The drive to the pier passed both at light speed and a sloth’s pace. The world around her was melting, bleeding together, time speeding up and lurching to a stop all at once. She guessed she had five or ten minutes at most to make it there before he did something drastic, something he could not undo. She had no idea what she was headed for, and she almost didn’t want to find out. If she were to stumble upon purplish police lights, crowds of white-faced beachgoers staring into the water, a body bag being loaded into the hollow gaping end of an ambulance, all the remaining love in her life gone in a winter afternoon…
Autumn had always figured it would be like this, that she would run from love in the end. What she never expected was finding a love worth running back to.
~
Autumn Mahal buried her best friend on a muggy Saturday in July. As they lowered Summer into the ground Autumn noted that she didn’t feel like she was dreaming so much as falling, tumbling backwards down a mountainside, unable to stop anything or anyone around her. By the time the “celebratory” reception rolled around, she found herself standing in her best friend’s dining room that still smelled like her, bruised and breathless, unsure of whether she even had anything left in her to destroy anymore. She knew she had truly reached rock bottom when not even the act of judging the questionable sartorial choices of her various neighborhood frenemies, which was her usual method of passing the time, stoked any joy in her. It was as if the great hand of God himself had reached up and turned off the light above her, and there was nothing she could do to step back into the sun. Even though it was barely July, Summer was gone, and nothing in the world mattered anymore. So Autumn turned to cocktail wieners.
As her family and friends milled about, all lost in the fog of shock and grief that descends when a young person is taken out from under a community, Autumn wandered over to the food area and felt like jumping out of her stupid unexfoliated skin and disappearing into the humid Florida air. Being at Summer’s house felt so wrong, no matter how much everyone said they were “honoring her memory” by not running from her old life. Autumn felt like a grave robber, an unwelcome visitor, that one creepy dude that just won’t leave you alone at closing time, no matter how hard you try to evade him. She could feel Summer everywhere, and she didn’t want to. Not yet, at least. She wasn’t ready to let it in. It all felt so recent, like she’d been walking these streets with Summer an hour ago. And she didn’t like it at all.
A girl from high school, Victoria, wandered over and tried to make small talk as Autumn ate. She suffered from a condition Autumn liked to call Kanye Face, wherein someone looked so smug and obnoxious all the time, you got the urge to punch them in the face even when they weren’t saying anything. Summer herself had never particularly liked this girl, actually. Why is she even here? Autumn heard herself think as the girl started blabbing about whatever. For days she had been posting rant after rant on social media, casting Summer as one of her best friends even though they had barely known each other. And Autumn felt the anger biting at her vocal chords from the moment she got a whiff of Victoria’s cloud of cheap Walgreens perfume.
“Like, I was just telling my mom, we will never recover from this!” Victoria shrieked as she piled her plate with carbs. “It’s just so wrong, and such a tragedy, and I can’t even process-”
“I know,” Autumn said, looking down at Victoria’s outfit. “Pairing that eye shadow with that skirt was indeed a tragic choice, but then again, that’s what wine is for, isn’t it?”
Victoria froze and stared at Autumn, who came closer, nostrils flaring. “Now, if I remember correctly, you met Summer approximately two times, and neither of those were particularly memorable experiences for her. However, if you looked at your Facebook wall right now, you’d think you were practically sisters – and there was nothing my best friend hated more than a social media showboat. So, let’s remedy this situation. You can shut your trap, take your skinny little ass outside, and tell the rosebushes all about your fake misery – I’d appreciate that. Oh, and I’ll be taking that, thanks,” Autumn said as she took the plate holding the last red velvet cupcake out of Vitoria’s hands.
“Bitch,” Victoria whispered, turning maroon and skulking away. As she disappeared in a huff of red hair and rage, Autumn couldn’t deny that she felt awful. Why was she incapable of filtering her words, her emotions, her facial expressions? It was as if there was a direct line from her heart to sleeve, and nothing she did could help it. Summer would have had her by the hair for doing that, and she knew it. Why couldn’t she have just hated her silently and then gone home and talked shit about her on iMessage, like Summer would have?
Ugh, Summer. She still seemed to hover in the air, as if the world hadn’t snatched her away quickly enough, and the remains of her had managed to escape in vapor form. As soon as she got the news about her best friend’s botched surgery a week before, Autumn promptly fell the fuck apart. She screamed and cried and raged and threw a lamp across the room and pushed down her neighbor’s swing set and drank every ounce of alcohol she could get her hands on. She felt so hopeless, so useless, even as she basically crawled over to the vigil at Summer’s house that night where her friends and family were gathering. And later, as the brutal finality of it set in, the questions started coming: what did she know? Was it painless? What the fuck happened? She simply could not wrap her head around the concept that she would never again walk across the street and find Summer watching bad TV in her Florida room with her mom and her little brother, so she stopped trying. After the vigil she cried herself to exhaustion and fell into the deepest sleep of her life, accompanied by the knowledge that she was different forever.
But the very next morning, after she recovered from the horrible cloud that set in when she was jerked awake by her hangover at seven and remembered what had happened all over again, she pulled herself together and went about her business again. She brought a casserole to Ms. Johnson and she took Summer’s little brother Chase out to Rita’s Italian Ice and she made the decision to not be miserable. Her feelings about Summer could be dealt with later, in private, preferably with the company of a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a gang of deranged Real Housewives tossing Shih Tzus at each other or whatever. She didn’t have to acknowledge it now. She wasn’t going to give that asshole doctor who had killed her friend the satisfaction of seeing her decline like that. So instead of confronting the death, she left it alone, let the wound fester in her chest, unattended.
After sending off Victoria in high style at the reception, Autumn turned to her favorite hobbies: finger foods, cocktails, and light gossip. Although she wanted to remain thin for her dating profile on Spark, this new dating app, bacon-wrapped cocktail wieners trumped an active sex life any day, and so she started heaping her plate high with everything that appealed to her. Autumn had always hovered on the heavy side of healthy, and a bump in her nose and a pair of unfortunately thin eyebrows had ensured her singledom all throughout her twenties. A disastrous series of crash-and-burn diets and fad meal plans had simply made her remain sort of chubby. It’s not like she was huge, though: while she was not rail thin, she certainly was not so obese that she would be starring in some upcoming TLC show called My 900 Pound Life: I Can No Longer Leave My Home Without the Help of Industrial-Grade Construction Equipment. Autumn always ran back to what broke her, and in her case that was French sourdough bread. A dip into the waters of the online dating world had helped her situation, but not by much, and lately she’d resigned herself to dying alone in a pile of cats. Husbands were nice, but Netflix and wine had their merits, too, and the body of a sleeping feline could always be used as an armrest if need be. And she’d been content with her status as a crazy cat lady – up until a few years ago, at least.
Because there was a problem: everyone seemed to be getting fucking married. She could no longer throw a rock without hitting three engagement rings and a bridal veil, and it made her want to set fire to herself. She was adrift in a sea of couples, with nothing to cling to but her cats. Her Instagram feed was clogged with girls in exotic locales reaching for their boyfriends’ hands on oceanside cliffs at sunset, and all Autumn ever seemed to be reaching for was her spicy chicken burrito at Chipotle. All the storms in her life were chipping away at her, eroding her, and soon no joke or snarky remark would be able to save Autumn Mahal from herself, from her own cynicism she hid under her wits and her jokes and her sequins. So she ate again.
