To begin again the story: Tawny had been unzipping Carson LaFell’s fly and preparing to fit her head between his stomach and the steering wheel when the big red fire engine came rising over the fogged curve of the earth. I saw it but couldn’t say anything. Survivors bury themselves. Carson’s eyes were closed when he let the car drift into the opposite lane and the fire engine folded up their Beamer 328i’s front end like the tinfoil of emptied Cough & Cold pill sheets. With two more seconds or an unclicked seat belt, Tawny too would have gone storming blind into the Jaws of Death. Brighton LaFell wished he’d been in the car to save his older brother or die alongside him; he also wished that Tawny had not survived the wreck but had instead become a single detail in a word problem about how many kilonewtons of pressure must be exerted by a hydraulic rescue tool to cut through a BMW’s high-strength steel body before the bodies inside bleed out — not to mention the amount of force with which a four-door import traveling at fifty-three miles per hour hits an emergency vehicle traveling in the opposite direction at forty-four miles per hour. Or better still, Brighton thought, would have been if Tawny had decided not to use her own car to give Carson road head because she was the last in her clique not to have given it, the last virgin to turn eighteen, the last to own a purebred corgi, the last to be given a birthday car, the last to take the Goldschläger/Xanax Car Wash Challenge, which is why she’d had her boyfriend of four and a half months drive her Beamer down winding Two Notch for the sole purpose of putting his cock in her mouth and later telling all her friends it was no big deal, as she’d already forgotten the meaning of l’esprit de l’escalier. Taylor Swift’s album Red is an accomplishment no one wants to admit is accomplished, an elevating moment of survived reinvention. Red, the color of state clay and C&Cs and fire engines and cherry blossom tips and Xannies and her Beamer and lakes of blood and candy apples and stop signs and hearts and the lightning-strewn sky on the cover of The Fundamentals of Physics (and other things I can’t think of right now). Adult pleasures pair with playful cynicism across Swift’s range of musical variations that favor an investigation of the disestablished self while maintaining broad market appeal. As Swift says in the intro to “I Knew You Were Trouble”: “I think that the worst part of it all wasn’t losing him; it was losing me.” Red, as a study of irrevocable loss, is unequivocal; life is a kind of radioactive decay where you witness the particles break off into the air like teeth from a punched-out mouth. But Tawny was thinking none of this, not when she asked to be excused from French class and smoked Marlboros under cherry blossoms in the quad, where she snapped off the filters and felt her insides fill, and not when Brighton kissed her in the back of the physics classroom (how the kiss happened is not important — not yet). The Jaws of Life is the most unsophisticated piece of hydraulic machinery (a simple engine, piston-cylinder with hoses, toggle switch for the arms), yet it has sixteen thousand pounds of spreading force, fourteen thousand of pulling force, and twenty-two thousand five hundred of cutting force at the notch. Put into perspective, a grizzly exerts twelve hundred and a girl, as she bites into a candy apple, one-fifty. Lieutenant Hal Turner cut open the Beamer’s top until the other firemen could lay Carson across the double yellow, and then, with a golden blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Tawny said something to Hal that kept him holding tightly on to the Jaws of Life in the middle of Two Notch Drive. And how could someone — even me — expect her to keep her days straight, since today is today but also all the other days that will replace this one?
