We were supposed to be looking for Isabella. Heads hung low, eyes straining under the secondhand store’s fluorescent lights, we waited for her.
After so many visits, Miah and I had started to think Jesse had made her up. He had first seen her a month ago among the vintage t-shirts, separating the travel from the concert tees. He described her as exotic: her hair was a puffy halo of waves and she wore Birkenstock sandals that reached up through her toes and around the backs of her ankles. She almost always wore a T-shirt from a different concert or country, a walking advertisement for all the things we had never seen. Jesse had called her Isabella after his favorite Jimi Hendrix song.
Though I’d originally rolled my eyes, I was becoming as eager as Jesse to see this Isabella. The way Jesse described her, she was not of this place, and I wanted to know how she had turned up in Phoenix, frizzy-haired and Birkenstocked, to haunt the aisles of Savers until her next adventure. Besides, the two months since we’d graduated from high school had turned into a blur of nothing better to do. Because we had hung out all through school, nothing seemed to have changed. It was just another summer vacation, and searching for Isabella was just another way to break up the days.
So we milled around. We held up plaid men’s trousers and asked important questions: Cut them off? Leave them? Add some patches? Two days before, I had scored a faded ringer advertising the 1982 World’s Fair. I had gotten used to my clothes always smelling like other people. There was a unique satisfaction in putting on another person’s rayon bowling shirt or high-waisted skirt; I could even fit into some of the children’s clothes. I imagined I could feel the places these clothes had been, the vacations they had seen, the fantasies children had acted out in them.
I had just gone through the trouser section and was making my way over to children’s tees when Jesse announced: “I knew it. Here she comes.” My eyes sprung away from a t-ball tee announcing Blue Jays, and on the back, sponsored by Red Bob’s Barbecue.
Isabella’s hair lifted around her face as she pulled open the glass front door. She walked in languid strides, the bottom of her jeans dirty and ragged, nearly hiding her sandals. The word Savers stretched across her red polo shirt. Her hips were round. A large, crocheted bag hung over one shoulder and she set it on the counter as she stopped, her back to us, to talk to a blond girl at the first register.
Jesse stared rudely.
“So… are you gonna talk to her?” Miah asked.
Jesse turned his head to look at him, but his eyes took a moment to detach. “Hmmm?”
“You gonna talk to her?” repeated Miah.
“Isabella?” Jesse said, “Oh, no. We need to go. My aunt wants the car back by five. Come on, Frances.”
Jesse made his way to the exit and Miah and I followed.
We were at Jesse’s watching a video of Frank Zappa playing a concert. The curtains were closed against the heat; the only light in the room came from the television and a small orange lamp on Jesse’s bedside table. Cigarette smoke curled around us. Above the bed hung a black and white print of Marilyn Monroe lying between white sheets, teeth showing, breaking an egg into a glass beside a jug of milk.
Jesse had lived at his aunt’s house since the beginning of freshman year when his mother had decided that the schools were better in the Valley. He had barely heard from her since. Sometimes people would gather there on nights when his aunt went out of town and there were no parties happening in the desert. Miah would bring his bass guitar, and when he played everyone would be silent, watching his big-knuckled hands slap and pluck the strings. Jesse would play lead guitar, imitating Steve Vai or seeing what sounds the instrument made when you put different metal objects next to the strings.
Once I had suggested they form a band. Jesse sneered, “Playing a guitar standing up looks stupid.”
Miah said, “Jesse says if we want him to join a band we have to get him a throne.”
Nobody was playing tonight. Instead, we stared at the television and smoked cigarettes until the ashtray was full. Only Sven had come over, the Swedish exchange student who had never gone home after high school ended. His silvery blond hair was pulled into a low ponytail. I sat between Jesse and Miah, close enough to Jesse that our arms brushed. The faint movement of his hair on my arm made me shiver.
Sven asked, “So did you find out what her real name is?” His voice was low and smooth, and I wondered if speaking as seldom as he did had preserved it in some way.
Jesse sighed. “No, we didn’t have time.”
Miah said, “Are you just gonna call her Isabella and see what happens?”
“As far as I’m concerned, that’s her name.”
Sven asked, “What ever happened to Kayleigh Bell?”
I looked at Jesse, but Miah spoke up: “She moved to Oregon with some guy she worked with at Pizza Hut. He was this total douchebag, but I guess he was the manager or something, so he had money.”
Kayleigh Bell had hung out with us quite a lot over the past year. Her hair was yellow and curly and hung nearly to her waist. Jesse decided she looked like a mermaid and had made sure she was at every party he threw.
Now he said, “She looked like the chick from White Zombie.”
I said to no one, “Oregon is supposed to be really nice.”
Miah said, “Hell yeah it is. Everything’s green and there’s, like, forests everywhere. There are all these little peaceful towns where the girls never wear bras.”
