July 2085: in between days, part 2

Natty and Hilary are 20. 

Soundtrack, "In Between Days" by The Cure

Thursday, July 27, 2085: 8:30 pm


Dance like nobody’s watching, even if you forget the moves. That's what people say, isn't it?

Natty used to dance. She used to dance even if she wasn’t good at it, and she didn’t care who saw her, or what they thought, or how she looked. She just danced. And she loved the hell out of it.

At some point she stopped dancing, and she doesn’t remember when or why. She never imagined it meant anything was wrong. People get busy, working jobs, going to college. Who even had time for dancing anymore? Losing yourself in the frenzy of so many warm bodies and all that music? Natty was trying to find herself, not lose herself.







Because when the warm bodies all part and leave you alone, you realize it's just not the same anymore. Natty didn't know when or why she started to feel silly dancing on her own. It hadn't always been this way. And she didn't know how it was possible there could be so many people around, but she still felt lonely.

She wasn't a little girl anymore, and somehow the charade of all this felt like it was missing the point.


Outside, the blue haze of twilight settled over the deck, and the heat of the night was still stifling. Natty had been here for five weeks now and she dearly missed the refreshing chill of northern nights, even at the height of summer. She wanted to pull on a sweater and sit in front of a bonfire. She wanted to snuggle close under Charlie's arm.

Natty took a seat at the bar and tried to look twenty-one.

Hilary came out. Lighten up, Natty expected her to say, but she didn’t. "So, let's get something to drink."

"I've got money," Natty said.

"That’s beside the point," Hilary said proudly, preening her hair and pushing out her chest a little further. "Pretty women don’t buy their own drinks."

"Well my dad gave us the money, so I'm not really buying my own drink."

Natty waved over the bartender and ordered two drinks.

"Can I see some ID, honey?"

"Oh, I meant virgin daquiris," Natty said, trying not to look guilty. "And some chips and salsa too." She paid with her dad's money.


"Another perk to having guys buy the drinks: they're old enough," Hilary said.

Natty shrugged. "I wasn't really in the mood to get drunk anyway."

"Which means you needed it more." Hilary kept staring down at the table. There was nothing there except a little spilled beer and some chip crumbs. “So that’s why you always wear that thing then?" Hilary pointed at Natty's hand. "Did Charlie give you that?”

Her ring. Natty nodded. "Yeah, he did."

“So what does it mean?”


“What do you think it means?”

"You're engaged?"

"Well..."

"Or is it like, a promise ring?"

"Geeze, Hil. We're not in junior high."

“So he like, proposed and everything?”

Natty shrugged. Now that she thought about it, she wasn't sure how to explain it. She'd never needed to until now. They’d been eighteen when it happened, and he couldn’t have afforded much more, just this thin gold band with three tiny pink opals. He'd bought it with money he had saved from his high school job at the video store, because they’d gotten a dorm exemption in their first year and nudged their way ahead of all the sophomores and juniors waiting for an apartment, because they lied and said they were engaged.

But then Natty had felt bad about lying, she felt like it would be a curse on them. So he bought her this ring. There, now it’s not a lie, he said.

Charlie could remake the whole world when he wanted to.

“It was more like an understanding, I think,” Natty said.

Hilary laughed. “Other guys get down on one knee with a poem or at least a speech, leave it to Charlie to have a mind meld instead.”


“I don't even really like diamonds," Natty said. "I think it's just what I would have wanted.” Natty felt tense. Had it all been as flimsy as Hilary made it sound?

Hilary shrugged. “Well, sure. It’s pretty. It’s fine. But I mean, I'm your best friend and you didn’t even tell me you got engaged.”

“I guess we didn’t think it was a big deal. I mean, we’ve been together so long, I guess we thought everyone assumed.”

Hilary glanced at Natty's hand again and scrunched up her eyebrows like saying: look at you now. A lump swelled in Natty's throat. She folded her hands under her arms.

Hilary shrugged. “You guys are on a break, why don’t you take it off?”