Summer’s mother had strictly ordered that this was to be a celebration, even though the word itself made Autumn sick. But she understood the sentiment: a young person had died. If they didn’t celebrate, they would lose their fucking minds. Similarly, sometimes Autumn thought that if she didn’t laugh at her life, it would do more than make her cry – it would eat her alive. And as she listened to a mutual friend talk about the latest engagements in town early in the afternoon, trying not to be depressed, she sensed someone watching her.
“Hi,” Hank Basara said, as Autumn’s other conversation mercifully faded away. Autumn turned to him. She’d had a few interactions with Hank, of course, none of which had left much of an impression, other than making her hate him. As fellow members of Summer’s group for people with medical problems, they were vaguely friendly in the way you might be friendly with the dude who lives across the street and always walks his dog past your car while you’re cleaning old Wendy’s bags out of your floorboard. He’d even taken her hand with his one remaining hand during the funeral, but then again, lots of people had held her hand over the past few days. Her best friend was dead – of course people were consoling her. At the time it had seemed harmless, but now she was skeptical.
He watched her with those firebrand black eyes of his, and Autumn wondered if he was looking for something he wanted, or something he wanted to hate. She suddenly stood taller, nervous she was letting him down in some way. Because all her life, Autumn had been plagued by some deep and desperate fear that she would never be enough. That whatever she was, whoever she was, would never be satisfactory. That if people got to know her, if they moved too close, they would be disappointed and turn away – that they would show up looking for Niagara Falls and find an afternoon puddle instead. And so the girl who thought she was a pigeon turned into a canary. If she was subpar, she would do all she could to hide it with jewel-toned dresses, mask it with witty putdowns, throw herself into the spotlight and do everything she could to hide her inferiority.
“Hi,” she said, and it sounded more like a question than a greeting.
“Shitty weather, huh?” he said. “Feels like a sauna out there.”
She gave him a look that said Go away, and when he didn’t listen, she rolled her eyes. “We’re at a funeral, and you’re talking about the weather?”
His face flickered. “Well, yeah. I figured I’d better talk about something besides Summer before I turned to wine too early.”
She paused, seeing him in a new light. What did he want?
“Look, Hank,” she finally said. “My best friend is dead. I don’t really want to talk about the weather. But my top is new, and I had to spend eighty dollars on it for a funeral I didn’t even want to go to, so if you want to compliment it, I won’t stop you.”
He glanced down at her chest. “Um…your top looks good?”
“Wow, thanks,” she blushed. “I totally wasn’t expecting any compliments today.”
“You’re welcome?”
She turned her attention back to the finger foods. “So, Hank, the last time you hit on me was at a goodbye session with our best friend, and now you’re doing it at her funeral. What gives?”
“Um, I don’t have the best track record?”
“I’ll say. Because, like I just pointed out, we are at a funeral right now.”
He bit his lip. “And you don’t think Summer wouldn’t have wanted her friends to be happy?”
Her eyes narrowed. “And you think Summer’s idea of pure bliss would be for a girl to get propositioned while she’s stuffing her face with hot dogs?”
He put up his arm. “Hey, I just wanted to talk. I’m not proposing marriage or anything. Do you wanna, like, go on a walk or something?”
Autumn sighed. She didn’t have time for this, and she had no idea how to process it. She’d always had a thing for the lost ones, the distancers, the phone call ignorers, the non-texter-backers, the ones who treated her heart like it was off-brand deli meat. And this worked for her: the distance kept her safe, and space was a friend of hers. A good-for-nothing father had made her create a prison for herself, called Autumn Island, population: one, and she was content with her life there. And that wasn’t about to be changed by an (admittedly charming) dude at a funeral.
She popped a final hot dog into her mouth, rubbed her greasy hands on a napkin, and smiled at him. “I’m sorry I flipped. I’m just sensitive right now, I guess. I’ll see you around, okay?”
At the tail end of the reception, Autumn grabbed a swig of white wine and prepared to hug her way through the dwindling crowd in the living room and disappear. All she wanted was to collapse into her pillow-topped bed, take half a Xanax, and forget that her best friend had been buried in the ground that day. But Hank wouldn’t let her.
She felt a whisper of something on the back of her arm, and she looked back to see him standing there, arm out, as if led there by some type of cue. His breath smelled faintly of whiskey, and words looked to be stuck on the end of his tongue, begging to escape.
“…Yes?”
He bounded up on the balls of his feet and looked around, breathing heavily like a kid about to jump off a diving board. “Listen, Autumn. I know I have one arm and a gruff disposition and stuff, but I can make a mean pot roast, and you hung the moon to me, and I just really want to hang out with you.”
And just like that, he unlocked her like a passcode.
Autumn looked at Hank with brand new eyes. He wasn’t exactly gorgeous: his skin was marked by light acne scars, his chin was maybe on the weak side of things, and his drab brown hair was shaggy and unkempt. But still, he was sort of cute, if only in a ‘hottest guy at the public library’ kind of way. Something about his eyes told Autumn something in there was worth exploring, and if not exploring, then at least not ignoring.
“Really?” she smiled. “You think I hung the moon? Aside from how gravitationally impossible and also damaging to one’s shoulder that sounds, that is just beyond sweet. Can I ask why, though?”
He stared at her.
“What?” she asked.
“I mean…I’ve had a thing for you for a while now. Wasn’t it obvious?”
She looked from side to side. “Uh, no?”
Hank stared at her, attempting to burrow into her confounding brain through those beautiful slate-black eyes of hers. He had always loved going to his grandmother’s house as a boy, mostly because of her fancy kaleidoscope she kept by her bay window in the sitting room. He would stare into that thing for hours, marveling at how something could be so interesting while he was so boring.
He swallowed. “I’m all dark, and you’re a kaleidoscope.”
She reminded herself to breathe. “Kaleidoscope…I think I can deal with that,” she finally said, and begrudgingly she followed him out onto the porch. Sinking onto a patio chair that smelled of Summer, Autumn ignored the history in this yard, deflected the memory of the night she and Summer had snuck vodka from her grandma’s cabinet and then vomited on the trampoline and tried to hide it with the hose. She pushed back at the scenes of Summer’s first and last big middle school party, which four people had attended, all out of pity. So she looked up and focused on the clouds.
Autumn had moved to Jax Beach as a child, and immediately she knew she would die there. Not in some depressing sense, just in a general one: she never ever wanted to leave. And why would she? The summers were blistering and beautiful, the homes were small and square and plain and comforting, even the palms were somehow lackluster in their faded green. But Autumn had never been one to deliberate, and so she stayed. And so here she was: twenty-four, with a shitty job, no marriage prospects, and a vicious form of breast cancer that may or may not have been in the process of returning. She wouldn’t find out for a month, at least, and she was trying to enjoy what she could before then. After Summer’s death, she couldn’t see another choice. She was going to win at life for her friend, or die trying. It was as simple and as serious as that.
And so there on Summer’s porch, at the end of her funeral, Autumn and Hank talked. And talked. They talked about their childhoods and what they wanted out of life and what terrified them and what disgusted them, which was basically everything. Autumn found herself opening up more and more – she had never met someone who was as grossed out by the world as she was. Soon they went deep, and nothing was off limits. Hank talked of the day he’d held a dying Iraqi child in his arms after a roadside bomb detonation, and Autumn spoke of the day she was diagnosed with cancer and her grandma fainted and fell down a staircase. They talked of the day they both realized Summer was going to die; they talked of the day Autumn learned to surf and the day Hank learned how to Jet Ski on a stopover in the United Arab Emirates. And as the sun fell into the west and the wine from Summer’s mom’s refrigerator really started flowing, they lowered their voices and spoke of how nobody would ever understand how much it hurt to be different. To be diseased. To be broken. To be incomplete. At one point, when the crickets started singing, Autumn was absolutely sure she felt Summer smiling.
