Photo by Simone Dalmeri on Unsplash
All I knew about him at first was that he was the son of a former NASCAR driver—a young badass villain straight from George Miller’s Mad Max, minus the black leather suit. How else could my father have referred to Chad when we first saw him shirtless outside Publix Super Markets? I laughed at my father’s description of him. At the time, I had no idea that Chad would become my first real boyfriend just a few months after he moved to my school. I was in the eleventh grade, and I wouldn’t learn long after he broke my heart that Chad had been expelled from a Jacksonville school for assaulting his science teacher.
Tevin, a good-looking boy—the leading scorer from the basketball team—was the only boy I realized was checking me out or had a serious crush on me. Tevin never forgot to walk with a fancy sway every time he saw me. He believed he had found the perfect way to remind me of his admiration for my natural, sensuous lips every time we met—old pickup lines from Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant’s movies that sounded like music on his lips.
Everyone at school seemed to know Chad was a troublemaker except me. Some of my friends assumed I was in utter denial or joking, even though I swore I had no knowledge of Chad being sent home at least twice right before the summer for instigating fights. Perhaps I wasn’t aware of this because I seldom noticed or cared about the tattoos on his arms or his blue 1970 Plymouth Duster 340, which I didn’t even know he drove until he ran a red light. He had caused my father to veer off the road that day, almost ramming into a palm tree. After all, my high school newspaper kept me quite occupied. I happened to be one of the editors who had been reading and deliberating between the works of our brilliant fellow student artists.
Back home, I’d get so caught up in my reading after completing my house chores that my father implored me to go out.
“Daaaph-neee,” he’d say while drumming his knuckles against my mustard-yellow bedroom door. “It’s the weekend, sweetheart. Party it up a little.”
A couple of times, Dad even charged himself with doing my laundry so that I wouldn’t have any excuses. One weekend, Dad carried me out of my room to his old Toyota Celica for my first driving lesson. By then, I was reading the twenty-ninth novel—part of a challenge I had taken upon myself two years ago to read as many books as possible.
Dad had a tough but great job. Perfect hours, too, from seven to four, working as a mechanic in his auto shop just one mile from the Delray Beach Police Department, where my mother used to work. Sometimes, I’d return home from school and find him pulling up in the driveway or retrieving letters from the red post-mounted mailbox surrounded by yellow jasmines and lavender flowers. Dad had kept that schedule for as long as I could remember—way before my mother fell in the line of duty as a police officer five years ago. I suppose he believed I was avoiding thinking about my beloved mother.
***
Mild sun, a blue autumn sky, no patches of clouds—it happened to me on one such weekend afternoon. It was a day unlike any other that I will never forget and live to recount to my kids and grandkids one day. Dad had left an hour earlier to get his usual comb-over haircut, and I was returning home from getting my nails done for my little cousin’s upcoming first Holy Communion. As I strolled into the driveway, I felt the soft breeze flutter my summer dress. The sight of the coral honeysuckles climbing the fence around the yard—and matching the color of the mailbox and front door—enraptured me with such tenderness; it was a sweet dream all too good to be true, except that it was real.
The second I stepped onto the porch, the Plymouth’s roar rang out, shattering the silence before Chad killed the engine and exited the car in his ripped blue jeans. With his left hand, he presented me with a water-sprinkled rose. Like a ballroom dancer, Chad took my right hand and spun me into his arms. The scene felt unlike anything I had ever read or imagined before.
Before I could speak, his lips kissed my left cheek, my right cheek, and then my lower and upper lips. I believed I had floated off the ground for a moment, feeling his tongue run its course against mine. This embrace must have lasted for about a minute, though it felt longer. At last, our mouths parted.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he said, his husky voice filled with passion. “I’ll be a good boy. I promise. Okay?”
I nodded, a part of me not wanting to know where he was taking me for fear of ruining a wonderful surprise. But then, his free hand revealed two movie tickets—The Notebook. He walked me to the passenger door, our hands clasped together. Just as I wondered if he had any idea how much I wanted another kiss, he spun me around and kissed me again before opening the door.
***
Chad and I talked on the phone the following week for countless hours. I lay on the salmon-pink sofa in my tight yoga shorts with my legs up, picturing myself in his arms while we talked. And we talked about almost everything: from happy movie nights with my mother when I was about ten years old to his parents’ divorce when he was in middle school, the muscle car that was a birthday gift from his father, and his dream of becoming a professional car racer one day. “You could say I used to think about mom a lot more when I was younger,” he said with a slight sense of sadness in his voice. I could tell this was the case whenever he mentioned his mother. From what I gathered, I believed the muscle car had brought him much more happiness than he had ever expected.
