Meghan Proulx
We arrived in the desert the night before the festival. The traffic was thick as hot goo, and it took my girlfriend Nat and I two hours to get from the entrance to our camping spot, which was just a patch of dirt. Her friend Anastazia was there too. But she was staying far away in a VIP yurt, or teepee, or some sort of fancy cone-shaped dwelling.
“Can you help with this?” Nat said, handing me a tent pole. I had no idea what to do with it, so I flicked it around like a wand. She rolled her eyes at me but didn’t say anything. We’d been bickering that whole day and were now giving each other the silent treatment.
We sat on our sleeping bags and ate cold bean and cheese burritos for dinner. The kind you could buy at any old gas station, but really shouldn’t. The cheese reminded me of the bagged cheddar my mom used to put on everything, including salad. Nat chewed while looking off into the middle distance, and I wanted to call my mom. I wanted to hear her loud voice greet me on the other end of the line.
The next morning, I woke up congested up to my eyeballs. It was already oppressively hot and yet my body wasn’t producing any sweat. I put on the smallest clothes I’d brought, which were a cotton T-shirt and jorts. I’d made the jorts myself in preparation for the festival, thinking they would make me look daring and unique, but instead I looked like a middle school-aged boy.
We walked down the long dirt road to the festival grounds. Dust choked the air, and my brain pounded against my skull. Nat brought the back of her cool hand to my forehead.
“It couldn’t be from the burrito, could it?”
“My symptoms feel more cold and flu-related.”
“We’ll try to find you something from a medic tent once we get inside.”
I smiled at her. She was looking at me like she cared again, and even though I felt like death and wished I was wearing a dress made of ice cubes, it made me feel better just to have her attention. Other people skipped by, excited to get into the venue with their hidden drugs and vials of alcohol disguised as tampons. Everyone wore fun, slutty outfits. Mini dresses and flower crowns, nipple covers and pants that were basically just nets. All the prettiest girls wore crop-tops and I wished I was too, but I didn’t have the self esteem required. Plus my mom always referred to crop-tops as “midriff-baring blouses,” which made wearing one sound like a sin.
We met Anastazia at our previously agreed-upon meeting spot, which was a rusty chain-linked fence inside the festival grounds. The two of them ran to each other and jumped up and down, rubbing their bare, sweaty bellies up against each other in what was really just a hug but seemed pornographic to me. Anastazia was dressed like a desert nymph. She hugged me with enthusiasm, and one of her necklace crystals slapped me in the face.
“Ow.”
“It’s an amethyst,” she said. “They activate your spiritual awareness and open your intuition. This one clearly wants to be close to you.” Anastazia placed the purple rock around my neck, and then we walked through the festival grounds, passing food trucks, art installations, and a man holding a long string of balloons that trailed up into the white sky.
Nat kept asking me if I felt all right. I kept saying “yes,” even as my eyelids drooped, I wheezed in and out through my mouth, and my body temperature equaled the triple-digit air.
“What’s wrong with her?” Anastazia looked at me like I was a strange, rare bird.
“She’s not feeling well. A cold or something.”
“I keep DayQuil in my purse. You want?”
Nat laughed. “You’re always so prepared.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” I said before crumpling into a fit of violent coughs.
“Don’t be ridiculous, just take them.” Nat rubbed my back while swinging Anastazia’s free hand and I blinked to make sure I was seeing things right. I’d never seen her hold someone else’s hand before. Suddenly I hated hands. Specifically theirs. I took the bottle of pills, but they weren’t bright orange.
“These aren’t DayQuil?”
“They’re off-brand and way better. My mom gets them from one of her tennis friends.”
I sprinkled five into my hand and swallowed them dry because I hadn’t brought any water with me. Nat and Anastazia gasped.
My aches and pains were gone, but as the day went on I felt hotter and more delusional. I had a sense that time wasn’t passing at a normal pace and that maybe I wasn’t a person, but merely one of God’s abandoned art projects. I went through four more rounds of off-brand DayQuil until the sun left the sky, and at last, the heat was tolerable. I spent a few hours floating outside of my body, making observations that were humorous and profound only to me, before giggling and running away like a raccoon with a garbage-flavored treat. I went to the toilet and taunted my blue-brown reflection in the pool of muck at the bottom of a porta-potty. I called myself mean names, and my mother’s eyes looked back at me disapprovingly.
I became self-aware again in the night while gyrating to The XX. I was in the middle of a scattered crowd and dreamy electro-pop songs played. I stopped and looked around for Nat, but she was nowhere near and neither was Anastazia. I had run away from them at some point, but I was no athlete, surely they could have kept up. I looked into the distance. Tegan and Sara were playing at the stage next to the XX, and I knew they would be over there, at the front, pressed up against each other and suffocating near the stage with all the other die-hard fans, because that’s how Nat was. I wasn’t a die-hard fan of anything, but I usually let myself be dragged around wherever she went. But not on that night. On that night I was without her, way in the back of a huge crowd of strangers, with all the other dehydrated girls, and I was getting more dehydrated every second. It wasn’t as hot out as before, but I couldn’t remember when I’d last drunk anything. And how many of Anastazia’s pills had I taken?
I sat down on the grass and looked up into the night sky because even in my state, I knew God was up there in his house, and maybe if I prayed to him, he would help me get some water. I called, but he didn’t answer. I closed my eyes and did the worshipy thing with my hands that people do at Christian concerts, but still nothing. Maybe he was just busy up there, doing one of his little side hobbies like playing the harp. Or maybe he was ignoring me because I was gay, accidentally on drugs, and hadn’t prayed since my mom died three months before.
