Unforgettable Summer

by Catherine Clark

  “That’s what they all say.” Denny swings his wallet around like a lariat. He grins as he walks toward me. The metal chain catches on a drawer handle and nearly rips the belt loop off his jeans.

  “This is all your fault,” he says, trying to unjam the metal chain. “You’re one of those bad-luck kind of people, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m cursed or something,” I say.

  Actually, that isn’t far from the truth.

  How Am I Driving?

  I get off of work at noon. It’s only six hours, but it seems like the longest shift ever, maybe because it starts at 6:00 a.m. I’ve been smelling and serving coffee all morning, and I’m thinking I may never drink coffee again. Which is all right; I’ve never liked it that much—I mostly just drink it at IHOP because of the refillable pitcher. And a certain waiter.

  “There comes a time when everyone has to make sacrifices,” my dad said when we talked about me taking the Espress-Oh-Yes job. “And you have reached that time, P. F.”

  Other sacrifices in my life: I look after my siblings a couple of mornings a week, the days I’m not working at Gas ’n Git, while my mom’s at the radio station and my dad’s figure skating. That’s just the scheduled summer baby-sitting. That doesn’t count the other times I know I’ll be called on to help. And I have to turn over almost all of the money I’m making to my parents because I owe them for the car repairs.

  I’m taking the bus to French class, starting today, because of that certain IHOP waiter and because I can graduate early if I get ahead on my credits. I want to travel for a while before going away to college. I’d love to go to France and actually use my French, but since I probably won’t be able to afford it, I’ll start out just cruising around the States, checking out places I’ve been before and places I haven’t. My parents and I used to travel a lot, before we settled here. I was a world traveler, or at least a U.S. traveler, until I turned six. It’s very sad to contemplate that my life was more exciting as a toddler than it is now. I try not to think about it. I try to focus on getting out of debt and hitting the road.

  Of course, for that I’ll need a car. Which is also why I’m here, this summer, not working as a camp counselor like my best friend, Suzanne. It’s all about paying my parents back.

  I look up at the bus-stop sign, which has our town’s motto on it: LINDVILLE IS KINDVILLE—BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR! DON’T LITTER. There should be a garbage can next to the sign, but there isn’t. That figures.

  At school we have different versions of the town slogan carved into the desks and written on lockers, including: Lindville is Kind-a-lame-ville, Lindville is Stinkville, and Lindville Sucks.

  All I know is that it will be a happy day when I see that “Lindville is Kindville” sign in my rearview mirror.

  Because it will mean two things: one, I am actually driving a car again, and two, I am leaving Lindville for greener pastures. Which won’t be difficult to find, because we mostly just have brown pastures here.

  At 12:06 I see the Lindvillager, precisely on schedule, coming down the street. Lindville’s not big enough to have actual bus-size buses—we have the short kind, the type that you ride on at an airport when you catch a car-rental shuttle.

  The town had a contest to come up with a cute name for the bus system when they started it a few years ago. “Lindvillager” is the best they could do. The bus has fake wood trim, like it’s an old-fashioned station wagon. Unfortunately, the paintings of the cute little village on the side got obscured by giant ads for radio stations and restaurants, and just recently those got removed and replaced by a huge ad for July’s big annual event, the Lindville Rodeo Roundup Days—as if we could forget they’re coming in July.

  The pseudo-bus pulls up in front of me with a screech. When the door opens, I see it’s Kamikaze Bus Driver again. This guy has this route nearly every day, which worries me.

  He has no sense of speed limits. He constantly cuts in front of cars. He merges without even glancing in his side mirror. He takes off when a passenger’s foot is barely off the bottom step. He’s a Driver’s Ed Don’t. You know those “How Am I Driving?” stickers they put on trucks? Now I know why they don’t put them on Lindville’s buses.

  If my parents knew this was the person driving me around town, they would give me back my license and a car so fast it would make even Kamikaze Bus Driver’s head spin. Only I’m not sure if it could spin, because he has so much gray hair on his face and neck and such a long beard that it might choke him. He wears a peace-sign button on his lapel every day, and occasionally adds another sixties memento to his outfit via wristband or headband. The back of his uniform shirt constantly has this wet trail of sweat down the middle of it, which, unfortunately, is something you notice when you sit behind a person.

