Promise of Summer

Ethan’s summer was boring because he was a wimp. Tomorrow was the first day of his senior year, and he was spending his last free day at Mimi’s, a local coffee shop downtown. Like he did every time he was there, he pretended to work on his summer assignments. It was his cover, considering he didn’t even like coffee. In truth he finished his work weeks ago. Most of July and August were spent at his grandfather’s home, making sure his grandpa got up, ate something, used the bathroom instead of his La-Z-Boy to urinate, and went to bed all without burning the place down. When the school work was done he read books, watched TV, and texted friends who were on family vacations in exotic places like Delaware or Maine. He always looked at summer as a time when everything was new, when there were no expectations. A person could reinvent themselves, set a new course. It seemed so impossible to do in the autumn and winter, with everything dying all around you, the air stinging your face, reminding you to stay inside. 

  Only at the end did he realize the summer oozed away from him, soggy egg yolks down a drain. 

  Being a wimp, Ethan used his few precious hours when he sister could fill in for him to go sit and pretend to enjoy overpriced coffee and read a book he’d already read to get a better view of the town square, where Dylan and his friends spent most of their time.

The square was more of an oval shaped grassy yard. It was ringed with shops and a parking lot, while several World War II memorials dotted the lawns. Dylan and his three buddies sat on the short steps of one honoring local veterans. It was a tall bronze statue of a soldier, Private Stevens, apparently based on a real citizen who owned a shoe store in the 1940s. The man was depicted with a rifle at his side, hand shielding his eyes from the sun, staring out at an apparently bright horizon. Everyone in town treated it with respect, and his once-bronze colored boots were now a dull silver from everyone rubbing his feet for good luck. 

Dylan and his pals Joe, Matt, and Chris, often sat under Private Stevens and smoked. No matter how warm it would be they invariably wore black, with metal bracelets on their wrists and flat brimmed trucker hats. Matt would sometimes bring a skateboard to skate around, doing half jumps and falling on his ass. Joe and Chris often sat around playing music on one of their phones, bopping to a beat Ethan couldn’t make out across the yard. The four of them would play chess, or laugh at dumb TikToks on their phones, or eat an entire pizza while giggling. A few times Ethan even saw them sipping from brown bags when the evenings rolled in, their speech growing louder as the minutes ticked by. 

They were punk, teenage lowlifes, just a little dangerous to be sexy, and Ethan loved their style.

Specifically, he loved watching Dylan. The boy was tall and thin, with dark hair to his shoulders that always looked clean and slicked back even when the heat of the summer crept up into the 90s. He wore tight t-shirts with bands Ethan didn’t really like, like Korn or Rage Against the Machine, and if he was in shorts they were always a little above the knee, showing off his calves, sculpted from riding his bike to the square instead of driving a car. In school he was always nice to everyone, answering teachers with a quiet, husky voice. Dylan didn’t play sports or do band, but when Ethan overheard others talking about it Dylan never had any discouraging words like his pals did. When Ethan was outed at school by Brock Johnson (who stole his journal out of his bag during lunch), Dylan was one of the few who didn’t seem phased by it, or give him any side eye. He seemed to smile even wider at him when he saw him in class. Even asked to borrow a pencil once last year, all while - Ethan swore - he batted his lashes at him. 

The other boys were easy on the eyes as well, but Ethan had a soft spot for pretty boys who looked too cool and acted that way, even for the kids they hung out with, and Dylan looked too cool for the entire town.

Even if there was even a chance Dylan felt the same way, Ethan was too chickenshit to ask. Those few afternoons he sat under a yellow umbrella on the sidewalk outside, finishing some iced mocha frazzled cappuccino thing he couldn’t stand, always ended with him slinking away without saying anything to Dylan. He always hoped the boys didn’t see him. 

  On the Fourth of July he came closest. That day the boys were obviously high out of their minds, sitting half asleep against Private Stevens’ pedestal. He was a little lit himself, having taken his mother’s bottle of peach vodka and taken several swigs for courage. The entire bicycle ride over he planned what he was going to say: a casual “hey,” maybe even a “what’s up?” then a deep, long stare at Dylan. Something masculine and sexy, a cross between James Bond and Don Draper. When he arrived at the square, he took a few deep breaths then strutted past, determined to make an impression. The vodka and his nerves made his stomach ache like it was full of angry bees in a steel drum, while his feet felt heavy. Instead of looking cool and strutting confidently, he was sure he walked by like he had a load in his pants. When he reached the other side of the square he promptly puked into a garbage pail.

“Wasn’t that kid in your Chem class last year?” was all he heard before he was out of earshot.

Now Dylan and the crew were sitting under Private Stevens eating sandwiches with sodas, people watching. The weather was cool, much cooler than the beginning of September normally was, which meant when they were back in class they would probably get hit with a heatwave as some cosmic cruel joke. Ethan burned through the menu at Mimi’s, and was now on frozen lemonade drinks. He kept his book on the table open to the same page in the middle, hoping it looked like he at least made some progress rather than just sitting there wondering what it’d be like to kiss Dylan’s pouty lips. 

The square was crowded. People walked slowly, taking in the idea of summer’s end, shopping for last minute nick knacks from the thrift store or just soaking up a little sun before school started. Moms walked with baby strollers, old couples held hands while they shuffled, little kids blew bubbles and chased after them. Everyone got in the way of Ethan’s view. After reading the same passage from Ethan Frome for the six thousandth time, trying to get a few good peeks at the boys, he checked his phone and answered a text from his mother wondering what on Earth he was doing. 

Be home soon, he wrote. There was no point torturing himself anymore. By tomorrow he and Dylan and the rest would be back in school, back in their own little cliques, Dylan with the punk stoners and Ethan with the quiet geeks, the ones who blended into the background. He would find some other straight boy to crush on for the final year of high school, and Dylan would probably get with one of the girls that always found themselves by the boys’ side. The girls with the tube tops and the tall black boots and stockings in various shades of black.

The promise of a new, exciting summer would finally be over and he could go on living his cowardly life as usual.

He sucked down dregs of his blackberry lemonade and stood up, giving one last glance towards the statue. But the boys were gone. 

“Are you Ethan?” a girl asked.

She approached from the side, a short blonde girl, in middle school maybe, with a white yipping dog at her feet. It circled Ethan’s legs a few times, letting its pink leash wrap around his ankles. 

“Yeah,” he said. The girl looked unperturbed by the dog’s corralling of him. She stuck out her hand, thrusting a piece of paper at him.

“The boy told me to give you this.”

“What boy?”

“One of the ones over there,” she said. She pointed toward Private Stevens. “Oh. Well, one of them.”

Ethan clutched the table, both to steady himself from the dog trying to untangle itself below him, and from what the note said.

Saw you staring all summer. Grow a pair and say hi next time, I don’t bite.

There was no name. No initial. 

  “Did he have dark hair?” he asked.

The girl’s dog finally untangled itself, and she scooped it up. She made a face with her mouth scrunched up as though she’d eaten a lemon.

“Um, I think so.”

  Ethan wanted the girl to say more, enough for a policeman’s sketch, but she was already moving away from him, holding the dog tight to prevent it from leaping at a mom and her baby stroller. 

The handwriting was sloppy, with short strokes in black pen like it was written in a hurry. Ethan’s heart started to race, and he looked frantically around to see where the boys went, not that he had any idea what to do if he saw them. There was no sign of them, or any indication they’d even been there. If they were smoking up or eating, they didn’t even leave a crumb.

He sat on the curb in front of Mimi’s, staring at the note. Maybe they’d be back. But as the sun set and the sky above turned orange, then purple, and the messages from his mother kept coming, Ethan finally turned away from the statue one last time, glimpsing a young couple walking by it enjoying ice cream cones. On the ride home he kept thinking of the note in his pocket. He thought about sticking it in his dresser drawer beside his socks and the condoms he never used. Summer was over, after all. But the promise of some excitement wasn’t gone, but renewed. Dylan - someone - wanted to talk to him. He just had to not be a wimp. 

  The thought of Dylan’s lips crossed his mind again. Ethan almost rode off the sidewalk into the street. 

  No reason you couldn’t be brave in the fall, he thought.