by Annie Harper
Copyright © Duet, an imprint of Interlude Press, 2015
All Rights Reserved
Individual Story Copyrights:
Beautiful Monsters by Rachel Davidson Leigh © 2015
The Willow Weeps for Us by Suzey Ingold © 2015
The Fire-Eater's Daughter by Amy Stilgenbauer © 2015
Surface Tension by Ella J. Ash © 2015
My Best Friend by H.J. Coulter © 2015
What the Heart Wants by Naomi Tajedler © 2015
The Most Handsome by S.J. Martin © 2015
Something Like Freedom by Caroline Hanlin © 2015
On the Shore by Rachel Blackburn © 2015
ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-36-8 (print)
ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-44-3 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934642
Published by Duet, an imprint of Interlude Press
http://duetbooks.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Book design by Lex Huffman
Front cover illustration by @Depositphotos.com/Dazdraperma
Back cover illustration by RJ Shepherd
Cover design by Buckeyegrrl Designs
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Contents
Beautiful Monsters
Rachel Davidson Leigh
The Willow Weeps for Us
Suzey Ingold
The Fire-Eater’s Daughter
Amy Stilgenbauer
Surface Tension
Ella J. Ash
My Best Friend
H.J. Coulter
What The Heart Wants
Naomi Tajedler
The Most Handsome
S.J. Martin
Something Like Freedom
Caroline Hanlin
On the Shore
Rachel Blackburn
Foreword
Summer is that “in-between” time when anything can happen. The days are long, long enough to reinvent yourself, to discover who you really are, to find the courage to open yourself to love. When we at Duet set out to publish our first collection of love stories featuring LGBTQ protagonists, we knew immediately that we wanted to set the stories in summer for that very reason.
In compiling this collection, we looked for examples of love that serve as catalysts for awakening to new ideas, new possibilities and new confidence. The stories we chose are about finding love in a range of its manifestations—from first love to the love that heals a broken heart, from platonic love to second chances.
Nine original stories from debut authors make up the Summer Love collection. In Rachel Davidson Leigh’s “Beautiful Monsters,” a campaign volunteer is assigned to assist his high school’s Gay Straight Alliance for the Pride Parade, forcing him to face the students he had previously avoided and the truth about himself. Naomi Tajedler’s “What the Heart Wants” explores the discovery of attraction and desire through a different lens: a young woman’s experience drawing figures in a summer art class.
The sweetness of a love forged in summer is present in three stories: “The Willow Weeps for Us” by Suzey Ingold, in which a young son of a grocer falls for a charming piano teacher on the eve of World War II; “The Most Handsome” by S.J. Martin, a story about a Cape Cod boy, recently out as transgender, who meets and falls in love with a college student visiting for the season; and “My Best Friend,” a young gay man’s letter to his childhood best friend.
In “The Fire-Eater’s Daughter,” Amy Stilgenbauer writes about getting another chance for happiness, when a local girl must choose between caring for her mother and running off with the traveling carnival to make a life with the beautiful and mysterious woman who stole her heart. Rachel Blackburn offers insight about a different sort of fresh start in “On the Shore,” in which a young woman retreats to her parents’ beach house to nurse a broken heart, but instead meets a vivacious girl who helps her find joy again.
Accepting and celebrating who you are and how you are different is explored in Caroline Hanlin’s “Something Like Freedom” about a boy who finds a safe space from which to imagine a new future after leaving his conservative parents’ home and in “Surface Tension” by Ella J. Ash, a story about a camp counselor who wants one summer where he can fit in without labels, but who ends up having a very different experience when he falls for the out-and-proud “head of canoe instruction.”
We are proud that Summer Love authors represent a spectrum of sexual and gender identity, as do their characters. Thought-provoking and brave, delightful and sweet, the stories in this collection will move and inspire. That a young reader may see himself or herself in these stories is our mission at Duet. That all readers see that love is love, no matter how you identify, is our greatest wish.
—Annie Harper
Beautiful Monsters
Rachel Davidson Leigh
Cody hardly feels the first blow to the back of his chair. In the seven weeks since he started volunteering for the Parker campaign, his office-mate Carrie Dodson and her boredom kicks have become his closest friends. Sometimes, when the donors aren’t picking up and the office AC dies, she wads up the used call lists and tosses them at the back of his chair, calling out points when she gets him in the head. Today, she works up a good rhythm before he finally pulls out both earbuds and looks back, eyebrows raised.
“Markhausen.” Carrie gestures toward his supervisor’s office door with one manicured thumb, her big blue eyes blinking under a cloud of bleached-blonde hair. “That’s still you, right?”
That’s when Cody hears a voice calling from the other side of the door. For a second, he isn’t sure what to do. For all the regularity of his presence as a campaign peon, he’s spoken maybe five words to the middle-aged dragon lady in charge. To be honest, he’s shocked that Judy knows his name. Judy doesn’t do names.
He stares at the closed door, eyes wide in confusion. “What do I—?”
“I dunno.” Carrie looks as surprised as he feels, but considerably less concerned. She glances at Judy’s office and shrugs. “I guess you go in.”
Cody nods and stands, like a robot in a seventeen-year-old boy’s body. There’s no way he could have gotten in trouble. A trained monkey could enter this data without breaking a sweat.
He pushes the door ajar with the pads of his fingers and steps inside to find his boss, the unstoppable Judy Gould, nearly buried under stacks of printer paper. He assumes the space at her feet is clear, but he can’t see anything except her head over the piles towering on either side of her desk. Until now, she has existed only as a passing blur of angles and three-inch heels, her elbows and fingernails slicing the air like knives, her lipstick the color of congealed blood.
“Cody!” She smiles and waves him in, already scrolling through something on her phone. “I was starting to think that those headphones had done something to your brain. Get yourself in here.”
He leaves the door cracked and hesitates before perching on a stack of folders piled atop a metal folding chair He focuses on balancing his weight, which isn’t easy when his feet barely hit the floor and his hands are slick with summer sweat. Judy, of course, doesn’t notice a thing.
“You’re in high school, yes?” she asks, glancing up from her phone. He nods and she barrels on.
“Here’s the deal. There’s a kid at St. Claire Senior High who’s been pestering me for ages about getting the campaign involved in ‘youth issues,’” she says with violent air quotes, “and I finally told him that we could ‘team up’ for a parade on Friday
. He brings bodies, we bring campaign signs and we get him off our backs for one more week. I’ll even throw in the markers for some artistic involvement.”
“So.” She stands, and Cody is reminded of a hawk before it dives in for the kill. “Since he’s a little shit who can’t vote, and you’re a little shit who can’t vote, I thought it was a match made in budgetary heaven. I know.” She grins, reaching for a stack of files in the corner. “Sometimes I outdo myself.” Cody wonders if, for Judy, “little shit” is a term of affection.
Judy pulls a piece of paper from the top file and waves it in his direction. “Apparently, his little club meets tomorrow. Go, be nice, and we’ll see you next week. Go team!” She raises her fists in mock encouragement, and Cody turns to get out of the office before the walls close in like the trash compactor in Star Wars. He has his hand on the doorknob when a chill runs down his back. Judy is laughing. Unless she’s literally taking candy from babies, Judy doesn’t laugh.
“Oh right,” she giggles, and Cody freezes in his tracks. “I hope you like glitter.”
Outside the door, he looks down at the paper and almost forgets to keep standing:
ORGANIZATION: ST. CLAIRE SENIOR HIGH GAY STRAIGHT ALLIANCE (GSA)
CONTACT: ANDREAS FURNEAUX
MEET: JULY 26, ST. CLAIRE SENIOR HIGH, RM 124, 11 AM
EVENT: ST. CLAIRE GAY PRIDE PARADE
No. Cody feels the blood drain from his cheeks. No, no no. Anything but this. He turns to barge back into Judy’s office, but he can’t go back in there. What could he possibly say? Instead, he drops back into his chair and stares a hole into the dirty white wall pocked with thumbtacks of campaigns past.
