I gathered up my food in one hand, suitcase in the other, and stepped back out into the blazing afternoon. It was only when I sat back down on the other side of the street and began tearing into my sandwich that I realized I forgot to check for the time. Oh well. My aunt was supposed to meet me at the station at 4:00, which couldn’t be too much longer. At least I hoped so. I’d never this aunt and uncle before, and Dad never talked about his family much. I wasn’t even sure what kind of car they drove, but I figured they’d know I was me because I was the only seventeen year old kid sitting on top of an overstuffed suitcase.450Please respect copyright.PENANAVC9jzdykW1
“I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for down here,” the man in the deli had said. Fat chance. I really wasn’t looking for anything except for maybe a summer of forgetting why I wasn’t at home. I finished my sandwich, mayo and all, and wished for the millionth time in the last two weeks that I could talk to my Grandpa one last time. Mom and dad were busy and my friends at home were all still just stupid kids; Grandpa was the only one I could tell exactly what was on my mind. Not that I wasn’t just a stupid kid also, but something about spending so much time watching someone slowly die aged you, I guess.
I shifted on my perch and felt something digging into my butt, which reminded me that I now had the cigarettes that I was craving earlier. I tore the cellophane off the bright blue pack and flicked it open. They were off-brand and cheap as hell, which is probably why they smelled cheap and musty. I dug the very center cigarette out of the back row and flipped it upside-down before sliding it back into place as the “lucky.” I then grabbed one out of the front row and lit it with one of the cheap plastic lighters I was always carrying around these days.
The very first drag wasn’t so bad, though it definitely tasted off for some reason. The nicotine effect was near-instant and blissful. I blew a thin stream of smoke out with a sigh and a slight cough, and watched the smoke dissipate in the harsh sunlight. I should quit, I thought to myself, glancing down at the neatly bundled cancer sitting ever-so-innocently between my fingers.Something about destroying my lungs felt appropriate, though, as if I were degrading my body to match the state of my mind, lately.
The aftertaste and the headrush hit me in the middle of my second drag and I leaned over and dry-heaved onto the concrete. The residual smoke tasted like sawdust had been packed in a septic tank before being rolled into what some asshole was marketing as cigarettes. I grabbed my stomach and groaned, dropping the cigarette on the ground still lit. The feeling took almost a full minute to pass and required the other half of my first bottle of Dr. Pepper to completely drown out.
I stared down at the cigarette on the concrete; it seemed to stare back at me with its ashy, glowing eye. The taste was awful, yes, but nicotine was nicotine, right? I firmly believed at this point that nicotine was the only thing keeping me from a complete mental breakdown.
I picked it back up gingerly between two fingers, closed my eyes, and took a tiny puff. There, that wasn’t so bad. It still tasted like ass, but at least it didn’t make me sick. I finished the rest of the cigarette in similar fashion, washing down the taste with soda between drags and concluding that these cigarettes must have simply been far stronger than the ones I was used to. I dropped the butt on the ground and stomped it out, vowing to find myself some Southern Cuts just as soon as I got to Gorham. I got up off my suitcase and dug out a bottle of cheap cologne, spritzing myself twice before pulling my shaking out each of my legs, trying to get rid of the pins and needles of the awkward position of my seat. Just as I stood up and stretched, a tired-looking late model SUV rounded the corner at a slower-than-normal pace and squeaked to a stop on the road right in front of me.
“Hey there!” The passenger-side window rolled down and I could see a pretty woman in her late thirties with dark hair, a sharp nose, and very green eyes sitting at the wheel. I didn’t even have to wonder who she was; there was absolutely no mistaking the lack of southern drawl and the physical resemblance to my dad, or even to myself. “Are you Ben’s son, Adam?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s me,” I answered, moving closer and hoping I didn’t reek too badly of smoke and sweat. I could feel the air-conditioned air from two feet outside the window and wanted nothing more than to jump inside, forget the suitcase.
“Oh, good! Sorry I’m late, traffic was all kinds of backed up on the interstate. I’ll pop open the trunk for you, put your stuff in quick, don’t let the cool air out!” She smiled sweetly at me and I nodded. I gingerly placed my suitcase atop a pile of miscellaneous junk in the very back and somewhat awkwardly climbed in the passenger's seat.
“You can just call me Marcy, if you want,” My aunt said with another smile. “My, you sure are my brother’s son, you look just like him!”
“Uh, thanks,” I said, unsure of how to respond.
“How was the bus ride?”
“Long,” was all I said. We sat in silence as she navigated the narrow roads back toward the interstate. What kind of things do you say to a person whom you’ve never met before?
“I was so sorry to hear about your grandfather passing,” she said finally, glancing over with a deeply sympathetic look. “You just say the word and we’ll give you some space this summer, or whatever you need. We’re here to help you put that all behind you, Adam.”
“Thanks” I said again, grateful already for just that. Marcy steered us up an on-ramp and up to the highway, southbound. “Pretty warm today, huh?” I said, trying to make light conversation so it didn’t feel so ungodly comfortable in the car. The air conditioning felt great, though.