Natty shook her head. “No. I’m not taking it off.”

A tall blond man in a trim brown suit waved from the doorway. Only just then, the drinks arrived. Hilary took three quick swigs of hers. Natty knew Hilary wouldn't waste anything that had alcohol in it, but these didn't, so she left the rest of it and got up. "Come on, are we dancing or what?"

"I think I'll finish mine," Natty said. They were actually yummy, fruity, and super cold, like the sno cones from a summer festival that dye your lips red. "I'll be in when I'm done."

Natty finished her drink, sat a while longer, then finished Hilary's abandoned drink too.


On shore, a young couple walked barefoot in the waves. A first date, maybe? Meeting and starting out new. Natty had nothing to compare it to—does it feel like that for everyone, at the start of each new relationship, like it was the start of everything? Natty only knew what it had been like for her, meeting Charlie in junior high, like her whole life just started, and he was there for all of it, and she was there for all of his. They grew up into each other in such an inseparable way, like two planted saplings growing alongside each other at exactly the same pace.

But if she hadn't met Charlie when she was twelve, would they have still fallen in love? How would it have happened? If they had met in college, would they have noticed each other? Or if they'd bumped into each other at a bus stop, would they stop and smile, or keep walking? Would they still have fallen in love if they had it all to do over again?

Natty went inside to find Hilary again. The blond guy in the brown suit waved her over.



"Aren't you feeling a little lonely, sweetheart. Get in here. We can make this a party of three."

"Oh God," Natty said. All she could think of was Hilary's orgy on a farm in the woods. "No," Natty said. "I mean, no thank you. I'll just..."

There was a large empty space in the middle of the room, so Natty went to dance in it.


She wasn't alone for very long. She supposed that should have been a compliment. This one was cute but not intimidating. He said, "You're a little shy, huh?"

"Not really," she said. "I’m just, feeling a little homesick."

"Oh yeah? Where you from?"

"Um, Michigan," she said. "I have a boyfriend back home. I really miss him."

Oh god, how she missed Charlie. A choke rose in her throat, she could cry to this stranger right here on the dance floor. She coughed and smiled instead.

"Oh, hey, that's cool. Do you want me to go?"

"You don't have to."

She should have just let him go. He danced two songs with her, keeping a polite distance that was more awkward than it was comforting. Then he said, "Nice to meet you. There's, um, someone, over there..."


A pretty girl, he meant. A pretty girl without a boyfriend back home probably. Natty didn't blame him. He was young and life was short, he didn't need to waste his night entertaining her. She was fine. The music was good and she was still feeling light in the head from all that sugar. She was having a modest amount of fun. Not as much fun as Hilary was having, but then, nobody in the room was having as much fun as Hilary was having.


Round three. "Hey, lady," this one said. Maybe she'd keep quiet about the boyfriend this time—she wasn't trying to be a total downer. Everybody was just trying to have fun, and it wasn't anyone else's fault that she didn't know what she was doing. So she decided to just dance.



Until she felt a palm on her upper thigh and a knee so high up between her legs she wondered if he could tell the color of her underwear.


"Get off me. What is wrong with you?"

Half the room stopped to stare at them.

"Chill out, girl. I was just dancing."

"That’s not dancing!" Natty shouted at him. "That was like, second base!"


Hilary came over then and poked her finger at the guy's chest. "What did you do?"

"Your friend’s a prude," he said to Hilary.

"I am not a prude," Natty said, but he wasn't paying any attention to her anymore.

"She’s not a prude," Hilary said. The guy backed away. Hilary was strong, and fierce, and so many other things Natty wasn't.

"I'm not a prude," Natty said again. "My boyfriend and I have sex all the time. I bet I’ve had more sex in a week than you've had your whole life."

"Where is this stud then, eh? If he’s so hot, why are you here alone?"

Natty didn't know why she was here anymore.


She checked her bra to make sure she still had the money her dad had given her, finding a quarter in change from their drinks to call a cab. She wished it would drive her a thousand miles, but she knew it couldn't. Then she took out another quarter and dialed Charlie's number again. There was no answer.

