let's work it out on the remix

   I had my first cigarette at a Mac Demarco show. It was 2017. I was 16. My best friend Tony and I stepped out for air after the opening act, pushing past sweaty hairy denim-clad bodies. Every self-professed indie kid in Atlanta flocked to the Tabernacle that spring night, and on the patio, constellations formed from the lit bright tips of their American Spirits and Lucky Strikes. An orgy of cigarettes inhaled and shared and deliciously, conspicuously lingered on between fingers, and someone dropped a whole, new, clean ciggie right on the floor, and this was before the economy got so bad that nothing could be wasted, so no one else picked it up, and this was before COVID when even disinfectant bottles were disinfected, so I did pick it up and put it in my mouth. 

   “Gross,” Tony scowled. 

   “We have to give them a try sometime. And, I’m stressed. Daniel is here.” 

   Tony, they were tall and gorgeous: a glazed round face like a honey bun, orange curls wound tight, with fake metal rings that left green imprints on every spidery finger. They tapped a stanger’s flanneled shoulder, and procured a lighter with only a smile. 

   “I don’t know why you freak out so much about Daniel,” they said. “We’re friends. If you wanna talk to him, you can just talk to him. Charlize is here, too.”

    “Oh, is she? Fuuuck.”

    “Yeah. I saw her from the back at first, and thought she was you. LOL.” 

     I rolled my eyes. Charlize and I were short girls with long black wavy banshee-like hair. Everyone said we looked alike, but we didn’t! My best friend comparing us was betrayal to the highest degree. 

    The cig razored my throat. It pressed between my eyes. I leaned into the grimy wall, all woozy. I passed the torch to Tony. 

    “You look so cute,” they said. “I’d post you on Tumblr, just like this. You leaning on the wall in your little leather jacket, aw.” 

    “It’s TJ Maxx.” 

    Tony coughed up smoke.  

    “Isn’t it crazy,” they said, “That our generation almost - almost - got rid of nicotine addictions.”

   I shook my head and produced my magic wand, my Juul, from a sweat-stinking pleather pocket. Like a wizard, I pulled and exhaled its minty cloud. This flavor, I was familiar with. 

   “Okay,” Tony backtracked. “Our generation almost got rid of cigarettes. Then fucking Mac Demarco comes along with ‘Ode to Viceroy’ and his whole smoking schtick and now we’re all gonna die from emphysema like our grandparents.” 

    “What the fuck is a Viceroy even.” 

   “Maybe they smoke those in Canada.” 

*** 

   We shuffled back inside, joined the hoard milling before the stage. Dust motes climbed beams of stage lighting. Pop music pumped through little speakers while we waited and breathed into each other’s backs. Daniel rose above the denim sea: he was almost as tall as Tony. His stringy hair was bleach-fried then boxed-dyed then cut short, so his head stuck out like that one skinny scared-looking muppet. Tony waved, and Daniel nodded, and he pushed through the nicotine-soaked mass towards us. My stomach wrung itself like a rag.

   His own BFF, the compact and shovel-faced student athlete Bobby, trailed behind him. Thank God. Daniel didn’t come with Charlize.  

    Daniel parked in front of me, and then the show started. Bless these indie kids, no one blocked my view with a recording iPhone. Only an occasional disposable film camera flashed above our swaying scalps. 

   Mac Demarco did great with the guitar and weirdly angelic mustachioed man voice. As an encore, he brought on stage Finn Wolfhard, the Stranger Things child actor with skeletal cheeks and sweet black curls. No one was surprised. In those years, people ran into that kid around Decatur all the time, for some reason. Finn sat on Mac’s shoulders, and strummed the same heavy metal riff on his guitar for eight straight minutes, and then they covered a Metallica song, and the crowd went nuts, and I was lifted off my feet by the bodies bucking forth on both sides of me, and I grabbed Tony’s hand to not drown, and the wave slammed me into Daniel’s warm back, and I was so happy. 

   Mac and Finn and back-up band left the stage for good. Hundreds of eyes glared at flipped-on house lights. 

   At last, Daniel turned and smiled at us. “Good seeing y’all! I’m gonna go to the bathroom before the line gets crazy.” 

   “I could pee too,” said Tony. 

   I looked at my feet. “I guess I’ll go as well.” 

