The Summer That Melted Everything (28 page)

“Why don't you take your sweater off, Dresden?” Sal looked at the sweater as if he hated it.

“I'm not that hot.”

I could've laughed at her, at her sweaty forehead and hair plastered to the nape of her neck like an attack.

“You're burning up.” Sal spoke like the soft spot of a hard truth. “And all because you're trying to cover the bruises she gave you.”

“How do you know about the bruises?” She asked in a whisper.

Sal bit his lip with the fear all boys have of the girl they love. “I read your diary. One of them anyways. I didn't have to use the bathroom. I found your room. I went to the shelf and picked a book at random.
Ham on Rye
by Charles Bukowski. A lot of beatings for you to circle in that.”

“God, don't you know anything about girls? You should never read what is still their secret. You … you…” She attacked him with slaps. I tried to break it up but got slapped myself, the happening like getting blood drawn by a thorn.

“I want you to leave this instant. Both of you.” She stomped her good foot the way all girls are prone to do at least once in their lives.

He reached for her, but she backed away from him.

“Get away from me.” She took a deep breath as if building the courage to say, “I hate you.”

Hate, that all-too-willing pallbearer of love, that all-too-eager shovel piling the dirt over the lover's head until the funeral is over only a second after it's started. The boy can go nowhere near happiness when the girl he loves is not willing to go there with him. He may grow up, borrow a tuxedo, a sunrise, a tropical honeymoon, but they'll never be his without her. She was his truth, his wisdom, and he was stupid without her. Just an idiot with a dumb life.

He stood there teetering, knowing full well that without her, it would be the cliff all the time. He tried once more to reach for her.

“I'm sorry, Dresden Delmar.”

“I don't care if you are sorry. I want you to leave, and I never want to see you again.”

“All right,” he whispered.

I don't even think he realized he was walking until we were almost around the corner of the house. It was her shouting for us to stop that made him jump as if being sparked back to life.

“I didn't really want you to go. You just … surprised me, reading my diary like that.” She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. “I wasn't prepared to be revealed like that. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I don't hate you. Not really.”

He smiled, and I think the whole world knew it. “Will you do something for me, Dresden Delmar? Take off your sweater.”

“Oh, please. If I take it off—”

“You won't be able to pretend anymore,” he finished her sentence. “Pretend that your mother loves you.”

“She does love me. You just don't understand.”

“Every bruise you've ever had, every sharp shade of purple, blue, black, I've had it too. We have had the same boss of pain, we have asked the same question, over and over again,
What have I done to deserve this?

“There is no lack of understanding between the two of us. We've been part of the same crash this entire time. We just had yet to meet and pull each other from the wreckage. When you take your sweater off and reveal, it is not to reveal you alone, it is to reveal our shared selves. The purpling, black whorls something we can make fine together.”

She was quiet as she watched a small yellow butterfly flutter past. As it landed on a rose, she began to unbutton the cardigan as she said, “I've never shown anyone, not even her, and she's the one who gave them to me.”

“Her who?” I asked.

“Mother.”

She slipped off the cardigan, revealing her strapless dress and her lay of freckles like a beautiful spray of mud. There with the freckles were the bruises. Flat as bruises are, yet piled upon her like things to weigh her, to make her buried beneath blues and violets and colors less terrible than the things they make.

She dropped the sweater to the ground. I walked around to see more bruises at the top of her back.

“Dresden?” I looked away because sometimes you see too much for just two eyes. “You said you haven't even shown your mom, but if she gave them to you, wouldn't she know about them already?”

“She only hits me when she's had too much to drink. I don't think she remembers when she's sober. I always make sure to be covered up so she doesn't have to remember. She wants me to wear long dresses anyways, because of the leg.”

“I think I should tell my dad. He's a lawyer, ya know, and—”

“Don't you dare, Fielding Bliss.” She sounded so mature saying my full name.

