The Gunshine State

In the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, we’re still only half dry from the ocean when Anna May tells me to watch this and sneaks one of the bumper stickers she’s just purchased onto the back of a nearby Jeep Cherokee. The bumper sticker is hilarious to her, but I don’t get the joke. It’s a cartoon image of the state of Florida, only there’s a trigger added to Tallahassee and a magazine sticking out of Key West. Below it reads, “The Gunshine State.” She has a whole stack.

I don’t trust puns. It’s like they’re always pretending to mean something more but never do. I tell her this in the car, later on, and she says, “Huh,” and strokes her chin, like I was trying to put words to something deep and significant, and I immediately regret saying it.

She’s sitting on one of my old towels, trying not to ruin the upholstery with her damp swimsuit bottoms. I don’t care. The car’s a piece of junk anyway. Sand stuck in the floor mats. Food stains on the console. A cratering indent in the doorframe where my left elbow rests. I thought she’d find it charming, coming back after all these years and I’m still driving my beachy sedan, living not at home but close by. But once she climbed in, pausing, it all became incredibly embarrassing.

In high school, Anna May told everyone she hated this place—this place being our hometown. Somehow, she managed to leave, move away, earn a degree and then a job in a city up north where people walk with a quicker pace. I noticed this about her when I picked her up at the hotel. She walks faster now, like her legs are longer or she’s training for a marathon.

I was in love with her back then, but nothing ever came of it. Probably my own fault, my own cowardice for not asking her out. I could never tell what she thought of me, though we would spend plenty of time together at school. She always talked highly of our friendship, and I left it at that.

She’s back, but not for long. It’s a work trip, I assumed. Her job sends her to sad hotels in places like Nebraska, Ohio, and Kansas, where she goes to trade shows and teaches strangers how the latest electronic can opener keeps your fingers cut-free, or which colors represent unsafe levels of lead in your at-home faucet test kit. Her suitcase is full of random gadgets, the kind that solve easy problems and don’t really need to exist.

It’s pretty boring stuff, she tells me, but I’m not sure. I’ve always had a slight obsession with airplanes and hotels, regardless of where they are. They’re like stamps, identical anywhere you go. Places pumped full of strangers, oxygen, and the potential for something to happen.

As we drive, her T-shirt’s on the dashboard, waiting for her body to dry, and she’s twirling another Gunshine State sticker in her fingers. A hot breeze comes in through the open windows.

“Bang,” she says, aiming then shooting at a billboard for a slip-and-fall law firm.

“Bang,” she says, aiming then shooting the county jail.

“Bang,” she says, aiming then shooting a man who’d just flicked a cigarette out the window of a pickup truck.

Then, she aims it at me.

“I surrender,” I tell her, and she smiles, blows the barrel like a kiss. She’s been acting odd all day, going quiet sometimes and looking off as if trying to read a faraway street sign. Her breathing occasionally gets uneven like she’s having a panic attack, but she shrugs it off and says it’s fine anytime I ask about it. I’m happy she’s here, though. That she called me out of the blue and asked if I was free. Admittedly, I missed her.

She kissed me earlier, when we were still in the ocean. I didn’t know what it meant, whether it was friendly or flirtatious or if those were even the options. I’d just told her she looked beautiful, because she did. We’re both older now, and it’s showing. Her skin paler from office work, her hair thinner, though still worn short. She looks stronger, too.

I thought she was going to kiss me again, there belly deep in the Gulf, but instead, she took a breath and went under, coming up moments later with half a sand dollar in her hands.

“I thought I felt something with my toe,” she said, wiping wet sand off the stony corpse and pretending we weren’t just then having a moment.

“You know it’s bad luck,” I told her, “to find a sand dollar that’s broken like that.”

“Liar,” she said. “It’s bad luck to take one that’s whole, that’s still alive.”

As a kid, I used to find sand dollars all the time. Living ones. Whole ones. My mom sometimes bleached them so we could hang them as decorations next to the hand soap in the bathroom. We were rich with them in those days. Now, all the sand dollars seem to come prebroken. It feels like a sign of the times, whatever that means.

Moments later, she challenged me to a race.

“First one to the buoy wins,” she said.

“What’s the prize,” I asked, hoping, by the way I said it, that she might suggest another kiss.

