Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish Page B

girls do things that were terribly embarrassing. I adored Mark, loved him, wanted him and would wet myself if he so much as said “Hi” when he sat next to me in American history class. He often asked me what I was writing and I never would tell him. It was just “stuff.” Poems about climbing mountains and counting the seconds until graduation so I could leave and how I wanted to someday be driving down a jungle road in a Jeep with two women who could kick ass without even blinking.
    Mark took my binder one day when I got up to go to the bathroom, and I was frantic after class because it was missing. When I stepped outside the room he was waiting for me.
    “Here,” he said, eyes down, pushing the book into my hands.
    “How the hell did you get this?” I seethed through my teeth, forgetting about his hair and teeth and beautiful shoulders.
    “I took it. I'm sorry.”
    I wanted to kill him. My rage was such a strong emotion that I was struck dumb. I was on the edge of a huge and dangerous tide that could have washed me into a place that I might still regret today. I felt violated, raped, exposed. I may as well have been standing in the hallway of my pathetic high school totally naked.
    “I'm so sorry.”
    “What?”
    “It was wrong. I am so sorry.”
    “That is my life in there,” I said.
“My
life, and it's private.”
    “It's beautiful.”
    He stunned me. It was a second slap in the face and again I could not speak.
    “I write poetry too,” Mark said, “but I've never told anyone. People would laugh. What you write is beautiful.”
    I could not take my eyes off of his face. I saw his lips moving but my mind was floating somewhere up there on the green ceiling in the hallway outside of the history room. He went on and on for a very long time. The last thing I remember him saying was that he would especially remember the poem about walking away from one place to another, unless I wanted him to forget it and then he would never even look at me again.
    “Remember it,” I said when my voice came back, “and do something remarkable with your life, Mark.”
    I never saw Mark after we graduated, but friends told me that he went to nursing school and now lives and works in San Francisco at a hospice for men and women dying of AIDS.
    And me? I give lectures, watch my husband make love to other women, and it has taken me half my life to remember the verses from my own poem. But I remembered. I finally remembered.
    Elizabeth must have been watching me think. Damn it. I can't get away with anything.
    “What?” she shouts into my left ear.
    “What would we do without the word
what?”
I think, because it seems as if I am always surrounded by that word.
    “Thinking and remembering,” I throw back to her.
    She nods and then shouts to Linda: “I need to pee.”
    Linda whips her right index finger into the air and stops the Jeep right there in the middle of the highway.
    “There you go,” she says. “We might as well all pee, because we have one hell of a ride in front of us.”
    Okay, then.
    I try and act like I know what I am doing. Linda jumps out, goes to the front of the Jeep and drops her drawers. Elizabeth takes the left side. Jane just sits in the Jeep. I went to college. I figure I can handle the right side just perfectly. This is why I never went on the camping trips with Katie's Girl Scout troop. What was I thinking? You can apparently go to the bathroom anywhere, at any time, with anyone you want to. If only I would have known this sooner I would have saved myself countless hours of time. Time that I spent needlessly looking for an indoor toilet facility. I cannot believe how my life is changing.
    We are all back in the Jeep quicker than it would take three men to pull up their zippers. Jane decides to hold it—which has pretty much been the main theme in her life.
    “Before we go, I want to know where we are going,” I say rather boldly.
    “To see the doggies,” Elizabeth answers. “But that's