The Hottest Summer I Can Remember

Anyone here ever had a crush on their best friend?--Hands up in the back of the room? Now how many of you have been so completely head-over-heels about your best friend that it's been the silent, unspoken demise of three good relationships over eleven years? How many of you can see their face every time you close your eyes, despite careful and intentional avoidance of their social media pages? How many of you haven't seen your best friend in nearly eight years? How many hands do we still have raised, back there?--None?

Well, that's where we begin this story. Wait--actually we begin this story twenty-one years before that, but the story will get there, eventually. Our story begins in a little town called Arden-on-the-Severn. It's a little backroad community at the eastern end of the Cypress Branch, a large tributary off the Severn River that splits off into dozens of sleepy little streams. If you follow one of the those streams, right through a long patch of oak trees and through three fields, around the back of one white-porched house, and down the side of a little dirt road, you come to Arden-on-the-Severn. It's a sleepy little town, with sleepy little rivers, sleepy little houses, and--for the most part--sleepy little people. It had always been little to me, even when I was barely tall enough to see passed my mom's waist in the grocery-store line, standing up on my tippy-toes to see over the wooden counter to where an old woman, Ms. Bingam, counted out coins into the liver-spotted and aged-line crook of her hand.

My name is Margerie Saint-Claire. Somewhere around here is a road that's named after my great-grandfather, who was long gone before I was born. It was right there, standing in the hot summer air at the young age of eight and a half, that I first met Gareth Wayne Thompkins; all these years later, his name still fascinates me, because it just sounds like a collection of first names all strung together. Today, right now, I can still remember the first time that I saw him. I was pushed up on the toes of my yellow-white running shoes, my fingers hooked over the wooden counter, watching Ms. Bingam sorting produce into a collection of tall paper bags while my mother made small-talk with her. How unseasonably hot the end of this summer had been, how the rivers had all but disappeared, how gas prices were on the rise once more. Gareth had come in through the door, and I'd only noticed because the little bell above the door had chimed; a sound that I loved coming to the grocery store as a child to hear. It sounded like windchimes, but shorter. Ting-ting.

I'd never been a shy kid--I wasn't reserved; I had plenty of friends, and the kind of energy you normally only get by stretching an elastic band really hard between your fingers. Like one little slip and wham, I'd be off. Trouble, my grade-school teachers had said. Despite that, I remember shifting slightly behind my mother's legs as Gareth came into the grocery store, his little arms swinging on either side of a plaid, short-sleeved, buttoned-up, blue-white shirt.

He was a miniature of his father, who had come in two steps behind him. As if somebody had taken the larger man, with his dark hair slicked back from a broad forehead either by pomace or sweat from the ninety-eight degree summer heat, and in a photoshop editor, simply dragged down one corner of the image. Gareth didn't have the height; in fact, he was pretty short even for an eight year-old boy, a couple of inches shorter than even me, but everything else was right there. The wide shoulders, the square jaw, the steady dark eyes that seemed to take in everything all at once--they were even dressed similarly. Not matching outfits or anything tacky like that, but just jeans and belts and off-blue button-ups. I'd never seen these two in Arden-on-the-Severn, and with how few new people I'd met in my life, I thought that was pretty special at the time. I still think it's pretty special, I suppose.

The first time I really met Gareth was biking down the long dirt path--it's been paved these days, but it had been little more than a ten-foot stretch of dirt back then--of Evergreen Road toward Homestead Lane, near Cypress Branch. I lived on Oak View Drive, which ran adjacent to it, in a little house tucked in near the forest. Gareth was sitting on a swing, which had been roped to the lowest branch of a golden-leafed maple tree. His house was a one-story bungalow; the white-walled paint slightly weathered, the ornamental shutters painted oaky brown, the driveway only a collection of heavy pavement slabs running through the yellow-green lawn up to a jutted-out veranda that served as a garage. His father's truck, a low-riding GMC that matched the shutters in color, was parked underneath the overhang.

"Hey--!" I heard his high voice call out, as I sped by. Pulling up short in a way that sent a plume of dust out from the back wheel of my three-speed, I glanced back over my shoulder.