I sat back on my elbows and stared up into the universe, daring something to appear among the stars. But all I saw was the moon. You could really see it in the desert. It sat up there huge and beaming at me like my mother.
My mom. Surely if she saw me, she would be concerned. I heard her voice in my head telling me to drink water, take care of myself, pray. But I was already sitting on the grass, which was warm and smelled like childhood, so I figured I might as well just lie all the way down, which was when I saw a cluster of strange, flickering lights zoom across the blue-black sky. The lights moved in a way that was synchronized yet chaotic like the ocean. I’d never seen anything like it. It could have been birds or planes. Except that it definitely wasn’t because I know what those things look like.
I sat straight up, realizing I’d just seen a UFO. A thrill passed through me, and I looked around to see if anyone else had seen it. There was a woman I hadn’t noticed before, an attractive middle-aged lady who, remarkably, was there among the hordes of intoxicated youth.
“Did you see that?” the lady asked me, her face a circle of surprise.
I nodded.
She chuckled and shook her head slowly. Life, am I right? her expression seemed to say. Then she went back to watching The XX, swaying to the beat and smiling gently. Then the attractive woman began to smile more intensely. She nodded her head faster and faster until her braids whipped her in the eyes.
“Lady, are you okay?” I said
She shook and laughed until she expanded and exploded into herself like a star. What was left of her melted into the grass like hot wax before re-animating and clumping together to form the shape of my mother.
“Woah.”
“Winslow Eleanor Day,” the thing shaped like my mother said to me. “Get up.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No seriously, the grass feels so good. Touch it.”
“It won’t feel so good when you’re lying on it dead of dehydration.”
“If I die here, ‘tis God’s will.”
“Is that really what you want?”
I thought about it. “Hey, is that really you?”
She shook her head at me. “Just try a little harder, okay?”
The mom-shaped thing morphed back into the swaying, peaceful woman. I watched her. She emanated so much well-being, and I had the impression that if I made the right choices for the next twenty years of my life and restricted enough calories, I could be just like her. But the truth was I wanted to be like my mom, who was loud, overwhelming, judgemental, ate too much cheese, and was my favorite person.
With the last of my energy I pushed myself off the ground and stumbled away from the crowd and the woman, and went toward the open space where people were walking to the food trucks, the beer garden, the porta-potties, or the ball pit where a man with spiky hair and a leathery tan shot vodka out of a water gun into the mouths of pretty girls. I ran up to him and opened my mouth like a baby bird. He looked me up and down.
“Get lost, little boy,” he shouted over the blaring music.
“I’m a girl!” I screamed at him.
“Okay fine, but just a little. You don’t look so good.”
I took what the spiky man gave me, swallowed, and winced. The vodka was coconut-flavored and definitely not hydrating. Desperate, I stumbled up to a green and red food truck selling thick slices of watermelon bigger than my head. I bought two slices for $16 total, which seemed like an unreal sum because money felt like arcade tokens in this place. I stacked the watermelon slices and ate them at once, practically unhinging my jaw with every bite. Pink juice ran down my elbows and made the hair on my forearms clump together. The watermelon was cold and tasted perfect. I bought four more slices because that’s all I could afford. I ate and started to sweat dramatically as my fever broke. My head cleared, and I could feel the full impact of how exhausted I was. I wanted to cry, but there was no point, and not enough water to spare in my body. I sucked it up and walked a mile down a floodlit dirt road back to the tent. Nat wasn’t there. I crawled deep into the cool, slippery cocoon of my sleeping bag and thought about everything that had just happened before falling into the deepest, weirdest sleep of my life.
In the morning, the amethyst necklace was wrapped around my head with the crystal resting over my third eye. I plucked it off gently. Nat was there, awake, and pissed about it. She told me I’d been snoring all night. I knew this was true based on the circles around her eyes, though I’d never snored before in my life.
Nat looked tired but cozy and I wanted to feel close to her. I told her about my night and thought she’d be dazzled by my adventures.
“You were just high,” she said, and then she turned away from me.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m just tired,” she said, and I knew that wasn’t the whole truth.
After we finished getting dressed and ready, I asked Nat to buy me a T-shirt at one of the concession stands. I’d spent all my cash on watermelon. “Consider it a parting gift,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows at me. Part of me hoped she’d be upset, yell even. But she didn’t. She looked surprised, and then like she understood.
We walked to the concession stand, and she teased me for wanting a shirt from a band I’d never heard of. But I wanted it because it was cropped, and also it had a wombat on it. I put the tiny shirt on immediately, even though it had that scratchy new shirt feeling, and I wore it all day and the next day too, bearing my midriff like the little sinner I was, knowing full well that if my mom had seen me, she’d have been shocked, appalled, and it was just wonderful to live a life she would have mildly disapproved of.
After the festival, Nat drove me to the airport, which was kind of her because she and Anastazia were staying in the desert for both weekends. She pulled up to the busy drop-off zone and helped me get my bags out of the trunk. We hugged like it might be the last time and a lady in a Camry honked at us.
I went into the airport, and though I could have gone anywhere in the world, I went back home. Hours later, I was on the curb of another airport on the opposite side of the country, and it wasn’t until then that I realized no one was coming to pick me up. I got into a taxi, gave it my grandma’s address, and stared out the window of a stranger’s yellow car, crying, because at last I had water to spare.
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Meghan Proulx is a writer in Northern California. Her short stories have been published in Wigleaf, The Offing, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y, and more. She was ranked as a Top Humor Writer on Medium, and won a Silver Anthem Award. This is her website: meghanproulx.com