The Definitive Collection of American Poetry.
The title was written in plain black script upon a grey cardboard cover, modest and unassuming. I wasn’t quite sure what compelled me to pick it from all the dozens of books John put before me. Maybe it was just that: between fancy leather bindings and gold embossed lettering, here was this cardboard thing, looking more like a textbook than anything else. It wasn’t terribly thick, but the spine was stiff and crinkled slightly when I thumbed through it, so I was pretty sure it had never been read before. I thanked John once again and retreated to my bedroom to get the slightly rumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter from my bag before quietly slipping out the front door and into the deepening twilight.
The view from the porch earlier lured me around to the back of the house where I was sure I could get lost among the trees and have a smoke in peace without fear of being caught. I wound my way between thick old trunks of what looked like fruit trees. Long, thin whips of grass snatched at my ankles as I dug a cigarette out of my pack and lit it carefully, being extra mindful not to take a deep drag. Once again, the dry and sour taste made me gag a little, but the rush of smoke instantly made me feel a little better, like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I sat down on the bank of the river, whose murky grey waters slid by with hardly a whisper, and smoked my way through two whole cigarettes without even opening my book. I flicked my second cigarette but into the water and watched it bob helplessly along until it joined the first in a clump of grass and leaves a few feet downstream.
“I might have a problem,” I said out loud with a sigh as I began fishing in my pocket for another.
“And what’s that? Littering?”
The voice that came from the darkness made me jump so badly I slipped down the bank and plunged one leg into the water up to my knee. I scrambled backwards, feeling embarrassed, terrified, and confused all at the same time. I whipped my head to the left and the right, trying to figure out the source of the voice, which just laughed from somewhere behind me.
“I’m up here.”
My eyes followed the length of a gnarled tree trunk behind me, up into the lower branches where I could just make out someone’s form against the dark background. “You scared the shit out of me,” I complained, rubbing my chest in the spot where my heart was threatening to pound itself straight out of my chest. My thoughts flashed briefly to murderers and assassins who lurk in the dark, but I figured that if the person were a serial killer or something that I would already be dead.
“Good,” the voice laughed again. It was a female voice, probably a teenager, accent smooth and subtle like John’s, but somehow much more… seductive, I guess. “What’re you doing, throwing your cigarette butts in the water like that?”
“My bad,” I mumbled, feeling my face turn red. “I’m not a litterer, I swear.” I wasn't usually. Cigarette butts just seemed like the kind of thing that didn’t actually count as littering. I strained my eyes to try to make out the face of my accuser, but she was well hidden behind some branches. A flashlight clicked on and blinded me immediately. I blinked up into the light, captivated for some reason.
“I was wondering why I didn’t recognize your voice,” the voice said. “You must be the Beecher’s nephew.”
“How’d you know that?” I asked, trying to shade my eyes with one hand. The flashlight clicked off and I could hear the scrape of something on bark before the person swung down and landed in the grass with a soft oof. I tried to blink the white spots out of my eyes, but even those couldn’t stop me from staring into face of the most beautiful girl who I had ever seen in real life.
Maybe it was the way she carried herself. Maybe it was the huge hazel eyes, or even the mess of sun-bleached blonde hair that spilled over her shoulders like she just didn’t care. Maybe it was the jean shorts, maybe it was the oversized grey Coldplay t-shirt that dipped down just low enough, or the dirty orange flip flops that revealed ten vibrantly green toenails. Whatever it was, it instantly made my palms sweat a little and my breath catch in my throat.
“It’s a small town; there’s no such thing as secret in Gorham,” she said with a wry smile, and sauntered down the bank so she could pluck the two cigarette butts out of the water. She inspected them carefully in her delicate hand and glanced back at me with a disgusted face. “You smoke Westons? Do you even have tastebuds?”
“That’s, uh, that’s all I could find in Birmingham,” I said, running a hand through my hair and thanking myself for deciding to take a shower upon arrival.
“Oh, Birmingham,” she said with a mock air of fondness as she marched back up to me and shoved the butts into my hand. “Don’t you just hate that place?”
“It wasn’t that great,” I said, feeling her fingers brush against my skin more than I felt the soggy garbage in my palm. I felt that awkward silence coming, the one where guys who could actually talk to girls would know what to say. Me, being one who definitely could not talk to girls, would probably just shift uncomfortably and sway on the spot until she inevitably left. They always left.
“You know, you better be careful wandering around the river in the dark,” the girl said in low voice. “There’s gators in the creek.”
“Seriously?” Something about her tone made me doubtful, but you never know. Last thing I wanted was to die in the jaws of a giant reptile in this godforsaken little heat sink. I stepped back a little from the bank and she laughed.
“Nah, I'm just messing with you. Only think you've got to worry about are the snakes.”
“What kind of snakes?” I asked, squinting down at the grass. We had garter snakes in our garden at home in Ohio, but not much else. I wasn't a fan of snakes.
“The kind that wear lipstick or boots and talk shit about you behind your back,” she said with a gleam in her eye. I gathered that this girl might not have been the most popular in school. Not that it mattered. I had all of three friends myself. “What’cha reading?” She asked me after just a half second of silence.
I blinked, surprised. I must have looked confused, instead, ‘cause she pointed down at my left hand, where I was clutching the book of poetry for dear life. I just sort of stared at her blankly, so she reached down and gently tugged the book from my hand so she could read the title out loud. “The Definitive Collection of American Poetry, huh? By whose standards?” I shrugged and she thumbed open the book. “Robert Frost, huh? Not bad.”