   In the cracked graffitied bathroom mirror, my eyes met Charlize. 

   “Oh. Hi!” She waved with soapy hands and a forced smile. Her black eyeliner smeared with sweat so chicly. 

   “Hey.” 

   “Crazy show, right? Like, the fucking Stranger Things kid?” 

   I nodded. I wanted to go home. Not because of Charlize, just because crowds zapped my every watt of electricity. Charlize, however, was still shooting sparks up her nose and out her eyes. 

   “Daniel is here, did you see him?” she asked. “I think me and the girls and him and Bobby are gonna go to Waffle House after, if you wanna come.”  

   I shook my head. “Thanks for the invite, but I’m really tired.” 

  “No worries,” she wiped her hands on her black pleather jacket. “I listened to your album. Extravagant Theatricality, right? It’s, like, really fucking good.” 

   I again inspected the shoelaces of my Doc Martens. “I listened to your mixtape, too. Number 2 Demon. It’s also really really good.” 

   For years, I’d uploaded grainy recordings to SoundCloud. I sang into a voice recording app, covers of Lou Reed and The Replacements, plucked a guitar with two broken strings. I concocted synthy beats on GarageBand and whispered my own songs over them. Charlize did all that too. In high school, my listeners suddenly shot up. So did Charlize’s. Our whole school careers we spent swapping first and second place at every talent show, open mic, and singer-songwriter contest in Atlanta. People assumed we were rivals. That we hated each other. 

   “Well,” Charlize said, “We should at least, like, take a picture together.” 

   She took out a shattered iPhone. I peeped my frazzled bloated pale form in the mirror. My every diet rebounded back to my belly. Charlize was toned and bendy and elastic in skin-tight all-black. I shook my head. I didn’t want to be in a picture together. Something like hurt flashed in her eyes, and I almost reneged, but she’d already left in a flutter. 

   Tony ambushed me outside the bathroom, wrapping me in one hot arm, their whisper a tickle in my ear: “Guess fucking what.” 

“Mm.” 

“Our good friend Daniel is hosting a little First Day of Summer excursion to the lake.” 

“Bobby wants to catch the Big Ass Fish, probably.” 

“Well of course. But more importantly, Daniel’s aunts have a house by the lake, and he’s inviting us. Plus, of course Charlize is coming, and her little friends.” 

“Oh, wow.” 

***

   The Big Ass Fish of Lake Hartwell assumed legendary status among a certain sector of our high school’s male population. Ask three boys in backwards baseball caps and jerseys what exactly the B.A.F. was and between their spits of chewing tobacco, you’d get three different answers. Maybe just a massive bass. Maybe a mutant inflamed by effluent water. Maybe our local Loch Ness. Enough rumors and reported sightings and grainy photos filtered through school that year after year, teenagers still pilgrimaged to the Georgia-South Carolina border for a chance at glory. These boys wanted to catch the Fish so bad, and none more than Bobby. 

   Daniel was the type to fan the spark of a single person’s pet project into a whole flame of a party, outing, gathering, happening. He hand-picked people for his rooms, a curated mix of personalities to cast his dramas. Thrilling to be invited, but why me and Charlize? Did he see us as the same? 

   June 1st, I drove my dented Camry up to Lake Hartwell. Tony rode passenger and thumbed their phone. Everyone else was already at Daniel’s aunts’ cabin. 

   “You know,” said Tony, “You’re obviously the only person I follow on GoodReads because your literary reviews are excellent, precise, and well-rounded, but I might have to follow Charlize too. I’m going through her profile, and she’s got some great takes on the post-modern cannon.” 

   “Okay,” I replied. My brain was outside the car, creating the catastrophe that would be Daniel seeing me in a swimsuit. 

   “I already follow her on Letterboxd. Her movie reviews, wow. She’s got wise things to say on Gaspar Noé’s oeuvre. So would it be okay if I follow her on GoodReads?” 

   “Yeah, why would it not be?” 

    “‘Cuz you guys are rivals?”

    “We aren’t, Tony. I feel like you’re the one person I shouldn’t have to explain that to.” 

