Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  Ms. Schultz, our boxy and Botoxed gym teacher, must’ve had a romantic streak, or maybe she’d stopped giving a damn—rumor had it, she was perpetually on the verge of retirement—because she didn’t budge or blow her whistle when the couple ignored the pop fly that dropped a few feet from them. Greg Holder sprinted in, scooped the ball up, and fired it toward second base, but not before shouting something at the couple.

  “Get a room”?

  “Email me that selfie”?

  “Long live your everlasting love”?

  I don’t know, because I couldn’t hear. But I could certainly feel the pangs of my insignificance as I sat there in a class that promised the world could be broken down into formulas.

  Okay, fine. Then what the hell was the formula for what these two lovebirds had?

  When the bell rang and broke me out of a daze of self-pity, I turned to Tess and said, “I would kill to have a boyfriend like Elliot Pressman.”

  “Really?” Tess said as she packed up her notebooks. “But he’s so . . . Elliot.”

  “Sometimes all you need is an Elliot. A guy who’ll hold your hand with a softball glove while you update your status. A guy who won’t expect you to do things like talk to him or bathe.”

  “So who’d you kill for your Elliot?”

  “Cranberry, I guess.”

  “Oh no. Not Cranberry. Cranberry is innocent. Cranberry is harmless.”

  “For me to find happiness, Cranberry got to get got,” I said, and I held my hand out like I had a gun and tilted it sideways for the gangsta effect.

  Of course, our incredibly kind chem teacher, Mrs. Otieno, was standing behind me when I did it, and I turned around and witnessed this tolerant woman, hanging and shaking her head. Not in disgust, exactly. In exasperation.

  I felt like a total shit.

  I don’t know if Cranberry’s spontaneous combustion made a lot of people feel like total shits, but it certainly made them rethink things. Besides eradicating the gaysplosion theories, it shattered any ethnicity arguments. We had a black girl, a white guy, an Asian dude, and a . . .

  What exactly are people from Turkey? Turkish, of course, but are they European or Asian? Are they Arab? It doesn’t matter, right? Because it obviously didn’t matter then, which I think frustrated a lot of people who were hoping for some excuse for their racism.

  “Well, leave it to them [insert your least favorite skin tone] folks to start poppin’ off like bottle rockets!”

  The more valid proximity arguments were becoming problematic too. The first three explosions took place on school grounds and so many, including myself, suspected something was in the air at Covington High. Magnetic waves? A grand confluence of cellular data? The chemicals wafting from the cafeteria food?

  Cranberry lived at least five miles from school, in a split-level near the highway, so it was clear that even if the problem originated in the high school, it wasn’t contained to the high school. A virus seemed a likely culprit, but the powers-that-be weren’t quite ready to go down that path. There was something else to focus on.

  drugs

  Drugs?” Mom asked me Monday afternoon as I waited in the armchair by the window.

  “What’s that?” I replied. My eyes were fixed on the driveway. Dylan was supposed to arrive at any minute.

  “Drugs?” Mom asked again.

  “No thanks,” I responded. “I did a bump of coke with breakfast.”

  “Ha-ha, hilarious,” she said, and reached to put her hand on my shoulder, but pulled back when she remembered how I’d been avoiding hugs lately. “I mean with this Cranberry girl. I looked her up online and she, well, her hairstyle choices were interesting.”

  “So she’s on drugs?”

  “Hey, all I’m saying is that the druggies stood out when I was in high school. A girl with orange hair? Come on.”

  “Did you really call people druggies?”

  “What do you call them?”

  “Katelyn Ogden.”

  “Wait, so Katelyn did . . . ?”

  “Not like meth or anything. But I understand that she dabbled.”

  Protip: When your parents ask you to confirm rumors that you know are factually true, it’s best to start your confession with “I understand that . . .” Because, one, it’s not a lie. You do understand. You understand the hell out of it. But, two, it distances you from the rumor. You’re analytical about things, not emotional, which means you’re not all wrapped up in the mess. You’re an observer.

  “Dabbled?” Mom asked. “Who else dabbles? Shit. Tess doesn’t dabble, does she?”

  “Tess neither dabbles, tinkers, nor flirts,” I said. “Don’t worry about darling Tessy. She is squeaky clean.”

  I wasn’t thrilled about the momentum of this conversation because it was obviously barreling toward me, a serial dabbler. I had yet to tell my parents about my dabbling, though I suspect they had their suspicions. Luckily, the momentum was stopped in its tracks by an ice-cream truck that pulled into our driveway.

  When Dylan had texted earlier that he was coming to pick me up, he hadn’t specified the mode of transportation. I had wondered for a second if he expected me to also have a skateboard, but I quickly convinced myself that he wasn’t that naive. I’d never seen him driving a car, which led to me picturing horse-drawn carriages, Segways, and even bicycles built for two. I definitely did not expect a rusty old ice-cream truck, though I suppose I should have.

  I leapt from the couch and through the front door to intercept Dylan as he made his way up the walkway. “Nice ride,” I said. “A bit cliché, don’t you think?”

