Boy Crazy

The whole city was talking about the blackout, even though by today’s standards the internet was taking its baby steps. Alyson’s computer shut off around the time Marlon came over to tell her. The phone wouldn’t have worked anyway. The power was dead. No MSN Messenger chat, no cell towers, no nothing. Somehow Marlon had a way of getting to Aly’s house the second anything happened. Maybe word of mouth was faster back then.

He came to get her because stores were still open on Main Street even though the power was out. In the middle of the afternoon, her room was bright from the pulled-back shades but the house was this weird quiet. She had to come with him, he said. And because she was a collector of candles and he a collector of lighters, he lit several while he talked and left one too close to the antique vanity mirror on the bureau her aunt left her and burned the wood forever in a black scar she would never sand away.

She never got that boy, but maybe it was for the best since his idea of fun when the whole city went dark was to wander into convenience stores and fill his pockets with as much as he could get for free. Sour Atomic War Heads and pizza flavor Combos, Maltesers, Crunchies, and Cadbury Cream Eggs. It wasn’t like our parents didn’t give us enough cash to buy enough junk to rot our teeth out. The problem was, we were good at it.

I was Marlon’s best friend, and Alys’s best friend.

That afternoon, the light entered the store through the propped open door, which had steel bars in the grate to protect against night-time break-ins. There was no protection against daytime raids. Not with the lights and security cameras out. Not that those had stopped us the rest of the week.

We used to sneak a chocolate bar into the front pocket of our sweatshirts. Backpacks and bags were for amateurs. Sleeves were more discreet. A few candles lit the counter by the register, and when we had filled our sleeves and front pockets — never pants pockets because they were a dead giveaway and would melt chocolate — we made our way to the checkout. Each of us paid cash for a bag of chips and a can of pop. Grape Soda, Diet Pepsi. All Dressed Chips and Doritos.

At Aly’s house, we unloaded the goods onto the couch in the basement where we used to watch movies all night — it’s not a boy-girl sleepover if we don’t sleep and Marl will leave at three or four. In the blackout, we can’t watch TV. We light candles and chew on Twizzlers. At one point, Aly and Marlon get into a wrestling tickle match on the floor, and I’m jealous. Way later, Aly falls asleep on the couch, and Marlon and I go outside on a late-night raid. We try to pick up from the 24-hour McDonalds but with the power still out, it’s closed. Marlon produces some sparklers because he’s the kind of boy who might have fireworks on him at any given time, and in the blinding dark of the parking lot in the shopping complex across from Aly’s house, he lights up the black pavement in stark white supernova sparks, writing our names and spinning in circles shouting his head off until we’re sure someone will call in a noise complaint, so we run back to Aly’s, going in the back door to the basement, to wake her up. When she hears about our running from the authorities, I know she’s a little jealous too.

We both loved other boys, at other times, at the same time. Not a month before, she cajoled her crush into going to the school dance with her. It was held at the rec center, and the four of us — me and Marlon, her and her crush — left the crowd in the dark where we couldn’t see anything but flashing multicolored disco ball flashes and an unromantic sea of adolescents sweating and separately grinding. We snuck around the side of the pool building to practice slow dancing. The corner alcove could be seen from the sidewalk across the green and was lit with floodlights, so we took turns holding up the guys’ suit jackets to hide the partners who were shyly trying out slow dancing. First Aly and her crush, then me and Marlon. The music poured out of the rec center doors and into the quiet residential streets, its echoes dulling the frenetic pace of the beats enough for us to waltz, hardly touching, with a good half a foot between our bodies. She told me later she kept hoping that boy would kiss her but he never did. I kept hoping Marlon would kiss me, but that never happened, and every time Aly had yet another crush on Marlon she would follow him into dark corners or down alleys hoping for her first kiss, sometimes pretending to get stranded when we hopped the fences into people’s back yards in the hopes he would come back for her and give her a boost, which he always did.

But he never went out with her, and the more she threw herself at our best friend, the more defiant his refusal seemed.

I was the one to fall asleep next, and I dreamed that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and they had gone up to Aly’s bedroom to make out. They lasted forever in that dream. They did the whole marriage thing, and the kids thing. I wasn’t sad the way a girl in love should be, even in the dream. I liked them together. In real life we had had that agreement, Marlon and I, that if we were still single at thirty we would get married, pool our resources, buy a house in Costa Rica, adopt kids, and make everyone jealous of our lives. That agreement was the most I ever got out of him. Like it was the most he had to offer me.

I slept on the couch, and when Aly woke me, the sun was coming up. We had no idea what time it was because every analog clock had stopped at 2:35 and every digital clock flashed 00:00. Sitting next to my curled-up legs on the couch, Aly said “Come outside.” Outside in the backyard, Marlon sat on a trunk of wood Aly’s dad had placed at the perimeter of his herb garden. We watched the sun come up, not over the horizon but over the roofs of the suburban multiplex houses that went on forever. It was the kind of beautiful moment where you would think if a boy you’d loved for years was going to kiss you, he would have done it.

If he was going to kiss Aly, he wouldn’t have let her come to get me.

I kept looking down at their hands as we sat, on each side of him, as if expecting them to be holding each other, but it never happened. We sat, we talked, we ate the rest of the cheese Doritos for breakfast. Then Marlon and I got our bikes and rode home. When we parted at his house he just said, “I could have lived like that forever. Too bad the power’s back.”

None of us had that streamlined sweetheart to wedding to kids kind of life. Aly and I wondered why neither of us ever ended up with Marlon long after we each had boyfriends. Each of us had a falling out with him — in each case, in a fight over the boy we were dating. It wasn’t until he went away for school that he had his first relationship, and though we weren’t friends anymore, we flipped through the Facebook pictures of him and this girl, wondering, why her, why had neither of us ever been given this honor? What was special about her? We would never know, but the best we can guess was that he wanted to wait for his first love.