Cicadas by Ted McLoof

I remember the night Alex Irby knocked on my bedroom window. It was the summer of ’99 and I was 16. The cicadas were leaving their husks everywhere and wouldn’t shut up. My father had moved out the year before and we couldn’t afford the house anymore. So when Alex Irby peeked through my window with her hand to her forehead, I imagine all she saw was a bunch of cardboard boxes and me asleep on a sheet on the floor.

Hey, she said, and tapped her fingernails, 1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3-4-5, on the pane to wake me up.

Shit I said, but I didn’t shout it (Shit!); I just said it like I was saying hi. I don’t think I registered that this was real right away. I’d spent so many nights imagining scenarios involving Alex Irby just like this one—in fact, I’d jerked off to her yearbook picture just before falling asleep that very night—that it seemed impossible that she was actually there, right now, in a zip-up hoodie and track shorts the forest green of our school’s logo.

I stumbled in the dark and opened the window. She looked at me blankly for a second, like she was looking for another dude and just realized she’d gotten the house wrong. But then she smiled her big lab-partnery smile at me. Come on.

What time is it even? What the fuck?

It’s like 10:30. What are you, 300 years old? 

I poked my head out the window and saw her knees getting red as she knelt on the tar-and-sandpaper of my roof. How’d you get up here?

I levitated.

Teach me?

If you cover up that little wiener of yours and get out here.

I shoved a reflexive hand in front of the gaping hole of my fly and almost went hard at the thought that Alex Irby had just referred to my penis, that she’d seen it, that a second ago there was nothing between my penis and Alex Irby but the July humidity.

She lit a cigarette while I pulled my own Panthers cross-country shorts on, and when she saw them she said We match! and handed me a cigarette of my own.

. . .

My mom’s a bitch Alex Irby said when I asked her why she came over.

Your mom’s a bitch so you walked all the way to my house?

It’s two blocks, don’t flatter yourself.

We were walking on my lawn. The cherries from our cigarettes looked at home with the fireflies.

I’m just saying I said I don’t get why you came here by which I meant me me me me me why are you here to see me tell me what’s so special about me me me me me—

I think she wanted me to be a boy she said, and I didn’t get it.

Why do you think that I said, because Alex Irby seemed so clearly the definition of what a girl was and what a girl is supposed to be that I couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting otherwise.

Because she tells me, she said. All the time. And then she squinted and pointed at me with her cigarette and put on that voice everyone used to imitate parents: You were supposed to be a boy!

My mom I said, and looked up at her bedroom window. The light was off but I knew that didn’t mean she was asleep. But before I could finish the sentence Alex Irby pointed to the fenced-in pool area. Hey, she said. Let’s swim and I said, In what.

She kicked off her flip-flops and unzipped her hoodie and I glimpsed the white Nike swoosh on her sports bra. It felt like someone took off my head and threw up in my brain. In this, she said.

. . .

But when I had asked what we were gonna swim in, that’s not what I’d meant. Mom couldn’t afford to service the pool since Dad left, so what used to be the neighborhood hotspot, a place we’d invite the families on the street to cool off and barbecue and play Marco Polo and time laps and practice diving and learn the breast stroke, that community pool in my backyard had turned into what Alex Irby and I were looking at now: an Olympic-sized cement hole in the ground.

What the fuck she said, looking at the pool rather than me. I know I said and she went Gatsby, these are some seriously questionable conditions you’re living under and I told her, Yeah that’s not news. I looked at the pool too and then closed my eyes, tried to will it full of lukewarm, chlorinated sex water. I would have given anything to skinny dip with Alex Irby and it felt like a particularly nasty O. Henrian joke that all the ingredients for that were here except the most important one. Just when I was about to open my eyes and apologize to her, my wish came true: I heard water splashing onto the pavement like a bathtub faucet. I opened them to see that resourceful Alex Irby had dropped our garden hose into the pool.

Are you kidding? It’s freezing I said, with the words little wiener echoing in my head now.

It’s like ninety degrees out.

