A Summer Nowhere

The summer I was sixteen, I decided to give up on the idea of something interesting ever happening to me. Everybody I knew had some kind of exciting story or other to tell and here I was with nothing to contribute. I'd never won a prize for being the seventh caller on the radio; I'd never gotten to go to Disney World; my Mama had never even gotten the Pick 3 numbers. The closest thing to interesting I had to share was that my name was supposed to be Jodie, but Mama wrote the D backwards on the birth certificate because she was a little bit dyslexic. When the nurse read it out loud, Daddy thought it was too adorable to change.

I wasn't inclined to agree, but you gotta' take what you get sometimes.

My best friend Sam—short for Samantha, but she hates it when people call her that—had a heck of a life story. She was born in near Oakland, California and had moved from there to Las Vegas and then finally to Russellville to live with her mama and her Granny. Granny basically raised her and her little sisters, so she was real attached.

Lynn, her mama, was a wild child. She got pregnant with Sam when she was seventeen. Sam's father was never in the picture and Lynn said that even when he was in the picture he wasn't all the way in the picture; it was like he was blinking, so his eyes were closed when the shutter clicked, or he didn't smile when the photographer told him to, so it could never come out right. Also, he was a little bit scary. He was into the occult and liked talking about putting hexes on anybody who wronged him. That's what Lynn said, anyway. But after Sam came along, Lynn met Ernie—he was the guy that became Sam's daddy, even though he was just her step-daddy. She was working on slot machines at a casino in Las Vegas and Ernie was playing. Lynn and Ernie had Sam's younger sister Jenny, then a couple of years later, they got divorced. But after they got divorced, Lynn found out she was pregnant with Polly. Somewhere between all of those things, she got hooked on speed and killed a bunch of brain cells. When Polly was a baby, she moved in with her mom.

I moved to Russellville from Alexander City, Alabama. Before my daddy died, we lived in a nicer house, but then we had to move to a trailer park after a heart attack killed him. The whole reason Mama moved us to Russellville was because she met Dennis, her good-for-nothing asshole of a boyfriend. He was at this bar she went to with a friend and told her he owned his own construction company. What he meant by that was that he worked for his brother, who worked for somebody who owned a construction company. He was on a job site, but was due to head back to Kentucky in a week. She pulled me out of Alabama and had us follow him home. Except he lived with his mother in Bowling Green and didn't even have custody of his two kids. Mama took a job waiting tables at a diner and before her first week was up, she'd charmed her way into legitimate employment in Russellville, helping people get food stamps and medical cards. The lady said she liked her attitude and how kind she was. They needed somebody compassionate and would just go ahead and look over the fact that Mama didn't have a college education or any kind of case work experience.

That's the thing about my mama. She's about as charming as an infomercial host. My Grandpa Withers—that's Mama's daddy—used to say that she could sell ice to Eskimos if she wanted. After she was given that job, we drove down to look around town and there was this nice little subdivision among all the farmland, and the very first house on the street had a For Rent sign in the front yard. The lady that owned the house was a lesbian Mormon, which was a pretty unique combination. When she said she was LDS, I thought she had some kind of disease, but then Mama had to explain that it was a religion—the Church of Latter-day Saints. The house was prettier than anything I'd ever seen. There were three bedrooms downstairs and a giant room upstairs with another bedroom on one end and a tiny little room that led to the roof on the other. The lady had a grand piano in the living room and tried to talk Mama into buying it to go along with the house, but Mama didn't bite.

In less than a month, Mama, Dennis, and I were moved into that house and I was enrolled at Chandlers Middle School for the rest of eighth grade. As it turned out, which I wasn't expecting, Alabama schools were a little more advanced than the ones in Logan County, Kentucky, so I got to be bored out of my mind for a couple of months. I met Sam my first day of school on the bus and we'd been best friends ever since. I had turned thirteen that spring, and she was about to be fourteen at the end of August. The reason we became friends so fast was because we were talking about what we'd take with us if we ever got stranded on a deserted island and we both wanted to take a case of Pepsi and a boom box with some Nirvana CDs.

Our houses became each others' homes away from home, but I liked Sam's place better. Lynn was one of those fun moms. One time, when she heard I'd never seen any of the Michael Myers Halloween movies, she loaded us all up in the van and took us to the Video Vault before it closed at nine o'clock to rent them all up. Never mind that it was a school night. We all stretched out in the living room floor with blankets and pillows and watched those slasher flicks until the sun was coming up. Then Lynn made us coffee milkshakes and sent us to school hopped up on caffeine and buzzing out of our minds.

Anyway, when I was a junior in high school, a few days before school let out for summer vacation, Mama told me that Dennis' kids were coming for the whole summer. For the first time ever, they'd be in our house for longer than a weekend and I was gonna be forced to share my space with Heather and Brad Jenkins. They lived in Bowling Green with their bat shit crazy mother and had no home training. They were wild because they didn't have any rules at their house and I hated Heather especially, because she walked around in a bikini and daisy dukes in the summertime and laughed at every boy's jokes, even when they weren't funny. My neighbor Mike Stevenson was the cutest boy at Logan County High and there was a glider swing between our houses that was on our property. When I wasn't at Sam's, she was at my house and we liked to sit in that swing and just be. But if Heather was over for the weekend, she always had to be out there making a fool of herself. If Mike saw her, he'd come and flirt. The problem wasn't that he flirted, it was that he didn't flirt with me. That's the thing about girls—we want everything for ourselves, even though we learned we were supposed to share.

I had a nasty of habit of getting sassy when I was in a bad mood and Heather always put me in a bad mood, so it was no surprise that Mike wasn't too friendly. I wish I could say that that's why boys didn't like me, but I knew it was because I wasn't pretty enough. Sam looked a cross between Kate Moss and a mermaid. She was tall and thin and had blonde hair down to her butt and eyes the color of clean pool water. Heather wasn't nearly as beautiful, but she flaunted everything she had like there was no tomorrow. She was shorter and curvier than Sam and had pretty hair the color of honey and eyes of the same shade, but she had a gap between her two front teeth that was so wide even braces hadn't fixed it. Then there was me; picture this: barely five feet tall with legs like a Corgi, long dark brown hair that didn't really curl and wasn't really straight, and boring green eyes, like a green so dull it reminded you of pond of water. Even though I only weighed a couple more pounds than Sam, she was so much taller than I was that I looked like an Oompa Loompa standing next to a supermodel.

Anyway, I got grounded for telling Dennis his kids were assholes and Mama said she had to use all her energy not to smack me in the mouth. I think she was being a little dramatic, because she'd never been real big on smacking me. Anyway, she told me that because I was so disrespectful, I could do without leaving the house for a week and see how I liked it. No phone, no TV, no friends. But she didn't say I couldn't go outside, so I spent a lot of time swinging in the glider at night when there was nothing else to do. I'd go out there and smoke cigarettes until my throat hurt, just because I was bored. Sam and I had never gone so long without talking or seeing each other and I missed her like crazy.

One day after we smoked a few joints, she and I decided that we were such good friends, we were probably telepathic with each other. So I'd sit out there on the glider swing and squeeze my eyes shut real tight while trying to talk to her with my mind. What's up? I'm bored as hell. I can't wait until this week is over. I knew it wouldn't work; I wasn't an idiot. But she didn't live too far down the road, so if the brain waves were gonna' travel, they didn't have far to go.

But if it weren't for me being outside all by myself at night, this next thing might never have happened. I was sitting there minding my own business when who else but Mike Stevenson showed up in my yard, asking for a cigarette. After bartering for it when I told him they were too expensive and it was my only pack and he should go get his own, he wore me down with his patented I'm-really-handsome-and-popular smile. And when he sat down next to me, the outside of his right thigh touched the outside of my left one and when I got goosebumps all over, he put his hand on my knee and that didn't help at all.

I felt too big and too small at the same time when he was around. He was tall, which made me feel tiny; but he had those lean muscles from playing basketball that made me feel like I was chubby. About a million times, I imagined what it would be like to wear one of his basketball jerseys to sleep in, but sometimes I worried it would be too small so it was a good thing I was just daydreaming about it.

And then he had these lips that always looked freshly scrubbed and ready to go. And then suddenly they were on mine and I didn't even know what to do with myself. My hands went to sleep from balling them up in fists at my sides and when he grabbed my wrists to wrap my arms around his neck, it felt like pins and needles all the way up and down my arms. We didn't stop until I felt his hand creeping its way up my shirt. I panicked and pushed him off of me. Plus, I needed to breathe. I'd never made out with a boy that hot and heavy, and I had completely forgotten to breathe through my nose. But instead of coming back for more, Mike took another cigarette out of the pack and hopped down.

