Jr.

My neighbor, Angie, and I listen to KIIS FM on the porch in the summers. We mist our chips with lime juice and Angie smiles approvingly when her cousin, Junior, laughs in disbelief at a white girl downing hot Cheetos without flinching.

Junior smiles at me whenever our eyes meet. He fills my summer with impromptu walks past Angie’s house when I know he’s there, and questions from my little sisters about why I smile to myself when I wash the dishes. Some nights when I try to sleep through the summer heat, my body slathered in aloe vera under the cool whisper of my fan, Junior and his brothers tap on my window. My sisters and I are at first always paralyzed by fits of laughter, but end up climbing our back wall so that we can run up behind the boys and scare them. Our little siblings eventually run away and Junior and I are alone and smile at each other and talk about our favorite things.

One night after Angie’s Quince, Junior and I sit below my bedroom window, our dress clothes stained by the cool, inviting grass. I eat the hot Cheetos that he brought me and he makes fun of me and asks me if I’m secretly Mexican. “Are you? Are you, Molly?” he asks tickling my neck. “No,” I giggle back and he looks at me, furrowing his eyebrows, and kisses me. “I like you, Molly,” he says and I just smile, licking the tangy red coating of Cheetos off my finger tips, pretending that I don’t remember that Junior and I won’t talk to each other come September.

In the fall, my friends and I will walk past Junior. and his friends at the bus stop and stroll into our AP classes, juicy couture bracelets adorning our famished wrists and musky Prada perfume settling in our wake. We will sip lattes on the rally stage at lunch while we listen to music about the good life we’re doomed never to find while Jr. eats his meal plan lunch in the cafeteria. And when I see Junior, I will keep my head down, pretending to be entranced by the veins that run through the school’s asphalt, concentrating on turning dried leaves into dust beneath my feet.

“I like you too,” I respond to Junior, smashing the Cheetos bag between my clammy palms. In the damp night of Long Beach, I bask in the lie that September will never return.

Molly