Chapter 21

Mom rode with us, and Franklin went to get Karen. He came back with Karen and her mom. I ordered elote for an appetizer. Everyone thought I must know what I was doing so they ordered it, too. Elote is Mexican street corn. The ears of corn are grilled, then coated with crema, chili, a bit of cheese, and sometimes, a squirt of lime. They loved it and we all made a mess of ourselves. Camila was always happy when a non-Mexican spoke to her in Spanish or enjoyed the food she served up. Camila was almost always happy, I decided.

Angela told us that with tax season approaching, several of the other accountants on staff at Bosch were working two jobs. Sometimes people took paid time off to work the other job so she had been getting overtime. She said accountants and tax season had a love, hate relationship. You loved the extra income but hated the tedium of it. I tried to imagine any part of accounting that wouldn’t be tedious and came up blank.

“What should we do with our summer?” Kim asked.

“What do you want to do, Honey?” Mom replied.

“I don’t know. What can we do when we’re sixteen and seventeen that we can’t do when we’re older?”

“Oh, Honey. We’re going to be here a while.”

“No, I’m serious. What can we do this summer, that if we don’t do it this summer, we probably never will?”

“Ah. You know what I would do,” Karen said. “I’d make a bunch of day trips. How would locals finish this sentence, ‘I’ve lived in the Lowcountry my whole life and I’ve never.’ What would they say to finish that?”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. Savannah, Beaufort, Daufuskie Island, Botany Bay Plantation, Brookgreen Gardens, Hunting Island. I could go on,” Mom said.

“You’ve never been to any of those?” Kim asked.

“I’ve been to most of them but not all. How many have you not been to is a better question. Those are all day trips.”

“That’s a great idea, Karen. I haven’t been to some of those. We could be tourists at home.”

“I like that,” Kim said. “I have another idea. I think we should go to every beach in South Carolina. We go and spend a day at the beach and keep doing that until we’ve been to all of them.”

“Oh, my gosh. How many beaches are there?” Angela asked.

“Aquaman? This is your thing, Buddy,” Franklin said. He knew I was a bit of a map freak.

“Starting up north there’s Little River, North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach, Socastee, Litchfield, Pawleys Island, and then some that you can only get to by boat, like the Boneyard. After Bulls Bay, there’s Dewees Island, Isle of Palms, Sullivans Island, Folly, Kiawah, Seabrook, Edisto, Hunting Island, and Hilton Head. I think that’s only fifteen. Do we count Daufuskie? And what about Pritchards Island, and Fripp? I don’t think you can go to Fripp unless you live there.”

“That’s perfect. There are about fifteen beaches and another fifteen-day trips and we could do two in one day. There’s a lighthouse on Hunting Island that I’ve never been to and there’s a beach there, too.”

Franklin, Karen, Sally, and I had gone to Hunting Island together after we knew she was moving. It was a fun time but it was sad, too. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back. Kim and I had been to a lot of places that I’d been to with Sally and it wasn’t a big deal. Hunting Island was different, though. The reason we went was to go somewhere new together as sort of a last South Carolina adventure for Sally. Stop overthinking things, Jack. Jeez.

“We can do that. It would definitely be fun. But is this something that we need to do now? Kim was asking about stuff that we can do while we’re still in high school that we couldn’t do when we got older,” I said. Everyone gave me a look that asked, ‘Why are you trashing a great idea?’

“Honey, Ronnie left us enough money that you could go on a cruise every week for the rest of your life. You could tour the world. There’s no time limit on that. But you and Franklin have both chosen to be productive, even though you could live the life of Riley. You worked hard last summer. You can’t get that back, but I know you wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

“Best summer of my life.”

“So, no, this isn’t a list of things you can’t do when you get older. But would you? This sounds like fun.”

“Mom’s right. Two summers ago, you had a good time learning and doing a bunch of stuff. I know you did stuff that no other kid at Porter has done. Do you know anyone your age who has shingled a roof or worked an excavator? Start a T-shirt collection or something. Get a different one from every place you go.”

