barbecueswhenpaperplatesfallapartfromtoomuchsauceandwhenwholebackyardsandpoolsandtownssmellofAugusts

Alex Nicoll The Deerfield River Fish I felt a tug at the line and turned to Robby and yelled at his prickly pear face: "Oh damn, this is the one!" My voice smelled like beer and a pack-a-day habit.

We had been floating on the water, making nicotine clouds and casting, but we were just catching little pumpkinseed who wiggled with lips hooked to our string, which we ripped off and threw onto the water, making little circles on the top and breaking the fishes' spines.

Cursing 'cause we kept catching puny fish, and wishing for more beers, we drifted over to the factory. We kept fishing, hoping for a catch bigger than our ring fingers.

We were thinking about crackly fat gold fish or black-lined charcoal fish.

When I tried to pull one fish out of the rotting riverside water, the 6 o'clock summer sun in my eyes, I fell in and felt his overripe dead flesh.

My whole spine went cold.

I found myself looking at what was a once a man in the Deerfield River. He returned my stare with empty milk eyes. I was screaming, shooting air bubbles out of my mouth. The bubbles popped like bombs allover his body, naked and falling deep.

He was bringing my fishing pole into the swamp bottom of the river, little plants grasping at his body, so bruised it was covered in little pale red flesh-flowers. I swam up to the boat and spat out the story and river water and then I threw up beer and 99 cents of burger and pickles and bun allover myself .

Sometimes I tell this at barbecues when paper plates fall apart from too much sauce and when whole backyards and pools and towns smell of August sweat.

I don't say that I haven't fished since.

Julie Brown BODY

The first time I saw Lloyah she was sitting cross-legged on a broken fold-out chair across the room from me, wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt and baggy, black shorts that swallowed her knees. She had artificial red hair that swung across her neck as she moved. She didn't say much, but every now and then in response to what someone said she would let out an unbridled howl of laughter and a snort . Then her swollen red lips would part again, and stay parted while she half足 listened, half-played with the dead skin on her knee. She was all of this right away, but in that wide circle of chairs and strangers I let her go for a minute and started to fidget and squirm with excitement like the rest of the kids.

A boy with dark black hair and a long nose was stretched out sleeping across two chairs. He was surrounded on both sides by a patch of noisy girls gesturing with their hands as they spoke. He slept on.

This was Joe. Some seats down from me, a tall boy was talking to a girl, the boy, Alex, the girl, Lauren. They knew each other distantly . Alex was German, blonde hair, blue eyes, though his nose and ears were usually red. I would learn later on that Alex was adopted, and adopted into Judaism. Lauren, on the other hand, was Israeli. She had round, green eyes and dark hair. While she and Alex talked, she would throw her head back in a deep belly laugh as Alex smiled, stretching his legs out into the center of the room.

Then there was Haley, a tall blonde twice my size who sat next to me and talked loudly across the room to the two or three people she knew from her youth group's region.

In the corner of the room, I heard a booming chuckle, the loudest of anyone's. There was a jolly-looking sort of guy with big eyebrows and thick brown eyes, holding his stomach as he laughed. His white socks came up past his ankles. This was Michael.

There were fifty-one of us there in that room: forty-five teenagers, five counselors, and for a few minutes our shy bus driver Kim was welcomed in to say hi. He was as short as me, and had a black handle-bar mustache that covered the bottom half of his face.

As a group, we spanned the entire country. There were kids from Chicago, Maryland, New York, California, though the majority of people were from New Jersey and Florida. And we were a wide range of ages, me being one of the youngest at fifteen, up to a girl who turned eighteen that summer while we were in California. The vastness of us as a whole was overwhelming, but once we all sat down and looked at each other, it became something familiar, like we knew right then that we would work out okay.

