I still had to sneak out of my house to go out at night. Mom and Dad liked to pretend I was a little angel virgin who didn’t know the lecherous ways of men. Too bad for them. They’d raised me with a deep well of ennui inside that seemed to get deeper all the time. Nothing was enough to stuff it up. Not booze. Not driving too fast in the rain. Not even cutting myself in little criss crosses along my inner thighs. I thought maybe love would fill it up, or at least some sort of time consuming obsession. 

Lila, my best friend since high school, was waiting for me in her mom’s puttering old sedan. She always parked at the end of the block, out of view of my house. It was too easy to sneak out. I had large windows in my bedroom that opened up into the backyard. I tucked my vanity stool under the window and crawled through it. Being silent as I made this trip had become so instinctual that I was sure I could do it in my sleep, if I was prone to sleepwalking. It took ten seconds to cross over to the small gate that opened up to the front yard. 

I crossed the lawn, comforted by the familiar shadows of my street in the dark. Our block mostly housed families and single seniors who proudly lived by themselves. The sagging branches of giant oaks kept me hidden under their silhouettes. But tonight, there was a shadow I didn’t recognize. Our neighbor in the house directly diagonal to us was an octogenarian, whom I seldom saw outside. Tonight, he stood straight in the middle of his lawn with his arms out at his sides. He was over six feet tall, thin, and moonlight filtered through the shadows cast by the boughs of the oak and cast him in backlight. I couldn’t make out his face. His limbs seemed to hang off him like a gaunt suit on a hanger. I held my breath, staring at his unmoving figure, trying to make out any expression on his face. I raised my hand and gave a timid wave. He made no movement of recognition, just stood facing me still motionless. My heart beat was pounding through my ears, and I dashed away towards Lila’s car. When I looked back through her rear window, he was still there, facing where I had stood. I wondered if he was having a fit of sundown syndrome. Had he seen me sneaking out before? Would he tell my parents? I tried to put it out of my mind, the further we sped away. 

Lila took us Uptown to the University of New Orleans’ unofficial official college bar. It was Big Cup Thursdays at T.J. Quills. Lila flitted about saying hello to people like a visiting dignitary. I could hear her laughter over the speakers’ bass pumping Top 40. We all have party tricks. Lila’s was tying a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. Mine was pretending to be clairvoyant. Nothing gets people hotter than when they think you possess psychic abilities. Not in The Exorcist, spin my head around and speak in tongues way. But to give yourself a bit of mystical allure in a Charmed kind of way. 

I sat down at the bar next to Eliot, who was waiting for me to get drunk enough to take me home. There was a guy across from us taking pompous drags from an e-cig. The one thing I hate more than e-cigarettes is seeing a guy in a camo trucker hat sitting across from me hitting one and making smoke rings that he poked his finger through while yelling, “Don’t let it die a virgin.”

Eliot noticed me staring and leaned into my ear to say, “I know that guy. He used to be a music major with me at UNO.” 

“What’s his name?” 

“Travis. He’s a douche.”

“I bet I could get him to buy me a drink.” 

There was still a mostly full vodka soda in a big cup in front of me, but I wanted to wipe the bored look off of Eliot’s face. So, I hopped off my bar stool and sandwiched myself between Travis and his friend, who was sporting a matching trucker hat. Contrary to the intended design, they did not blend in with the background. I summoned up all the lines that had been used on me before. “You know I’ve been watching you,” I said, trying on a coquettish smile. “I’m really good at reading faces. I bet I could guess your name.” 

“There’s no way,” Travis said. His eyes not so subtly examining the low cut of my tank top. 

“If I can guess your name, will you buy me a drink?” I asked. He nodded. Though he would have probably bought me a drink no matter what name I said. “You look like your name started with a…T… Trevor?” Travis’s eyebrows disappeared into his cap. “Or maybe a Travis? Yup, definitely more like a Travis.” 

Travis stared at me for a few moments before breaking out in a whoop. He wrapped his arms around my waist and picked me up off the ground. His friend scanned me with a look that said he would probably have burned me at the stake back in Salem. Travis pounded the bar and barked for the bartender.  After I downed the shot of whiskey he thrust at me, I peeked over my shoulder at Eliot. He was using straws as chopsticks to pick ice out of his drink.  “You’re, like, incredible! Okay, now guess my last name! If you get it right, I’ll buy you a car!” Travis shouted and put his hand around my waist. I shook my head and told him I’d be right back. 

