Grab your shades and sun loungers! Dive into this feel-good collection of winning short stories for the LGBTQIAP+: Sun-Kissed Summer Anthology contest.
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Author's Note: Trigger warnings: non-descriptive crude humor, observations of the human body, the word "fag" used jokingly once, and brief mention of sex, and of underage drinking, and of death at the very end. Keep in mind that this is typical high school humor being utilized, and I don't want to insult anyone.
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There are quite a lot of friends I don't remember meeting. Our friends must've been friends with each other, and then we started to have conversations on our own, and then we would say hi in the halls, and somehow their number would end up in my phone. Many of my friends, I think, I probably made through my classes and Instagram. Most of them I met during middle school or freshman year. All of them are casual and simple, the way we like it.
I never feel the loneliness that people said came with high school. I have friends in every class. There is always somebody to each lunch with, someone who will have the homework answers. Amilcar and I shared three classes, and so we sent each other every cheat sheet we got our sneaky little hands on.
Ami is one of those dudes whom I don't remember befriending. I know that in middle school our mutual friend was Michelle, and we'd exchanged memes. Someone had the idea of creating Red Shoes. ((An inside joke: for half a year a pair of red heels were left unattended in Miller's room. He didn't move them and no one claimed them. Then, the day before spring break, they disappeared. It was a good joke for a good while.)) Red Shoes, capitalized and everything, was a group chat that consisted entirely of memes. I'm pretty sure that's where I first became proper friends with Amilcar--knowing his sense of humor told me more than anybody else.
We never became best friends, or even close ones. The reason that I consider him a friend at all is because he's always been there, talking or fighting or dancing. We don't converse outside of school or about anything other than school, besides friending each other on Snapchat. We acknowledge each other wholly, but given the time we've known each other we don't know much about each other.
Amilcar is popular. He's Mexican, and at our school there's a group of them who all hang out with each other. They don't let you in unless your mom constantly shouts at you that the house isn't clean enough, he says. My mom doesn't shout at me in general; in fact, I can't picture shouting at her. Ami laughed when I told him that.
I don't like to approach him when he's hanging out with them. They're always huddled in a group, talking with that accent of theirs, and I am entirely too Caucasian for them to consider even saying my gringo name. The fights that Amilcar had gotten into were because of them, so he says. Once, when we were sitting in the back of English, he told me that when he's with those friends an insult can't be taken lightly.