“Hey” she asked after he pointed at something in the yard. “What happened?”
“Oh, you mean the bandage inside my bicep?” She nodded. “Here, I’ll show you.” Hank peeled back his shirtsleeve and slipped off a bandage to reveal a simple orange sun tattooed on the inside of his arm.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“I got it the night she died,” he said, his eyes going even blacker than they already were. “I was so fucking angry that I called all my friends to my house, got shit-house drunk, and told stories about Summer into the night. And then I kicked a wall and sprained my toe, but that’s a different story. Anyway, one of my buddies was a tattoo artist, and so he opened his shop at two in the morning to give me this, for her.”
“It’s a sun, like, for her name?”
“Not quite. Everyone knows how bad I was when I got out of the army, but she invited me to her Support Group and…fixed me.” He swallowed, lowering his voice. “This sounds cheesy, but it’s true: in the blackest time of my life, she was my sun, and I’ll never forget her.”
And Autumn was crying.
“Sorry for the truth bomb,” he said, slipping the bandage back into place. “I should just shut up.”
“No, it’s fine,” Autumn said, wiping her cheeks. “This just really fucking sucks. I miss her so much. I can even smell her right now…I feel like I’m dreaming, and I don’t know how to wake up.”
Hank bit his bottom lip. “Hey, let’s talk about something else. Want to hear my toe-spraining story?”
And so it went, into the night. Soon Autumn discovered she was having a good time, even though it was disgustingly humid and she was sweating like a Kardashian in church. She was really, truly enjoying herself. And Hank was, too. Soon he found the suit of armor that was his past falling away, the force field of Grumpy Army Hank shattering, and he was freed of the empty persona the world had forced him to become. Autumn’s laughter seemed to release him from himself, and all at once he could be Hank. Because you do not recover from being sent to a war you do not support, from waking up at dawn to patrol filthy streets full of people who hate you and don’t want you around, from watching people die on sidewalks in front of you. You bury the wounds as best as you can, but like hot coals under a seemingly dormant campfire, they are always there. And sometimes, at night, when you’re quiet, you can feel them burning.
Before they knew it, they were both solidly drunk at their best friend’s funeral. There was an air of this being wrong, somehow inappropriate, but there was also a libertine glee embedded in their revelry, too, because both of them knew that Summer would’ve loved this, and probably would’ve injected some wine into her feeding tube right there with them. And what else were they going to do – go home and fall apart in the isolation of their bedrooms? They were delaying the inevitable, sure, but they didn’t mind – not while the company was so good.
But soon Autumn started having too much fun, and she grew suspicious. This was going so well, it was alarming. The last time she’d been this comfortable with a guy, it had gone like this: they matched on Spark, a dating app. They had two wonderful dates in which he showed himself to be charming, funny, and improbably knowledgeable about early ‘90s Adam Sandler movies, the funny ones before he started playing the same schlubby dad with the unrealistically hot foreign-born wife that he portrayed in all his newer movies. And just like that, Autumn fell for him. The next thing she knew, he stopped returning her messages, and then he became Facebook official with a blonde from Autumn’s college, and then he immediately married her, God bless his merry soul. Now they had one-and-a-half children and were hopelessly trapped in a loveless marriage, or so Autumn hoped every night as she cursed him to hell during her evening prayers. All she’d ever wanted was a cute hipster boyfriend who would sit next to her at coffee shops and sip lattes while she yapped about her work drama – was that really such an unreasonable demand?
So she closed herself to Hank, right there on the porch. And she didn’t know if she would ever open up again. She’d done all this before, and she didn’t want to put herself through the next steps of this pointless song and dance. She wouldn’t be able to stand another twist of the knife, another near miss, another disappointment.
“I have to go,” she suddenly said, reaching for her purse and missing it by several inches due to her compromised motor skills.
“But I’m not done yet,” Hank said.
“I am.”
“Why?”
She turned to him, her eyes slits. “Look, Hank. I’m not a fan of going into things blindly, so I want to know what I’m dealing with here.”
“…You do?”
“Yeah. So I’ll ask you what my grandma asks people: what is your most basic truth?”
“My most basic truth?”
“Yep. Just hit me with it.”
He paused, staring at her in the crickety darkness of Summer’s backyard. “Well, since you’re asking…all you need to know about me is that Iraq did something to me that can never be undone.”
Off in the distance, a leftover firework popped in the July sky, making Autumn think of ocean waves and golden blonde hair and depthless hazel eyes.
“I have dormant breast cancer and a dead best friend,” Autumn said next. “Don’t talk to me about things that can’t be fixed.”
And then he was slipping down his seat towards her, and they were kissing on the lips, no tongue, and to Autumn it felt less like falling into something than soaring over it, leaving the only Earth she knew and entering something altogether extraterrestrial.
~
“Can I hang out with you again?” he asked when Autumn finally insisted she had to go.
“I don’t know.” And then the uneasiness hit her again, that old deep geyser of a thing telling her that somehow, somewhere, something wasn’t right. She didn’t know for sure, but something just whispered up from below: something has gone wrong. And the last time she’d felt it, Autumn had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“There’s something else you should know about me,” she said. She scooted back a little, and it felt weird.
“You were born with three nipples?”
“Oh, no, they found out that was just a mole. Anyway, it’s just that, like…I haven’t been exactly truthful about my cancer situation.”
“Ohh.” Fear sank in, made its presence known. “You said you were in remission?”
“I am, but…”
He sighed. “Ah. The dreaded ‘but.’”
Autumn hadn’t meant to hide her cancer news, per se. Lying wasn’t a usual option to her, unless one of her friends asked her if they looked good in their harem pants, because harem pants looked good on precisely two people, and Blake Lively was one of them. No, it was just that everyone was always so concerned about Summer, as usual, and she didn’t want to cause any more drama, and…well, she’d simply neglected to tell everyone about the chance of the reoccurrence of the cancer she’d supposedly been “cured” of two years ago. Because, quite frankly, having a diseased person like Summer in your life could be exhausting, and she didn’t want to rock the boat. Everything was always All About Them, and that was the nonnegotiable truth, as horrible and callous as it sounded. Not to mention that Autumn hated talking about her own health problems to begin with. Cancer was just a boring subject to Autumn, an excuse for healthy people to condescend to unhealthy ones. They just didn’t understand it. The world told Autumn she didn’t have cancer anymore, and that wasn’t true. Because when are you diagnosed with cancer you are diagnosed with it forever, no matter what the tests say. You can never un-feel the fear of not knowing when it could return, un-experience the anxiety of knowing it lurks in the cells of your body literally forever, un-send the bolts of terror that spike down into your chest every time you walk through a set of glass doors into the cool sterility of a medical building. You get cancer forever, it’s the rest of the world that thinks you’re cured. And the fear never really went away – it picked and prodded at you until sometimes, on your coldest nights, you wondered if there would be anything at all left to take away if it did return. A second cancer battle for Autumn would be like looters hitting a Wal-Mart a week after a hurricane left and the dust had settled, after everything had already been pillaged. What was the point?