  There’s this sign over his head that says, YOUR DRIVER: ______. PROFESSIONAL & COURTEOUS. Kamikaze Bus Driver won’t fill in his name, because if we don’t know his name, we can’t complain about things, like how two days ago he raced across a railroad crossing to beat an oncoming freight train, right as the bar was lowering.

  But the really sad part is, that’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to me so far this summer.

  I have hope, though. For some strange reason, I have hope.

  I take a seat behind an elderly woman with a laundry bag, and in front of a guy with brown hair and a mustache, tight Wrangler jeans, and a T-shirt that says, FORGET THE WHALES, SAVE THE COWBOYS!

  I always sort of wonder how other people end up on the bus. Not that it’s a bad thing; just a curious thing around here, because most people seem to have their 2.7 cars per household, no matter what shape they or the cars are in. People just drive, and if they can’t, they get someone else to drive them. I think there are more gas stations per capita here than in any other town or city in the country. Hence the fact that I can get employed at Gas ’n Git. People need gas; gas stations need warm bodies to run them.

  Me? I’m on the bus because a week after I got my license in November, I crashed while turning into the Happy Hamburger parking lot. Happy Hamburger is the most popular lunch place for our school. You would think we wouldn’t want to eat burgers, since we drive past so many cattle in feedlots every day, but no, it’s like there’s something in the air that makes you want beef, because you don’t want to let the town down or something. We have to make sure the meat business thrives, because that’s where our parents’ jobs are, and if it dies, we all die with it.

  Anyway, that day freezing rain was falling and the streets were icy and I turned left while accelerating, which I found out later you’re not supposed to do, and the car started to skid. I couldn’t remember which direction to steer, whether to brake or not, so the car just kept sliding sideways. First we knocked over the giant brown plastic steer out front. Then we skidded right up to the Happy Hamburger and fishtailed right into the building.

  Everyone from school was inside, either in line or eating. Everyone saw us. It was so embarrassing.

  But then this amazing thing happened. Steve Gropher, who I didn’t even know then, came running outside to see if I was okay. Well, technically he could have been coming to check on Suzanne and her ex-boyfriend Rick, who were in the car with me at the time, but he ran right over to me. He was there in about two seconds and he said he’d seen it happening because he looked up from the ketchup pump dispenser just in time.

  I wasn’t hurt, but I was in shock, and I kept saying, “Oh, God, I can’t believe I just did that. Did I just do that? I can’t believe I just did that,” over and over, while he sat there next to me and someone called an ambulance and a tow truck and my parents. We were all fine—just some cuts and bruises—but everyone thought I was bleeding profusely because Steve had been clutching those little paper cups of ketchup when he ran outside and they’d gotten crushed in his hand and spilled all over both of us when he hugged me and tried to calm me down.

  I didn’t know Steve then, because he had only moved to Lindville th
at fall. All I knew about him was that he was a junior like me, he was a waiter at IHOP, and that he was very good-looking. So that was my happy accident, if there is such a thing.

  As far as my vehicular career goes, things went downhill after that. Of course, my parents wanted me to get a job so I could pay them back for the one-thousand-dollar deductible they had to spend to get the car fixed up. All the good jobs were taken, but I got this Christmas-season job working for Mr. Stinson at Western Wear Bonanza. He was trying to drum up business, so he rented this mechanical bull called “Rudy the Red-Nosed Rein-Steer.” If people could stay on the bull for fifteen seconds, then they got to choose a “Bonanza Bonus,” which was a cheesy free gift, like a bumper sticker or a bandana.

  It turned out that no one could stay on the bull very long. There are plenty of real, authentic, hardworking cowboys around here who could have stayed on for hours, and had enough left afterward to kick Mr. Stinson all the way to the food court. But most of them don’t shop at the Sunset Mall, so instead we got a lot of suburban customers with no skill.

  I was working the night shift one Saturday when Suzanne and some other friends from school came by. We were joking around, and I thought it would be funny if I put the store’s Santa Claus mannequin on the bull and let Santa ride for a while.

  It was funny. Very, very funny.

  Until I turned the speed on the mechanical bull up too high, and Santa went flying off the rein-steer and into the left-side front window of the store. The glass cracked and Santa landed facedown on Mr. Stinson’s “A Proper English Christmas” display, wrecking the plum pudding.

  Needless to say, Mr. Stinson fired me. “You are a retailer’s nightmare,” he said. “Have you no concept of responsibility? Move on, Miss Farrell, move on. I never want to see you again. Not even as a customer. You are a bad seed,” Mr. Stinson said. “A very, very bad seed.”

  Needless to say, Mr. Stinson is a little over the top. I didn’t like working for him and I was actually okay with losing the job.

  A couple of weeks later, I went to work for Bob’s Pizza. They didn’t care about my retail history, but they maybe should have checked into my driving record. I’m not sure I need to really go into it. Let’s just say that it involved a desperate attempt to match the competition and deliver pizza in thirty minutes or less.

  I totaled the car that had just been repaired. My father gave me some lecture about making the same mistake twice. My parents donated the banged-up station wagon to charity. And now I take the bus.

  So, I guess you could say that I don’t do well with steering—or steers. Part of the reason I took the job inside Gas ’n Git is that I thought it might bring me good karma, spending time around gas pumps and helping people in cars. If there’s a fuel god, I’ll pray to him or her. It can’t hurt.

  The Lindvillager pulls up in front of the school. As I start to get off the bus, Kamikaze Bus Driver puts his hand on my arm. “Excuse me, miss,” he says. His voice sounds like tires on a gravel road. In the rain.

  “Um, hi,” I say, pulling my arm away from him.

  “Next time you work at the gas station—tomorrow?” he asks in a gruff voice, his words emerging from the curly beard in a muffle. He doesn’t take off his octagon-shaped sunglasses.

  “No, not until next Monday.”

  “Okay, then. Monday. Bring me a large coffee.” He shoves a couple of dollars at me.

  The last thing this man needs is more caffeine, I think. But okay, whatever he says. My life can’t get weird enough. Now I’m taking coffee orders from insane bus drivers.

  I have to get out of this town.

  En français, s’il vous plaît

  On the blackboard there’s a sentence: C’est le premier jour de la plus de votre vie.

  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Or something like that. En français.

  Actually I think it’s the first day of Intermediate Semi-Accelerated-Because-It’s-Summer French. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, 12:30–2:00.

  I take a seat, and right away a girl who was walking across the school lawn beside me takes a seat next to me. We exchange awkward smiles. She has perfectly straight, long reddish hair and is wearing a purple tank top with a washed-out silver crown on it. I don’t know her, and I’m guessing she goes to Franklin. This is a combination summer school at Edison High, for students from all over the region. The teacher from Franklin, Monsieur LeFleur, is supposed to be excellent. Everyone raves about him, about how he makes crepes and teaches the geography of France with travel videos.

  I glance up at the clock. It’s 12:30. Where’s Steve Gropher?

  To take French—or any foreign language—in Lindville in the summer seems very bizarre. This feels about as far away from France as you can get. We’re sitting in a hot classroom with the windows open, it’s ninety degrees outside, and the hot wind is blowing smells from the rendering plant into the room. If you’ve never smelled a rendering plant, it’s sort of like spoiled, canned cat food that’s been left out in the sun to bake. Not that I’ve ever had a cat, but that’s what other people say.

  This kind of situation isn’t exactly covered in phrase books. Comment est-ce qu’on dit?: “It smells like death today”?

  I glance at the clock again. Now it’s 12:35. Where’s Steve? And where’s Monsieur LeFleur?

  A woman enters the classroom a few minutes later and quickly takes roll. This doesn’t make sense, unless Monsieur LeFleur is running late, or unless he is too brilliant to take roll and has someone else do it for him—a French secretary. Except that she doesn’t sound or look French. She’s wearing an American-flag T-shirt with a styleless khaki skirt and blue sandals.

