E R O S I O N ;

The pub didn’t close till 2 a.m. but he left much earlier than that, pushing out of the stifling heat and wincing against the cold that sobered him like a slap. Inside the bar, he’d only just begun to feel the effect of two glasses of beer on an empty stomach. Diffuse tingle and burn, body like a limb waking up. Heat gathering in the face and hands. Going numb was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it was familiar, and he was fine with letting the feeling wash over him like a lukewarm tide. His thoughts grew muffled until they were sound underwater; the resulting silence was deceptively peaceful. He might’ve stayed longer, ordered another beer, let himself sink deeper and deeper until he’d reached a lightless depth that blotted out everything else, but the bar had started to draw a crowd. By the dregs of the second glass, Peter felt uncomfortably aware of everything around him once more. A headache had begun to incubate beneath his left temple and something else sat low in the basin of his stomach, indigestible. 

Anhedonia. When he’d first read the word on some late-night Google pursuit of symptoms, it had sounded like a place: a landscape of buckling hills, sighing grasses, barren trees. Wind sifting through empty fields and a sky the color of ash. 

The cable car station was empty at this weird, in-between hour. He slouched against a wooden post and stayed low inside his jacket, trying to hold onto warmth from the bar, losing the battle. The headphones around his neck served no purpose; the iPod in the pouch of his sweatshirt was drained. Eventually, the cable car lumbered into view and he lifted his head, groggier than expected, watching through half-lidded eyes as the cable coiled python-like around idler wheel, eventually creaking to a stop. He peeled away from the post and pressed a knuckle against the release button; the door sliding haltingly open. In the far corner of the unheated car, he sank down and spent a few moments staring at his own reflection in the black glass, thinking apathetically of the work he still had to finish, the bowl he wanted to smoke, the sleep he wouldn’t get. 

“Can you hold it?”

She skated backwards slowly, slowly widening the space between them and the treeline. It would be two years soon, two years since she first arrived in Switzerland to this place, and with all that time she was still in awe of it’s natural beauty. The mountain climbed craggily upwards, the evergreens were so dark green they looked nearly black against the blinding white of fresh snow. The air was so clean, and it could be so quiet this far from the shadow of the school— even now, as she watched Pete inch carefully forward, she could believe for a moment that they were the only ones left in the world. She watched his face contort in concentration, biting back a smile.

Are you in love? Momo had asked it once, wine drunk and giggling, sitting cross-legged on the floor while she braided her hair. She thought of it a moment, thin fingers deftly weaving the glossy black strands. Pearl wanted to be loved, to be cared about. She needed it like sunshine, and she smiled at her friend’s question, not answering. How sentimental she could be, someone might think, such a charming quality. It’s only until they realize that she had to be to survive. Clinging to these small tender moments, she keeps herself afloat. Peter didn’t have to say it. It was enough that she could feel needed, and it was good to feel that way. Like she was important to someone, like she mattered.

He didn’t mention his mother much, and never before so easily.

Over the years, Pearl had found it simpler to pretend for others like her own parents were not dead. When people asked about them she replied in the present tense. She didn’t correct anyone when they asked. She made believe like they far away, but not gone. Death made people feel awkward. They fumbled for the right words to say with the same moon-faced apologetic expression. She wouldn’t erase them. It wasn’t moving on either, but at least, she tried. This was her burden to bury, to keep safely tucked away. Out of sight. It was hers to keep manageable. Shiny, contracture scars that required tending from time to time.

Pete was different. He didn’t board grief away, he sat with it. He carried it with him, and it was corrosive. It rusted like old sheet metal left in the rain. Anyone who looked at him could see the damage it inflicted, the dark shadows and the dark eyes and that heavy hopelessness that he pushed uphill, like Sisyphus. She knew his family history in broad strokes, a timeline delivered in monotone. She’d done her best to spare him a pitying look when he’d finished telling it, she knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of one. It was a raw seam, his past, and she didn’t press on it. No, it still needed time to heal.

She looked up, hiding her surprise to listen intently, giving him her usual dose of wide-eyed attention. “How old were you?” She was trying to picture him on ice skates, years younger and padded shapeless and miserable in hockey gear—still recognizable by that same characteristic frown. It pulled a smile to her lips. “Did you play any sports at all as a kid? How did they squeeze ‘Kovalenko’ onto the back of a jersey?” Pearl turned from in front of him to his side, slowing to be able to skate hand in hand at his pace. 