“Yeah,” she told Hank. “It’s a shaky remission. Remission with an asterisk, if you will. Three days before Summer died, I went in for an appointment.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I’m good for now, but they found stuff they didn’t like, and they want me in once a month for the foreseeable future. They’re worried.”
“How worried?”
“Like, worried.” She got up. “I like you, and you’re really funny, and I can see where this is going, and I don’t want to waste your time.” And just like that, Autumn turned and walked into the soupy Florida twilight.
Autumn chided herself as she got ready for bed, back in her room across the street. She was stupid and reckless and she had gotten drunk at a funeral and kissed someone. No matter how hard she tried, it seemed like she was physically incapable of making good decisions. What kind of garbage monster was she, anyway?
Come to think of it, most of the time she didn’t even know who she was. The world had put her in a box and she was suffocating in it. Cancer survivor, immigrant, chubby person: she was none of those things. She was just Autumn, and she wanted someone to look at her and not search for what she was supposed to be, but see her, whoever that was, anyway. Sometimes she hated her stupid sucky life so much. She was homesick for places she’d never been before, sick with nostalgia for people she’d never met. There were colors out there she’d never seen and boys out there she’d never kissed and she wanted in on the action. She wanted to smell new types of foods and lay her eyes on new mountains and step into new seas and look down at marshy fields from between two roaring engines at thirty thousand feet and lie down at night into a warm bed and clutch the shoulder of someone she could call her own, forever. She wanted it all. She just had no idea how to get it.
~
Two days after the funeral, Autumn found herself at work. She felt like a war refugee, still smarting from the bomb of Summer’s death, and she figured work would be as worthy a distraction as any. Not that work was any more pleasant than burying herself in a pile of blankets in her bed. During her early twenties she’d treated her life like a burning building, somersaulting through an endless series of unpaid internships and assorted garbage occupations, fleeing anything that might turn out well for her, until she’d settled as a marketer for a company that manufactured pens. She absolutely hated it, but she couldn’t think of any other way to spend her time, especially after Summer’s death. The world was moseying on, even though hers had skidded to a stop. She knew that’s what Summer would have wanted, anyway, as she probably hated being center of attention from wherever she was just as much as she had on Earth. So the dead fish went with the flow.
As eleven-thirty rolled around, Autumn sat in her cubicle with the pathetic potted plant and the Missoni scarf she’d hung from a clip to give the room a splash of Summer. A photo of a Funfetti cake hid in the corner, beside a shot of her and Summer at last year’s Fourth of July parade. Just looking at it made Autumn want to cry, but she circled her eyes up at the ceiling and got on with it. But as the day went on she was reminded of something else: she probably wasn’t even fit to be dealing with actual human beings yet, anyway. Because Autumn’s ability to always say the wrong thing and accidentally horribly offend someone was rivaled only by her complete inability to bounce back from such incidents. “Oh, you’re such a cute pregnant woman!” she would tell a girl at the supermarket who would turn out to be extremely not pregnant, only to then stammer, “Oh, you’re not expecting? Oh, um, let me…” before immediately exiting stage left without saying another word. She was hanging up on a thirty-two-year-old mother of two that she had just mistaken for an elderly woman when a coworker appeared at her cubicle.
“Autumn, baby girl?”
“Yes? Also, I am twenty-four.”
“Whatever. First, I just wanted to check in on you. I just didn’t know if you…if you were okay, after everything with, you know…”
Autumn rolled her eyes. That morning she had decided something: depression was the most boring thing in the world, even more boring than cancer. Literally no one wanted to hear about how sad you were. Nobody was ever like, “Oh, you’re down in the dumps right now? That is the most interesting thing I have ever heard! Let’s get some skinny lattes and talk about how much you hate the world!” No. Nobody cared. She was already sick of people singling her out because of her disease, acting like she was Mother Teresa with a tumor. It was ridiculously condescending, because suffering in itself did not make you interesting. A lot of boring people had shitty lives. What made you interesting was how you got back from it. And she was nowhere near done yet.
“Hey, Erin?” Autumn asked.
“Mhmm?”
“Yeah, love ya forever, but listen up. I’ve dealt with leaving my homeland when I was a kid, the loss of half my family, and breast cancer. If you think I need to be treated with kid gloves after losing my best friend, you’ll have to answer to both of us, because I’m pretty sure she’s just as much of a bitch as a ghost as she was when she was alive.”
Erin sputtered, spitting out a bit of her coffee. “Oh…um…okay,” she said, wiping her neck. “What are you doing right now?”
Autumn froze, looking down at the YouTube tutorial she’d been watching on how to get ombré gold-to-aqua nail polish. “I’m, uh…working,” she said as she closed out the tab. “Why?”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
Her shoulders dropped. “Ugh, do I really have to be an adult today?”
“It’s a boy,” she said, fixing her eyes on Autumn, who stared back.
“What? Like, a boy, with a penis?”
“Yes, he does indeed appear to have a penis, although these days you can never be too sure.”
Autumn felt her mouth fall open, and not in the figurative sense. Never would she have thought that someone would actually like her enough in this large and punishing world to show up at her job. And she kind of loved it. A chubby immigrant with zero romantic history and an aggressive disease: nobody had ever had more people to prove wrong. And she wanted to flounce into the lobby and prove that she was wanted, even if nobody was watching. Because when did a performance need an audience?
“You mean someone showed up at my job like a creepy stalker?” Autumn asked. “That is so unacceptable, because I didn’t do my hair this morning. Is he cute?”
“Um…no.”
“Do I look cute?”
“Not really.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Your hair is all oily, and you’re dressed like you’re recovering from a C-Section.”
Autumn slumped again. “Okay, well, guess that means I’ve got nothing to lose, then. Watch my purse.” She headed to the bathroom, did her hair as best she could, and emerged ten minutes later. Sure enough, Hank was waiting for her in the lobby, looking nervous and eager and breathless. Her stomach jumped a little, but she ignored it.
“Oh, God, this is so weird, I totally wasn’t expecting anyone!” she said as she walked out in her newly applied lipstick and sort of hugged him. “What are you doing at my work! This is crazy. You’re stalking me or something! Also, I didn’t curl my hair this morning, and I look a total mess.”
Hank swallowed, taken aback by the sight of Autumn in something other than funeral attire. And it struck her, how nice it felt to be looked at by someone who didn’t need anything from you. She didn’t smile back, though. Autumn’s face had only two modes: resting bitch face, or batshit crazy lunatic. Normally she looked mildly perturbed and vaguely judgmental, like someone had just passed gas or worn clogs in her vicinity. When she actually tried to smile for photos, though, her large eyes and extremely white teeth combined to make her look like a clinically insane death row inmate, much more Stephen King’s Carrie than Carrie Bradshaw. So she went halfsies and smirked a little.
“So…did you need something?”
He swallowed some air and stood a bit taller. “You don’t look like a mess. You look beautiful. And, uh…I came here today to ask you to get off Spark.”
“You…what?”
He nodded.
“You came all the way here to tell me that?”
“…Is that bad?”
“Yes – I haven’t gotten my nails done. And how did you even know I’m on Spark in the first place?”
He shrugged. “I downloaded it to stalk you.”
She blushed. “Aw, nobody’s ever admitted to stalking me before. That is so sweet.”
