Camilla

By Rosi di Rienzo

Featured in Volume 8 of Image OutWrite

We break up at dawn, the weak light of a beautiful day peeking through the curtains like a fucking creep. Rude, really, how the weather in Southern California refuses to acknowledge when you’re having a shitty time.  

She climbs in through my window like usual. But she doesn’t climb into bed next to me, or slide her hand up on my stomach, or nuzzle into my shoulder.

Instead, she sits in the armchair across the room and tucks her bare feet up under her, leaving her leather flip-flops perched neatly on the windowsill. She’s too far away for me to smell the coconut oil in her damp hair, fresh from the shower after her predawn beach lifeguard workout. She sits running her hands through her cropped hair, the way I did a million times this summer. When it was wet with salt water straight out of the ocean, when she kissed me, when she roamed all over my body.

I wait for her to speak. The waiting feels like standing under a waterfall of lava. Hot, all-knowing dread.

“Elia,” she starts.

“Yes.” It comes out steadier than I expected. Part of me knew this was coming, and now that the moment is here, I feel strangely calm. At least now, I can get rid of that nagging harpy that’s been lurking at the edge of every happy moment for the past three months, whispering it’ll never last. Knowing this shit was a ticking time bomb. Now, the harpy can say her final I told you so, and go on her merry way to haunt some other chick who’s in doomed love with a hot older lifeguard who’s about to leave for college.  

“I leave on Saturday.”

Like I don’t know. Like I haven’t been counting exactly how many days we have left since she kissed me the first time at that beach bonfire in May. Since she wandered by me in art class in January and told me I had a knack for graphite work, then held my gaze for half a second too long. I can picture exactly what she was wearing that day: her swim-chiseled arm muscles clearly visible through her white t-shirt, loose jeans broadcasting confidence as they hung off her hips. The compliment dangling in the air between us.

“Mmhmm?” I reply.

You’re gonna have to fucking say it. Don’t ask me to make this easier for you.

“I’m going to college.”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t realized.” It comes out snappier than I intended, and I’m immediately ashamed. She always said I was so mature for my age. That was not a mature move.

She flinches a tiny bit at my tone, but takes a deep breath and leans against the high back of the blood-red armchair. She makes eye contact with the Coco Ho surfing poster above my bed, her deep brown eyes threatening tears. The light is catching them just so, and they almost look hazel.

“This is really hard, okay? I…honestly, when we started up a few months ago, I didn’t think it would go this far. I thought we’d have some fun times, maybe I could help you get more comfortable with your sexuality, and then I’d head to Williams in August and that would be that. A little short-term, symbiotic situation.”

She breaks off and looks at me, seeming to ask for permission to continue.

“I am not uncomfortable with my sexuality.” Shit. There I go again. I should just not talk. I sound like a whiny five-year-old.

She levels her gaze at me, stopping her expression just short of skeptical. It’s kind of her. That’s the sort of person she is.

“Okay. Well, point is that I thought we had something to offer each other. And we’d be able to hang out this summer and emerge on the other side relatively unscathed.”

“But?” I finish the sentence in my head a million different ways, all of them fantasies. But I fell so hard for you. But I’m transferring to UCSD to stay near you.

I cross my arms under my boobs, then immediately uncross them when I realize I’m wearing a white t-shirt through which my nips are clearly visible. She doesn’t get to see my nips right now. I pull the worn patchwork quilt up to my armpits.

She’s not looking at my nips, though. She’s moved on from Coco and is staring at the Bethany Hamilton poster to my left. Good practice for what she’ll do when she gets to Williams, I guess. Hop from one girl to the next, making each of them feel special before dropping them.

The thought stops me up short. Who’s this jealous bitch in my brain? That bitter shit is not my style. And yet here I am, thinking it, feeling it so deeply I want to pick up the water glass next to my bed and smash it against the wall.

But I don’t. A small victory. Maybe that’s what maturity is – taking a sec to reflect before acting on your stupidest impulses.

“But…it turned into something real.”

“Yeah. I agree.” Snappy again. Get it together, Elia.

Flashes of the past three months play in my head. Laying on her shoulder at the drive-in theater as she strokes my hair. Goofing around on the lifeguard stand after dark, daring each other to do increasingly weird trick jumps off the top before collapsing into the sand, giggling. Feeling her body against mine in my bed, her skin smooth and bronzed as though polished by the sun and sand.