For an eleventh-grade Dutch Fork Golden Bear who lives in a gated community where visitors are called in by the front guard and there is no such thing as an unleashed Doberman, Tawny’s seen some shit: Carson was some shit because her friends never got over how she could go out with someone like him — someone who whole stole candy bars? someone without a credit card? The LaFells drove used domestics with mismatched doors and lived in a snout house in Crosland Heights, which had a reputation for having a reputation, but Carson never told Tawny the real stories: Here’s where someone gunned down a policeman on Christmas Day, where two guys on LSD killed their friend and tried to burn his body in a backyard grill. Her parents threatening to homeschool her if she missed any more class is some shit too, and going sixes on Coricidin C&Cs has made her see some shit, like lakes of blood in the night sky over the event horizon of a moonlit horse pasture. The dead fire engine she drives by every day is some shit. Before she’d reached into Carson’s opened fly, she’d been telling him what l’esprit de l’escalier meant, and he’d said, “Sounds like ‘Doberman thought.’” “Doberman?” “Yeah, like, ‘I would’ve punched that Doberman if I’d’ve known he’d bite me.’” Tawny shouldn’t have said anything to Hal Turner, but she did, right after those treacherous minutes in which Hal had cut around the spiderwebbed windshield and the peeling dash while her unconscious boyfriend’s bloody arms hung lifeless over the steering wheel, Red still askip on the shorting radio. By the next Thursday, she’d hard-eyed her vanity to the point of convincing herself of some half-invincibility. She’d seized all too well the smoky emptiness behind every fear that dear ol’ Mom and Dad had set ablaze inside her: like razorblade-embedded Galas on Halloween, like old refrigerators by the train tracks, like “red and yellow, kill a fellow.” She’d never even seen quicksand except that one time when, half-asleep, she’d flipped to Channel 22’s Faces of Death and watched a wrecker on-screen snatch this missing girl’s grit-encrusted body up out of some past night’s sinkhole. So everything has changed for Tawny, and her now-dowsed fears are vaporous words that she anti-mantras into the mirror: We are never ever getting back together. That same Thursday, she had wanted to stay stay stay through all three lunches while killing a brand-new pack of Marlboro Reds because Taylor Swift had come out against teen smoking and because all the friends she smoked with in the quad had sworn off pop music, the same way they had sworn off American Girl dolls and exposed midriffs in middle-school cheerleading outfits: “We grow every day,” they’d said. “We become our better selves.” And they’d changed cig brands to better fit what they called the Best Up-Fuck Years of Your Life: from Virginia Slims taken from their moms’ overspilling purses to Parliaments bummed outside Whiskey Junction to sister-bought Camel Lights to Newport menthols adultly purchased with fakes from the hunting-loop 76. These Swallows Hill girls had once set the biology class’s pet cockatiel free after painting it gold; they’d poisoned one of the town’s three cherry blossom trees; they’d shoved their younger brothers into walls and covered the holes with motivational posters that read “Challenge” underneath a photo of a grizzly catching a salmon in midair. A black spot is no different than a black hole, a sad beautiful tragic place from which all time and starlight cannot escape, a concept Tawny learned about exactly one week after it — it, which tendered the school’s roster with a minus-one; it, which no one pretended to whisper about in study hall and no one stayed quiet about except Brighton. He sat in front of her in physics because she had an L last name too. On Friday he dropped a big headlight on her desk with all the gravity he could muster, as if he’d been waiting years for her to finally see him — though if anyone has any say in the matter (and I do), we’re all going to end up in the same place, where we don’t need eyes to see — and Brighton wanted to kiss her so much, and he wanted her to be dead so much too, and he’d written down both these goals in the front matter of The Fundamentals of Physics. The dead fire engine had been left on the side of Two Notch. No one knows that the Jaws of Life are only called the Jaws of Life because they snatch people from the Jaws of Death. Hal Turner used the Jaws of Life to slice off the roof of Tawny’s car in two minutes flat; now Tawny drives by the dead fire engine with Taylor Swift burning the radio wires while she’s sloping on cold meds and singing his favorite song wrong, the way he used to: We are never never getting back together. I almost do believe this.
