Josie and I always picked boys at the start of the summer, and just for that summer, they would be ours. It didn’t really matter whether they liked us back, or if we held hands with them, one was Josie’s and the other one was mine. We’d take them to the community pool, to the beach, to the county fair. To the shopping center with the bookstore in it, the one that had that massive man-made lake behind it. To the drive-in with one of our families the last weekend before school started. To anywhere, and everywhere. Just for a summer, the boys were ours, and when school started in the fall, we’d spend time laughing about Michael Harrison trying to kiss her at the pier on the fourth of July or Alex Thompson throwing up at my brother’s baseball game. After they left, we’d go to the meadow and make scrapbooks, and we’d run back home and spend the whole night dreaming up our future. Then, at the end of the summer, the boys would go back to being boys somewhere else. Jo and I stayed together well past summer’s end. It always worked out the same, just like that.
But the summer after we graduated, Josie didn’t pick a boy. It was a stupid game anyways, she said. And that was all it was— just a game. Jo was going to college next year, and people in college didn’t play games anymore. They went to parties. They didn’t pick boys, just for the summer. They had boyfriends. Her face was bright red as she told me that we were not kids anymore. We needed to stop dreaming up crazy things and find someone to really date so we could get married to someone. I wasn’t going to college, but I listened intently. If Josie said it, it at least felt true, even if the words hit my ears like stinging, searing daggers. It didn’t matter if I really agreed with her sentiments or not. After that day in June, I didn’t see her all summer.
Of course, I didn’t pick a boy either. Josie picked a practice run of college life, running far and fast from Sebring at any opportunity. I picked long nights on the porch, wondering how you could manage to fill an empty scrapbook you bought last year with no new memories to keep track of. I got eaten alive by mosquitoes and walked to the corner store for aloe, alone. I watched the Fourth of July fireworks on the pier, and Josh Kelley asked me where Josie was. I had to admit I didn’t know. I walked down to the meadow and I sat, and I stared at cloudless skies, and I cursed whoever could hear me for the clear weather and peaceful days. It was beautiful nearly every day of the summer, and it was horrible. I brought my journal along and pretended it was the scrapbook, laying down and taping stray pieces of grass and bark and moss to blank pages, scrawling nonsensical paragraphs that denoted Jo’s absence at every opportunity. I laid awake during the night, wondering how I was supposed to make anything new without her, how I was supposed to do the rest of life alone. What would happen to that bright blue house we’d picked out in Destin for when we retired, the one we wanted to live in as old wrinkly hags with a big white cat in the window as we watched kids on bikes ride by while we drank wine and ate ice cream? Who was going to move in instead?
On one of the last days of summer, after a brutal August spent filling up journals instead of scrapbooks and helping my younger siblings get to summer school instead of taking day trips out to the coast, smushed together in the backseat of Finley Cooper’s busted Jeep, she called me. Jo asked if I could be at the meadow by noon, so I quickly said yes before she could change her mind. My hands shook as I hung up the phone.
Every step I took out the door felt unsteady, as if the ground shifted when I moved. I took each step anyways, down the block, past yards of overgrown grass. I watched the sun reach its peak in the sky as I rounded the corner down a small dirt pathway, bordering the edge of the parking lot to the elementary school. I followed it along, down a small hill that opened itself up into that grassy clearing, blanketed in shade from tall trees laden with Spanish moss. For the first time all year, it felt like summer— with memories of Jo and I, carving our names together on the side of a log to claim it as our own, braiding impermanent bracelets from stems, and dreaming up futures for ourselves. It was here that she’d told me once that she’d rather get married to me instead of one of these stupid guys we spent the summer with— that particular summer, two years ago, was the summer of Henry Baez and Felix Green, where Henry tried to ask Josie to make things official during the final week of summer and she spit her soda out at him on accident.
I remember running from Jo’s house— the house with a flickering lamppost, on and off and on and off all day, half a block up Whitacre Avenue from the elementary school— as soon as Felix dropped us at the curb. We clambered over each other to slip out of the backseat of his truck, screaming a hastened goodbye between giggles as we bolted down the sidewalk. We couldn’t help but laugh the whole way down the road, too out of breath to truly disturb the whole neighborhood, but loud enough that the bulldog in the front yard of the Gardner’s house next door howled like mad. We could hear him for at least twenty minutes, even after we made our way down the dirt path. The hill down to the opening was steeper than I remembered that day, and I remember my feet giving way underneath me. Something about the adrenaline from the speedy getaway and the summer high led me to overlook the trickle of blood from a rock leaving a small gash on my shin. We laughed at my fall as we settled in on the lush grass of the meadow. Josie noticed the gash before I did, right above where my sock hugged my calf. She wiped away a small drop of blood making its way down toward my sock with the hem of her shirt. I smiled. I didn’t even notice the sting.