It’s loud, you’ll wake my mom up.

She took her unzipped hoodie off completely now and said Do you want to do this or not?

Alex Irby was captain of the debate team and it wasn’t hard to see why.

. . .

Alex Irby was the most confusing girl I knew at a time in my life when every girl was confusing. They’d write you a note with heart-dotted i’s during algebra and by lunch they’d be making out with Rick Derris. But the other girls were never confusing about who they were, just who they were to you. But Alex Irby was friends with everyone. She was on the cross-country team and in the plays. She ran Dayna Caine’s campaign for class president and ditched school after lunch on Fridays to get stoned. She wore berets in her hair and Nike Shox on her feet. She had a divorcee’s posture and a college-girl’s J. Crew sweaters and braces on her teeth. She went to almost every party but you could always find her, by the end of the night, by herself in someone’s front yard looking at the sky, or wandering toward the school playground to swing on the swings alone, or talking intensely to whoever had showed up without a friend.

Who knew what was going on in Alex Irby’s brain?

I would have killed for that kind of mystery. Where Alex Irby was a walking question mark, I was a five-foot-two exclamation point. It was a small shitty school in a small shitty town where everyone knew everyone else’s shit, so when Dad left everyone knew he took his money with him and the lunchladies, all friends of my mom, had started sliding me free food in the cafeteria. 

Jesus, Alex Irby was saying now. Cold.

I told you!

She was sticking her toe in the water. We’d only filled it three feet deep by five feet wide. She looked at me with her arms across her chest, hugging herself, daring me with her eyes to go first.

What’s that sound she asked. I listened for my mom for a terrifying second before I realized what she meant. The cicadas? and she said I guess and I said Have you not heard them all summer? They live underground their whole lives. They only come out every seventeen years. 

And for the first time, Alex Irby looked deflated. Like she’d been slapped. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard she said.

. . .

It was weird. The flood light that normally lit the pool underwater was shining directly at us like a spotlight from behind, and it made two elongated shadows on the aqua paint. The paint was peeling in curlicues from being exposed all summer in the dry heat. Every now and then one would flake off and lightly echo when it hit the pool’s vinyl floor. She sat down next to me and pulled out another cigarette and there was something in her mood that had changed. So what’s with your mom I asked.

She scrunched her face like she’d forgotten she had a mom until I’d reminded her. What’s with yours she asked.

Mine’s crazy I said. She was the first person I’d ever told that to. But I’m not the one sneaking out in the middle of the night to get away from her.

Jesus Gatsby she said. You’re so dramatic.

Why do you call me that?

Gatsby?

Yeah.

She shrugged. Because you’re so dramatic.

She handed me a cigarette and before I could ask for her lighter, she lit it with the cherry on hers, leaned in to my face so that the ends could kiss. Then she blew out her response with the smoke. You ever think about parents?

I don’t know what that means.

She tapped ash off her cigarette. I mean, what they did when they were this old? What they were like? I can’t stop thinking about that. Like, where were they the last time the cicadas were here?

Give me an example I said, not because I wasn’t catching on but because I’d been thinking something similar lately. We were looking at each other’s shadows in front of us as we talked.

Mrs. O’Neill she said, talking about Ben and Ashley O’Neill’ mom. The cops in town stop by her house while Mr. O’Neill is at work, right? And she’s clearly fucking, like, half the officers.

I’d seen the cars. I knew what she meant. I just never heard anyone say it so casually before. Maybe she’s not I said.

She either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. But why? What was going on in her house, when she was our age, that makes her ok with that? And do the cops all know about each other? Do they talk about it? Did they do this shit when they were younger—like did they learn it?

Maybe I said. Or maybe they’re the guys who never got laid and they’re making up for lost time,

Or trying to prove something she said and I said Or maybe they really like her. I’ve talked to Mrs. O’Neill before. She’s nice. Maybe she listens to them, or maybe she’s lonely.

