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They paid five dollars so you could all set up a tent on the empty and apocalyptic parking lot on the beach.
But the air got cold, and the twilight faded away. It was black and purple out on the dunes. A mist steamed up along the shore, and thickened into a fog so dense that you lost the lighthouse up ahead.
You could only guess where the lake met the horizon, and where you guessed you found not one but many darknesses.
You found a crumbling bridge in a park near a golf course, arching over a stream and overhung with willows. Ashley brought out a bottle of Jack Daniels, and you partook.
A garbage bag lay in the street. Several garbage bags lay in the street. On the corner of Lewis and Belle, several garbage bags were stuffed with rotting clothes.
You walked to school past potholes and potheads, Buicks and bailiffs, funeral homes and Bible studies.
When you were young, before the trapdoors started falling open, you went for walks with Bitty and Betty along the weedy tracks at Kearsley Park. Your sisters shoved you down so that you scraped your knees and taught you that life was a predatory thing.
Up ahead, Lewis narrowed and curved to the right, and the houses fell aside for the river.
Ashley lived in the East Village, just across Longway from the Eastside. She lived on Linwood Avenue near Parkside Drive, and the houses were what you'd expect on streets with such names.
After a few blocks, you stepped into a parking lot strewn with glass and paper. Yellow light rained down from the carbon streetlamps and the only sound was the buzzing of the electrical wires.
You saw tennis courts and a playground and a huge oak in the middle of a large field, but no people.
It was a strange, prismatic space. A crescent-shaped well opened at the back, and three floors of polished mahogany and burnished chrome faced an unfolding bank of windows.
A few blocks further on, you found a coffee shop. You went inside. The scent of cinnamon spiced the air.
Walking home along 2nd Street, you passed Hall Street and a factory and reached a place where there weren't any streetlights.
You got a burger and fries and sat in a booth near the window.
You went up several steps so that Ashley could fit inside. If you followed the spiral stairs to the top, you'd be in a turret that rose above the school. But pigeons nested up there, diving on any students that climbed too high.
On your left a crack-assed black stop spat and scratched by Reedy Weedy went Loco Pogo in the Furnsie Pern of a Loobledy Pop.
You met a chubby girl from Carmen-Ainesworth and she told you that her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she'd been planning all night to come to this purple poppy preptastic club with its Chippendalish bouncers and five dollar gin ebonics, and she wasn't going to fuckin' change her find for him!
Some boys playing soccer down in the park briefly turned their heads in your direction, then returned to their game.
He knew the hassle involved in interviewing innocent parties. The rest of them started calling the bluff Deadman's Hill.
MOVE TO MEREDITH! SAGINAW AND CLARE COUNTY LINE TO EXTEND SERVICE FROM LONG LAKE TO MEREDITH
You lived right where that nail went in, way off the 14 3/4 road, and the nearest town an esemplasy in the gray was named for an indian but everyone thought a car. Right?
The most beautiful and awful sight, in those days, will be to climb the highest trees, to put your hands to your eyes and look out. At the very edges of everything, where the earth makes a little curve, a faint and flickering light, soft orange and all surrounding, an aurora from the earth. The fire deep and silent and approaching. It will overcome you. It will look like city lights beyond the horizon, but it will feed on the trees.
And now, to send you on your way...