I remember the way soft beams of the sunset settled on the side of her face as she laid out the leather-bound scrapbook. She leafed through until she got to the next pair of blank pages, lightly creased. On the left page, we laid down the things that we’d kept from the day: the wrapper of the soda straw, a polaroid of Jo and I in front of Culver’s, the blade of grass I’d torn up as she attached the other pieces with a small, pink roll of craft tape. She slid the scrapbook over to me, and I took out the pen from my shirt pocket, scrawling lines describing the “Henry Baez soda incident” in vivid detail. I made sure to write about Jo, too, detailing how she remained radiant, glowing, and absolutely untouchable, even as soda ran from the sides of her mouth following the fiasco. She grinned. “You should be, like, Shakespeare the Second,” she remarked.
We talked about what classes we could take so that we’d spend as much time together as possible. We talked about how much we couldn’t wait to graduate, free from the grasps of Dr. Adler’s science room. We braided together stems of small, blue flowers that dotted the meadow as we talked about our future lives together, how wonderfully silly it’d be if we stuck it to all the boys we’d known by just choosing to get married without any of them. We drew it up, on the corner of the left page of today’s scrapbook entry. We’d have a small, tasteful ceremony in the summer, maybe in a meadow like this one, with flowers and twinkling lights adorning trees full of Spanish moss and lavender flowers. She slid the ring of flowers around my wrist, and she smiled wide. My cheeks ached from how much we both smiled. We carved our names into the log we sat on, beaming wide, gushing over the idea that we could get away with a summer, a lifetime, without any boys we’d have to make fun of. Something in the air, something on the light breeze, always made talks like these feel like a dream. The first summer without boys doesn’t feel as nice as we’d imagined.
I ran my hands over the scar on my shin as I pulled my knees closer to my chest, leaning my back against the log. I picked a long blade of grass and picked and picked and picked at it. A shadow appeared in my periphery. I needed something to distract me from my shaking hands and my quickening heartbeat and my blurring vision, so I attempted to hone in on this single blade of grass in my hands. Confronting a blade of grass was easier than confronting Josephine Spencer, now standing in front of me, with curly blonde hair that cascaded down to her waist.
She sat down next to me. I tore the blade of grass in half, holding one half between my index and middle fingers while ripping the other half into smaller and smaller pieces.
“I’m sorry.”
I took a shallow, shaky breath, attempting to parse the right words to say out of the thick, tense air that sat between us. Nothing came up. I didn’t lift my gaze from that blade of grass, now in exactly seventeen smaller pieces. She closed her eyes, and she started again. “I’m sorry for trying to run. From this.” She stopped abruptly. She shook her head, as if trying to shake off the emotion straining her voice.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to ruin this. The summer… any of this. I didn’t want to change things, but I wanted to do this for you, and now I…” Her voice trailed off, hesitant to confront the crushing weight of the unspoken things that hung between us: the weight of the summer, of the distinct lack of boys, of her pending departure from Florida. My eyes stayed stuck on my hands as I shredded the other half of that blade of grass. Eventually, there was no grass left in my hands to shred up, and I lifted my head slightly.
“Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re leaving.”’
I turned to face her and studied her reaction. Her head was already hung low, and I watched as she picked at the corners of her thumbs silently, the same way I’d watched her do a hundred times before. I took a deep breath, trying to steady the uneasiness of my breathing as my heart got louder. I tried not to think about what would happen to this clearing when we didn’t come back every summer and a lump formed in my throat. I felt hot tears rise and bubble up at the seam of my eyelids. I tried to choke them back. I couldn’t.
She looked towards me, tears streaming down her face now, too, and grabbed my hands. She watched as she carefully enveloped my grass-stained thumbs with her perfectly manicured ones, cupping my tight fists gently with her soft palms.
“I,” she sighed, and she laughed a little to herself before drawing a sharp breath. “I love you, Hannah.” Tears rolled in gentle waterfalls down the sides of her face and she searched mine for an answer to the question she didn’t ask out loud. I could feel my heart rise in my throat, and I wanted to scream. Instead, I said nothing. The tears stung. My eyes hurt. I wanted to go home.
