What I Remember
My foot was hurting. I had landed awkwardly running through the woods, a root emerging, thick and twisted, and I had misjudged it. Or, I rolled my ankle playing basketball the night before. Under the lights at the high school, the air thick with heat, fireflies shining on and off, on and off, over the field next to the court.
My foot was hurting. I was sitting on the dock, kicking the skin of the lake water with my good foot, my hurting foot submerged, cool.
“Jess!” I heard Greg before I saw him. I didn’t turn. I was about to start junior year and I knew a thing or two about how to act. He sat next to me, his bare arm skimming my bare arm. Neither of us moved to avoid this lightest of touch.
“How’s your foot?”
“Swollen, but okay.”
“You’re tough.”
That was the first time it had just been the two of us. That night, after we snuck out to smoke weed by the water’s edge, I followed him back to his house. We crept in quietly, careful not to wake his parents. In his room, beside his Michael Jordan poster, I let him take off my tank top. He asked if I wanted to do it. I said yes.
No. That night, I watched Greg and Big Tits Shana smoking weed at the water’s edge. I watched from the recreation department’s cabin among the buoys and the balls and the ropes and flags, my elbows sore from the rough raw wood window sill. I saw him hold the joint to her lips as she inhaled, illuminated by the lights at the base of the dock, and the moonlight filtered through the cloudy sky. I heard the swish of the water lapping at the wood and her grating giggles that manifested as an uneasiness deep inside me, while something like gravity kept me watching. He smoothed a sweatshirt on the same dock we’d sat on earlier, and I strained to see what their hands were doing as they lay on it, wriggling a little, kissing.
My cousin CJ told me that when you remember something, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it. “That’s how things’ll get twisted over time,” he said.
Well, I remember dreaming up that night in Greg’s bedroom. I remember the nerves snapping all over me, how his hand felt on my leg. I remember that I imagined thinking, I am so lucky to be here, for this to be how I do it for the first time. I can see his light brown eyes—the kind of eyes that ask and answer questions while you’re just trying to keep breathing—and the red linen drapes over the window. I close my eyes and hear the bull frogs’ quacking, the stealthy whine of the mosquitos, the slam of a neighbor’s broken screen door flapping in the distance. I remember my lips trembling, and I tried to hide my shaking hands as he took off his shorts. I remember that, so what’s the difference? Whether it happened or not, all that remains is the same memory either way.
Taking away memories can be harder. I didn’t tell anyone about my car rides with Uncle B. He wasn’t a real uncle and shouldn’t that be a clue? But I like what CJ said because I’m going on the basis that the opposite might work too. If I don’t think about things, I can lose the memory. Case in point, it was Uncle B that actually said that to me, but I prefer it to be CJ. I don’t think about Uncle B’s sweaty palms, his wide-ridged fingernails and the misshapen thumb, small and hooklike. It didn’t happen. I don’t want it to have.
My foot really was hurting that day there on the dock. I just don’t remember how I hurt it. I decided not to.
Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City. She is the creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and creative nonfiction contributing editor at Barren Magazine. Her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in PANK, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, JMWW Journal, and others. Jo is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee and is studying for her MFA. She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.