An administrative assistant named Ariana leaned over from her chair at the reception desk. “Autumn, he just admitted to stalking you, and you’re flattered?”
“Shut it. I’m getting attention right now.” Autumn licked her upper teeth to erase any lipstick stains and returned her attention to Hank. “So, where were you? I think you were talking about how beautiful I was?”
Hank’s face faded into a smile. Really, this was all Autumn had ever wanted, for a boy to show up at her work. But something about it felt all wrong. Was it his arm? Was it his cargo pants, which were a cardinal sin in Autumn’s world? Or was it just her self-hatred? Was she going to ruin this for herself by being a bitch?
“Why don’t we just hang out now?” he asked. “When’s your lunch break?”
“Whenever I want it to be. I usually just go somewhere by myself for twenty minutes or so. But are you sure?”
He nodded, and she appraised him. It had never really occurred to her that she did not have to go through this life alone.
“Okay,” she said, throwing up a hand. “Well. My best friend is dead at the hands of a careless surgeon, my life is in ruins, and I’m consuming four thousand anxiety calories a day in a desperate bid to make myself forget that my career as an adult has so far been a massive flop. I can’t imagine a better set of reasons to go on a lunch date with you right now. But Hank?”
“Yeah?” he asked. His eyes were deep wells that she had overlooked for years, and suddenly all she wanted to do was fall into those depths and explore just what she had been missing.
“We’d better go somewhere with bacon grilled cheese.”
~
“Tell me something,” Hank said as they settled into the cheap plastic chairs outside the grilled cheese truck in Atlantic Beach he’d found on his favorite dining app. Autumn had two modes of dress: grieving widow, and demented magpie. Today she was a magpie, in a sequined burnt yellow skirt and a flowy top that hid her problematic upper arms.
“Okay. This Gruyere is fucking life-altering.”
“Something else,” he said as she wiped her lips. “I know you had cancer, and that you’re – sorry, you were – Summer’s best friend. What I want to know is everything else.”
Autumn took a sip of her drink, refreshed. She hated when people leaned in close and asked about her “journey,” when they frowned and poked for details and said sorry. Dance, cancer monkey, dance! The word “sorry” contained pity, and pity conferred inferiority, like they were saying “Sorry your life sucks, cancer chick!” In the eyes of the world she would always be That Girl, the one people frowned at before going about their merry business. In truth, she was fine, her body just didn’t really like itself. And the only person who understood that was gone.
Autumn looked up and smiled a little, and it was more genuine that she would have liked to admit. “Oh, God, you’re putting me on the spot! This is so uncomfortable! But hold on, I keep a baby album in my bag just for this purpose. Here, let me get it…”
Hank watched as Autumn fished in her messy bag for photos of herself. She was an absolute egomaniac, and he loved it – when he was with her, he didn’t have to think about himself and his own problems.
“Jesus,” he said after they’d gone through most of the album. She paused midway through a bite of her sandwich.
“What?”
“You can just really put it away. You’re so small – I have no idea where you keep it. That’s a compliment, by the way.”
She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t actually have two stomachs, but they checked.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean – it was just a figure of – never mind. Hey, tell me something else about yourself. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Wow,” she said.
“What?”
“That was just…honest. I’ve never met someone so quick to acknowledge that we haven’t grown up yet. And, don’t laugh, but I want to be famous.”
“Famous?”
She swallowed. “Yep. I just want to be really fuckin’ famous. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I just want it, all of it, like now.”
He tried not to laugh. “Okay, and do you have any…skills, or anything that might lead you there?”
“Oh, well, I do have a passion, but it’s stupid.”
“There are no stupid passions.”
“Try me.”
“Okay, what is it?”
She sipped her Snapple. “I make cat clothes.”
“You…cat clothes?”
“Yeah, like, I know I have a day job, but my passion is cat clothing. You know, outfits for cats. I design them, I sew them, I dress up my cats every day – it’s my thing, or whatever.”
“And this is a thing that people actually buy?”
She nodded, her eyes sparkling in the way they do when humans talk about what they love. “Oh, you’d be shocked. There’s a whole, like, community of cat clothing people out there, you have no idea. There are Facebook groups, message boards, the whole thing. I could probably make okay money doing it, but I’ve never pursued it professionally.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m just scared.”
He smiled. “Well I, for one, think you’d be a wonderful cat fashion designer. Autumn’s Feline Couture and More, Inc. – I can see the Etsy store now.”
She took out her phone and tapped something into her Notes app.
“Hey,” he asked, “are you stealing the name I just made up?”
“Nope,” she said after she saved the entry “Autumn’s Feline Couture and More: use this name” and then tossed her phone back into her bag. Hank glanced at the time on his own phone and then leaned closer.
“Hey, can we…make this thing real? Can I get your…I don’t know, your number, or something?”
“Hank,” she said, and he stared at her.
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what?’ I’m sitting here with hot sauce dribbling down my chin. My hair is a catastrophe. I’m swimming in a boring ocean of depression. And when I sit down, my stomach rolls over on itself. Are you really asking me out right now?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he said. And Autumn did a funny thing then: she said yes. But only, she demanded, if they go to Shim Sham, a bar that also happened to have the best chicken and waffles under the Florida sun.
“But we can’t eat there,” he said. “You got banned for flipping out and telling the bartender he made minimum wage, remember? You told us in Support Group.”
“Well he called me an ‘immigrant’ because of my brown skin!” she said. “But fine, we can reschedule that one. And the bartender also neglected to compliment my new layered haircut, which was much worse in my book than the immigrant comment.”
“It’s the South,” he shrugged. “People are racist.”
Her mouth shrank into itself. “Okay, don’t speak to my experience. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“To be isolated?” he asked, pointing at his nub. She wanted to be offended, but again she felt that bizarre sensation that said: he understands you. This is common ground.
“Touché, Hank. Touché.”
“We don’t even have to hangout at night to get to know each other, anyway,” he said, settling into his chair. “We’ve got a bit of time. What kind of music do you listen to? What are your Apple Music playlists?”
She rose a bit, trying to look like the dignified music connoisseur she was. “Well, you know, I have very eclectic and sophisticated tastes. I love anything from classical music to folk rock to this really obscure Romanian poet I found, he does these chants that are just beyond-”
Just then an older woman walked by, bumping the table and knocking Autumn’s purse to the floor. An old Ashlee Simpson CD clattered under Hank’s chair.
“That’s not mine!” she cried. Ever the gentleman, Hank bent down and started picking things up, and a Britney Spears Greatest Hits CD peeked out from under a merlot-hued scarf. He looked up at her, a question in his dark eyes.
“I swear, those aren’t mine!”
“Your driver’s license is next to your Hilary Duff album,” he said. She puffed out her cheeks and let out a long sigh.
“Okay, fine. I have the musical taste of a preteen girl at a dance-themed slumber party. I give up.”
“You should’ve just said so,” he smiled.
“Why?”
“Because you can just…be yourself with me. It’s fine. You do know that, right?”
And then it occurred to Autumn just how valuable it made you feel, to be accepted by someone. “That’s cool,” she said, feeling somehow lighter. “What music do you like?”
“You’re going to laugh, but…I only listen to 90’s rap.”
“No! That’s awesome. Yeah, speaking of hobbies, I like to jog, too.”
“I can tell.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you’ve lost weight lately – ten pounds, at least.”
