Third Wheel
KIT BRYMER
Small town shit. Smoke, asphalt. Walking to the gas station and back, dangling your legs over the edge of some bridge. Corn syrup. Red 40. Tessa likes Bomb Pops, but only the cherry parts. She decapitates one and hands me the rest of it, a half-melted mess, and I lick at white and blue while she stains her lips red.
“It’s like eating a turkey leg,” Tessa says. “The stick is the bone.”
“Sure,” I say.
“It’s the same as eating corn on the cob. Like, you’re eating a vegetable, or a grain or whatever, but it’s still kind of primal. I mean, it’s basically meat.”
Her teeth are pink and she looks insane. I play along.
“I think peaches are like that, too,” I say. “Very carnal.”
“Not apples, though.”
“No. Apples are too civilized."
Tessa scrunches her nose. “I hate that word.”
Heat and humidity in the high eighties, sweat pooling in our collarbones. This is the kind of heat that trumps everything; we talk in circles or not at all. Tessa scratches at a bugbite on her ankle until the skin breaks and blood rises in a dark bead. A beauty mark. A tattoo. This is what we’ve been doing with our time off.
I look over the edge of the bridge into the cool stream below. If this had been last summer, we would’ve been down there, splashing and cutting our feet on the rocks at the bottom. I can see it as clear as anything. Jean shorts and bikini tops, sunscreen smeared on our noses. And the girl in between us, her laughter ringing through the trees and carrying into town, to all the familiar places we belonged to back then.
I set the popsicle stick down, tongue numb, and Tessa tosses it over the side of the bridge before I can tell her not to. It falls quickly and bounces off the bank before landing in the water with a quiet splash. The distance between the bridge and the ground really isn’t so great, when you see it like that. If we jumped, we’d probably only break a bone or two. “You shouldn’t litter,” I say uselessly, and she shrugs.
“It’s just wood, it doesn’t really count.”
It’s too hot to say anything else. I read the initials carved into the truss. RM&ES. K loves A. Forever forever forever. There are dozens of letters and names on this beam alone, along with the obligatory dicks. For at least sixty years, this has been the place where couples go to commit acts of romantic vandalism. That’s what it’s really for—crossing the stream is only incidental. We all grew up knowing this the same way we grew up knowing that the creek behind South Street is for losing your virginity in a car and Harper’s Trail is for buying drugs, or else for trying to buy drugs and losing your nerve. Growing up here makes it second nature, you know these things the way a dog knows a scent.
I run my fingers over the beam until my eyes catch on a set of names I recognize, and only a second or two passes before I realize Tessa’s staring at the same spot. The letters were carved carefully and filled in with black Sharpie. Made to last. Neither one of us speaks but we’re both thinking the same thing. It’s one of those moments when you can just tell. “We should head back,” she says, and I don’t argue.
The sun sets and the heat doesn’t break, it festers. The street lights turn on and the sidewalks go blond. Tessa stays two steps ahead of me, kicking at a stone with one sandaled foot.
“Do you think there’ll be an assembly about it?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Even though it happened over the summer?”
“Especially since it happened over the summer. They’ve been waiting for months to talk to us about it. The guidance counselors have all been on standby, probably.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her face half-shadowed. I think of that picture the art teacher used to keep on her classroom door, the one with Jesus showing off the gash in his side.
“I don’t know how you get over things so quickly,” she says, and it’s a challenge I don’t take. There’s no right thing to say and she knows it. She kicks the stone into a gutter. We know every house on this street, even in the dark. We know who lives there, all the things they’ve done since kindergarten. That’s Carson’s house, the one who steals grocery carts and pushes them into the creek. That’s Liza, who’s probably going to Harvard, and her sister Emma, too, the one who threw up on the eighth grade field trip. Michael, who got cheated on. Ms. Andrews. The Carters. The Angelos.
“If there’s gonna be an assembly, they should have talked to us first,” Tessa says. “I’m sure they talked to her parents.”
“What would they know that we don’t?”
I laugh, but it’s more for punctuation than anything else.
More small town shit. Drinking in someone’s basement, usually Tessa’s, because her mom can’t do stairs because of the stroke and her grandma can’t do stairs because of her hip. Tessa’s basement is like a section of the ocean where no laws exist because no country bothered to claim it.
Tonight it’s seven dollar wine in Christmas mugs, courtesy of Tessa’s brother Jason and his employee discount at the grocery store. Tessa gives me a Frosty mug “out of respect for my religion.” Frosty is nondenominational, she says. He doesn’t care if you have accepted Jesus into your heart.
We’re sitting in one of the beanbags that belonged to Jason back when he was in high school. If you put your face to the fabric and inhale deeply, you can still get a whiff of Axe body spray and something else you’d maybe rather not think about. Tessa’s dark hair is wet, and a droplet falls on my bare thigh as she leans her head on my shoulder. She’s fresh out of the shower and our bodies are practically crushed together; all I can smell is the candied citrus of her shampoo. This closeness is new. Tessa used to be the type of person to push you away when you asked for a hug.
She fills my mug again. “I don’t know how you go so fast.”
Once the bottle’s half finished, Tessa pulls out her laptop and boots it up. “I hate this game,” I say, because I already know what we’re gonna do.
“No, you love it.” She smiles, and her face is blue in the glow of her screensaver: a photo of a band she doesn’t listen to anymore from a concert she didn’t go to. She searches up the chat site she likes. As we wait for the first person to connect, she says, “I’ll skip them if it goes bad.” The first chatter is a man in his forties. Beard, wifebeater.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“Don’t be boring,” Tessa says, which is a go-to response along with old enough or, if she really wants to freak someone out, twelve.
“I’m not a pervert, okay? I just—” Tessa skips him before he can finish.
Another guy connects. Younger than the first. Crew cut.
“Are you two lesbians?”
Tessa laughs. “Cuz you’d love that.” Another go-to.
“Not you. I want to talk to your girlfriend,” he says. Meaning me, I guess. “Yeah?” I say in my greatest customer-service-sweetheart voice.
He smiles big. “Are they real?”
It takes me a second to figure out what he means.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she says. She skips him with a flourish.
“This is boring,” I say, my face burning.
Tessa isn’t fazed. This is fun for her even.
“We’ll get someone cool. Just wait.”
The next person loads. A girl. Our age, with corn-silk hair and a gap between her front teeth. I see a flicker of recognition across Tessa’s face and that’s all it takes, that’s enough for her to click out of the page completely.
We stare at the screensaver in silence. The laptop fan whirs, spitting hot air onto our thighs. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this hot in my life.
“It didn’t even look like her,” I offer. “I mean, it wasn’t her.”
Tessa turns to me, and for one terrifying second, she makes this expression like she’s going to hit me or something. She doesn’t, of course; she wouldn’t.
She clears her throat. “Obviously.”
She won’t say it, but she’s sorry.
It’s Sunday night and we can hear the races going on across town, cars chasing in circles. The tires squeal as they round the track again, again. Tessa’s head falls onto my shoulder and I have to remind myself that it makes no difference to her, it’s just a spot for her head to land.
She’s thinking about something else. School starts tomorrow and the cars are looping the track again.
KIT BRYMER is an emerging writer and student at the University of New Hampshire, where they major in communication sciences and disorders. When they are not writing, they enjoy trying new recipes, upcycling clothes, and pacing back and forth. Their work is forthcoming in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s Touchstone Journal.
