Summer Vacation

A very fortunate thing happened to me this summer. What it is, I can’t say yet—I’m writing as if it has already occurred, but the truth is it hasn’t. In actuality one bad event preceded another—first, Sarah left me. I lost my passport, and then my cell phone. I felt like Job and told everyone so. People didn’t avoid me but wished they could. I tried valerian root to help me sleep, but it made the nightmares worse. Someone charged $2,000 to my credit card at Prada, my bank said it was my fault.

Most recently my exes had begun to stalk me on my way home from work. It had been for about a week. They wore hockey uniforms and attacked me as soon as I walked outside of the door, following my car home from work, where they’d leer at me from outside my home and wait until the morning to start it all back up again.

“They have long memories,” Ash said. He was looking at me with suspicion, having already passed judgement on me though it wasn’t at all fair. He handed me my sandwich in a paper bag, where it instantly began to soak through the bottom. “Are you sure you didn’t do anything wrong?”

“I’ve never harmed any of those women. I would never do that.”

He shrugged. I looked behind me, where a girl wearing pajama pants wiped her nose with her sleeve. She was young enough to have acne but not too young to have no hate in her heart. Now she locked eyes with me.

“You’re saying you haven’t done anything wrong,” she said slowly. “Those girls out there are just mad for no reason.”

I exited the shop.

“I’ll take a meatball sub on toasted Asiago bread…” I heard the girl say, and then the women leaped out of the bushes and grabbed my sandwich.

“I haven’t eaten all day,” I said. I was clawing at the bag, jumping up and down. The pajama pants girl was pointing her finger at me through the glass and laughing. Ash had turned around but I could see his shoulders shaking. “Come on, give it back.”

“After all you’ve done,” Toni said. “After all you do.” Valerie took a bite of the sandwich and then they were all eating it, passing it around with glee.

“There’s something chemically wrong with me!” I screamed.

“You should be castrated,” Naira said. She was wearing black eyeshadow which made her green eyes look more yellow, like a panther’s. “The only thing wrong with you is that you have no honor, no respect, no nothing.” Naira burped and threw the wrapper down on the ground.

Then they rose up like a swarm of wasps and were quickly gone, scrambling between the trees. I turned around. The pajama pants girl was standing in the parking lot next to her Subaru, staring at me.

“You should probably ask them at some point,” the girl said. “About what you did, before it’s too late. My girlfriend got mad at me once and threw a jar of pickles at my chest.”

“And what did you do to deserve that?”

“I told her she was getting fat. But afterward I apologized, and we hardly ever fight anymore.”

She waved goodbye and then streaked off into the sunset. Even if she was just a teenager, I couldn’t help but hate her. Ash was bringing the trash out, ready to close up. He opened the door for me without saying anything, pointing to the new sandwich on the counter. I pulled my wallet out but he shook his head.

“On the house.” I took a bite. It was mostly mustard. I could only taste the meat halfway through. I got in his car and we rode in silence. My exes followed behind us, jumping from telephone pole to telephone pole. Ash said, “I have to go to this birthday party. For my niece. Trust me, you don’t want to go, it’ll be boring.” I had a feeling he was lying to me, but I didn’t challenge him. He rode off and I searched for a cigarette until I found one in my desk.

I’d quit smoking around a year ago but the stress was too much so I went ahead and lit it immediately as I stepped back outside. Strangely, the colors of the sky were the same. I wondered when night would come and hide my exes from my sight—perhaps never again—and I grew anxious, thinking about what to do if this would happen, coming up with nothing.

When had this all started? Which one of them was the leader? They were there now, spread out on the roof of the building across the street. An ice cream truck passed by, its jingle echoing through the neighborhood. It seemed like they were in the middle of playing poker—the five of them were gathered around a folding table, analyzing their hands. Check, I heard Naira say as I stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside, where I continued watching them through the window.

I was struggling to think about if it were Naira. We’d had an amicable breakup. After all, there had been no love, no hatred, either, just an understanding of the roles we played: I am here and you are there, and somewhere along the way we form an axis. We’d stopped texting each other back, and she’d never contacted me again…Toni said something to the group and they all laughed. She stood up, fetched a beer from the cooler they had beside them, sat back down. A depressive who hardly left her house, she would often trail off in the middle of her sentences: “I’m supposed to be going to pick up something from the grocery store…” I’d wait for her and then realize: that’s it, that’s the entire sentence. The breakup was the same way. I’d come over one evening and we’d watched a movie. It was a documentary about sweatshop workers; it was very sad. She cried the entire way through. Afterward, she’d said, “Well, I guess this is it.” At first I hadn’t known what she was talking about, I thought she’d meant the ending of the movie. After five minutes of her looking at me with tears in her eyes, I realized she meant the end of our relationship. I didn’t suffer. I got drunk that evening and the next day I was fine, which is another kind of sadness.

Ashley seemed to have folded and was nodding off. Reggie had an enormous stack of chips in front of her. The rest of them seemed to be getting angry; the laughter had stopped and now they mumbled to themselves, glaring at Reggie every now and then. But she was unfazed; I knew her, Reggie never lost her composure. She blew a strand of hair out of her face, licking her lips.

“Does anyone know how to play blackjack?” she offered. Mira shook her head.

“No. Can you teach me?” Toni said, and I began to write a plea on a piece of paper: Please leave me alone, all of you…

“Okay, so I’ll be the dealer.” Mira went about explaining the rules. It upset me that Kayla wasn’t there—like perhaps she had gotten over our relationship, or worse, no longer cared. Bile rose in my throat: it must be her behind all of this, haunting me even in her absence. I picked up my phone and sent her a hateful message: “You have no right to do this to me…” But the message went undelivered. I sat down and wrote her an email reiterating the same message, only for it to be sent back. I took to writing her letters and sending them to her via post. I’d write well into the night, while the exes would gather to sleep in rows, taking shifts: one or two would take watch while the other three slept.

I lost track of the days. Ash asked me if I wanted to go somewhere, and when I didn’t respond, said: “Okay, I admit it. I lied about the party. It was a lot of fun. I’m really sorry.” It dawned on me then how strange it was that they wore hockey uniforms, as they hadn’t ever played a single game. I began to tally the time on the wall: a month had passed. That’s when Kayla contacted me through video call.

“Hello,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “Ash told me what was going on.”

“Fuck you, Kayla,” I said. “Did you even read my letters? You don’t deserve to even talk to me any more after all you’ve done.” Toni’s voice echoed in my head: After all you’ve done. After all you do.

“I moved three months ago,” she said. She was really upset, she was shaking. I wanted for a brief moment to reach out through the screen and hold her. “Do you really think I have the energy for all of that? Do you really think I’d do that to you? But you believe whatever you want to believe. It doesn’t matter what I say.”

She paused. We were both quiet. “God knows I tried with you,” she said, and then hung up.

I looked back outside. They’d set up two nets, and a set of bleachers. They weren’t paying me any attention at all. The sun hurt my eyes as I stepped out of my door and climbed onto the roof, where the game was starting. They glided across the concrete in their skates, passing the hockey puck back and forth without a sound. I couldn’t believe it—how fast they all were, and how strong, and I wondered if any of them had truly loved me. I took a breath and stood up.

But the game was over. Someone had scored the final goal, and now they were all roaring in victory, lifting each other up onto their shoulders. All my neighbors had been watching, I guess, and started shouting from the windows, “Congratulations!” The pajama pants girl was there among the crowd, and Ash, too. The girl looked at me like, You see? There was nothing else I could do but clap, but it was disturbing. I couldn’t tell who had been defeated. I couldn’t figure out who had won.