GRACE SHELTON

CW – suicide, drowning

92.3 FM

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Track one. They’re playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio again. Summertime puts his feet up on my dashboard so he can drum on his lap to the song. His cleats are leaving dirt everywhere; the summer football league doesn’t practice on AstroTurf.

I say, “Put your feet down,” because I remember that article I read three months ago. If you get into a car crash with your feet on the dashboard, the force of collision will drive your knees through your chest and kill you instantly. Doctors will pick splinters of your ribs out of your patellae. I saw them do it once on Grey’s Anatomy.

The music drowns me out. He taps his fingers in perfect rhythm to the piano solo in the middle of “Tuesday’s Gone” like he knows all the notes by heart. When the guitars rejoin, louder, he imitates their screech.

I say again, “Put your feet down,” because even though I’ve only known him since May, he fits perfectly into the shotgun side: the wind in his hair, not a care in the world, harmonizing with classic rock. I can see every mosquito bite on his legs. They bulge angry, red, inflamed. I don’t want them going through his chest.

Once more, he does not hear.

The speed limit rises to fifty-five as we leave the city behind. I press the accelerator, hovering a little under sixty. To my left, I see slices of a river every now and then, like punctation in a never-ending poem. Burnt orange against cobalt blue, harsh yellow fading into gentle purple. Ahead, the road stretches past the horizon. It is not yet late enough for morning rush hour; the earth is silent save for Lynyrd Skynyrd through the speakers. The summer league hosts practice before sunlight. I think, Aw, what the hell. There’s no one out here to hit us. He reaches over to turn the volume knob the entire way up, and I roll down the windows for the rest of the world to hear about someone else’s messed-up life. I don’t even relate to the lyrics.

I say, “I love you,” because I’ve never said it to anyone before and the timing feels right. Today is the beginning of eternity. Summertime keeps his feet on the dashboard, bobbing his head in rhythm. I know he isn’t listening to me.

I think I have the rest of forever to tell him.

We arrive on his driveway as the final chord progressions of “Tuesday’s Gone” ooze out through the speakers. His skin shines in the sun’s red glare. I can’t help myself—I lean over the seat divider and meet his lips in a lingering kiss, without even putting the car in park. Nowhere near the first between us. The only one I remember. He tastes like peppermint.

“I—” I begin when I break away, but the phrase catches in my throat, and the moment is gone. He blows another kiss as he unlocks the passenger door and steps out. I wait until he’s inside his house before I drive away.

When EMTs drag him from the bottom of his swimming pool the next morning, I sleep right through the sirens.

* * *

Next song, track two, they’re playing Elliott Smith on the radio again. A whole different atmosphere. I place Summertime back in the passenger’s seat, let him put his feet up on my dashboard and say nothing about it. As long as it makes him happy. He stares out at the passing landscape in all its vibrant color, as the office buildings become pine trees and apartments fade into the occasional power line. The air between us hangs heavier the second time around.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, like I should have before.

Summertime shifts in his seat. “Nothing.” It’s hard to gauge his expression with his sunglasses obscuring his eyes. 

The main details of his appearance in my passenger’s seat have not changed; Summertime’s bright red football jersey clashes with my seat covers and his cleats rain the dashboard in a dusty film. His peroxide-blond hair whips around his face. Water… sweat drips from the end of each curl. It’s the little things that are different: his veins bulge, the mosquito bites on his legs have multiplied.

“I know something is wrong.”

Summertime smiles, all straight white teeth. “No more than usual.” He lowers the window a little more on his side to wave his arm in the wind off the highway. Once more, I remember an article. A man lost his hand when he stuck it outside of a car window.

I don’t say a word to Summertime about it.

“Talk to me,” he yawns.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“Oh, um, alright.” I clench my fists on the steering wheel. We’re over the speed limit. Once morning rush hour begins, I’m totally going to get ticketed. “Everything’s free game?”

His eyelids slide shut as he leans back against the headrest. “Tell me your favorite memory of us.”

“Yeah, cool. Okay.”

A memory. I have favorite memories. We’ve been together for a whole summer, him and me. I reach for something happy, like our first kiss, or his birthday party, or our picnic in the woods behind his house, but something else overtakes my reminiscence: parking on Summertime’s driveway tomorrow morning, screaming up at his window like the boyfriend in an eighties movie. I’d had no idea he was gone. I blink to clear the thought away, and it returns in even brighter color.

“You know, you and I, the other night…” I stall.

His mother got home from the hospital at twelve to find me asleep, leaning against the siding. She’d said, “You were the last one to see him,” and despite the lack of venom, we both knew what she implied.