She drives by the dead fire engine, now painted the color of the sky, because that is where the engine hit, or was hit, or “entered a fatal vehicular collision,” which was the object of the game she and Brighton had played back when they were in elementary school with collectible Barbies and three Cobra action figures named Ghost Bear, all piled into Barbie’s VW Microbus before they shoved it off the highest step of the tallest staircase in Tawny’s house (because the LaFells’ house had no stairs), a game they called Who Survived the Wreck?! even though Brighton collected all the bodies, alive or dead, and buried them together under the lounger’s red afghan. (What is a deadly collision if not an illustration of perfect physics at work?) Without one aberration, cue Carson’s tilted head in silhouette overtaking the side door’s panes on his mission to ferry Brighton back between the two low brick ramparts (one graffitied, the other sideswiped) spelling out “Hellcome to Crosland.” Carson’s apologies for tracking indoors a trail of yellow-sick leaves are words as diaphanous as the shed cottonmouth skin hanging from his rearview. It’s when Carson mothercats Brighton by his hand-me-down Gap shirt so that they rise together above the pink and punk debris that Tawny sees brothers who will become variables straight out of her physics tome — they’re an equation alright. She’ll later learn that “acceleration” means any change in speed, but if she were ever to solve for one of the LaFells, she’d need to answer herself: Who was the first force? Who equals Δx when one’s initial position and one’s final position change at speeds divergent? Who of their duo will break off like a particle, like a promise, like a plastic arm? The day of the creepy headlight, she skipped half of French with Monsieur Glass, since she knew Brighton would be waiting for her afterward. He wanted to take up his older brother’s mantle of turning hall-pass like into church-hall love by holding on to her. Plus, throw in the myth that if anyone graduates from Dutch Fork a virgin, the statue of the golden bear out front will come alive and eat them. Carson, from his current invisible seat in the tallest swamp birch, does not want Brighton to kiss Tawny; younger brother means a lot of things: defender, slave, inheritor of the bright-orange cross-trainers Carson was wearing when the fire engine struck him but not inheritor of his rich smoker girlfriend with the candy-apple lip balm. Tawny hadn’t studied for the quiz on what Monsieur Glass called “untranslatables,” like l’esprit de l’escalier. She killed a pack of Marlboro Reds, and every time she inhaled, she felt slutty; wisps had risen from Carson’s chest after they’d used the Jaws of Life to pull him from the pancaked wreckage; once, she’d seen lightning strike a birch in her backyard, and the fire had climbed the trunk like a spiral staircase, as if everything out of sight — fear, her lungs, root systems, the unspoken wattage of stories, the compartments of our decay, the very places we step again — was always burning. After more than a few Coricidins, she thought too much in sixth period, remembering the night she’d lied to her parents to stay at Carson’s: they’d popped their usual sixes and made out while stripping off each other’s clothes, but she’d soon been struck by the feeling that if she gave it all up to him in his room, there’d be nothing left to give anyone ever again (we offer the fire until we can only offer its smoke), and so Carson, angry, shoved Event Horizon into the VCR, and thus commenced the worst single hour of her adult life before Brighton came in to ask, for the first time in years, if she wanted to play Who Survived?! She feels the dead fire engine watch her pass, and she remembers Hal Turner’s face when she told him she believed that she had not ended an innocent phase in her life, that she’d crested a horizon only to find another higher horizon beyond it, and then her mouth fills with smoke and she brushes the gold flakes from her wet shirt and Taylor Swift blitzes on the radio that this is the last time until the next time.
She drives by the painted fire engine, which Brighton had visited after last night’s candlelight vigil. He’d slashed the engine’s tires with his brother’s survival knife and tried to break the horn with the heel of his own palm. He had wanted to bend the ladder into the swamp and haul the engine block into the road, and it was only after he’d wrenched one headlight from its socket and stepped back to let the swampwood burn up the engine’s face that he’d realized what he was doing to his brother’s memorial. Tawny had not gone to the vigil, but the ones who had, like Carson’s dropout friends, who’d seen worse yet never knew what to say in the face of worse because little mistakes are relative, all circled the campus statue of Gus the Golden Bear, whose iron jaws rippled until people blew out their crimson candles and someone started a trash-can fire to say: “This is what Carson would have wanted!” (Not true.) At third lunch, she killed a pack of Marlboros while hiding out with her friends in the quad under two very alive cherry blossom trees and beside one very dead one, and together they miscounted the petals blowing back and forth across the mosaic of a grinning bear in washes of fallen white slivers tipped bright red, like they’d each been dipped in a lake of blood. She smoked Marlboro Reds because that’s the only brand the 76 night-shift attendant sold to fake IDers. Carson had hated her smoking habit — he’d kept a running tally of how many six-minute spans she’d cut off her life: sixty-eight hours, twenty-one minutes (and I’m counting now) — but smoking seemed cooler than his Taylor Swift obsession. She thought too much in fourth-period physics, since sloping on C&Cs turns the windows to little lakes of color that make her thinkthinkthink and she’s been popping those red Cough & Colds by the rule of sixes because that’s how Carson taught her: “Go six, go twelve, go eighteen if you want totally wrecked!” he’d said after she’d seen him in his biggest hoodie five-fingering boxes from the 76. “Why six?” she’d asked. “Because that’s how many in a sheet, three sheets to a box. Who takes five pills and leaves one behind?” They had a different high than the pink Xannies she and her friends tooted off the dash of her tinted Beamer through hollowed-out Bics before first bell. The only problem with the rule of sixes is the other rule of six: there’s a one-in-six chance she spends the whole sloping experience horking to the point that she makes her own new rule: Never again. Tawny wanted to stop saying deadweight equaled best weight, wanted to stop saying she was okay, wanted to start saying that she wasn’t fine at all, but here again that all came back around: the clean, bright lift of two Xanax chased with Smirnoff Ice in the bathroom at second lunch. She drives by the dead fire engine on the swamp’s edge because she can’t not drive by it, because Two Notch is the quickest way to Dutch Fork, because any other country zag adds twenty minutes of speed traps. Plus, this is the bog curve where Carson died — was killed (I can say this) — and the engine’s front is covered in a thin mask of soot, a grinning sky-blue skull missing one tooth.