Just out of Cody’s peripheral vision, Carrie clears her throat. She gives a wave when he turns. She could pretend that she hadn’t heard everything in Judy’s office, but there really isn’t any point.
“I wouldn’t get worked up about a bunch of high school punks, babe. Do you know these kids?” He shakes his head. He doesn’t know them. He knows of them. He’s been avoiding them for years. “Well, don’t worry. Everyone loves a basketball star.”
She turns back to her double-wide computer screen and Cody nods. No. It isn’t like that at all. No one knows him at school. He’s fast, so they let him play, but most of the guys on his team don’t even know his name. The moment he steps off the court he’s just another white boy with blond, wispy hair that won’t stay out of his eyes. He’s invisible. It’s either that or be the runt—the short kid with eyes too big for his face—and given that choice, he’d rather be nothing at all.
Carrie peeks up over her computer to find him still gaping at the wall. “Get a move on, Markhausen. I wouldn’t want you to be tired for your big debut!” She grins, and before he can protest he’s shuffling toward the front door.
Stepping out of the Parker for Senate northern headquarters in St. Claire, Wisconsin, Cody squints at the mayflies buzzing under Monroe Avenue’s only streetlight. Concerned citizens had campaigned for more, but the idea was dismissed as unnecessarily indulgent. The lamp flickers under the pressure of beating wings, and Cody, the proud representative of the Parker campaign, turns to throw up in front of the door.
* * *
The next morning, Cody finds himself walking through the hallways of his empty school. His footsteps echo in long, dull tones. Without air conditioning, the building cooks in its own stale air; the walls sweat like a giant body in the sun and drip condensation into dirty puddles on the floor.
As he walks, Cody rolls a tiny plastic model between his fingers until he can feel the edges cutting into his skin. When he was thirteen, his aunt sent him a model-making kit in a gray box labeled WARMACHINE. He’s sure she had no idea what she was doing; she probably walked into the nearest game store and asked what to give a quiet child. Still, she did well. Four years and a hundred models later, he’s learned to love the details on a monstrous face. He sculpts wings and paints lips for hours, until his warriors emerge from fields of gray.
The models are meant for a two-person tabletop game, but Cody’s never bothered to find someone to play with. Instead he reads about each unearthly face in paperback guidebooks until he knows the characters as well as members of his own family. For years the monsters blurred together, until he found Kaelyssa: Guardian of the Light. In a game full of enthusiastic killers and team players, she is solitary and peaceful. She fights with terrible precision, but her enemies never break her shell. Cody wishes he could pull that peace from the pages of his book and wear it like a winter coat.
Instead, when the world creeps in, he rolls the figure in his hand, or presses it into his leg until he feels the sharp-edged wings against his thigh. On days like today, it hurts just enough to pull him back into his own skin.
Cody hears the meeting before he sees the room. He follows the wordless chatter toward a lit doorway. As he stands, willing the building to fall around his shoulders, a short girl with bushy eyebrows bolts into the classroom. As she enters, the room erupts in greeting. Cody can make out a boy’s voice screaming, “Girl, where have you been? I have been worried.” Maybe if he sneaks in now, everyone will be paying so much attention to her that they won’t notice him come in.
The entire room sees him when he slips inside, but no one seems to care. Cody isn’t half as interesting as whatever Bushy-brows is trying to say, and for that he is infinitely grateful.