But she’d already taken off like a bullet, her lean muscles pulling her quickly through the grayish water. I nearly followed, but once she dived through a wave and came up neatly on the other side, I realized she’d already gone too far for me to catch up. I was never the strongest swimmer, never learned proper form, never practiced the breaststroke or butterfly, never worked as a lifeguard during summers like all my friends.

When she reached the buoy, she turned around and shouted, “I won.” I feigned disappointment, pretending I gave it my best shot. But she could probably tell that I didn’t move an inch.

* * *  

In the car, Anna May asks if I ever get bored of this place. I tell her yes, of course, that I also never liked it here. It has an ocean-side charm, nobody can deny that. But it has always been a home more fitting for retirees, the kind of people who show up at the beach each evening in lawn chairs, cheering and applauding when the sun disappears into the horizon. It is a place of conclusions. Done with work? You come here. Got divorced? You come here. Broke, tired, angry? It’s a place of dead ends, of final breaths.

Anna May says she knows what I mean. I don’t remember if her family still lives here, her mom being someone my mom used to know but hasn’t really talked about lately, not in the way she talks about her other friends and my other friends’ moms. It’s in my mind somewhere that Anna May’s mom moved too, but no, I don’t think that’s right.

So I ask if Anna May’s going to see her mom while in town, but she doesn’t answer. She changes the subject, asking what she should wear that night, because we’re going to a party with some other friends from high school, and she needs to shower first and get changed.

I tell her anything’s fine, because it’s only Billy Jones’s house. He’s got a swimming pool and a deck in his backyard, and he has everyone over at least once a month. It’s like a minireunion. Suddenly I feel embarrassed to admit that I’m in the category of people who never left, who hang around backyards acting like teenagers again.

Anna May said she remembers Billy Jones. They might’ve had history together in 11th grade. He was the kid who wore chunky Vans and played the trombone, right?

I don’t remember. This could be true. I didn’t know Billy well in high school. We only became close after graduating.

“He had a mullet?” Anna May adds.

“It’s possible,” I tell her.

Then, I’m sitting on the neatly tucked queen bed in Anna May’s hotel room while she gets ready. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a chance we’ll be back here before the night is done. She’s asked me to drive her to the airport in the morning, and I’m not certain what that means.

When the shower comes on, I stand up and look out the window at a concrete parking lot a dozen floors below. I wonder if it’s identical to the ones Anna May sees everywhere else she goes, the other hotels in random towns across the country. It’s empty, aside from a lone white sedan parked in an accessible spot, its driver’s door hanging open. Leaving doors open is a pet peeve of mine, and I can’t help but grow irritated at the idea of it dangling like that. I imagine closing it, the satisfying click of it coming back together, then testing the handle, making sure it’s locked, making sure it’s all OK for the driver whenever they return.

That’s when I notice there’s a woman lying on the pavement beside the car. From afar, it looks like she’s squirming, her bag off to the side. It’s possible she’s been mugged, shot even. In my mind, the perpetrator is someone in a mask carrying a gun that looks like Florida.

From the shower, Anna May begins to hum a song I don’t recognize. It sounds nice against the pattering of the water and the acoustics of the tile. I cover the receiver with a cupped hand when I dial room service on the bedside phone.

“There’s a woman,” I say as soon as someone picks up on the other end, “in the parking lot. She needs help.”

But the voice is pragmatic: “Sir, we don’t have a parking lot. The parking lot you’re looking at must belong to the building next door.”

“I think she’s hurt,” I say. “You need to do something.”

“This is room service,” the voice continues. “We provide meals, fresh linens, toiletries.”

Shortly thereafter, I’m in the elevator, willing it to move faster but not so fast that it comes off its line and pancakes me into the floor of the building. However, once I reach the parking lot, more cars have joined the white sedan, and the woman is nowhere to be seen. I sit for a moment and survey the area. In all likelihood, someone’s already helped the woman, someone who’s not me. It’s possible, though, that I never really saw her at all or it was a trick of the distance, a blurry shape of a woman who was fine, not hurt at all.

It’s only when I’m back on Anna May’s floor that I realize I don’t have a key, nor do I remember her room number. I try to guess, but the door I knock on feels wrong as soon as I do it. There’s no shower running on the other side, no humming. Still, someone answers: an older man wearing only boxer shorts.

“Sorry,” I tell him and back away.