Tawny drives by the painted fire engine that sits on what everyone (everyone but her and me) agrees is holy ground. She skipped half of Monsieur Glass’s period because when she mouthed aloud her “untranslatables,” everything sounded like “I survived the wreck,” and she killed a pack of Marlboros because Carson had always said he wouldn’t steal cigarettes for her, just like he hadn’t stolen his copy of Red because he wanted to support Taylor Swift’s career. Before the Friday physics when she saw his face in his brother’s face and felt that telltale C&C nausea at the memory of playing Candy Land with Brighton years ago, when they used to call it Crosland, since Candy Castle was Swallows Hill, Gumdrop Pass was Two Notch, and Licorice Castle was Crosland Heights because of Lord Licorice’s bats, which Brighton swore swooped around their bricked-up chimney until he stopped playing Crosland altogether and started wanting to throw Barbie’s bus down two stories. The gumdrop shortcut was safe. Some shortcuts are little mistakes, and some lead to bigger ones. You take the shortcut until you can’t anymore. She sloped on pills in sixth period, when someone supposedly kissed her (now I can tell you), because Brighton dropped the headlight on her desk, told her he had tried to burn down the fire engine, then explained that no matter how much Carson had loved her, Brighton had always loved her twice as much, and that there’s no drama at the edge of a black hole but there is a point of no return, and “we have gone past that point,” he said, but she’d already tried to forget everything about Event Horizon, so she nailed him with her eyes, the pills making the windows, the board, the chalked-in equations break into webs, and I imagine she expected to see a black hole standing before her in orange cross-trainers, but Tawny only saw a younger brother, and she wanted him to become the black hole because nothing sounded more capable of surviving, so she kissed Brighton with his lightning-emblazoned textbook pressed between them like she would go up in smoke right then and there, then drove by the dead fire engine while thinking Carson was the lucky one (I heard her tell Hal as much) and wishing she could somehow be the lucky one too — only, without lightning, there’s no fire; without fire, there’re no trucks; without trucks, there’re no roads; without roads, there’s no Crosland Heights; without Crosland, there’re no LaFells; and without LaFells, there’s no reason to hazard beyond the black gates of her own batting lashes, so how would she know if luck’s out there without first trying to see how fast she could make it fall away?
And my eyes were closed for that ganglial instant of ruin, before everyone’s lives radiated outward like racetracks, like fire, while I lost the rickety compromise called living, and this weak scaffolding tore away to reveal other ground suddenly gained by a misstep, and I went to the very ends of space and found its actual razor edge and cut myself off on it (please do not mistake me for only me) in the side yard, where I once filled a ground hive with spray-gun glue and bombed its exit shaft with a trash lid, but those jacket-fuckers kept streaming out in bright phalanxes to stick me in a thick thunderstorm of festive rage, the universe deserving the universe, and someday I’ll go back and put warning labels on my losses: eye, right of way, one particle dissipating my charge before the next one came; my mouth stung shut for the better, and have you seen that trio of horses cantering mischmetal down South Boundary so that the sealer crystal sparks? Sight goes blurry, then clears for good when your head’s the calm in a swarm — I have seen blindness, and it is easily bought. Call me a half-truth, halved again. The roses dropped are stolen and not red and resemble sheet-metal byproducts like antihuman spikes, bear mace, pop-up hail-damage shops, and make no mistake, in this cavitied state of grace, my limits are as follows:
