We ride in the back of her father’s pickup truck on the freeway. When I look back on that night, it’s odd that we are with her father, because I don’t remember seeing him again that night. But it was most certainly his car. My parents would have never let us in the back, on that hot metal bed without a seatbelt, but Nina’s family let us be free. That’s why I loved coming to visit her, even after she moved.
The downside of sitting in the bed of a truck is that our hair constantly whips our cheeks and eyes. Neither of us has anything to tie it back so knots form that won’t come out for days. While we squint to keep the hair from our pupils, we watch the suburban sprawl stretch into prairie punctuated by the occasional warehouse. I think of the countryside as something picturesque, a place of rolling, verdant hills and meadows, but this is flat, patchy, and yellow. It is only June and the summer rains have not yet started. Everything is bone dry.
I count the horses, but don’t see many of them, which is disappointing. Mostly, I see cows. If horses get out and roam the prairie, my Spanish teacher says they would be called cimarrons. My history teacher once used that same word to describe escaped slaves. I think that is why it’s stuck in my head. But these few horses do not matter, because Nina’s stepmom Paula has a horse at her house, and that’s where we are headed. I’ve ridden a horse a couple of times, trail rides on family vacations, but this is a rodeo horse. Nina says she can teach me to ride her fast around barrels.
We turn off the highway and ease onto a two-lane road with potholes. Nina’s father used to live down the street from me, but he recently remarried and moved out to the country. I met Nina’s stepmother at the wedding, in her white ballgown dress with layers of lace and tulle, but she did not linger long with us kids. I supposed she had plenty to do that day, although Nina says she’s just mean.
The truck passes a gas station and a grocery, the parking lots of which are littered with men in caps, tight jeans, and boots. Most of them are smoking cigarettes. Some spit brown pools of tobacco on the asphalt. We wave at the young ones we think are cute.
“Don’t worry, there will be boys at the party,” Nina says.
“What do I talk about with them?” I ask.
Nina rolls her eyes. “Whatever you’d normally talk about. We’re not in a foreign country.”
I make some excuse about not knowing what to talk about with boys at home either, but Nina knows the truth. I think it’s different out here. We just finished the sixth grade, and Nina’s father changed her school one month before the end of the year. She’s lucky in that she got to skip out on so many exams. Somehow, even with only a month in the new school, Nina already knows everyone in her grade and has invited them all to the party. It will be a pool party, which is expected if your birthday falls in June like Nina’s does.
We slow and pull into a gravel driveway. In front of us is a double-wide trailer, a covered car port, and a tall, gnarled oak tree. The aluminum above-ground pool peeks through the pillars of the car port, but I can’t see the horse.
“She’s behind the house,” Nina says, reading my mind. “We’ll see her tomorrow.”
I nod. It’s her birthday. I can be patient.
Nina jumps out of the side of the bed of the truck while I gingerly climb onto the bumper and sit before I hop down onto the concrete. Empty beer cardboard boxes stack next to the door of the double-wide, along with a broom covered in cobwebs and a wrought-iron cross nailed to the siding. We are already in our bathing suits, so we put our cover-ups on a chair and run through the grass to the pool with bare feet. There are goatheads, but they are not yet old enough to hurt us. By August, the green burs will grow bigger and harden into the spiky nuisance they always become.
The pool is just a bit cooler than the air, which means we can get in quickly without shrieking. Nina’s plan is that we will be in the pool when people arrive so none of the boys can see our bellies. We talked about doing crunches every day for a week to make sure we looked our best, but I don’t think either of us followed through on it. In those days, we made lots of plans we didn’t keep. Besides, Nina is already thin. Short and thin. It used to make her upset that she was so small, but now she goes on about how much she can eat without gaining weight. Her saucer eyes give her the look of one of those life-size dolls, except her eyebrows sit heavy over her lids. She often plucks so many of them that she looks angry. It’s the only thing she considers a flaw.
I, on the other hand, am a patchwork of imperfections. My height has stretched higher than acceptable for a twelve-year-old girl, and to make matters worse, I have further sprouted in odd places. My feet and arms are gangly. My hips too conspicuous. I already had a birthmark shaped like California on my cheek; I didn’t need anything else to set me apart, but here we are.
Climbing up and then down into the pool is strange, like getting into a giant cauldron. I’ve only ever been to in-ground pools with smooth concrete bottoms. Nina’s pool is lumpy, like it could bow until it folds in on itself.
“The stable’s there. Willamena’s in the round pen,” Nina says.
“The horse has a name?” I ask.