He drops into a seat at a long table against the leftmost wall and stares at the crowd. This isn’t what he expected. He doesn’t know what he expected a real group of those people to look like up close, but it wasn’t this. Even with only twelve or thirteen bodies in the room, they’re making enough noise for a mob twice their size. A round boy with short blue hair and domineering hands sits on a table, gesturing to three blonde girls who seem more interested in trading magazines. A boy—or maybe it’s a girl—races to lift Bushy-brows in a rib-rattling hug, and they’re laughing before her feet hit the floor.
“How could you go without me, you traitor?” Cody stares as a tiny Asian girl with chubby cheeks suddenly wails in existential pain. “I introduced you to Adam Pascal. That was me,” she says, jabbing her finger up into the face of a tall, dark-skinned girl whose eyes are rapidly filling with tears. “I showed you the brilliance of his soul, and you couldn’t bother to tell me that he would be performing within fifty miles of my body?”
“Maddie—”
“Don’t. Just don’t.” Maddie slams herself into a chair with all the scorn she can muster. “I don’t think I know you anymore.”
“Mads—”
“Maybe I never did—”
“Oh, come on!” The tall girl drops into a crouch and glares into her friend’s face. “It’s been years. Literally. I thought you were over Rent.”
“Over Rent?” The boy on the table turns, aghast, as though she’s just implied that it is possible to be over running water.
“Butt out, Terrence.”
It’s all overwhelming, and Cody feels himself sinking lower and lower in his plastic chair. If he drops under the table and stays there long enough, maybe they’ll forget why they decided to meet in the first place and just go home. He pulls a pile of campaign guidelines from his backpack and starts to set them up around his body like a barricade.
Then he hears a dark chuckle from behind the boy called Terrence.
He jerks to attention, and it stops. He flips a packet on parade etiquette right side up, and there it is again—a low laugh that might be directed at him.
Cody leans all the way back in his seat to peek around Terrence and finds a thin white face looking back at him, emphatically unimpressed. From his awkward angle, Cody can just make out the boy who owns the face: long, thin legs crossed on top of the table, long fingers clasped over a thin chest. He tips back in his chair as if he owns the room; Cody wonders if it might not be true. The boy cocks his head at him, but Cody can’t stop staring. Somehow, the boy seems to take up more space than his w
iry frame should allow. As he leans, the loose ends of his jacket and T-shirt drop away from his body in points as sharp as the lines in his face and his dark, cropped hair.
The boy squints at the papers now piled in front of Cody’s face. “I knew it.” He nods, and the corners of his lips twitch in the hint of a grin. Leaning forward, eyes hard as cut diamonds, he whispers, “Watch this.”
Cody watches. He can’t imagine that he has a choice. Slowly, the other boy turns to the group, legs still crossed over the top of the table—and does absolutely nothing. As the seconds tick away, the boy crosses his arms over his chest and cocks his ear toward the group while the noise grows. Cody is suddenly reminded of a chef hovering over a pan, listening for the exact moment when the bacon starts to sizzle.
A minute disappears, and then two, and now Cody can’t tell one conversation from the next; the squealing sounds converge until he can’t bear to sit still. He opens his mouth to tell this kid exactly where he can shove his little demonstration, just in time to watch the boy toe over a stack of textbooks and send them crashing to the floor. The crash cuts through the room, and suddenly the boy has the entire group’s rapt attention. Faces peer from every corner, hands frozen in whatever gesture they’d been making when the pile hit the ground.
Impressive. And from Cody’s angle, it almost looked like an accident.
The other boy unfolds his legs and eases to his feet, impassive under the group’s gaze. As he stands, he crosses his arms delicately over his chest in a precise show of irritation.
“Good morning ladies, gentlemen and everything in between,” he begins. The tall girl tosses a pencil at his head, and he ducks it with ease. “I’m glad to see that you could all join me on this beautiful summer day. We have three days until the glorious crappitude that is the St. Claire Pride Parade, and do we want our presence in the parade to suck, Kaiylee?”
“No,” a voice calls from the back, like clockwork.
“No what?”
“No, André, we don’t want to make the parade suck any more than it already does.”