Autumn let herself feel the victory of being complimented – it wasn’t like she got them often. She’d been able to keep her breasts during her bout with cancer, but only by a hair. Therefore cancer hadn’t just attacked her body, it had seemed to wage battle against her very femininity as well. What would she be without her breasts, the very thing that society told her made her a woman?
“I am so offended,” she said, “because I have lost fourteen pounds in the last year, not ten. And hasn’t anyone ever told you not to comment on lady’s weight, unless you are willing overestimate their weight loss by at least twenty percent?”
He leaned back, smiling with his whole face. “We’re going to have a lot of fun together, Autumn Mahal.”
“Why’dya say that?”
He pointed under the table. “Because we missed your High School Musical CD.”
~
So that night they started texting. Autumn added him on Snapchat, and he added her back. Seeing his little icon made her giddy for reasons she could not explain. Soon she learned that not only was he very funny, but he also seemed to really enjoy talking to her. He made the initiative, and after years of having her texts go ignored, it was a welcome (if unsettling) change. And to top it all off, he even sent images of his neighbors’ cats.
Before long they were seriously flirting. In the olden days, the days the people on Fox News were always screaming about, this would have been called “courting.” Autumn had seen it in all the movies: a black car would pull up in front of a charming little house at dusk. A tall, dark man in pleated slacks would swagger up to the door, corsage in hand, where a broad-shouldered father would hand off his daughter with a smile. “Be safe with her, sport,” the salt-and-pepper-haired father would grin. “I expect you two lovebirds in by eleven.”
Now Autumn figured she was lucky to get more than one drunken hookup on the side of someone’s car before her date matched with another girl who was willing to do anal, and then left Autumn in the dust faster than you can say “KY Jelly.” She was a years-long veteran of online dating, and from what she could gather from her own experiences coupled with the experiences of the strangers she stalked on Facebook, the stages of this modern new method of courtship went like this, ranked in order of occurrence:
“Matched:” this is when you decide someone is attractive enough to have sex with, and click “yes” on their photo. If they also deem you worthy of intercourse, the app will beep, and you will be given the option to message them. It is surprisingly rare to actually match with someone who is not a garbage human, because almost everyone will either be: A: a massive tool who is only interested in sex, B: posing shirtlessly in his bathroom in his profile picture, which also means he is a massive tool, or C: married. Good luck with those ones.
“Messaging:” a bizarre stage when you are both conversing back and forth, but neither of you have yet deduced if the other is worthy of penetration.
“Talking:” this comes after messaging. You are talking regularly, usually when you are out at the bars and trying to meet up, or bored in an airport and trying to pass the time by sparking up conversation with an old match.
“Texting:” you decide that the other person is not an arsonist and/or pedophile, and you give them your phone number.
“Hanging Out:” the person has impressed you via text with their non-pedophile-ness, and you finally agree to meet in person. This step is unbearably and uniformly awkward. You will meet somewhere that is more casual than a restaurant but not as casual as a bar, like some kind of lounge-y situation, preferably with a large alcohol selection. You will walk slowly through the crowd, looking for the person you remember from the photos, and when you finally spot them, you will share an awkward half-hug and then amble into two chairs and notice how disappointed you are in their looks. Their cheekbones will be weaker than they looked online, and their skin will be splotchy and oily. But they looked so good in their profile photos, you think to yourself, with that filter, and those optimal conditions in their well-lit bathroom, and that perfect angle from above their head…
You will then realize how stupid you are, order a drink, and pray you stop caring. The standards for Spark dates are extremely low – all someone wants is a normal person to pass the time with. So, considering that you do not reveal a past criminal history and/or time spent living in a nude commune in the mountains of Tennessee, you are probably going to arrange to head to the next bar together. In the meantime, you each get progressively drunker to quell the harmonic doom vibrating from the fact that everyone is getting married and you are all going to die one day.
“The Morning After:” the bar visit went reasonably well, not that you remember any of it, thanks to all that Fireball whiskey. You wake up at their place, hung over and needing to diarrhea, next to someone you met on an app and barely know anything about. The shame sets in. You know you want coffee to make your head feel like it isn’t Saturn, but you don’t want to ask and look like a freeloader, and you also know it will make you need to use the restroom even more than you already do. Then your date will wake up and look at you like you are a maid who has come back a year after getting fired to collect lost wages. (And not even a beloved maid you had to fire for staining your clothes, but a sneaky one who stole jewelry out of your roommate’s bathroom.) You will both walk out on a porch and try to enjoy the morning and make small talk, and then they will give up and immediately drive you home. At least you’ll get to do your bathroom business in private, but chances are, you will never talk again. In fact, you will see them in a bar three weeks later. They will be with a new match. You will smirk with the knowledge that their house smells weird and they look like a cadaver in the morning, while secretly cursing their partner to death for stealing them away from you. You will both avoid each other until it becomes inconvenient, accidentally bumping down the same hallway together to the bathrooms, pausing and looking away and pretending you are strangers until you both sigh passive-aggressively and finally slip into the restroom. Their date will notice and get mad. They will get dumped and the process will start all over again.
“Deleting Your Dating Apps Together:” figuring that you are not going to find anyone else out there who is any more interesting and/or good at sex than your current fling, you both take out your phones and press “delete” on your apps while sitting in the back of a moderately-nice beer garden. You are not officially dating, but you are no longer actively looking for sex, either.
“Facebook Official:” against all odds, you have survived all previous steps, and have gotten over the secret inner rage you acquired from letting yourself date someone you found on a sex application. You will decide, You know what, why not lock this person down? You can’t jog like you did when you were nineteen, which means you’re aging, which means you’re getting older by the day and oh God we’re all going to die eventually so you’d might as well hitch your wagon to someone before you’re left high and dry in the game of musical chairs that is your mid-twenties. So you make your relationship official in the most pointless and modern way possible: you put their name on your Facebook profile. Your past flings will stalk the shit out of them and promptly decide their nose is weird. You will not care, because life is a rat race to everlasting love, and you’re at least three quarters of the way there while all your exes are single, miserable and ugly.
“Moving In Together:” you will rent a townhouse in the yuppie part of town that is too small to be comfortable, too big to be personal, and too expensive to be practical. Soon domestic bliss sets in. Just kidding! You’ve never lived with anyone and it’s weird. You can never avoid them and you watch all different shows and you hate the food they cook and they have a bunch of weird habits and you don’t want to smell their bathroom smells. So you go out to eat five nights a week just to escape each other.
“Your First Big Fight:” she will want to watch The Bachelorette, while he will want to watch a playoff hockey game. A tiny squabble will turn into her running out of the house saying his last girlfriend was an ugly whore, and he will call her a slut for having met him on Spark. They will reconcile at a nearby bar ninety minutes later, she will cry, and he will walk her home and have sex with her on the kitchen floor while the dog whines for food from the garage.
Engaged: you’ve lived together for a year and two months and, whoop de do, you have not yet been murdered by this person and/or sold into the international sex trade by them in the dead of night. So you do what society tells you to do. He will bend on one knee next to a drainage pond and wince in pain because it wasn’t the right place and he is now half-squatting on a sandy rock. She will jump with glee and act like she didn’t know it was coming and like she didn’t force him into buying a ring beyond his budget and like she didn’t shame her friend into hiding behind a nearby shed with her phone pointed at the scene to capture the moment. She will load forty-eight photos of the same exact thing onto Facebook in an album called OMG WE’RE ENGAGED!!! Her friends will congratulate her and then quietly call her fiancé weird-looking behind her back.
