My 1st Crush is Getting Married
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
As a kid, I thought of you as a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar: only existing during the hottest summers of our youth. Chlorine skin, dripping brown hair, chapped lips that cracked and bled. 14-year-old fig fruit limbs ran small-sloped green hills at a swim club that we spent all hours of all days at: waded in organ-shaped pools till small sores developed on our fingers and toes. We had to close our eyes while playing water games from the hours occupied in chemicals. The girls leapt like mermaids.
One stifling mid-July day, I bounced off of almost translucent toes, red eyes shut, and dove straight into the backplates of your stegosaurus spine--chipped my front central incisor. When we got out of the water blonde-turned-green-haired Nancy said, "It looks like a mouse took a bite out of your tooth." I spent the rest of that summer with a nip out of my tooth that reminded me of you. I scraped my tongue against the sharp edges often, sanding the enamel whenever I wanted to think of that moment.
* * *
The next summer on the first day of the public pool opening—the heat so brilliant the world felt red—we dared each other to jump off of the highest tier of the playground equipment. Stung our feet and shins while landing into the sandpit, it was how Lindsey broke her leg the summer before but we kept doing it anyway. In the sand, we played, "don't touch the lava," too old to play kid games but doing it anyway. The only acceptable non-lava sand was the cool, shaded, fair-haired grains under the wooden awnings we jumped off.
Having exhausted the game, you and me and a few other kids we knew seated ourselves like pretzels in the coolness of the sand; we filled our mouths with Reese’s Pieces and Sour Patch Kids, and the candy would echo in kisses during rounds of Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, the empty green bottle of Sprite moved like a compass. Not-so-parted lips and shy lizard tongues, the kisses were like the Mortal Kombat arcade game—wasted quarters, crushed buttons—are all teen exhibitionists?
The first day of summer exists in a space where time doesn’t obey rules, it has always lasted as days within days—too long and not long enough, the sun a walk-the-dog yo-yo, an orange Lifesaver that never sets. As the hours passed, our summertime friends moved our seated circle to the grass and played the card game Spoons. You and I found excuses to twist limbs into each other while fighting over cards. Sunburnt skin and goosebumps the result of all hours outside—hurt red flesh, cold water droplets drying on limbs, involuntary and unknown emotions raising the quills on our foal bodies. Everyone sat in the sweet grasses, both in motion and not, cards in an unbroken circle, until our rides arrived in waves to take us home.
* * *
There was a shack in between the small green hills, home of the beginning of footraces from a youthful year earlier, which sold the cool sweet treats that would melt against our summer mouths. We counted nickels and dimes from allowances we hadn't rightfully earned and swapped tastes from the bloom of each frozen flower.
The August day I turned 15, the cracks in your lips were stained blue from an Italian ice, you flipped the berry brick to reveal the ice crystals on the bottom—the sweetest part. We stood at the foot of the snack shack and looked at the slopes that led to the organ-shaped pool—and the summer is an underworld with the sky made up of dew from forever damp skin. All worlds are born from chaos with no explanation.
I pulled your wrist so you would face me and in the uneven motion I dropped my ice cream bar, the bath of blue in the Italian ice cup was a spray that misted around us. Leopards spotted with candy.
Your icy tongue turned rose gold with the residue of the strawberry shortcake bar, a garden inside every person. We bumped peeling noses and having never been good at math tried to figure out symmetry and complements in the shapes of faces: sublime teen triangles, unsure isosceles. Your hands with dirt-filled fingernails rested against my watermelon-seeded shoulders, and the cold of your mouth bloomed against the hot of my sunburned lips.
* * *
Every summer is a remote in-between space where disappearance and reappearance are sprung from the blood of ice cream droplets. The melted drops flower in short-lived wounds out of shallow soil. Sea anemones blossom pink in the small hills with the summer buried and then reborn out of the green landscape; stretching pout-mouthed with slightly cracked lips becoming alive for a brief few months—a memorial to brevity.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer based in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit. She is the author of Better Bones and Marrow (Thirty West Publishing House) as well as Unicorn Tracheotomy and Tiny Thoughts for Tiny Feelings (BA Press, 2002). She chronicles the many ways she embarrasses herself at www.youlifeisnotsogreat.com.