by Tanya Boteju
Ginny and me with the basketball team. Ginny squishing Charles into a selfie against his will. Ginny and me with straws up our noses.
I’d reminded myself that Ginny would be gone at the end of the summer, and if I didn’t go through with this soon, I’d be left staring at old photos forever.
Now, sneaking another glance at her perfect face next to me, I wondered for the billionth time what Ginny saw when she looked at my face. When I saw her, I thought about whether her lips would feel soft or spongy against mine. I thought about how long I could stare into her clear green eyes without getting embarrassed and looking away. I thought about kissing each and every freckle on her face.
I couldn’t imagine someone thinking any of those things about me. Whereas my features had been a befuddling mix as a fourteen-year-old, now they just seemed unremarkable. I had zero kissable freckles, plain brown eyes, and constantly chapped lips. People always seemed to think that having parents in different shades automatically made you exotic and beautiful. But I felt like my features might die from boredom.
I clicked my brakes in and out on my handlebars a few times. Should she hit the brakes now, before careening into a cavernous heartache? Or does she shift into high gear and grind her way up the steep hill of romance?
My jaw had grown so tight in the time we’d been walking, it felt like I’d need a crowbar to pry my mouth open. But her house was getting closer and closer, and somehow, the thought of making my declaration in her kitchen, or living room, or—God forbid—her bedroom, seemed infinitely more terrifying.
Staring hard into my handlebars and mustering up every ounce of daring I had in me—which was exactly half an ounce—I finally spit out, “Ginny, I consider you a good friend. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, silly, I know.” She pushed my arm and I almost fell over my bike again—from the push mainly, but also because my feet felt like flippers.
“But do you also know that—”
She stopped walking and put her hand on my arm. I stopped too. “Nima. You know I love you, but I love you as a friend, and I don’t want anything to get in the way of that. Okay?” She gave my arm a squeeze and then let go.
My eyes immediately found my shoes.
She knew. All this time. And never said anything.
And I didn’t even get to finish my sentence.
My fingers, wrapped around both handlebars, gripped tighter and tighter until they hurt. Tears pricked, but I blinked them back. As I did, I willed a grin across my face and forced myself to meet her green eyes. “Oh, yeah, for sure. Keep it simple, right?” My voice echoed thinly between us.
The crack in my heart widened when her face settled into relief. “Exactly. Why ruin something as great as this?” She threw her arm around my shoulders and nattered on about my rebounding abilities.
I barely heard a word she said. I was too busy wishing for the Giant Hand of God to squash me with its enormous thumb.
By the time we parted and I trudged up my patio steps, I’d thought about all the things I could have—should have—done differently before blurting out my feelings like an ass. Tell her a funny story. Reach for her hand. Gaze into her eyes. And I thought about the worst offense of all: I couldn’t even finish telling her I love her.
As each missed opportunity emerged, my body slowly caved in on itself. I barely made it upstairs to my room before collapsing onto the bed, where I remained for hours torturously replaying each moment of my unfulfilled desire over the past three years in my head and wondering if I’d ever have those opportunities again. If I’d ever know what it was like to be wanted by someone else.
Sorrow was becoming an unrelenting companion. When my mom left, my heart experienced its first deep wound. Now that Ginny had stomped all over it, I guess you could say I was starting to develop some pretty solid calluses.
CHAPTER 2
So here I was, finishing my junior year, my heart wizened by two major disappointments, and my brain further distressed by the fact that Ginny would be heading across the country for university at the end of the summer. Even though she’d drawn a clear boundary around our relationship, my emotions still wanted to color outside the lines. And pining away for her my senior year sounded about as fun as coloring with a box full of gray crayons.
Ginny, of course, instantly managed to move past my pathetic attempt to profess my love to her and acted as though nothing had changed as we finished out the last few days of the school year. I guess nothing really had changed for her. But having to sign Ginny’s yearbook on the final day of school, a mere three days after my epic failure, just about broke my brain and I ended up writing, Thanks for not making fun of my weenie T-shirt. Sorry about that whole barfing thing. Smiley face. Nima.
When the final bell rang at noon, Charles and I left to get ice cream from the Fast Pick, our local convenience store.
Foggy with woe, I took a minute to register what was happening around me as we crossed the street in front of the school.
“Move, freak show!” A booming voice broke through my gloomy trance.
Charles’s voice followed. “Nima, what are you doing?”
I blinked. Then shook my head and contemplated Charles, who was standing a couple of feet ahead of me, looking back. “What?”
“Hurry up!” he said, urgently waving his hand toward himself.
I realized I was in the middle of the crosswalk, paused for no good reason.
“ASSHOLE. MOVE.”
I looked to my left. A massive blue truck bore down on me, grunting and puffing smoke out its backside. The driver was Gordon Grant. Talk about assholes.
I’d known Gordon longer than I’d known Charles. He and I had even been something like friends for a while during fourth and fifth grades, improbably bonded over produce. My dad used to take me to the community garden and teach me how to plant and grow vegetables. We’d hunker down in the soil and he’d show me how to dig little holes far enough apart for the roots to stretch, and where to sow which plants according to the sun’s arc. Dad would bring me to the garden at least two or three times a week to help water or weed or check for pests.
