A Midsummer Tale ~ First Place
April Vázquez

Photo Credit: dianne.dacayana/Flickr (CC-by)

The first thing Kyle Mayhue says to me when he opens the door of the trailer where he lives and finds me standing on the front step is, “You look tough with your hair like that.” He pooches out his mouth in a pucker and nods approvingly.

I haven’t seen him in over a year, since he dropped out of high school and stopped riding my bus. He looks older, like an adult almost, with a sparse reddish beard and tan, muscular arms. His curly, dark auburn hair is a little longer, but his face is unchanged besides the beard: coarse, with a wide nose and a long, deep scar on his right cheek that crinkles into a dimple when he smiles. I probably do look different to him, with my eyeliner and bizarre clothes. My hair is shaved down to an inch on one side, and down to my chin on the other.

Kyle works third shift at the factory at the bottom of the road. He lives here on a dirt hill with his grandmother in the wasteland of shacks and trailers that lie between the factory and Kingstown, the Black neighborhood at the edge of Larrimore. Even from the doorway, the place smells like fried food and cigarette smoke. Behind him I can see a box of powdered sugar donuts on the kitchen table among a mess of papers and clothes, under a glaring light bulb with no shade. A dreadlocked dog shuffles around the dusty yard on a long rope.

I’m here, ostensibly, to buy weed from him, but what I really want is to get into the habit of seeing him again. What I’m buying is his time.

“Come in,” he says.

I visit him once a week all spring, buying marijuana every time. When I’m there I smoke a little with him, but what I buy I don’t smoke. I scatter it out in the woods and rake leaves over it with my foot, then I wad up a piece of notebook paper around the baggies. The truth is that I don’t really like to smoke it. It’s just a way to justify my visits.

Kyle’s grandmother, Marlene, is loud, vulgar, and good-natured, with a raspy voice and wheezy laugh. She has a big bosom and disproportionately small waist, and she draws on her eyebrows in thin, brown pencil lines that give her face a quizzical look. She chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and loves the Jerry Springer show, which, because it conflicts with her work schedule at Ruby’s convenience store, she watches when she gets home at night. I’m here in time to see her today because it’s a teacher workday.

“You gonna tape Jerry for me or what, Kyle?” she says, twisting her lips to exhale out her cigarette smoke to the side.

“Naw. I’m sick a you watchin’ that shit. It’s embarrassin’.”

“You know what’s gonna happen if you don’t tape it,” she says, balling up her fist and shaking it at him.

This is their shtick. He gives her a hard time, but he tapes the program for her. He even watches it. One day I arrive in time to catch the last part of the show with him. Two surly brothers are in love with the same girl, a scrawny, pasty-looking child from Alabama, not yet in her twenties. They scream and curse one other as the audience chatters like primates, urging them on to an open brawl.

“Ain’t this sick?” Kyle asks, yawning.

“Yep,” I say. But we keep watching it.

As time goes on, I stop buying weed from Kyle, and he eventually stops offering it to me, even to smoke. Instead we watch TV or play video games or listen to CDs. To listen to music, we go into his room, where the stereo stands between a weight bench and the bed along the far wall. At first we sit on the floor, which is covered with thick, orange carpet and smells faintly musty. Then we sit on the bed, on top of an old green sleeping bag, then eventually we lie on the bed, though we don’t touch. I begin to visit every day, inventing excuses for being out in the afternoons. I say I have activities after school, science club, Spanish club, National Honor Society. Or that I go to Becca Bradham’s. I know my mother won’t check up on this story; she considers Becca’s family beneath us.

Kyle never touches me. He lies on the bed and smokes cigarettes and softly sings Pink Floyd songs, occasionally getting up to change the CD. He waits until I’m ready.

*

On the day I’ve chosen, I skip school. Anyway, it’s winding down now; the seniors are out already, leaving the rest of us restless and indignant about having to show up. We’ve come to the purgatory of post-yearbook signing and academic awards, with nothing to look forward to except interminable exam reviews and, finally, the exams themselves. Crestdale High can spare me for the day.

I spend the morning at Don’s Pancake House, having a leisurely breakfast, then on a bench under a maple tree at the city park immersed in The Bell Jar. I wake Kyle up at just after one o’clock, knocking softly, then louder, on the door of the trailer. It’s hot as hell, the hottest day this year, the kind of sultry summer day that makes the whole outdoors feel like a sauna in central North Carolina. The top of Kyle’s Buick radiates heat in squiggly waves, and as I stand on the cinder block step, sweat beads on my upper lip and brow and makes a pool in my bra.

He comes to the door bleary-eyed, with a slight flush to his skin. He’s wearing only pajama bottoms, emblazoned with the Duff’s Beer logo. “Why didn’t you come earlier?” he says, squinting into the sunlight, grinning. He closes one eye, scratches his chest. “Come in, lemme brush my teeth.”

When he comes out of the bathroom, he has little drops of water on his face. They glisten in the sunlight. I walk over to him, stand in front of him, closer than I’ve ever stood before, and with one finger wipe a drop of water from his cheek down through the groove of his scar.

“Be soft with me,” I say, biting my lower lip. “It’ll be my first time.”

His skin is salty. He keeps his eyes closed, and I see that the lashes are longer than I’ve ever noticed before. His back gets slippery with sweat, there’s more hair than I thought, and a dog howls, far away, from the direction of the factory. The air conditioner rattles. It hurts, but not too much.

When it’s over I notice there’s a little blood on the sleeping bag. “I’ll tell Grammaw it’s motor oil. She prob’ly won’t even notice,” Kyle says, kissing my nose. I decide I’ll keep a tally, I tell myself we’ll do it twenty times. Surely once you’ve done something twenty times, you know how it’s done.

This is how I begin, but the weeks spread out into months, and I lose count of my tally, knowing the number was well beyond what I’d planned. There’s nothing I can really pinpoint that I don’t like about Kyle. I keep waiting to tire of him, not to want to see him anymore, but the feeling never comes. So not seeing him has to be a planned act, a decision. Just like going to bed with him was, but harder to make. Anyway, it’s summer, and the ungodly heat seems to have trapped me into a sensual lethargy. Like Daisy Buchanan on the day in New York City when Jay Gatsby challenges her husband, I can’t imagine taking any serious action, making any change in such heat.

I keep it up till September. It’s only when the mornings grow cooler and the first leaves show a pale cast of pale orange and yellow that I begin to imagine letting Kyle go. On the day I’ve chosen, it’s raining.

“I can’t see you anymore,” I say to his shoulder as soon as I walk in. I look up at his face, where his grin has frozen, then, in an instant, he’s made his expression blank. He takes a step back, his movements stiff. I watch him pick up his denim jacket where it’s slung over the arm of the couch. A fine white cat hair sticks out from the collar, reminding me of the thistles I used to get stuck in the cuffs of my pants when I played outside as a child. Like tiny archery arrows.

“You getcha a boyfriend?” he asks. “A rich one, that you don’t have to sneak around with?”

“Yeah,” I say softly.

“That’s cool. I’m just gonna run out to the store, get me some cigarettes. I’ll see you around.” He doesn’t look me in the eye.

While he pulls on his jacket and gets his keys, I look out the window at the drizzle hitting the leaves of the nearest tree, light green but veined with red-purple lines that bespeak the cold to come. I feel it already, in all the blueish veins that lead to my heart.

Kyle leaves without another word. He’s never looked as good to me as when he walks out the door.

April Vázquez is the winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and Carve’s Prose & Poetry Contest, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Orison Anthology Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in dozens of publications, including Salon, Ruminate, The Windhover, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. Email: aprilsosaso1111[at]yahoo.com