The only thing was, I didn't know anyone. Not anyone at all. I'd talked briefly, lightly, with a few people online, the charismatic ones who sought me down to say hi. But I didn't really remember any of their names. Yes, I could match some faces to their profile pictures on Facebook, but was it really them? Could I really be spending my whole summer with people I had only known the past few months through pictures? I started looking at people's faces, how often they smiled, how much their eyes glowed, any little sign of friendliness and I would try to socialize.

As a person I was decent, I could keep on a conversation, input my opinion when needed, lend out bits of advice. But I was awkward, and

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when I say awkward, I mean bad timing, lost jokes that no one could understand. And I was still getting used to my body .. I would look down at my thighs, my protruding round hips and stomach and shirt loose against my skin; the hair on my shoulders dark brown and broken at the ends, and I didn't know what to do with any of it, or what would happen to it that summer. I wanted to know where exactly my body would fit in between everyone else's.

Our first full day together was an explosion. We were like a bunch of puppies running into walls. We couldn't contain all of those hormones, our excitement flooding as we stepped inside our bus for the first time. It was sparkling perfection, new seats, the smell of plastic; it would never be that clean again. But for the moment we sat down and looked up expectedly at the staff as they explained our entire trip and taped a road map of the country to one of the large windows.

One of them put a little star on where we were in New Jersey. She moved her finger across the map slowly, starting in the North, hitting California, and then winding back through the South. We exploded with cheers.

Over the next few days, we had a brief venture of the u. S . We were essentially just heading up to Canada to spend a night. But those first couple of days were crucial. I had been worried that I wouldn't fall into the right group of people, or every teenager's nightmare, of becoming the group outcast. Luckily, cliques didn't really exist on our bus. And we knew this because of what we heard of our "sister" buses, the other four or five buses that were doing the same thing we were, only starting off in separate locations. We had heard how "cliquey" some of them were, and this was because most of the people on their buses already knew each other. One bus was almost entirely from New Jersey, and as a result cliques from before the trip continued into the trip, and those poor kids that weren't from New Jersey were left out of it completely.

Somehow our bus escaped cliques. We were curious about each other right from the start, with so many types of bodies, backgrounds, opinions. Our bodies became objects in motion. We weren't sure what to do with them; we treated each other carefully, cautiously, overstepping boundaries every now and then but always retreating back to the intimacy of strangers However, somewhere along the way to Canada, those boundaries were ripped open like wounds. We were flailing, flustered, and excited. I noticed that everyone's cheeks were permanently pink, everyone's eyes so wide like they'd seen something extraordinary in the person they were talking to. I was undone, in a good way. I think I realized then that I would be essentially free from everything I was used to back in Connecticut. Nothing was guaranteed, except a place to stay and food to eat, and sometimes even those were unreliable.

When we finally got to Toronto, our faces had changed. There was a more relaxed tone to our voices when we spoke, more of a satisfaction in our stares, because we knew we were stuck with each other for a long time.

As we drove through the congested tourist streets along Niagara Falls, I sat crammed between Joe and Lloyah. We had become something of a motley crew, the three of us. Usually at the end of a long day lying with our heads crammed together on the seat, we would let our drowsy minds wander and expand into creative imaginings, and I was happy because I could finally let out those awkward, stream of consciousness

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thoughts I had suppressed on purpose for this trip. with Joe and Lloyah I imagined the strange possibilities of open road. We concocted fabulous and ridiculous stories and always ended up stopping because we had worn out our throats with laughter.

Here in Toronto, I was getting used to Lloyah and her subtle sultriness, the way she just sat with her thin legs crossed and watched everything behind shrunken eyes. She had this natural enticement in the movement of her limbs, in the way they bent and hung around her bony body like cranes. She hardly ever wore makeup, and when she did it was with a shrug and a couple flecks of mascara.

Now, though, she looked at me while we sat in heavy traffic and stated matter-of-factly, "You haven't kissed anyone before, have you?"

I looked at her, horror-struck.

"It's okay," she said. "I could just tell, that's all." Joe chuckled to himself. He was out of it and half-asleep, as usual.

"Here," Lloyah said decidedly, after I had bent my face towards the window so that she couldn't see how red it was. "I'll just show you. n She leaned over to me so that our noses were almost touching, pulled me to her, and kissed lightly between my lips. She tasted like Burt's Bee's.

Haley, meanwhile, was standing in the aisle watching. She shook her head.

"Noo. Come here."

She pulled my face over to hers and kissed me hard, except her lips were rougher and chapped in the middle, and when she drew away, she just laughed and dropped me back into the pile of people on the seat. Was I supposed to thank them? I didn't know. I looked at Joe and saw that he had nodded back to sleep.

That night was our first house stay, where the local synagogue volunteered families to host us. I was paired up with Lauren, who I had come to know in what seemed like waves. She was the kind of person who enveloped you fully, who bounded over, green eyes wide, and gave you fat wet kisses on the cheek or sometimes, if she was in a really good mood, on the mouth. Tonight she was so excited it was just me and her that she swooped me up in a hug and pinched my hip, saying, "This will be a fun time, oh yah. n Our host came, a big silent man with little glasses who led us into his station wagon and drove us through the narrow streets to his house. When we got inside, the mother, a tiny blonde woman introduced herself as Mrs. McKeown, then said, "Alright, girls. I'm just going to clean up a little, then I'll come and do a few laps with you in the pool." Then she floated out of the room, leaving me and Lauren to wander confused into the guest room they had given us and pull on the bathing suits at the bottoms of our bags. I sat on the edge of the bed in my little bronze-colored suit as I waited for Lauren to finish. She sighed heavily and tucked some of her cleavage in.

"I'm still not used to wearing one-pieces for this trip." She turned in front of the huge mirror against the wall and ran her hands along her naked thighs. Her red sui t pulled tight across her hips, black lines twisting and maneuvering down the sides.

We grabbed towels and padded out into the kitchen where a screen door led to the wooden patio. We went down the stairs and into the pool, where we slid softly into the water, dipping first our toes, then our thighs and stomachs and arms. We waded around up to our necks, my own sight deliriously blurred because I had just taken out my contacts.

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I let my ears go under until I could hear the inner canals start to flood and clog and I rolled onto my side, and swam over to Lauren, who had discovered a plastic, blow-up ball.

"Look, I'm giving birth." Lauren squeezed the ball underwater between her legs, then released and sent the ball shooting through the air. As we were laughing, we heard a tiny splash on the other side of the pool. Mrs. McKeown's head was bobbing over in the shallow end, her legs stretched out while she sat.

"Hello girls." She tilted her head back. Lauren grabbed my waist, giggling, and pulled me into the middle of the pool where we turned and floated on our backs for a while. I felt an arm at my side pushing back water. Mrs. McKeown floated by. I watched her breast stroke to the deep end, then flip gracefully under water and resurface on the shallow end.

She swam back over to us, amused. Her eyes were dry, brown, tiny eyelashes stuck together as she blinked. Her suit rode tightly around her chest, exposing a large brown birth mark and a patch of light freckles. A small water droplet hung from the tip of her nose, where it hooked, and I watched her teeth sink in behind her white lips when she smiled.

We excused ourselves to get ready to sleep, and tiptoed with wet feet back into the house. I looked back at Mrs. McKeown, her body slicing a thin cut down the middle of the pool. She was all white.

A few days later we got to Chicago. By now everyone on the bus had let themselves go, if only a little bit. Some were definitely more confident, leading sing alongs or making sure to mingle here and there around the bus. And others, like me, stayed in one place. But I did want to meet everyone. I wanted to have that kind of self-ease, to be able to go up to every single person on the bus and hear their life story. I wanted to. But like most far-fletched schemes, this one fell flat and I ended up parked in one general area of the bus most of the time. I did get to hear some life stories, even solitary chunks from people I didn't normally talk to.

