2025 Pushcart Nominated Story from Stanchion Magazine Issue 14
I’m holding on to the side of Scott’s pool with my elbows, treading water because I’m too short to stand. A loose game of volleyball limps along at the other end of the yard, a couple of Art Club kids sneak behind the shed to smoke, the radio blasts “Everlong” by Foo Fighters. And I wonder, when I sing along with you/if everything could ever be this real forever/if anything could ever be this good again? I mean, I hope so, it’s not like the bar is that high. Maybe that’s the piece of advice I should have given the incoming freshmen this week, brought in over the summer for a few days of bonding and making themselves visible to the seniors who theoretically promised to take pity on them, instead of some bullshit about being themselves and not taking anything too seriously.
It’s August, in the nineties every day for a week, and the water is still warm at nine-thirty, the flood lights posted up around the fence bouncing off its blue surface. Except Scott, who greeted me and nodded towards the cooler full of sodas and added that there was a stash of beer and Zimas under the deck, no one has said anything to me. Shannon was probably never coming anyway—she’s leaving for London tomorrow with her parents—and Melinda, who has publicly taken her side, isn’t here either, probably at the Tubs with the stoners from Sacred Heart. Neither is Wes, whose pale mustard-yellow Dodge 400—It was my grandfather’s. Weird, right? he said, running a finger along the side of my neck — I saw parked two doors down from his dark house when I drove over here. Camping, up in the Adirondacks, I think he said. It’s not a movie, so the girls didn’t grimace or lean away from me when I walked into the backyard, and the guys didn’t leer or make disgusting noises when I took off my dress and pulled my hair into a ponytail, but no one seems to know what to do with me, either. Once I became tentative friends with Shannon and Melinda through the Service Club and Speech and Debate, I was generally tolerated at parties like these. But even if I got the same invitation as everyone else, on the second-to-last day of Summer Bridge right before Shannon blew up, I’m not sure how far that tolerance extends without them. I guess I’m finding out.
Here’s the Goo Goo Dolls, the DJ announces as Chris lowers himself down the pool ladder, setting a can of Cherry Coke on the pavement. “‘Baby’s black balloon makes her fly,’” he sings along. He has a nice voice, just a hint of gravel to it. He could sing in a band. “Hey, Evie.”
“Hey.”
“Wes isn’t coming.”
I roll my eyes. “I know.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Like if you were, you know, worried about running into him.”
“Why would I be?”
“Jesus. Forget I said anything.”
I sigh. “Sorry. Greg hasn’t said anything, has he?”
He shrugs. “He’s fourteen, so, you know, he’s oblivious. Brothers, man.”
“I can’t imagine we inspired, like, a ton of confidence, as a group, after all that.”
He smiles at that. “He’ll figure it out. Didn’t we?”
“It’s only been three years, so I’ll get back to you about that.”
He swims out a little ways, then back, positioning himself next to me. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about him. Or any of them. Shit, it was probably fun for them to see high school girl drama. And if you care what I think, and maybe you don’t, I think Shannon was kind of out of line. It’s not like they were going out.”
“Thanks, I think. I’m not sure I didn’t have it coming all the same.”
Holly and Tori swim by then, Tori looking over one shoulder and Holly giving Chris’s chest a once-over. It’s thin, and pale, even in August, made paler by the blue-white lights from the fence and the contrast with the sprinkle of wiry black hair coming in. “So, Evie,” Holly says, “have you talked to Shannon?”
I shake my head.
“Did you, like, know she was going to be like that?” Holly asks, crossing her arms over her purple bikini.
I shrug. “Who can ever know how someone’s going to be?”
“Shannon said you knew they were going to the semi together,” Tori says, sipping a Zima.
“When they went together last year, it was just as friends. He, like, left to go play pinball for half an hour right when they started the slow dances—”
“Yeah, I was there. Lost a five dollar bet to him on the Ghostbusters machine,” Chris breaks in. He brought some sophomore girl he knew from Stage Crew, I remembered. I guess he didn’t want to slow dance either.
“Anyway,” I say, “I guess I didn’t know she was going to flip out in front of all the little freshmen on the last day of Summer Bridge. So I don’t know. I—how has the, um, party been?”
Holly looks over at the volleyball game. “Scott’s an idiot,” she comments. “His parents just, like, went up to Scranton for the baseball game, and you know people always leave to beat the traffic. They’re going to be home earlier than he thinks. We’re thinking about getting out of here. What about you, Chris?”
Chris shrugs. “I’m here in the pool with my Cherry Coke. What’s anyone going to do?”
“Yeah, but they’ll break the party up, call people’s parents.”
“Cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.” He looks up at the sky, dark orange-grey with streetlights and humidity.
Holly says, “We might go up to the Tubs.”
“Cool,” Chris says.
“All right, well, later,” Tori says, and they swim away.
He watches them go, then says, “I don’t know, maybe we should get out of here.”
