CANDID

Except for the absence of school, summer has never had any special appeal to me. I almost always prefered being inside a climate-controlled environment whenever possible, especially when the Ohio heat stretched into the nineties and the air became so heavy I felt like I was drowning in my front yard. I have had little patience for discomfort, especially when inside my house there was not only air conditioning, but also a television, computer, and piles of books. 

 

In early elementary school, I became so terrified of being stung by a bee that I spent almost the entire summer inside. I’m not sure if I was stung once and decided that it would never happen again or if I struck preemptively. When my parents would get sick of my lurking, they would force me outdoors and I would keep my eyes peeled for black and yellow stripes wherever I went. If I did spot a bee I would immediately freeze. Mom always said that bees had poor eyesight and couldn’t see a motionless figure, so I would stand still until Dad would inform me that my nemesis was only a “head-knocker” bee that didn’t even sting. Although I eventually overcame my fear of stinging insects, my habit of hiding from the uncomfortable persisted into high school. 

 

Before I graduated, my friends and I started making plans for how we would spend our last summer before we all went to college. We were scattering across the state to different universities and while we all promised to stay in touch, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to see each other. As we struggled through our final weeks of public education we started discussing all of the mostly illegal ways we could waste our summer: bonfires stocked with alcohol provided by older siblings, renting a cabin at Deer Creek State Park and getting incredibly high, maybe even a cross country road trip to California. I was used to solo summers ensconced indoors with Harry Potter or Law & Order: SVU reruns. The prospect of a summer spent with friends having daring adventures and risking everything we had spent all of high school working for sounded ideal. Finally, I would get to experience summer instead of reading about it.

 

To kick off our summer, we planned a hotel party. Torey was going to borrow his brother’s ID and rent a room at an inn in Grove City, a Columbus suburb far away from our small town homes where our parents could all too easily figure out what we were doing. His brother also purchased the alcohol, a considerable amount even for a group of teenagers trying to be rebellious. 

 

We carried the alcohol—two handles of vodka, two six packs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, a twelve pack of Bud Light, and two twelve packs of Bud Light Lime-A-Ritas—to the second-floor hotel room in book-bags and under coats. While we had been expecting all of our friends to arrive, there were only five of us facing this mountain of intoxication. It’s probably good that we didn’t attempt to drink it all. 

 

In fact, we barely attempted to drink any of it. For some reason, none of us had more than a beer or two apiece. We all blamed the heat, which was surprisingly high for the beginning of June. Walker blamed the fact that he was hung up on a girl and I blamed the fact that the last time I drank, I vomited bright red all over Marissa’s bathroom. I don’t think any of us really knew why we were unwilling to tackle the alcohol piled in the mini-fridge. 

 

Instead of drinking, we talked. Marissa and I sat on one bed. Both of us had just graduated and were now heading to the rival colleges, Ohio University and Miami University. Once while drunk on the floor of a bathroom we looked up the distance between our two colleges. Three hours would separate us come the fall.

Austin and Walker sat on the other bed. They were a year behind Marissa and me, and still had another year of high school. They frequently mentioned how much they were going to miss us and how we had to enjoy this last summer. It was the only time I saw either of them all summer.

 

Torey sat in a chair by the door. Despite Marissa’s requests to not smoke in the room, he was lighting up every few minutes, letting the menthol smoke drift out the open door. His butts swam in a cup half full of a noxious mixed drink I had started and never finished. He and Marissa were engaged, having dated since our sophomore year. He was leaving for Navy boot camp in the fall and had already sworn in. His mom had breast cancer and one of his three older brothers had AIDS. He smoked a lot.

 

I would smoke with him, lighting maybe one cigarette for every three of his. I still burned through an entire pack that night, standing on the walkway outside our front door and ashing over the railing onto the bushes below. We had been watching MTV until True Life changed to music videos that we had never seen before. Then we turned the TV off and talked about what we were doing with our lives.

 

“I’m really joining the Navy for the wrong reason,” Torey said. “I don’t really love my country, I just want the benefits.”

 

“Not me,” Walker said. He wanted to join the Marines. “I want to be a front-line infantryman, right there with a gun.”

 

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed,” I said. He didn’t respond. My biggest issue with my future college was that it was conservative and I was not. My problems sometimes seem very small.

 

Marissa eventually fell asleep on the bed next to me. Those of us still awake talked until sunrise. We all agreed that it was good that we didn’t drink, that sometimes it was nicer to just talk instead. Besides, it was really hot. Heat is definitely an excuse for not drinking. Obviously.

 

When the sun climbed over the horizon at around six in the morning, we drove back to Madison County in silence. I fell asleep in the backseat.

