Free Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulos

instead and she answered right away.
“Why are you nervous?” she asked. “You don’t have to sleep with him if you don’t want to.”
“That’s not why I’m nervous,” I said, wishing Laura had been there.
“So you are going to sleep with him?”
I laughed at Mary’s interest in my sex life, but now I had the additional worry that Nick was expecting it as well. As my parents prepared to go out for the evening, I went to their bedroom to see my mother. She was putting on makeup.
My mother was born breech and there’s a Filipino superstition that says breech babies have the ability to be healers. Whenever my aunt had a bad headache or a cold, she called my mother. Mom always rolled her eyes, but she would still drive over to see what she could do to help. My father got a kick out of it too and at night I often found him sitting on the floor, my mother on the couch above him scratching his balding head while they watched television. “Maybe your mother can make my hair grow back,” he’d say, his eyes half- closed like a dog. I was sceptical of these so-called powers, but sometimes when I had cramps, I would lie in bed and she would rub the small of my back. The warmth of her touch was maybe not healing, but it was soothing. Before Nick came over I craved that kind of comfort.
“Going to have a quiet night?” she asked.
I nodded. “What time will you be home?”
“Not late.”
I worried that Nick would still be here when they returned. As I fretted, Mom walked past me in a cloud of perfume.
But when Nick arrived, I relaxed. We went to my bedroom and he was the one who noticed the guitar first. He asked me to play him a song.
Laura and I learned how to play guitar together the summer before. We met our teacher waiting at a radio station to get free tickets to a concert. He was behind us in line and overheard us talking about how we wanted to learn to play guitar and said he could teach us. We didn’t think twice about accepting his invitation and every Thursday afternoon after that we gave excuses to our parents and met him for lessons. Sometimes they were at his place, a dark, skinny row house he shared with two gay men, but when the weather was nice we’d go to a nearby park. The three of us would sit cross-legged on the grass while Laura and I took turns playing his second guitar. At the time he was the most interesting person we’d ever met. We talked about inviting him to parties and laughed at how everyone would freak-out. As the summer wore on, his quirks became annoying. He was twenty-four, nine years older, and we weren’t sure why he was spending time with us. We broke up with him at the next lesson telling him we’d learned everything we needed to know and wouldn’t be coming back. He looked upset, embarrassed, but we ignored it and left. Together we’re powerful like that.
When I played the guitar for Nick, it was the first time I’d played for someone outside of those guitar lessons. Nick was very attentive. He was quiet and leaned in to listen to me sing. And then we kissed, and I know I said it was sloppy, but it was also sweet.
Laura called me that night, late.
“How was it?” she asked.
“It was fun.”
“That’s great, Esther,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. Either way, that night I fell asleep content. I thought about Nick and wondered if he was going to somehow factor into my life. I wondered if he would count.
At school Laura kept distancing herself from me. We’d known each other for years, but had only become best friends after bonding in an English class over our taste in music. I wasn’t used to not talking to her multiple times a day. A school week passed, then a weekend, and we had barely spoken to each other.
One day my calculus class ended early and I made my way to the cafeteria to meet other friends for lunch. You could take a shortcut through the parking lot to get from one end of the school to the other, and I ran into Laura