It’s a hot, oppressive summer day, the type where the air is so wet your clothes never dry and all the old folks fan themselves with a newspaper and shake their heads and go “oh, it’s a scorcher.” You’re sitting by the neighborhood pool, feet dangling in the water, the tops of your pasty thighs burning in the sun and your ass uncomfortable on the scratchy pool deck, but your towel is so far away and you’re very comfortable where you are.
A shadow blocks out the sun and you tilt your sunglasses up.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hey,” she says back, sitting down next to you.
You know her from calc, and you’re pretty sure you took some art elective together in junior year. She’s on either the softball or volleyball or cross-country team, or some combination of the three, and she has that kind of effortless cool you don’t even bother hoping to strive for.
There’s a bead of sweat on her temple, and you watch through your tinted sunglasses as it chases its way down her face, onto her clavicle, and under the curve of her sports bra. You snap your eyes away as she turns to look at you.
“Out for a run?” you ask, heart pounding in your ears more than you’d like to admit, but you chalk it up to the mind-numbing heat. Maybe you’re getting heat stroke. She nods and toes off her running shoes, mumbling a quiet sorry as she peels off sweat-stained socks and stuffs them in her sneakers. She scoots forward and dips her toes in, leaning back on her forearms.
“Yeah, I definitely wish I wasn’t,” she says ruefully. “It’s a fucking scorcher.”
You want to poke fun at her for sounding like one of the old folks who fans themselves with a newspaper, but you don’t think you’re that close. Instead you just nod in somber agreement.
“Yeah,” you say.
A silence stretches between you, gooey and syrupy and not quite awkward but not comfortable, either.
“I heard you got into one of those fancy technical schools in California,” she eventually says. “Congrats.”
“Ah,” you say, mildly caught off-guard. You’re so used to keeping to yourself and your four friends, you always forget that other people perceive you. “Yeah, thanks. Gonna be cool to get out of this bumfuck town.”
She snorts, but her face looks kind of sad or maybe disappointed, and you wrack your brain to try and remember if she’s staying in-state or something.
“You’re headed to one of the Ivies, right?” you ask, really hoping you’re right.
She nods and you let out a little sigh of relief. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, gonna play softball for them,” she says, kind of distracted. It doesn’t seem like she’s terribly excited.
“It…doesn’t seem you’re terribly excited,” you say slowly. Normally you’d be way too anxious about crossing a line, but the sun is making you loopy and you just noticed that she has a bellybutton piercing, holy shit, and you’re not sure that you have more than two brain cells to rub together right now.
She lifts one of her broad, tanned shoulders.
“Yeah, I got offered a full scholarship to play in-state,” she says. Oh damn. “But yeah, I wanted to move too, so. You know.”
“Oh, neat,” you say, and then internally slap yourself in the face. Who the fuck says neat. “Nice.”
“Ricky’s staying in-state,” she offers up. You’re not sure what to do with this information. You’re pretty sure Ricky is her on-again-off-again boyfriend who’s also on something between two and six sports teams, but you have no clue if they’re on or off right now.
“Kind of a bummer, you know. We were talking about trying to make it work this summer.”
Okay, so they were on, and now they’re off.
“That sucks,” you say, trying to be sympathetic but not sure how. She shrugs again.
“It’s alright,” she says, breezily. Maybe a little forced. It is weird, you think absently, that she would choose to sit here with you and spill her heart out like this.
She pushes herself upright after another few minutes of languid silence. There are little bumps on her forearms where they were pressing into the ragged pool deck.
“You headed out?” you ask, trying to not sound disappointed. You probably fail.
She shakes her head, ponytail swishing behind her. It smells like apples, and you immediately feel like a creep for noticing.
“Nah, I wanted to grab a freezy pop from the grocers. You want anything?”
“Oh sure, a popsicle would be real nice,” your mouth says before your brain can catch up. She nods as she pulls her socks back on, making a face, maybe at the way the damp fabric drags across her toes.
“Wait. I don’t have my wallet on me,” you say as your brain finally catches up.
She waves dismissively at you.
“It’s like a dollar, don’t worry about it,” she says, lunging forward to stretch out her thighs. You pointedly don’t look at her ass.
“Besides,” she says, cracking her neck. “Don’t wanna leave you thirsty.”
Your brain short-circuits. She grins, lopsided and confident, before taking off.
That was flirting. Right? That had to have been flirting. You wait for her to turn around the corner and then scramble to your feet, stumbling your way towards the reclining chair where you left all your stuff. You fumble your way to your phone and frantically scroll to the group chat.
hot trash summer
u guys
help
u kno jasmine
narcy narc
is she the girl who went to prom with ricky?
hot trash summer
y
es
do we know if she’s like
not full hetero
like mb not full homo but like
u kno what i mean
à la elêvætör
o
m
g
bitch
B I T C H
hot trash summer
alastair u r not helpful
narcy narc
!!!
biiiiiiiiiiiiiitch
get it
hot trash summer
MARCUS U R NOT HELPFUL EITHER
crunch wrap supreme
I mean she’s on the softball team, right?
That has to count for something?
hot trash summer
thank u, belle, for being the only useful human
crunch wrap supreme
Also, BIIIIIIIITCH
narcy narc
lol
hot trash summer
goddammit
where’s hikaru
hikaru is my only friend
You hear a beeping sound and drop your phone in a panic as you whirl around to find the source of the noise, the shatterproof case once again saving it from an untimely death. It’s just a little cardinal, stopping on the roof of the pool house to cock its head and cheep at you. Still, you place your phone back on the lounge chair and grab your towel, spreading it back out on the side of the pool and returning to your previous position.