“All right, geez.” I looked up at the sky and the God who should've done better. “Why does she hit you, Dresden?”

“I guess because I'm not as perfect as her roses. Everything must be as perfect as those roses. You've seen Mother. Is there or has there ever been anyone more perfect than she? It must be a great pain to her. To have everything so beautiful but me.

“Sometimes, I'll look at the bruises and see petals. I'll see roses. And then I'm no longer sad. How can I be? When my mother has given me nothing but flowers.”

Dresden was a girl too in love with her mother ever to see the monster of her. She needed help, so I said as simply as I could, “Your mom's a bitch.”

“She isn't. And I'd like it if you never call her that again, Fielding.”

That whole time, Sal had been quietly staring at her bruises, like a boy too well depressed to be able to say something large enough. I knew the way he saw her then would be the way he would fight never to see her as again. From that moment on, she had the shield in him. She had the boy who would turn into a man for her and be the one her mother would never be strong enough to go against.

“I could turn your bruises into real roses.” He went to the patio table to pick up the pair of scissors and roll of tape left there from when Dresden was putting on her construction paper makeup. With a glance around the garden, he went toward the bush of roses so lavender they were almost certainly blue.

“What is the name of these?” He cupped one of the roses in his hand—so large, it eclipsed his palm. “Do you know?”

“I know all of my mother's roses.” She stood so close by his side that the bottom of her dress blew across his calves. “This one is Blue Girl.”

He quickly cut the stem of the one he held.

“Mother will kill me,” she said in a hushed gasp.

“Isn't she doing that already?” He looked at the bruises. His frown never greater than when he looked upon them. “Let me make the hurt into every other happiness possible. Let me make you the infinity of the roses, instead of the life with the bruises.”

She allowed him to cut the bush nearly empty, the roses piling in severed beauty at his feet. He laid down the scissors and asked if she could tie up her hair. She took the hair clip from off the patio table to hold her curls and frizz up in a bun.

And then he began. Rose after rose, taped to her flesh by their short stems. Always directly over a bruise, and always carefully, as he knew bruises and their business well.

By the end of it, she was left with roses upon both her arms, a cluster on her chest, and a scattering on her back. When he went to better the bruises on her legs, she stopped him from pulling up the billowy skirt of her dress.

“Let me cut the dress shorter and—”

“No.” She rubbed the leg through the dress.

“We don't care 'bout it bein' fake,” I said.

“I do. It's hideous.”

“It's a marvel,” Sal corrected her. “Look all around this world. A tree loses a branch, no one replaces it. An angel loses his wings, and he'll never have another pair.” He turned and showed her his scars. “But a girl loses her leg, and somebody gives her a new one. In this world where so few things are given, how can you not be in awe at what you've got?”

She took a few steps away from us, her eyes slowly widening as if through thought she was coming to defy her own gnawing doubt that she was not something special. When she let the dress slip free from between her fingers, I could see a sort of echo inside her. Broad and far, a glowing thing to flick back the shadows of her own self-hate.

“I didn't lose my leg.” She whispered as if what she was saying were too fragile for anything more than a hush. “I never had one to lose. Still, I like what you say. Hand me those, will you?”

She held her hand out for the scissors, and as soon as Sal gave them, she gathered up the bottom of her dress and began to cut through its pale blue cotton. Thinking it too long after the first cut, she made a second and a third even, bringing the hem to above her gently freckled knees.

“I've never worn anything so short.” She giggled as if it came from the very small of her back.

Sal took the scissors from her to cut the remaining roses from the bush. These he would gently and softly tape to her legs.

The sun is hot and the boy is nervous as he moves his hand up the girl's legs, toward the thighs that already know his name by heart.

“Sal,”
she whispered,
“my Sal,”
while I, nobody's Fielding, stood close enough to know I was forgotten.

“Did you know it's my birthday?” She grabbed Sal's hand. “And this is the best gift ever.”