   Suppertime by our arrival. The cabin sat on a hill sloping gently down to the water. The lavender haze of evening settled on surrounding pine trees. A peeling deck held a feast, a picnic table crowded with overripe peaches, greased pizza boxes, microwaved buffalo wings, spilled wine, spiked punch that reeked like rubbing alcohol, crumbly grocery store cookies, pipes stuffed with weed smolders, ant-covered gummy fruit snacks, Hot Cheetos, and cigarettes. 

    Bobby was five deep into a six-pack of beer. Charlize and her two cool scary friends wore matching skimpy black bikinis, six legs crossed the same way. They nodded at us behind sunglasses. Julia was the first girl in our grade to get lip filler. The lisp it produced blended with her hypnotic vocal fry into this hyperreal hyperfeminine hiss. She was still dating that rapper, before he got canceled, again, for real. Sophie was a DJ before everyone became a DJ in Atlanta. Sophie, we realized even at the time, was ahead of the times, with music -- these splunky ribbiting, toy-like beats -- and a triangular bob of red hair. 

    Daniel greeted us in lobster-print swim trunks. His tallness, his trapezoidal jaw still let him look patrician. 

   “Hey, good to see y’all. Come sit down. We already ate, but feel free to help yourself.” 

   I looked at six intertwined bony hands, free of grease, sauce, crumbs. They had not eaten. I reached for the boxed wine. Bobby shot up from his seat. 

    “I’m goin in!” He yelled. “We’re wastin daylight! I have to catch the fish!” 

   “Bobby,” said paternal Daniel, “you’re not supposed to swim thirty minutes after you eat.” 

   People who’ve been hot their whole life are freaks. Daniel was weird about rules like that, for example. It was really attractive. 

   Bobby leapt from the deck, down the hill, arms up in abandon, a disobedient toddler on the run. He scattered pine needles under bare feet. Off the dock, into the lake, splash. 

   Daniel smiled. “We should go down to the dock. It’s beautiful down there.” 

   Three assorted fishing rods dangled off the dock. Bobby swam out with a net in his teeth like a dog. Charlize and Julia and Sophie lowered into the shallow end of the lake. Charlize’s hair floated around her like a siren’s. Tony too looked mythical in water, their long shadow rippling under late-orange sun. I sat on the dock, wrapped in my dress, nursing wine from a red plastic cup. Daniel, unbelievably, sat beside me. 

   A family of geese, two parents flanking three adolescent goslings, swam single file beside the shore. I watched them comb through tiny waves with bobbing necks, like techno was pumping through them. Daniel watched with me. 

    “There’s no real lakes in Georgia,” he said quietly. “All man-made. Like this one, they flooded a whole town to make it.” 

    “You’re thinking of Lake Lanier,” I murmured. 

    “Oh. Maybe. Spooky, isn’t it?” He looked me in my eye. “It’s definitely haunted.”

   “Guys,” said Charlize. “Where the fuck is Bobby?” 

   On his feet, Daniel scanned the lake. Bobby disappeared. 

   “Wait, I see him!” Tony pointed. One hand rose up a football field away. A tiny Bobby thrashed. 

   Daniel dove in, his swim captain stroke chopping down the yards between them. Charlize too, darted like a quick and silent fish, her black hair trailing behind. The rest of us stood agape, useless, paralyzed. 

   Daniel and Charlize dragged a floppy Bobby to the dock. The foundation leaked off Charlize’s face into brown water like a pale oil spill. They heaved Bobby onto gnarled wood. He lay there, still, slack-jawed. Then, three wet coughs. He vomited beer and buffalo wings and lake water. He shook. 

    Daniel: “Jesus, Bobby! What did I say? Wait thirty minutes after you eat!” 

    Charlize: “It’s not the food! He was fucking drunk!” 

    Bobby, rabid-eyed, through clanking teeth: “I saw it. I saw… the man. In the water. He got me. The fish got me.”

    Daniel rubbed his shoulder. “Hey, man. It’s okay. You’re okay. Let’s get you inside.” 

    By the elbows, Daniel and Charlize raised Bobby. Shaking, limping over pinecones, draped over them both, he went into the house. The rest of us looked at our feet, silent, unsure what to do. We headed to the house too. 

***

   As night crept in, Bobby, in the master bedroom, draped under three quilts, finally stopped shaking. Still he muttered about the fish, the man, the fishman. Sophie diagnosed him with shock. Julia, with being a drunk bastard. By midnight, he passed out. Daniel closed the door. 

