9 minute read
Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down
by Ethan Cutler
It was homecoming, sophomore year of high school. She wore a short green dress, hung up by two small straps over her shoulders. Her feet were bare, she didn’t want to spend money that she didn’t have to wear fancy shoes for the first two minutes of the night, only to take them off indefinitely. It must have been so gross to walk barefoot across the school floors, dirty and wet from the rain tracked inside. I took off my dad’s huge dress shoes too, but left my socks.
Advertisement
day?” “God you look good,” she said. “Can you wear this every
“I’d rather die.”
Some friends showed up behind me, and I turned to greet them. As I waved them down, she reached around behind me and put her hand (in that small place) on my back between my spine and my hip, just below the rib cage where my frame gets thin and you can feel the tense muscles that hold the weight of my posture. I was very still. My friends, not knowing who she was, acknowledged my presence and then went on to the dance. I’d like to think that I was unaware of what she meant, oblivious to her intentions. But I think I knew.
I came along anyway, walking the long hallway leading to the cafeteria and gym, where the dance was being held, in silence. It was lowly lit, with balloons and decorations covering the walls. I long outpaced her (bare feet), and she had to thoroughly compensate in speed just to keep up. Sometimes she would run ahead and dance on the cold wet tile floor, spinning and leaping, then wait for me to slowly catch up.
This was the beginning of a complicated relationship—we had been friends briefly before, but the dance started the spiraling. For about a year afterwards, we were a complicated mix of close friends and secret lovers, where being open and honest about our lives fueled a translation of that into desire. For her, it was telling me about her awful boyfriends, her mom, her struggles through (drug-fueled) depression. She was always good at telling stories, the kind where all of sudden something horrible happens—there she goes stabbing herself in the neck—and you’re surprised, again. I was good at listening. I told her all the small things every day that set me off—loud alarm bells ringing, people talking, my mother being a mother, the volume of the radio wasn’t set in fives, the ways my brother set an impossible bar to reach. And with a wink or a touch or a smile, she could melt that tension away.
And I told her all of the quiet desires (the whispers), the things I would do. I said I wanted to run away and be with her. She told me all the things she wanted to do to me. I told her I wanted them. But, in a way, we were never friends, and we were never lovers. We told each other the most important things in our lives like the closest of friends, but only to set up that romance we thought we wanted. And the flirting and romance was always to distract ourselves from our lives. It wasn’t fair to her that I lied over and over when I told her that I wanted what she wanted.
I lied to myself, too.
That first night at the dance was the closest we ever got to a relationship. I got some snacks and we stayed out in the cafeteria, away from the dancing and music. She took my hand and sat us down around the corner, back behind the vending machines where the hallways to classrooms were closed off, on the outskirts of the cafeteria. Past her I could see people glance towards us. Not quite out of sight. Focus.
“What do you want to do?” she asked me.
I was silent. It wasn’t a question.
Her hands explored my body while everyone could see, and I tried to close my eyes. But I knew their faces. That one-eyed squint in disgust, “look at that” to their friend. I was doing a good job, I think, kissing and feeling and breathing. But the next day a friend asked me if I was okay, they said she was on top of me and I looked lifeless (catatonic). Arms and legs limp, lips numb, always gasping for a breath.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” A teacher noticed us and she slid off of me. Neither of us said anything, her hand still resting on the inside of my thigh. Her fingers were soft and soothing. She had a hair tie on her wrist, along with some fancy metal bracelets that made a lot of noise whenever she moved her arm. They were probably borrowed from a friend; she would have never asked her mom for anything, and she wouldn’t spend money on accessories herself. The only thing I ever saw her wear besides that day was a cheap keychain bracelet. She usually wore long shirts (that covered her wrists).
The teacher walked off. She smiled at me and poked my forehead. “Now you can get in trouble with me! It’s been so lonely...” she trailed off with a smirk. I gave her a blank stare. My eyes go dark when I really think. Hair, eyes, skin, green dress, bare feet, long sleeves, power, love, pain...
She tilted her head to one side, and asked “What’s going on in there, huh?”
