Indian Summer by Mike Lee

There was a sense of peace, anticipation, and of place when I arrived at the Krispy Kremes that cool October morning; autumn leaves turning and the sun bright over the roofs of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. It was a Friday, before school, and coffee and glazed donuts beckoned while waiting for Mariah, my girlfriend, and walking on to the bus stop. Suppressed an urge to talk her into skipping school; we had fifth-period English together, and it was our chance to read our story assignments.

I worked hard on mine and typed for hours on Mom’s boyfriend Bill’s Remington Rand upstairs in his house the night before. I was not going to play hooky after working that damn hard on the story. I looked forward to showing it to Mariah. I wrote it for her, and she read the cursive, first-draft pencil in class, and told me how much she really loved it. Admittedly, the story was little more than a pastiche of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, but I based one of the characters on Mariah, so she liked it better than she would otherwise.

I ordered a half-dozen glazed for us to share, along with a large coffee light. I sat down facing the highway, waiting for Mariah as I dumped sugar into the Styrofoam cup. I had to stir it again after the first sip, the half-dissolved sugar so thick in my mouth. I opened my white plastic notebook and carefully pulled out the manila folder that held my short story. Looking at my first page, with the title and my name neatly typed at the top, I decided this was my first short story, a true piece of literature, typewritten, with overtyped corrections in Liquid Paper.

These five pages in my hands were far beyond a cursive scrawl in a spiral notebook—while not perfectly neat, this manuscript signified me as a writer.

I looked up from admiring my first page to see her. Upon arrival, Mariah stood, rapping lightly on the window. She wore a woven hippy shawl over her peasant blouse, blue jeans stuffed into black leather boots, and heels that were worn and in need of replacement.

Mariah was a tuff girl, she: mirror sunglasses stolen from the Tunnel Road Shopping Center, the shawl pulled from an open window of a parked VW microbus, the rest were all mom-bought clothes from Bon Marche and Iveys, but the shawl she wrapped around herself, and the beret perched and angled precariously over her dark straight hair was the evidence used in her occasional desperate lie she was older than fourteen, a façade, though, just like my denim jacket marked up with BLACK SABBATH in Marks-A-Lot and washed over and over in the laundry room to take the stiff new look away. These freshman year uniforms never fooled anyone, so we hid behind sword and sorcery and fantasies of fake medieval combat and Byzantine plotting while occasionally taking tokes from joints in the smoking area before class.

The donuts eaten, coffee spilled on the ground, sitting on the back seat of the bus trundling toward high school, right past the old elementary school, downhill to under the I-40 overpass, city turning to suburbs and then to mountains. We read each other’s stories while the creepy guy sitting across from us played The Doors’ Morrison Hotel on a Norelco portable cassette player.

We didn’t pay much attention to him since school started in August—he was from a different junior high, in Swannanoa, he said when we asked. Kind of like us, denim jacket and dingo boots, and greasy shoulder-length brown hair that was haphazardly parted on the side and hanging over his eyes, hiding behind them like those greasy locks were his veil of invisibility.

When he wasn’t bumming cigarettes from everyone in the smoking area, he smoked Marlboro 100s, probably shoplifted from Ingles. He also had that cassette player and listened to decent jams: Doors, Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Steppenwolf. One day, he played The Stooges on the bus, and that blew our minds. Nobody listened to The Stooges unless they were crazy or cool, and we assumed he was just plain fucked up, so we did not talk to him.

He did look like he needed a friend. I could tell by the way he acted. He came across as unapproachable and never talked unless it was the wrong thing to say, like telling the born-again Christian girl who sat in front of him he loved Satan, or asking Dwayne, the kid from our old elementary school, if his mother put out, him not knowing Dwayne’s mom died years ago.

We gave him a wide berth, cool cassettes playing on the bus or not. Boy was too fucked up for words, and we imagined he set fires and tortured animals. We knew for certain he lived in a shack in the hollers, and that for certain marked him as bad news.

That was one lonely boy, Mariah said quietly, after she finished reading my short story, squeezing my hand.

I nodded. Indian Summer by The Doors began playing on the cassette player. We mouthed the lyrics as we tried hard not to kiss. I leaned toward Mariah, looking into her ice blue eyes, cold yet inviting me always, never closing them whenever we kissed. People didn’t know we were a couple, especially our parents, and unfortunately, we had to keep it a secret since we began hanging out in eighth grade. Her old man did not care for me, and likewise Mom hated Mariah.

I looked beyond Mariah’s adoring eyes to see the boy’s face reflected in the dirty window opposite us, and saw his eyes were closed, and he was quietly singing along to the song.

When we got off the bus, making our way up the steps, I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Gotta smoke?”

He jerked, surprised, then recovered.

Yeah.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered pack of Marlboro 100s, offering me one.

“Thanks, man.”

I let him light it for me. Mariah seemed to soften up, too, and we hung out for that half hour smoking and talking bullshit until the buzzer indicated first period.

I finally found out his name. Perry. Perry wasn’t as fucked up as we thought, but that’s us, always assuming the worst from others we are too afraid to admit are like us, but he was a mess.

But so were we.

Mariah and I read our stories to the class. We each received an A.

Rode the bus, Perry played The Doors until his stop. Mariah and I went to Krispy Kreme, holding hands, her head resting against my shoulder, and me thinking of the weekend as a distant shore.

Counting the hours, from 96 on down to zero.

Mike Lee

Image: A pack of cigarettes open with the filters facing outwards.