a base to set off fireworks. I used to count the age rings when I was younger. It had lived longer than any of us.
Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants. They pulled me amongst them, into space and memories. Lying on my back reminded me of being attacked by the wolves, long ago, when I’d been someone else. One moment I was alone, my morning and my life stretched out in front of me like frames in a film, each second only slightly different from the last. A miracle of seamless, unnoticed metamorphosis. And in the next moment, there were wolves.
I sighed. Overhead, satellites and planes moved effortlessly between the stars; a bank of clouds gestating lightning moved slowly in from the northwest. My mind flitted restlessly between the present — the ancient tree stump pressing sharply against my shoulder blades — and the past — my backpack crushed beneath me as the wolves pushed my body into a bank of snow left by the plow. My mother had armored me in a blue winter coat with white stripes on the arms and mittens too fluffy for finger movement.
In my memory, I couldn’t hear myself. I only saw my mouth moving and the stick limbs of my seven-year-old self beating at the wolves’ muzzles. I watched myself as if from outside my body, a blue and white coat trapped beneath a black wolf. Under its splayed paws, the garment looked insubstantial and empty, as if I had already vanished and left the trappings of my human life behind.
“Check this out, Ringo.”
My eyes flew open. It took me a moment to register Cole next to me, sitting cross-legged on the stump. He was a dark black shape against a sky made gray in comparison, holding my guitar like its frame was spiked.
He played a D major chord, badly, with lots of buzzing, and sang in his low, gritty voice, “I fell for her in summer” — an awkward chord change and a melodramatic tip to his words — “my lovely summer girl.”
My ears burned as I recognized my own lyrics.
“I found your CD.” Cole stared at the guitar neck for a very long time before he put his fingers down on another chord. He’d placed every finger wrong on the fret, however, so the sound was more percussive than melodic. He let out an amiable grunt of dismay, then looked at me. “When I was going through your car.”
I just shook my head.
“From blubber she is made, my lovely blubber girl,” Cole added, with another buzzing D chord. He said, in a congenial voice, “I think I might have ended up a lot like you, Ringo, if I’d been fed iced lattes from my mother’s tits and had werewolves reading me Victorian poetry for bedtime stories.” He caught my expression. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist.”
“They’re untwisted,” I replied. “Have you been drinking?”
“I believe,” he said, “that I’ve drunk everything in the house. So, no.”
“Why were you in my car?”
“Because you weren’t,” Cole said. He strummed the same chord. “Gets stuck in your head, did you notice? I’d love to spend a summer with my lovely summer girl but I’m never man enough for my ugly summer squirrel. …”
I watched a plane crawl across the sky, lights flashing. I still remembered writing that song, the summer before I met Grace for real. It was one of those that came out in a hurry, everything at once, me curled over my guitar on the end of my bed, trying to fit chords to the lyrics before the melody was gone. Singing it in the shower to lodge it firmly in my memory. Humming it while I folded laundry downstairs, because I didn’t want Beck to hear me singing about a girl. All the while wanting the impossible, wanting what we all wanted: to outlast the summer.
Cole broke off his idle singing and said, “Of course, I like that one with the minor chord better, but I couldn’t work it out.” He made an attempt at a different chord. The guitar buzzed at him.
“The guitar,” I said, “will only obey its master.”
“Yeah,” Cole agreed, “but Grace isn’t here.” He grinned at me slyly. He strummed the same D chord. “That’s the only one I can play. Look at that. Ten years of piano lessons, Ringo, and you put a guitar in my hand and I’m a drooling baby.”
Even though I’d heard him play the