A true/false thing

   We picked M up on the side of the road on our way into Ocean City, because when you're 17 everyone is your friend. She was on dope of some kind, but we didn't dig deep, we asked her for coke, and she provided. In parking lot traffic leading up to the bridge, we cut lines on someone's AP history binder and held them to the driver's face while he kept his eyes on the road. The summer safety seminar had not been lost on us.

     When we finally made it to the hotel, M said she was gonna split, but somehow she was still there in an hour and she had mixed drinks from someone's stash, and she was sitting cross legged on the bed and telling us about her step brother who had fucked her mom's mom. She told us about her first step father's brother who had told her when she was just a baby that penises worked like baby bottles. She laughed. She cut lines. We inhaled.

    We had to cross the street to get to the boardwalk, and we had to get to the boardwalk because that is where things happened. We ran into some of M's friends on the wrong side of the road. They invited us up to their condo to take a break, and we went. We peed with the door open with guys in their 20's watching. They fed us drugs and we repaid them with door open peeing, and M slipped me some tongue. She was gentle and sad and more full of longing then anyone I had ever been intimate with before. I suddenly wanted to take her home and scrub her face and maybe share my boyfriend with her. Then she laughed and took a swig of tequila from the bottle. "This bitch is hot," she laughed, and she fell onto a couch with her tongue down a 25 year old's throat.

    I left her alone there. I had known her for 6 hours when I heard that she had been murdered. She had acted expendable, boys whispered, but she had been soft and moist and sweet when you got close enough.

     We were on the boardwalk when I heard, and I was momentarily shaken because it could have been me, in a way, but could have been me only lasts so long when you're in a place where everything can be yours. I got another hole punched in my right ear's cartilage and paid with a kiss, and we laughed and danced on the dusty planks by the beach.

    I heard she died naked and fighting, which makes it worse, somehow. One of the guys she was with was hospitalized for a few weeks with a nasty stab wound. Another turned up dead the next season. They say he tried to jump from a hotel balcony into the pool, but other people who know people who know people said he landed on concrete on purpose. Everyone agrees he was deep in a horse hole anyway and wasn't likely to come back. His sister blames that girl who had to go and get herself murdered in his hotel room.

     I dedicated close to none of myself to thoughts of the sad girl we had picked up for an evening during that week. I got drunk with my friends and flirted with men and took showers with strangers. I accepted pills and hugs and swam in the ocean. But when I got home at the end of the week and sat in the dark with just my computer's light shining on me, I could see every line in my fingers, and they looked older than they should be, and I could smell that girl somehow, and I wept.