Free This is the Part Where You Laugh by Peter Brown Hoffmeister Page B

pretty much every night in the summer. I’d go down and catch one, hold it, sing to it….” She scratches her nose with her forearm. “I guess I was a strange little girl.”
    “Sounds normal enough to me.”
    “Well, anyway, I loved them. And I heard that bass eat frogs, that they rip their legs off sometimes and leave the rest of them to die. So I hate bass. Fuck bass.”
    “All right,” I say. “Fuck bass. Kill ’em all.”
    Natalie smiles. She says, “Do you go to Taft too?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And do you play any sports?”
    “Basketball.”
    “Wait,” she says. “You play basketball?”
    “Yeah, that’s pretty much all I ever did growing up. All I ever do now.”
    Natalie says, “I don’t know why, but I didn’t think of you as a basketball player.” She tilts her head and looks at me.
    I look out at the water in front of us, the black ripples bigger with the wind, yellow lantern lines on black. I hate it when people don’t think of me as a basketball player. I know that’s stupid since they wouldn’t know unless they were watching me play, but somehow I wish it were more obvious. If I looked like Creature, they wouldn’t even ask me if I played.
    “Sorry,” Natalie says. “I didn’t mean anything by that. There just aren’t a lot of basketball players under six feet, you know?”
    “It’s fine,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “You probably get that a lot, huh?”
    “Yep.”
    “Sorry.” Natalie splashes the water with her feet again. “Sometimes I just say things.”
    I point to the scar on her knee, half lit from the lamp. She leans back and lets the light fall directly on her leg. Now I can see that the scar is one long line with four dots to the side.
    I say, “What’s that from?”
    She shakes her head. “Long story. Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.” She stands up. “But I’m gonna go wash my hands now.” She smells her palms again and makes another face. “It was nice hanging out, though.” She picks up her lantern by its handle. Grabs her
Catcher in the Rye.
    I stand up. “I’ll see you around?”
    “All right,” she says, and walks up the dock.

WALLFLOWER
    In my tent, I can’t stop thinking about Natalie, can’t fall asleep. I keep thinking about how it would feel to kiss her, the smell of her hair when she leaned down next to me, her strong legs, those brightly colored bra straps, how she loves frogs and swims after them in the dark, how she reads alone at night on her dock, and the light of the lantern casting shadows across the angles of her body.
    I imagine her in my small tent with me, how the tent would fill with the smell of her, her breath, her lips, her body on top of me, the good weight of her. Then I’d turn and roll on top, feel her underneath me.
    I think about all of that, and pretty soon I’m wide, wide awake.

TOMBSTONE BLUES
    We slept in a Dumpster the first two times we got kicked out of motels, but that makes it sound a lot worse than it was. The Dumpster was mostly filled with cardboard, and the first time we slept in there, we slept between a new refrigerator box and a big brown box that said FRAGILE . Both smelled like paper.
    We put our two suitcases in the Dumpster with us, our army blanket, and our sleeping bag. We swam down four layers in the cardboard before we laid out the blanket and pulled it flat, then settled in next to each other with the sleeping bag over the top of us.
    I was fine until my mom said we had to shut the lid. I didn’t want to do that.
    She said, “You want someone to see us in here?”
    “No.”
    “Or to toss bottles in on top of us?”
    “No,” I said. “We can shut it.”
    So she shut the lid.
    Then the Dumpster didn’t smell as good. It still smelled like cardboard next to us, cardboard on both sides, but there were other smells that came through. Smells from the corners, smells from below us on the Dumpster’s floor. And it didn’t feel like there was quite enough air in there