   In the kitchen, a busted JBL speaker hooked up to Sophie’s phone sputtered her hypnotic robotic electronica. Pretzel crumbs and bits of weed littered the countertops, spotting the aunts’ collection of ceramic roosters. Charlize snatched the speaker and hit the plus volume button twenty times. The yellow kitchen light swung with the bass. Tony and Julia inhaled wine and exhaled plumes of minty vapor. That was my Juul flashing between Julia’s acrylics. I knew I wouldn’t get it back. 

   Then, on the countertop, her bare feet too close to the ceramic roosters, Charlize danced. Daniel hopped up beside her. Their heads went front-back-front, like the lake geese. It was a party, and I was exhausted. I slunk out the back door, and no one noticed. 

***

   A fat full moon grinned into the lake. I dipped my toes in her reflection. On the dock, Bobby’s fishing rods remained, like three wands on a tarot card. Pine trees sighed in the summer breeze. Cicadas screamed their strange rhythms. Wine made me sleepy. I didn’t hear the footsteps until Charlize appeared beside me. 

   “Hey,” she said. “You okay?” Heat and glitter rose off her skin. 

   “Yeah. Crowds just wear me out.” 

   She crouched beside me, a cat on its haunches.

   “Is that why you never go out with us?” 

   “Pretty much,” I replied. 

    She combed three fingers through her hair. “Hmm. I thought it was because you, like, hated me.” 

    “What! Charlize, how could I hate you? You’re so beautiful, and fun. I thought you hated me. I’m such a recluse. I always cancel on everything.” 

   Charlize sighed. “Everyone, like, assumes we hate each other just because we’re two hot bitches who make good music in the same scene. Even, like, Sophie and Julia think I hate you. But I don’t! And they’re always, like, ‘you two look alike.’ Which, we don’t. Wait, what the fuck?” 

   One of the fishing rods jerked back. It clattered to the dock. Charlize grabbed it. 

   “Do you know how to reel in?” I giggled. “What if it’s the Big Ass Fish?” 

   Charlize, from the ground, yanked back the rod. A massive form rose from the water, howling and slapping water where the fishing hook dug into flesh. 

   “Is that a-”

   “Merman?” I whispered. Wine blurred my eyes. But indeed, in the shallows was a humanoid slick with silver scales, with flaring gills. Webbed hands grabbed blindly at the fishing line wedged in his mouth. Grey saucer eyes pooled with moonlight. His torso was very, very muscled. Why was he kind of-

   “Wait, he’s, like, hot,” Charlize observed. She winked at me, then cooed at him, “Hey, Mr. Merman, be calm. We’re gonna let you go. Just, like, be still. We need to get the hook out.”

   Two gorgeous eyes batted doe-like from the water. The merman dropped his bulging arms. Bashfully, he came close to the dock. The scent of moss and salt wafted from a chiseled jaw. His face came level with our wood. 

   “Open up,” Charlize snickered. Plump lips obediently parted. Charlize plucked the hook from his mouth. 

   “Sorry about that,” she said. “We can, like, get you alcohol for the wound.” 

   But, with a plop, the merman already disappeared into black waters. We leaned back on our hands, splintered wood scratching our palms. Dazed, drunk, we watched the lake. 

   “I feel like,” I said, “We’re in one of those vaguely erotic magical realism short stories everyone is writing these days.” 

    “Right,” Charlize rolled her eyes. “It’s, like, we get it. You read Carmen Maria Machado. You want to fuck cryptids. Like, give me a break. Write about something else.” 

   She reached into the pocket of her black shorts. In her hand, a pack of cigarettes. 

   “You know,” she sighed, “Mac Demarco has my blood on his fucking hands. Or, like, the black tar from my lungs. I never would’ve touched cigs otherwise.” 

   I read the label. “Woah, Viceroys! I’ve never seen those before.” 

   “You want one?” 

    Against the infinite black sky, our smoke crept up and up. The cicadas never stopped singing. Water licked the shore, again and again. I didn’t cough once in front of that cool and beautiful girl. 

   She looked at me with a small smile. “We should do a song together.” 

   “Woah, yeah. The whole school would go crazy.” I smiled back. “I’m glad I know how you’re feeling.”

   “Me too.”