by Amy Jo Burns
Reading Simon’s words gave me a smolder, a sign of life inside my crumbling cask of a heart. The sensation led me to believe he possessed the power to cure my illness.
Picture this: my body on a trampoline, brown hair floating and gleaming, dressed with golden highlights. The scene—Simon’s front lawn, all the guests at his graduation party shuffling back and forth from the food to the constellation of card tables. The yard was stuffed with people. I came with my parents because Simon knew everyone; everyone here knew everyone.
The trampoline, wide and black with blue skirting, stood shunted to the side, not far from the mass of cars, most of them American-made. When I arrived, I’d intended to shoot straight for the party’s nucleus, the head of the snake, and insert myself there. Simon would have to notice me then.
But the trampoline waylaid me, lounging in disuse while a few small children shyly felt its legs. The need to jump—to fly—gripped me as it never had during my short season as a cheerleader.
“Hey,” I said, bending toward a little girl circling the tramp’s perimeter. “You wanna fly?”
She giggled and turned her head to the side, bashful. I hoisted her up, setting her on top of the springs before kicking off my sandals. It was hot that day, and the grass caught in the trampoline’s shadow felt cool on my feet. After pulling myself up, I asked her if she wanted to play popcorn. She did.
“Tuck yourself into a ball,” I told her. “Wrap your arms around your legs and don’t let go.”
We set out, timid at first, a few light jumps that lifted her bottom inches from the bouncing pad. Soon we started to jump high, she and I, opposing forces. She flew when I landed, the nylon stretching and giving way beneath my feet. My pressing down propelled her upward. We both reached higher and higher, tossing each other in the air. She squealed with delight, hiccupping as she landed. The fear of falling no longer grounded me. After a year of wondering whether there was any hope left for me, a resounding YES thumped in my chest.
“Hold on,” I said. “I think we can get you higher.”
I dug into my landing. Sweat streaked through my hair. Higher now, higher. Our speed quickened as we turned jagged circles around each other. Just a little higher now. And there, finally. She flew. Really flew, her body limned in sky. We collapsed, giggling and staring upward. I sat up, and the world righted itself. The party still blazed on. Simon, from the heart of the herd, looked back at me.
I was my own solar system, this little girl my moon, needing nothing at all, just as Simon had said.
The following Saturday, Simon picked me up in his old jeep. The jeep was an extension of Simon himself, clean but rugged, primed for adventure. It purred in response to Simon’s hand on the stick shift. As we left my neighborhood and crested the hill near town, we sank back for just a moment at the light before hopping forward.
On an early evening in early summer, we rode with the windows down. The breeze had a sublime chill. It felt almost as good as a summer’s virgin dive in the Silver Pulley pool, which I hadn’t done for two years. With Simon at the wheel and my feet propped on his dashboard, lost sensations bloomed in my stomach. Hope, maybe. Or fear. I couldn’t quite distinguish the two. Either way, I was finally heading somewhere.
We waited in line outside the movie theater, and Simon bought us tickets to see Shine, starring Geoffrey Rush. We chose a pair of seats that creaked as we settled in. I sat to his right, and Simon rested his right ankle on his left knee so that our knees met.
When the lights faded, the speakers crackled like bacon in a frying pan. The film strip blinked. From the opening scene, the plot arrested Simon. He scooted forward in his chair and buckled over during the few funny parts, slapping my knee as he struggled to compose himself. His laugh flooded the theater. He clutched the chair’s armrest as the drama heightened, each fingernail stunted by an aggressive biting habit.
When the movie ended, Simon collapsed against the back of his chair. The abandon with which he viewed the film left him both exhausted and invigorated. Sitting beside him in an old, forgotten theater, I started to shed the parts of myself I thought were holding me back. I could be bold, defiant, and what I’d always wished to be but never quite was—steel-hearted. For the first time, I felt sexy because I felt like someone else.
“There’s nothing sexier,” Simon told me as we drove through town in his jeep, “than a girl who can drive a stick.”
I took my feet off the dashboard and sat up. An awkward pause swelled between us. I couldn’t drive a stick. Simon knew I couldn’t drive a stick. It was early July, and I was auditioning for him, still.
Simon tapped the steering wheel as we pulled to a stop across from an old, fenced-in graveyard. The jeep hummed.
“And if she’s driving in a pair of cowboy boots,” Simon added, “I’d be down for the count.”
I frowned. As if we were a pair of actors cast and recast in a series of films, Simon vacillated between moments of acute desire for my attention and an urgent need for me to realize that this thing between us was nothing more than ephemeral. One day, he’d put on the bad-boy persona, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who catches the pretty young thing’s eye. The next, he’d turn into an alchemic brooder, leaving me out of it. And my least favorite character was the paternalistic Simon. Not long after our first kiss, he told me how much he loved the song “Crash Into Me” by the Dave Matthews Band. When I told him I loved the song too, he recoiled. Simon’s attraction to me stemmed from his vision of a virginal girl, wholly untouched, and he didn’t want the truth messing with it. It wasn’t me he was drawn to, but his casting of me in his mind.
“You shouldn’t listen to that stuff,” he’d said. “That song is dirty.”
