WHAT IS DEATH BUT A PERSONAL APOCALYPSE?
The girls ran out of the party barefoot. One held a champagne bottle, the other the hem of her tattered white dress, bought second hand. Wet grass tickled their toes. Red lipstick smeared across their teeth. The moon above, a perfect silver coin. Their laughter like the first budding of spring.
They went into the garden beside their dean’s house and collapsed behind a fruiting fig tree. One shushed the other. The other shushed back. They were hiding, from the men, the adults, themselves. They didn’t want to be found.
From where they sat in the damp grass, they could still hear the party, the false compliments, the flickering candles, the pomp, the circumstance, the music that faded like a forgotten dream.
The girl on the left took dainty sips of champagne. She drank carefully so she wouldn’t get the hiccups. Her silver bracelet tinkled; it was given to her as a promise from a boy that she didn’t intend to keep. Even so, she never took it off. Her name was Nadja.
“It’s not fair that the world is ending right when we get to live it,” said Nadja. The champagne bottle was rimmed with lipstick. She handed it to Caroline.
In three days, after the ceremony, the family dinners, the mortarboards and robes, Caroline would move back home to Milwaukee to work as a clerk at the same bank where her mother was the manager. An English major, reformed. Caroline wanted to write poems, but her loan payments thought otherwise. Her education was a false promise. She couldn’t afford a life of the mind. A full ride only goes as far as graduation day.
“Who said the world is ending?” said Caroline. She took a large gulp from the bottle. Wine fizzed down her chin and she wiped it off with her palm.
“Everyone. The penguins. The scientists. The news.”
“The world has always been ending. My grandma is still afraid of the atomic bomb.” Caroline handed the bottle back to Nadja then lay down, resting her head in her friend’s lap. Nadja teased her fingers through Caroline’s coarse hair, plucking out stray leaves of grass, then kissed her forehead.
Nadja wasn’t going to move back home like Caroline. Nadja’s parents, who lived in a townhouse in New York, bought her a one-way ticket to Paris for graduation. A grand tour. She would travel in Europe for a while and write or take photographs. She would leave and she would change. She would join a world that didn’t include Caroline. They both knew it.
“But it’s never been this bad before,” Nadja insisted.
“Tell that to the dinosaurs.”
“Tell that to your grandmother.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Oh nothing. Does everything have to mean something?”
Caroline stood up, her eyes wild in the moonlight. “You should never brush curly hair, you know.” She started to dance to the ghostly whips of party music. Her arms flopped above her head. Her hips swayed as she stepped left and right.
Caroline and Nadja both wanted what Nadja had: before they worked, they wanted to live. They wanted to see art that made them cry. They wanted to smoke cigarettes off rusted fire escapes, wear scarves that tickled in the summer breeze. They wanted to kiss an Italian boy at two am in a discotheque and forget about him the next day.
Nadja stood up and joined in Caroline’s dance. She put her hands around Caroline’s neck. Caroline was taller, skinner, prettier, but in a feral way. Nadja was manicured, straight teeth and neat eyebrows, while Caroline’s beauty was rooted in disgust. An ancient witchiness hid behind her eyes.
“I’ll be the boy,” said Caroline. “I want to lead.”
Nadja rested her head on Caroline’s shoulder. Together, they swayed, melting into each other. Nadja thought about the nights they spent together holding hands to weave through crowded dance parties, drunk on their beauty and cheap vermouth. Their college life was ending now like a tiny death, and what is death but a personal apocalypse?
Nadja pulled away, the words I’ll miss you on her tongue, but it was Caroline who spoke first. “We should curse something.”
Nadja laughed. She picked up the champagne bottle but one of them had kicked it over and now it was empty.
“I’m serious,” said Caroline. “If the world is going to end anyway, what does it matter?”
At first it was a game: who should they hex? Their horrible English professor who stared at them when they wore tight sweaters? Winter? Caroline’s ex-girlfriend? Early alarm clocks? Polar bears for killing the penguins? Men for killing the polar bears? Ink stains? Late trains? Paper cuts? All the politicians everywhere in the world?
“I’ve got it,” said Caroline. She grinned wickedly and whispered it to Nadja. Nadja tried to protest, but Caroline wouldn’t hear it. “You know it's perfect.”
Nadja did admit that was perfect.
They held hands in the moonlight, closed their eyes. Caroline whispered in an ancient language with words that Nadja didn’t understand. She felt a blackness rumble from deep within her. A strange shadow in the evening. A crumpled letter. Lips stained with poisoned wine.
Nadja opened her eyes. “I’m scared,” she whispered. But Caroline shushed her.
“Be quiet. It’s working.”
Only, Caroline didn’t curse Daylight Savings Time like she told Nadja she would. She cursed Nadja. Perfect Nadja of the perfect life. A brand-new dress for every party. A fruiting garden for every season. Parents with a large house and a larger bank book. The freedom of unfurling time.
How could Nadja think the world is ending, when for her it was only beginning? What about Caroline – who will spend her next forty years in a cubicle, refreshing her inbox and eating boxed salads under the glow of a computer screen?
Caroline spoke faster now. A young wind rushed through her wild hair. A black bird squawked somewhere near. The drip of candle wax. The breath before a scream.
Caroline would do so much more with the life Nadja had been given. She knew she would, and so she cursed Nadja and all of her gifts. She took away everything Nadja would ever dream.
But the world doesn’t work that way and Caroline knew it. A curse is just a wish, but it hangs there, dark and cloudy all the same.
Shelby Heitner, 27, Brooklyn - USA ✯ IG: @shelbyheitner & YT: @twentysomethingcritic ✯ shelbyheitner@gmail.com
“Shelby Heitner is an English masters student and art critic living in Brooklyn. She is from Los Angeles, but hates the sun.”