He was hopping down from the swing, doing a little jog toward the side of the road. Walking my bike over to meet him half-way, I stood with it slanted underneath me. He gave me the kind of lopsided grin that's most usual on young children, but which I know from pictures that Gareth has managed to hang onto well into his late-twenties. It's that grin I remember, most often. Tucking his hands into his pockets, he kicked a toe where the edge of the sparse grass met the long dirt road.

"I saw you in the grocery store," he pulls a hand out of his pocket and sticks it out toward me, "I'm Gareth."

I shake his hand, awkwardly, "Mary." I reply, "Well Margerie, but that's my grandma's name and everyone calls me Mary, or Gie-gee."

"Gie-gee," he gives me that grin again. I barely notice that a couple of his teeth are a bit crooked, or that he's missing one of the bottom ones, "I like that. Where are you going, Gie-gee?"

"To the river. I like to throw sticks into it and then see how far they go before they get struck."

For those who haven't grown up in a small town, that might seem like saddest, most time-wasting activity you can imagine. All I can tell you is that... you're right. You're absolutely, totally right.

But that doesn't matter when you're eight years old and you've only seen the outside of Arden-on-the-Severn for the hours of family gatherings. To me, this was a riveting activity. I could spend hours, every day of the summer, watching little bits of branch float down the sleepy little river until they inevitably got trapped by a fallen branch or a collection of rocks, or just the side of the river itself. Then I would hike back to the end of Evergreen and start the whole thing over again. Evidently, Gareth thought the same.

"Fun! Can I join you?" He asks.

"Okay," I mumbled, feeling suddenly and unexplainably shy.

"Thanks," he fell into step beside me as I stepped over the side of my bike and proceeded to walk beside it down the edge of the dirt road. Immediately, he fell into a one-sided conversation about how he'd come to end up in Arden-on-the-Severn and that he hadn't made any real friends yet because school hadn't started and that he missed his old apartment in New York and that--

Long story made very short, Gareth and I became fast friends over the course of six hours spent racing our sticks down the river. For the first ten minutes, I felt awkward about the little man-looking boy who stuck to my side, but once the sticks started going and we both started running, cheering and throwing up our hands when our sticks got stuck, everything changed. His father tore a strip off us, at the end of the day. We both kicked our shoes at the end of the driveway as Mr. Thompkins explained--quite calmly, thinking back on it, but in what felt like an angry tirade as children--how we couldn't just go romping off through the woods without a word to anyone. I felt quite stricken at the time, as I turned to make my way back home.

I figured that was the end of Gareth and I going down to the river. But then, as his father led him away by the wrist up their short pavement-blocked driveway, he turned back over his shoulder and give me a little, friendly wink. Entirely friendly. Like we now had a secret that nobody else could possibly know about--and then he had me. I didn't know it at the time, but looking back on it I know. That's when I fell head-over-heels in love with Gareth Thompkins; his short black hair pulled back from his face, one eye dropping down in a conspiratorial wink over a round cheek.

His mother had passed away, two years earlier. She'd been a senior medical officer on a battleship somewhere, the SS-something. I thought that was the coolest thing, and Gareth agreed with me. He didn't talk about her very much, and I didn't like how quiet his voice got when he did, so I tried not to bring her up. Or even to talk about my own mother very much, when we were together. His father, who I knew only as Mr. Thompkins, worked as a physical therapist. I always thought that's why there was a different woman sitting in the living-room, each time I went over there. Now, thinking back on it, I realize that was probably only part of the reason. There was some kind of drama in his father's family, and that's how they had come to end up in the back-end town of Arden-on-the-Severn.

Now I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here. What's important to know: Gareth and I went back to the river the next day, and the day after that. And the day after that, he came back to my house afterwards and my mother served us shrimp that had to be picked apart with your fingers, and kind of spicy cheese, and crackers, and iced tea. If she knew that her daughter had an innocent, childish crush on the dark-eyed boy who sat politely on the swinging metal bench on our back porch, she didn't give anything away.

"What a sweet boy," she said as the screen door swung closed behind him.