As July drew our vegetables into full growth, one such pest we found—plucking young carrots and tearing leaves off the lettuce—was Gordon.
He was a year older than me but had already been kept back a grade by that point, so we’d been in the same class for a couple of years and it was clear why he’d been held back. He barely said a word or handed in any assignments, from what I could tell. He’d just slouch over his desk, pencil-drawing chaotic patterns across the laminate wood until our third-grade teacher, Mr. Chan, told him to “straighten up and start erasing.”
The first time we’d come upon him in the garden, he’d been kneeling in the dirt, a bony ten-year-old with shaggy, dark brown hair and a surly forehead. A scattered pile of carrots and new potatoes lay beside him. When he heard us enter the squeaky garden gate, he grabbed whatever veggies he could and tried to hop the fence on the opposite side, but with handfuls of carrots and potatoes, this proved a challenge.
Sauntering over, his hands out in front of him, my dad asked with complete sincerity, “Want me to hold those while you climb over?”
After that, Dad, in his typical way, managed to coerce Gordon into helping to harvest, rather than attempting to steal from the veggie patch. Gordon didn’t talk much at first, but it was easy to see he enjoyed the work—learning something useful, getting his hands dirty, tasting the fruits of our labor. Over the next year or so, he didn’t change much at school, but the three of us worked diligently and consistently over the small plot of land, and by the end of grade five, Gordon and I had even worked a few times alone. We gardened mostly in silence, but from time to time, a conversation would spring up between us.
“What d’you do with this?” Gordon might ask about some vegetable—cauliflower or beets.
“Um, my mom bakes the cauliflower till it’s crispy, usually. Sometimes she makes curry with it.”
A few times, Dad invited him to dinner so he could try these dishes, but he never came. He’d show up in the garden at our designated times and trudge off afterward, and the only other time I’d see him was in class.
After fifth grade, though, Gordon stopped coming to the garden. He appeared less and less in class, too, and when I tried to ask him if he’d help harvest the new crop that summer, he walked right past me and grumbled, “That shit’s for losers.”
My dad said all we could do was keep inviting him back, but after a few more attempts and just as many unpleasant responses, I gave up.
All I really knew about him now was that he smoked a lot of weed, hooked up with a lot of different girls, and skipped classes more than anyone else at school.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and shuffled forward past his truck.
The second I cleared his bumper, Gordon vroomed past me, yelling, “Get your head out of your ass, Clark.”
Watch as a rampaging rhino plows through innocent bystanders.
“What were you doing?” Charles asked when I caught up to him.
“Got a little lost in my thoughts, I guess.”
“Ginny?”
I’d told him about how successful I’d been with her. I shrugged, then changed the topic. “Why do you think Gordon’s such a jerk?”
“Who knows. Maybe he’s super disappointed school is over.”
“Ha-ha, right,” I said, shaking my head. “That must be it.”
He smirked. “But also, maybe don’t pause randomly in the middle of the road.”
“Yeah, I guess that didn’t help.” I smirked too, even as I tried to ignore a stubborn anticipation in my stomach for the disappointing summer ahead.
After ice cream, Charles and I parted ways but agreed to meet up later. At home I celebrated the end of school rather extravagantly by first, mowing the lawn, and then, hanging the laundry.
Such was my thrilling life.
Laundry was always something I’d done with my mom. When I was really small, she’d turn it into a game. Once I’d created two separate piles of whites and colors, she’d make me place the colors in the best rainbow I could before adding them to the washer. If the rainbow lacked variety, it meant that our wardrobe hadn’t been vibrant enough that week, and we had to step up our fashion sense. “Only boring people wear black and white all the time,” Mom said. I don’t think I ever saw her in just one or two tones.
After she left, I staged a quiet revolt by reverting to jeans and T-shirts as my standard uniform. My dad, however, retained some of her fashion sense. Even though he spent much of his day in fairly run-of-the-mill overalls for his work at the carshop, he always managed to embellish his outfits in some way. I was about to fasten a pair of his extremely purple underwear to the clothesline when I heard “Nima!”
“Charles!” I yelled back, not needing to look past my dad’s gigantic briefs to see who it was.
“Hey,” Charles said, breathless, as he bent over and rested his hands on his spindly knees.
“Lord love a lemur. You really need a little more fitness in your life, friend.” Like I should talk.
He rose, pulling at his shirt like he always does. He had on his Einstein T-shirt and the same ratty jeans he always wore, rain or shine. His clothes and scrawny body, combined with what he liked to call his “loose and lush” Afro, always made him look younger than he was. “What are you doing after you’re finished hanging your nasty underpants?” he asked, once he’d stopped huffing and puffing.
I threw my days-of-the-week undies at him. He caught them, realized he had my Sunday underpants in his hands, made an absurdly grotesque face, and threw them back up into the air. They floated to the uneven, dusty lawn.
“Great, you jerk. Now I have to wash them again,” I said, prodding my toe beneath them and flipping them up into my hand—which finally worked after three tries. “You can make up for it by helping me. Then we can grab a snack and head down to Old Stuff to see what Ginny’s up to. I need to buy some new old underpants.”