“Of course she does, why wouldn’t she?”
From the driveway, two kids walk up. Nina waves. I stare at the fence behind the house. A dark bay horse stands at the gate, like she’s waiting for us.
“Is she mean?” I ask.
“I didn’t invite anyone mean.”
“No, the horse, Willamena.”
“No, she’s fine. She’s just old. We’ll go tomorrow. Come meet Trey and David.”
We abandon our plan of staying in the pool and run through the grass again to meet the two boys. I try to cover my belly with my arms, but I can’t do that and run at the same time. I wonder if Nina wants me next to her so she looks smaller in comparison. I wonder if that is why she invited me at all. I might try another diet, one I saw in Cosmopolitan, when I get home.
The boys are scrawny, as most sixth grade boys are, with clipped sandy-brown hair, gelled into a single front spike, but their tight jeans and steel toed boots make them country. They look so alike they could be brothers or cousins, but they are not.
“Do you like either of them?” Nina whispers.
I shrug. It’s hard to focus on flirting with boys when I feel like a giantess next to Nina. I’m a head taller than her, and at least a couple of inches taller than Trey and David. On my basketball team, I play center.
Nina waves us all back in the pool so we don’t have to talk on dry land. She can talk up a storm when she wants to, which is great for me because I can’t think of anything to say. Their conversation is mostly about teachers and other students at their school, so I can’t contribute anyway. I nod along and laugh when appropriate and try to steal glances at Willamena until other kids arrive. This time Nina does not get out to greet them but yells at them to get in the pool, which they all do. She has this influence over people.
Nina introduces me to everyone, and they ask me about living in the city. I try to explain that I only live in the suburbs, but I have two malls within a fifteen-minute drive of my house, so to them it’s all the same.
From the house, Nina’s stepmother Paula walks out in jean cut-offs and a faded tank top, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She is thin like Nina but the color of almond skin. She takes a long drag, then lets the smoke slither out of her mouth while she leans over to turn on the radio. Tinny country music comes toward us in fits and starts. At other friends’ houses, their mothers always come greet us. They ask if we want food and check in on us from time to time like we are sure to slip into trouble if they don’t. With Nina’s family, we are not disturbed, which is ideal for a birthday party.
The pool is getting crowded and Nina basks in the attention. She talks to everyone, hops around to each group to give hugs while others wait for her to greet them. I hang back, let my elbows dangle over the side of the pool, and watch Willamena, still at the gate. I wonder what she’s thinking. Is she also waiting for Nina to greet her, for someone to come and feed her, or is she just watching? She probably hasn’t seen so many kids on the property before.
“Come with me,” Nina whispers.
She tugs on my hand to get out of the pool. I don’t want to show my body to all of Nina’s friends, but I can’t say no to her. This has always been the dynamic of our friendship—she decides the adventure, and I follow. It’s good for me to have someone who pushes me out of my comfort zone. We run across the lawn to the car port, dripping wet.
“Don’t you dare get my floors all sopping,” Paula says.
The bitter words turn us toward a pile of faded towels sitting on the empty chair next to Paula. I take one and dry off, but Nina is already inside. From here, the music is loud: guitar riffs and a deep, resonant twang fill the silence that neither I nor Paula want to fill. Country music is not my favorite, but I appreciate it in this moment while I rub my arms and legs and squeeze the excess water out of my hair. I don’t want her to yell at me again.
I hold the towel around me, swing the screen door open, and head into the kitchen to find Nina. Puddles mark her trail, and I use my towel to absorb each of them, although by the last one I’m only dragging the water along the floor. The towel is already too wet, so I roll it up in front of me.
“Oh, great idea, we can hide these in the towel,” Nina says.
She’s taken two beers from the refrigerator and holds them out to me.
“What are we going to do with those?” I ask.
“It’s a party, dummy. We’ll see who wants to try them.”
I don’t argue because Nina knows better than I do what these kids will want to do. The beers get bundled under my towel, which I now hold tighter. My pulse pounds when we go outside, sure that someone will sniff out what we’re doing. But we make it back to the side of the pool without anyone trying to stop us. I shouldn’t be surprised, though; they treat us like adults here, mostly. Nina climbs into the pool, takes the beers, and hides them under water. I drop my soaked towel on the ground and follow her.