Did you play any sports at all as a kid? Peter’s mouth twitched. “Yeah, tons. That’s why I’m so athletic now.” By his side, Pearl’s movements were light and balletic. Her steady pace was his metronome- he tried to keep in time with her, moving with smoother, shorter strides. He was beginning to get the hang of it, he thought. The trick was momentum. Not too much, nothing beyond your control- but there had to be something outside yourself propelling you forward, something to keep you in motion as you lengthened one leg and then the next and then the other again, the timing of the blades moving past each other in a way that was constant and equal. Momentum. If you did things immediately, the act didn't have time to gather weight. Much in the same way, that night in Zurich on New Year’s Eve, when they’d walked up and down the winding cobbled streets where withered Christmas garlands were still hanging and come back to the hotel room, shivering, carrying the snow in on their coats and hair, slightly drunk off champagne and soon kissing in that way that was slow and deliberate, when he’d felt his heart beating like it was the only thing inside of him and he’d finally worked up the courage to reach for the buttons on her blouse, momentum hadn’t allowed him to overthink anything that followed. It had kept him in the present, kept him doing one thing until it lead to the next and the next. He hadn’t even noticed when his anxiety, that constant low-voltage hum, had finally fallen quiet. 

“I think I was like, eight or nine. She thought it’d help me make friends, but I wasn’t about that slipping-and-sliding shit from the get-go.” Peter shrugged within the bulk of his jacket.  “I didn’t even last long enough to get a jersey.” A short silence settled. Only the quiet scrape of their blades filled the air. The passing mention of his mother had shifted a weight in his stomach and Peter felt uncomfortably aware of it now; he knew there was still a sinkhole in the middle of him that he could fall into and be swallowed by. He knew he had to be careful when around it’s slippery edges. Saying nothing else about his short-lived ice hockey career, he squinted at Pearl, eyes scrunched against the bright glare of sunlight off ice. A breeze kept lifting her fine hair, tugging it free from her scarf; Peter reached over to sweep some away from her face and allowed himself another half-smile. “So correct me if I’m wrong, but knowing how to skate- that’s a Canadian citizenship requirement, right? Did your parents get you a tiny pair of toddler skates as soon as you could walk?”

He would never admit this to her, and felt shitty for even allowing himself to feel it, but it’d been something of a relief to hear about her parents. One of the main reasons he didn’t tell people about his mother was because there was no way to comprehend that kind of a loss secondhand. No one knew what to do with another person’s grief, so they handled it like it was something fragile and cumbersome that they’d rather not be holding. What you ended up with was too much sideways sympathy. Condolences, prayers, and sad looks across grocery store aisles; all of it as well-intentioned and meaningless as pamphlets about mourning.

The first time she’d asked what his parents were like, Peter had felt a certain resistance- not an urge to lie, exactly, but to side-step the truth like he had so many times before. They’d both been existing outside their own separate pasts at the time, still simple to each other, still filling the role of strangers over coffee. It was unsustainable, he knew. But he also thought there was a slim chance that he could convince her that he was worth the trouble before she found out what the trouble was. When he did finally tell her about his mother’s cancer, his father’s absence, his life in Detroit, then Edgeworth, he kept strictly to the facts, laying them down as casually as playing cards. Pearl had slid her small hand across the table and placed it over his. I’m sorry. He was used to that. But her eyes had been waiting for him, and when he looked up, they articulated something too knowing to be pity. Something gentle and grieving. He’d understood then, even before she’d told the story of the dark highway and the mangled car, that they were both members of the same club. The fee to join was to be hurt beyond belief. They’d both paid up front, in full, for a lifetime membership.

The sun was lowering by the time they completed an entire circle. Peter did a careful, wobbly pivot to show off that he had, in fact, gotten more comfortable on the skates- then they stood face to face, still joined by one hand. The light was hazey now, late and golden, slanting into her eyes; his gaze was drawn there and held. From the few photos Peter had seen, he knew his eyes were exact replicas of his father’s. Dark, like coffee before cream. In bad lighting, they were almost black. But Pearl’s eyes were a color that belonged entirely to her: a soft, washed green that looked translucent when the light hit it, reminding him of sea glass held up to the sun. They were eyes that spoke for her, voicing all her thoughts and emotions. Eyes that opened up her face- unlike his, which seemed to block all entry.


