Dead Teenagers at Make-Out Point
“Can you hear it?” I say.
“Yes.”
She sways against me. I take her hand and cradle her waist. We went out dancing that night. Our feet find the rhythm. We slip into the moment. Her face glows in the glittering lights of the dancehall. The beats move us, the tempo increases. I twirl her. We lose our balance and tumble laughing to the grass. We find each other. We waste no time.
Up here on Make-out Point, I make her mine again.
She now lays her head on my chest. “I remember how we danced.”
“You were like an earth angel.”
“And that night,” she says, running her fingers through my hair, “I had this dream, the best dream I ever had. You’re driving, it’s dark, I’m there with you. It’s better than any rollercoaster. Crazy… I lean in. I can’t resist. I love you so much. I have to kiss you. And then it’s like the headlights suddenly turn into stars and all the light in the world comes flooding in, and it’s so beautiful I almost can’t bear it.”
“I’m always there,” I whisper.
We stretch out and hold each other close and the setting sun warms our skin.
All too soon, she says, “I’m starting to slip away.”
I also feel it, like knots slowly coming undone in every part of my body. “We don’t have very long.”
“But there’s so much I still want to do.” She grips me tight. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“Hell, yes.” I get up and locate Brad’s car keys.
We run hand in hand down to the gravel parking lot. I try the keys in car doors until I find Brad’s — a tiny snub-nosed thing upholstered in space-age plastic, looks like a toy. I floor the accelerator, the engine squeals like a stuck pig. Laura giggles. We shoot out of the parking lot, spraying gravel. She fiddles with the radio and finds a rock and roll station. We screech onto the blacktop and hit sixty on the first straight, then I downshift to take a tight curve, stomp on the gas again as we straighten out. The engine starts to whine at around a hundred miles an hour and we’re both laughing. This body I’m in rejoices. She rolls down her window. Her hair’s all over her face. She shouts, “Crazy!”
We’re so alive, just now.
She leans in, says, “Kiss me.”
I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. But I do. I’d do anything for her.
From the corner of my eye I see a car whipping into view from around the next turn, rushing head-on at us. We’ve drifted into the other lane. I try to correct but my hands do not move. These hands are not mine. Brad is in the driver’s seat now. The effort of retaking control seems to have exhausted him. He sits there mute and rigid. We’ll ram straight into the oncoming car. At the last moment he makes a decision. He twists the wheel hard and his nerves flare with pleasure. We veer into the guardrail. The steel tears like a wet strip of cardboard. We swing around and down in slow motion, hovering in the big sky. Laura screams with delight. Then we plunge into the forest below. Impact flings us from our seats. The windshield bursts like popcorn as we fly through. I don’t have time to feel any pain before I’m looking down at the wreck. My borrowed body hangs skewered on a branch, Laura’s lies mangled in the undergrowth.
I think to myself: For a moment, they felt joy, they were alive. Now they’ve gone wherever it is the exhausted dead go, the place where we can’t follow.
Our place is here.
The sun has set now and my eyes are wide open. Laura lies in my lap. I try to stroke her hair, but my hand cannot feel her curls, they pass through my fingers.
“I’m here,” she says, “I’m here with you.”
“You’re here. Always.”
“This is the night I can’t stop thinking about.”
Joe L. Murr has lived on every continent except Antarctica. He currently divides his time between Finland and the Netherlands. His fiction has appeared in Read by Dawn I & II, Avant Garde for the New Millennium, Eclectica, Dark Recesses Press and other print and online publications. Visit him online at joelmurr.blogspot.com
