This is about 85 percent true. No need to incriminate anyone but myself!
Mr. Pavlovich said that in the summer, under the right circumstances, at the town wharf in Searsport you could see massive schools of squid, undulating and shimmering in the moonlight as they hunt for prey. I’d never seen it, however, and Mr. P could occasionally exaggerate the experiences he’d had as a high school science teacher and fisherman. He might have seen a thousand squid. He might have seen one, once. Or none.
Jamie and I didn’t see any squid. The orange-tinged sodium lights had just come on, but it was late June, so the sunset lingered well past 8 p.m. We weren’t at the wharf to go squid fishing. We were there to meet up with Todd and Paul, who at 20 were two years older than us, and who had about a 50 percent success rate in acquiring weed via Todd’s crazy redneck uncle.
We wandered around, peering down into the impenetrably blue ocean. Jamie bagged groceries at the Shop n’ Save and told me that she saw the teacher that got fired for being a pervert come through the line. We assumed he’d left town, but nope, there he was. She got to see all kinds of people, all the time. I was a little jealous.
The boys showed up in Todd’s Chevy Lumina, weed in hand. We got into Jamie’s comparatively luxurious minivan, a 1992 Dodge Caravan that still had Lisa Frank stickers plastered on its back windows and armrests, stuck there by her three younger sisters over the years. Despite our best attempts to replace it with the aroma of marijuana, the van still smelled like children; sour milk and sugar and dirt.
We closed the windows and clambaked the van with thick clouds of smoke and listened to a few tracks off of “The Marshall Mathers LP,” which had just come out and which Paul attempted to rap along to. It was around 8 p.m. on a Friday, and Jamie and I had graduated from high school a week prior. We’d gotten away with it. Sure, we had college at the end of the summer. Sure, we had dumb jobs and parents that tried to tell us what to do. At that moment, we were free.
Jamie announced she was too high and needed to go walk around. We followed her out into the perfect June night, high and stupid and giggling. It was finally fully dark out, but the stars weren’t visible yet. Again, we walked the length of the wharf, up and down, back and forth. I looked, again, for squid. No squid. No fried calamari for us tonight.
Todd pointed out the orange life rings hanging on posts every 50 feet or so. Had anyone ever noticed those before? I didn’t think I had, actually. It was like a picture on a living room wall. You don’t see it once it’s been there so long.
“I’m gonna take it,” Todd said. “Nobody even notices they’re there, right? No one will notice it’s gone. There’s plenty of other ones.”
I remembered a few months earlier, when Todd and Paul had come across a deer crossing road sign knocked over by a plow truck, and Todd managed to jam the entire thing in the back seat of his car so he could display it on his bedroom wall. Surely Jamie and I should get the same sort of trophy? That should be ours. We were cool too.
“I’ll get it,” I said, uncharacteristically bold. “I wanna get it. You guys got that road sign. I’ll put it in my dorm room when I move in this fall. It’ll look cool.”
I stepped up on the railing and lifted the life ring off its hooks. It was dusty and dirty, and the fluorescent orange paint flaked off on my shirt. The nylon rope attached to it was coated in a white, salty film. It seemed like nobody had touched it in years, or decades.
I threw the ring around Jamie’s waist, and she modeled it for us like a hoop skirt. I announced that we were going to turn it into an art project. We were going to paint it, and it was going to look cool, and it was going to hang on my wall at college. Todd said he’d let us have it. Even if it was his idea to take it, he said. Have fun with your art project.
Jamie was still wearing the ring around her waist as we walked back to the parking lot, with a plan to get fries at the local truck stop. A pair of headlights appeared in the distance, coming down Steamboat Avenue. It was the first vehicle we’d seen in over an hour. We froze.
Still wearing the life preserver around her waist, Jamie and I bolted onto the beach next to the wharf, and then up into the bushes near the shore, doing our best to hide ourselves and our contraband art project. We shushed each other, whispering, while Jamie attempted to shimmy her way free. We were maybe 30 or 40 feet from where the cars were parked.
The boys stood next to Todd’s car like a couple of dopes; they looked like children. The cop got out his cruiser and approached them, and presumably asked them what they were doing. We could see Todd shrug and hear him say “nothing,” but Paul interrupted him, loud and clear.
“We were seeing if the squid were out,” he said. “Thinking about doing some squid fishing. No squid tonight, though. We were just about to head out. Maybe next time we’ll get some squid. We can get some… fried calamari.”
I couldn’t see the cop’s face from where we were hiding, which I assume was a mix of amusement and annoyance. Would he search the car? How much weed did Todd bring? I hadn’t paid attention. I’d just smoked the stuff. I felt sick.