“What about your Cherry Coke?”
He chuckles. “You want to keep answering stupid questions all night?”
“Not especially.”
He chugs his Cherry Coke. “Get your stuff. Let me drive.”
“Uh, where?”
“I’ll show you something cool. What time do you have to be home?”
I shrug. “No one cares anymore. My mom goes out a lot and my dad just watches TV.”
“Who’s moving out?”
“Whoever blinks first, I guess.”
He nods. “Well, let’s get our stuff and go.” He hoists himself out by the ladder, and I let go of the side of the pool and do the same, drying off and throwing my black cover-up dress on and stuffing my feet into my old black Gazelles while he pulls on a black t-shirt and steps into checkerboard Vans creepers. I don’t think anyone notices us leaving together—they’re too busy arguing with Holly and Tori, who want to break up the party, and Scott, still insisting his parents won’t be home for at least an hour and if people would be fucking cool it wouldn’t be a big deal—but even if they do, it’s not like it matters now.
Chris has a teal Celica, nicer than my mom’s old Plymouth Acclaim, and he lets me in and turns on the same radio station. “1979” is playing, and there’s a dark green tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Wes’s Dodge 400 was spotless, which I remember thinking was weird, weirder than making out in the back of his grandfather’s car; Chris’s back seat is messier, a couple of Cherry Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers on the floor. “Where are we going?” I ask, after he turns out of Scott’s neighborhood and towards the highway.
“The Nicholson Bridge. It was the largest concrete structure ever built when it first went up. I remember watching trains go across it when I was a kid, when we used to live up there. It was so high up. Just amazing.”
“So you want to go…like, look at a bridge?”
“I want to climb it.”
“Climb it? Do trains still go over it?”
“Not at night, I don’t think.”
“You don’t think. Are you fucking nuts?”
He shrugs. “You have a better idea? Barnes and Noble is going to be closed, so…”
I sigh. “I guess not.”
It takes almost an hour to drive up there, and he talks about narrowing down a topic for Original Oratory (“X Games sports in high schools,” he says, “expanding sports beyond the typical jock stuff, making it more accessible”), and asks me what I’m doing for Oral Interpretation, and I admit I haven’t thought much about it yet (“That excerpt I did from The Bell Jar, that played pretty well, but it’s like the lightest part of the whole book and still kind of a downer. I wish I could pull off something funny”). And eventually I see the viaduct looming in the distance even in the dark. It really is huge, and high. Ten stories at least, maybe more. I’m not good at judging this kind of thing. Or anything.
Chris pulls off to the side of the road and parks, at the foot of the massive hill on the side of the viaduct, covered in trees. He cuts the engine, jumps out, opens my door for me.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll help you.”
“You sure? This, like, cannot possibly be safe, or legal.”
“Like you cared about legal at Melinda’s birthday party.”
“Oh, I had some of those wine things. That’s not, like, jumping in front of a train.”
“Good thing we’re not going to do that.”
He holds out his hand. I hesitate for a moment before tossing my tote bag on the floor, then stepping out and taking his hand.
There’s enough of a path to suggest that maybe we’re not the first people to try this, but it’s narrow, and steep, and unlit, and beset on all sides with trees and thickets of plants and probably full of ticks. “How are you doing?” he asks, panting a little, about halfway up.
My legs are getting scratched up, but his probably are too. “I’m okay, are you?”
“I’m good.”
The moon hangs huge and yellow over the mountain in the distance. The temperature is finally dropping, the humidity breaking up a little, the sky blacker, but the air is mostly still. The trees are quiet, as if they’re watching us, hanging back, wondering if we’ll make it. Our feet crunch over the ground, leaves and twigs crumpling under our weights, and every so often I can hear a chipmunk scurry away through the brush.
When we make it to the top, my feet land on gravel, inches from the tracks. “You sure there aren’t any trains at night?” I ask.
“We’ve got a good buffer. I’m paying attention. We’ll hear if anything is coming.”
He reaches out his hand to me. It's warm, dry, solid. We walk along the bridge, not more than four feet from the tracks, and with every step we’re farther from the abutment.
“Let’s—go back,” I say.
He leads me to the very edge of the bridge, to the concrete parapet that comes up to my chin. “Just enjoy the view with me. Just for a minute or two. Then we’ll go back.”
I lean into the parapet. The town of Nicholson, a handful of buildings home to a few hundred people, sits directly below us, on the east side of the river; beyond, the northern tier, dotted with lights here and there but mostly black hulks along the landscape; above, the stars, positioned in constellations and galaxies I can’t name. He hoists himself up on the parapet and sits down. His feet dangle over the edge. If he loses a shoe, he’ll never find it in a million years.
“Chris— ”
“You should come up here.”
“Uh, no thanks.”
“Just be still and you’ll be okay.”
“How would you know?”
“Come up and I’ll tell you.”