“…when we were in the woods…”

I broke his bedroom window before I drove home, throwing rocks from the end of the driveway. I don’t know why. His family could have pressed charges. What little glass didn’t fall inside made a rainstorm as it fell around me, cutting into my cheeks and palms. There were pieces lodged in my skin the entire drive back to my apartment building, for days afterwards, for weeks. Pulling them out meant admitting it happened.

“…it was raining—”

What else is there to say?

“You don’t have one.” Summertime rubs his thumb over an open, bleeding gash on my knee. Ripped jeans. Torn skin. It wasn’t there a second ago. “You really don’t have one.”

I scramble for an excuse. “Summertime, there are so many and—”

“Forget it.” He pulls his arm back into the car and rolls the window up. “Not like I need to know anyway.”

My first attempt to save him is a failure before we reach his house.

* * *

Track thirteen. They’re playing Modest Mouse on the radio again.

Summertime does not say a word the entire ride back. He takes his feet off the dashboard without my asking. I want to tell him that I love him, but the words stick in my throat like peanut butter on the roof of my mouth. Summertime loved peanut butter. I barely recognize road signs and signals once I remember that.

We pull into his driveway. The asphalt is smooth, freshly sealed. At its top, miniscule shards of Summertime’s bedroom window glimmer in the sunlight.

In his garage, I spot the chlorine tablets his father uses in their pool, and I know that his family will try to sell the packages online after tomorrow morning.

He should invite me inside for frozen pizza, a soda, some cheesy horror movie, but I’m not delusional enough to think that something so domestic could really happen after the car ride here. There won’t be any more long summer weekends. He isn’t going to run his hands through my hair as I fall asleep with my head in his lap. His parents are going to arrive home early tomorrow morning and find their son at the bottom of the pool. Everything circles back.

“Am I picking you up tomorrow?” I try not to sound like my heart is crumbling to ash in my chest.

He doesn’t meet my eyes as he gathers his things from the shotgun side. “Mmhm. Like, twelve.” Backpack, tennis shoes, sunglasses. He even picks up the little tube of chap stick that he likes to leave in my car in case of emergency. I can hear his voice in my head: Your lips are your most sensitive skin. They trust you to take care of them.

“Do you promise?”

He never cleans up his trash. I watch him clean up his trash. “You always do.” Three weeks’ worth of sandwich wrappers, crumpled up. Plastic straws. The paper from a package of Oreos.

“But do you promise?”

“Look, if this is about an article you read—”

The fierceness of my own voice catches me off-guard. “Promise!”

Summertime shakes his head, more dismissively than in answer. Both hands are too full for him to properly close my car door, so he bumps it with his hip. His shirt rises just enough for expose the fresh bruise. Just before he enters his house, he pivots back towards the car, and something about him is broken in a way that I can’t repair.

“Good job saving me,” he says, emotionless. “A real valiant effort.”

I peel out of the driveway knowing damn well I should have stayed. The chlorine tabs sell for twenty dollars.

* * *

Track thirty-five, they’re playing Fleetwood Mac on the radio again. I have to change the station.

Summertime lives in my passenger seat like a cancer that can fiddle with the air conditioning. This morning, his sunglasses are cracked and his lips are blue. I don’t remember what he looked like before. He turns the knob until the vents blast my fingertips with icy wind.

“I’m tired of this,” I tell him.

He pretends not to hear. A whole month and I still can’t get into my car without returning to the end of August.

“Just tell me what’s wrong and we’ll fix it.”

We’re on the highway again. The specter of my family’s apartment building looms in the rearview mirror. If I squint, I can imagine that I see the aloe plants out on the deck, the soft fronds of my fern blowing in an early-morning breeze. Squint a little further, and the fern becomes bleach-blond hair, the sliding glass door becomes a bedroom window, and I can’t escape it. The river water laps at the road’s edge on my left. It must have rained last night.

“I know you’re listening. Summertime?”

He scratches the mosquito bites on his legs. They seem to have doubled in size. In his right hand, he clutches the obituary section from an old newspaper, and his smiling face glares back at me from a black and white picture. I look away before I process the typeset name underneath.

“Work with me here,” I say.

His voice comes like the soft lap of a wave on parched sand. “I’m sorry.”

“I won’t be mad. Tell me why you’re going to do it.”

“You don’t have the right to be mad.”

“Summertime, please, just tell me.”

He drags out a breath. “My name isn’t Summertime.”

My lungs burn. I resist the urge to stomp the gas pedal through the floor of my car.  “So?” 

Summertime curls his legs up in his seat, away from me. “So it’s not.”