“I don’t have anything better,” I said. “I’m trying not to overthink everything, you know.” They all laughed. Even Kim. Huh.

We talked for another hour about which beach we should do first and if we should combine this or that. I grabbed my map book and we figured times. Little River was the furthest away to the north. Hilton Head was the furthest to the south. The only way to Daufuskie Island was by boat from Hilton Head and that trip would undoubtedly be the longest. The idea of touring the coast grew on me.

We had finished eating long ago. We said goodbyes, I dropped Kim off at her house, then went home to write in my journal. I spent an hour writing just about baseball and didn’t get anywhere near being finished. I skipped forward a page and wrote ‘Cherry and Mei’ at the top, then another page and wrote, summer plans. I’d write those later but I wanted to remind myself.

Thursday and Friday were dedicated to review. I turned in my last paper, finishing biology with the lymphatic system. Mrs. Nichols asked which section I enjoyed the most. I told her it was hard to choose since the whole thing was fascinating but the muscular system is what makes us move. I told her that Vince was going to try to figure out the neuroscience part of it and she liked that.

The final for keyboarding should be easy. I’d gotten up to seventy words per minute with pretty good accuracy so I wasn’t worried about that. My biggest concern was for Kim in precalculus. We had a lot of ground to cover to prepare for a cumulative test and she was sweating it. She wasn’t the only one. Lunch turned into a precalculus study session. It was supposed to be a study session, but it turned into me, reviewing concepts and doing my best to answer questions.

PE was actually a lot of fun. We played softball. Hitting a giant softball, thrown at forty miles an hour or so was ridiculously easy. Throwing one of those things from center field was a bit more difficult. I stopped in Coach Miller’s office after PE. He was grading the last batch of papers before finals the following week.

“You’ve had quite a year, Aquaman. Did you stop in to tell me what you’re going to do next year?” he asked, smiling.

“No. Definitely not. I don’t know what I was thinking when I did that last year.”

“You did what you said you were going to do, right? You did the same thing with Hamilton, right? Worked out.”

“Yeah, but a huge part of that was our pitchers. Randy and Thumper are both graduating. Randy was amazing.”

“Mr. Milicent had a pretty good season, too. Rusty can’t wait for next season when he’s in the hot seat. I think you’re going to see Cherry start some games. Mr. Smoak was in earlier. He says you’ve got him swimming a mile in under thirty minutes and he’s pretty happy with that. Any chance you might do a triathlon this summer?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe. I bought a bike.”

“Alright. Want my input on that?”

“Definitely. Have you done one?”

He smiled but didn’t answer. “The bike and run both use your legs. It’s an endurance event. So, for the swim, drag your legs. Save them for the bike and run. You’ll still swim plenty fast enough and you’ll have a lot left for the run. It’s just a thought you can experiment with.”

“That sounds like a good idea. I rode, then ran a week ago and the switch is killer.”

“Legs decide to run under protest?”

“That pretty much sums it up. Running under protest. You don’t have any tricks for that transition, do you, sir?”

“For the last half mile on the bike, stretch your hamstrings. You’ll have to coast a bit, but it will help. Stand up, and stretch them out. When you start your run, start with short strides and lengthen them out a little at a time.”

“You have done this before,” I said and he smiled again. I knew it.

“Bike to run is tough but if you try those two things, I think you’ll find it helpful.”

“Thanks, Coach. How’s married life?”

“She spoils me. I’ll end up with a gut if I’m not careful.”

“I’m happy for you, Coach. My mom just got married, too.”

“Your time will come. Relax and enjoy high school.”

“Thanks, Coach. I’m having a great time.”

“I bet you are. Have you fallen short on anything you’ve set your mind to? I’d ask how you would handle coming up short or failing, but I already know the answer to that.”

I didn’t know how he could know that and I asked him, “How would you know that?”

“You didn’t make it to State last year. So, all you did was bust your ass to get back to regionals and then on to State. You swam two-a-days and took home some hardware. On top of that, Bobby did too, and not just in backstroke. What you did after regionals last year says a lot more about you than those trophies do.”

