Summerseed
Summer sits heavy on my chest like a fat, lazy housecat, warm and suffocating. I have too much time on my hands and my hands are empty with possibilities, grasping and calloused.
Summer is an idealized vision of the future, for kids to daydream about during class, imagining warmth on their skin as the murmurs of the teacher fade into a flimsy setting. It is meant to be waited upon. It is the anticipation of summer they want, not the reality. In reality, summer is absence.
I fall for it every time, fall just as hard as everyone else. This summer, I tell myself, is the summer. I’m going to fill it up, I’m going to cram it with hard-earned joy.
And yet I find myself the same. I lay on my bed, sheets strewn about, sweaty and thoughtless. The sun bakes my room with me inside, melting slowly until I die or until it gets cold again. A fan sputters helplessly in the windowsill, coated with years’ worth of dust.
On the inside I am dancing. On the inside I am screaming. On the inside I’m doing something dangerous and fun, I’m meeting someone new and falling hard and fast and leaving just as quickly. Summer is meant to be a breath of fresh air. Yet my lungs move infinitesimally and my body is still and stale.
It was meant to be the summer, this time, it really was. And then my only friend left and now I am confronted with myself.
If Imogen were here, she’d tell me to get up, stop being lazy. She’d show me a plastic water bottle filled with vodka from her parents’ cabinet, too expensive, and waggle her eyebrows suggestively. She’d have an invite for a party I wouldn’t want to go to and would end up at anyway.
I think about all the parties I haven’t gone to in just the first few weeks, and I wish I wanted to be there.
Outside, cicadas buzz. A neighbor is mowing their lawn. My decrypt fan whirs menacingly.
I think about how I am a teenager. I think about what a teenager should be doing. I think about summer.
There is a gas station at the end of my street where the kids at my school buy alcohol. The elderly man behind the counter doesn’t card. He is tired of us. I shift back and forth in front of the counter, shivering in the harsh A/C under the flickering white lights, and practice saying ‘Marlboro’ in my head.
“And a pack of Marlboro Reds please?” My voice is too high but it’s steady. He sighs and doesn’t ask for ID, even though I am a teenager. To be a teenager is to playact at adulthood. I pay in cash and leave feeling marvelously unfulfilled.
Imogen liked to smoke Marlboro Reds when she was drunk. She smoked yellow American Spirits when she wasn’t. They taste the same to me, but I like to say Marlboro. I like the way it feels in my mouth, and the way it sounds when I say it. Like some all-American cowboy.
I fumble to unwrap the cigarettes, tucking the rest of the pack into my back pocket, and as soon as one touches my lips I realize I forgot a lighter.
I am standing outside the gas station in the near-empty parking lot, and I can’t go back in and admit my folly to the man at the cash register. There was a rack of colorful Bic lighters dancing at the corner of my vision as I focused my gaze on the rows and rows of boxes behind his shiny balding head, I now recall. I pull the cigarette from my mouth and study it, thinking about paper and plants, and the tobacco trade we learned about in history class.
A car pulls into the lot and a group of men spill out, the kind of men who exist somewhere between high school and college and want you to listen to the music they made about it. I estimate each one has about two or three lighters. Imogen would already be flouncing over to them, tucking her hair behind her ear. Their eyes would travel the length of her body and she would laugh slightly and ask for a favor. Men liked to do things for her.
I slink away from the parking lot, back down from whence I came.
My street is suburban and easy and evokes very little. I do not particularly want to go home. I take a left instead.
There’s a park with a playground here, empty, right next to a skate park, less empty. I sit on the swing set and sway slightly, my feet anchored to the ground, listening to sounds of skateboard wheels hitting concrete, of boys cheering and whistling and cursing each other out. In my hands, the unlit cigarette slowly disintegrates. I am peeling it apart, watching the tobacco leaves spill out onto the woodchips below.
“Need a light?”
It’s a boy I don’t recognize. He’s holding a beat-up skateboard and his shoes are covered in silver duct tape, and he stands over me with some sort of look on his face. He digs in his excessively deep men’s pants pockets to produce a red plastic lighter, waving it in front of me.
“Yeah, thanks.”
I let the taken-apart cigarette fall from my fingers and grab a new one, holding it to the boy’s flame.
“Want one?” I offer. He accepts.
“Were you just sitting here waiting for it to light itself?”
I think about what Imogen would say, and I’m not sure I can pull it off. “It kind of worked.”
He laughs. “Seriously, what are you doing by yourself?”
I shrug, inhale. Gray smoke clouds the sky above my head. My mouth feels dry, and my head feels like it’s slowly being felted with wool. “I’m really fucking bored.”
“Summer, huh?”
Cicadas buzz. A trickle of sweat drips down my spine.
“Well,” He ashes his cigarette in the wood-chipped playground and jerks his head towards the skatepark behind him, hidden mostly behind some thin, green trees. “You should come hang out with us, if you’re so bored.”
The thought is unappealing. I weigh my options. In my head, Imogen urges me forth, smiling impishly. “Maybe I will.”
He grins. “I’m Toby.”
I tell him my name. He says it’s pretty. I follow him and try not to look away.
There’s a storm brewing somewhere in the distant horizon. Dark clouds swirl, and I can taste lightning in the air. But overhead is clear, and the closest thing to thunderclaps is the sound of wheels hitting concrete, of boards slicing metal rails. Some of the boys greeted me when I sat down at the edge of the bowl, but most ignored my presence entirely. One whistled and slapped Toby on the back.