He watches me now as I whisper-shout, “Anna May,” toward the other rooms. A few moments pass before a door opens, three rooms down, and Anna May pops her head into the hallway, hair bunched up in a towel.

“You dork,” she laughs. “I was wondering where you went.”

I look back at the man in the boxer shorts as if to say, “See?” but he’s already closed his door.

* * *  

In Billy Jones’s backyard is a ping-pong table and a scoreboard with everybody’s name on it. Anna May and I show up late, Anna May wearing a sundress that’s only slightly more formal than the situation calls for. I wait for a volley to end before saying hi. Mara’s playing Eric and losing. She’s low on the scoreboard, trying and failing to climb the ranks among her peers. My own name is on the board, too. Billy Jones has everyone play so he can rank us, give suggestions, measure our growth over time. I hate it. I never liked ping-pong in the first place, but he’s relentless on making sure we know our rank. To him, ping-pong is a metaphor for life. He says it all the time, though I’ve never understood what he means.

Everyone’s excited to see Anna May. They remember her, for the most part. Mara had a locker near hers. Eric might’ve had a class or two. Cassandra was friends with her at one point, went to her 16th birthday party. Kelly and Terrance were a different year and went to an opposing high school. Only Peter didn’t grow up here.

It’s nice how quickly everything picks up again. Soon, Anna May is going on about work then giving a fake presentation about a package of napkins she brought that change color when they interact with certain germs and bacteria. Billy Jones pats my back, gives me a thumbs up and a wink. He’s ragging me, probably trying to embarrass me.

My score goes down on the board after a few rounds of ping-pong. Eric, the star of the night, doesn’t gloat, but I can tell he’s happy after Billy Jones erases his name then puts it two places higher, knocking me down to the bottom tier. I’m distracted, though. And not just because of Anna May. I’m picturing the woman by the car, the woman who was both there and not there. It’s selfish of me, wishing she had still been lying there so I could save her, so my efforts were worthwhile. Still, something feels unresolved. Like an open door waiting to click shut.

In the car on the drive over, I tried to explain this to Anna May, tried to convince her that the woman was real. She never implied the woman wasn’t. She simply said it was funny how I had ended up out there in the hallway, shouting for her. I was thinking there was something she maybe didn’t understand about our town—my town—when she touched my arm, making me realize that I was rambling, perhaps ruining her evening. So I stopped and tried to tell her how great the day was, but then she was the one distracted, her cell phone lighting up her face.

“Sorry,” she said, but something on the cell phone had upset her. It wasn’t worth asking, because once she finished, she pulled out the Gunshine State sticker again and twirled it in her fingers like a gunslinger. Her eyes were glassy, and I felt like a missed connection already.

“Bang,” she said, aiming and shooting at nothing.

* * *

Soon, people grow tipsy from the beer cooler as they sit around an unlit firepit. It’s too warm to burn anything, but it feels wrong sitting anywhere else. Anna May is next to Cassandra, and they’re catching up about what happened to the Olive Garden where they both used to work.

I’m sitting on the other side of the empty firepit, but I still hear it when Cassandra quietly asks about Anna May’s mom.

“My mom told me she’s moving into that facility on Bay Street. I’m sure she’ll love it there,” Cassandra says.

Anna May shoots me a look, as though worried I might overhear. I look away.

“She’s OK,” she mutters. “The court’s making her go, so I’m not sure about loving it or anything.”

“I hope she gets some rest, though. A chance to take her mind off the daily grind. She can sit back by the pool and get a tan. She’ll be happier there, I’m sure.”

“There’s no pool,” Anna May says, her voice strained.

“Oh,” Cassandra says. “Still, I’m sure it’s nice.”

Anna May goes for a drink refill. She comes back with two Coronas, hands me one as she passes. Eventually, the conversation envelops the full group. People start telling stories about high school, and Anna May asks if anyone remembers the gunman at their high school.

“We never had anything like that,” Mara says. “A gunman?”

“Nothing ended up happening,” Anna May says. “But yeah, the whole school shut down. Teachers locked all the doors. Everyone had to crawl on the floor and hide.”

“That sounds familiar,” Eric says.

“I don’t remember that,” Billy Jones says. “I remember some fights in the hallway but not a shooter.”

“I didn’t say it was a shooter,” Anna May says. “I said it was a gunman.”