“Wow. Thanks, Coach. That’s a pretty big compliment.”

“A well-earned compliment. Set a new kind of goal for next year. We both know that you’ll do just fine swimming. Set a goal to bring as many of your teammates with you.”

“I’m not quite sure how to do that. Everybody makes up their own mind how hard they want to work and what kind of goals they set, right?”

“Why are you thinking about doing a triathlon?” he asked and waited.

I thought about it for a minute. “Because Marty said I’d be good at it.” He nodded.

“Every young man wants to hear three things. They want to hear, ‘you’ve got what it takes.’ He told you that. They want to hear, ‘you can do it,’ and I think he’s probably done that, too. There’s one other thing. ‘Good job.’ It’s powerful. You try that with Aaron next year and see how he responds. The guys respect you, Pierce. They’ll respond to that. Just something to think about.”

“That’s a lot to think about.”

“It is. I think you’re up to it.”

I wasn’t so sure. I started to leave, then turned back, “Hey, Coach, I think you did a pretty good job this year, just so you know.”

“Thanks, Aquaman. It was fun, wasn’t it?” It was very definitely fun.

After lifting with Mom, Kim and I picked up where we left off, cramming for precalculus. Kim announced that her brain was full. It wasn’t and we worked on Spanish for a while. Mom invited her to stay for dinner. It was still light outside and we decided to cool off in the pool. I changed and was bobbing in the deep end when Kim came out.

I watched her walk toward me. The sun was just right to highlight her soft brown hair as it fell across her shoulders. Her white bikini top had the most perfect job in the world. It didn’t need to support her. It just needed to cover her. She had developed that mystery chick biker vee and that made her waist look smaller than it was. I thought she might have lost a little more weight because of running, not that she needed to. Her belly was flat and toned, and her legs looked better than ever.

She’d been looking around as she walked, casually looking over the backyard. When her eyes finally settled on me, she smiled. “See something you like, Aquaman?” she asked, coyly.

“I have a boner.”

“Well, aren’t you just the silver-tongued devil,” she said with an exaggerated Southern accent.

“You take my breath away.”

She dropped into the pool next to me, popped up, and put her arms around my neck. “Let me give it back to you,” she said and kissed me.

I held her to me and there’s no way she missed my erection pressed against her. I dropped my hands to cup her butt, pulling it tight against me. I ached. Kim walked us toward the other end of the pool.

“Anyone could see us from the kitchen window when we were over there. You’re worked up, aren’t you?” she asked. She was pleasantly surprised.

“You have no idea how good you look.”

“I guess I look fuckable?”

“You look supremely fuckable. I’m ready to pop a gasket.” She reached down, inside my shorts and stroked me a couple of times and that’s all it took. I grunted and thrust against her, coming in my shorts.

“Wow, Jack. That was super-fast.”

“You look super good. Damn, baby. You look so, so good.” I ran my hands up her sides, then down and into the back of her bottoms. She pinched her butt cheeks together and I laughed at that. “Do you want me to...?”

“No. Not in the pool. It’s not good for me in the pool. The water dilutes all the lubrication, I guess. I can wait. You’re still hard. Doggone, Aquaman. You’re a horndog.”

“I’m in lust.”

“Yeah. I knew that.” She reached back down into my shorts, wrapped her fingers around the head of my dick and gently squeezed. She ran her thumb over the top of my dick and then kissed me. She started rubbing me up and down, slowly as our tongues dueled. We parted lips. “I love to feel you inside me,” she said, picking up the pace. We locked eyes and I came a second time, and then, I was quite finished.

“Feel better?”

“Oh, my gosh. You are so, so beautiful”

“Thank you. I guess you like my new bikini, then.”

“I try to be a gentleman and only look at the parts it covers.”

“Uh-huh. It got you worked up, though.”

“You got me worked up.”

“Anybody else do that?”

Oh-oh. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not trying to trick you or anything. Is there anybody else that you see and just get worked up over?”

“Do you mean, who else do I think is hot?”

