Bottle Caps

1. Green Eyes – Wavves
One More Weekend – The Academy Is…

Every year that one of them graduated, ever since Will and Nate, they took a road trip. It was supposed to be all guys – Will, Nate, Jack, Nattie, and Andrew – but Emily was basically one of the guys and Will deserved to bring along his girlfriend so then why couldn’t Nattie swing by the city and get his, and when Juliet and Abi got together they formed this evil girl machine that convinced Andrew that it must suck to be the only one really single, and so they snatched Shannon into Nate’s dad’s van one forest fiery night in Colorado.

The summer was blurry with pungent smoke and cheap beer. Andrew was two full months of eighteen and Shannon was a ripe, stubborn, maybe-barely-shifty-fifteen. Both of their eyes were greener then than they are now (his turned blue, hers turned brown) and somehow they always ended up falling asleep on one another in the mysterious wormhole in between the two furthest backseats.

Abi and Juliet goaded a lot and Nattie wolf-whistled a little. They drove through the mountains and on until the desert and everybody kissed everybody in the dark when it didn’t matter until they got pulled over in Vegas and Andrew got a DUI – only two beers, but god fucking damn it he’s a fucking lightweight, why the fuck would you let him drive? – and Shannon and Juliet and Nattie got MIPs because they were in the wayback and still had their beers and were still very much minors even if it was two days until Nattie’s eighteenth.

Andrew let Shannon lean into him in the police station because Nattie and Juliet were cuddling and Shannon shook a lot and Andrew kept swallowing the bile in the back of his throat. The calls home hurt but they bartered for one more weekend, drove on to California and celebrated Nattie’s birthday on the beach with fireworks.

Andrew lost half of his eyebrow to a Roman Candle and Shannon lost half of her virginity to him and they fell asleep, sweaty and sticky and syrupy sweet, pretending not to remember a thing when they woke up wearing nothing but palm fronds and lace.

Jack drove them to Colorado in one night and Andrew pressed a Coors bottle cap into Shannon’s hand and a kiss to her temple when she climbed off of him and into her window at six in the morning. Jack scowled and Andrew could swear he mumbled creepy and illegal to Nate, but Juliet kicked him in the head from the first backseat because nobody was allowed to judge on those road trips and besides, what were cutesy kisses and memorabilia when Will and Abi had fucked in the trunk at least twice and Jack had just high-fived his friend.

Andrew stared through the sunroof and wondered if Shannon felt alive like he did when it was her innocence being corrupted. He half hoped she’d grow up and forget, but that really wasn’t the point, and he fully hoped she understood.

2. Half a Person – The Smiths
Old Soul Song – Bright Eyes

Shannon was still jailbait, still couldn’t whistle, and was still wearing that bottle cap on a dental floss necklace three summers later when she called Andrew, her happy, shivering voice scratching at his ears like a mewling cat. He was in art school, legally drunkish and lonely with a muted trumpet for a roommate in Brooklyn. She was a month from eighteen, two from college, clumsy, shyly commandeering and lost in the Bronx, but there was a parade and it was raining and come find me, it’s beautiful.

All they’d seen of each other were funny midnight facebook apologies. She spent a summer in Peru, he started a band with Jack and Nate. Abi and Will moved to London; Juliet married Nattie. Two hazy summer weeks weren’t much to forgetful kids who hopefully weren’t living the best years of their lives.

The acceptance letter from NYU was seen as an invitation to unlock drawers
full of drunken polaroids and clench the bottle cap tighter at night, though, and Shannon spent her savings on three trains to get into the city early.

Andrew knew better than to ignore her and took the packed thunderstorm subway unnoticed. The crowd in the street swallowed the barricades with harmless intentions and the floats screeched with accordions and Andrew hated it right away, but when he offered to rescue the short girl in the soaking sundress, she was too starstruck by the sudden outburst of humanity in the street to say anything and he was struck by the outburst of awkward joy in her still-greenish eyes and walked with her and the analog camera he didn’t remember her having and until the police came and they ran, hands intertwined, back to the train, a smashed Corona cap in her hand as a so we meet again sort of gift.

