Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

There was a boy at home. He just wasn’t ready to say it yet. And maybe he was afraid. I mean, it was the devil who’d been invited in the first place. Maybe he was afraid that being the devil was the only way he could stay.

Being the devil made him a target, but it also meant he had a power he didn’t have when he was just a boy. People looked at him, listened to what he said. Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?

It’s not like anyone was coming looking for him. No mother showed up on our doorstep. No father either. Major newspapers from all over the country wrote at least once about him and various media outlets from TV reported on him in their local broadcasts, yet no one came saying they’d been looking for him and that he was theirs. No one came saying they wanted him back. Maybe if they had come and said that, he would’ve went with them. It was their not coming that kept his staying.

After bursting the balloons, we walked down the lane. When we came upon the Delmar house, Dresden stood up against the oak. I noticed her face right off.

She watched us approach over her book, Lord of the Flies. When I asked what was on her face, she answered it was makeup. In truth, it was construction paper, cut, trimmed, and taped into blush, lipstick, and purple eye shadow with long black lashes. The most unflattering was the pair of arching black lines placed over her own faint brows, giving her a sort of exaggerated madness.

She sighed like we were bothering her as she returned to her book and began to circle words.

“Why do you do that every day?” Sal asked.

“One should write in their diary every day.” She flipped through the pages, showing how circling a word here and there made sentences like, Today was not so bad, and I hate my leg.

“I’m no writer, but still I want to record my days. And books have given me all the words I need. I just go through and take the ones that belong to me for the day. I like having my life entwined with literature’s great tales. It makes me more—” She closed her eyes and found the word. “—significant.”

I tried not to stare at that leg. I couldn’t see much of it. She wore a long, flowing dress, one of her many muted floral ones that went below her ankles, but the leg’s silhouette was still there. Its unbending form and black flat, which went against the bareness of her other foot.

“There’s a pool in the backyard.” Her frizzy hair stuck out as if it too had its own life to seize. “You guys could go for a swim.”

We walked around the house, which was a large whitewashed brick, the white fading in places to the rusty tinge beneath. It had green shutters and green trim that matched the green bushes of the rose garden.

The heat would not prevent Alvernine’s roses from blooming. When the sun’s rays were too much, she would shade the roses by setting up tents, the kind used for parties and events. She would drape the bushes with dampened blankets to regulate their temperature, and she used fans, reaching from the house by extension cord, to keep them cool.

Each rose was so perfect and just like the next, they were almost unreal. Like they were machine printed. A garden of wallpapered walls. Later, we would come to learn Alvernine had been siphoning water from the forgotten artesian well at the top of the hill to keep her roses hydrated.

If found out, the well would’ve been seized by the town, and Alvernine would’ve paid a fine for breaking regulation. Worst to her, the town would’ve stopped her use of the well, and her roses would’ve died like most of the gardens in Breathed.

We still had our cannas, but only because Mom insisted we still water them, which we did so by driving to the river and bucketing it up, though the river too was getting low.

There by the rose garden was a sweeping inground pool with a diving board. Sal was looking down into its clear, clean water as he asked if he could go into the house. He had to use the bathroom, he said.

Dresden looked at the back door and frowned. “Mother doesn’t like … strangers in the house.”

“Is she home now?” I asked.

“No, she’ll be gone for the day, but still—”

“Please.” Sal stepped closer to her.

“All right. It’s, um, just through the back door there and … Well, here, I’ll just show you.”

With them in the house, I went over to the edge of the pool, where I dipped my toe in. The pool had been filled in late spring, before the water regulations would’ve made such a thing impossible.

“You can get in if you want.”

Dresden was back and looking at my bare chest. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not. It’s hard to be shirtless in front of a girl who may wish you weren’t.

The summer had tanned her usually pale skin and given her freckles their own sort of triumph.

“You can swim, can’t you?” She laid her pen and book down on top of the patio table. “Mother will be upset if you drown in her pool.”

“I can swim.” I headed toward the diving board but stopped when she asked if Sal was a nice boy.

“Whatcha mean?”

“I mean is he nice?”

“I’m nice.”

Her sweat wet the edges of the construction paper. Even the heat was trying to undress the clown. She certainly didn’t look like Dresden, the girl who in her simple beauty could make two boys give her the wind.

I brushed by her, feeling her on the back of my hand. Sometimes the briefest touch is the one that lasts the longest.

“Wanna swim with me, Dresden?”

“I think I might drown with you.” She said it softly, the way someone may speak of floating instead of sinking.

“I wouldn’t let you drown.”

“I don’t think you’d be able to help it, Fielding.”

I told myself she was wrong. That there was no reason for that sadness in her voice, because no one would ever drown with me. I would be enough to save them all, I said to myself, feeling confident in that great, big lie.

“And what if you swim with Sal?” I asked. “Would ya drown with him too?”

“Girls don’t drown with boys like Sal. They live eternity with them.”

I walked by her, didn’t brush her again, though. I returned to the diving board, not realizing I had said her name until she said mine.

“Yes, Fielding?”

The splashes of my cannonball reached her, but she didn’t shriek like other girls would’ve. She just stood there, a wetter girl than the one before.

I followed the cannonball with a few laps. By that time, Sal had come back, apologizing for taking so long. I climbed out of the pool, my jeans shorts hanging low from the water, the denim’s heavy fray splotched and matted against my legs.

“Why don’t you take your sweater off, Dresden?” Sal looked at the sweater as if he hated it.

“I’m not that hot.”

I could’ve laughed at her, at her sweaty forehead and hair plastered to the nape of her neck like an attack.

“You’re burning up.” Sal spoke like the soft spot of a hard truth. “And all because you’re trying to cover the bruises she gave you.”

“How do you know about the bruises?” She asked in a whisper.

Sal bit his lip with the fear all boys have of the girl they love. “I read your diary. One of them anyways. I didn’t have to use the bathroom. I found your room. I went to the shelf and picked a book at random. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. A lot of beatings for you to circle in that.”

“God, don’t you know anything about girls? You should never read what is still their secret. You … you…” She attacked him with slaps. I tried to break it up but got slapped myself, the happening like getting blood drawn by a thorn.