“Yes. Not just pretty. Karen is pretty. Actually, so is her mom. But is there anyone else that you see and she just gets you going? I already know you think Lori and Lani are hot.” I started to say something and stopped. “I’m just curious. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Just curious.”

“Cheryl is pretty hot, and she likes to tease me. We’d never do anything but when you’re as hot as she is, she probably shouldn’t tease me.”

“She is, in fact, pretty hot. I talked to her the other day in Piggly Wiggly. Mom hadn’t been grocery shopping since before her surgery so I went with her.”

“What did you talk about?”

“School. She’s back in school and enjoying it. She’s making better money bartending but can’t wait to be done. I think she’s probably really smart.”

“I think so. Mickey’s an idiot.”

“I don’t think Mickey can change who he is,” Kim said.

“I’m not buying that. Veronica and Angela are both booze free. Mr. Hinkleman treats Sally like an adult. Manny said he was going to clean up his act. Doctor Legare is in love, and Bobby told a joke once. People can change if they decide to.”

“I guess that’s true enough. If Bobby could tell a joke, then anything is possible. She’s better off without him, though. That’s for sure. She likes to tease you. She told me about the first time you went to Bad Kitty.”

“Oh, my gosh. I was clueless.”

“She said you were cute. She said she had to mop up after you left because you’d left a little puddle of hormones where you’d been standing.”

“Uh-huh. That sounds like Cheryl.”

“Who else? Never mind. What am I thinking? You’re sixteen, and most of my friends are either cheerleaders or could be. What do you think about asking Mel and Bobby to go with us on some of our excursions. Maybe Mei and Cherry, too.”

“Let’s split it. I like their company, but sometimes I just want to be with you.”

She kissed me and said, “You’re sweet. I need to get home and you drove.” We climbed out, dried off, and I drove her home.

Friday was all about review. We had another precalculus cram session at lunch, and that was about enough math for me for the week. We played silly speed games in keyboarding class, since we already knew what our grades would be for the year.

At PE, I tried a bunch of different bats, but it wasn’t the same with softball. If you’re used to hitting eighty-five mile an hour fastballs, a forty mile an hour softball pitch is pretty easy to hit. I came up to bat three times and hit it over the fence three times. I think the final score was something like fifty to forty. It was silly but it was fun.

I was in the mood to lift and set a couple of personal records. I was happiest with my progress on legs. Kim, on the other hand, was very happy to give her legs a break. She went home to get ready for her girls’ night out. I didn’t know what that involved and I didn’t think I wanted to know. I knew they weren’t old enough to go drinking so I wasn’t worried about it. I hit the sack.

Kim and I didn’t have plans for Saturday and I thought she would have been up late so I grabbed my journal, a scratch pad, and a pen, and drove to The Cut. It was only seven and there were already a dozen boats out. I couldn’t see the boats, but I had a pretty good idea of what kind of boat, or at least how big they were by the trucks and trailers in the lot. Most were under twenty-four feet. That meant they were probably fishing inshore where the water was calm. If you try to take a boat smaller than about twenty-four feet out to the jetty, the waves will beat you up and it’s not much fun.

Before I settled in to write, I took a look at my surroundings. The city had recently cut the marsh grass between the picnic bench and the Wappoo Creek, giving me a better view of the creek and the homes on the other side. The Wappoo Creek is about five hundred feet across, which is pretty wide for a creek. Two guys were cleaning their boat on the far side. Sometimes, dolphins will swim up the creek looking for food but the tide was going out, so I didn’t expect to see any.

The air was still cool but I knew it was supposed to hit ninety by ten. There is a light post next to the picnic table and a falcon was perched on top, looking for breakfast. I don’t know birds that well but a peregrine falcon looks like it has Elvis Presley sideburns and it’s pretty easy to identify. Spanish Moss, which is neither Spanish, nor moss, waved in the breeze on a live oak nearby. A couple of squirrels ventured close enough to see if I was going to toss them some food. Nope.