I thought for a moment. “Unromanticizing. I’m trying at least.” She looked blankly back. “All of this, all of you. I’m trying to rationalize you.” This did not give her clarity. “I’m trying to take you apart.” “Oh....okay...” She smiled. “I can handle that...”
“No, no. Not like that. You’re just, too many things, not like that. God. You’re just...” Deep sigh. “Nevermind.”
She paused, looked away. I wondered if I had hurt her feelings. She hid her eyes from mine as she was thinking. Her skin was so pale, face scattered with acne and blemishes, visible even in the low blue light of the dance. I only noticed when she was looking away, the way that her blonde hair covered most of her face when it was down. And I wanted her hair up. Her open face. Show me so I don’t imagine. Show me.
She turned back and caught my eyes. “I can be anything I want to be.”
And she kissed me again.
She left the dance first, an old grey sedan pulled up to take her home. Her boyfriend. I watched her get into his car (and kiss him) and then drive away, and I finally let myself remember. My brother came soon after, and I was quiet. Another kind of numbness ensued. I told him (she was—no...) the dance was lame, and he laughed and agreed, all the dances were always lame. And then he let me be silent for the rest of the ride. We listened to music— back when he loved Interpol. Only when it was far into the middle of the night, when I was sure he was asleep in the bed across from mine, I finally began to cry.
She probably didn’t realize the same things that I did that night. Maybe she discovered how exciting it was for her to fantasize and imagine another life apart from her boyfriend, how powerful it made her feel. I think I discovered a kind of (cold) apathy. When I was with her, for a moment I felt numb to the million things that occupy my mind at all times — clocks ticking, people looking, my body aching (remembering). Maybe that’s why I say we were never really in a relationship — real relationships deal with real life, both people serve as anchors to reality for each other. It always felt like
we were real. But ours was an escape, a fantasy designed to forget about reality. Eventually reality comes and you can’t pretend anymore.
I learned to forget about her boyfriend. Boyfriends, really, after a while. In my head, I could justify everything. I know it’s bad to cheat on your boyfriend, but it’s fine cause he’s fucking horrible to her. She deserves better, she deserves something else. That kind of thinking grows on you, where one really bad thing can get cancelled out by another bad thing. I always felt guilt and regret and discomfort about the things me and her did together, or said we would do. But she (loved it, so it) was fine.
Slowly she became something clear—she was my love-joy diver. My stand-in. She was my blood-red keychain bracelet. Eventually I knew we would never do anything we talked about, eventually I realized that I was utterly terrified of that first night at the dance. She was so many things. Love, lies, sexy, wrong, everything nothing wrong. She was power. I was terrified of her, and I thought I loved it. I was terrified of sex.
I still am. I would rather die. Just as much then as now. Never again. Unromanticized.
In the following spring, long after the dance and far into our mess of a relationship, I was at work with my dad, doing office work. Filing papers, scanning things, wasting as much time as I could. My dad was in another room, in a meeting. I checked my phone. And she sent me a message. “Open carefully” with a winking face. I went to the bathroom and it was another video, this time of her mast(fuck…don’t read this)amera, her mirror was so dirty. Her feet were bare. And there it was, finally—emptiness. I’d taken her apart. It looked like the most unnatural thing a person could do.
Writer Spotlight: Ethan Cutler
“The paradoxical thing about a memoir is you don’t remember what people said – there’s no way you remember what people said. So you have to pick details that represent what you think is the truth, but aren’t necessarily realistic depictions of the truth. I don’t actually know if a conversation took place, but it’s an embodiment of things that I know happened. You have to decide that you’re representing the truth however you want to go about it. So, most of the details in the story come from truth but don’t necessarily end up in a final draft situation, as memory.”
“At the end, I had to try to make a strand through the whole essay to make this make sense, but over time you’ve realized that what you thought you were feeling is different, and I mean that’s kind of the arc of the whole essay. I thought I was feeling this thing, and at this one moment at the very end I’m like, actually, this is not desire, not really, it’s distraction, and there’s nothing behind it – so I thought that was a good moment for that. But that doesn’t come across I guess, in the clearest way. But I like ending with scenes and not descriptions.”
Hear more from the writer on our website!
