by Sean Boling
Chapter Fifteen
I probably would not have noticed that Soren’s gun safety program had made the transition from video guns to real ones had I not decided to pass on the following night’s block party. I had decided to stay in my room; it offered the kind of solace that the street scene’s forced attempts at forgetting could not provide. I didn’t feel like forgetting; I wanted to read quietly about human recklessness and watch movies about our natural tendency to screw up and apply those stories to our circumstances; I wanted to learn from it all, not stuff my face with hot dogs and chips and sneak a beer with friends or try to get high off the secondhand smoke coming from the joints a few parents would light up in their garages.
The bass from the amp in our neighbor’s garage lightly rattled my walls as I lied on my bed with my head propped up to read. It sounded like the theme this evening was dance music, as the tempo was fast and repetitive. I tried to escape it by repositioning myself in my parents’ room. The club-like beat did fade slightly, but still obscured the sound of gunshots that I eventually picked up on through their window. The sun was still just above the horizon, so I got up to see if I could find the source of the shooting.
From my second-story vantage I saw Soren and Blaine out on the range with some cans lined up along the top of the embankment, firing at them with their backs to The Ranch. Blaine looked as though he was struggling at this point, many of his shots raising the dirt in front of the cans, or hitting nothing at all and whizzing over the cans out into the distance. I wondered how far the bullets went before they landed and bounced to a stop, how close they would get to the hills.
I also wondered what sort of advice Soren was giving Blaine, what coaching platitudes and paranoid slogans he was rattling off. As unlikely as it was that I would be able to hear them, given their distance and the noise coming from the street, I still wanted to find out if I could pick up anything, and went downstairs into the backyard to try. My reality checking through the backyards and windows of The Ranch had sunk from nightly to every few nights to rare, as the returns on my observations had started to diminish. The scenes were becoming repetitive, the patterns familiar. All of the problems were the same; the only thing that changed were the people who avoided them.
But Soren’s mentorship of Blaine had the potential to offer something new. I stood on the bottom beam of our fence so just my head peeked over, but aside from the sporadic shooting and the occasional disjointed sound of Soren’s voice, I couldn’t hear them.
“What are you looking at?” a voice startled me from behind.
I turned to see Shay peering over our side gate at me, just as I was doing over our back fence at the target practice.
“Sorry,” she smiled at having made me jump. “I was just checking to see why you weren’t out in front tonight.”
I gestured for her to come over, remaining silent even though there was no way Blaine and Soren could hear me. I realized this by the time Shay reached me.
“Check it out,” I nodded for her to perch next to me and see what I was seeing.
I watched her watch them and figure out what was going on. “Is that Blaine?”
“Yes.”
“And that must be Soren’s gun.”
“It is.”
She watched a little while longer. “What’s the purpose of this?”
“I’ve got some ideas,” I told her.
“Like…?”
“It’s fun.”
“Brilliant.” She sighed, stepped off the bottom beam, and turned to lean against the fence.
“I’ve got some others,” I said, maintaining my post.
She ignored my offer and pressed on with her main purpose for tracking me down. “It’s official. We’re leaving.”
“Now?” I asked, stepping down to join her. “Tonight?”
“No,” she assured me. “Day after tomorrow.”
I didn’t know what to say. Plenty of people had left already, but this was my first close friend to go.
“I’m going to miss you,” I finally said.
“You know I’m going to miss you,” she replied in a jokey tone that lasted but a moment before she started to choke up. I hugged her, and then rocked her back and forth as she cried harder. I was shedding some tears too, but remained a bit more composed thanks to the shock I was also experiencing at having stirred this much emotion in someone.
“I love you so much,” she said in my ear.
Hearing it so close made me shudder, as I went from shock to shame at not being able to match her intensity. I told her I loved her, too, but could tell that it didn’t come across as sincere when I said it.
“Thank you for trying,” she said, laughing bravely.
“But I do,” I unlocked myself from her embrace and looked into her eyes. “I really do love you.”
“I know,” she said. “And I know it’s different.”
We stood quietly for some time, looking down for the most part, occasionally giving each other a small, lost smile.
“I’m ruining this,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I countered. “It’s me.”
“What have you done?” she asked. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
I sighed and tried to think of something comforting to say. “Well,” I offered, “I blew it with you. That may not be wrong, but it’s pretty stupid.”
I glanced her way to see if that worked. She was holding her gaze my way. Then she stepped toward me and gave me what I guess was my first kiss, but I was too surprised to experience any other emotions besides surprise. My only memory of it is that it happened. The guilt I felt afterwards remains much more embedded, as it wasn’t my intention to lead her on.
“We have two days,” she said.
“Shay…”
“I’m not expecting anything. I mean, we’re never going to see each other again, anyway.”
“That’s not true,” I jumped at the chance to say something comforting again, and hopefully not screw it up this time.
“It is true,” she maintained. “And you know it. We’ll keep in touch for a while, maybe, and even if we do, it’s going to fade. And that’s fine. It should fade. It would be weird if we didn’t meet a bunch of new people as we grew up, enough so that there’s no room for the old ones. It’s healthy…”
She stopped herself and took a deep breath.
“I want you to be my first,” she said.
Before I had a chance to be speechless, she qualified her request. “I don’t necessarily mean all-the-way sex,” she explained. “I just mean...I don’t know. Whatever happens.”
My guilt came doubling back. I couldn’t bear to turn her down, so I stalled.
“I’ll find an empty house,” I came up with. “One that’s unlocked, or has a window left open.”
Her smile released a level of joy I had become unfamiliar with since summer had started; it allowed me to forget for a moment that it was in response to a lie, that I had no intention of following through on my house hunt. But that moment passed, and I had to find ways to stall in order to let my primary stall take effect.
“I told my parents I wasn’t feeling well,” I said. “I should go back inside, not blow my cover.”
Shay imitated a drunk parent. “Oh, hey baby, you feelin’ better? Well come on out an’ party! Whoo! Give your mamma a kiss…”
I laughed, relieved to get back to the kind of interaction we usually had. Then I realized she really did want a kiss. I obliged, but adhered to the mother theme in my approach.
“I’d invite you in,” I said. “But we wouldn’t want to get caught.”
She grinned and kissed me again. I kept it short.
“Save it for later,” I said, which seemed to appease her. She hugged me instead, which would have felt great if I didn’t also have to start choreographing my tap dance of avoidance that I would be performing over the next two days.
“Love you,” she said as she pulled herself away and headed for the gate
.
“Love you too,” I said, and knew it sounded more sincere this time, because I imagined what I was really saying was “I’m sorry.”