I opened my journal to the page on baseball and started writing. After playing for a season, and doing particularly well, I still didn’t know that much about the game. Some of the guys knew every player on the Atlanta Braves roster, their batting averages or ERAs. They knew who won this World Series or that and why some other team should have won, if only their bullpen was decent. I didn’t know any of that. I’d had fun and planned to play again as a senior but didn’t plan to play in college. I knew that there were about 20,000 high schools and only 300 division one colleges in the US. That meant competition for spots on swim teams or baseball teams would be fierce.

Vince and Birch had both told me they thought I’d be competitive if I wanted to go for it. Both sports were fun but they weren’t some sort of consuming passion. Birch was using swimming to pay for college and Vince wanted his dad to see him play at the college level. I didn’t have any plans along those lines.

I wrote a little note about each of the players on the team. Legs and I had always jogged out to the field together and talked about a bunch of stuff. Thumper had coached me on where to play and had tons of good advice. Gizmo was just a crackup. I had no idea what his dreams or plans were but I hoped he became successful. He was one of the most likable guys I’d ever met, even though he tried to light my foot on fire.

I saved Cherry for last. He’d been playing for a long time and I thought he could probably play anywhere in the infield if he’d wanted to. Being a relief pitcher meant he watched baseball a lot more than he played baseball and, to me, that seemed weird. The thing that stood out about Cherry, though was his total devotion to Mei. He called her ‘Plum’, which is what Mei means. The two of them were inseparable and they had been for years. I wondered if Kim and I would be like that after a few years of being together. Maybe people thought we were like that already. Who knew?

Slowly, some comparisons crept into my thoughts. Cherry had learned to speak Chinese because Mei and her family spoke it. Kim had learned to speak Spanish so we could have our private language, although it wasn’t very private when we were around a bunch of Mexicans. Cherry was planning on going to Hong Kong University and I thought that would have been a pretty unlikely choice if it hadn’t been for Mei. I didn’t think Kim would have had Emory in her top twenty schools if I hadn’t planned on going to Georgia Tech.

Cherry would do anything to protect Mei. Anything. I felt the same way.

One other thing that seemed the same was the certainty of our relationships. I didn’t think Mel and Bobby would break up, and I didn’t think Vince and Lani would. But there was a chance. It seems like there was always a chance that some couple would break up. Marty and Jan had been dating for a while but I didn’t think they were locked in as a couple. The rest of the squad were trying to get things figured out. Annie or Marci would go on one or two dates with a guy and then move on to someone else.

Kim and I were different. I don’t think anyone had any doubt that we were in it together for the long haul. That’s what I thought about Cherry and Mei. It made our friendship with them different. Unlike Vince and Lani, they weren’t ahead of us in school. We’d all be seniors the following year before they went to school in Hong Kong and Kim and I went to Georgia. After that, we’d be back in the Lowcountry. I thought that when Cherry and Mei left, they’d be gone except for the occasional visit to see family.

I finished writing some lessons learned about driving, Kim’s track experience, and what Mom and Dane had to say about St. Lucia. I had just started my next section when Kim sat down next to me.

“What are you ruminating about?” she asked. She liked the word, ruminate.

“What do you think of Cherry and Mei?” I asked.

“He dotes on her and she eats it up.”

“Dotes?”

“Yes, dotes.”

“Huh. Do I dote on you?” I asked.

“No.”

Oh-oh. “Should I?”

“No! It’s cute when they dote on each other and fawn all over each other. If you tried that with me, I’d feel smothered. Nope, nope, nope. You’re fine. I have no doubt that you love me every bit as much as Cherry loves Mei.”

“Okay. Good. She eats it up, though.”

“Yes, she does. It’s probably why he does it. Hungry? I haven’t had breakfast.”

“What do you have in mind?”

We went to Waffle House. I love Waffle House. Not only do they provide good food at a fair price, they have the most interesting customers in the world. We went to the one on Savannah Highway, right near the freeway. That’s where the people watching is best.

Kim had the All-Star Special with scrambled eggs and bacon and I had the Fiesta Omelet with grits. We were just watching people and every now and then, one of us would point out something, but we’d do it in Spanish. Kim was getting pretty good at it.