I interrupted, “Arizona girls don’t wear bras.”
“Yeah, but these are West Coast girls.”
“Kayleigh Bell never wore a bra.”
Miah smiled wide and rocked his head up and down. “Tell me about it. When we get some money together, me and Jesse are gonna move up there. You should come too. We can, like, buy a house or some land or something and just live off the land. Like grow our own vegetables and shit.”
Jesse said, “What the hell do you know about growing vegetables?”
“Nothing, dude. That’s the point. In Oregon you don’t have to know anything. It rains all the time. You just put shit in the ground and it grows. You could put Frances here in the ground and she would grow.” He swung an arm around my shoulders.
“Fuck you,” I pushed his arm away.
We spent the next hour talking about all the things we would do in Oregon. We would grow our own food and pot, selling the leftovers to support ourselves. We would let people stay with us when they were traveling through, like a hostel. In truth, I didn’t much care how we lived. I cared about who I would be there: instead of shorts and t-shirts, I would wear sun dresses and sandals. My hair would be loose, fuller, not short and flat against my head. I would be fit, riding my bike everywhere I went. The awkward, quiet person I had been would be erased, and this new person would be the only way anyone remembered me.
We talked until all the cigarettes were gone and there was nothing on TV but infomercials and reruns of shows about genies and witches that had played before our lifetime.
This was definitely the day Jesse was going to speak to Isabella. After a few weeks of avoiding the subject, Miah had goaded him, “I bet she’s got a boyfriend.”
“No way. Don’t you think we would have seen a boyfriend hanging around?”
“No, dude. Stalkers hang around. That would be you. Boyfriends wait for her to call them when her shift is done.”
“Bullshit. If I had a girlfriend like that, I’d hang around all the time.”
“Apparently you would anyway.”
I drove them in the faded blue station wagon my stepdad had given me when he bought a new car so Jesse wouldn’t have to leave early this time. When we arrived, Isabella was at the third checkout register. Today she wore a brown t-shirt that read Katmandu, stretching at the letters a and d. Her hair was wound into a loose bun, with tendrils falling around her face. She wore a ring through the cartilage at the top of her left ear.
We milled around for about an hour. I sifted through rows of faded jumpers, trying to imagine the people who had sold these things. Had they joined the Peace Corps? Won the lottery? But in my mind I saw widows filing into the front doors with boxes of neatly folded garments, taking whatever money they could get for them without looking at the bills. I wondered how long Isabella had worked here; I decided not long, or we would have seen her before—she had probably run out of money on her travels and had stopped in Phoenix for a while just to save up.
Isabella never took a break, and eventually Jesse decided that it would be rude to bother her while she was working.
“I’ll come back and talk to her when she’s not so busy,” he said.
Night in the desert north of Phoenix was cold and thin. We had found a new spot for parties after the cops had gotten wise to I Hate You and jocks had taken over The Crack. Cops were a problem because some of us weren’t old enough to drink. They would pull up without their lights on in an unmarked car, dressed in plain clothes. We didn’t know them until they were on top of us. They shined flashlights in people’s eyes and checked IDs. They told us we couldn’t have cars out here.
Jocks we knew from a mile away. They drove too fast and ran over bushes. They threw cigarettes out of their windows into tumbleweeds and smashed bottles on the ground. They walked around the desert in flip-flops and letter jackets advertising their school mascot, usually some animal whose habitat the school had been built upon.
This space in the desert didn’t have a name, but it was wide and flat and all the cars in the world could park out there without anyone knowing. It was far enough out of town that no subdivisions would be built there for some time. There was a good turnout tonight; fifty or so people, half of whom we didn’t know. Cars parked around the flattest space in a rough circle. Some people left their doors open to listen to music.
We built a pit and started a fire. We drank and smoked and filled our clothes with the scent of burning wood. Some people played bongos or acoustic guitars. As the night wore on, the green scent of smoking tree branches gave way to the dirty smell of cardboard beer cases being burned. We sat on blankets or spaces of earth cleared of the litter of broken tumbleweeds. No animals could be heard, only the chirping and whirring of insects and the crackling of the fire.
Kayleigh Bell had returned from Oregon without her manager. Things hadn’t worked out, she said, but she was going to go back and get her own place as soon as she got the money together. In the meantime, she and Sven had spread themselves out on the cold desert floor about twenty feet from the bonfire. Their frosty skin and silvery hair mingled so they looked like necking unicorns.
Jesse’s face was flushed in the light of the bonfire. He was drinking too much; his eyes flashed and his skin looked like he’d been working out. He spoke loudly and at length about Isabella.
“She had a t-shirt on from Katmandu,” he said, “I bet she’s been everywhere.”
