The Book of Joe

corner. “Where’s your car?”
    “Still at the high school,” Carly says. “Where’s yours?”
    “At home. You picked me up, remember?”
    “Oh, yeah. God, that seems like forever ago.”
    We begin walking aimlessly up the block. “Time, in general, has been behaving oddly since I got here,” I say.
    “How so?”
    “Well, I’ve been here for just under a week, but it feels like months already. And the days when I lived here, way back when, seem so much more immediate to me now than they ever did before, whereas the last seventeen years seem to have been reduced to this tiny area on the map of my life. Just a little yellow shading on the legend to mark my time away from the Falls.”
    Carly flashes me a funny, tender look that lasts for a few seconds. “You’ve been very unhappy, haven’t you?”
    “Not really.” Then I think about it for a moment. “And by that I mean I guess so. Yes.”
    She turns to me and puts her hand gently against the side of my face, a gesture so loving and wholly unexpected that I nearly buckle under it and break down, but instead I just tremble quietly as the feeling washes over me. When my shaking becomes even more pronounced, Carly has to steady me with her other hand, placing it on the other side of my face. She cradles my head like that for a minute, staring at me intently as if she’s taking measurements of my soul through my eyes. Then her own eyes mist up and she says, “Oh, shit,” and her hands slide down my face in a caress as she steps forward and puts her arms around me. “Shit,” she says again, crying softly, almost imperceptibly into my shoulder. I open my mouth to say something and then close it decisively in a rare display of restraint, not trusting myself to preserve the moment. Instead, I just bury my face in her hair and hold on to her as if my life depends on it.

    We walk back to my father’s house in companionable silence, our private thoughts mingling tangibly around us as we go, our bodies close enough to build up an electrical field that tingles like a bug zapper every time our stray limbs inadvertently touch. This thing between us, this invisible ball of anger and fear that’s been floating ominously there ever since I arrived in the Falls, seems to have finally been vaporized, and in its place is a warm emptiness waiting to be filled.
    Given my recent success rate, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the first to attempt filling it.
    Once we get to my father’s house, we drive my battered Mercedes to the high school to get Carly’s car. I pull up alongside her Honda and throw the car into park. School has already let out for the day, but a handful of kids are still hanging out in small clusters on the stairs or in nuzzling, groping twosomes perched on the hoods of cars. “God,” I say. “Remember high school?”
    Carly smiles. “Every day, lately. I have trouble remember ing specific events, but I totally remember what it felt like to be so full.”
    “Full of what?”
    “I don’t know. Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit.
    Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon.”
    I think about her analogy for a few seconds. “So what, you just go through life being emptied of all vitality as you go, until none is left and then you die?”
    “Of course not. You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then” - she nods toward the kids outside - “it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe.”
    “I know,” I say, nodding. “Even though my life in highschool pretty much sucked until you came along, I still woke up every day with the strength to get out there again, as if I believed at any moment things would change for the better.”
    Carly sighs, long and deep. “Oh, well.”
    We just sit there for a few minutes, watching the teenagers in front of us as if the windshield were a television screen, the two of us resting easy, buoyed by each other’s silence instead of drowning under it. “This is nice,” I say.
    Carly combs the hair out of her face with her fingers and turns to look at me, her lips pressed together in an unintentional pout, and says, “You should kiss me now.”
    “I need some help,” I tell Owen as I drive slowly back toward my father’s house, still replaying Carly’s kiss in my mind, running