All of it with the undercurrent of the most intense desire I’ve ever felt. Infatuation? Borderline obsession? A hook from somewhere behind my bellybutton drawing me towards her, pulling the corners of my mouth into a stupid grin whenever her name pops up on my phone. That moment a month ago when I realized I’d fallen for her, that this is what people mean when they say stupid shit like “head over heels in love.” It does feel like falling. Delicious and terrifying and exhilarating.

“I’m fucked up about it, Elia. Everything between us is so good. Honestly, you’re the first person I’ve ever felt this way about.”

“Yeah, same here.” It comes out small.

“I just…I can’t go to college across the country while I’m attached to someone here. No matter how good it feels to be with you.”

She looks at me, swallows hard, mouth set.

I nod slowly. The sob is sudden, tearing out of my body like a tsunami. I’m not ready for it, and it makes me retch when it catches in my throat.

“I’m so sorry, Elia.”

Am I hyperventilating? What’s happening? It feels like I just got pounded by a wave and lost all sense of which way was up. My breaths come faster and faster.

She’s sitting next to me now, a coppertone blur. Her arms around me. I would’ve killed to feel her touch me just sixty seconds ago, but now I recoil.

“Don’t – want – your – fucking – apology,” I manage. I don’t her to say sorry, I want her to say she loves me.

Maybe I am a crazy bitch.

I crawl out of her arms, out of bed, craving the solid floor. I press my palms into the knobbly rug, dropping my forehead down between my knees. I sense her behind me, still sitting on the bed, face probably arranged in that sweet concerned look she got when I sliced my leg open on the reef. I’d been trying to show off for her. Craving that head-cocked look she gave me that day in art class when she was impressed with my drawing.

I stay facedown until my breathing slows, then stay a bit longer. It feels savagely good to ignore her. To make her wait.

She resettles on the floor next to me, legs crisscrossed. I can just make out the smooth gleam of her kneecap to my right. Through the floor, Dad and Marcus are getting up, the pitter-patter of Marcus’ paws soft on the hardwood.

“I love you,” her voice catches. She’s crying now, too. “It’s been…amazing spending time with you. There’s nothing wrong here. But I need to be able to grow when I get to Williams, and I can’t do that if I’m talking to you as much as I want to talk to you. I can’t be living half here and half there.”

I take a steadying breath, tilt my head to the left to look up at her. I can see up her nose. It’s perfectly clean.

“I knew this would happen.” I manage to say it without bitterness. “You’re not the type to let anything hold you back. It’s one of the things I love about you. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with it.”

She nods, frowning a deep quivering frown.

“Can I…?” She opens her arms, and I nod once. She arranges herself on the floor and circles herself around me. Her arms are hard and strong where they squeeze me to her, her tears hot as they fall off her nose onto my cheek.

We lay like that for maybe a minute, maybe two, maybe an hour. I can’t get close enough to her, no matter how hard I squeeze. I want to shrink myself down and crawl inside her bones. The grief rushes out of me like water, running over all the things I love about her, all the things I won’t have when she’s gone. The sweet texts goodnight, the comfort of her listening to my half-baked ideas without judgement, the squeezing next to each other in the booth at Marv’s to share fries, my leg inappropriately draped over hers.

And then it’s like the faucet turns off. It’s almost a relief. I let go of the doomed hopes that maybe this conversation would never come, maybe I could come to Massachusetts somehow, maybe there’s a way to work it out. This is the way it is, and the only way it could ever be.

I loosen my grip on her ribcage. We sit up, knees touching, foreheads pressed together. I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping a moment away from the moment will give me the strength I need. In reality, all it does is push out a few more fat tears.

“Go,” I whisper.

She doesn’t move.

I look back up into that face, all delicate nose and sharply defined lips. I press my mouth to hers. I’m still surprised every time by the softness of her touch.

I pull back. She’s staring at me like I’ve got the secrets of the universe locked in my eyeballs.

“Go.” I say it again, stronger this time.

She unfolds herself to stand, leg muscles showing off their sinews as she moves. I watch her move catlike to the window, swoop one leg over the sill onto the trellis.

And she goes.