Free The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott Page A

in early March, it became harder to romanticize. The tourists on the cobblestone promenade above turned their heads and clapped politely for the bland jazz bands. Below them, we remained loyal and observed the secrets revealed among the hills of silt: parking cones whose bright orange urgency had faded, lifeless ducks facedown, tennis shoes whose brands were unrecognizable or forgotten, Grocery Outlet shopping bags. We named our haunts along the river or accepted those that had been passed down: K-Dock, Lundry’s Landing, The Woodbridge, Anus Beach, The Cop Shop.
    Some meanings were forgotten; no one knew what the K stood for. Anus beach had once been Anise Beach, for the herb that grew there persistently. As for Bill Lundry, he’d fallen off the Woodbridge onto the putrid sand below; rumor has it that he finished his beer as he lay there half broken, that he would have died were it not for his sky-high blood alcohol concentration. I remember, still, the miniature jellyfish who returned from their travels once a summer for a month, briefly illuminating the river with undulating circles.
    Different people like to tell different stories about the river, about the steamboats that held lavish parties during Prohibition or the people who’d occasionally drowned in it. There was a worn redheaded man who sold pot out of his backpack who liked to say that it used to be different: clear and green like a Rolling Rock bottle, and sometimes kids would even swim in there. I was happy to believe it, and believing can feel dangerously close to knowing.
    When I got to college and my peers shared their adolescent experiences, I was shocked. They got into movies for half price on Fridays because Alex or John so-and-so worked there; they had their first drinks before or after prom and became too violently ill to really enjoy themselves; their Midwestern social lives were restricted by distance and whether or not a car was available; their curfews were strictly enforced; they’d had at the most two awkward, unfortunate sexual experiences before leavinghome; their parents were bankers or involved in insurance and had done everything they could to provide a normal, safe upbringing.
    A normal, safe upbringing was what our parents had (at least told themselves they) wanted for us, but the place we were raised seemed, the more we looked, to lend itself in every way to an experience that was anything but.
    Among ourselves we’ve tried, cautiously, to dissect it. The pedestrian nature of the town certainly had something to do with it: everything could be walked to (though even the few spots that seemed unfeasibly far, we still ventured to), and the centrality made it such that it was easy to feign a respectable bedtime for a school night and slip out a window an hour later. Rarely did we associate indoors; our town was overflowing with unenclosed physical spaces just hidden enough and begging to be occupied.
    Below the steel bridge that bisected the town into east and west was a three-by-ten-foot grated platform reached by ladder, and as long as our descent was discreet, no one would suspect that beneath the passing of cars was a group of laughing teenagers dangling their legs, feeling the rumbling, passing a bottle of cheap whiskey in the dark. The roofs of the old buildings could be reached by climbing pipes and fire escapes, and once atop one, other rooftop landscapes were easily accessible. An old Victorian that had been converted to an office boasted an unfenced backyard thick with sound-muffling redwoods and a wooden back porch to sit on; an alley on either side offered a high probability of escape in the case of police.
    The roof of the old mill (which housed hair salons, a gym, clothing stores for middle aged woman that sold shapeless hemp dresses and wooden jewelry, and a wine bar that always seemed to be hiring) was a triumphant discovery: a series of intricate angles and slopes that provided secrecy and a clear view of both the river and