The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

time we made it to town, though, my eyes were dewy and red. I had no family around, no lovers to fear running into. My mother had moved to Virginia to live with an ex; she had promptly dumped him but remained in the South. But the last time I’d returned home, during my first year of college, Dyson was at his sickest—I feared I might dissolve into guilt on our trip.

“There’s still time to go back,” I said as we rolled into a gas station.

“I’ve come all this way to see the famous nothing,” Blake said, playing the part of a tourist. He kissed my ear, playing the part of my boyfriend. “I’m here to see what made you.”

“I made me,” I said.

“Then you’re the first landmark.” He pulled a disposable camera from his coat pocket and snapped a photo of me in profile, my mouth curled in amusement.

It was late autumn, cold enough for parkas and hats. The leaves had already fallen and what remained of the trees were the broken fingers of branches. The air smelled of hot tires and pennies. We went for a walk down Main Street—once the center of town, home to a hair salon and a toy shop and a used army surplus store—now home to a former hair salon and a former toy shop and a former used army surplus store and piles of wet wood scraps on the sidewalk. The front window of the salon had been shattered. No one cared enough to cardboard over the hole. “This isn’t a place to return to,” I said. “It’s a place to escape.”

“Deep,” he said with a smile. He loved to tease my self-importance.

A dollar store had replaced the old firehouse. The library had burned down. Bees had taken over the Dairy Queen. The post office had packed its suitcase and left in the night. All the pizza places remained pizza places but were empty, their open signs impatiently flickering. The cemetery had doubled in size (Lesterton prided itself on having the cheapest plots in the state). My mother’s day spa was now a kennel for exotic pets. The supermarket where Dyson stocked up for purges had become a retirement home. The elderly roamed the lot, clicking their canes.

I brought Blake to the only remaining landmark in town: the river behind the high school where everyone hooked up after class. We used to spread out behind the trees on the banks of the river, becoming adults, the sound of the rushing water muffling the awkward silence of teenagers fucking. Sometimes Dyson slipped out here to throw up after lunch. But runoff from a nearby M&M plant had been tainting the water for decades, the town had recently learned, and the river had been diverted away from the school. Make Out Creek was reduced to a flaky-mudded riverbed.

“This town is so embarrassing,” I said. My fear of returning home had flattened into shame. “Everything here used to be something else.”

And then Blake unleashed the wisest and kindest thing anyone had ever said to me, the wisest and kindest thing that anyone had said to anyone, ever: “Everything in this town used to hurt you, you mean.”

My love for him leaped through the ceiling. “That’s exactly what I mean,” I said, and stretched up for a kiss.

We drove straight to the cabin—a luxurious cherrywood A-frame outfitted with flat-screen TVs and bay windows and a fireplace and Jacuzzi and a pair of espresso machines in the kitchen—and fucked without shutting the door. Over the weekend, Blake drafted new songs while I hiked or scripted future live streams for my followers. I spent entire mornings in a recliner at the window, sipping coffee, as Blake strummed his guitar. We shared sprawling dinners and laughed and fucked until the morning sun was glossing the windows. For the first time in years, I drank and smoked and relaxed in complete disregard of ABANDON. That was the public Sasha’s responsibility. The authentic Sasha, the Sasha having a romantic weekend with her lover—the authentic Blake—deserved to enjoy herself, and that meant living as decadently as she pleased.

Sunday afternoon, before leaving, I lounged on a moose-skin rug in front of the fireplace as Blake performed the song he’d been writing all weekend. “The True You” was about our weekend together: from Main Street to our talk at the riverbed to the smoking and fucking and drinking and eating. Blake had never written a song about me before, and though I loved the attention he paid me and the care that had gone into the song, I made him promise to never release it. I worried my followers would ditch me if they knew I’d been cheating on ABANDON.

“I love that you want to keep this for us,” Blake said. The fire crackled behind him. He kissed my forehead, my eyebrows, the bridge of my nose, my chin, my neck, each cheek, each ear, and finally my mouth. “This will be ours for as long as I love you,” he said. A contract masquerading as devotion.

This wasn’t the last time we kissed, but it’s the kiss I return to when I want to think fondly of our relationship. A month after the trip, Lucas Devry took his life. Blake dumped me. He accused me of sabotaging his career. I was a fraud, he insisted, a starfucker who had never deserved him. Our ending was not a breakup but a heave. He considered himself a plane taking flight; I was the weight he needed to cut to lift off.

Two weeks into my exile, Blake released “The You I Knew,” a vindictive rewrite of “The True You” about a woman who hides her authentic self from her sensitive boyfriend. In describing our weekend together, he exposed the Sasha I showed only to him: who didn’t adhere to the demands she made on her clients. My few remaining followers bailed.

The you I knew, he sang, Was never the true you. A song for idiots. A song