Everyone is huddled around Nina as she clicks open one can. Most of the kids have never tried beer, and their faces pucker. One girl spits it out. When it’s my turn, I take a small sip. My father drinks a single beer after work each day, so the smell of it reminds me of crisp button-down shirts and watching the nightly news, but the taste is acrid and unpleasant. I keep myself from making a face, because I am not a child. The beers go round and round until they are empty and Nina drops them on the far side of the pool. Looking back on this night, two beers among twenty some-odd kids would have done very little, but we act like we are drunk. Another way to be adults. We sway with the music, yell louder, and laugh at nothing. We are bonded by our transgressions.
I think about climbing out to go see Willamena, but Nina finds me again to tell me that two of the boys think I’m cute.
“Which ones do you think it is?” she taunts.
This isn’t a game I want to play, although if one of them would go see the horse with me, that would be okay. I shrug, and Nina points them out without a fuss. This is the great thing about Nina. She’s never had a mean bone in her body. Sometimes I think about how things would have turned out if she had lived a different life with different parents. So much of our lives has nothing to do with our own choices.
One of the boys is Donald. He’s on the basketball team, and he’s taller than me, so I agree to meet him.
“Everyone calls him Don,” she says, like that somehow makes him more enticing. “He lives on the other side of town.”
Although she does not tell me so, this means he’s black. I know this because it’s the same in my town, the town where Nina used to live, too.
I wait for Don to come to me. This is what Cosmopolitan says to do, so they feel like they’re winning you over. Some hunter-gatherer instinct. I’ve had two boyfriends so far, but one I didn’t really care for. It was obligatory to have a boyfriend over the summer, but it was optional to talk to them, so we were only together in name.
Someone changes the music to hip hop, and the bassline pulses through the ground and the water fizzes with tiny ripples. The other kids in the pool cheer and jump, turning the water into a wave pool. Water rises up to my chest and onto my face but I laugh and sing along with the others. I at least know the words to this song.
Paula marches out from the house and yells something, although her voice is drowned by the radio. She turns to us with her hands on her hips, her eyes shaded by sunglasses so we can’t see her expression, but she turns off the music and takes it inside. Everyone quiets, no longer giddy with the taste of beer, no longer encouraged by the beat of any song, rap or country. Paula returns to her seat and lights another cigarette.
“Hi.”
Don is standing beside me now in the pool.
“I play basketball, too,” I say, unsure what else we have in common.
“It’s too bad there’s no hoop here.”
Don shoots an invisible ball with the flick of his wrist.
“But there’s a horse at least.”
“That’s my brother, Jeffrey.” He points to a slightly shorter kid across the pool.
“Are you in the same grade?”
Don shakes his head. “Jeffrey’s better with horses than I am. When we had one, Jeffrey would be out with him every morning.”
I wish Don would invite Jeffrey over to join the conversation, but it doesn’t seem polite.
“Recently, we had to shoot him.”
“Jeffrey? Why would you shoot your brother?”
“No, the horse. He was old and sick. But Jeff couldn’t do it, so I had to. Big brother things.”
I turn my head to Willamena and squint. I don’t know the signs of horse aging, but she doesn’t look gray or feeble. I hope she lives for a long time.
“Sometimes the best thing to do is let them go. Less suffering,” Don says.
He shakes his head slowly, letting the gravity of his deed wind its way through my body. I would have been in Jeffrey’s camp and refused. I give a meager smile, and Don clears his throat. The heat covers our mouths and noses and the sound of screaming cicadas is all that we can share for a moment. Even in the night, the heat is relentless, desiccating the grass and cracking open the land into shapes that resemble hexagons. When the rains come—if they come—the clay earth won’t be able to hold it and this place will flood. I think of Noah and his ark. Willamena would need a partner before that happens.
A breeze picks up and I shiver as the water evaporates on my skin. I sink lower into the lukewarm water, and Don follows me. We lean against the side of the pool with only our heads exposed. Don’s hand finds my own. A pizza delivery arrives and Paula goes inside to get her cash.
“I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” Don says. “Come on, let’s be first in line.”
Our towels, like everyone else’s, are in the grass, soaked with water that found its way over the sides of the pool. Once we climb out, we wrap ourselves in the wet terry cloth, which does nothing to dry or warm us. I try shaking like a dog, but that does little. We drip water through the grass and leave wet footprints on the concrete patio and into the kitchen. The stout, graying pizza delivery man is setting up the boxes and we hover until we can each grab a slice. We make little puddles on the kitchen floor.
“What are you doing in here? You’re mucking up my house!”
