This Lousy Heart

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

The first days of August were my last days in Rockville, and so I spent my time driving all over town, down the big roads and curving little neighborhoods. I discovered cul-de-sacs I’d never known. I spied on people. I tried to feel sentimental, as people say they do at times like that. Most of the time I drove slowly, but on the big curves I liked to hit the gas and feel pulled sideways toward the open windows, as if something out there knew I should be flying away into the green late-summer haze. College waited.

A week before I left, I passed Peter running. He surprised me when he came jogging up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I pretended I didn’t see him and drove by, but still I spotted the flash of sweat and knew he’d seen me. I was both watcher and the watched. After that, I saw him at least once a day, like a word I’d heard once and then couldn’t quit hearing. Maybe he never stopped running, and I only had begun to notice. Each time I pretended he wasn’t there. I suppose if I had just waved at him the first time I could have kept waving until I was gone from town for good, having addressed the question of our ending with a wristy twinkling of my fingers. By ignoring him I guess I was saying to him, Not now but later. I will talk to you when I’m ready.

We’d known each other since forever. Once, we had ruled the hallways of the Palisades apartment complex where tracks ran down the middle of gray carpets like trails in a forest of dusty plastic dragon trees and philodendrons and fluorescent light. I was in seventh grade when my mother and I moved out to one of the neighborhoods with real split-level houses. Peter and I still went to the same school, but there were so many strangers in the hallways it was hard to hold onto what you knew. I collected new friends, all of them girls. Sometimes I’d see Peter at the strip mall across the street from the school, and I’d say hey and he’d say hey, but my new friends would pull me away.

He had his obsessions. He always had to have something to consume him totally. Usually he’d wring everything from