Slide - Kyle Beachy [79]
“Diadem.”
“Whatsits … jeweled headband used as a royal crown.”
“Finial.”
“The thingy on top of the other thingy” she whispered. “An ornament.”
“You are going to be accepted at a top-tier school and have the time of your life.”
When I stood, I found myself sore, tired. I pulled her up and kissed each of her temples, then briefly her lips, resisting the urge to replay the whole sequence again, return to the ground with her in my possession. A girl within arms. But then we were apart, and she moved through light into the darkness of garage, and I slid quietly through the side door into my parents’ unstable home. I walked calmly through the living room, up the stairs to bed, leaving the computer glowing into an otherwise dark office.
august
one
there was sun all over the place, and glare, in this season of squint. I parked in whatever shade I could find and ate the bagged lunch my mother kept preparing for me, sitting at the foot of trees. We had reached the month of legend and woe. August, dank and brutal, sucking from the city a steady sour tang of human sweat.
Then there was the other thing, the narrowly averted debasement of my angelic neighbor. I worked very hard to keep her out of the daydreams that came at me with increasingly sexual overtones. Sometimes I fell into a whirlwind of sexual memory, Audrey and others and Audrey again, and I found myself longing for her distant frame—an hour, ten minutes with her familiar body. Thirty seconds, her neck only. Single glancing touch.
Was Zoe a virgin? I told myself: do not even wonder. Far more important was that, when asked, I could tell Audrey that, NO, I had not slept with anyone this summer. Because actually this was technically true—if I had pressed myself into anything, it was cotton, the underwear had remained throughout, which meant at most what we had done was a kind of play technical recreation and nothing more—and it was important to milk these rare moral victories when they came.
And look what else I could do! With one minor sleight of hand, one negligible benevolent fraud, I could instantly upgrade the generosity of my existence. Every bottle could be made into Premium with a quick swap of the caps, these “Premium” bottles substituted into orders for Purified or Natural Spring. Com pliments of me, no no, you're welcome. Please, really, it's my pleasure. If this qualified me as a liar, it was a title well worth the bright looks of gratitude on my customers’ faces. The spread of eye, curl of lip, tilt of head that captured their disbelief. How clear the happiness. Premium. Postures changed at the sound of this word. Meaning: the highest grade of drinking water available. And if they pressed why, exactly, I was willing to do this? I said we'll just keep it between us, with a wink and sly nod, and here they grew even further grateful, charmed into one of these minor conspiracies we all so dearly crave.
I returned home one afternoon and opened the front door to the sound of my mother yelling. I stood for a minute, stunned. In the computer room, she yelled a short word and then stupid. The computer wasn't working. I heard a series of clicks, that blandly infuriating chirnk, meaning, in computer, no, that won't work. The living room between us was not dark and not light, striped with shadow. Her short bursts of voice came out shrill. She was enraged and breathing loud enough for me to hear from where I stood. And I knew: