Unsure, I reached out, my hand barely brushing her bare shoulder, traveling that delicate ridge of collarbone, exploring her slender and perfect neck. My fingers drifted through her hair, my movements surer now—I gotta admit it did something to me, just like always. I found her chin and gently turned her head in my direction, brushing that midnight hair over one shoulder.
There were those beautiful eyes of hers, alive with mysteries she could never share. Those full lips, containing all those secrets that she would never speak. Like I said, it did something to me. Just like always. I moved in to kiss her, and she didn’t move away. It didn’t start out like much of a kiss, but it shook me up the way I hoped it would.
When it was over, I really had the itch. I wanted her more than ever.
One look, and I knew that she felt the same way. A tear ran down one smooth marble cheek. I wiped it away, and it smeared on my callused fingers, and I found myself wishing that I could crush it in my fist.
She said, “I just want everything to stay the way it is.”
“Don’t worry, little darlin’,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I was. “Tonight it’s you and me. Just like it’s been all summer, ever since you and me became an us. Those jerks are in for a big surprise.” I slipped one hand around the back of her neck, but not in a rough way, and with the other I twisted the rearview in her direction. “Just look at you, Shari. You’re not the same girl you were when school let out.”
Shari stared at her reflection. She didn’t blink once, and a shiver rocketed over my spine like someone was stepping on my grave.
“No,” she said finally. “I’m not the same person. This place…and you…you’ve given me so much, Johnny.”
She pushed the mirror away, looking at the cemetery through the mosaic of kamikaze bugs plastered to the old Ford’s wind shield. Low fog bathed the ring of tombstones where she’d danced a couple of nights back with nothing covering that beautiful marble skin of hers but the blood of a black cat. I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, but I could see that she was spooked, just as spooked as the first time she visited the cemetery. That was back when she was just a scared kid in hand-me-downs who’d been broken by other kids because she couldn’t bear to look anyone in the eye, before the black dress and the red lipstick, before I took to parking boosted cars in the long shadows between two jagged mausoleums, before all the secret kisses and all the things that went with them.
So much had passed between us that summer. We’d made a world of our own, and no one else knew anything about it. But with school ready to start up, our world was going to change. We’d have to face those other people again. I thought I had it all figured out. But with Shari so rattled and uncertain, I couldn’t help but worry.
Her voice trembled. “Sometimes…this summer…” she began. “It just doesn’t seem real. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and it will have all been a dream. I keep thinking that maybe I’m imagining you…. I always had a crush on you, y’know? And I keep thinking that I’ll wake up, and I’ll be back in school with all those people, and you’ll be here….”
I nodded. She took my hand then, her fingernails digging into my palm like little knives. I couldn’t help but shiver; she couldn’t seem to let go. Her face had disappeared in the darkness—there was just a little razor cut of a moon in the sky, and the night was coming on hard, clouds blanketing the stars.
“I keep staring at that moon,” she said. “I keep thinking that it looks like a sickle.”
She couldn’t stop shaking. “I’m afraid the moon’s going to slice down out of the sky, Johnny,” she said, her fingers locked in mine. “I’m afraid it’s going to cut us to pieces.”
The carhop’s roller skates made an icy little rumbling sound as she drifted across the parking lot, away from the stolen Ford.
When she was out of sight, I lifted the Coke off of the little metal tray and handed it to Shari. Then I reached under the seat and found the cardboard box. Inside was a Revell model kit that I’d swiped from a hobby shop in Fresno the same night I boosted the Ford. I slipped the lid off of the box, revealing a miniature ’48 Chevy.
“Wow.” Shari smiled. “It looks just like it.”
“Yeah, I’m a real artist.” I wasn’t bragging. I’d done a good job. Customized it just right. Two-tone paint-job—turquoise and black. Every detail reproduced, right down to the miniature tornado swirling on the hood.
I handed the model to Shari, then rummaged through the unused parts in the bottom of the box until I found the decal sheet. I traded her the sheet for the Coke. She ran her fingers over the decals, whispering a few words.
I knew better than to listen. Instead I stared between a couple of dead moths splattered on the windshield, studying a turquoise-and-black ’48 Chevy parked over by the bowling alley.
Shari dipped the decal sheet into the Coke. She let it sit for a minute, until the decals started to drift away from the backing.
There were two license plate decals. She attached one of them to a blank plastic plate glued to the trunk of the model.
The other floated on the surface of a Coca-Cola ice-floe. Shari stared down at it as she took the glass from my hand, then glanced over at the Chevy parked by the bowling alley.
“You promise not to blink, right?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not going
to get distracted by a carhop who’s a dead ringer for Anita Ekberg or anything, are you?”
When the girl you love asks you something like that, you’ve got to laugh. “Baby, I’m just like The Flamingos,” I said, and then I sang the rest of it—“I only have eyes for you.”
Shari hustled on over there. My ears were treated to the sweet little staccato rhythm of her high heels on blacktop, but my eyes got the better part of the deal when she bent low behind the ’48, her tight dress riding up over firm thighs.
The fingers of one hand dipped into the Coke. Then she reached out, kind of tenderly, the way she sometimes did when she ran a finger over my lips. But her finger only traveled the length of the Chevy’s license plate, leaving behind a decal from a Revell model kit.
And then the two of them showed up, right on cue. Slammed out of the bowling alley like they owned the world, swaggered across the parking lot.
Shari barely had a chance to straighten up. They both saw her at the same time, saw that black dress hiked up to the limit, that red lipstick, saw everything through a testosterone haze.