“Don’t tell me what music I can and can’t listen to,” I shot back.
Simon made me angrier than anyone I’d ever met, but I gave him my forgiveness so often because he knew how to ask for it.
“You’re absolutely right,” he’d said. “I’m sorry.”
I looked out the window. The light turned green. Simon shifted gears, and the jeep jumped forward. As the air moved through the windows, the tension dissipated. Though Simon’s riddles often left me confused, I relished the challenge, each interchange a spar for one of us to gain prowess over the other.
“You know I like you, right?” he said.
There it was, everything I wanted—his shimmering honesty and his disregard for the consequences of it.
“I like you, too,” I answered.
“You do?”
“I thought it was obvious.”
Simon smiled. “Just one thing, though.”
The engine idled. I grew nervous.
“I don’t like the suitcases,” he said.
“The suitcases?”
“Yeah, you know. The baggage. I don’t want it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m leaving for college soon,” he said. He planned to study engineering at a university close to Erie, a little under an hour away.
I sighed. “You think I don’t know that?”
Though this sentiment hadn’t surprised me, the words stung. I had thought his capacity for bold truths had drawn me to him, but these quick moments of honesty did nothing but repel us. We were better at playacting truth than we were at honoring it.
As we merged onto the highway, a thrashing wind filled the jeep. Simon sulked, and I fiddled with a strand of my hair. How quickly the mood had darkened.
Simon and I shared just one secret that summer, a confidence that tumbled out sideways during another car ride on another sunny afternoon. We were cruising around town, and we passed the courthouse where Mr. Lotte’s trial had been held five years earlier. The scandal had been buried without any apologies offered, and the town was still sick with some disease, still caught between amnesia and dumbness of the mouth. We need to put this behind us, people had said. For the sake of our community. But silence hadn’t been the antidote everyone had hoped it would be.
/> I thought of Mr. Lotte every time I passed that spot, an area known around town as “the diamond” for the way the streets crisscrossed around the courthouse. This was Mercury: a place I loved more than any other, a town where diamonds were only landmarks, a stretch of earth where it never seemed to thunder and lightning at the same time. Yes, I remembered Mr. Lotte, though I never pictured the two of us together. His face and body had turned amorphous in time, leaving behind a bitterness whose genesis I—still in my fugue state—could not determine.
As Simon and I rode past the courthouse, his eyes hazed. Shifting gears, he took a left turn and accelerated.
“I hate Mr. Lotte,” he said.
So skilled at keeping my own secrets, especially from myself, I said nothing. Still, Simon had my full attention. He pulled over to the side of the street and turned toward me.
“If I ever do anything that makes you uncomfortable, you have to tell me,” he said. His expression and tone were almost violent with urgency.
“You never make me uncomfortable,” I said.
“No.” Simon was insistent. “You have to promise me.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”
Simon could never make me feel fear in the way Mr. Lotte still had the power to. I saw him just once after the trial. He was walking through town with his wife. Just walking through town, not far from the courthouse, not far from where Simon and I now sat. That’s how it was in Mercury—your greatest joys occurred in the same spots as your worst secrets, and often it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
The day I saw Mr. Lotte, I rode in the backseat of my father’s car, headed in the same direction as he was, and I recognized the back of his head. When I saw him, shock coursed through my body, and it felt just like that day I sat on his piano bench and his hands began to wander. Instinct caused me to slouch in my seat, and we passed him by. Then I sat up, puzzled by how swiftly my body executed a command my brain did not give.
The regret of an untold secret was a merciless captor. How long I’d kept it, despite so many opportunities for release. Even Carly and I spoke about Mr. Lotte’s investigation only once while sitting in the last row of chairs after a Sunday church service. Side by side we sat, both in tights and buckled shoes.
She didn’t ask if Mr. Lotte ever touched me, and she didn’t ask whether I believed her. Of course I did. As a child, I was able to believe it had happened to her while denying that it had happened to me. Carly shifted toward me in her chair.
“Right after church today, I went into the hallway to get a drink of water at the fountain.” Her chin quivered. “You know Ricky Flagg?”
I nodded. Ricky Flagg was a kid about our age who went to our school. He liked to draw pictures and throw rocks.
“I stood behind him in line at the fountain, and when he was done drinking, he turned around and said, ‘I know what you did. I know all about you.’”
I didn’t need to ask, but I did anyway. “He was talking about Mr. Lotte?”
She nodded. “He thinks I’m a liar.”
My stomach twisted.
Carly rubbed her eyes. “I ran into the kindergarten classroom so he wouldn’t see me cry.”
“He’s just a jerk, Carly.” I felt my own tears beginning to form. “A stupid jerk.”
She sniffed. I just stared at her, unsure what else to do.
“Wait here,” I said. “Just wait.”
Planning to find Ricky, I ran to the hallway where the water fountain was. “Stay away from my friend,” I was going to tell him. “Or else.” “You leave her alone,” I’d say.
But by the time I got to the hallway, it was empty and the lights had been shut off. Ricky Flagg was long gone, and my attempt to make pathetic amends was thwarted.