It wasn’t until she was sitting on his counter wearing his green sweater, clutching the new bottle cap and developing her pictures in his bathtub – he’d gone through a photography phase – that he thought to ask what the hell she was doing, and she mumbled that she needed a place to stay for the next four years because she didn’t want to stay in a dorm and it was really far-fetched and stupid but please don’t think about it, that’d ruin it and it was impossible to turn an underage blonde to the streets without more guilt than Andrew needed at that vulnerable time.

They barely slept. She lied a lot – better than she had in Vegas – to get a job at the bar where the band played most gigs. She turned eighteen, started school, paid enough of the rent. It came as almost no surprise when winter rolled around and they curled closer and closer together in the absence of a central heating system until the snow piled up and campus closed and they threw up whatever inhibition they had left and went positively wild on that threadbare mattress, in that freezing shower, and tried to make up for three years apart in the long, euphoric nights together between Friday evening gigs because nobody could question them then.

3. The Calendar Hung Itself – Bright Eyes
Coeur D’Alene – The Head and the Heart

Shannon’s twenty-first birthday was a ragged night in the seamy underbelly of the city. Andrew woke her up at three the next afternoon, humming You Are My Sunshine and tracing bored patterns from the knob at the base of her neck to the dimples at the hinge of her back, never quite dipping below the elastic of the underwear she fell asleep in or into her tangled, green-dyed hair. She giggled as he scratched her chin with his fledgling beard to kiss her groggy eyelids good morning.

“You love me far, far too much,” she grumbled, kissing his lips and pulling herself awake to boil the water for their typical, beautiful breakfast of ramen and champagne. The sex had calmed down into a simple euphoria over the last few tumultuous years but they couldn’t quite yet tell it was love.

It was a week until the fall semester began and Shannon took her junior year abroad in Barcelona. She’d been tripping around the apartment singing lilting Spanish commands that were most likely incorrect. Andrew’s whole summer was spent tocando la trompeta and durmiendo tan tarde, ¡que desastre! and corriendo every which way for her, but it all seemed endearing and silly until she was actually packing her suitcase. She stole his socks and that stupid green cardigan and then she was gone, and even if it was only until Christmas, it felt like absolutely forever.

The first letter was a lonely cry about the rain and the museums and the fact that everyone there smoked cigarettes and wasn’t that gross, and Andrew was lonely himself, so he started going to museums in Manhattan at strange hours and bumming cigarettes off strangers so he could maybe feel a little bit lonely with her.

The second letter was a month late and terrifyingly nonchalant, the envelope holding a bent Becks bottle cap and the mocking postscript saying she probably couldn’t write any more letters. Andrew set down the trumpet and took to the piano because her ghost sat in every chair and of course he couldn’t strangle it so he sat awake at night, drinking her favorite wines and bending her bottle cap further, wondering if she was asleep with some swarthy Almodovar villain.

And she wrenched her sheets everywhere at night, drinking coffee even though she hated coffee and missing the little apartment and studying ugly mannerist paintings, watching the other girls kiss in the freezing bungalow like it was still fun. She wrote a million letters she was too scared to send because Andrew probably went on tour with the band and fell in love with the merch girl like she knew people did when their lovers were gone, but when his letters came, she tore them open. Christmas, though, she buttoned herself back up in his sweater the whole redeye flight on little bits of hope. Her trembling fingers jammed her key nervously into the lock and she found Andrew coughing alone against the dry antique bathtub, fully clothed with a bottle of whiskey. She kicked him fully conscious and kissed him until he knew for certain that she’d never leave forever because I fucking love you, idiot.

4. Hotel Yorba – The White Stripes
Black Treacle – Arctic Monkeys

Years passed without much glamour. A pregnancy scare, off-and-on jobs, a cross-country tour. They kept the apartment, the band gained fame, Shannon stopped taking pictures, left that to Abi when she and Will moved back to the city. Shannon started a job at a publishing firm. The bottle caps finally went on a real chain and hung in the pale triangle of her neck. Abi and Will became a bigger part of their life and Andrew took it upon himself to be as good a man to Shannon as Will was to Abi when he started watching them closer, but Shannon sat in his lap and read him her secret short stories and swore she wouldn’t love him half as much if he were Will.

Abi announced that she was pregnant two days after she and Will were engaged. They got married in a tiny chapel in England with a few family members the summer Shannon turned twenty-four. Abi was absolutely resplendent in a silvery gown dancing over her straining tummy – twins, they knew now – and Will grew his beard and Shannon and Juliet each caught one daisy from the untied bouquet, but since Juliet and Nattie were already hitched, Juliet tucked hers behind Andrew’s ear.

