pink. I listened to Bridget tell her story of disapproving parents and illicit teenage sex. She was glowing like a porch light in the mist of balmy evenings.