azurelunatic | It's the last Tuesday in July, and I can't sleep just yet.

After Purple mentioned it, I've had "The Freshmen" in my head all day. (Can't be held responsible. What made us think that we were wise?)

Other times of the year it's mostly faded to a thing that happened once. It's a big thing, too big to be lifted from under my skin in one piece.

Every year that's between that day and me, I've been able to comprehend it a little better. If I'd actually been pregnant the time I dreamed I was that summer (in the absence of all possibility, and of course Shawn would have been the father) and I hadn't had an abortion (as I dreamed I had, dreamed of telling the children who came after about their sibling who wasn't), that kid would be nearly

apraxial's age now. Eighteen. Adult. (What made us think that we were wise?)

I have to believe that Shawn didn't know how genuinely spooked I was. I have to believe that he could have never realized how devoutly truthful my parents had been with us. I was a little alien, and he had no conception of how far I would actually believe him when he told impossible stories like they were the truth. (I know he must have known that he was scaring me, that I was sweetly credulous and hung on to his every word. That power had to have been intoxicating, and it would have been natural to push it just a little further.)

Mama is a worrier. It's contagious. And when you've been worrying yourself sick (never mind the other physical factors: I was bound to catch something or other the way I was carrying on) over the boy who has gone out of state for the summer, you worry when he goes radio silent for a week. This was before everyone had email and a cellphone. People got busy. People went to Baha'i religious retreats with their dad and stepmom and three stepbrothers for a week, and didn't answer the phone because they weren't home. People forgot to fucking mention the retreat beforehand because sometimes people are disorganized, full of ADHD, and sometimes kind of a thoughtless shithead.

It was no-one's fault, except perhaps my own, that I got so sick. Look, if you're an indestructible teenager wearing spiritually significant jewelry, and the body part that you are wearing that jewelry on starts to puff up and get red and itchy? FOR THE LOVE OF GODS, TAKE IT OFF. MAKE AN APPROPRIATE RITUAL APPEASEMENT AND TAKE IT OFF BEFORE YOU FUCK YOUR BODY UP FOR LIFE. Also, if it's at all possible, see a doctor about the case of swimmer's ear, or whatever else is going on and making you so physically miserable you can't function, before it gets to the point that you're so physically miserable you can't function.

I still can't talk sensibly about the babysitting job that I never should have accepted. I was too young, the kids were wild and traumatized themselves, I was miserable, and nothing was okay. (They had no father anymore. They wouldn't have needed babysitting quite so urgently if he were still alive, and his absence was still a raw burn mark.)

I still can't talk sensibly about the relationship. Not then, not now, not here. (We never talk of our lacking relationships.) By the grace of whatever powers there are, I regained her friendship and it's more than I deserve. (It's a wistful thought every now and again, but a rare now and again; I can feel in the shape of my bones how I'm not the person I thought I would become, neither in partner nor in the most basic level of my brain.)

Eighteen years ago today, minus a few days, a teenage girl fell off a cliff. She didn't survive. So he told me, eventually, painfully, in a letter that he never contradicted. I never had the courage to re-read that letter. (It's somewhere in my papers in Alaska, if it didn't get lost or damaged. Did I hide it so well that I'll never find it? Did I slip it into a book and bring it home with me?) The letter was the final testimony. We never spoke of it again. In the absence of any contradiction, I accepted it as the truth. (Was it the truth? Was it yet another lie? I felt as though we'd been circling closer to the truth with every verbal sidestep. The words, awkward pencil handwriting on yellow paper, cut to the core of all the evasions and rang true. But who was I to judge the truth, out of him?)

Eighteen years ago, Shawn, and Shawn's pants, fell immediately in love with a girl he met at a Golden Corral. She liked what she saw. They went to a party. They had sex. There was teenage posturing involving her (apparently suddenly ex) boyfriend. He was happy with a girl who wasn't me. He thought she was perfect. I thought she was (a skank, a slut, probably imaginary, she hated me, she was too good to talk to me) a threat. He said he was happy. He said he had a girlfriend. (He'd tried to kill himself. His girlfriend was dead.)

Eighteen years ago, the love of Shawn's sixteen-year-old life was horsing around near a steep edge, fell down, and died.

Eighteen years ago, Shawn was too traumatized to explain over the phone, over precious daytime minutes of long distance, what the fuck was going on. Instead he freaked the fuck out, tried to kill himself, tried to make anyone around him (except his parents, not his parents) listen to the last story he had to tell in order to pretend everything was all right, pulling us in with equal parts charisma and panic.

Every now and then, ever since search engines started to be a thing, I google what little I know. Was it in New Mexico? What date was it? The name he told me, was that her real name?

I haven't found her. Each year, maybe more and more old newspapers make it onto the web. Maybe one day I'll find her obituary, or a little news item about a fatal hiking accident with a pretty blonde girl, maybe wearing those same white short-shorts, just about sixteen years old.

She existed. I have to believe she existed. I have to believe that she, too, wasn't just some figment of Shawn's wild imagination, that he didn't construct his dream girl only to fridge her to justify a suicide attempt.

I haven't worked up the courage to write his mother and ask what she knows. She wasn't the one on the spot, but surely her ex-husband talked to her? Surely he would have mentioned that something had gone wrong during the retreat, and Shawn came back different? It's been such a closely held secret all these years that I never considered it an option. He held the people who could get a parallax view on his life strictly apart, mediated the interactions.

It's been eighteen years. Rest well, little phantom. The daughter I never had would be older than you were, now.

Every year I lay out the puzzle pieces and mourn. I mourn for her, who died so young. I mourn for Shawn, who never spoke of her again. I mourn for myself, so young and scared. I mourn for A, bewildered by a girlfriend gone suddenly irrational and a rival gone terrifying.

It must have been a year later when I found myself at the fair. I'd ducked into a quiet tent to escape the dust and crowds, and found myself with an elderly couple who lived out near the lake, past Fox. They were Baha'i, a rare faith in the world and even more rare in Alaska. Their tent was a sanctuary. I listened to them respectfully. I prayed quietly, recognizing the harmony between their faith and my feral pagan ways.

Later, as the horses trotted around the ring and I sat dodging mosquitoes in the stands, I watched the fuchsia and electric orange clouds in the cerulean sky. I felt the shard of her soul which had stabbed through my heart release and float to join the heavens. I said goodbye. I wished her well.

Every year I sit a while. I don't know her people. I don't know their customs. I don't know who she has to mourn her. I don't know where I could find her memorial, to lay flowers or burn a lock of hair, Barrayaran-style. I have a name that may never have existed, and I have the memories of the marks her absence left on Shawn.

It's the last Tuesday in July, and I can't sleep just yet.

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