Through the Apple Orchard

Thraiighihe AppleOrchard Sebastian Matthews What can a boy do with such information but store it in his body? —Robert Boswell, "Smoke" All Alan wanted to do that last summer was go over to John's and smoke cigarettes with his friends. We'd wait until John's mom backed her car out of the drive—she had the late shift at the county hospital—then start rustling around in the pantry. If we got lucky, there would be a few cans of warm beer or some cooking sherry, and we'd kill the rest of the night up in his drafty barn loft out behind their ramshackle house, shooting the shit and listening to Zeppelin and Hendrix. The whole summer seemed to go that way. In a few days we'd all be starting high school—Alan a Catholic school over in Concord, John the local public school, me all the way across the country. I couldn't have articulated the feeling then, but I remember the whole summer having this sense that something big needed to happen—that Alan and I had to make it happen—before it was too late. Before what was too late? I wasn't sure. Before the summer ended maybe, and with it my childhood. As if a screen door might somehow slam shut in the wind and mysteriously latch. It made sense, then, when John's sister agreed to buy us a case of beer, to throw a big end-of-the-summer party. Made sense to hold it in John's loft, the perfect party spot. If Alan kept hanging on John's every word, following him around like a puppy, it wasn't like I had much choice. John and Alan called up everyone they knew, then John drove us to Concord in his beat-up Duster (though he only had a permit), his long hair whipping in the wind. We sat waiting in the New Hampshire state liquor-store lot for over an hour, paranoid about cops. I felt bad that we skimmed ten bucks off John's mom's stash, but John said he did it all the time, she never noticed, not to worry. His sister finally showed, on her lunch break from Papa Gino's, sexy in her candy-red uniform. She had to pass alone under the new highway—her quick, staccato steps echoing inside all that concrete, sig80 Sebastian Matthews naling her arrival before we could make her out in the rearview. Then her pretty, other-side-of-the-tracks face there in the passenger's-side window, expression blank when she saw who was in the car. "You're just kids," she said. Her name was Cindy or Sherry or something like that. "I shouldn't be doing this." We laughed nervously. Alan fiddled with the radio knob. I had this terrific urge to lean forward and take Cindy/Sherry's face in my hands and kiss her. She looked at me like she guessed my fantasy and stuck her tongue out, darting it like a cat. Which was, in and of itself, almost enough. She got us the beer, though, and when John stepped out into the afternoon sun with a case in his arms, a shit-eating grin spreading full across his farm-boy face, I almost liked him, almost forgot that he was trying to steal my best friend. We hooted and hollered like we were at a rodeo. I remember that drive back down the highway as one long rush of wind and blaring radio rock and roll. Little flashes of it filtering back. The cracked leather seat, the case of Narragansett under my arm, its cool cardboard pressing on my skin. John stiff-arming it down the highway . Alan turning back and smiling, crooning along with Tom Petty, She's an American girl. John stored the beer in an old cooler full of ice while Alan and I pulled out all the best records. Styx. Kansas. REO Speedwagon. Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic." Td been listening to new music ever since the move, stuff John had never heard of or would ever like. Had been turning Alan onto...