Cool Dark Blue

     It was a crisp June night and we sat in a nook on the far end of the beach near Front Street, shaded by white pines and juniper bushes. We poured premixed vodka lemonades into McDonald’s cups and sipped as the temperature dipped and the late night sun sunk into the vast horizon. The early summer wind was picking up. It was the longest day of the year and we couldn’t afford any more drinks at the bars. We had two Moscow Mules each at Bubba's and our tab was $63; everything seemed to be getting more expensive in those days. As summer beat on, Chicago money infiltrated the entire western coastline of Michigan, all the way up here to Traverse City. If you wanted a quieter summer night you could always head to a cabin town on the other side of the mitten near Lake Huron or a desolate faraway beach in the Upper Peninsula, but we’d never been to Traverse City. And we’d only known each other for a month. It felt like the right place to go.

      We got a room at the Econo Lodge for 80 bucks a night in a place 30 minutes south of town called Chum’s Corner. I lived in Michigan for all 22 years of my life without ever hearing about it. We didn’t have the funds to Uber into town— and weren’t sure Uber even existed in these parts— so we drove, buzzed, on back roads into town, windows down so we could smell the pine and sand. In a desolate region of the state, Traverse City was one of the few urban centers, and by “urban”, I mean a place with an outlet mall and a Wal-Mart.

     We sat on the cold beach, she in her “Lake Michigan: Unsalted and Shark-Free” sweater we found at the souvenir shop, me in my olive green Gap flannel I brought from downstate. We could hear the waves crash on the beach and I thought about how people from out of state don’t know that these lakes are big enough to have whitecaps. In Lake Superior, there are shipwrecks. Are there shipwrecks on Lake Michigan? Probably. If a summer night could be this choppy, God only knows what November gales could bring. Come to think of it, I myself had never been north of Saginaw in between the months of October and March. As far as I was concerned, Up North only existed in the summer.

     “Did you bring them?” She asked, pruney fingers tapping the soggy plastic cup.

     “Obviously. How should we split them?”

     I pulled out the pills from my pocket. They looked like generic breath mints, unbranded and scentless. I had only taken Percocet once in my life but those ones were oval-shaped, had imprints on them, and were chalky. I let the pills roll around on the inside of my palm. They were marbly, smooth, kind of dense. I thought they might be fake.

     “I should have brought my pill cutter,” she said. “But it’s big and bulky and unbecoming to have in my purse.”

     “We can probably get one at CVS,” I offered.

     She took one of the six pills out of my hand without responding and cracked them with her canines. I had never seen anything like it. She looked at me, the violet sky reflected in her eyes, and smiled. There was nothing sinister inside, only vague agony. The pill was cracked in a imperfect half but I didn’t mind. Especially since I was convinced they weren’t real.

     “The guy said these are 10 milligrams so we probably don’t even need to split them,” she said. “But my tolerance isn’t what it used to be these days.”

     “That ‘guy’ is Alex, and he’s good people,” I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to convince myself or her. There would be a reassessment of our friendship if he sold me fake shit, I thought. I had never taken opiates before, so would I even know?

     We washed down the mystery half-tablets— I gave her the bigger piece— with the vodka lemonades, at this point room temperature and watered down with melted ice. I laid my head back and let it fall into the weedy sand. As a child I hated having sand in between my toes, underneath my clothes, anywhere I couldn’t shake it off in one fell swoop. But growth was important to me, and I thought this a good time to free myself from the shackles of mild ammophobia.

     I looked up, hoping to see stars. My dad told me once that if you get far enough north in Michigan, you could catch a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis. Unfortunately not a star was in sight; I forgot we chose to travel to the one place in Northern Michigan with city lights that illumined town deep into the night. Instead I watched a lone, formless black cloud move through the sky like molasses. The moonlight was dim and it felt darker than it really was under the

juniper shrubs.

     I heard heavy breathing and looked to my right. She was sleeping. Was it the drugs or was it just late? I looked at my cracked Casio. We had been drinking for the last five hours, at least. I didn’t feel much, if at all. At this point each summer, I never felt drunk, just weary. I stood up and wiped the sand off my flannel. I ran my hands through my hair, puffy and voluminous from the humidity. I closed my eyes and let the thousand grains fall from it and walked towards the water. I took off my leather sandals and stood on the wet, packed sand, the part of the beach where not every tide rises, save the big waves. I let the occasional rush of freezing Lake Michigan water rinse over my feet, but instead of chills I felt a warm rush course through my veins, from deep in my chest to the tips of my fingers. Were the pills working? Or was I getting a rush from the Great Lake waters? After all, they were always considered fresh and pure and rejuvenating. Did it matter? I never thought much about being high.

     I waded deeper in the water, until the tide came up to my oversized basketball shorts, soaking the fringes of the mesh. I looked behind me and saw her sprawled on her back on the beach. Her vodka lemonade had tipped over. I didn’t even know who she was. I barely knew myself. What was I doing? I waded around the water for what felt like fifteen minutes waiting for something to happen. I wondered how deep I could get in the cool dark blue before it was too far. I didn’t know our next three years together would be the worst of my life, but I wouldn’t change a thing. Somehow I knew I’d always remember that night.