She is walking through downtown. It’s the kind of downtown with buildings that rarely go above two floors and never five. She hears a band playing in a parking lot and goes to watch. She is really, really high. A dog runs up to her. She scratches it behind the ears.
It is hot. It has been so, so hot. It’s getting hotter. She was wearing a very thin hooded sweatshirt but now she takes that off. She had a two-piece bathing suit on under her clothes but now she takes her pants off too. She is sweating. She hates sweating.
Nobody in the parking lot is really looking at her because some other people have already taken their clothes off too and by now it’s sort of old news.
She likes the band. They are loud and energetic. The man holding a guitar has violent, crazed eyes and she likes that too. The man holding the guitar stops playing and begins yelling, screaming things without any music behind him. The words are not intelligible. Does this happen all the time? She wonders. The man playing the bass looks bored and the woman behind the drum set looks annoyed.
She kicks off a sandal and scratches one toe with other. She thinks of continuing her walk to the beach. She is still so very hot.
Suddenly she hears a noise from the crowd, a loud noise, and people suddenly part to let a girl with green hair walk through. The girl with green hair is yelling at the man, in a kind of controlled fury.
She can’t tell, she realizes, whether this is part of a performance or the girl is legitimately mad. The crowd seems to be buying it. But the crowd also looks hungry, eager, and it watches the two of them in a way that doesn’t really seem to give any clues.
Leaning on the back of the parking lot fence, she attempts to scratch her toe again and in doing so trips over her own feet. She crashes onto the pavement and skins her thigh, and her clothes and bag go everywhere. Embarassed, she picks herself up to see the girl with the green hair and the man holding the guitar are now looking at her, paused in their yelling, looking almost scared in their interruption.
She walks to the beach after that, still high, and sets her bag and clothes down in an isolated spot and swims out to the point where she can’t see bottom. She floats there and make plans to buy a postcard for an other girl who lives in a building on the other side of town, and all she plans to write on it is, “Hi. It’s nice out at the beach today. I wish you were somewhere like it. I know you love the sun. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll say it three times, since you know redundancies best come in threes. But really. I’m sorry.” Lying on her back, gently tugged by waves, she thinks about her right hand writing the words onto the postcard, thinks about if the other girl will get to see it. She wants to look with the other girl in the way that the man and the girl in the parking lot looked at her. She wants to share surprise. And when she walks back through downtown, the buildings colored ember as the sun goes under, she notices a drum key on the parking lot where the band was playing. She wonders if the woman will notice it’s gone, and how impossible it would be to give it back.
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