Cecilia
I am fifteen and Charlotte is almost seventeen, and Charlotte is careening down Blake Avenue from Howard’s house in Megan’s blue Volvo station wagon, me beside her in the passenger seat. We are headed to the Charcoal Burger, where we will get milkshakes and French fries from the drive-thru and inhale them, even though we have track practice in an hour and I know the sugar and grease will make 400-meter intervals even more unbearable. It is April, and the skies are grey with spring rainclouds, but it is warm enough to have the windows down. Everything is turning green, and I turn “Cecilia” all the way up, because there is only a month left of school, because we have given ourselves the afternoon off, and because everything promises summer is coming, summer is coming, summer is coming, and that anticipation is almost better than summer itself.
We left Megan at Howard’s house with Alan, the college boy she is dating who is living there for the summer, or rather Megan shooed us away, which is fine. Neither of us wants to hang out on Howard’s couch with his parents’ copies of Time and Sunset while Megan and Alan sneak upstairs where Megan may or may not finally lose her virginity, which she has been endlessly debating for weeks now.
I pound my hands on the dashboard in time to the beat and Charlotte drums hers on the steering wheel and we sing along with Art at the top of our voices as he laments the fickle two-timer Cecilia. Yet as loud as we are singing, as much as we are expressing our utter joy at being free in a way that only fifteen and almost seventeen year-olds can, there is something stale about our performance, something played out like too many Monkees reruns on Nick at Nite. It might be because, as I learn years later, Charlotte has just discovered her mother’s affair or because we are both starting to worry about missing so much school, or because our friendship has faltered ever since Charlotte started dating Starr. Starr has replaced me as her primary companion, and Starr has given her access to a social group we were both excluded from, one I didn’t realize she wanted so badly to be a part of and one that has not cracked the door open for me as it has for Charlotte. Or maybe it is that I don’t care enough to try to squeeze through the opening.
But I also know that I cannot be as happy for Megan about her college boyfriend as I know I should. I was supposed to have one of these boys that have come home with Howard from Boulder to raft guide for the summer too, but none have taken to me, not even the one Megan and Charlotte have targeted, have set aside especially for me. The college boys see me as I should be seen: as 15, with an early curfew and strict parents, no driver’s license, and even more unsure of my place than them.
I am now the only one without a boyfriend, and I am ashamed. I feel like a child, like a little sister tagging along, and I will now be the only one of the three of us still a virgin. The fact hangs heavy on me, feels like yet another interval I have to run, another hill to summit, another Chemistry lab I don’t understand how to complete. I just want to get it over with so I can be like everyone else, can participate in all the conversations the other girls are having with each other about sex, even though the idea of allowing some boy full rein of my body terrifies me. I have always been the advanced one – the one who read first, got the answer first, drew the better picture – but in this area I am horribly behind, and I do not know how to pull ahead. It embarrasses me, shames me, and I feel like everyone must see my incompetence, must point at me and whisper. I want Megan to be happy; however, I can’t help but hope she chickens out again, decides to wait a little longer so we will still be in the same club.
“Cecilia” ends, Art triumphant that Cecilia has returned, and I hear the first bittersweet chords of “America.” Charlotte reaches over and turns down the music, and I am annoyed, because I want to hear Paul tell Kathy there is a cigarette in his raincoat, want to imagine I am on a bus with my lover, both of us searching, searching together.
“Think she’s going to do it?” Charlotte asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“This is it,” Charlotte says. “I can feel it.”
“Probably,” I say. I turn the music back up and am swept up by the perfect cracks in Paul Simon’s voice, and I watch out the window as we begin to cross the bridge over the Colorado River. Charlotte is quiet because driving over the bridge makes her nervous, and I look at the ragged, towering cliffs of Glenwood Canyon to the east and Red Mountain rising above town to the west, all the hillsides just beginning to green. The clouds are piled above us, rolling and twisting, and the song and the sky reenergize me, make me believe that I might be next.
“Probably,” I say again, and look at Charlotte, and she glances from the road to look at me, and suddenly we are laughing like we used to, at nothing, with abandon, nothing else mattering.
“In Howard’s house. In Howard’s sister’s bed.” She is laughing so hard I can hardly understand her, and I am laughing so hard that my, “I bet she reads weird porn in there,” doesn’t come out right and this makes Charlotte laugh even harder, but then a car honks at us because Charlotte’s veering into the other lane. She gets serious and quiet again, and the moment passes and is so far gone that I’m no longer excited about my milkshake, will not get excited even when Charlotte hands it to me and I take the first sugary sip..
In a week, the school will finally call my parents and tell them how much school I’ve missed. Then Alan will break Megan’s heart and starting dating another girl, a local girl home from college for the summer, offering Megan no explanation, not caring. She will leave for the summer to be a camp counselor and when she returns she and her parents will move to Washington State, where her father has gotten a new job. Charlotte will drift even further from me towards Starr, and I will no longer fight letting her go. I will be grounded, and then will befriend the skate punks, but I will never be able to be quite as silly, quite as spontaneous with them. There will be no more illicit milkshakes, and I’ll regret I didn’t enjoy that last one more, didn’t appreciate its sweet simplicity, didn’t marvel at just how pink, just how bright it could be.
Candace Nadon’s work has appeared in Platte Valley Review, The Fourth River, Hartskill Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, among others. She lives in Durango, CO and teaches at Fort Lewis College as well as Western State Colorado University’s Low-Residency MFA.