The "normal gang" for me was by now, Lloyah, Lauren, Haley, Joe, and Alex. Michael would come later, more through association with Haley than anything. The group of us would sort of clump together, always end up piled in a seat talking about where we wanted to go, who we wanted to be. Our "real" lives were never mentioned. I barely knew anything about who they were back home or who they were when the summer was gone.

But now in Chicago, it was quiet hours, a.k.a the two or so hours of driving in the morning assigned to give us a chance to catch up on sleep or write in journals or what have you. For me, it's impossible to sleep once I'm up, so I spent those hours writing or blasting the Shins to high volumes as I looked out the window. These particular quiet hours, I couldn't sit still. With every mile we gained I felt rampant.

I started bouncing in the seat, mouthing the words and grinning like an idiot. It must have been then that Alex saw me and started laughing, loudly, so much so that one of the staff members woke up in the front and mouthed 'Quiet!'

I looked at Alex, half-embarrassed, half-glad to find someone else awake on the bus. He motioned to come sit next to him, and I slid over, pulling out my ear buds.

"What were you listening to?" " 'Sleeping Lessons', the Shins?"

"Oh yeah, I love them," he smiled and put one of his ear buds into my ear. "Listen. The Decemberists. Pure amazing." He pulled out a small notepad, flipped to a clean sheet, wrote down their name, then

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ripped out the page and gave it to me. Then he flipped to a new sheet and looked at me. "Any bands you recommend?"

We went on like this in low whispers while the rest of the bus slept. After a while, we just listened to the music. My eyes were drooping and I quietly yawned.

"Do you need to sleep?" Alex asked.

"Eh, well, maybe I'll just lie down for a bit." I paused, thinking.

"Here, there's this way we can both curl up and be comfortable at the same time. I think," I paused again. "I think it goes like this? We just, each of our heads, where our feet are?" I scrambled around awkwardly on the chair, adjusting my body to mold comfortably into his. It failed miserably. I'd seen it done by so many other people on the bus, just about the only position that worked for sleeping when it came to these seats. I figured for us though it had something to do with the fact that Alex was a good foot and a half taller than me. He looked at me and laughed, "It's okay, it's okay." He stopped my furious scrambling and pulled me up to where he sat leaning against the window, fitting me so that I was lying on my back on his stomach. I was surprised at how effortlessly he did this. I mentioned it.

"Go to sleep." He put his big hands over my eyes, kissed the top of my head, and began to rub my arm until I fell asleep.

Later on, as we drove through a strange patch of woods, one of the boys in the back of the bus yelled that he had to pee.

"Well that's too bad, Jake!" The staff leader called back from the front. "We still have another few hours of driving, and there's no rest stop here."

Jake looked outside at the woods, hoistened up his pants and yelled back, "PIT STOP IN THE WOODS! PIT STOP IN THE WOODS!" A bunch of other guys chanted along wi th him, saying they had to pee too until finally the staff leader agreed and our big coach bus pulled over on the side of the road. As the four or five guys raced into the outskirts of the woods to pee, Michael and Haley were standing over me singing "Hairspray" songs in the order of the track listings. They both knew it by heart. Their voices were loud and passionate, and oh did they get into it. After a few minutes of waiting the rest of the bus yelled at them to be quiet. They sang louder.

Haley bent down to me while Michael was getting something from the front of the bus and said quietly that she wasn't sure if she liked him like that, that she knew he liked her, but she wasn't so sure about him. He came back with a bottle of water and she took it and went back to her seat.

On our way back from the Badlands, the water cooler got used up and we still had two hours to go until we got into town. My throat was shriveled up. We sat sticky and too close for comfort, even for our bus's standards. I sat there feverishly and watched the miles and miles of desert and the whiteness of its tiny sun.

When we finally got into town, we decided to go to Walldrug, a popular tourist attraction that was actually nothing more than a Midwestern Wal-Mart. But what we were most excited for was the "free water" advertised in all of the previous billboards. We stormed the place, a pack of ravenous sweaty teenagers. What we got was a fat cooler full of water that tasted like pee. I was thirstier than ever, so much so that Lloyah convinced me to steal a cup of root beer from the soda machine.

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During those first Shabbats, all of the girls formed a tradition.

A few hours before services, there would be a mad scurry between hotel rooms asking to borrow this or that dress . Our suitcases would all lie open on our beds, and we would make rounds to each others' rooms, peering at the dresses laid out and asking to borrow them. What ended up happening was that by the time we had all hurried downstairs for services, no one was wearing their own dress. One of the dresses was simple, black with green and white stripes on the bottom. I swear that dress was worn by every single girl in the group.

I was happy to find that my blue polka dot dress was pretty popular among the girls. The only problem was that I was small, and one night, Lauren plucked it from my suitcase and proceeded to pull it over her body. She was a big-boned girl with curvy hips and breasts, and as she was putting it on I heard a tiny ripping sound. Apparently she didn't though, and she stood in f ron t of me smi I ing and running her hands over her hips . The dress came up higher than her knees, and the sleeves were cut tight into her arms. "Mhrn, now I need earrings," she said, and raced next door to her room. I pulled my red dress over my head and waited for her to come back, because she still had my deodorant in her hand .

Salt Lake City was a surprise. I didn't think the staff would let us spend the whole afternoon there, but all of a sudden they packed us into the bus and we were driving down a long stretch of sand dunes surrounded by still water. I was sitting with Haley and Joe when Haley exclaimed, "Look!" There was a large flock of black birds sitting on the water, and as we drove past them (many, many yards away) they did the wave. They did the actual, stadium wave along that periwinkle stretch of sky. We were amazed.

When we got to the shore, we took off our shoes and began to run .

This sand seemed to stretch on for miles until it finally hit the low water in the distance. Meanwhile, everything around me was overcast and grainy, the sky, the rocks, the water. And everything seemed twice as wide, like I was in some poorly-developed panoramic picture. We ran and ran until suddenly the ground was more rock than sand and we slowed down, our feet beginning to sore from hard contact with the pebbles . We trudged on until we were standing at the edge of the water and everything smelled and dripped of heavy salt.

While we contemplated for a minute as to how to approach the water, I heard a loud yell and felt a gush of air as Michael went charging in past me. He was wearing one of those thin, see-through hygiene caps that lunch ladies wear. We had each gotten one at the candy factory we visited yesterday, and he had refused to take it off, so in he ran, hiking up his long shorts and flailing his arms, mouth wide open. But as soon as he had touched the water, a dark cloud came swirling out that moved and followed him as he ran. He screamed. He came back to the shore, and we watched that dark cloud of gnats sink back onto where we saw that the thin surface of the water was covered entirely by tiny black gnats. Michael hemmed and hawed, bent his head down close to them to get a better look. Then, with an even more triumphant cry, he splashed into the water for a second time. This time, however, he didn't stop. He kept running as the large, growing cloud of gnats followed him, but eventually, they just settled back down onto the surface. Michael kept running until he was in the distance and standing on a raised rock. (The water was shallow, about a foot.) He threw his arms up into the sky and we all cheered from the shore. This gave the rest of us the courage to wade out to him . Each of

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us unsettled the gnats, but they only swarmed up angrily for a second then settled back down. We waded on.

After a few minutes, me and the other girls stopped and looked at each other. In one collective howl, we quickly grabbed our legs and yanked them out of the water. Our legs were red and stinging sharply as the salt seeped into our naked legs, into the open pores from when we had all shaved our legs that morning. We marched on, ignoring the stinging until we got to the rock and looked out at the miles of low, grey water. I turned to face the shore and see what the other half of the group was doing and saw that Lloyah and Alex were long gone down the shore, walking, two slumped figures holding hands.

