Your Face Is Ripply: A Short Story About Youth

        I am slinking along my neighbor's fence humming to myself. The night is warm, crisp, and dark with just a sliver of moon hanging over the treetops. On cloudless nights like this, you can almost see the Milky Way. The stars steal my breath.
       By going this way, I can get to Matthew's house in about five minutes. Leaving from my front door and sticking to roads, it would take me twice as long. When it's late and everyone's asleep, I sneak out the basement window, climb over the fence in the back of our property, cut through the neighbor's yard, and find myself in Matthew's development in no time. My heart is thumping in my throat. If my parents know I sneak out this way, they haven't mentioned it to me.
      All of the windows in Matthew's house are dark. I sidle up to his, having to squeeze between two fastidiously maintained hedge bushes, and tap as quietly as can be. I press my ear to the window to listen for Matthew's stirring. The glass is cool. When I pull my ear away, the faintest ring of condensation is left behind. Tap, tap, tap. I am emboldened by the silence in the house, and this time I awaken Matthew. His face appears at the window, scrunched and half awake. He holds up one finger and moments later emerges from the front door.
     He is wearing pajama bottoms and a thin, worn hoodie. We embrace. He smells faintly of sweat and toothpaste. "I missed you," I breathe into his neck. "You didn't tell me you were coming," he responds.              
     We walk hand in hand through his back yard and sit on the bank of Sherman's Creek, which runs between his property and a for-sale lot behind it. We have spent hours sitting on the bank of this creek, holding hands, arguing, smoking joints, and laughing. Yelling and making love. The water has carried away all of our secrets.
      In the middle of July, Maryland plays home to a symphony. The peepers and bullfrogs are out in full force tonight, accompanied by a world of crickets and grasshoppers. Occasionally a katydid screeches her two cents into the night. The babbling water keeps time. Matthew and I just sit and listen for a while.    
      We split an eighth of mediocre mushrooms; enough for both of us to feel the effects, but not enough for things to get crazy. We sit and listen some more. "I missed you," I repeat. Matthew leans over and kisses my neck, once, then twice. "You, too," he whispers in my ear. My toes tingle.
      He has been in South Carolina, where he spent the first 13 years of his life, for two weeks. When his plane landed this afternoon, he did not call, but he knew I would come to him. I always have. We are always drawn to each other without ever having to ask; it is not dramatic but the simplest thing in the world. His hand is electric in mine.
      The frogs don't sound like frogs anymore as the psilocybin goes to work on our brains. A bullfrog bellows out just feet down the bank from us. "Steam boat," Matthew says softly, and he is right. I whistle a few bars of the song from Steamboat Willie. He chuckles. "South Carolina was bad," he says. I squeeze his hand more tightly and lean against his shoulder.
      "How was he?" I whisper. Matthew only ever goes to South Carolina to see his dad, who is bad off in a drunken way and who never seems to have time for his kids. I have never met him, but rage followed shortly by pity grabs my gut every time I think about him. I am in love with a man who can never love enough because of a mean old drunk in a shitty house in Lugoff, South Carolina.
      "It was shit, what do you think? It's always been shit, and it always will be shit," Matthew answers. I lift my face from his shoulder to look him in the eye, but he averts his gaze. "Your face is getting all ripply," he says,"Stay down there.You're freaking me out."
      I lean back on his shoulder and watch the dancing, iridescent crowns on the ripples in the creek. They weave in and out of one another, forming faces and animals and so many dragons. Matthew sniffs. I pick up a rock and toss it into the creek, and Matthew follows suit. We develop a rhythm; plop in front of me; plop in front of him. The frogs near us have grown silent, trying to discover what new threat this is that has invaded their lives on such a serene, dark night.
      Matthew is standing now, hurling his rocks downstream with all his might. He wobbles sometimes on the release, but the rocks fly straight and true downstream and land with satisfying splashes. He has removed his hoodie and is sweating through his white undershirt. His eyes are gleaming, wet in the faint moonlight. I watch him, enthralled with the tracers following his arm as he hurls rock after rock after rock. His energy flows through me and I stand, too. I begin to swing my arms along with his, and they fly through the air and they feel like wild things and I laugh.
      Matthew is not laughing. Matthew is growling. Matthew is an animal, and he is in the creek up to his shins now, and he is beating a large rock with a fist-sized one and he is screaming, "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" into the night. A katydid answers hysterically. I sit down again on the bank of the creek and I watch Matthew slay the big island rock. I do not know if the sparks flying every time stone strikes stone are real or a product of my drug-enhanced imagination. I feel oddly satisfied watching a man beat the shit out of something immovable.
      After a few minutes he stops screaming and shortly after that, he stops beating. He sits on the island rock with his head in his hands, heaving with labored breaths. At first I think he is sobbing, but when he stands, his eyes are dry and monstrous. He is a gladiator. Fire ripples through his slightly-too-long hair, and emanates from his finger tips. "I'm sorry," he says.
      I run to him and leap into his arms, knocking him against the big rock and forcing him to sit. My lips are on his face and in his hair, on his neck. I breathe in his sweat and taste salt on his skin. "Stop," he laughs, "your face is all ripply."
      We do not stop.