Peter’s company was unexpected, but not unwelcome, and she knew his presence would at least force her to go closer to the fire, and their classmates, eventually. There would be little hiding her retreat with him as witness, and so she instead let her feet carry her to a tree free of uncomfortable knots, leaning against it. A break? She certainly did, nodding in acknowledgement of their shared discomfort when among the revelers. It was far easier to be on the edge of it all, even if the chill of the wind stung more the further she was from the fire.

“That’s good, at least? I’m glad you haven’t offended someone to the point of violence or something.” Even if he had, there was little likelihood he’d be chased – she knew it was easy to get distracted at a party like this, with the quantities of drugs and alcohol she knew were in wide circulation, and even if an offense was serious enough, it was far easier to confront someone at their door. After all, it was a small school, and it was easy enough to find out which room the offending party called home. “Oh, uh? I don’t mind. The smell isn’t bad, and the fire-smoke covers it fairly well.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, ducking her head a little, a little unwilling to admit to someone who had only ever seen her at her best (in lecture halls, in libraries, with notes open) that she has had weed, even if he clearly had no issue with it. “It is cold, isn’t it. I swear it wasn’t this bad last year, or at least if it was I somehow forced myself to forget it.” Poppy was comfortable with this change of topic, at least for a few seconds, before remembering the person to whom she was speaking. Fuck. Her eyes widened in horror, uncomfortably aware that she’d just brought up the night Peter’s best friend went missing to him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I should be used to the cold, really, because it’s just as bad in Connecticut, but I swear spending the winter in England desensitized me because it rained half the days I was there, and even though I was in Scotland for a little while it wasn’t exactly the mountains… I don’t know.”  If she could get him to focus on the idea of weather, and if she was lucky, and he was stoned enough already to be distracted by the steady stream of words, it would be okay. This non-judgemental not-exactly a friendship wasn’t exactly the type of thing she could afford to lose.

“Thanks,” Peter mumbled sheepishly around the joint, which had already found its way back between his lips. “I’ll try and keep the smoke downwind.” Prying open one cold fist, he felt around the inside of his pocket till he found the Bic- somehow, it’d become tangled in the loose coils of his headphones- and fumbled blindly to get it free. The lighter was overdue for replacement, and the tiny flame it produced wavered weakly, discouraged by the wind. It went out twice before he managed to catch it. But once the tip of the joint finally brightened, Peter took a deep pull and briefly, felt warm.

He released the smoke with a polite turn of his head. The wind carried it away as promised, but the smell lingered behind like a good memory- a rich, herbal scent, recalling blustery afternoons in Detroit, countless after-school hours at the park near their crumbling duplex, passing around a tightly-rolled joint, watching dogs play in the slick mud. At some point in his adolescence (or maybe even earlier than that) he’d discovered that there was a place in his mind where he could go. Hard to say where it was. Some days he woke up there, and those days passed by without leaving a trace, as insignificant as blank spaces on a calendar. His quiet days. Other days, usually when the world felt particularly intrusive, overwhelming him with feelings of disorder and danger, that place eluded him. A child psychologist had prescribed him Adderall in the fifth grade (for ADHD, a false lead that took almost two years to disprove), then Concerta. Lexapro. Ativan. The drugs worked. Sometimes too well; they blotted out everything, good and bad. But weed had come into his life as early as middle school, and Peter had discovered then that it was simply the easiest shortcut. He could smoke up, slip away from himself, and spend a couple hours in that private place, unburdened, completely out of reach. Sometimes, he’d spend whole days stoned. At his worst, weeks.

He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find his way to that place now. It was probably too late- the levees had broken, and the blood-rush of anxiety had overtaken him. The wave was finally crashing. As Poppy spoke, all Peter could do was nod along, face crowded with other thoughts, a muscle flexing near the hinge of his jaw- but he didn’t mind that she was filling up the silence. In the absence of Tchaikovsky, there was at least her voice there to distract him, and to keep the aural noise of the bonfire as far, far removed as possible.