She scanned my face, over and over and over again before her gaze fell and landed on her hands around mine. They stayed there, and I didn’t see Jo’s eyes again as she searched for the right words to say. “I- I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
I couldn't find anything to say to that. I didn’t know what to do either. All I could think to do was hug her, hold onto her as tight as I could manage. She was water in my hands, I knew that, but I could feel her unsteady breathing in my arms and the sun hitting the backs of my hands and we were there, just for a few minutes. I said nothing. I held on for dear life.
I’d love to say I got in the passenger seat of her Mini Cooper the next morning, one suitcase each packed in the back, and we ran away together to Destin. We rented some cheap apartment 30 miles north and worked dead-end, minimum wage jobs and pooled together our life savings until we could afford that bright blue house, complete with planter boxes on the windowsill filled with the same blue flowers growing on the edge of the meadow— Bermuda blue-eyed grass. We adopted that big white cat named Ellie, and we got a golden retriever, too— Sailor. We would go down to the beach every day until our bones were too old to carry us there, then we would sit on the front porch in white wicker chairs until one of us got sick and the other took care of her, every day, until we were too old to keep going anymore. We’d spend every summer together, every day together, until we ran out of days to spend. It’d be summer, then, forever, together, in some beautiful afterlife.
***
The next morning I stood against the ever-flickering lamppost in front of Josie’s house and watched her load her car with boxes. The red shirt we bought at the thrift store together in the summer after our freshman year poked out of the corner of one of the larger boxes. Before that day, I wondered what people meant when they said they felt as though the air had been sucked out of them. On that day, the air seemed thicker in that moment, and between the humidity and the choking tears constricting my throat, I felt my face get hotter and hotter with burning feelings that I wasn’t equipped to unpack.
Josie told me that she was moving to Georgia back in April. It was two weeks before she told me that she’d be having a summer without boys, and four weeks before it sank in that she also meant she’d be having a summer without me. She had gotten her final college admissions letter in the mail that morning. It was ritualistic, the way she woke up before anyone else in the neighborhood did, the second she heard the mail truck pass. She’d bolt out the front door quietly, sneaking to the mailbox. That morning, a pristine white envelope with her name on it met her there. She quickly concealed it in her backpack, where it stayed until the end of the day, once we’d settled in the meadow, like all the other envelopes before. There, she produced it from its hiding place, with creased corners after its hours spent trapped under textbooks in the depths of her bag.
“I want you to be the first to know,” she assured me, trying to press the folded corners back down to sit flat. I drew a shaky breath, gathering myself to portray the most confident smile I could muster. My heart raced.
“Open it.”
She gently coerced the sealed edge up from its place, pulling the letter out and carefully unfolding it. I watched her eyes scan the page eagerly. She looked up at me, and before she said anything, the glimmer in her brown eyes declared the school’s decision. I didn’t need to read the letter, but still, Josie pushed it into my shaky hands.
Dear Josephine Elise Spencer… congratulate you on your accomplishments that have earned you… look forward to seeing you…
My heartbeat grew faster the more I read. I felt dizzy. I was happy for Josie— I was. But in the reflection of her wide-eyed gaze, I caught a glimpse of a life that wasn’t anything like the one we pictured, the one we’d talked about. It was a life where she met some guy at a party, and she brought him home to meet her family, and she didn’t invite me over for New Year’s Eve, and she didn’t meet me in the meadow on New Year’s Day in the afternoon to watch the first sunset of the year, and she went back to Georgia, and she stayed there, she never came back.
I smiled. I hugged her. I couldn’t breathe.
She tore the seal off the envelope and opened the scrapbook meant for summer memories. I sat completely still, frozen, as if I were watching a car wreck. Violating the sanctity of the meadow was one thing. She’d already brought the envelopes here before. But those letters were denials: reminders she was meant to be here with me, declaring an eternal set of summers that we’d spend together. This one was different. This time, I wasn’t comforting Josie with dreams of what we’d do together instead of going to college, like getting jobs at the bookstore together so we’d get discounts on new journals and stationery. This time, I was the one devastated, not her. She certainly wasn’t picturing a life in Sebring, and she certainly wasn’t able to comfort me. So instead, I smiled as she slid me the scrapbook to write something that would accompany her collage, a quickly-arranged spread of the envelope’s red seal alongside a sticker of a bulldog that’d fallen out of the envelope. She picked a small red flower that off a tree on the border of the meadow, pressing it gently along the edge of the page before taping it down.