  He didn’t take the bait and turn around to look at the boxy white truck with the faded Popsicle and sugar cone decals on it. He simply shrugged and said, “Date a lot of ice-cream men?”

  “Of course you don’t show up in a Hyundai or something,” I said. “You’ve gotta be the kid who rolls up in something quirky, endearing, and yet strangely manly.”

  “First time I’ve driven it actually. I usually take my mom’s minivan or my brother’s pickup, but they’re both occupied.”

  “You’ve got a brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  Mom was in the doorway, watching our exchange, sizing up the chariot that was going to whisk me away. I wondered what she knew about Dylan. Surely the rumors hadn’t reached the adult sphere. But you never know what she overhears at the deli.

  “Nice to see you again, Dylan,” she said. “I’m guessing that thing doesn’t have airbags.”

  Dylan shook his head and said, “Seat belts though. And it reaches a maximum speed of forty-five miles per hour when it’s going downhill, so there won’t be any drag racing, I can assure you of that. Strictly an around-town vehicle.”

  “Like a trolley car,” I added. “You’re not afraid of trolley cars, are you, Mom?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure what to be afraid of these days.”

  While I would have loved to shrug off her worries as typical parental jitters, how could I possibly do that? It was a tough time to be a kid, but, good God, I couldn’t imagine what sort of panic had overtaken our parents’ brains. The best I could do was redirect things with a joke. Only it wasn’t really a joke. It was more of a test.

  “Don’t worry, Momma Bear,” I said. “Dylan is only taking me to meet his three kids and then we’re going to burn down a convenience store or two.”

  She rolled her eyes. A good sign. She detected hyperbole.

  Dylan, on the other hand, rolled with the punches, which I wasn’t sure how to interpret. “That wasn’t the plan, actually,” he said. “But I guess if we have time, we can fit those things in.”

  Grumbling audibly, Mom accepted this all as teenage snark. “Be safe,” she said.

  Be safe. In the history of mo
ms, has there ever been a more useless declaration? My mom isn’t stupid, of course. She knows saying “be safe” won’t make me any safer. She knows that hugging me won’t make me any safer either. Still, she rushed over and hugged me because even if I wasn’t gaga for that stuff lately, and even if that stuff wouldn’t prevent me from blowing up, she couldn’t let me leave her sight without at least squeezing the ever-living fuck out of me.

  what to do on a second date

  The ice-cream truck bumbled down quiet roads on the western edge of town, out where things get all “are you sure we’re still in New Jersey?” I figured we were just driving around, going nowhere, because that’s what was discussed over text.

  Him: What ya wanna do?

  Me: Doesn’t matter. Getting out is enough.

  As we rolled along, our conversation started with the ice-cream truck’s origins. Turns out Dylan’s father drove it on summer evenings in the nineties to keep the farm afloat, a fact I found both noble and depressing. So I changed the subject to Perry Love and Cranberry Bollinger. Neither of us had known them well, but Dylan had noticed the incongruity I mentioned before.

  “Cranberry wasn’t anywhere near the school,” he said.

  “Hallelujah, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Young Mr. Hovemeyer, were you hoping our halls would be all Jackson Pollocked up each and every week?” I asked as Dylan guided the ice-cream truck onto a dirt road.

  “No, no, no,” he said with a furrowed brow. “But it seems like it should be a communal experience. Something we should all be going through together.”

  “You’re weird.”

  His response was a crooked smile and a “yeah, well . . .”

  Without another word, he pulled the truck over and parked in brown grass next to a hulking blue silo with a dent in the top that made it look like it had been struck by a meteorite. He hopped out and circled around to the passenger side—to open my door and help me down, I guess, but I had beaten him to it. I was already waiting in the waist-high grass.

  “We feeding some chickens?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said. Then he opened the back hatch of the truck and yanked out a green duffel bag, which he hefted over a shoulder. “Follow me.”

  The silo door wasn’t much bigger than a dog door, but the duffel fit through, and Dylan did too, twisting his body and snaking his way inside. “Come on in,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  I stuck my head through the door and I couldn’t see farther than the reach of the sunlight. A couple of feet at best. “It’s dark as hell in there. There could be raccoons with switchblades. There could be Jehovah’s Witnesses, waiting to pounce.”

  “Completely empty,” he assured me. “Besides, I have a light.”

  He reached his hands toward the door and I figured what the hell. I’d never been in a silo before, and while that’s not exactly bucket-list worthy, it’s something to do when you’re with a boy who intrigues you, scares you, and turns you on in equal measure.

  By the time I’d slipped through, stood up, and dusted myself off, Dylan had moved toward the center of the silo. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his echoing footsteps and the hiss of the duffel’s zipper. Any guess as to what was in that duffel bag?

  Samurai swords?

  The bones of an ex-girlfriend?

  Pie? Lots and lots of delicious pie?

  Wrong, wrong, and unfortunately wrong. You weren’t paying attention, were you? Because Dylan had already told me what was in the duffel.

  “Let there be light,” he said.

