Danny’s Camaro was primer-gray and had a broken window crank on the passenger side that I cut my leg on when he took a turn too fast. I still have the scar.
It had sun-bleached burgundy seats, and the air inside smelled of too-sweet cherry licorice — a pot of air freshener under the seat to mask the smell of sweat, decay, vulnerability.
He spent too much on a set of rims. Flashy jewelry for a dying thing.
*
We chose a direction and drove, and I hung my head out the window like a dog, eyes closed against the whip of sun-streaked hair. He sped through intersections late late late at night, never bothering to stop, resting his heavy forearm on the window frame, looking at me, instead of the road.
*
We walked the grounds of our high school, leaned against its cool stucco walls, and stared at its doors — closed for the summer — as if to ask, What now?
I liked to step behind him, press my forehead between the blades of his shoulders, wrap my arms around his waist. With every breath his flesh filled my palms.
*
Vagabond, wanderer. Boy of no fixed address. I counted on you to just show up at my door, until one night you didn’t.
I heard you got married. Your friend told me in the 7-Eleven, somewhere between the cat food and the Slurpee machine.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
*
I marvel that the smell of cherry licorice can conjure up that old primer-gray Camaro and its driver, and I wish I could say that fourteen years later I can flip through these scenes as I do old vacation photographs, with mild interest.
But with one whiff I can remember, vividly, how damned hard it was to smile at Danny’s friend in the 7-Eleven and say, “I’m so happy for him.”
Denice Aldrich Jobe works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine and online in Wilmington Blues.