Late afternoon Thursday. The day was an anti-climax. Of my classes, only two had real finals and of those only one was during finals week. The other was the day before finals were to begin and it wasn’t even a test – it was a term paper to be turned in on that date.
     The other final was essay – show up early in the morning after coffee and cold Pop-Tarts and start cranking out that five-paragraph-essay structure.
     I returned home and slept, not because I was tired, but because for the first time in three months, I had nowhere to go and no responsibility.
     Except one.
     The journals began as independent study for Professor Dave No-Last-Name. He was giving me until the end of finals week to turn in my 50-100 pages, which I’d long passed sometime in November. I had more than enough to give him – more than enough about Gina, about her life, about my thoughts and her crazed existence. I’d edit the contents for grammar, spelling and consistency, then pop it into a Kinko’s ream-of-paper manuscript box.
     I thought he might be pleased, maybe even impressed, with the writing. I didn’t know how I could do it any better, this observance and writing thing.
     But it still didn’t feel right, turning it in this way.
     How do you finish writing about something that doesn’t end? Something that is far from being resolved and has no natural stopping point?
     And what about this online thing? Omar, a reporter for the local metro paper, put up a Web page for me and we’ve both been sending e-mail copies of the journals to our friends and fellow writers. What I do for them? Write "THE END" after some random journal entry and then pen a little epilogue and on what I’ve learned and how it’s changed me life?
     In a word, bullshit.
     Closure, resolution, finality, SOMETHING. Something beyond the current state of affairs with Gina, which is in actuality a mess.
     I called David. I asked his advice.
     "Ms. Yi," he began, his voice nasally and his breathing heavy through the local distance of the phone connection. "Ms. Yi, you are to turn in what you feel is appropriate to turn in and what you think is representative of your experience this semester," he said.
     "Uh huh," I said, goading him on.
     "If you’re interesting in finishing what you started on your own, and that’s what it sounds like you’re considering, you’re free to do what you will. This is yours. You are aware of that, aren’t you?"
     "Yeah," I said. "I guess I am."
     "I’ll expect your pages next week, Ms. Yi. I look forward to reading them."
     "Thanks," I said.
     Which left me right back where I started.
     Nowhere.
     Seeing no resolution, I slept some more, hoping to find some answers there.

* * *

     My first boyfriend, a freckled boy with long-hair who sometimes wore a headband because somebody once told him it was cool, was walking through Barton Creek Mall, past the Suncoast, downstairs past the Old Navy, upstairs in front of the video game store, toward Montgomery Ward’s.
     I was following unseen, as if I were a floating movie camera, tracking.
     The image didn’t jibe – Tim (as in "don’t call me Timothy because I’m older now") was walking past stores that didn’t exist when he was 12. There was no Bed Bath and Beyond or Sprint PCS phone shops in the late 80s, the springtime of our youth, the age we both were when he walked me out behind the 7-Eleven, when he stole the first kiss I had to give.
     He was walking quickly, his tattered Levi’s and army surplus jacket whispering their fabric whispers as he moved.
     There was music where he was headed, past the food court in an open area outside Ward’s. There was a small stage erected and there was a crowd there. The music was faint, but as he walked more closely, I could make it out – late-career U2. "Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses."
     As we got nearer, Tim (Timothy, Timmy) took his place among the others, who were all men, I could now see, and who were all men I knew. Boys I’d had crushes on, basing my desires on a steely look or an exposed bicep, boys I’d kissed or more, some boys I didn’t know but whose presence I knew even then must be the recycling of some buried memory.
     In the dream, they were expectant and none of them noticed me. I was the invisible Heather-Cam, tethered to nothing, floating like a cloud that holds no rain.
     The clapping started somewhere off to the left and soon the boys were hooting and whistling. I looked to the stage and Gina appeared from nowhere, wearing a Miguel’s specialty dress, svelte slit and all. Her hair was done up and she was dancing alone, her arms outstretched and her spins measured as if with some unseen partner.
     The boys, one of them a lab partner in 10^th grade biology who’d almost spilled sulfur on me and whose clumsy apology had secretly claimed my heart temporarily, were watching her, their eyes fixated even as their hands pumped and slapped in applause.
     She smiled, that half-interested smile, and they all took it personally, their frenzy increasing.
     I watched them, still in no space of my own, as their empty eyes stared, drinking in the sight of her. They were thirsty in that sense, but also hungry, I felt, each of them wanting more than she would ever give; none of them would be satisfied until they had her completely, until one of them owned her, had captured her, had devoured her.
     The swell of the crowd, 50 men in all I guessed, surged forward, and as they did, she started to fade, her skin going from deep golden brown to caramel to off-white. Her body continued to move, to shimmy and bump, even as her cells began to dissipate. She lightened until her shape began to blur, and at that sight, the men rushed forward further, afraid of losing her completely.
     They pushed and clawed, they fought and tore at each other and as some of them, these boys and men, jumped the three feet onto the platform, she was fading completely, the expanse of the mall behind her glowing and chattering through her transparent figure.
     They touched the place where she’d been, the place where a tiny dew-drop image of her still hung in the air, then evaporated into nothingness.
     Some of them cried, others stomped angrily, others began to walk away, heads down, defeated.
     Gina was gone.
     Gina had escaped them all.

* * *

     The phone woke me. The dream of Gina had long passed, replaced by a spectrum of other images and places that I would forget seconds after awakening. Sun from outside was spilling into the room and my clock read 11:15 a.m.
     "Heather," she said when I answered.
     I hadn’t spoken to her or seen her, outside of my dreamlife, since the night I’d picked her up from stranger’s apartment.
     "Heather, are you asleep?"
     "Just getting up," I said.
     "I’m going somewhere, Heather. I want you to go with me."
     "Where are you going?" I asked. I rubbed my eyes, willing wakefulness into them.
     "The Valley."
     "To see your folks again?"
     "No," Gina said. "They don’t know I’m coming."
     "Juan?" I asked. If that was the case, I wondered how she’d explain her actions to him. Or if she’d even bring it up.
     "No. He doesn’t know I’m coming either," Gina said. "Just you. Can you go? Are you done with finals?"
     "Just finished yesterday," I said. I thought about a trip for a moment and my decision was made before she asked.
     "Can you go?"
     "I can go," I said. "When do we leave?"
     "Today."
     She told me where she wanted to go and I was surprised, given the last week. But I was intrigued too, wondering what this trip would mean and what she would do when we got there.