Aurora(64)

“June 2nd of that year was the first really hot day of the summer, and as evening came it turned into one of those bathwater-humid midwestern nights, when you feel drunk just breathing the air. Kyle and Thom were headed out for the night, to the movies on Highway 100 they said, but I knew that was a bunch of bullshit. They were just going out to drive my dad’s old Chevy Caprice Classic around town all night. For a teenager in a boring-ass town like this, an available car with a full tank of gas is, as I know you know, the gateway to all evil. Drinking, drugs, sex—there was really nothing that couldn’t be done in a moving vehicle at night in the summertime. This, please understand, was not wise. I am not recommending this type of behavior. I am telling you how it was, Scott, and you will no doubt recognize it as how it still is today. But very bad shit was going to go down that night, so please don’t romanticize what I’m saying. At all. It is my step-parental duty to tell you that.

“Anyway. I’d had a particularly awful day, full of the sorts of things that normally would be forgotten by the following week, but given the events of that night, I remember every single one in vivid detail. Trust me when I tell you they are all exceptionally boring. Something about so-and-so saying something shitty about me to what’s-her-name and bullshit like that. Point is, I was really sad and depressed and had locked myself in my bedroom when I saw Thom and Kyle headed out to the car, and I yelled to them, out the open window, that they should take me with them. Thom didn’t even respond, but Kyle stopped, looked up, and said something to Thom, so I knew there was hope.

“Kyle and I had made out before. Twice. Maybe a little grinding. I’m sorry, too much detail? OK, well, we’d made out twice, and he never tried to touch my breasts or anything. OK, I’m sorry, Scott, but this is how the story goes and you asked, so do you want to hear it or not? My point is, he was seventeen, I was fifteen, and he’d been sweet and tender with me and never tried anything I didn’t want him to. Which only made my crush worse. I remember the second time we made out I’d tried to push things further than I should have, and he suddenly remembered he had to be somewhere. And he left. This guy may have been a liar and a troublemaker, but he knew how to behave himself with someone younger than him. Fine, I was in love with him. Or maybe I just remember it that way. Memories can be fucked sometimes.

“So they let me go with them. And we all three drank and those two smoked weed, and at some point after midnight, somebody had the bright idea that we rock mailboxes. It’s sort of an antiquated custom, you may have never heard of it, OK, wait, I can see by the look on your face that you have, so, fine, you know the drill. Find a good-size boulder, not so big that you can’t hold it comfortably, then look for a mailbox that’s on a long, straight stretch of road, get the car up to at least forty miles an hour, and drop the rock on the mailbox as you go past.

“It’s actually way more of a skill than it sounds, particularly if you’ve been drinking, and those guys were at least seven or eight beers into the night at that point. I’d had maybe two at the most, because I really couldn’t handle drinking at that age. That, as they say, is an acquired skill, and as you know I am much more fond of the occasional pharmaceutical than I am a booze buzz. Gives me headaches.

“So we hit some mailboxes. We discovered early on that if you drop the rock from the front seat you are in serious danger of the rock bouncing back into the door or rear quarter panel, so Kyle and I had ended up in the back seat together, taking turns, one of us leaning out the window and dropping the rock while the other held onto you. We were trying to be careful, because you had to get a pretty good lean out the window going in order to get the right angle on the mailbox, and, you know, we didn’t want anybody to get hurt or anything.

“I’ll skip the next part, because I can see that you’re uncomfortable with the realities of teenage hormones and sexual desires, but I guess it can be summed up by saying that I was attempting to misbehave, and Kyle was attempting to not fool around with his best friend’s little sister right in front of him while on a vandalism spree. But that happened, and I can’t really tell the story without it. My hands were where they should not have been.

“Kyle asked me to stop, but I couldn’t tell how much he meant it, and, as I said, I’d had two beers. That was a lot of liquor for me. Kyle, I remember, moved my hand away from him, and shoved me across the back seat. I thought it was pretty funny and, like a kid that doesn’t know when to stop a game, which is exactly what I was, I slid right back up against him. And he shoved me back again.

“Thom yelled something at us from the front seat, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hear him. I sat forward—of course nobody was wearing a seat belt—and I yelled at him to mind his own business, and he yelled back at me, and I called him something awful, and it went back and forth like that for a while. We could really fight in those days. After a bit of that, I sat back, determined to continue this increasingly fun and physical shoving match with Kyle, because I knew I was safe with him, you know what I mean? It was the greatest feeling in the world—I could explore things, I could push things, I could take it too far, because I knew I was with someone who would always pull me back before I went over the edge of the cliff. Isn’t that sort of exactly the type of person you need to know when you’re a teenager?

“But when I turned back, Kyle was gone.

“Like, not in the car anymore. I was alone in the back seat, and the car was moving at fifty miles an hour, and the guy I had just been fooling around with was gone.