I smoke another cigarette to give myself something to do. I know nothing about skateboarding, but it seems to involve an awful lot of falling, which doesn’t hold my attention as much as the sky above and thoughts of summer rain. Toby is probably trying to show off, but I can’t tell if the flips he’s doing are impressive.
I am an ashy smudge in the corner of the scene, some sort of ephemeral stain. The cigarettes are making me feel shaky and nauseous.
Someone breaks out a case of beer and tosses them about. He looks older, probably in his 20s. He spots me and waves a can around like an offering. I nod, and catch it, fumbling slightly and cradling it to my stomach so that I don’t drop it. I picture the metal can hitting the ground, exploding foamy beer. I wonder if Toby would help me clean it up.
It’s lukewarm and it tastes bad, but it settles my stomach. My mind buzzes and hums quietly like my old, dusty fan, and my thoughts are beginning to feel distant.
“Still bored?”
Toby has a way of appearing suddenly and surprisingly. Or maybe I am just never expecting him to be there.
“Not as much. You look good,” I’m probably lying, but lying feels easier right now.
“Thanks,” He says. “I’m kind of getting bored of it, too. You want to get out of here? Go for a walk, or something?”
I’ve heard men say that to Imogen, right before she disappears with them at parties, leaving me standing alone. But the only person I’m abandoning now is myself. “Sure.”
I don’t know where we’re going and I’m not sure he does either. Endless suburban streets branch out before us, crisscrossing hopelessly. He tucks his board under his arm and walks unnaturally close to me.
“You live around here?”
“Yeah, a few blocks away. You?”
“I’m at the state college, the downtown campus.”
He’s a college student. “Oh, cool.”
I think about how I am a teenager and how he might not be.
“There’s, uh, this neat spot nearby I like to go to.”
It’s a dried-out drainpipe, one of those big ones that looks like a tunnel, covered in colorful graffiti. It emerges in the center of a small patch of trees that was once, maybe, a forest. Toby sits at the edge of the wide mouth, and I follow suit. The air is starting to cool down, but my skin is still hot and itchy. I’ve finished my beer and my mouth tastes sour.
Toby digs his hand around another one of his pockets. “You smoke?”
“Um, yeah.”
He has a joint in his hand, and I watch him light it with that red lighter. When he hands it to me, I pretend it’s another cigarette. But it’s thick in my throat and burns smoother.
We pass it back and forth until the movement feels heavy and arduous, and my eyes start to sink down in my head. My voice comes from somewhere that my mind isn’t, and the responses aren’t mine either, so I’m not sure what I’m saying, but it seems to sound okay to Toby, who’s laughing and talking easily. I am suddenly envious of him. He seems relaxed, happy. It’s summer for Toby, who spent a day at the skatepark with his friends, drinking beer and smoking, who picked a girl up easily and is going to get what he wants from her. I suppose I am that girl. I suppose I am a girl who met someone at a skate park, whose summer could be one filled with this sort of thing, whose summer should be. I suppose I am a girl.
Vodka-filled water bottles crinkle in my hollow ears.
Then his hand is on my cheek and his lips are on my lips and they feel cold in the warm air, kind of dead, and too fast-moving. Another hand slips behind my back and caresses in a way which is probably meant to soothe, or to excite. And yet—I feel nothing. My skin is wetsuit-material-thick, freezing water kept at bay, but the chill is there.
And I am nothing.
Boredom has taken me, has slipped underneath this wetsuit and formed some sort of bottomless pit in the center of my chest beneath my sternum, sticky, uneasy summer boredom, and I am fading into it, left behind.
Toby’s mouth is heavy and dry on mine, and his hands seem disproportionately large, growing and growing as they sink lower and lower. I am so still but he does not notice. The emptiness begins to sour, dread creeps in, and on the inside I wriggle from his grasp. And yet, I am so still. My body betrays.
Imogen talked about men like they owed her. She talked about men like they loved her. She let them touch her like this and she writhed in their arms like whispering smoke.
I am not her any longer. Those hands do not reach into the void of my being. Those eyes do not see what I am seeing.
Thunder cracks, and rain shatters the earth.
I gasp and remember how to breathe as wetness seeps into my warmth-thin clothing, rainwater blown into the mouth of the pipe that is our shelter. Something ticks behind my ribcage like an old-fashioned alarm clock, warning me it’s time to go, and I fall back, away, and the falling feels endless. I catch myself on crumbled rock and the pain won’t register for another few moments, but I can see thin scrapes of blood welling up on my palms when I pick up my hands, scrambling out of the darkening tunnel, where Toby cowers, calling out voicelessly.
The rain crashes down on my head and begins to wash it away, pounding relentlessly against my skull, my hands, my bones the frame of my body. Under the cooling storm I am relinquished momentarily from the heat of absence.
Rough, unseen hands grasp at my chest, my throat, the small of my back, and I am suddenly aware that I am shaking, standing here and shaking, blood washed away baptismally. That sleezy, sticky, boring feeling is nowhere to be found.
Toby calls again, louder, loud enough to hear him, just barely.
“Imogen?”
Something then begins to germinate in the very deepest crevice of my stomach, the crevice which was ripped apart by bored nothingness, a tiny green seed taking unsteady root there, unfamiliar and yet unfathomably mine.
Standing beneath this force, vision narrow and blurry, soaking and gray, I whisper her name again. It does not sound like mine.