“Thanks for the smoke.” he winked at me and headed back to his house.

I couldn't even say anything. What do you say to something like that. My whole body felt like it was on fire and when I went inside the house to find Mama sitting on the couch watching Law and Order, I was sure she'd be able to tell I had been up to something. But she just kinda glanced up at me and told me to load the dishwasher. As I rinsed the dishes and loaded them in, I couldn't stop thinking about how my face was numb. My lips felt like they did that time I had to get a cavity filled and they numbed my whole mouth, except this time, they also felt like something was pushing on them. It felt like his lips were still on mine. I caught myself touching them, pushing and pulling on them and trying to make the feeling come back.

Before I knew it, the whole kitchen was spotless. I had wiped down the counters, swept the floor, cleaned out the sink, and put away the leftovers from dinner. If it weren't for Mama coming in to get a glass of tea, I probably would have just roamed around that kitchen all night, cleaning stuff to keep my hands busy.

“You suckin' up?” she asked, that little smirk on her face that she made when she knew I wanted something.

“Huh?” I mumbled. “No. I'm just bored.”

“That's what happens when you run your mouth, Jobie.” she warned me, nodding her head like she was telling herself she'd just said the perfect thing.

“I know.” I said, heading down the hall to my room. “Night.”

It was the first house we'd ever lived in where I could make it up just the way I wanted it and I guessed the best part about being grounded was that I could spend a lot more time in there to appreciate it. We'd painted the walls a dusty shade of purple that I liked a little bit better than the sage green Mama had picked out. But you couldn't see much of the walls for the posters I had taped up. There was a big black and white shot of shot of Kurt Cobain hanging up over my bed and the rest of the space was filled up with other rock stars: the Smashing Pumpkins, Guns N Roses, Sublime, Marilyn Manson. I liked anything with a guitar involved. There was something about a guitar hanging around a guy's neck that made him look a hundred times better than he did without it.

I liked to lay upside down on my bed so that my head was by the foot board and my feet were by the headboard. I'd look up at Kurt and wonder what it would be like if he hadn't offed himself. I wondered what had to go through a person's head to put a bullet through it. It seemed like I was sad all the time, but I didn't think I could ever do it. Sam had real damage that made her think about it all the time. She'd even taken a bunch of Tegretol one time, but she ended up getting her stomach pumped and spending a few days in the hospital. After that, she didn't try anything anymore.

The thing was, Sam had had a hard life and nobody in her family ever talked about it. When her mom moved them to Russellville to live with Granny, her Papaw started keeping too close an eye on her. Then every once in a while, she'd wake up to him touching her. At first, it would just be him tucking her in or adjusting her pillows; then it got weird. She saw him jerking off in her room one night and finally told Lynn, but Lynn didn't believe her. Sam had a habit of being dramatic and Lynn just thought it was another one of her stories. Then Papaw started taking things too far: he put his hands down her panties, up her bra. He'd walk in her when he knew she was changing clothes or getting out of the shower. The problem was that if Sam told her Granny, Granny would kick Papaw out of the house for sure. But Papaw paid all the bills and then they'd have no money to live off of. So Sam never told anybody. But she started fighting him off when she got a little older and he didn't bother her anymore.

The craziest part about it all was that I was so jealous I could barely stand it. Sam had such a fascinating life story, I could listen to her talk about it for hours. Sometimes she used me as a therapist, even though she had a real therapist that they made her start seeing after she took all the pills. I wanted to have that kind of story to tell. Or any story to tell. Everything about Sam was interesting. She looked interesting, she sounded interesting, she was interesting. And I was just me. That was my only problem. I wanted to have problems people wanted to hear about, even if it meant I was miserable. I was miserable because I wasn't miserable enough to be interesting and that was making me crazy.

When I couldn't sleep, I sat in my bedroom floor and took all the clothes out of my dresser. My dresser was where I kept socks, underwear, and sleep clothes. I had so many long flannel nightgowns it was disgusting. It looked like that girl from Little House on the Prairie was keeping her stuff in my room. I got disgusted and threw them all in a trash bag, but then all I was left with was a few ratty t shirts and a couple of pairs of shorts. I wanted to be one of those girls that slept in lingerie or something. I wanted to be twenty-five so I could be done being sixteen.