The cop said something about the park closing at 10, and to think about taking off soon, and Todd, that dick, said yes, officer. They got in his stupid Chevy Lumina with the stupid Godsmack sticker on the back windshield, and they drove away, leaving us in the bushes to fend for ourselves. The cop got back in his cruiser and sat there for a few minutes, doing whatever it is cops do. We stayed silent, terrified and mad at our so-called friends.
As soon as the cop drove away and his lights disappeared I pulled Jamie up to her feet and yanked the life ring up over her shoulders. We ran to the van, flung open the side door and tossed in our stolen goods. Like two bank robbers fleeing the scene of the crime, we peeled out and away.
We drove around for a while, out of Searsport and down back roads, still pretty high despite the sobering police encounter. It was well past 10 p.m. now, and my mother generally expected me home around 11.
“I can’t keep that thing,” Jamie said. “I can’t have it at my house. There’s nowhere to hide. You know what they’re like. I have no privacy. I’ll get caught. It’s gotta go with you.”
I knew this to be true. Jamie’s sisters would rat on her in seconds. What was I going to do with a huge life ring with flaking paint and 20 feet of rope that was already coming untangled? I hadn’t thought it through. I had to make a decision. Now.
We devised a plan. Just before arriving home, I would pull the life ring into my lap. As soon as we put the car in park, I would hand it to Jamie, who - being on the opposite side of the van where my parents could see from either the windows - would open her door and toss it as far as she could into the thick bushes and trees that lay between our house and the neighbors. I had to hope she’d throw it far enough they wouldn’t see it.
She drove away. I couldn’t see it. I said hi to my parents, and I went to bed.
The next day, after they’d gone to work, I retrieved the life ring from the bushes and hauled it inside. I covered it in an old coat and a blanket, and I stowed it far in the back of the long, creepy closet in my bedroom - a place neither I nor my mom enjoyed going in, which meant it likely would go undetected until I went to college. I’d figure out how to get it to the dorms later.
The summer continued; more weed and wandering in the netherworld between high school and college. Dorm move-in day arrived, and I’d mostly forgotten about the life ring. I didn’t have my own car, so I couldn’t just toss it in my parents’ Toyota on our way out the door. My freshman year went by, and my big plans to paint it and hang it on my dorm room wall never materialized. I made a million new friends. I wasn’t bored.
The next summer, I came home and sure enough, it was still there, covered in the same coat and blanket, untouched. I spent the summer working, partying, hanging out with my new college friends. I didn’t see Jamie as much. I never saw Todd or Paul.
Another year went by, and another. The life ring still sat in the closet. I had my own car at that point, and could easily have retrieved it at any point without anyone knowing. I never did. I graduated from college and still, it remained behind forgotten boxes of books and garbage bags full of old clothes. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved in with my parents. Before she did, they renovated my old bedroom for her, and finally, after more than a decade, my mom decided to suck it up and clean out the creepy closet.
“What is this thing doing in your closet!?” my mom asked, seconds after I’d picked up the phone. I pictured her holding the life ring, paint still flaking off, rope trailing all around her.
I told her Jamie and I stole it from the town wharf the week after we graduated from high school, and that it had sat in there for the past 10 years, undetected. I meant to use it for an art project, but I never did. My mother said that I could have been arrested, and that I needed to take it out of her house. Her daughter was a criminal.
A week or so later, my husband and I had dinner with my parents, and then I dragged the life ring out of their house and jammed it in the trunk of our car, my mother watching disapprovingly. I didn’t know what to do with it. Decoupage it? Redecorate our apartment with a nautical theme? I felt stupid. I didn’t want it. I was reformed now, compared to that delinquent teenager getting high in a minivan and stealing public property. I was an adult.
We drove down to the Searsport wharf. The poles holding the life rings were still there, but the rings themselves had been replaced with new ones that weren’t crusted over in salt and dirt. I left the old one on the concrete, a little offering to the town where I was raised. The harbormaster would be confused, and the thought of that made me smile. Maybe my teenage self was still somewhere in there. Maybe none of your selves ever truly go away.
I looked over the railings down into the water, to see if the squid had returned, as Mr. Pavlovich said they did in the spring and summer. Squid fishing in Searsport had become quite popular in the past decade, I’d heard. People complained about squid ink staining the wharf. I’ve still never seen them, but I hear on certain nights, under the right circumstances, there are thousands of them, shimmering and undulating in the approaching moonlight as they hunt for prey.