Married: you’d might as well kill yourself now, because you just married someone you met on an iPhone, and nothing but doom and herpes lies in your future. You’re welcome.
But for some reason Autumn was totally thrown off by Hank. He was nice, he was sweet, and he liked hanging out with her in real life, and not just messaging her at eleven PM on a Friday asking for “drinks,” aka sex. What was this? What did he want? Where in the hell was this going?
~
Before Autumn knew it, Summer had been dead for over a week. Every day Autumn woke up and remembered it all over again, the feeling similar to when you show up at the beach for a relaxing day and find low, grey clouds hanging over the horizon. Every joke was something she wanted to tell Summer; every sunset was another moment she wished Summer could see. She was so angry, and all of it was horrible. So she didn’t let it in. She pushed it away and locked the door, denying her pain’s existence in hopes it would dwindle in exile.
That Friday some girls from work invited Autumn out to the bars. She kind of hated all of them and didn’t really know how to tell them, but she had no idea how to say no, and also margaritas would be involved, so she was sort of on the fence about the whole thing.
“Hey, did you get the group text? We want to have a bonding night,” said Irene, whose name struck Autumn as hilarious for some reason, as she leaned into Autumn’s cubicle at the end of the day. “Eight o’clock. Tacolu.”
“Yeah, sorry, it’s a rule of mine not to respond to group texts, it just makes them last longer. And no thanks, I’m just gonna hang out at home.”
“The office is paying for the bar tab,” Irene said.
“Be there at eight thirty!”
“Where is my green top?” Autumn asked her Nani later that night, stomping through the kitchen. Nani scowled at her from the table. Born in a time when women could not vote in most countries, even developed ones, Autumn’s grandmother had still maintained a spirit of rebellion, and she’d even been the first girl in her town to stay in school the whole way through. Spirited and sassy, she was the kind of woman drag queens admired, and whom grocery store clerks were terrified of. She dressed only in rainbow-hued muumuus, and her hobbies included watching a Mexican telenovela all day that featured a midget witch and various evil twins, even though she spoke zero Spanish. Basically she was Autumn’s hero, and the two fought like puppies stuck in the same pen on a summer afternoon. Because she was all Autumn had. Besides a few extended visits, Autumn’s own mother had never really made the move over from the homeland, and the question of whether she hadn’t been able to move or whether she just didn’t want to move had kept Autumn up for hundreds of nights. She had a new husband and new kids, a new life, and Autumn had never once been invited into that life. So she’d turned to Nani and tried to look back as little as possible.
“Right where your dignity is,” Nani said, sipping her wine. “In the gutter.”
Autumn sighed. Although Nani was a loving woman who had held her granddaughter for hours the day Summer died, she still wore her disapproval of Autumn on the sleeve of her cheap K-Mart muumuu like one of her flashy silver bracelets. She was independent, sure, but she was still from the old world, and to her, an unmarried twenty-four-year-old woman was a failure on par with the search for nuclear weapons in Iraq.
“What?”
“I threw it in the garbage,” Nani said. “Hasn’t anyone told you that you find a man first, and then start dressing like a harlot, to keep him around? If I would have gone around in a garment like that at your age, they would have driven me out of my hometown in shame.”
“If only we could be so lucky,” Autumn smiled.
“You do look a bit thinner, though,” Nani said, approval in her accented voice.
“Thanks! I’ve lost a few pounds, all due to replacing beer in my diet!”
Nani looked at Autumn with a new hope in her eyes. “That is just wonderful. You will be swimming in engagements before you know it.”
“Thanks,” Autumn said, grabbing her phone charger from the counter and heading for her room. “Granted, I did only replace it with vodka, because we all know clear alcohol has much less caloric value. But an improvement is an improvement. Toodles, Naniji!”
Autumn showed up fifty minutes late to dinner, and the girls were already neck-deep in a conversation about the pros and cons of white gold engagement bands vs. platinum. Autumn hadn’t been this annoyed since Nani had learned how to text message and had spent all day and night sending her things like “NnNnNNnNNnNnnn” and “WHERE IS THE INTERNET, I CAN’T FIND THE INTERNET” and “DR. OZ SAYS WENDY’S BAKED POTATOS CAUSE SALMONELLA, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE, LOVE, ME.” And when her bang-bang shrimp tacos came, the texts from Hank started coming, too. They’d been talking on and off all day, but now that alcohol was in her stomach, seeing his name on her phone brought a new giddiness.
First things first, though: Autumn ate. She had never been one of those girls who uploaded pictures of a palm-sized pile of blueberries and captioned it “healthy breakfast, so delicious!” The only blueberries on Autumn’s plate were inside her Eggos, right next to her bacon. So only after she’d finished her tacos did she pick up her phone and see what he’d said:
I kinda like you
Stop it, she typed, meanwhile praying that he would not stop. Where are you?
V’s Pizza with some friends, thinking about Summer, he responded, and she texted Same, just at Tacolu, drinking a peach margarita to curb the depression.
You’re cute, he said. Let’s meet up tonight.
Quit it! she said, thinking, Oh god please keep going.
I’m tipsy and I kind of want to do things to you, he said next. She blushed and deleted their message history, as she didn’t want to get into a sexting match at dinner. She’d made that mistake before, and things hadn’t exactly ended well, to say the least. (Autumn was never again welcome in the Beach Boulevard Applebee’s, let’s just leave it at that.) So she ignored him and changed subjects.
Where are you going next? she asked.
Lynches, he said, which was the exact bar she was hitting, too. Are you coming?
She sat taller to calm the boiling sensation in her stomach, which she suspected wasn’t entirely due to the alcohol she’d consumed.
We’ll see.
~
On the walk to the bars, a homeless man sprawled out next to an abandoned newspaper kiosk catcalled Autumn and called her “hot cakes.”
“That is disgusting!” she said. “I have half a mind to call the police!” She put a hand on her waist and threw out her hip. “But hey, how does my top look when I go like this? Is this angle cute? I need some good pictures to post tomorrow. And wait, if I sling my belt a little lower, do you think it would make my hips look-”
That’s when Ariana grabbed Autumn by the elbow and dragged her down the street.
“You need Jesus in your life,” she said, and Autumn pulled her arm away and smiled.
“Oh, I already listen to Lana Del Rey, thanks.”
Inside, Autumn seethed – Summer would’ve totally supported her occasional hobby of seeking sexual attention from harassing strangers, and Ariana had no right to shit on her parade. She didn’t even do it that often – twice a week, tops. Sometimes it seemed to Autumn like she had a million followers and zero friends. One of the things she’d never really expected about Summer’s death was how strange it was to suddenly be without a best friend. Where was her person? All she wanted was someone to sit and talk about Beyoncé’s Instagram with. Religious types were ranting about social issues all over her Facebook, and she wanted someone to laugh at them with her, someone who understood that using a long-haired, sandal-wearing, love-spreading hippie from Israel to justify intolerance made about as much sense as heading to San Antonio to get a snowmobiling license. She already missed having someone to steal clothes from, someone whose refrigerator she could raid when she got bored with her own, someone who would always hate who she hated, and then agree to un-hate them whenever Autumn decided she was over the feud. For one of the first times ever, Autumn Mahal was truly lonely, and this was a solace that not even Oreo ice cream could fix – though she tried, every day.
