The Prestige.

         “I don’t know,” she says. “I just wanted to know where you were.”

         In Molly’s mind, sometimes when David disappears he’s in matriarchal houses across the country, always surrounded by women, the lone wolf in a sea of doves or sheep or something. She imagines the nothing-brown of his mophead of hair bobbing into and out of complimentary wine glasses, mouth stretched wide in laughter, eyes sparkling and lowlight dancing over the softened ridges of his bones, until she falls asleep full of it. Molly’s never been the type to wait around for people to talk to her, but she waits for him anyway. David’s kind of like a mirror. You walk by it and catch a glimpse of yourself, and turn back again. Molly walks in circles, half of the time.

         On Sunday everything is just the same as usual. They’re sitting lopsided in a Suburban, six of them crammed on the way out to Red Rock, hookah and Grant’s hair flowing all over everyone. The sun hits her and Molly thinks about how gorgeous she really is, and how lucky she is to be drowning in the company of men, as she is. Her eyes are this ridiculous claret blue. Her hair shines the way all women wants theirs to, it happens all the time, and she can feel their pinprick gaze through David’s eyes, sometimes, when he looks at her like the way he’s doing.

         “Molly,” David says one day, “we’re really good friends, aren’t we?”
         “Of course we are,” she says, and she means it. They’re best friends.

         Vegas is Planet Uncomfortable in the summer but it’s October. Feet darting over rocks tenuously, afraid to strike, David leads and she follows. Every once in a while, he laughs back to check on her, saying things like, “you got it, Molls?”  and giving her his hand. Grant, comfy in old Chaplin shoes, keeps it friendly with Robert and that other guy he brought with him, but it’s nothing like the little parentheses of connection Molly and David have when she makes a tiny noise and he knows she’s going to fall. David always kind of catches her when she’s going to. He always kind of catches her off guard.

         When she falls for him, he shoots her right out of the air. So subtle you wouldn’t ever notice it, like a tiny fungus he retracts the hyphae of his affections just enough to sting her, and she’s warned. He bares his fangs a little. It’s strange, Molly thinks, looking at the side of his face in the campfire light, I never noticed how prominent his nose really is. Odd-shaped but… nice, really, he leads with it. Molly thinks back to something she learned in her Psych 101 class, back around the time when they didn’t actually know each other, that people lead with the feature that’s most important to them. Molly leads with her shoulders, maybe. David’s always scent-drunk, always sniffing her out.

         The day they go cliff-jumping, David rides shotgun with Grant in the jeep, air seeping through holes, she’s sure, in his ridiculous safari hat, and he just talks talks talks about religion and bullshit and she’s listening like fuck. Fives minutes in, after a break for Led Zeppelin on the radio, David says something about faith and survival. She doesn’t know why, but it hits her. David says, half-choking on sand, “It’s like, when you’re faced with, you know, an 800-foot drop” - he laughs - “you just stop thinking. You want to jump. That’s where the saying ‘leap of faith’ comes from: you’re going to jump anyway, but you have to have the faith there inside of you that you aren’t going to die. Nothing instinctually wants to die. But I want to jump every time we go, and that‘s some kind of instinct, y‘know? I don’t know.”

         But he does, Molly thinks, he knows something, and she watches the boys catapult themselves over the edge, stands at the little tip of their cliff and wonders blithely if it’s strong enough to support her weight, just watches emptily as their board-shorted selves grow smaller and splash safely below.

         The two of them stop talking to each other mid-semester. There’s a day when she realizes he’d never, ever speak to her if she didn’t speak to him first, and she’s tired, and just ends up in a cycle of not-talking-to-David. She still sees him everywhere, but nowhere she isn’t, and at night sometimes on the nights she’s off or alone she’ll kind of stare out the open window and try to picture him rolling through wine country like in Sideways or staying in female hostels in Europe, taking pictures for a living and eating exotic cheeses, the only guy living on a floor of girls who all love him but won’t ever date him. She thinks about it and thinks, well, maybe I wouldn’t ever date him either, if we had the chance. Maybe it’s just this ridiculous idea she had one night, when she couldn‘t sleep.

         One day David calls her in his tiny pocket of time between missionary work and partying for cliff-jumping, just out of the damned blue. She doesn’t get to answer the phone. She just gets the voicemail four hours later, and drives out to the site by herself. Wading through the mud-wracked, disgusting muck on the side of the river she dirties the hems of her tiny shorts, looking for him at creek’s bottom. Like La Llorona, like gold miners and brillo pads, she’s scouring.

         “Molly,” he says, and he’s standing on the other side of the bank in a blanket, wet and happy like a dog, with an assortment - a full house of cards of people - of kids she’s just never seen before, “What are you doing here?“ and it’s like that.

         After the gallivanting, he’s one hand on the tip of her shoulder blade and swaggering like a person who really knows what they’re doing, a social drunk, and he says what she knows he was going to say all night.

         “Why would you start looking for me in the river?” is basically what he asks, and eyebrows knit together, eyes sinking into the back of her skull, she looks him dead in the irises and says,

         “I don’t know. I just wanted to know where you were.”

         He smiles spaghetti sauce and hugs her, and she smiles, too, really happy, like they’ve shared some kind of inside joke. She drives over the dam by herself in the night, terrified of the power poles clinging onto the sides of the rock.

         It doesn’t even mean anything, it just happens. It’s kind of the last time they speak to each other for a while. There’s something significant about it that’s lost in the scenery - feelings she loses touch with while crossing the Strip, maybe, things muted like stars are by strip club signs, something she was just on the verge of understanding but loses the second she thinks about it too much.