Paula appears in the kitchen with a crumbled ball of bills in her fist, which she shakes at us. She shoos us out of the house and continues to yell, but we can’t hear her after we sprint back outside. We take the pizza slices flopping in our hands across the patio and back toward the grass. We run past the pool halfway to the pen when a goathead pierces my foot. I stumble as needles of pain shoot up to the crown of my head. I hobble the rest of the way to where Don is leaning against the fence. Willamena backs up when I approach. Her brown coat is dusty, but it shines in the porchlight. She seems skittish, and I would be too if I had to be around Paula every day.
With one hand, I remove the sticker from my foot, throw it toward the edge of the property, and lower my foot gently to the ground. It still stings, even after it’s no longer wedged into my sole.
“What’s that lady’s problem?” Don says.
I scrunch my face. “I’m supposed to sleep over, but I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t.”
It sounds so simple coming from Don, but Nina won’t forgive me for skipping out on the sleepover portion of her birthday weekend. If I miss it, we won’t be able to gossip about who got together at her party. I won’t be able to tell her about holding Don’s hand or Paula’s freakout in the kitchen. And I won’t get to ride Willamena tomorrow.
In the distance, Paula hollers again. This time, the kids still in the pool all scramble out and rush toward the house, wet like we were. I am sure they’ll get a tongue lashing like we did, and sure enough, the yelling continues. We already know what will happen, so we turn toward Willamena, who’s nudged closer to the fence. She shoves her nose between the wood of the gate.
“You think he wants my crust?” Don says.
“It’s a she,” I say.
Don waves his crust in front of Willamena, who takes it greedily. I don’t know if horses are supposed to eat pizza crust but I trust Don’s actions, since he once owned a horse. Even if he did shoot it.
“Is that your brother?” I point to a figure sulking toward us.
“How’d y’all get pizza?” Jeffrey asks from across the lawn.
“We went before everybody else,” I say.
“No, I mean, Don, how’d you get pizza? She didn’t pick you out?”
Don turns, his brow furrows. “No man, we just walked in. She didn’t let you have any?”
Jeffrey lets his body slam into the fence. “All I know is the white kids got let in.”
“Maybe they were dry?” I offer. “She yelled at us because we were wet.”
“Nina tried to get us all slices, but her mom started making a fuss at her inside. She came out crying with no pie. Told us we should get back in the pool.”
“That’s fucked up, man,” Don says.
“I’m over it. Let’s just go,” Jeffrey says. “I told you we shouldn’t have come.”
I hand my crust to Willamena, who takes it like a carrot.
“That horse needed the pizza more than me anyway,” Jeffrey says.
“Poor girl,” Don says.
He is talking about the horse, but I think of Nina too.
Jeffrey fiddles with the gate. There’s no lock, just a metal slide latch, which he opens. We walk inside. The horse takes a step back but Jeffrey and Don are good with the creature. We pet Willamena and she calms. Her breath slows and ours does too. We stay there for some time, just petting this horse away from the other kids, like she knows it’s what we needed. She hasn’t left, even with the gate wide open. I wonder how often they come out here and pet her. The stagnant heat bears down on us and keeps us from saying so many things we should.
After a while, Don and Jeffrey bore of petting Willamena. The yelling has stopped. Fewer kids splash in the pool over the low hum of tepid conversation and the higher pitch of the unyielding cicadas. When they decide to leave, I get my phone from the pocket of my coverup, so that Don and I can exchange numbers. We will text exactly three and a half times before one or both of us realizes it’s too much work to keep up a conversation with a person you probably won’t see again.
As he and Jeffrey walk out, they avert the patio and remain in the shadowed grass all the way to the road. I watch until they disappear into the comfort of the darkness and then turn to find Nina. She’s still talking to some boy, a new one, in the pool. She hasn’t tried to find me, so I call my mom. She sounds tired, but she will come pick me up, or my dad will. Until the blue minivan pulls up, I don’t leave Willamena, who by this point leans her head on me like Nina does when she’s tired but unwilling to go to sleep. I wish I could take her with me, but our backyard won’t fit her pen. Telling Nina goodbye will only make her upset. Better to send a text when I get home.
In the car, my mother wants to know if everything is okay, and I don’t know what to say to her. But I’m old enough to know that it’s nothing she can help with, so I mumble something like “it’s fine” and buckle my seatbelt. I try to find Willamena once more before we drive away to see what she does with her freedom. I think I see her shiny brown coat reflecting the waxing moonlight near the oak tree, but it could have been a cobweb or a puddle. It could have been almost anything. You see, that’s the beauty of nighttime. It’s more accepting than the sun. At night, it’s much easier to let go. Less suffering that way.
