9Lazy Eye || Silversun Pickups
COLE
“Cole,don’t tell me we’re going all the way to thecross!”
Roxanne was falling behind me as we made our way up the mountain in the dark. It was probably a stupid idea. The trail was dark, we were both still feeling our beers, and all we had to lead us on was the shitty flashlight on my phone and a vague idea of where we were going.
It was her eighteenth birthday, though, and I’d missed her party. Misguided as it might have been, this was my way to do something special for her. She deserved something special. It was just over a year since I’d found her at the bus station on that hot summer day, and Roxanne Nadeau had carved herself a place within my life and burrowed deep inside it. I don’t think she knew she was doing it, but even though I hadn’t quite figured out what I felt for her back then, there was no getting rid of it.
There was no getting rid of her.
“Câlice!Was that a snake?” she shrieked as she bolted up the path to catch up with me. “Tabarnak, Cole, I think that was a snake!”
I shined the light behind us. “You mean that big stick, Roxy?”
She gave my shoulder a shove and huffed. “Whatever. What are we doing on this hill, anyway?”
She still missed the ‘h’ in hill, but her English was nearly flawless. Monroe was always telling me how impressed she was with Roxanne’s reading. Less than two years after arriving in Montreal barely able to string a sentence together, Roxy was working her way through Shakespeare.
“It’s this tradition,” I explained, as the glow of the cross’s lights came into view through the trees. “At my high school, you were supposed to come up here the night before you graduated to watch the sunrise while you talked about life and shit. They called it the Tequila Sunrise.”
“Tequila?”
“Yeah.” I smirked in the dark as the mini bottle of Sauza shifted in my pocket. “You were also supposed to get drunk. I know you’re not graduating today, but, you know, you’re an adult now. You’re kind of graduating from childhood, right?”
I also knew her own high school graduation hadn’t been all that great. In Quebec, there are only three years of high school, and since her birthday is in August, she graduated at sixteen. She’d only just finished school when she ran away, after what happened with that bastard her mother was dating.
Even back then, she always tried to play it down, said she’d been thinking of leaving for a while and that day just pushed her over the edge, but I knew how much it messed her up. I saw the way she was shaking the day I found her. She used to shake like that all the time. She always told me ‘nothing actually happened,’ but whateverdidhappen hurt her. It hurt her bad.
She was eighteen, and she deserved to feel happy. She deserved to feel free and young and reckless and alive. There was no better place for it than looking down on the lights of Montreal.
I watched her as she stepped ahead of me to approach the cross, inching towards it like a moth being drawn to the light. She still had her skinny matchstick legs. They stretched out of a pair of cut-off denim shorts and into some beat-up Doc Martens. She had an oversized Killers t-shirt on top. That’s how she dressed in those days.
“I don’t know if I like this cross,” she murmured once I was standing next to her. “When I’m down in the city, it always feels like it’s watching me.”
Auntie used to take us to church sometimes, but not enough that I felt the pull—and the guilt—I noticed in Roxanne sometimes.
“We’ll sit in front of it,” I told her, “so nowyoucan be the one watching.”
The city stretched out in front of us as we sat in the dirt on the side of the hill. I pulled out the bottle, and we each took a pull. She told me about the party I missed. They pretended to put her on the schedule at Taverne Toulouse, and she’d been all annoyed about working on her birthday, but when she showed up, the whole place was decorated, and everyone had pitched in to get her a cake. They called it her ‘Promotion Party’ since she could finally be a server instead of a dishwasher.
I tried to get the night off but couldn’t. I was working as a bouncer then, trying to save up for school. Call it stereotypical, but as a tall and intimidating black guy, it was an easy gig to get. I showed up at Taverne Toulouse half an hour after closing time, and the staff were still going strong. I stayed for a beer or two and then told Roxanne I had something to show her.
“What time is it?”
I checked my phone. “Quarter to four. The sun rises at five.”
Her bare thigh was almost brushing the dark denim of my jeans.
“I’m so sleepy.”
She looked it, too. We had switched to French a while ago, after all her words started running together. She blinked at me a few times and gave me a tired smile.
“Why don’t you sleep for a bit?”
“Okay.” She bobbed her head and then got this sudden look of alarm. “But you’ll wake me up for the sunrise, right?”
She sounded so innocent, like a little kid being persuaded to take a nap.