What I really needed was to see Ginny. I was caught in that limbo between rejection and letting go, and my heart straddled a confusing line between wanting to see as much of Ginny as possible before she left in September, and wanting to avoid her for the sake of my sanity.
“You are not buying underpants from a thrift shop,” Charles responded.
“What if I am?”
“You’re hideous.”
“You’re insidious.”
“Supercilious.”
“Stupid penis.”
That made him laugh, which made me feel lucky to have a friend who thought I was funny.
After we’d finished hanging clothes, we headed back into the house and started rummaging around in the fridge for something to eat. I could hear the TV on in the living room, which meant Dad was having a nap. He liked to doze with TV shows in the background. Particularly soap operas. He said other people’s drama made him feel peaceful and put him right to sleep.
Charles and I settled down at the Formica kitchen table with some tuna salad, crackers, and a couple of apples. As soon as we sat down, my year-and-a-half-old mutt, Gus, bounded into the kitchen from the living room, where he’d probably been napping with my dad.
Gus looked a little like a cross between a schnauzer and a skinny raccoon—gray fur; short, wiry beard; and black markings across his stubby tail and around his left eye. He was ugly-cute, and I adored him. Dad brought him home just after Mom left, some sort of consolation gift in his mind, I think.
As Gus huddled up against my feet, willing me to drop something from my plate, Charles contemplated a cracker and said, “Nima, in your expert opinion, what should I wear tomorrow?”
Tomorrow was the first night of Summer Lovin’, the town’s summer extravaganza. It was the biggest thing that happened in Bridgeton. People drove in from all the surrounding areas to experience everything you’d expect from a local festival: games, baked goods competition, pie eating, bouncy castle, Ferris wheel, small-town bands, variety shows . . . you name it.
But the festival enticed performances and attractions from elsewhere, too—terrifying rides and unusual acts that wouldn’t otherwise reach us. Somehow, Summer Lovin’ had acquired a kitschy, energetic following, and for four days, Bridgeton felt like double its regular size, with crowds of locals and out-of-towners descending daily upon our limited but well-used resources.
Despite our usual reservations about most large-group activities, Charles and I actually looked forward to the opportunity to people-watch and eat fried food. I liked the atmosphere: dim, dusky evenings all aglow with gleaming lights and every imaginable delicious smell in the air; people laughing and acting like fools; dogs snuffling the ground for threads of cotton candy or stray popcorn kernels. It was a nice way to begin the summer, anyway, and a break from the monotony of life in Bridgeton.
I began to wonder if this year, it might also give me a chance to liven things up in my own world. Even though Ginny hadn’t said it, I could see what she saw—simple, awkward, humdrum Nima. Let her record your stats, watch her chase your rebounds, but what else is she good for? I needed more than paint-by-numbers. I needed van Gogh or Matisse. Maybe then I’d be worth framing and displaying on someone’s wall.
“Helloooooo.” Charles.
“Sorry, what?”
He rolled his eyes and tried to wipe his tuna fingers across my cheek, but my bob-and-weave was too quick for him. He slumped back into his seat, his arms falling limp to his sides and his head thumping against the back of the chair. “What should I wear, I said.”
“Good God in a Gucci bag, I don’t know. Why wouldn’t you just wear what you always wear?”
He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head in his upturned hands. Staring at me. Blinking deliberately.
I blinked back for a few mo
ments. Then, “Oh. Right.” The girl. He had a new, somewhat surprising crush on one of the girls in the grade below us, Tessa. I didn’t mind her, I guess, but she giggled too much for my taste. I was a little protective of Charles. This was his first major crush and I was scared he’d get hurt. . . . I knew how it felt, after all. Instead of expressing that much warmer sentiment, though, I said, “Maybe don’t wear that T-shirt. Or those jeans. Or anything in your closet.”
“Such an a-hole.” He got up, stacked my plate onto his, and took both to the sink.
“Want to borrow something?” Charles and I were lucky. We were about the same size—he was small for his age, and I had the smallest breasts known to man. Or woman. Or basically any human alive. I had very little going for me in the butt department also.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Ummmm . . . how about my gray cords and . . . a black T-shirt? Casual but classy? It’s Summer Lovin’, after all. You’ll look like a dinkus if you dress up too much.”
“You’re a dinkus. Come on, let’s go to Old Stuff and see if we can find something super cheap. But please don’t buy someone’s dirty underpants,” he pleaded.
“I do what I want, dinkus.”
We grabbed my bike, then walked over to Charles’s house to get his. Since everything in Bridgeton was a short distance from everything else, we rolled up to Old Stuff in about three minutes. We only had about half an hour before it closed, but Ginny would keep it open for us if we asked her to.
The bell attached to the door ding-a-linged as we entered. Instantly, the musty smell of old clothes met our nostrils.
Ginny crouched by the shoe section, lining up a selection of tattered army boots and sneakers. She looked up when she heard us come in. “Hey! What are you two punks doing here?” she said, bouncing up into standing position and flashing her stupidly cute smile. A piece of my heart splintered off and pierced my chest.