Five Summers on a Handwritten Note | ✓

1. Firsts

The person I did end up with, one afternoon in early June, was Samantha. She was Sam to me and her friends, Sammy to her doting parents, and Silencio, Samantha Parker to Mrs. Cano, our Spanish teacher, who said it so much it became a classroom tradition. Sam was sweet, blonde and short. She wore patterned pinafore dresses, volunteered at Christian camps every summer break and was set to study Pre-Law at an Ivy League. We'd known each other our whole lives, and we were friends I suppose, in a non-committal way.

Funnily enough, the chasm I'd looked to fill didn't happen with Sam. We were just in my room that day, for some volunteer thing we were planning, and it was the first time I'd seen her in bell-bottom jeans, and there was something thrilling about that. She felt it too, as she sat close to me on my bed in that sticky, Georgia heat. The only thing I remember was that her toes were painted yellow and she leaned in first, to kiss me, and I'd melted right into it. There was no fear of moles or clashing teeth, only that I was hurting her, which she insisted I wasn't because she'd done this before. And I'd thought, fuck, is everybody except me not a virgin? Then there was that dizzy rush of exhilaration that I wasn't one either, not anymore, and it wasn't all that bad if we just had an AC or something in the room.

We did it again, three more times, over the course of the summer before Sam and I decided we should probably stop. It was very matter-of-fact. None of the clinging hands or the bleeding hearts and the melancholy which clogged up everybody else's Summer Before College. Sam had just squeezed my hand, the only moment where I might've felt my heart stir slightly. I'd squeezed it back, whispered a good luck into her ear, and that was the end of it. We were never so close that we could over-zealously promise to stay in touch and so that is the only memory I have of her. She's forever stuck at eighteen, in blue bell-bottom jeans and sunny toenails.

All of that was twenty years ago.

And here I am again.

I'm back in my bedroom, and I've been here plenty of times since I was eighteen, but it feels different now with these memories spinning like re-runs in my brain. My bedroom stretches beyond childhood nostalgia and rampant adolescence into the downward slope of what should've been my hedonistic twenties. Instead, there was that six-month slog between graduation and getting a job in Denver when I was twenty-three, followed by another period of unemployment and homelessness when I was twenty-five. My parents indulged my failures, knowing I'd find my way out of here again, somehow. And I did.

The last time I stayed in this room, properly, like it belonged to me again, was the night before Emma and I got married. That was eleven years ago.

None of those moments in my life seem quite as potent now, as that hour I spent in here with Sam. It feels wrong, to feel the imprint of her lips on mine or the ghost of an old summer searing my skin with its heat.

Death conjures up the strangest of sensations.

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You'd think I'd feel some sort of sorrow - Sam was my First after all, wasn't she? And she was the Good Sort, easy to write obituaries about because you could reel off all the amazing things she achieved at so tender an age: the innocence made her a martyr, her youth solidified the tragedy and her Christian faith gave her photograph a soft glow that hovered angelically above the condolences and the candlelight.

But she won't come out of the shadows for me to grieve her properly.

I'm not the only one who can't get Sam un-stuck from the past. She's still there, for most of the town, in her patterned pinafores and soft smiles and the little Bible quotes that she scrawled in the margins of her schoolbooks way back in fifth grade.

I didn't think too much of it when I heard about her going missing just a week before college started. After all, we can't come to the worst conclusions so soon right? I waved it off as an impromptu road trip in a last-ditch effort to wash away the remnants of Sunday School Samantha, a persona we attached to her that had, more or less, withered away by ninth grade.

By early December of my first year in college, I was too caught up in the usual sort of college drama you only think about fondly later on - girls, liquor, professors and their rumoured perversions. My memories of that summer lay discarded between the old bedsheets of my bedroom, seventy miles away.

They couldn't find her. Hell, I don't think any of us - apart from her parents - allowed much time for Sam. She was in my periphery for a while and all my phone conversations with my parents and school friends, for the first three years after she'd gone missing, indulged in their incessant speculation. Oh she might've just run away, maybe she met someone, maybe she lied about the Pre-Law thing and chickened out about coming clean, did you know they say she did it with some kid at the back of a school bus? So much for that good Christian virtue, huh? Wonder how the Parkers tried to cover that one up.

The rumours of Sam's hidden vices had begun after a police search in her bedroom, where they'd found a bunch of condoms stashed in a wicker storage box along with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. That sealed the deal for most people - Sam was a slut, and a socialist.

I played a tight-lipped game, tensing at the mention of a girl I wanted nothing to do with. Sure, we'd had fun - once, twice maybe? The details became vague even to me, irrelevant. I'd answer whatever was thrown at me, of course. Yeah mom, she did come over once. Yeah, it was a project. Yeah, she was a nice kid. I don't know, I can't tell if she liked me or not. No, of course I don't think she was a crazy feminist who got an abortion. You need to stop listening to aunt Jillian, mom, she's nuts.

Sam slipped away from existence. The police stopped looking for her, the 'Missing' posters were usurped by weekly community bulletins and the only time she was brought up again was when somebody swore they'd seen her at some feminist women's march in New York, news which satiated aunt Jillian and further scandalised everybody else.

It's been so long since then. Our Southern town frothed and boiled in its little cocoon but 'Nam had destroyed the seventies and the war fatigue forced us to settle into a sullen and mournful silence. The silence made Sam's mystery derelict - old news. It was only her parents who still, according to mom, stood in front of the church every Sunday to hand out flyers with Sam's face on it until the pastor gently advised them to stop because they were making everybody uncomfortable. For the next twenty years, Samantha Parker became our local runaway with a notorious reputation.

Until last month.

It happened in quick succession after Mrs. Cooper's fifteen-year-old son, an avid fisher under the watchful eye of his veteran Pops, fished out some blackish cloth from the lake. Coated in years of grime and decay, tattered - but a dress, nevertheless. A pinafore.

They had to go searching for her after that. It had to be her.

And it was.

Samantha Parker, the feminist dyke baby-murderer, was practically canonised overnight.

I'd just smoothed out Aggy's blonde hair as she let gurgled in her sleep - her first night in a grown-up-girl bed - when I heard the news. Emma had handed me the phone, eyebrows pulled down by her sunken expression, shoulders hunched.

"Hey, mom?" I questioned, knowing it was bad. Mom always told Emma everything first.

"You've got to come home, baby." Mom's voice seemed to be drowned out by a commotion behind her. She hadn't called me 'baby' since my thirteenth birthday. "It's Sam. Remember that girl from your school? Sam, missing?"

I put the phone down slowly on top of the blanket. I could still hear mom's voice struggling through the muffle. Baby? Hon, you there? 

I looked at my daughter's sleeping frame. It must've been a while because the sounds around me disappeared - the gurgling, mom's voice calling out to me in a haunting echo of baby baby baby?

For the first time in twenty years, I felt Sam's hands drawing me back into a kiss I thought I'd long forgotten.

For the first time in twenty years, I knew that she was dead.

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