What a sweet boy. I can still hear those words, in the back of my mind.

We went to elementary school together, as the summer came to a close. We were in the same grade, obviously. Like Gareth had promised, in that first rush of information upon meeting, he made friends immediately. Well--made friends might be a bit strong. He collected friends. The teachers should have called him a little terror, but they didn't; instead, they seemed as dumbfounded as the rest of us by this man who had accidently found himself in an eight- year-olds' body. He picked up the nickname hey-now, because those were the words I heard most often when we were together. From teachers, and our parents', and neighbors, and security guards: "Hey, now!--come down from there, get off of that, don't go in there, watch yourselves. Hey, now! Gareth's friendships were real, but they were only that. I can't remember him ever having a best friend--besides maybe me, or showing interest in somebody romantically, or even having really spoken of what he felt about other children. He told me what they did. He never told me how he felt about it.

The only person he seemed different around was me. People noticed it. When he came over, in the years that followed, my mother began considering him in a different way than she had previously. Her green eyes followed us from behind the screen-porch door as we sped away on our bicycles, down the dirt road toward the river.

One night, I heard my parents fighting. They didn't fight often, but when they did it was barn-burning. They always went outside to do it, tucking themselves away behind the garage where they thought I couldn't hear them. I sat on my bed, eleven years old, listening to their voices drifting over the lukewarm spring-summer air. I could only catch a couple of words, every once and a while.

"--break her heart!" I heard my mother cry, and my father's response was muffled by the distance. I knew they were fighting about Gareth.

No, he won't. I remember that clearly, too. That one thought. It had nothing to do with Gareth; at eleven years old, I was very aware that it was possible for boys' to break a girls' heart. It had never happened to me, and it wouldn't. I'd seen it happen to a couple of my friends. He won't.

The one and only time in twenty-one years that I've seen Gareth violent, it happened so suddenly that it took my breath away. Rodney Parkins had always made little jokes about us; how we spent all of our time together on the weekends, how we went home together after school. Rodney was popular, but it was a different kind of popularity than Gareth, and a different kind of popularity than myself. He was a big kid, with broad shoulders and a crop of orange-blonde hair tucked back behind wide ears. He wasn't a bully, but his occasional words bothered me. As Gareth and I gathered up our bikes from beside the school office, Rodney came around the corner with two of his friends, Elena and Robert.

"Gareth and his girl-friend," Rodney had sung, "sitting in a tree--"

I didn't see him. I wasn't listening. I didn't even know he was talking about me, for the first moment. I was staring at Gareth, caught off-guard halfway through a conversation about ladybugs. There was a fraction of a second, which might have stretched into a full second, where I saw his small body pull tight. He was twelve years-old. Years later, I would see the same kind of thing happen to Brad Pitt, in a movie called Snatch, sitting in a movie theater with a boy whose face I can't really remember any more. In that moment, with another boy's hand on my thigh, I remembered Gareth's face--a picture of such flawless, radiant anger that it takes my breath away. The kind of anger that can only be felt in youth. The tendons of his closed hands standing out along their backs, the suddenly rigid curves of his short arms, the small points of bone that stood up through his cheeks, how motionless his dark eyes had gone.

Rodney had six inches and forty pounds on Gareth. The fight had gone exactly as anyone would expect it to go--in the opposite direction. Rodney's head snapped backward, and he toppled backward to the sidewalk. Putting down his bike, quite calmly, Gareth had gone into the office--with me at his side--and explained what had happened. He's been suspended for a week, and his father had forbade him to go to the river with me for another week after that; Rodney was back in class the next day, his right eye swollen shut. He never said another word about Gareth or I. At least, not where we could hear them.

We both attended Severna Park High School. It was much of the same. About half the graduating class of Rockbridge Academy came with us, while the other half dispersed between High Road School of Anne Arundel and Arundel High School. Rodney didn't come. Both of our friend groups expanded, while Gareth and I were the bridge between them. I swam and joined book clubs, he swam and played lacrosse. I worked as a cashier, during the summers, while he alternated hours between roadside construction and working as a stock-boy at the same grocery store I was at.