“Overrated,” I blurted out without thinking. The girl gave me a sideways look and her lips twisted into a grin.
“Not one for the classics? Man, you’ve got shitty taste in writers and cigarettes!” She threw back her head and laughed what I can only describe as a golden laugh, one of those laughs that was self-possessed and made you smile when you heard it. I wanted to say that it wasn’t that I didn’t like Frost, it was just that he was overrated, in my opinion. I didn’t say that, though, because I was too fascinated watching her slender fingers deftly flick from one page to the next. There was just enough light left to make the whole scene seem surreal and extraterrestrial, like a dream or something. She looked up and me and noticed me watching, so I darted my eyes over to the river and pretended to be interested in the water. “What’s your name, kid?”
It was the second time I had been called a kid today and this time I felt a twinge of annoyance. She couldn’t have been much older than me if she was, in fact, older than me. “Adam Ellis,” I said, regardless.
“Adam Ellis. I like that. That’s a good name.” I felt a little self-conscious that she felt so familiar with me. Maybe that was just people from the south, though. The girl smiled at me and handed the book back to me. “You're awfully quiet for a Northerner.”
“What do you mean?”
“I always assumed that folks up north were loud and obnoxious, always pushing people out of their way and everything,” she explained, flopping down on the grass and leaning back on her elbows. She looked up at me innocently, as if daring me to join her. I stayed standing.
“I think you're thinking of New York or something,” I said, trying not to look at her face too much because, at the angle I was standing, I could sort of see down her shirt. Not really, 'cause it was dark out, but still. I didn't want to be a creep.
“Maybe I am,” she said, pursing her lips. “Where are you from, Adam Ellis?”
“Ohio,” I said automatically. She made a face.
“What the hell happens in Ohio?”
“People die.”
It just sort of rolled off my tongue. I was rubbing the spot on my wrist absently and that's what popped into my head. I immediately felt a little sick and expected her to recoil in disgust, or make an excuse to leave, or something, but she didn't. I mean, just blurting something like that out makes you creepy, right? She just leaned there with those long tan legs splayed out in the grass and looked up at me with those big hazel eyes, more curious than concerned.
“Why, yes, I suppose people die in Ohio,” she said without missing a beat. “They die here in Alabama, too. But we haven't laughed nearly enough to talk about that yet.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, pretty shocked that we were still having a conversation, let alone that it seemed to be going pretty well. I don't know. I'm a terrible judge of the effectiveness of social interaction. Case and point.
“Laughter is foreplay for death,” she said with a grin, nimbly picking herself up off the ground and brushing her hands off on her shirt. “If you want to talk about death, you've got to take me to dinner first.” I opened my mouth, completely unsure of how to match that level of confidence and, lets be honest, raw sexuality. “It was nice to meet you, Adam Ellis, but I’ve got to get going.” She said finally, taking a step back and sort of giving me a once-over with her eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”
“Maybe,” I said. Without further ado, she turned around and stalked off into the darkness. It was hard not to notice that she had stuck her flashlight in the back pocket of her short jean shorts because that was where her butt was and despite my feeling like I was forty sometimes, I was still a teenage boy. My heart just about stopped when she whirled around about twenty yards away and cocked a hand on her hip.
“Hey, Adam Ellis!” She called, voice echoing across the grassy way in an almost haunting way.
“What?” When I called out back, it was much quieter.
“Do you know anything about Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“The writer?” Of course she meant the writer. How many other Ralph Waldo Emersons were there? As luck would have it, I had actually done a unit on Transcendentalist writers in my English class that fall. Emerson, of course, was rather important to Transcendentalism. So I yelled “Yeah, I think so!”
“I need your help, then, Adam Ellis!” She yelled, back-pedaling away.
“With what?” My voice cracked a little as I yelled and I hoped she couldn’t tell. Whatever she said was mostly drowned out as she turned away and jogged alongside the riverbank, but I did manage to catch the words “meet,” “library,” and “ten.” It took me a few moments to guess that she was telling me to meet her at the library at ten the next morning, but she had disappeared by the time I opened my mouth to ask her why on earth she wanted the gangly new kid who littered, sweat too much, and had shitty taste in both writers and cigarettes to meet her anywhere, let alone a library.
Speaking of cigarettes, I finally exhumed that third one out of my pocket and began puffing away, trying to wrap my head around what had just happened. I wasn’t the kind of guy hot girls talked to. Hot girls from Ohio definitely didn’t give a shit about Frost, or Emerson, or even reading, really. I looked down at the book in my hands and saw that one page had been dogeared on the bottom corner. I opened it to find Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.
“Totally overrated,” I said out loud to myself. I finished my cigarette and put it out on a rock. The butt joined the other two in my pocket and I began wandering back toward the house, squinting in the almost nonexistent light to read the poem for what must have been the tenth time in my life.
I was able to sneak back inside and slip into my bedroom undetected; it seemed that John and Marcy had gone to bed already. I stripped down to a pair of basketball shorts and a white t-shirt before resting the poetry book on the bedside table and collapsing onto the bed, noticing with a huge yawn just how exhausted I was. I didn’t even bother getting under the covers before sleep began to overtake me and all I could see was that girl’s face, frozen in a laugh, etched on the backs of my eyelids.
Just before I fell asleep, I realized with a jolt that I didn’t even know her name.
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