I never went back. Instead I told Eliot I wanted a cigarette, grabbed his hand and weaved through the flocks of frat kids. Lila glared at me, when I walked out with him. I knew how she felt about him, which was mostly that he was a bum. But I got into his black Ford Bronco anyway. Drunk driving was Eliot’s special talent. Some people are really good at reading music, and some at playing poker. Eliot was really good at chugging whiskey, and then driving himself home at 4 the morning going 75 on a 25 miles per hour street. That night there were no other cars on the I-10 East. Eliot liked the way I gripped my seat belt tight when he pumped the gas hard. So when he took one hand off the wheel to grab a cigarette, I gave it a yank to the right and laughed as we swerved and he fumbled his cig. “You ever drive a stick shift?” Eliot asked. I shook my head, and he took my hand and placed it over the stick. “I’ll teach you. It’s easy.” 

Eliot numbered the stick positions and let his fingers linger over mine for each one. Then he would let go and dictate, trusting me not to put the car in park on the interstate. This was his party trick. I knew, because he had shown me once already. The first time he’d let me drive the stick I couldn’t wait to hit a red light, so I could kiss him. This time around, I stared at the smile on his face and wondered how many girls he had taught to drive stick.

We had to park somewhere to hook up. He couldn’t take me back to his place anymore, since he’d just introduced his roommates to his new girlfriend. It’s hard to say why I liked him. He was an alcoholic. One night, I waited for him at T.J.’s from 7pm until midnight, calling him every hour and leaving messages, trying to sound as nonchalant as I could while blowing up his phone. He finally picked up around 1 a.m. and said that he’d drank too much, blacked out, and couldn’t pick me up anymore. When we first met he was dating a friend of mine I met at a summer job. She’d been seeing him for a few weeks. She gushed about him to me in the car when we were on our way to meet up with him, and his roommate, Matty. “He’s gorgeous,” she said. “He’s like Belgian, Colombian, and Dominican, or something.” She picked up her phone and showed me a blurry side profile photo of him that she must have taken while he was driving. “His roommate is really cute, too. I think he’s your type.”

I wondered what she thought my type would be. Matty had a broken ankle when we met. His left foot was in a cast, and he was surprisingly nimble on his crutches. Even though I had slept with him that night, I knew deep inside that I still wanted Eliot. And I knew he wanted me too. When he thought I wasn’t looking, I’d caught his eyes lingering on me a few times.

We drove around the city, taking turns slugging from a quart of Jack Daniels Eliot kept in his glove compartment. The city became more sinister after sunset. The streets were kept aglow with flickering red lights and street lamps that were always going out. Potholes that New Orleanians lovingly touted as eccentric local landmarks turned treacherous after dark. We had a few spots that we rotated between to park and fuck. Sometimes we went to Audubon Park, a densely thicketed park where oak trees grew together and mingled their dangling limbs, creating shadows that could conceal what we did. We would park at The Fly, a part of the park that faced the Mississippi River. We sat there once to watch the water and talk about what we were doing. A rare occasion. 

“We’re just bad people,” Eliot said, smiling at me. He reached out and tucked my overgrown bangs behind my ear. A disarmingly intimate gesture. “You and me. We’re the same like that.” He meant, because he was cheating on his girlfriend by seeing me. And I was sleeping with him behind his roommate’s and my friend’s back. I didn’t really care about that. I just wanted him to want me. But I didn’t think he’d want me without all the lying and running around. “You like being bad,” I said, but I meant it more like a question. He closed the gap between our mouths and pushed his tongue between my teeth. The heat that rose out of him seized me, filling my throat and lungs, until my mind completely blanked. Maybe that was his real trick. Making me forget what I wanted. Making me forget whatever decency I had in the light of day.

Tonight, we parked outside Greenwood Cemetery. Anne Rice was buried there in her family mausoleum. And the Hurricane Katrina memorial was down the street. The memorial was built in stone and shaped in a huge spiral, just like the walls of the hurricane itself. After midnight, the block in between was the perfect place to be alone and not be seen by any living creature. 

We had a routine at this point. Eliot would park the car, and crawl into the backseat, still swigging from his whiskey. I’d follow him, trying to slink into the back as seductively as I could in a mess of limbs, empty takeout containers, cigarette butts, and other trash. He’d grab the back of my head, pull at my hair and kiss me, sloppily, sometimes missing my mouth and licking my chin. I would straddle his lap, spread my legs on either side of his, his belt buckle digging into the cotton crotch of my underwear, metal poking hard against me. I’d murmur in complaint and tug on the buckle until it gave and slid his belt out of the loops. He’d pull his pants down just enough to free his dick, and I’d lift my skirt and line myself up on it. We didn’t drag it out and indulge in any of the sensations. He fucked me quickly, our hearts beating so fast from the heat and the fear of being seen. 