She handed me a pen. I scrawled: To Josephine Elise Spencer’s new life; brilliant, radiant, and exceptionally smart.
She smiled. It felt like a gut punch.
As her dad finished with the last of the boxes, crammed neatly into the light blue Mini Cooper, she found her way to me. My shadow flickered on the sidewalk, on and off under the streetlight. I could feel the August heat and the lingering stillness of unspoken words hanging over us. We kept an uncomfortably tense distance between us, and I felt the same soreness in my throat return from the day before, that longing to scream a confession clawing at my throat. I stared at her, desperate, like she could say anything in these final moments to ease it all, to remedy that earnest ache, to lay my fears and tensions and desperations to rest. I knew, in reality, anything she could say would only keep me on edge, but I believed in her, invested all my hope in her, waited for her to tell me where to go and what to do, like she always did.
“Well,” she sighed, and she flashed a smile. I tried to gather one in return, but all I could do was purse my lips together and pray I kept tears from rolling down my face.
Her head tilted down, and we both watched her hands as she picked at the raw skin around her thumbs until they bled. Her hands shook. I’d never seen them shake before.
I scanned the surrounding area. Both her parents and her younger sister had gone back inside to double-check things.
“I,” my breath hitched in my throat, and I could feel all that I’d kept down fighting its way up my throat, creeping towards my tongue. “I’m happy for you, Jo. I’m happy.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked up from her fingers to meet my gaze, and she studied my expression.
“Are you happy, Hannah?” She furrowed her brow and her wide eyes shone with a desperation for honesty. It was a simple request, and it was the only request she made; it was not a demand, and nothing more, nothing less.
“I’m- I’m trying. I’m happy. I’ll be happy, Jo.”
She didn’t say anything, this time at all. She grabbed my hands, then trailed up my arms to grip my shoulders, and she stared into my eyes. Hers were glossy with tears, but a half-smile stretched across her face. Josie said nothing, and I could see her accepting that she’d never hear an honest word from me again. She smiled fully now, letting tears start to fall. I kept my composure, in a fight against myself to keep anything I could close to me.
I felt heat spread from my face through my body as she wrapped her arms around me and held me quietly. All that hung in between us— all the plans we left unmade, the unfinished pages of the decade-old scrapbook collection, the day before in the meadow, all of it — dissipated and fizzled out, quietly into the air. I closed my eyes, and she let go, and just as quickly as they went, all the tension reassembled itself in the thick tense air of a Florida summer, looming, lingering, aching. She was in the car. She left. I couldn’t think, and then, almost unconsciously, I was walking the other direction down Whitacre Avenue, turning past houses with overgrown yards, running past the elementary school, down dirt paths and the side of a small hill. I collapsed next to the undisturbed, engraved log, flat in the green grass, staring up at a cloudless sky. It was almost a perfect day, were it not for the still, lingering air. It was a threat, looming over my body with a disquieting pressure, bringing everything that lay underneath to the surface. It was horrible.
“I love you,” I declared under my breath, shaky as I felt the occasional tears streaming down my face turn into a flood. The cap had burst clean off the bottle full of everything I didn’t say, and it kept flowing, and the tears kept coming. Between heaving sobs, I told the meadow, “I love you, Jo.” Everything in my body ached, missing half of myself in the place I’d come to know who I was when I was whole. I felt it, that red heat rising in my throat, occupying my chest, and I knew it was love, felt most as it’s leaving, speeding away in light blue Mini Coopers to other lives. I knew it was love, felt most as it was leaving. I smiled. I whispered it again. “I love you, Josephine.” I laughed. I filled my fists with grass, and I kept on crying as the sun set. I picked red flowers from the tree at the edge of the meadow and I tied the stems together to make chains that I laid on the log. “I love you,” barely audible as it escaped my throat. I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t care. Hours could’ve passed, or days for that matter. All I could think about was the way my eyes stung, and my throat burned. I laid there, picturing the Mini Cooper driving down Whitacre over and over and over again, the light blue singed with red, painting it a soft lavender. I stopped wanting to scream, but it still burned inside of me. I loved her. It was summer. Of course I did.
Peyton O'Neill is a Literary Journalism and Creative Writing student at UC Irvine. She has always had a passion for dreaming up new stories, and she is currently in the process of accumulating a collection of short stories and fiction to give to the world one day. For now, she just dreams about it, and writes, and writes.
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