When we got out of the water, Michael raced past me with Haley on his back, both of them letting out battle cries as they raced the many kilometers back to the other side of the shore. I watched their figures get smaller and smaller, and I trudged back slowly, watching the sky take on a pale, pink stain.

That night, I walked into my hotel room to find my roommates, two girls I hadn't really talked to before, comparing breast sizes in the shower. I only stood in the doorway for about a second before one of them pulled me inside to ask my opinion. I was shocked, and grabbed my own chest protectively. 路Well, urn, you see I don't really, I mean I don't ... " I started, averting my glance self-consciously, as if they were my own breasts out and exposed. One of the girls had dark black hair and she grabbed a brush from the sink and began to pull it through, already losing interest in what I was saying. She turned to the other girl, who had long thick tangles of curls that went down to her butt. 路Can I borrow your razor?"

"Yeah, sexy, of course you can."

I backed away slowly. I just wanted to go to sleep, that's all. I was fine just skipping the shower tonight. But the girls didn't let me off that easily. The one with long, curly hair looked me up and down, then asked, 路So, do your boobies sag too?"

I let out a small cry and mumbled that I had to forgotten to take out my contacts. I ran into the bedroom, and collapsed into the duffel bag, my arms still covering my chest. They soon forgot about me and finished their shower. I could hear them talking and laughing and the sound of the shower turning off as they stood in silence, brushing out their hair.

I sat propped up on a pillow in bed. When they came back into the room I feebly sat up and mumbled my bra size.

They smiled sympathetically at me and got into bed. After a few minutes of channel surfing on TV they decided to flip through for a while, eventually staying up until two o'clock in the morning to watch porn, only to find out angrily that it had been replaced with a rerun of the Andy Griffiths show. I was quietly relieved.

We got into San Francisco and immediately I was in love. The streets rode up and down and shone with all of these orange pigments I would come to associate wi th as late summer. Everything was elevated and rolling and running. Everywhere the buildings seemed to slant and beckon with wide fingers to me, and I felt not the least bit tired as we walked the hills all day.

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At dusk, as the red sun was starting to go down, we climbed a hill to an open field where our sister buses were already converged and diving into the pizza. We stared at them. Other buses? They existed? By then we were in a complete world of our own, one where it was only us, the fifty-one of us together on the road and nobody else. So here and there the people on my bus would greet friends from other buses, asking how their trips were going, the gossip, the drama. But a little ways through, all of us sort of converged back together into a huddle and held hands. We didn't want to lose more time than we had to with each other. So we started to clap and sing our song, "I Went Down to the River", one where people are picked and dance and grab someone else to sing after them. And soon it was a loud festive circle of sound and bodies being grabbed and pulled and swung around. It all ended in a large heap as we fell into each other laughing, and fanned out onto the ground making daisy chains. I fel t more comfortable than I had ever been that trip and laid out on the grass with my jeans rolled up to my knees watching the silhouettes running and leaping through the last rays of light, long limbs and fireflies.

Lloyah's room was locked. I had just come down the hallway from my room, where Haley and Michael were sitting on the floor counting out MnM's. Every so often they would lean in really close, and Michael would gather the courage to touch her hand while they were laughing. I was sitting in a cardboard box next to the bed, giggling to myself and smoothing out my blue dress for Shabbat. (I had finally gotten it back. ) I liked the lighting in our room. We didn't have any lamps on, just the shades drawn back. I sat with my eyes half closed, twirling a piece of wet hair around my finger. I looked over at them and knew it was time for me to leave when he reached down and touched her face and she didn't jerk away.

I banged on Lloyah' s door, but I could hear music loud from inside, probably the Decemberists if Alex was in there. I put my ear to the door, and then pounded into it on the off beats of the song until Lloyah opened it. She was s tanding in her black bra and boy shorts, holding a bottle of hair dye in one hand. There was a streak of red on her cheek.

"Close the door," she said, and led me into the room. Alex was sitting in his boxers on the edge of the mattress, globs of dark red dye dripping down his forehead. He looked up at me when I walked in.