The river bursts its banks to run across the road. Little waves crash against my tires as I press harder on the accelerator. Hydroplaning. What a way to go. With the windows rolled down, chlorinated air overtakes the car’s interior in a suffocating cloud, and I think, why not just cut the whole thing short and die together?

Summertime’s clothing is soaking wet anyway.

I say, “You shouldn’t have left me behind.”

He sets the newspaper down between us. I can quote the obituary word-for-word; it was the closest I could get to his funeral. No way I could be there at his wake, knowing it was my fault. No way I could be there when they lowered him six feet under.

It seems far more macabre to read about Summertime’s death when I can see him sitting on the passenger side, but there’s his picture, complete with gelled curls and a letterman jacket. His initials are embroidered on the pocket. There’s his real name, printed in uniform lettering, as if it were meant to be typed and prepared in just such a way. I haven’t said it since I lost him. I’m not going to say it again until I wake in the morning and he’s still waiting in front of his house for me to pick him up.

For now, it’s the sound of the water below us, the drip-drip-drop of his football jersey against my seat covers. A memorial service will be held at St. John’s Baptist Church on Sunday. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

“What do you think this fixes?” Summertime finally asks. What little pink was left in his cheeks vanishes into the frozen air.

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you keep coming back here?”

I take my eyes off the road for a whole thirty seconds just to look at him, to gather myself to answer. The boy in the obituary is unfamiliar in comparison. Beside me now, I have a sketched rendition. Charcoal lines. The shadow of a person. 

And yet, I could get used to remembering him this way. The pallor in his skin is not so bad. My car can take a bit of water damage. If it never gets worse, I can handle remembering him like this.

I want to be comforting. Instead, I whisper, “Was I not enough for you?”

He lingers in front of his door for a moment when I drop him at home.

* * *

Track seventy. It wasn’t the radio’s fault. I connect my phone to Bluetooth in my car and play The Beatles— maybe all he needs is a love song.

Chlorinated water plasters his hair against his cheeks.  Things are more detached this time— like he stops existing when I am not looking at him directly. He twirls his broken sunglasses between his fingers, and I pretend that he isn’t dripping on my seat covers.

“I don’t know why I did it,” he says.

The world too is detached. Although I know it should be early morning, the sun leans toward the earth, to preface nightfall. We are not driving on a rural highway, not watching the city disappear behind us, not staring down a river on the left. Houses line the backroads. Streetlamps illuminate the stretched yellow lines ahead. Blue sky fades purple on the horizon as the sun dips below, and this way, Summertime and I have spent the day together. I ease my foot off the accelerator, allow myself to breathe. We spent the whole day together.

“There wasn’t some defining moment,” he says, louder, as if I hadn’t heard him before. “One car ride didn’t make this happen.”

I’m going slow. There’s no one on the roads. I stare into his eyes instead of the pavement, and make him exist again. “So let me save you.”

“Why?”

“Because I need this to end.”

“Get out of the car.”

“You deserve to be saved.”

“Why does it have to be you?”

Who else could it be? I was the one who drove him home. I was the last one to see him.

The day after this one, I got home from his house and every good thing we shared became an echo of the last wave goodbye. Every last item that bore his likeness, turned to a corpse. All I have left is what I can visualize right now.

“Go on, tell me.” Summertime says.

“I need to think.” I memorize the way water beads on his eyelashes. He has such long eyelashes.

“You don’t remember my real name.”

I memorize the delicate curve of his jaw, down to the runaway freckles dotting his chin. There’s one slightly bigger than the others, almost like a birthmark, just below his bottom lip. “I do. Let me think.”

“I don’t know why I did it,” he continues, “you can’t stop it, and guilt isn’t love.”

I memorize the veins running along the arms that used to wrap around my waist when we kissed. I memorize the fingertips that brushed runaway strands of hair behind my ear. I whisper, “Just another minute,” because I’m never going to find the right thing to say.

We pull into his driveway before the world goes dark. I watch the pink fade out of the sky and settle into a calm, navy blue beneath a scattering of stars. Just yesterday, Summertime and I lay out beneath the entire cosmos and he was pointing out Orion and Cassiopeia—and now never again. His silhouette becomes angelic in the dark. When he unlocks his side and pops the door open, it almost looks like he’s ascending into heaven.

Before he leaves, he leans over the seat divider and gives me a kiss, freezing cold. I can’t move my arms from the steering wheel. I picture myself again, tomorrow morning, asleep against the siding while he’s lying dead in some morgue. That’s it. It all comes back to that.

“I loved you so much,” I choke out. “You had to know that. You had to know it was going to destroy me.”

When he laughs, water leaks out from between his chapped lips. “This was never about you.” I watch his bedroom window shatter into a thousand different pieces as my car pulls away.

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