Miah said, “Oh man, one day we’re gonna travel all over the place. We can just put some stuff in a backpack and travel all over Europe and Asia and shit. Where’s Katmandu, anyway?”
Jesse snapped, “It’s a city, dumbass. In Asia.”
“Dude, we totally have to go there.”
“You don’t even have a passport.”
“I can get one. It’ll be awesome. And when we’ve gone everywhere there is to go, we can buy a place in Amsterdam.”
“Amsterdam?”
“It’s paradise, man. My cousin’s friend went there once. Everyone rides a bike and there’s no pollution. You can, like, smoke a joint on the side of the road if you want to. Can you imagine? A whole country full of blond, bike-riding stoner chicks? Paradise. I’m telling you, man.”
We talked about all the places we would travel to. I would learn languages so we could talk to people. We would buy t-shirts in every country so people would know where we’d been.
Jesse started on about Isabella again and I wandered away from the fire. Careful to make sure I could still hear music, I walked into the dark. Out here in the desert was like a different sky, the darkest imaginable blue and so thick with stars you could barely distinguish them from each other. Music hummed faintly in the background and I tipped my head back and let my eyes unfocus. I’d read once that it can take four years for starlight to reach the Earth. I wondered where I would be when the light that was being born in that minute would reach me—a beach in Bali? A French university? Amsterdam? I tried to imagine what the sky would look like from a different part of the world.
Back at the bonfire, Sven had rested a guitar in his lap and was playing a Cat Stevens song. We passed a joint around. Jesse was so drunk he couldn’t speak anymore and when I sat down next to him he surprised me by lying down with his head in my lap. I put a hand through his hair. It was clean and soft like a little boy’s, and his head was strangely light. Without the heat it gave off and my hand in his curls, I wouldn’t have even known it was there.
Autumn was approaching, so the next day we went to Savers to pick up some sweaters. The cool weather in Arizona was always unpredictable. For months you wore nothing but tank tops and shorts, and then one day in late October you stepped into the crisp cool air of autumn and thought, It’s finally here.
Miah waited in the car because he was hungover. The store smelled mustier than usual, as if the clothes themselves were actually aging. Isabella was at the first register. I had already grabbed all the sweaters I wanted and was trying to herd Jesse toward the checkout registers. I was dying to get the sweaters into a bag, to escape the smell.
Jesse picked out a green button-down shirt with a black stripe down each side. It wasn’t his style and didn’t look like it would fit him.
“You ready to go then, Jesse?” I asked. “Jesse.”
There was a rigidity in his lower jaw I had never seen before. He walked slowly through the aisles toward the front of the store. I followed. The cardigans draped over my forearm felt heavy and rough.
Jesse stepped into Isabella’s line while I waited in the checkout one row down. Isabella’s smile was broad; her teeth stuck out at cute angles. As she pressed the price of the shirt into the register, Jesse pretended to examine a magnet in the shape of a cowboy hat in a display on her counter. I held my breath, waiting for him to say something to her, wondering what her voice would sound like, if she had an accent, if she was friendly or curt. But Jesse didn’t look at her wide smile. His head stayed lowered as she folded his shirt, placed it in his plastic bag, and took his money. He looked toward the front doors and held his hand out blindly for his change. The whites at the sides of his eyes were those of a man lost in a city he didn’t know.
Jesse said little on the way home, except that he didn’t want to embarrass Isabella in front of her coworkers. “That wouldn’t win me any points, would it?”
I didn’t say anything.
As the weeks passed, our shadows stretched out on the concrete to form emaciated silhouettes. The days were shorter, but still filled with nothing to do. As people got jobs or went off to college, there were fewer parties in the desert. Jesse’s aunt got a new job and went out of town less often. Kayleigh Bell had rented an apartment with Sven in Peoria, a stepping-stone until they got their money together for Oregon. The approach of autumn made us feel like there was something we should be doing—buying notebooks or having last-gasp end-of-summer parties.
The sun was blinding as I drove to Jesse’s that afternoon. Neighborhoods radiated from the freeway in rows of red tile roofs that nestled into the foot of the mountains. Jesse’s aunt had rented a house on Pinnacle Peak Road, so now I had to drive over the mountain to get there. The first time I’d muscled my wagon over the curves of the road, I had held my breath on the upsweep that vaulted my car to the other side of the peak. I had expected the sky to open up into a wide horizon. But as my car swung over the top, my breath escaped in a surprised “Uh!”—another red-roofed subdivision stretched for miles into another set of gray-brown peaks against the same blue sky. I remembered that in Phoenix you could never see horizon—there were always mountains in the way.
When I arrived at Jesse’s house he was sitting alone in his room with an ashtray in his lap, watching WWF wrestling.
“Where’s Miah?” I asked.
“What, do I have a fucking leash on him?”
I said nothing, but sat beside Jesse on the floor.
