1.
You’re walking down a canyon road at dusk with the fireflies and a boy named Billy. He says between Marlboro Man puffs that he had a date last Saturday with one of the popular girls. Her name is Liz.
He wants you to ask questions. That’s obvious. Instead you fish through your macrame purse, pretending you have your own smokes, but only find broken stubs.
He hands you one of his smelly unfiltereds, and you startle at the white moons of his fingernails. Surprised by his clean hands, even with the callouses on the meaty tips of his thumbs.
He reminds you of the horses at your uncle’s stables in Burbank, silky hair, black pinpoint eyes searching the open sky.
He lights you up, and you think he’s going to kiss you. You don’t want him to and he doesn’t. You both keep walking, thumbs out like the Manson kids even though you live with your parents in a pink ranch down in the valley.
You got stranded here after everyone you partied with last night including your asshole boyfriend, Duane, ditched you. You woke up in a thicket of rainbow eucalyptus trees and Billy standing over you. You don’t have a phone because it’s 1972. You’re officially breaking up with Duane as soon as you see him.
“We could do something more potent,” Billy says. “Make you feel better. But not here. Too many highway patrol.”
“I’m not that desperate.” You squeeze your eyes. “Sorry. I’m just really, really mad right now. I have to go home.”
“Okay. Want my jacket?”
A blue Corvair pulls off at the side of the road and a woman pops her ratted up, beehive hair out the window. “Jump in, sweetie. But not your boyfriend there,” she says, shaking her finger. “No hippies in my car.”
Billy tilts his wild mane and grins. “Guess I look as dangerous as Charlie. Go ahead. I won’t hold it against you.”
For some reason this makes you sad. He’s a freak, but maybe not as much as you thought. Maybe without the sparse forest of mustache he’s trying to grow, he’d be kind of cute. You watch him in the side mirror as the woman takes off. Chevrons of sunlight around him, not yet swallowed by the twilight. His hair gleams as he waves you goodbye.
2.
Liz is telling everyone Billy disappeared. She doesn’t get what happened to him. She thought he liked her. Wanted to do her.
Somebody says he joined the Army. Others think he went with the hippies up north. Joined a cult.
In class Duane writes I Love U on your palm with a red Bic pen. You never broke up with him, but he tells you that you’ve been cold and way too bra-burner lately. Says you need to cut the bitchy attitude. Says he heard you were with that weirdo Billy the night he went missing. You yank your hand away, and in the bathroom wash off the red ink.
You borrow your dad’s car and go out in search of Billy.
You drive to the spot where the Corvair picked you up.
You go to the brushy area by the eucalyptus trees where you partied with Duane.
You do this every day for a week. And each time before dusk, you see streaks of sunlight arrowing behind you on the road before going home to watch Maude with your parents.
3.
Two years pass and you’re pregnant with Duane’s baby. Your mom and dad make you get married, and the ceremony is on Billy’s mountain. No reason other than Duane likes it.
Even when you say your vows, Billy is on your mind. During your wedding bash in the woods, dancing among the woodsmoke, drinking champagne, you whirl and think you see something in the crowd. Those strange chevrons of light beaming through the leaves of the trees, down a steep path where nobody ever goes.
You’re not high or drunk and while Stairway to Heaven plays, you escape Duane. You follow the trail down the canyon in your antique lace wedding gown and Thom McAn high-heeled sandals.
You find the spot where you passed out years ago. Where Duane spray painted a heart with both of your initials on a rock. Now it’s a blurry stain from that night.
You hike deeper into the darkness. Your gown caked in sandy brown dirt, the lace ripped, sounds from your wedding party fading into the backroads of your mind, and you’re 16 again.
Back in this place again, only this time with Billy. This time you let him kiss you. Because that’s how life should work. How things should play out when you let yourself feel what you feel. Because Romeo and Juliet didn’t kill themselves. They lived to change the world.
And in a universe where mountains save sunlight for special people, you stand with him on a precipice of a cliff thousands of feet above L.A., and he curls his calloused hand around yours and takes you to the sky.