Chad continued to call multiple times a day. Then, the phone calls stopped. When I called back, the sound of a disconnected phone message traveled through my eardrums like a sudden, sharp crack of thunder. The back of my neck tingled, my arms stiffened, and my toes curled out of my flip-flops. Did I dial the wrong number, or what? I checked and rechecked. I had no clue that he and his father had moved back to Jacksonville until a week later when I took Dad’s car and drove to his house to check up on him.
The following day, I dropped my father off at work and drove to my best friend’s house around noon while listening to an R&B station with the windows down. Sandra may want to go to the beach or shopping or something, I thought. But the visit turned out to be a mistake. All I needed was a friend to talk to. I couldn’t tell what was more unpleasant: Sandra poking her small head out of the door and whispering, “Come back later,” because her boyfriend was inside, or the thought of Chad making out with another girl in his car. Back in the vehicle, I waited to start the engine. I thought perhaps Sandra would reconsider. Despite the stifling heat, I sat there with my chin on the window’s ledge and a vacant stare. The brown cedar brick pavers couldn’t be duller. I tried to picture Chad racing at some abandoned racetrack or getting a new tattoo, his arresting smile forever widening in the reflection of a mirror, with my initials DV imprinted in bright, bold ink on his chest. But no matter how hard I tried, such positive images only lasted two minutes at the most.
Then, I couldn’t retain anything worthy from my reading. I found myself reading the same passage twice, then thrice until I fell asleep. The last time this happened to me, Tevin was particularly flustered with me about a story in the high school paper in the fall of last year, claiming that I’d misquoted him on purpose. (Of course, I didn’t.)
“Don’t you think it might have been a lot harder on him to tell you he was leaving?” My father asked over breakfast one quiet morning that summer.
This was the last thing I wanted to hear. My lukewarm coffee and vegan bagel sandwich were left untouched. I was more interested in doing my crossword puzzle at the table, glancing now and then at the driveway through the casement kitchen window. Was I still naïvely waiting for Chad to call or show up? I imagined him pulling up in the driveway after a quiet little rain on a lovely afternoon in a slow-motion sequence: He exited his car in his black, tank top undershirt and strolled toward the front door while taking off his sunglasses.
To make matters worse, Dad said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. Well, maybe this whole thing was bad luck to begin with.”
I knew Dad was trying to be nice, but his voice was annoying, and the entire conversation felt impolite. He spoke with food in his mouth and avoided looking me in the eye. I suppose the constant sullen look on my face must have exasperated him. Sometimes, I’d force a smile for the sole purpose of greeting him while he browsed through the morning paper. But the smile would fade even before we could say anything else—me asking him for the crossword puzzles or him wanting to know if I had any ‘grand plans’ for the day. My brows would contract, my jaws would tighten, and my father would lift the paper so close to his face that I took this as a sign that he didn’t want my pout anywhere near his face for a kiss on the cheek.
“Come on, eat your breakfast,” Dad said, kissing my forehead before he left the table with his empty plate. When he returned, he grabbed the paper he was reading and ruffled my disgruntled hair, making it even scruffier. “It’s gonna be okay, Daphne.”
My countenance unbent for a moment with a half-smile because I believed his voice sounded much more earnest this time. Nonetheless, the more I listened to my father throughout the rest of the summer, the more relieved I felt: “I still think Chad was never meant to hurt you, sweetheart. Maybe he wanted to call but didn’t know what to say.”
Starting school in the fall, Tevin ignored me; his famous pickup lines were now a thing of the past. He wouldn’t even glance at me when I waved to him or said, “Hi, Tevin! What have you been up to?” I resented him for the way he disregarded my greetings as though he and I were in a relationship, and my brief involvement with Chad betrayed him. My promotion to editor-in-chief of the school paper helped with my grief more than I anticipated; I thought less and less about Chad running away from home just to be with me, the PlymouthDuster 340, his voice, his smell, the kisses, and the hugs, among other things. Eventually, I thought, maybe the entire thing was unreal. In retrospect, it occurred to me that I had not seen him a single night in my dreams since he had left.
Published numerous times in Drunk Monkeys, Soidenet Gue is a writer based in Florida with a penchant for writing about families. His short fiction has appeared in various print and online journals, most recently Whistling Shade, Washington Square Review LCC, and Twenty-two Twenty-eight. Currently, he’s at work on a short story collection. Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soide.fred/