“Sal, you swimmin'?” I spoke, if only to remind myself I still existed.

“You go ahead, Fielding.” He let Dresden lead him to the bench amongst the roses.

I tried to splash some water their way as I jumped from the diving board. Failing, I hung on the side of the pool, watching the two of them share the same smile as he leaned in and smelled the roses on her chest.

I dived under the water, nearly swam the length of the pool on that one breath. When I resurfaced, I heard Dresden talking about her construction paper makeup.

“Mother would be angry if I got into her makeup. I do it for her. Try to be prettier. I thought I'd put on some makeup and try to be prettier. She blames me, you know. For Father leaving. She says he left because of my leg.

“She hates my leg. She hates that I won't be able to follow in her ballet footsteps. She says I'll never be asked to dance. I think that's the worst thing to tell a girl. That she'll never dance.”

Sal began to remove the construction paper from her face. She didn't try to stop him. The tape made soft sounds as he gently pulled it from her skin, the paper falling in a pile of color at their feet. Once every piece was removed, he held her face, his hand perfectly sized to her cheek as if the make of them individually was had in the creation of them both at the very same time

“I hope you're infinity, Dresden Delmar.”

She sighed, “You know, I shouldn't even be talking to you.”

“Because I'm the devil?”

“Because you're … not white.” She struggled to say that very thing. “Mother says I am to stay away from you. She says my leg makes me prone to trash.”

“I'm trash? But I know Tolstoy and Shakespeare and…” his voice disappeared. A frown on his face as if the air was bad. An incident really, entangling him like wire wrapped around his teeth, back down to his ribs.

“I'm sorry, Sal. I didn't mean to … it's just, well, I don't think you're trash, but Mother's Old South, you know?”

“I see.” He smiled for her sake. “If you're not supposed to be talking to me, then I don't suppose you'll dance with me?”

She looked about to burst at that very question. A golden rise about her as if she could already feel herself being spun around, held, waltzed across a ballroom. Then suddenly she lost her smile as she stared at the white roses in front of her.

“Those are Mother's favorite. But she's the one who says I can't dance with a black boy. It serves her right to lose her roses to my dance.”

She grabbed the scissors and without hesitation cut the white roses so quickly and with so much eagerness, she'd be cutting a new one before the old one even had the chance to hit the ground.

Rose by white rose, she taped his dark skin, until he was someone she could dance with. Sal in the white way, but not the right way. And yet it would not lower him, he would not let it. He was going to be dancing with Dresden Delmar, and everything else was outside the heaven of that.

“Fielding?” she called to me. “Would you turn on the boom box? There under the patio table?”

I pulled myself up out of the pool, shaking the water off my hands before lifting the box up on top of the table. I found the local station and turned up the volume. I suppose it could've been any song. In memory it is always Alphaville's witchy ballad of youth. “Forever Young.”

Arms around each other, they placed the trust in their feet as they closed their eyes. Her face tucking into the white roses on his. I watched them until she kissed him. Lips on lips and I dived into the pool, staying under until I thought my lungs would burst into bright, turquoise shards.

When I surfaced, I saw the smashed birthday cake dropped on the concrete by the pool. Red rose frosting and cake as white as the white high heels clanking on that very concrete. Alvernine, come with her green polka-dot dress and its silk that clung to her braless form and her sexy-as-hell curves.

And sexy is what Alvernine was, with her full lips and slim cigarettes. She was a woman known to turn an ashtray into a tool of seduction. Her heavy brow made her eyes seem pillowed in a sort of jungle-cat way. I thought, there is where men go to die. There is where they are devoured by the jaguar.

Though it was from her Dresden got the red hair, Alvernine took to dyeing her own a light strawberry blond, ironing it straight and smooth. And while she was covered in freckles just like Dresden, Alvernine lessened her darker freckles and successfully hid the lighter ones on her face with makeup, which she would also apply to the freckles on her body.