"Hey. Wanna dye your hair with me?" I contemplated for a minute; I fingered the ends of my limp, brown hair while I stood over him.

"That's okay," I said. "I'll just watch."

Lloyah went over and stood in front of him so that his face was level with her neck. He buried his face into her chest while she squirted out some dye and rubbed it deep into his roots with the tips of her fingers.

"Want an M and M?" Joe asked me from where he laid next to Lauren in bed. They were watching the news with the bag of it between them. I sat down at their feet .

"Joe, I wanna dye your hair. You'd look so sexy as a redhead," Lauren said. She grabbed a fistful of M and M's and shoved them into her mouth. I bit my tongue. I was trying to picture Joe with red hair, and it was not pretty.

The T.V. flickered on and off for a second, and Lauren threw the remote to the floor. I looked up just as the door to the room opened, paused, and stayed open.

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"What the ... " Lauren's roorrunate Liya stepped into the room, holding her nose. "Guys, it wreaks in here." She went into the bathroom. We heard another pause, then a low rumble as she came storming out . "Nice, Lloyah. Really nice. You stained the tub."

Lloyah jumped up . "I couldn't have! I used a towel." She ran past Liya into the bathroom, then let out a moan and swore. Besides the fact that it was "illegal" on this trip to dye anyone's hair, it was also Shabbat. I wondered if they thought everyone else wouldn't realize that Alex had gone from being a blonde to a red head.

That night, they never showed up for services.

Some days later we arrived in the Grand Canyon, my own skin so brown and doughy and worn I barely recognized it. I realized that enough fingers had kneaded into its surface and enough elbows and knees had worn it down to make it this way.

I settled into my cabin room with Lauren and another girl I knew somewhat well. There were two beds, and Lauren insisted that I sleep with her in the one next to the window. Later that night, I woke up to the sound of Lauren moaning, and her two arms wrapped around my body. I jerked. Should I wake her? No, I lay still while she quieted down, only her arms tightening their grip around me. I felt her legs twist around mine. I didn't know what to do, so I slowly tried to pry her away. With a jerk she woke up, her red-veined eyes inches from mine and she let out a small gasp of exclamation.

"I thought you were Joe! I dreamt you were Joe!" I laughed hard into the pillow, and she snorted a few times, rolling back and forth with silent laughter . Our roorrunate shifted in her bed .

"Well, you can still be my Joe," she squeezed my side and put her chin in my shoulder. We fell asleep like that.

That morning we went for a hike on the canyon, but halfway down it started to pour and we all had to race back up, taking shelter in the cabin's lounge . Lloyah, Alex, Haley, Joe and I all collapsed onto the couch and surveyed the rain outside. The cabin was large, fitted with dining halls for eager tourists and multiple gift shops with wooden carvings. The place smelled like trees.

After the rain stopped, Alex, Lloyah, Haley, Michael and I ran outside to go back to the canyon. We decide to race and somehow I took the lead all the way to the empty train tracks on the border of the woods . I stopped when I recognize a few kids from our bus, standing a foot away from a deer. There was a heavy mist hanging in the air, the kind you find after a deep rain storm. Alex ran past me. I took a last look at the deer standing on the tracks and raced to catch up with him.

At the canyon the five of us stumbled around holding hands, giving piggy back rides along the edge of the rock. We got to the edge of a rock that jutted out into the canyon, and sat on it, just watching the last of the mist rise up to meet us. After a while we walked back to the lounge, and I went to go practice with our makeshift bus choir, singing in Hebrew in front of the lounge. A small crowd of tourists and natives came to watch, and some of the natives were drunk and tried to sing along with us. We welcomed them into the group, and only stopped after forty-five minutes to go inside and eat warm spaghetti .

I began to find bruises on my body. I looked down one day to find a large bruise under my thigh, two on my hip; I counted four on one arm. And everybody else had the same, but I just figured it was from when we collapsed into each other, or grabbed here and there wherever

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we could. We had got ten much more rough wi th each other, finally the waters tested and broken and splashed allover the place.