The night went on, and Hank didn’t show up. He didn’t even text back. The girls were being annoying, talking endlessly about their various Spark conquests. Autumn hated girls who jumped from relationship to relationship and talked about it constantly, mostly because she could never be one. So she wandered to the bar and started doing shots alone. Why wasn’t Hank there, anyway? She felt weird being out at a bar without Summer, and she wanted someone who understood. Also, fine: he was cute. He was marginally tall and he had pretty good teeth and he looked at Autumn with all the interest in the world, for whatever strange reason. His pale skin was kind of alluring and he was really smart and he had a sardonic sense of humor that was sharp enough to slice through a stone. Okay, she could admit it now: she was interested. Monogamy usually scared her like decaf coffee, but now that she was drunk, the idea that someone could like her wasn’t exactly so terrifying. He was such a good distraction, too, and not only from the Summer thing. Autumn was locked in that endless and awkward time between college and adulthood, waiting waiting waiting like when you show up too early for an appointment and hover in the parking lot trying to look busy. You don’t know what’s waiting for you through the door, so you dilly-dally. And she couldn’t think of a better person to dilly-dally with than Hank.
Finally she took out her phone and drunkenly attempted to type “where are you,” but her wobbly fingers instead wrote Where Yugoslavia, and she pressed Send before she could stop herself. She readied herself for the regret to hit her, but she didn’t even have time – Hank was already there.
She stopped breathing. He looked kind of cute in a brown T-shirt, and he was with some boy Autumn was mortified to realize she recognized from Spark. But still she did what she always did when she was drunk, and walked right over. The Spark boy gave Autumn a weird look, and Hank turned to her.
“Hey, Autumn, um…wait, do you two know each other?”
“God, no!” Autumn cried, swaying in her heels a bit. “Why? Who asked? Did he say he matched with me on Spark? Because I didn’t, and I don’t even know what Spark is! I don’t even know what we’re talking about right now because I’ve never even heard of Spark before now. What’s Spark? I need a shot.”
“Ooookay then.”
The Spark guy started dancing to the music, staring at a caramel-skinned girl by the bar, but Hank’s eyes were only on Autumn. They were burning into her, actually.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You know what it is.”
“No I don’t.”
He bit his bottom lip and looked down at her with a tilted head, his eyes hot little coals of desire. “You look sexy, that’s what.”
Autumn blushed, then gasped. “I am a feminist, you cannot call me sexy! Until you buy me a shot, that is.”
She pulled him over towards the bar, but he didn’t wait for drinks – he pulled her close and started dancing with her. It was awkward with just the one arm, Autumn couldn’t deny it, and she didn’t really know how to move around him. But soon he proved a better dancer than she’d expected, and she didn’t even have to work at all, which was obviously a plus. And after two songs Autumn pinpointed that strange intangible thing that was drawing her to him: he was a firstborn. He had to be – you could see it in everything he did. He swung his hips when he walked, his shoulders were high and straight, he never seemed to ask anyone for permission. Even his nose seemed to watch hawkishly over the rest of his face. Autumn was technically a firstborn, too, but her childhood had been so convoluted, moving here and there and being forced to live with a parade of uncles and cousins and family friends, that her birth order had been shot to hell. Perhaps because of all that, she’d always envied the easy confidence of people who knew their place in the world, who walked without looking down.
“Thanks for dilly-dallying with me,” she said, and he looked at her funny. “Sorry, inside joke. You totally didn’t have to come tonight, though! I’m glad you did, but still.”
“So you think I came out just for you?” he asked, smiling, his breath tickling her nose. It smelled like basil, but she tried not to think about it.
“Hell yes. You’re stalking me, and I can see no other logical explanation.”
He laughed. “Sorry, but no. I was miserable at home, thinking about you know who, and when my friend invited me out, I couldn’t say no.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve been doing a lot of things just to do them. Just to get the fuck out of the house.”
“Exactly.” His face darkened. “Do you feel…I don’t know, weird, being out at the bars without her and all? Like…like it’s not appropriate or something?”
Autumn nodded. Summer was everywhere. She had been in this very bar dozens of times, and it made Autumn want to jump out of herself – she felt like she was visiting a gravestone before it had even been carved. She could still see Summer’s face, picture how she always looked down and to the right when she spoke, how she listened to oldies whenever she got scared. She envisioned how she always smelled like sandalwood, how she’d always get caught watching the Kardashians and then jump for the remote and turn it off and claim she’d been reading a book. Just thinking of these memories made Autumn’s bones hurt, and she knew Hank understood all this. And then it occurred to Autumn just how close it could bring two people, to have loved the same person.
But what would Summer think of this? Lately Autumn had been split between wanting to live for her and wanting to die for her. Was she really smiling at them? Or was she mortified at their partying so soon after her death? Or had she vaporized into oblivion, and none of this mattered at all?
Autumn shook it off and pulled Hank closer. Another shot, another series of flirty glances. A few guys sniggered at Hank for not having an arm, and Autumn glared at them and then danced harder. Soon he led her into the middle of the floor, and she had to sort of halfway dance while clutching Ariana from behind because she was so drunk. “Blood on the dance flooooooor,” Saviour sang from the speakers, her voice soaring. The beat throbbed and so did something in Autumn’s throat. She was drunk off whiskey and something else, something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Her best friend was dead, she was wasted, and now that her inhibitions were gone, she couldn’t run from the misery she buried when she was sober. She wanted to evaporate into the beat and never return. But there was also a weird joy embedded into all of it somehow, somewhere. It was that sweet sadness of grief: even if she was miserable, she had never felt so alive, and she had never experienced so many emotions at once. Hank was here, and she liked him, and she could admit that to herself now, even though this was also so, so wrong. She was supposed to be mourning, not skanking her way around the bar scene, drunk on infatuation. But she didn’t know how to stop.
“Tell me something,” Hank yelled, leaning down to talk over the music, his eyes burning even in the half-light.
“Huh?”
“I said, tell me something.”
“Okay. I want an apple fritter from Cinotti’s bakery.”
“Something non-food related,” he laughed. “And why are you dancing alone?”
Autumn looked down and realized she had strayed from Hank and was now swaying her hips and throwing her hands around like someone’s drunken aunt at a wedding. She smiled anyway. “Trust me, babe, you don’t wake one day at seventeen and get told you’re probably going to die, and not learn how important it is to say fuck it and dance on your own,” she yelled. “And do you really want me to tell you something?”
He nodded.
“Okay. You smell like pizza and expensive cologne, and I want to know more about you, and I may be thirteen seconds away from passing out, and you look at me like I’m worth looking at, and it confuses me. Oh, and-”
He kissed her then, and she was almost too surprised to pull away. She opened her mouth as he slipped in his tongue and the next thing she knew, she was leaving the dance floor and she was flying.
There was so much misery in the world, that was true. There were old people stuck in nursing homes and little children locked away in orphanages and dead girls named Summer and you could go to a different dog shelter every day and still want to kill yourself inside of every one of them. But in that smoky bar in Florida, stared at by the ebony eyes of Hank Basara, Autumn Mahal was happy.
And for maybe the first time ever, she fell into the feelings that were pulling at her damaged soul. He pulled away for a moment to take a breath, and with a moxie that could only be gathered by a young woman drunk on cinnamon whiskey and summer and sheer terror, Autumn grabbed Hank and kissed him with everything within her cancer-ravaged body.