  I look around the classroom as I hear names called. Steve said he was going to take French this summer, too. I could have sworn he said he’d be in this class. We talked about it a couple of times. But he’s a no-show. He’s not even on the class list. I can’t believe he blew it off. I recognize a few other people in the room from Edison, but I only know them vaguely.

  “Good news, class,” the woman says after finishing roll. “Your teacher, Monsieur LeFleur, is ill today.”

  People around me start high-fiving each other, and then the woman says, “Therefore, you will be doing quiet reading of your textbook for one hour, and then I will give you a quiz.”

  “So what was the good news?” the red-haired girl next to me asks. “Did I miss something?”

  The woman frowns at her. “The good news is that you might have gotten out earlier than usual if you hadn’t just been so rude.” She clears her throat and looks at her list. “Your name is, again? En français, s’il vous plaît.”

  “How can I say my name in French?” the girl asks.

  “You know what I mean,” the woman says. “Introduce yourself, en français.”

  “Jeu mappel Charlotte Duncan,” the girl says in a flat accent as she cracks her gum.

  “Charlotte. No gum chewing in French class.”

  “Don’t French people chew gum?” Charlotte asks.

  A few people laugh and the woman clears her throat. “The point is that you will be working on pronunciation in this class. You will be working on it especially hard. Gum and candy interfere with this important step. But never mind, for now—begin reading. I am sure that Monsieur LeFleur will be here for your next class. He has not had a sick day in eight years.”

  I crack open my textbook, and Charlotte leans over toward my desk. “How do you say ‘bad air day’ en français?”

  “Je m’appelle Lindville,” I say, and we laugh. It sort of makes up for Steve not being here. Sort of.

  Rooty Tooty, What a Cutie

  “So what are you up to now?” Charlotte asks me as we’re dismissed from class. Even though I just met her, for some reason I confide in Charlotte and tell her I want to go to IHOP after class. I tell her that it isn’t because it’s international and it isn’t because it’s a house and it isn’t because of the pancakes, though they are an excellent
side benefit. I explain there’s this waiter I know, who I kind of want to see, who was supposed to be in French with us. I don’t know why I’m telling her all of this. Pouring my heart out isn’t something I usually do. But she’s just so easy to talk to that before I know what I’m doing, I’ve confessed my need for an IHOP fix.

  “The waiter’s a friend of yours?” she asks.

  “Sort of,” I say.

  “You like him.” She nods knowingly. “Let’s go.”

  I’m so glad she’s going with me. Going alone seems sort of pathetic, although I was willing to do it.

  IHOP is very close to Edison High, which means it’s a huge school hangout. It’s only a ten-minute walk, but no one ever actually walks there. It’s just not done. Unless you’re me, and you can’t drive, and you have a desperate need to get to IHOP. Then you walk. It’s a horrible walk, but it’s my favorite one.

  Charlotte and I make small talk as we wait for a light to change so we can sprint across the street. There isn’t a crosswalk and there’s never a light for pedestrians. That’s just the way it is here.

  We walk past prairie dogs in a vacant lot on the side of the road, perched atop dirt mounds, chirping to each other. They’ve taken over fields like this all over town, and they keep building new colonies and growing in number, despite the fact that they’re constantly getting run over when they try to cross the road to other, more vacant lots.

  It’s windy and a few small tumbleweeds blow across the breakdown lane ahead of us as we hike through the brown dirt on the side of the road. So much dust is in the air that my eyes keep watering. The good thing about the wind is that it’s now blowing hard in an easterly direction, and the feedlot odors are blowing out of Lindville and into the next town. We export our bad air. Sort of the way World’s Worst Coffee Breath exports his bad air into Gas ’n Git.

  I glance up at the billboard hovering over us. There’s a painting of a giant black bull, with the initials IZ branded into his flank, facing down a couple of grinning rodeo clowns. DON’T MISS INSANE ZANE! LINDVILLE RODEO ROUNDUP DAYS—JULY 10–JULY 20. LASSO YOUR TICKETS TODAY! it says in loopy, brown rope-style script.