Now, more than five years later, this memory was just one of many that built a barrier between me and anyone who dared attempt to breach it. Simon stared at me in earnest, as if trying to pull out an unrevealed truth not about me, but about himself.
“Simon,” I said again. “You never make me uncomfortable.”
He sighed. A few cars rushed past, and Simon turned on the left signal before merging back onto the road. We never talked about it again.
While Mr. Lotte waits to receive his punishment, those of us who stayed silent concern ourselves with parties and posing for photographs. We’ve graduated into the age of serial sleepovers and our first boy-girl parties, and we’re running wild with excitement. Hungry for a new sensation, we fantasize. Our little minds let us travel not beyond Mercury’s borders—our imaginations can’t reach that far—but beneath them, into other basements besides Mr. Lotte’s, into slow dances that crackle like the radio, into letting a boy sip from our plastic cups of orange soda next to a hanging bike rack and a dusty pile of free weights, into knowing what it’s like to stay out until ten o’clock at night. Oh, the fever it causes, and we are aching to get sick.
At every sleepover, we spend the first few hours in our pajamas posing in front of a Polaroid camera, pretending to be models.
“You totally could become a model in New York if you want,” we take turns saying to each other.
“We’re gonna do it,” says the shortest girl in our class. “Guaranteed.”
One girl wears sunglasses, a tight royal blue nightshirt and rainbow-striped tights. We all fawn over her tights and beg to borrow them. Another wears a XXL Paul Mitchell shirt that her mom got for free at a hair salon. It drags on the floor and her head can fit through the armholes. We pass around glittered Chapstick and headbands, pairs of sunglasses and cheap neon nail polish. We act like we’re posing for the click of the camera, tossing our hair and pouting our lips, but the camera is just a piece of plastic that allows us to continue doing what we do best—pose for each other.
After a while, we get bored with the Polaroid photos and start to chat. It begins with the normal things: boys we like, girls we don’t, summertime madness, and school-time blues. We spread out across the living room, legs slung on recliners and couch arms, bodies sprawled across the carpeted floor. But as we talk, we start to inch toward each other. We speak so softly that our faces end up in a bunch so that we can hear.
“Do you think he’s gonna go to jail?” someone asks.
“No way,” one of us says.
“Sure, he is. I’d bet money on it,” says someone else.
No one needs to identify who “he” is or what “he” did. Lotte’s former students never say a word, as silence is our method of survival. The other girls titter and gasp, and we listen with attention until someone’s mother sweeps in from the kitchen.
“Girls!” she speaks sternly. “What is this dirty talk?”
We all look to the floor and remain silent.
“I don’t want to hear another word. Do you hear me?”
We all nod, and the mother exits the room more slowly than she entered. She shuts the glass door that leads to their piano room—almost every home in Mercury has one. We can see it from the couch. No longer in use, the piano bench is covered with papers and magazines. Even the metronomes have gone silent, but their ghostly ticking lives on in the faces of wristwatches and the blinking lights of airplanes passing overhead. Tock tock tock tock. Piano benches across town wait for someone to sit on them, but no one is playing piano in Mercury.
For a few minutes we sit in silence before someone finally starts taking pictures again. No talking. We put on pairs of sunglasses and smile for the camera.
At boy-girl parties, talking is encouraged. Boys will be boys, and boys will be rowdy. They arrive in packs, spreading themselves throughout the basement in awkward clumps of sneakers and fresh haircuts. They smell like Downy and grass, as if all their basketball tournament T-shirts were first tumbled dry and then hung outside on the clothing line. The girls pair up to approach them, or go solo, if they dare.
The heavenly night stretches before us as we spy the cherry-red lips of every boy in the basement. If you think girls have the redde
st, softest lips, surely you’ve never seen the boys we know in Mercury. Looking at their buoyant faces, their ruddy cheeks, their sweating palms, we start to think that this is where safety resides. Our best bet is to find one boy to take shelter within, and we’ll do our best to find a nice one. Not a fickle one like the girls we know and know ourselves to be. When the time comes to play spin the bottle, it’s enough for us to just knock knees with the boys on either side as we all sit cross-legged in a circle. The empty two-liter pop bottle bucks beneath the force of eager wrists. It spins like a racing disco ball, catching the spark of the bright yellow tube lights above us.
Kissing one boy, two boys, three boys, four. Sometimes it’s just his mouth that touches us, other times we can feel the easy weight of his fingertips on our slender collarbones. It’s the innocence we love, the illusion of danger without the threat of it, the faint taste of orange pop on our lips when we pull away. We’ve already started to pretend that this is danger, or perhaps we never stopped.
Soon, the braver, bustier girls will challenge a boy to make out with her while someone times them with a watch. See, she seems to be able to say with her mouth without using any words. See how far I will go?
But none of us good girls would ever dream of going that far, so we sit on the couch away from the action, or wait at the window for the coming headlights of our parents’ cars. The clock is about to strike ten, and our time with the Rust Belt cowboys will be over for the night. Still, we can’t help but be mystified by these brash girls, so unashamed of their youthful sexiness, able to French-kiss a boy and not think twice about it. We can’t help but wonder—if we ever went that far, or farther—what kind of girl, then, would we be?
Understudy
