I found Karina the day after, asleep. Tripped over her, actually, when I was running down the beach looking for her. The dunes rose up around her, and the cattails and grasses waved over her head. She had tucked herself into an old turtle’s nest. She was swaddled in sand, her halo of curly hair glittered with grit. Her smooth cheeks puffed in and out. She was dreaming, gasping and letting out whispering little breaths.
We were used to coming upon people sleeping in the dunes, a sleeper or the dreaming dead. Sometimes a bum curled up in a meadow, usually naked, their clothing and shoes stolen by the wakeful. They were rounded up by dreamcatchers, then claimed by loved ones or unclaimed and sent to a state facility. This was back when my parents were still together, and I made my dad call Karina’s to tell him where to find her. I never imagined it was her I’d have to give up.
Six years later, Karina walked into our two a.m. biology class like she hadn’t been gone a minute. I barely recognized her: her hair heavy and wavy, boobs bigger than mine, taller than anyone in our class. When I did realize who it was, I was so angry. She had abandoned me, and I thought she wouldn’t wake up until after I’d graduated college and gotten married and my kids were the age she’d been when she went down. I had already mourned her. And if she was awake now, it meant she was dying soon and I would have to mourn her again.
It was Joaquin who said, “Easy. The last thing she remembers is fourth grade.” He knew how much we’d meant to each other. He was the one who patted the desk next to mine. He was always going against what everyone expected of him, surprising me in the hallway with shells when he should have been in class, finding weird kitsch on eBay that I loved, laughing when I thought he was going to shout in frustration, saying the most random things that had us cracking up for days.
Soon Karina and I were having sleepovers again, Joaquin climbing in through the window after basketball practice. We showed her high school algebra, the bands and TV shows she’d missed, how to smoke, told her what things were expected of us now that we were older. I taught her how to flake on plans and how to ghost and how to drift away from someone without causing a fight. She still had the sad innocence of a child, hadn’t yet learned the defense mechanisms that we high schoolers had for dealing with grief and hurt. She was so earnest. Every time we showed her something new, she’d jump up and down and laugh. She squealed when we ordered our usual combination of coffee and fries at the diner. Joaquin and I took turns teaching her how to kiss, and she’d gasp every time, dig her fingers into our arms. I’d lie down on the floor holding her, with my fingers tangled in her hair, the ceiling spinning until it was time to go to school. It was like we were kids again, had gotten a do-over to promise everything, even better than before. We swore we would never believe in a god who would condemn us for how we loved or when we slept.
The three of us were inseparable. I wasn’t angry anymore that she’d left me; I was just happy she was back. I was as in love with her as with Joaquin. Out of the three of us, I was the protector, the one who would pull someone by the shirt if they cut in line, who would glare anyone down who made a crack about our threesome, who would keep her old bullies away. “It ended up true,” she said, “that sometimes you give things time and they get even better.” But there was the shadow of her short life. She told me she was afraid. Not of death, which she thought would be like dreaming, being pulled apart and into a new form; but of pain. The doctors couldn’t say what would kill her, not yet anyway. It could be a tumor or a lightning strike or a murder.
Then, Joaquin fell asleep a few months later, leaving us to figure out anew what we meant to each other. At first, Karina and I spent all our days and nights in the Denny’s that his parents owned, just to be near him where he slept in his glass coffin. When his mother brought in a prayer group to chant novenas for his great sin, surrounding him behind the hostess station on their knees, Karina and I talked loudly to drown them out in case their words would infect his dreams. Karina held my hand under the table, and just before daybreak we lay on the beach where she’d first gone to sleep, watching the turtles shamble out to the sea. I wept and I railed. Karina was quiet, but she opened her arms for me to curl against her in the sand. When we made each other come then, we were tender and quiet.
At first, I recounted memories about him like it was his funeral, things even Karina didn’t know. But the whispers at school about his sin were getting to me. Joaquin would have shrugged, or danced in front of them and given them a bow. But without him, it was up to me to make them treat him like a person.