I was eighteen the first time that Gareth and I kissed. Our final year of high school. We were sitting on a dusty brown couch--not that the couch was dusty, that was just the color of it--in the corner of Alice Silverton's basement. There was twelve of us in total and, like older teenagers are want to do while we're chalked-full of hormones and newly-discovered dirty thoughts and mostly good intentions, we were playing truth or dare. I can't remember who the dare came from. It was one of Gareth's; kiss Mary on the lips.

"Childish," Gareth had rolled his dark eyes--I think maybe it was Alice, who had said the words. Then he had looked over at me, across the laps of the two people who sat between us. May I?--those dark eyes had asked. Not should I. May I? I nodded a couple of times, a repetition of small gestures.

Maybe some people would say that eighteen is too old to be having your first kiss. Maybe they're right, or maybe not. Couldn't say. I didn't say I was eighteen when I had my first kiss--I said that I was eighteen the first time that Gareth and I kissed. Listen more closely.

What you need to know is this; I still looked like I had in the years leading up to that. It wasn't that I was an ugly kid. I've gone through plenty of photo-albums with my mom in the years since then, and I'm often surprised by what I looked like in my teenage years. My hair, which had never quite chosen a colour between blonde and brown, hung flat over my shoulders. My teeth and the features of my face were just a little bit too big for the head which held them; my body was that of a swimmer or a pole-vaulter, managing to be long in all the wrong ways without quite able to be described as slender. This wasn't fair, I thought, because girls' were supposed to hit puberty before boys. I'd always thought it would give me a hand up, at least for a couple of months. It sure as shit hadn't.

Gareth had hit puberty the year before me, and he'd hit it fast and hard, like a dark-haired wolf breaking free of a tree-line and stretching out over an open field. He'd hit puberty at a dead run.

His cheeks pulled in toward his mouth slightly more than they had in the years previously. He still couldn't grow a beard, but I could see the small lines of dark hair which had begun to come up around the sides of his face and the back of his neck. His already broad shoulders and chest had filled out handsomely, during years of lacrosse practice and construction work. His teeth had straightened; now, only the two on either side of his mouth tilted in toward the front ones, ever so slightly. He wasn't the shortest boy in our grade any longer. His body had never decided to grow tall, but he held himself straight-backed, with the appearance of height. He was about two inches taller than I was, which I considered to be an insurmountable distance.

So I sat there, on Alice Silverton's dads' reclining couch which wasn't reclined, watching as Gareth stood from the other side of it and made his way around two sets of legs, so that he was standing in front of mine. There might have been a kind of hushed, expectant silence in the room--if there was, and I thought there was, I wouldn't have been able to hear it over the beating of my heart.

And then he just, kind of... kissed me. As if it were the easiest, simplest thing he'd ever done, and he'd simply not thought about doing it before that exact moment. He leaned down and touched his lips to mine. My chest wanted to collapse in on itself, but it couldn't, because the kiss was just that. A kiss between friends. Barely more than a brushing of our lips.

I'm not sure why I chose to reach up and take his head in my hands; I've turned it over and over and over in my head, for the entire night after the small party and in the eleven years since then. It wasn't bravery, I don't think. I just did it, because he was already kissing me, and because we had stared at one another for a moment before it happened, and because... well, because I wanted to. Taking his head in my hands, I tilted my head slightly and pressed our mouths together. He let it go on for a couple of seconds, and then he was pulling back from me, stepping away. A pair of flat dark eyes stared down at me, and a little crooked smile appeared--but something told me it wasn't quite genuine. Nobody else would have noticed. The smile was for them; his eyes were for me.

"You can't... do that."

They were the first words he'd spoken to me since we left the party, winding down the dark roads that connected Omar Drive, through a cemetery and around a couple of small fields, to Oak View Drive. Glancing over my shoulder, I can see his face in the moonlight. It makes him look even older than his already startlingly aged eighteen year-old face did; the hollows of his ears and eyes and the tops of his cheek cast in shadow. It was an almost grim expression. I wasn't afraid of him, though--I couldn't be afraid of Gareth any more than I could be afraid of myself.