Page 49 of Saint
Anyway, at some point after college, I decided that the one, singular goal of my life would be to have my ashes scattered—not near the Timber Wolf—butviathe Timber Wolf, by someone riding it. Of course, the theme park probably has some boring rule about human remains on the property, so clearly I would need to make enough money to bribe them into allowing this. Therefore I’d been collecting together millions and millions of dollars in the form of a donation, so that by the time I died, they’d have to turn down a bananas sum of money if they didn’t want to allow my ashes one final shaky ride on the coaster.
Obviously, all that Timber Wolf money was given away to much better causes when I went to Mount Sergius.
“I can’t believe you were never worried about the coaster still being there by the time you died,” Elijah laughs, shaking his head as he writes in his journal. “Like this whole plan depended on awoodenroller coaster still being there in sixty years or whatever.”
I’m glad he can’t see my face. I reach for another beer bottle and open it, so I don’t have to answer.
So I don’t have to tell him that the Aiden from before never planned on living that long.
“What about you?” I ask, setting my bottle down on the soft dirt under the tree and turning to look at him.
His brows knit over his sunglasses. “What about me?”
“You switched jobs too, didn’t you? What’s the biggest difference you saw between them?”
“If I were writing an article about my own job, I wouldn’t be in a Belgian forest right now,” Elijah says. I can’t see his eyeroll behind his shades, but I know it’s there all the same.
“Uh-uh. I’ve readModeandGQandEsquire, and all those feature pieces are always super meta with the writer breaking the fourth wall or whatever. In fact, it might be your journalistic duty to let your own insights bleed into the text.”
He sucks his teeth a moment, but it’s a thoughtful suck, not a judgy one, and then he sighs. “Okay, okay,” he says. “You have a point about the fourth wall thing, I guess.”
“I know.”
He swivels his head to give me a look from behind his sunglasses. “Don’t push it, Bell.”
I decide to ask what I’ve been wanting to ask since he first came to Mount Sergius. “Why did you leave event planning to begin with? You were so great at it.”
“It actually parallels your story in a way. Hand me another beer, will you?” he says, setting his notebook on the ground and stretching out his legs. His shorts have ridden up a little on his thighs, exposing the place just above his knee where his quadriceps begin. Firm swells of muscle that beg for kisses and licks.
“Thanks,” he says as I hand him an opened bottle, and then he takes a drink. “So you left,” he starts, and my stomach gives an automatic twist, like it’s trying to eat itself, but he keeps going before I can say anything. “And it was the first breakup I’d had that didn’t feel romantic in its own way. Before you, every relationship that ended—or every time I thought my heart had been broken, even if there hadn’t been a relationshipper se—came with this romantic mourning period. It felt romantic to be heartbroken, to nurse my wounds, to decide if I’d wallow or have revenge sex or live my best life or whatever it was that felt the most cathartic at the time. But after you left...there was nothing romantic about it. Nothing at all.”
Pain—aged and smoky like an Islay scotch—spikes his voice. But again he continues before I can speak.
“Everything felt grayed out. Like a bad filter had been applied to everything in my life, and I began to see my job not in terms of how good I was at it or how much I got paid, but for what itwas, which was planning events for mostly rich white people, and for the same group of them over and over and over again. Fundraising events, galas, receptions, pre-perfomance shit, post-performance shit—the same faces, the same self-congratulatory smiles and small talk. And then amidst all that, my boss had a chat with me about my personal social media presence.” Elijah uses finger quotes, bottle and all, around the wordchat.
“She said my social media was too political, too contentious, especially for an election year. She was worried it was coming off as ‘divisive.’ And that it was reflecting poorly on the venue.”
“That’s fucking awful,” I say. “Divisive?”
“Yeah. When I’m sharing my opinion about current events, it doesn’t make me informed or au courant.Informedis for white people,divisiveis for me.” He gives a long exhale after rubbing at his forehead with the hand holding his beer. “And you know that it wasn’t actually ‘current events’ that set her off—she wasn’t offended by my tweets about Brexit or the Panama Papers. Nope. In her eyes, it was divisive to talk about things like police brutality, like white supremacy, like nativism and voting rights and basically anything that suggested in the smallest, tiniest way that racism existed anywhere, in any form whatsoever. Somehow, to her, therealracist thing was talking about racism in the first place. Even if it was onTwitter—my personal, in-no-way-associated-with-the-goddamn-venue Twitter.
“And you know the hell of it was that I didn’t push back at all when we were in the meeting? Like when I was in there, when she was giving me her concerned face, herthis is purely about the venue’s reputationface, I just nodded and agreed because I was so shocked and also she was my boss and could fire me right then and there—and mostly I just wanted it to end so I could escape. But then once it was done, and I was on my way home, I could finally process what had happened in its entirety—text and subtext, so to speak. I put in my notice the next day.”
“So that’s why you left,” I say. “I’m sorry you had to make that choice. But I’m really glad you did and got away from there.”
“Me too. And there was a silver lining, I suppose—my quitting was the final straw forherboss, and she was fired not long after I left. They even asked me if I’d like to apply for her job, but I said no. I was ready to move on, you know? Not just from what had happened, but from being there altogether.”
The wind picks up a moment, ruffling my robe and Elijah’s notebook, and he reaches over, casual as you please, to tuck the edge of my fluttering habit under my calf. His fingers graze against my skin, and I feel that graze all the way up my leg to my stomach.
“While I was figuring things out,” he says, leaning back all nonchalantly like he didn’t just touch my leg, “I started writing more than ever. Not just for social media and for open platform sites, but for myself as well. Journaling and essaying and all the stuff that falls away when you get too busy for it.”
“And this was your major, right?” I say, my hand going to the still-tingling patch on my calf. “Creative writing?”
“Yes,” he says, with the self-deprecating sigh of someone who got a liberal arts degree. “After I graduated, I was hanging out with all these writers and they were hanging out with all these artists, and then I become a gallery groupie, and I sort of tumbled into event work.” He shakes his head. “At the time, it was just a job. It was only supposed to be a way to pay the bills until my writing could find its place. But by the time I met you, writing had shrunk into this little ghost of a dream, barely there enough tobooat me when I was bored.”
“I don’t remember you talking about it much,” I remark, although I add, “but there was a lot I missed.”
“I didn’t talk about it,” he says. “I never thought to. It was like a kid’s dream of being a ballerina or an astronaut. That’s how far away it felt.”