The moon is nearing its apex, and its golden cast is fading to its usual white as I take his extended hand and lift myself up next to him. We’re square in its light, which also bounces off the water of the Tunkhannock Creek below us, turning it silver. The parapet is pretty substantial, concrete and three or four feet wide, but still I can’t shake the feeling that a gust of wind—admittedly unlikely on a still August night—or a train would knock me over and I’d fall, a black-and-white smudge through the dark, and scatter on the surface of the creek below.
“Awesome view, right?”
“Yeah, but, like, aren’t you afraid?” I said to him.
He looks out, looks like he’s really thinking about it. Then he says, “I came up here once before. After Melinda’s birthday party.”
“I remember you left early.”
“Do you remember what you said to me?”
“Not really. I remember you seemed kind of down.”
“I’d only had my license for, like, a week, and I drove up here.” He kicks his feet back and forth. “I used to come up here with my dad—not, like, up here, just pull over on the side of the road and watch for trains, and then we’d go to Waffle House. The kind of thing that stopped when they broke up. Okay, I was getting too old for it by then anyway, but I got up here and I was like, One time I came here with my dad and it was the last time, and I didn’t even think about it. And I was so mad about it, and about everything—I used to like Melinda, and at her party she was all over Wes, and I hadn’t seen my dad all summer, and I came up here and just started climbing. And when I got to the top, I came out here, and I thought of what you said, and you said, ‘Maybe you should talk to somebody.’”
“Wow. Profound of me.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. But you were the first person who said that to me. You didn’t say, oh, it’s not a big deal, it won’t matter in a few years, you have so much going for you. And I thought, well, I could jump, or I could talk to somebody.”
“Chris. I had no idea it was as bad as all that.”
“It’s not now. I did what you said. I told Mr. Corwin everything—”
“Mr. Corwin? What, between two-line drills, he actually has time to talk?”
“He made both my parents come in for a meeting, and they actually had to talk to each other, and me, and then they started sending me to a counselor, and I started taking Prozac.”
I look down, down at the surface of the water.
“Anyway, I remember when kids used to make fun of your shoes, before you got to be friends with Shannon and Melinda. And I saw how Holly and Tori were talking to you. I just thought, like, if they’ve turned on you—this could end stupidly, and I didn’t want you to feel alone.”
I don’t say anything for a long moment. I don’t think I’ve ever been so high above anything. The cars, the houses below us are nothing to us; they’re barely visible specks on a barely visible landscape, all too dark and little to really notice. I imagine us falling, breaking the surface of the water, breaking apart into a million black-and-white particles like marbles careening off each other. Then I imagine us floating, like everything inside us has turned to helium, carrying us away from this bridge, over the creek and the mountains, somewhere else.
“Thanks,” I say, finally.
“Anyway, that’s it. We can come down now.”
He turns himself around and hops down like it was nothing, his feet crunching into the gravel again. He offers me his hand and we walk off the bridge, back to the abutment and down the hill and back to his car.
“Want to drive through the McDonald’s on South Main, and then I’ll take you to get your car?” he asks, brushing some dirt and dry leaves from his t-shirt.
“Sure,” I say.
I look back a few times as we drive away, but he was right enough—I don’t see any trains. He puts the radio back on, and it’s the Goo Goo Dolls again: it’s lonely where you are, come back down, I won’t tell ‘em your name.
He drives us to McDonald’s, where he orders a plain cheeseburger and complains that they don’t have Cherry Coke, and I order a Happy Meal with nuggets. I offer him money, but he says not to worry about it. We eat sitting on the roof of the Celica and bitch about how annoying the freshmen were. He drives me back to Scott’s, where everyone is gone and the pool glows ghostly blue.
“I wonder if they got everything cleaned up before his parents got home,” I say.
“Well, if they got busted, no one’s going to be talking about you and Wes next week,” Chris laughs.
I laugh too. “That’s true, I guess.”
He gets out and opens the door for me. “Get home safe,” he says.
“Yeah, you too. No bridges without company,” I add.
He hugs me. “Get home safe,” he says.
“I will.”
“You can call me, if you want, if anyone says anything stupid to you.”
“Okay.”
“‘Night.”
He waits until I get into the car to drive away. I turn my lights on and drive myself home, where the light in Mom’s room is off and Dad is asleep in front of an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner. The answering machine is blinking, and I press Play—Evie, it’s Shannon, you need to call—I press Delete before it finishes. I go to my room, take off my dress, look out the window, up at the moon, small and high now, think about falling, think about floating.
Abigail E. Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. In addition to Stanchion volumes 14, 15, 16 & 17, her recent work can be found with HAD, Farewell Transmission, Major 7th, and The Dodge, and is forthcoming from JMWW and Atlas and Alice. Stanchion Books will publish Myers' debut short story chapbook The Last Analog Teenagers in the summer of 2025.
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