Over time, we also took on the same functions, the same two-day stomach bugs; when one threw up, another did too. I figured that our bodies were just changing at the same time. We had become dependent upon the same air-tight snacks and sleeping arrangements, the same dead air particles floating around. Somewhere along the line, we lost track of that world outside the bus. We had built our own system, and inside the bus, there were no social or physical boundaries. It was just us, feeding off the primitive in each other.

I came to believe that we were flawed on purpose, that those extra pouches of skin were just there to get a better grip when we held onto each other. Those last few weeks we shook a lot, touched each other when the nights seemed eternal and the days made us shrivel up.

We learned the curves of each others' bodies and how to naturally sink into them while riding out seven hours in the desert. I lost that little black eyeliner and wore the same shorts almost every day, the ones that still had grass stains on them from San Francisco.

Our bus pulled into Albuquerque at ten o'clock in the morning, which was strange for us because at that time we were usually out sight-seeing somewhere or on the road. This was Friday, Shabbat tonight. We had the whole day to relax and explore the hotel. It was ninety-eight degrees outside, so we all clumped into the indoor pool and swam around for a bit. The center of the hotel was large and airy and had balconies reaching out from the second floor . Me and Haley and Lauren sat on the railing to the pool, our bare legs dangling over the water . Our bus mates came and went, some going for a dip, others going down for a nap in their rooms. I was rooming with Haley and Lloyah tonight, and last Haley saw Lloyah was in the room with Alex, so we decided to not disturb them. Lauren looked at us and stated that we needed to go explore this grand hotel. In actuality the walls were made of wood and smelled of cedar and our bus made up most of the guests, but we got up anyway and went upstairs.

We discovered a long enclosed bridge made of glass that connected one part of the hotel to the other over a busy highway road. When we stepped into the tube the temperature instantly climbed, taking on the affect of a sauna.

"Mrnm," Haley said.

"Just what we needed." We all had on our dresses for Shabbat and slowly we spun around and around with our dresses catching in the air, our bare feet sticking to the carpet . We kept spinning and spinning over the highway until we couldn't see straight and all the lights and the nOlses became as dizzy as the speeding cars below us.

It was one 0' clock in the morning as I sat in the bathroom untangling my hair from its bun. I finally got it out. It hung down my back in messy waves because of the humidi ty teasing it so much. I closed the light, peeled down to my underwear, and climbed into bed.

Lloyah and Haley were sharing the other bed, and they lay in their underwear on top of the sheets because it was too warm for any sort of blankets. The TV was on low, a fuzzy blue episode of Family Guy was playing, but we had stopped watching a while ago . We lay in the dark, the air conditioner rattling over by the bathroom.

"Come over here. I can't even see you," Lloyah mumbled to me from the other side of the room. I was half asleep, and clumsily picked

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myself up and slumped onto their bed where I lay between them on my stomach, my face in a pillow.

"Can you imagine what it'd be like to just live like this, all the time?" I said. Ever since the trip had started, I had become more and more entranced with the idea of living on the road, where nothing permanent and mundane could ever catch up with me. I would be free like this, only there wouldn't be a daily itinerary and there wouldn't be such convenient sleeping arrangements. But that was okay. I was and am an idealist, and that summer I had gotten the chance to live out the possibility.

"I would do it in a second," Lloyah said.

I turned onto my back to watch the tiny flecks of dust sink down from the ceiling, all bumping into each other as they fell, and I thought I could be okay with that kind of living. It was okay to bump around, to feel around for someone to hold onto. We lay there on our backs squished into each other, all of that body heat flowing from one person to the next, our bare arms and legs clumped together in the sheets. It was just us squirming and flailing our bodies around that summer because we were still young and always spinning. We would keep on burning like some great nebula explosion. Limbs and fireflies burning and spinning and spinning.

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