She just wanted to go home. But the problem was, her parent's house wasn't home. She didn't grow up there. She hadn't spent more than a dozen nights in that house in her life. She wanted to go back home, to her real home. Because this ocean was salty, it wasn’t Lake Michigan, and this wasn’t where she grew up, and Charlie wasn’t just two blocks down the road, in his family's house that she could walk to whenever she wanted. The home Natty grew up in was back in Lakeside Heights with another family living in it.

She'd looked them up once in the phone book. They were a thirty-something couple with two kids, a boy and a girl, and she'd driven by the house to see that they'd painted it an awful ruddy shade of orange. They even uprooted the two trees in the side yard where Natty used to tie her hammock, where she'd spent her young womanhood reading books and listening to the waves and daydreaming about what the future held for her. They paved over it all with a carport. Natty could never go home again.


Hilary came outside and plopped down on the bench. “Lighten up! We're all just trying to have some fun!”

“Well having some slimy boy’s knee up my crotch is not my idea of fun!”

“I don't know what to tell you, Natty. You don't want to dance with boys. You don’t want to dance alone either. What do you actually want? Why are you even here?”


“I don't even know why I’m here anymore," Natty cried out. "I'm bored of dancing anyway. I just want to talk to Charlie. I want to talk to him now. I wanted to talk to him the whole time I've been here, but I didn’t think I should and now I know that’s stupid.”

“Natty, when you were in there, you called him your boyfriend, not your fiancé.”

“So what?”

“So don’t you think that means something?”

“What do you want it to mean? Why do you hate him so much? You have never liked him. Ever since sixth grade when we first met him and you tried to ask him out and he said no.”

Hilary huffed and rolled her eyes. “You can't be serious. Trust me, I do not want your boyfriend. He’s just... God, I feel like you're going to settle down and never do anything, and some day you'll regret it."

"Well, I feel like you do too much," Natty spit back. "And I keep waiting for the day you'll call me to say you got gonorrhea or pregnant or murdered."


"How am I gonna call you if I got murdered?" Hilary said.

They both laughed then, a bitter, betraying laughter Natty didn't want because she was still so angry.

"I’m a big girl," Hilary said. "I know what I’m doing.”

“So do I,” Natty said.

“Fine.”

“Fine."

Hilary exhaled. “Well. If you should ever find yourself not engaged at some point, you should transfer your credits and come to school with me. We have a great medical program. We’d have so much fun together.”

No, we wouldn’t, Natty thought. We wouldn't have fun at all. She could have cried because it was so true. The earth had shifted and parted and moved. They would never be the girls they used to be again.

"Are you coming back inside?"


Natty shook her head.

Hilary wasn't coming, Natty knew it before Hilary even said so. "It's only nine-thirty."

Natty offered a defeated shrug. It was all she had.

"Well maybe you could leave the back door unlocked?"

"Sure," Natty said.

"Thanks, babe. We'll hang out tomorrow, okay? We'll go shopping or something."


Hilary had boys to catch up with, and Natty had a cab on the way. If she closed her eyes and pretended really hard, she could almost pretend this was junior prom, a night she had always held in mind as the great highlight of their youth. But the part she never wanted to remember was that Charlie had to bring up the car for her because Natty had danced blisters into her heels and couldn't walk across the parking lot, and Hilary left her waiting alone to go give Isaiah a quickie blowjob in the girls bathroom.

Nostalgia was dangerous; it didn't tell the whole truth. It left out everything small and modest and real, like a pink opal ring bought with a video store paycheck, like a boy carrying his girlfriend from the bench to the passenger seat of his car because she couldn't take a single step further, like the slow, quiet joy of falling in love, like a post card that said, "You don't have to figure it out on your own."

Natty had loved Charlie for as long as she could remember knowing how to love. "Do you think we take that for granted?" she asked him once. No, he'd said. And maybe he hadn't. But she had. She knew that now. She'd taken him for granted and she was so sorry.

—