I remember though. Our freshman year, a man was walking around the neighborhood with an automatic rifle in his arms. In an abundance of caution, someone from the school signaled a code red and called the cops. It was a huge ordeal. Turned out, the guy was just walking. Just carried a gun with him wherever he went. Had a license for it too.

I remember because Anna May was there in my classroom. We were sitting next to each other, wondering if this was it. She watched me the whole time, stared straight into my eyes, as if watching to see if I would cry. I don’t recall if I did or not—cry. I probably would have been embarrassed to cry at that age, even more so when the lights turned on and the teacher said it was nothing really, absolutely nothing at all.

I often fantasized after that about stopping the shooter, being the hero. It’s a shameful, boyish fantasy, but I still have it sometimes. That I, alone, creep through the hallways and get the job done.

She’s watching me now, because she knows I remember too. But I’m not crying. I’m thinking about the open car door and the woman in the parking lot. It’s not healthy to obsess this way. I know that but can’t help it.

“And he was just walking around the school?” Billy Jones asks.

“Yes.”

“I must’ve been gone that day,” Mara says and shakes her head.

Everyone thinks about the story; the mood sours.

“Ha, sorry guys,” Anna May says after a moment. “Didn’t mean to bring everything down.”

Nobody responds, and Anna May sips her drink, looking like she might want to run away. I consider going to ask if she wants to leave, but Cassandra is suddenly tipsily leaning over and loudly whispering, “Do you think you’ll move home now? To take care of your mom?”

But Anna May’s not having it. “Who’s next,” she asks, standing up. “Ping-pong. Who’s next?”

I raise my hand. She grabs at my sleeve, and we cross over to the table and begin volleying to determine who goes first. Anna May wipes at her eyes, smudging her mascara, but she doesn’t look at me directly. It’s her serve, and she gets in three points before I can even return the ball.

She’s tense, growing tenser, and her serves become harder, more precise. One at a time, bang, bang, bang. This is how she got out, I realize now. Her emotions make her strong. Once she hated this town enough, once her angst and her bad relationship with her family got the better of her, she left. She was a bird taking flight. Before long, the ping-pong ball skitters across the yard and lands in the pool. I go to retrieve it, but when I turn around, Anna May is pulling the bumper sticker out of her bag, raising it in the air, and shouting, “I’ve got a gun.”

Everyone looks, but nobody does anything. She’s grinning, her cheeks wet with tears, and pointing the sticker at various objects, the pool net, the swaying pine tree, the yard lights, Cassandra, Billy Jones, me. Finally, she’s got the gun on herself.

“Anna May,” I say, approaching slowly. “Don’t.”

I’m no longer sure if the gun is real or not. It might as well be. Who can say what’ll happen if she pulls the paper trigger sticking out of Tallahassee.

“It’s only a joke,” she says, laughing. “It’s just a joke. Don’t worry.”

“It’s OK,” I say.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Anna May replies.

I approach. She lets me grab the sticker and toss it into the grass. I imagine doing this to a real shooter, talking them down.

“It’s not a real gun,” she says soberly.

“No, it’s not.”

“Bang,” she says quietly, even though the gun’s in the grass.

When she leaves, she does it without telling me. Mara says she saw her leave in an Uber while everyone was busy in the kitchen. I text her, asking if she’s OK, but she doesn’t respond. She’s gone already. So I ask who’s next.

There’s a silence among the group, an awkward, embarrassed silence. “It’s over,” Billy Jones says finally. “Eric’s on top.”

He’s tired. Probably regretting the way the party ended up. It’s usually effortless, casual, fun. Now, people are anxious, wondering if Anna May’s OK, wondering if they’re OK. They’ve all been drinking, so they’re overly sensitive, getting upset over small things. But my name is at the bottom of the scoreboard. I can’t let it stay there. I have found a determination inside of myself that wasn’t there before, a fantasy of beating the game, rising to the top.

“Who’s next?” I repeat, gazing upon the faces of my friends, my enemies. “Who’s next?”

Nobody wants to play. Billy Jones shakes his head and goes inside. Others start leaving too. It’s late. But I’m waiting for a challenger, I’m waiting for someone—anyone—to give me the opportunity to rise from the bottom. It’s pathetic down here, but I’m floating, soaring, burning. I’m a phoenix. I’m on fire.