 

• • •

 

Marissa’s graduation party was a couple weeks after our wild night of not getting drunk. After eating cake with her grandparents, Marissa and I decided to go shopping the next day. I had my summer orientation at Miami the day after that and I was determined to arrive ready to handle the notoriously well-dressed university.  

 

I had won the distinction of Best Dressed in the yearbook my senior year, but this was mostly due to a severe lack of competition. Madison Plains High School served a rural community that didn’t place a high emphasis on any kind of fashion. The county lacked even a Target and most people purchased their clothes from Walmart or Tractor Supply Co. When camouflage hunting jackets and boot-cut jeans are the norm, a t-shirt that actually fits and a couple nice sweaters can go a long way.

 

Even this level of style was something that I was only recently developing. Ever since my mom stopped dressing me in elementary school I had gravitated towards baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirts. My hair was long because I have a large forehead that I wanted to be covered with long bangs that sometimes hung past my eyes. I never really thought about improving what I wore. It’s not like it particularly mattered.  I was too deep in the closet to think about hitting on anyone and my friends certainly didn’t care about how I dressed.

 

I started dressing well because of a single day my junior year when I wore the nicest t-shirt with a pair of baggy khaki cargo shorts. Not acceptable under my standards today, but extremely fashion forward for me at the time. Marissa commented that she thought that I looked a lot nicer than I usually did. I probably wore that outfit three more times that week. The following summer, I bought four t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and two cardigans from H&M, a company that specializes in cheap but well-made hipster attire. H&M is still my favorite store, and was the first one that I insisted Marissa and I stop at when we went to the mall a year after my first visit.

 

“So what classes do you want to take?” I asked Marissa. We had totally different majors at totally different universities, but all that any of the seniors could talk about since March was what we were going to do in college. We had spent hours bragging about student centers and official rankings, but now we were actually going. 

 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably freshman Chem. Whatever they tell me to take, I guess.” She had plenty of time before she had to decide. I had twenty-four hours before I would be in Oxford.

 

“Me too, I guess,” I said. 

 

The actual buying of clothes was probably the most uneventful part of the trip. We spent a couple hours walking around the mall with Starbucks in hand, accumulating additional shopping bags. Graduation party money isn’t real money.

 

We were leaving Marshall’s when I commented to Marissa that I wanted to cut my hair before college.

 

“Honestly, I would be willing to do it right now. I just need to do it.”

 

Marissa raised an eyebrow.

 

“The Great Clips in London does a pretty good job if you really want to.”

 

And so I got my hair cut.

 

It wasn’t exactly that simple. I spent the entire car ride agonizing. Yes, I had been trying to transform myself for college, but what if my new hair was so horrible that I might as well just stay with the shaggy mop I had been sporting for years? And even if I should cut my hair, what should my new haircut be? Marissa was looking up options on her iPhone and some of them did look nice, but would they look nice on me? I had a big forehead and a long face. My hair was thin and straight, and I had no idea how to use styling products. Instead of looking better for college, I might look so bad that I would have to drop out and work at the aluminum factory in Mt. Sterling.

 

Despite my internal melodrama, I still drove to Great Clips. There was a sample book that I flipped through and decided on the first hairstyle that I thought looked decent. When the clippers took off the first chunk of hair, I was so nervous that I wanted to abort the entire thing and go to orientation with a chunk missing. I dug my nails into the arms of the chair. 

 

The end result was decent. My bangs were limp and flat since I didn’t know what to do with them except sweep them across my forehead and I didn’t really have enough for that anymore. The back was shorter than I had expected and my forehead was in fact very big, but I had done it. I had cut my hair.

When I got home and stepped out of the car, my mom looked at me strangely before exclaiming, “I didn’t even recognize you.” When I got inside and looked in a mirror, I didn’t really recognize myself either. 

 

Good.

 

• • •

 

I decided to go to my two-day orientation at Miami without my parents. I wanted to get to know people without worrying about saying the wrong thing in front of my parents. I thought that I would finally begin to make my first steps towards true independence. 

 

Instead, I didn’t talk to anyone for almost the entire day because everyone else came with their parents. And while everyone was too busy attending tours, lectures, and information sessions to worry about socializing, I was still alone. 

 

Just before dinner on the first day, students and parents are separated. At last, I wasn’t the only one who was awkward and alone. 

 

Our group was standing in line for dinner, and two guys behind me were making conversation. I was turned halfway towards them, hoping to see if there was a point where I could jump in.

 

“Dude, some of the girls in this group are really hot!”

 

Nevermind.

