Tolliver, who poured our coffee when we sat in the diner, whispered when I saw her by chance at the Albertsons that I should be careful, Shannon was back from a bad affair with a married professor—it took a woman to know, you could tell by the eyes—but Shannon, when I asked her, only said she was exhausted and needed to come home. She hadn’t even tried to kill herself or anything, she said. She’d just decided. She wanted now to be back in the place she had only ever wanted to get out of, and that, from the way her voice caught and lashes glittered when she said it, was the worst thing of all. So I talked to her, and she didn’t ever tell me not to. She spent a lot of time hunched over with her hands scrunched back into her sleeves, staring into space with her eyes gone shadowed and flat. I got the sense, whenever I saw her, that she had been crying only moments before and was now in that perfect calm of apathetic clarity where she could finally speak without emotion, if only because all her emotion had just run out. She looked good, though, in spite of it all. It was like her body doggedly resisted the things she did to it, breasts prodding the front of her oversized high school sweatshirt, her ass asserting itself under the droop of tired jeans. Her hair, clearly unwashed, and her voice roughened sexily under duress in a way I would never have imagined from her clean and clean-cut former self. In short, while depressing to talk to, she was not at all unpleasant to look at, and I spent a lot of time in the early part of that summer sitting with her in the diner just to the left of the spot she was staring at, patiently watching her face until she’d blink and shake her head and smile quickly and sheepishly at me before settling back into gloom. We would talk, when she felt like it, about old times, lame comforting little anecdotes from high school that one of us would always remember wrong. Our classmates were mostly married and settled, either around town or in cities nearby. Laura, a kid we used to talk to, was in Silicon Valley or something, and Dennis, a kid no one ever talked to, was in grad school somewhere on the East Coast, and a couple of people had died in incidents I was fearful to mention. But we were the ones who had failed our potentials—I subtly, she spectacularly, but we had this thing in common. We knew, and didn’t speak about it. We would walk from the diner down out past the post office, the Albertsons, the high school, between the trash piles with their halos of flies that grew taller, more like walls, each day we passed them. These piles were a new institution since Shannon had left. Icaria had never had a reputation, but we were gaining one now for our storms: remarkably frequent, remarkably predictable, zipping down Main Street every six weeks from April to October. We had always had storms—of my childhood, I remember nothing so well as the scratchy, heavily Febrezed loops of the afghan we kept in the basement to clutch when the sirens went off—but it was only in our late adolescence that they began to acquire a pattern, and only at the end of senior year, when the last
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