You feign casualness as you hear rubber soles slapping across the pavement from behind the fence. She drops down beside you and hands you a popsicle, the plastic crinkling when your fingers brush up against each other. You mumble a thanks and pretend your heart isn’t about to hammer its way out of your chest, pushing yourself upright and unpeeling the wrapper.
She kicks off her footwear once again and scoots next to you, feet dangling in the water alongside yours. Her toenails are painted bright blue, chipped and fading but still vibrant through the ripples of the pool water. You take a tiny bite of your popsicle, wincing a bit at the sharp cold against your teeth.
“Hey,” she says. You turn to look at her. There’s a blue raspberry freezy pop dangling from her hands, and she has a look in her eyes that kind of scares you and kind of thrills you at the same time.
“Hey,” you manage to respond, somewhere between a croak and a squeak. She reaches out to loosely grab your right hand. A drop of melted ice sugar has dripped down the popsicle and onto your wrist. You watch through the haze of a fever dream as she brings it up to her mouth and licks it off.
“Um,” you say, lightheaded. She grins at you and gently returns your hand to your side.
“You wanna catch a movie sometime this week?” she asks, casual as all hell. You blink rapid-fire. What the hell is going on.
“Sure?” you ask, this time definitely a squeak.
“Sweet,” she says, and makes to stand up.
“Wait,” you manage to get out before she leaves. She looks at you quizzically and for the first time you see a flicker in the veneer of confidence she has up, the tiniest crack in the facade.
“I, uh—I’m not. I don’t want to be, like, your experiment, or whatever—”
The words spill out of your mouth, feeling like marbles against your tongue, because honestly you would be fine being her experiment, but you also know that your friends would be very upset with you if you didn’t at least try to stand your ground.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she says, shoulders loosening a little, and for the first time you consider the possibility that maybe she’s as nervous about this as you are. “I’m not experimenting. That’s what the locker room is for.”
You try to not think about that visual and immediately fail.
“Okay, um,” you say, trying to figure out how to word your next question. “Uh, why—why me? I guess?”
She laughs and looks a little sheepish.
“You know how we were partners for that one project in calc? It was kind of close to the end of the school year, some time in spring.”
You nod, having some faint recollection of the day she was talking about.
“I’m really bad at math, and you were just like, really nice and also super competent, and I dunno. That just kind of did it for me.”
“Wow, you really are a big gay nerd,” you say before you can stop yourself, and are immediately mortified. “Oh my god, sorry.”
She laughs so hard that she curls over this time, and you can’t help but join in, even though your face is burning hot and you’re still unbelievably embarrassed.
“Yeah, guess so,” she finally manages to wheeze out after the giggles have subsided. She smiles at you and you smile dopily back, holding her gaze in the hot summer heat.
“Okay, well,” she says, starting to walk backwards while still looking at you. “See you Friday? We can meet here and I can drive?”
You nod furiously, feeling kind of dumb because you’re pretty sure you look like a bobblehead, but she trips over a pool noodle and barely manages to catch herself so you feel a little better.
“Yeah, sounds good,” you say, and she grins at you and gives a little wave one last time before tossing her empty freezy pop wrapper in a bin and taking off on her run again.
You stare down at your wrist. There’s a faint blue stain from where her lips touched your skin. The popsicle is still melting in your hand, all but forgotten, beads of ruby red sugar splashing down onto your thighs.
“Holy shit,” you whisper to yourself. You awkwardly get to your feet, careful to not smear more of the popsicle juice than you already have. You scarf down what’s left and toss the wooden stick in the trash, rinsing your sticky hands in the shower by the pool and hurrying back to the lounge chair. There’s a series of messages in your group chat that you promptly ignore in favor of scrolling straight to the bottom.
hot trash summer
i have a date this friday/??????
holys hti??????
à la elêvætör
BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITCH
crunch wrap supreme
Omg
So proud of you
They grow up so fast…
à la elêvætör
girl get it
like fr tho get it
hot trash summer
fjsdklfjad
what is happening even
narcy narc
HELL yeah girl get it
u better give us deets
also where the fuck is hikaru
@Hikaru “Fuck you I’m a delight” Oyama
hikaru come celebrate
hot trash summer
aaaaaaaaa
!!!!!
You put down your phone, unable to stop smiling. The heat melts away around you, leaving you feeling light and airy and buoyant. You slip into the water and watch as the stain on your wrist washes away, wisps of raspberry blue in its wake.
//
Hikaru “Fuck you I’m a delight” Oyama
100+ new messages wtf
What’d I miss
Wait
O shi
narcy narc
lol
Hikaru “Fuck you I’m a delight” Oyama
O sh
O SHIT
YEAHHHH GET IT
Damn Jasmine????? Did not expect that one
Lol
Hell yeah girl get it
Hot trash summer strikes again <3
About the Author Leanne Su
Leanne Su placed 5th in the Summer Short Story Contest August 2021 with her award winning story Blue Raspberry. Leanne won the $25 cash prize and publication in Indie It Press’s forthcoming Anthology, 2022: COURAGEOUS CREATIVE.
Leanne Su is a second-generation Chinese American woman from Seattle, WA. She is currently a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan where she researches electric propulsion. When she’s not breaking or fixing thrusters, she’s usually embroidering, swimming, or taking cursed pictures of her cat Pudge. You can find her on Instagram @its.lean or on the world wide web at leanne.space.