  White shapes erupted on the curved walls of the silo and the place transformed. From darkness, disco was born. Sitting on the floor was a spinning orb that shot out the light. If I had inspected it closer, I would have discovered that it wasn’t some fancy club or theater equipment. It was a regular illuminated globe, a miniature plastic world poked full of holes and mounted on a battery-powered turntable. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was, only what it was doing. It was showing me Dylan’s smiling face and his reaching hand.

  As I grabbed his hand, music kicked in, perfectly on cue.

  I knew the song. It was a song Tess and I used to sing when we were riding our bikes down the shore and dreaming of our future. It was a song that everyone in New Jersey knows. I suspect the rest of the world knows it too, and they probably make fun of it. Out here in the northwestern corner of the Garden State, we don’t ever pronounce it “Noo Joisey” and we certainly don’t appreciate all the uninspired cracks about “The Dirty Jerz” and “The Armpit of America.” And yet we will freely admit we have an irrational attachment to certain songs. This one was perhaps the most obvious example of that.

  Yes, I hate to break it to you. It wasn’t some obscure but transcendent indie track, or some dusted-off gem from the good old days that boys are supposed to play you to make you rethink the past while you fall in love with their musical archaeology. It was an enduring emblem of cheese. I’m embarrassed to even say the title, because it’s one of those eighties’ anthems where even the drummer sings on the chorus. But dammit if it didn’t slay me right then and there in that silo, ricocheting off the walls with all the light.

  “When my dad died,” Dylan said as he pulled me toward him, “I used to come in here and put on this music and I would dance by myself.”

  He was dancing with me now, slowly turning me against the spin of the lights. “That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve heard in my entire life,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I liked it. It helped.”

  “This is your silo?”

  “No. Bank owns it, I think. Used to be owned by a family called the Rogalskis. But their farm went bankrupt and they took off. Not sure where to.”

  “Do you still . . . farm?” I asked, which suddenly seemed like a weird thing to be asking a boy I was dancing with.

  “Dad had life insurance,” he said. “We’re doing okay without milking any cows these days.”

  As the chorus erupted, he dipped me slightly. He wasn’t the best dancer, but his moves were certainly practiced.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I asked.

  “Like I said, I used to dance in here all the time.”

  “I mean with another girl.”

  “Oh,” he said as he dipped me again, this time a bit lower. “Yes. I have. Does that matter?”

  It didn’t. His hands on my hips and my hands on his back, the pulse of the music, the ridiculous riot of light—that’s what mattered. But still I pressed things further, because that’s who I am and what I do.

  “Did you lay that girl down and make sweet, sweet love to her?” I asked, channeling the same muse that inspired Elliot Pressman’s ode to Cranberry. “Did your bodies entwine right here in grain dust and mouse turds?”

  “Not in the silo. We did things in the field behind it.”

  Crazy, right? No bullshit, no “oh baby, there’s you and there’s only ever been you”? Maybe it should have bothered me, but it didn’t. He was fully clothed and yet he was naked.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you asked.”

  Is that all it took? Okay then. “Did you really burn down the QuickChek?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Short answer: no.”

  “Long answer?”

  “Hell no. Keith Lutz is a pyro and brought me along when he and Joe Dalton wanted to burn some stuff. Always good to have a scapegoat on hand. A farm boy with a shitty father is a perfect one.”

  “Is the other rumor a lie as well?”

  “What’s the other rumor?”

  “You know. The doozy. About you having three kids and all that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know the rumor?”

  “I don’t know about having three kids. There w
ere never any blood tests that I’m aware of.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, and though I was tempted to stop dancing, I didn’t stop dancing because I was enjoying the dancing. “Did you take Jane Rolling here?”

  “She was my girlfriend. We did things together. That’s what you do. You’ve had boyfriends, haven’t you?”

  I have. Never for much longer than a month or two, but at the time I would have called them my boyfriends. Carson Sears. Patrick McCoy. L. T. LaRouche. (That’s right. I dated a guy named L. T. LaRouche. Do with that information what you will.)

  But me having a boyfriend was besides the point. There was a more pressing matter. “Dylan Hovemeyer,” I said. “Are you using the same moves on me that you used on some girl you knocked up?”

  “We also went to the movies,” he said. “We went to dinner. Are those things off-limits too? I wanted to have a nice afternoon with you. Isn’t this nice?”

  The chorus kicked in again. He couldn’t possibly have planned the timing, but goddamn, goddamn. Those lights did their thing, the music boomed, and it was nice. There was no denying it. As there was no denying this:

  “You’re a father,” I said. “A dad. I’m dancing in a silo with a dad.”

  “I’m only a kid trying to figure things out. Hoping that you don’t blow to smithereens.”

  For that whole time in the silo, I had forgotten all about the spontaneous combustions. I guess that says something. I had spent so much energy in the previous weeks trying to push those images and ideas out of my mind . . . when all I needed was a power ballad and a homemade disco ball.

  I was a little mad, a little confused, a little stunned by how things had gotten here, but mostly I was sharing the same thought. I was hoping to God he wouldn’t blow to smithereens, right there in my arms.

  And he didn’t.