Finally, he said, “His parents made him get a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“What do you mean ‘what kind of job’? The kind with a time card and a boss and a paycheck every two weeks until you save up enough money to buy an SUV or a ranch house. That kind of job.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Shooting range. He sits in a concrete hole in the ground and presses a button to release clay pigeons for a bunch of rednecks.”
“I thought rednecks shot animals.”
“Not in the suburbs.” He took a drag of his cigarette.
“Well at least now he can save up for all that shit he’s always talking about. Traveling and everything.”
Jesse laughed through his nose and shook his head. Smoke shuttled out through his nostrils.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I took a deep breath, “So Kayleigh Bell and Sven are having a party at their new place. You wanna go?”
“How do you know?”
“Sven told me.”
“When did you talk to Sven?”
“Do. You. Want. To. Go?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m over those guys. I’m over parties.”
“What do mean you’re over parties? It’s all we do.”
“Yeah, well, I’m doing something else right now.”
The air was thick with cigarette smoke and dust, the television screen covered in a layer of marijuana resin.
“Whatever,” I said, “you wanna get something to eat? You wanna go to Savers?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, okay. I guess you’re over Savers too?”
“Yep.”
The air felt even thicker. I exhaled impatiently, my voice rising, “What about Isabella?”
“Fuck Isabella.”
For a moment I was dumb. I guess I had known he would never talk to her, but the thought of him not trying—I didn’t know what else we were supposed to do. I stared at Jesse’s curtains, closed even though it wasn’t hot, and the future yawned ahead of me, blank and dim. “Fuck you,” I said.
Jesse’s eyes left the television screen for the first time. He looked at me like I had a different haircut or something.
“Fuck you,” he said dismissively. He looked back at the television. He didn’t even mean it.
I didn’t remember driving to Savers. I certainly didn’t need any more clothes. I strolled the aisles but nothing looked comfortable to me. Nothing looked like it would fit my frame. I wandered over to the wall of multicolored pegs that held hats and suspenders. Cool air wafted around a corner and I followed it to an opening in the wall that I had never noticed before, into a room that smelled of metal and wood. Shelves lined the walls all the way up to the ceiling, filled with dusty picture frames and trinkets, large metal toasters and broken lamps. Three entire shelves were devoted to free-standing clocks. I opened a jewelry box upholstered in flowery fabric, the imprint of rings still pressed into the lining. I picked up a heavy brass watch that lay inside, tarnished after years of neglect. It no longer kept time, but the metal on the back preserved the words, faintly carved: To Pattycake, Love Wolfman. My face leaned closer to the fragrant lining, trying to imagine the room this box had been in.
I walked around a crowded shelf that divided the two halves of the room. Isabella kneeled a few yards away from me, in front of a pile of picture frames that had fallen through the bottom of a cardboard box. Up close her skin was ruddy, and the backs of her arms were covered in tiny red spots. She began picking up the frames that hadn’t broken, assembling them on the empty shelf in front of her. I walked toward her slowly.
She looked up. “Oh, hey,” she said.
I started, some irrational part of my brain shocked that she could see me.
“Hey,” I replied. I bent to help her pick up the frames. Many of them still held pictures belonging to the previous owners.
She noticed me looking at them. “Weird, isn’t it,” she said. “I mean, doesn’t anyone want these?”
“Doesn’t look like it.” She wore a t-shirt advertising the Barcelona Olympics. “What’s it like there?” I asked.
She looked at me blankly, then down at her shirt. “Oh this? I got this in Vintage tees.”
She scooped up the broken pieces of picture frame. When she stood I saw that she had a name tag clipped to her belt, nearly concealed by the edge of her t-shirt. It read: Mariah.
“That’s a pretty name.”
She laughed a little and rolled her eyes. “Thanks. It’s from a song. My parents thought it was this great folk song.” A dimple settled in and out of the cushion of her right cheek as she spoke. “Turns out it’s from some weird old musical about the gold rush.”
“Damn. So who’s Mariah?”
She thought about it. “Nobody, really. It’s just this song they sing.” She dropped the pieces of frame into a wastebasket and rubbed her hands on the thighs of her jeans. “Well, thanks. See you around.” Mariah disappeared into a door marked Staff.
I found nothing worth buying. But I spent some time there, browsing through the shelves of discarded belongings until I’d made my way around the room and back to the picture frames. I stared at every one of them. People stood in front of low brick houses with gardening gloves on. They held babies with wild hair and dirt on their faces. They leaned on cars. Some people were old, and they stood in living rooms without families, dressed in clothes much like the ones I bought in that store. I wondered how their pictures had ended up here, hoping something in their expressions would tell me how a person gets to a place. Out of every frame in every imaginable style stood another unknown person staring back at me, smiling in silent testimony of how a life is spent.