Cam & Beau by Maria Cichosz

Author:Maria Cichosz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Now or Never Publishing
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

On the drive up there was a brief confusion over riding shotgun and who had called shotgun first, resulting in Cliff jumping into the passenger seat and laughing hysterically as Stacey physically pulled him back out for a high-intensity round of rock paper scissors, best two out of three. She was strong, Stacey. She and Cliff had a physical ease that could only have come from having slept together on multiple occasions, or from having absolutely no desire to—I couldn’t tell which. Beau leaned over me with his arms crossed on the open driver’s window and watched them shoving each other around, amused and distant. The things he’d lived through ensured he could not be fazed.

I was still getting used to this new Beau and his sudden periods of immense brimming calm. At times like that I couldn’t read him, thinking he looked removed, impenetrable, far away—thinking exactly what he’d said to me at Christmas, driving home from my mom’s place in the black frozen night: You get so distant and I just feel like, how can I even—approach you. When you’re far away like that.

The strange symmetry of things coming full circle. You can approach me, Beau, I should have said then. Seeing how it was me who had put up all the fences, kept him at arm’s length because I was afraid of his heat, afraid to get burned. Afraid of what he might say, scared of speech, of simple words. Because I was yellow, a quality that had stunted my entire life. A fundamental fear of action and consequence, of confronting what is not known.

Stacey won, even after Cliff insisted on going best three out of five. The Jeep’s AC was broken and I drove with the windows down, dry highway heat blasting through the car and sanding down my skin, tossing around my hair. She put on a Paul Simon CD, Beau’s absolute favourite, and Cliff miraculously rolled a joint without most of the weed getting caught in the wind tunnel whipping through the car. I kept checking the rear-view to assess how much he’d lost and making accidental eye contact with Beau instead, submerged in that deep blue while Stacey talked at me and I had to keep saying, what?

When we stopped for gas I let Cliff fill the tank, leaving the car to walk slowly across the shimmering tarmac, feeling its concentrated heat on my ankles and rising around me, a thousand tiny particles of dust and pollen and insects and spider webs swimming in the thick light. There were fields stretching out as far as I could see, sun-soaked and hazy with distance. Everything but the road and buzz-saw whine of cicadas was quiet, heat dampening the world down, urging it to sleep.

I closed my eyes and felt the heat on my body, thinking helplessly of the grate of skateboard wheels on pavement and warm air on bare shins as I pushed along languidly beside Beau Larky, who was almost my height when he walked on the curb.

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