Free The Journey Prize Stories 21 by Various

child, singing – trying quietly to sing but whispering, choking out the words, gasping, soaked in sweat despite the air conditioning, dripping sweat, his yellow night shirt soaked through and sticking to his broad back, and one of his outstretched hands shaking while he gasped the words, one at a time: “There’s. A. Moon. Out. Tonight.” He caught his breath and was silent, alerted to me, but I knew not to move, or speak, and to deepen my breathing in a successful enough imitation of sleep, successful enough, if not to fool him, then to allow him to pretend not to know and me to agree to pretend that I had not witnessed his agony and his urgent nostalgia.
    His nostalgia. Christopher was fourteen when his nineteen-year-old cousin, Jerry, with his girlfriend, Andrea, drove all the way down from Halifax to visit him and his parents in Windsor for a week. In his family photo album there’s a picture of Christopher, short but already taking on his adult stockiness; Jerry, tall and wiry, looking very hip in his stovepipes and pleased with himself; and Andrea, a more voluptuous DianaRoss, on Jerry’s arm. In the story Christopher tells, his voice had changed early that summer, became its impossible, deeply textured bass almost overnight, and when Jerry heard him he exclaimed, “We’ve got our bassman!” He and Andrea said they had been singing doo-wop the entire trip, with Andrea taking the falsettos in her soprano and Jerry the tenor leads, but were frustrated that they didn’t have the bass. So Christopher was conscripted out of his book-reading loneliness and into the trio, and the family performance of The Capris’s
There’s a Moon Out Tonight
was, to hear Christopher tell it, the pinnacle of joy in an otherwise unrelievedly, archetypally wretched adolescence. When they were done Andrea leaned over, placed one hand lightly on Christopher’s chest, cupped her other hand around his ear, and whispered to him, “Girls always go for the bassman.” Jerry heightened the pleasure by hamming up some jealousy, exclaiming, “You stealing my girl? You making time with my girl?” Her lips brushing his ear, her fingertips on his chest – it was the erotic highlight of Christopher’s life, he told me in our only conversation about respective romantic histories, easily overshadowing later conquests, when his confidence had caught up to his liquidy bass and drew lonely, dreaming girls to wait in the dark for the late-night FM deejay to finish his shift.
    Christopher tells that story, the music part, not the sexy denouement, when he’s asked to explain what began his obsession with doo-wop, but for him it’s the unexplained that draws his attention, the puzzle about Jerry. “Why would he want to visit us for a week? God, my parents were the most uptight, the most dull, the most judgmental – why would he want to spend a week with us?” His theory is that Jerry planned to visitonly a day or two before adventuring across the river to Detroit, but that he stayed for him, to rescue him, stayed to give his little cousin something to get him through the pain of the next few years. And Andrea seemed happy to join in and add her special bonus. He proposes the theory, then rejects it, because he cannot imagine anyone being that sacrificing, certainly not any nineteen-year-old guy with a world to explore and an Andrea to explore it with.
    Before they left, Jerry and Andrea gave him the latest record by The Marcels, which became the first record in Christopher’s collection. More importantly, they convinced his parents that they needed to buy Christopher a record player to play it on.
    The highway out of the city was a badly paved, potholed strip that became a dusty, rutted dirt road, whose curves we followed into the countryside as the afternoon became evening, past small villages where we sometimes stopped for more passengers, past farmers herding goats,