I stared past his head that he had buried into my neck. I could see the cemetery through the back window. The oak tree branches shuddered under a summer wind, concealing the above ground graves and then exposing them again, a quiet slow kind of magic trick. I was superstitious, although I tried not to be. Often as a child I’d heard that you should hold your breath while driving past a graveyard. It was disrespectful to the dead to show off that you were still breathing. If you incurred a spirit’s jealous wrath, they would try to enter your body when you inhaled. If that’s how they felt about breathing, I couldn’t imagine how they felt about fucking.

A stone mausoleum shaped like a cathedral, stood taller than the plain rectangular ones beside it. It was in my clear line of sight. A tall crucifix stood erect at the crux of the cathedral doors. All the lines of this crypt were sharp, gothic, and there were little stained glass windows, shimmering along the sides. Eliot nibbled at my neck, still gripping me tight. I threaded my fingers through his curly hair. My eyes blurred and refocused, catching a glint of light coming from the cemetery. 

Suddenly, I could see a shape begin to form next to the mausoleum. A tightness clutched my throat. The shape began to resemble my elderly neighbor. The figure was in the shape of an old man, long thin legs standing shoulder width apart, arms dangling at his sides, just like before. Again, I couldn’t see his face. Moonlight dripped down between the serrated leaves of the trees, and caught wisps of silvery fine strands that floated on top of the figure’s skull. I gasped, which Eliot took as a sign of pleasure. He was still inside me, moving vigorously, the zippers and buttons on his halfway slid down jeans scraped against the bottom of my thighs. I squeezed my eyes shut, threw my head back, and said a silent prayer that I was hallucinating. Eliot dug his coarse fingernails into my skin. If he ever noticed the raised white scars inside my thighs, he never mentioned it. 

I sucked in a breath and looked out of the rear window again. This time my eyes locked onto the man’s figure immediately. He was definitely there, and he’d gotten closer. He cast a shadow onto the tangled grass in front of the crypt. I leaned forward. Eliot shifted his grip to my ass. I watched the man, and he seemed to be watching me. Could he tell it was me inside the car? Had he followed me?

His body seemed somehow limp and stiff at the same time, like a skeleton at a Spirit Halloween store. The only thing that moved on his body was the thin pieces of hair on top of his head. 

“Eliot,” I whispered. My mouth was dry, and the air inside the locked car was dense, quickly growing humid from our breaths and the sweat of our undulating bodies. 

“That’s good baby, you can scream my name,” he said. 

“I..” I tried to describe what I was seeing, but I could only shudder. The man had gotten closer to where we were parked. But I never saw him move. It’s like he just appeared, still casting a long shadow in front of him, scraggly, jagged black lines that didn’t match up with the figure he cut. 

“Oh god,” I said. 

“Yeah, you like that?” Eliot asked.

“No, someone’s there. Someone’s looking right at me,” I finally blurted out.

“What? No, it’s fine, baby,” Eliot said, determined to finish. He shoved into me harder, harsh and erratic. 

“Wait, no, I’m serious! There’s a man!” I banged my fists into his chest and squirmed in his lap. Eliot gathered my wrists into his hand and locked them together. He shushed me, and covered my mouth with his. His breath was heavy, thick with whiskey and choked me. I writhed and thrashed, trying to slip out of his grip. “Stop,” I whispered, tears now forming at the edges of my vision. 

“Come on, just a little more,” he mouthed into my cheek. I stretched my neck and struggled to get a look behind him. I saw a pair of eyes, glowing. But they weren’t eyes, just orbs, a piercing shine, like staring into the sun. The man in shadow was now right in the rear window, so close I could only see his eyes, or the space in his head where eyes should be. There was only that light that hurt to look at. I screamed. My shrieks filled the car. The air inside was leaden with carbon dioxide. It was hard to get enough air into my lungs. I heaved and choked when I could gulp down enough air to make a sound. Eliot tensed up inside me, all the motion finally doing him in. He grunted, huffing like a feral hog, finishing inside me. His grip loosened on my waist, and I untangled my legs from him, pushing away, kicking and wriggling myself backwards until my ass hit the floor of the car. 

“Fuck, you scratched me,” Eliot said, examining some marks I’d left on his stomach. 

“There’s a man right outside your car fucking following us, asshole!” 

“Where? Jesus!”

I covered my head with my hands and sobbed, shaking uncontrollably. I listened to him, as he shuffled around in his seat, denim sliding and zipper pulling back up. I stayed still, hugging my knees. I could hear him jostling around in his seat, the leather squeaking under him. Then, silence. Not even a breath. Was my neighbor still there? Was he at the side door trying to get in?

“Fuck,” Eliot whispered. I lifted my head, and tried to find him in the dark through my tears. When my eyes found his, he laughed in my face. “You crazy fucking bitch.”