“Oh, June is always so mild, I love this time of year,” Marcy with yet another smile. She liked to smile a lot, I guessed. I glanced at the console, which told me it was ninety-two degrees out. I tugged at my sweat-soaked shirt and watched greater Birmingham whiz by outside the window.
I could only imagine how the rest of the summer would be.
My aunt and I--Marcy, I was supposed to call her, which was strange to me without some sort of prefix--drove south on I-65 for almost an hour before turning off and heading northeast on a county highway for at least another hour, if not more. I wasn’t really paying attention to the clock because I was equal parts tired and distracted by Marcy playing seventeen years worth of Twenty Questions with me.
She probed me for information about my school, hobbies, likes, dislikes, and all that other stuff you catch relatives up on at the holidays, except this was a literal lifetime of information she wanted me to divulge, and I was too conscious of coming across as anything polite and amicable to try to lapse into silence. This was, after all, the woman who was generously offering to share her home with me in the face of a family tragedy. This thought made it all the more odd to me that, somehow, I had never met or spoken to my dad’s sister in my entire life.
We passed several little towns after we turned off the interstate, and Marcy seemed to know an interesting and pointless little factoid about every one of them. This one was founded the same day George Washington Carver was born. That one was named after an infamous serial killer. Each one whizzed in the blink of an intersection or two, a grey wooden blur on the green expanse of wooded hills that slid past outside the window. I could see the heat waves rising on the pavement on the crests of the hills and was once again grateful for the air conditioner blowing at full blast.
“So, Adam, what do you want to do this summer?” Marcy was asking after a blissfully long period broken only by a few random facts about a few random old buildings. “Our town isn’t too big, but there’s plenty to do. There’s quite a few kids your age, too, so you could make some friends!” This caused me to think of my own friends back home, who were the developmental and social equivalent of the Three Stooges.
Ryan Bellum, whom I had been friends with since middle school, was a short, scrawny little pervert whose obsession with all things female had been inherited from his five older brothers and no shortage of softcore porn magazines he was always trying to show me. Though overly-enthusiastic at times, Ryan was downright reliable and quite witty, actually. People called us George and Lennie when we were together at our high school, which irritated me just as much as it cracked Ryan up. No, I wasn’t retarded or anything, I just didn’t have much to say to people who cared only about matching their sneakers to their hats. Combine that with being tall for your age, and you’ve got a perfect target for teenage cruelty.
Dan Peterson and Danny Lenmar, though they shared a first name, could not be more different than one another despite a similar interest in video games and computers. Dan was your classic, pale and bespeckled dweeb who wore t-shirts that said things like “Got Code?” and “Einstein Did It Better.” Since his mom and dad had separated before we knew him and his mom worked all the time, we spent the most time at his house drinking way too much soda and doing absolutely nothing of importance. Conversely, we all referred to Danny as our “token black friend,” especially because in our suburban Ohio high school Danny was one of less than a dozen African American kids. By some miracle, he was the only one of us who had a girlfriend as well, despite his general hermitage in favor of spending countless hours buried in the deepest and darkest places of the internet.
Even just these three proved to be too much for me sometimes; I didn’t need any new friends. Especially because, come the end of August, I would never see them again. So I just offered Marcy a shrug and she smiled at me for about the millionth time in the last two hours.
What did I want to do this summer? I wanted to lay low and forget everything that had happened that spring. I shifted my gaze back out the window wondered how much further we’d have to drive. The sun was close to touching the tops of the trees to the west. I wondered if the nights were any more bearable than the days down here.
Probably not.
“We’re almost there,” Marcy said, as if she could read my mind. “Just about a mile more to town. John--my husband, your uncle-- should be home from the library by now. I’ll fix us up a late supper, how does that sound?”
“Sounds good,” I said simply without looking over. I could feel her eyes linger on the back of my head.
“You know, I’m sure this podunk little town in the middle of nowhere isn’t what you had in mind for your summer vacation,” she said, not unkindly. “I mean, that’s what I thought of this place when I moved down here. It grows on you, though, Adam. I promise. Your mom and dad thought it would be good for you to get away so you can start to heal. I can’t promise that you’ll love it here by the time you leave, but I can promise that we’ll do our best to take care of you.”
I glanced over at her and nodded, not trusting my voice around that stupid lump that seemed to form in my throat whenever something reminded why I was down here in the first place. Marcy--you guessed it--smiled at me and turned back to the road as we crested one last hill and a grey smudge of a town appeared to grow out of the trees in front of us, slashed in two by a lazy river that twisted and wound back and forth before disappearing into the woods on either side. We began our descent into the town and I couldn’t help but feel a feeling of great apprehension, like this insignificant ink blot on the map somehow held the secret to the crumbling facade that was my sanity.
Marcy switched off the A/C and rolled down the windows, blasting my in the face with warm, muggy air. At the bottom of the hill we slid by a decrepit, old wooden sign that declared, somewhat ironically, that we were now “proudly” entering Gorham, Alabama.
I rubbed my pocket unconsciously, wishing I could have another cigarette.450Please respect copyright.PENANARfTPiHYatW