Something between the jet lag and the silence of the night made sleep impossible, but the countryside was warm enough to walk around in by moonlight, hand in hand with a man Shannon could confidently say she was in love with, wearing his green sweater over her grass-length chiffon bridesmaid’s dress, drinking bottled Guinness and carrying her high heels. They lay down in the grass and watched each other’s glassy champagne eyes for a long, quiet while until Andrew asked, “What are we?” and she replied something stupid like carbon-based life forms and he punched her shoulder and bit his lip.

“No, like, what are we doing? We’ve lived together six years now, even more, really, and neither of us has any intention of ever leaving, I don’t think. So should we be getting married and having babies too?” His eyes were truly baby blue and the sky was the color of the sea. Shannon stifled a grin and stared into its sticky depths, starless like their city’s by virtue of the clouds.

“I don’t know. Do you want to be?”

“It might be nice.”

She laughed in agreement and he shrugged happily, grass-staining his new white shirt, kissed her forehead, pressed the Guinness cap into her hand, and it was sort of settled. They were married cheap at the same chapel early in the dewy morning with Andrew’s grandmother’s Claddagh ring switched hands and turned upside down and the rest of Will and Abi’s wedding cake. They honeymooned at a shitty, empty Manchester hotel with doors that didn’t lock in the pouring rain, dancing to The Smiths on the creaky floor until the power went out and then they huddled together for heat like they always did in New York, even after they bought the space heater, ignoring worried calls from their friends because they were too in love to care.

5. Wonderwall – Oasis
I Wanna Be the One – fun.

As the years grew up and ran away and the band started constant tours and Shannon’s job had her constantly on airplanes or her computer, the nights when she and Andrew both were back at home and undistracted became so few and far between that they left love for letters and lived for the lustful nights where the floor groaned and they mumbled lovey nothings into each others’ ears, ordering pizza at four in the morning to eat in cheap lingerie and cheaper boxers, drinking bad beer for the bottle caps, comparing new scars, and swearing they’d make more time soon.

The sex was lovely, the awkward nights stripping on Skype as last-minute birthday gifts (twenty-seventh and thirtieth) were some weird sort of life-saving, but the honest love there was obvious. When Shannon started throwing up every morning, she sort of knew. The tour was nearly over when she called Andrew from the clinic with the official news, a grinning, tearstained whisper of, “We’re having a baby.”

Andrew was a godsend the moment he got home after the first redeye flight he could catch, insisting he needed a little bit of domestic bliss before the kid came because he knew what would happen soon – Abi and Will’s twins were nearly three by now, chatty blue-eyed girls, and they were an admittedly perfect handful. Alice Juliet was earnest and freckled, Louise Shannon was cunning and curly-haired, and they became band mascots, prodded into every costume imaginable.

Andrew called Shannon onto maternity leave, kissed her tummy and massaged her back a lot, charmed her constantly-visiting mother by playing trumpet when none of them could sleep or buying his wife – the word still sounded funny – apple juice by the gallon as they threw baby names every which way. Andrew and her mom liked traditional, but Shannon wanted weird, Jezebel or Beck, and while her word was supposedly gold, when the boy came on a May midnight, she hastily compromised and Nicholas-nicknamed-Nix Beck Dost turned their lives into a happy hell.

Andrew pulled the tawny creature behind the curtains and into the moonlight to cry a little and hum him made-up melodies while they cleaned up a luminous Shannon. Nix was already showing himself to be a brilliant, sobbing, life-saving sort of accident, and Andrew’s heart knotted, hysterically happy. He knew this was the sort of love you were supposed to feel for such a thing, the simplest sort of love on earth.

Sure, the kid was nicknamed for the night and middle-named for the saddest, drunkest bottle cap on the chain that now hung from the family’s east village headboard – they couldn’t bear to leave the city with all the money in the world – but Nix transformed everything with big green eyes, a crooked nose, and a curious smile. Alice Juliet took a liking to him but he played Louise Shannon’s games and looked longingly after Nattie and Juliet’s little girl when she was born four years later. He was spoiled rotten, unbuckled in backseats with a massive, loving, musical family, and he was the untarnished proof that everything truly could turn out right for the wide-eyed sorts of kids who fell in love on road trips.