 

I did manage to make conversation during the meal. I overheard a group of girls next to me at the end of the table mention Supernatural, a TV show that I had watched last fall. Although I had quit watching about halfway through the show’s run, I still knew enough to interject into the conversation. We bonded together out of mutual desperation for people to talk to, more than anything else. The longer we talked, the more I realized that we didn’t really have very many common interests. But we were all so intimidated at the thought of being by ourselves that we stuck together the entire night, and chatted the next day. We promised to stay in touch, but aside from an awkward lunch with one of them, I never saw any of them again. 

 

Even if I had failed to make lasting friends, I still made it back from orientation without being expelled for a bad haircut. I was registered for five classes. I was going to college. 

 

• • •

 

My friends and I only spent one night together that summer, a far cry from our original hopes for a summer spent in mutual intoxication. It was the Fourth of July, and Austin (a different Austin than the one at the hotel party) had his graduation party. It was later than most graduation parties, but it served to gather at least some of my friends in one place.

 

We were sitting around a bonfire, but without any alcohol. The party was over but we were itching to do something, to finally live up to our expectations of summer. Marissa suggested that we go to a hookah bar in Columbus, since we couldn’t really find any alcohol. Hookah, a Middle Eastern method of imbibing tobacco smoke, doesn’t provide a high of any sort, but those who had previously been said that it was fun and I was content to tag along.

The hookah bar was in the Short North, an artsy neighborhood. It was packed with twenty-somethings dressed in all manner of hipster or urban apparel, all of whom looked much cooler than us. We were a group of teenagers in the corner, most of us never having smoked hookah before, puffing away on the unfamiliar pipes and trying to not knock one of the expensive contraptions over. 

 

We didn’t talk much, or if we did, we didn’t talk about anything important. I can’t recall a significant scrap of dialogue until we returned to Austin’s house; most of our friends left, and Austin asked me if I wanted to smoke weed with him.

 

I had never smoked weed before. I knew that Austin did, quite frequently, but it had never had any appeal to me. Still, this was my Bohemian summer of great adventures, and I was going to consume a controlled substance, dammit. 

 

Attempting to smoke weed was easily one of the more terrible experiences of my life. A part of me must have known that this endeavor was doomed for failure when Austin had to first create a smoke device out of an empty Gatorade bottle, using a pocketknife and a lighter to shape his instrument. We were standing awkwardly behind a shed in his backyard. At least, I was awkward. I’m not sure how someone is supposed to stand when preparing to do drugs. 

“When I light it, put your thumb over this hole and then breathe in,” Austin instructed me. “Try to hold it in your lungs for a while and then exhale. And don’t feel bad if you cough.”

 

I did feel bad when I coughed. Not out of shame, but because I felt like my lungs were on fire and were going to break out of my ribcage. I didn’t cough that hard when I had pneumonia my freshman year and couldn’t leave the house for a month. 

 

“You want to light it for me?” Austin asked.

 

We each used the bong three times. Austin was indeed high and recounted a fictional story about people with no bones living in fear of a race of vampire people. 

I threw up.

 

I still don’t see the appeal of smoking weed. I suppose that I didn’t get high at all and maybe the high is enjoyable enough to warrant putting one’s body through the rigorous process, but I think I’m content to stay away from marijuana for the foreseeable future.

 

• • • 

 

The day before I was going to start college, I was in bed. I had two suitcases packed full of clothes sitting on my floor, but I was in bed watching Shameless on my laptop. 

 

Shameless is a Showtime television series depicting the poor, dysfunctional Gallagher family living in poverty on the south side of Chicago. Although my family was neither poor nor dysfunctional and I had never set foot in the south side of Chicago, I was hooked on the show. I was determined to catch up with the last season before I left for Miami. Thus, I was spending my final day of summer in bed.

 

Most of the plot of Shameless focuses around the Gallagher’s getting themselves in and out of all sorts of trouble, with the law, with gangsters, and with each other. Cigarettes and liquor were passed around like candy and other drugs make frequent appearances. The characters generally regard these as commonplace, simply normal objects that inhabit their world. 

 

Perhaps that was the ideal I was trying to capture. Maybe my desire for what I saw as Bohemian rebellion was actually a search for dysfunction in my life. I’m not sure what it means that I would desire such strife, just as I’m not sure why I didn’t get plastered in that hotel room. 

 

Sometimes we are so desperate to leave our pasts behind that we try and change our futures drastically enough to erase what we’ve already done. I wanted to leave behind my fear of bee stings so badly. I was willing to vomit into Austin’s bushes just to prove that I wasn’t afraid anymore.