But that’s my point, said Alex Irby as she flicked her cigarette away. She wasn’t born lonely, was she? Nobody comes out of the womb like that. So did someone or something do that to her? Or is it just like this inevitable thing that happens to people?

I got up and felt the water again, a little warmer from the summer air. Without looking back at her I said OK—here’s one. Do you think your parents talked about how to be your parents?

You mean like birth control? she said. She walked to the opposite side of our little puddle and slid her feet in. The water reflecting on the giant blue walls around us made it look like an aquarium where we were the exhibit. 

Gross. No. I mean I’ve been thinking about—let’s say your kid wants to like, I don’t know. Play Magic: the Gathering or something.

That fucking card game with the wizards and stuff?

I mean—exactly. You know that girls his age are gonna react like that and you know it’s gonna be miserable for him. So do you just say, You do you, kid? Or do you tell him to conform a little?

Maybe this sounds shitty she said but I feel like I’d rather have my kid be cool and repressed than friendless and true to himself. 

But that’s what I’m asking. That’s your instinct. But do you think our parents talk about stuff like that? Do you think they have a plan for all that stuff? Because the thing you’re talking about—What do you do when your kid starts changing into someone you don’t know?

She tapped her nails on the pool’s bottom just as she had on my window, one-two-three-four-five etc, and they echoed like batwings in a cave. Then she kicked her foot and splashed me. I took my shirt off and slid in all the way, waiting for her to follow my lead. When she didn’t, I turned over onto my stomach and pretended to be drowned.

Hey Gatsby I heard her saying from under the water. I lifted my head up. How’d your folks meet?

In high school I said, though I couldn’t remember them actually telling me that, since they didn’t talk to or about each other. But they must have told me at some point, or else how did I know?

You think they ever did this? she asked, but I didn’t know what this was, whatever we were doing. Snuck out together like this she said, splashing me again. Talked like this.

For a second I forgot where I was, forgot Alex Irby was sitting a foot away from me in her underwear, forgot I was in one giant, barely-filled, spotlit objective correlative for my family’s separation, forgot I was lying waist-deep in tap-warm hosewater, because Alex Irby had thrown me the question my brain had been circling like a shark fin but never figured out how to name. My mom and dad, those two people whose relationship as far as I could remember it consisted mainly of thrown china plates and screaming matches so loud that I no longer set an alarm by the time my dad moved out—no way. Nothing that starts out like this could ever end up like that, was the answer to her question. But the only thing I could say was, it turns out, the truth:

They must have.

. . .

Let’s play a game said Alex Irby.

By this point we were lying on our backs on the ground, her feet facing the deep end of the pool and my feet facing the shallow, but with our faces next to each other kind of, so that strands of her wet hair were splayed out octopuslike under my head. The floodlight hit the water we’d splashed everywhere and the reflections that made, along with the fireflies and the cicadas and the floating cigarette cherries and the stars, made it feel like we were in something heady-but-banal, a Floyd laser light show or a disco ball at a middle school dance.

I’ll bite. What game?

I’ll say something I’ve never told anyone and then you say something you’ve never told anyone. 

I squinted at the sky. Or else what?

She turned her head to look at me. Huh?

We tell each other stuff we haven’t told other people or else what?

Or else nothing. You just keep doing it.

Don’t there need to be, like, stakes or consequences or something for it to be a game?

You’re such a boy, she said. That’s such a guy thing to say. And though I was flattered to hear it (I was way more often accused of the opposite), I didn’t want to piss Alex Irby off. Not now.

OK I said. Go ahead. You said you’d go fir—

My dad hasn’t been home in two months. My mom won’t tell me where he went and I’m starting to think it’s because she doesn’t know.

I waited for her to say more. When nothing came, I looked at her; she was taking a drag with big eyes, waving her hand counter-clockwise, and I realized she was waiting for me to take my turn.

Oh. Um I thought. I’m a virgin.

It has to be something secret.

I’ve never told anyone that.

Yeah but it’s pretty obvious.

My laugh echoed in a circle around us and then seemed to disappear into the pool’s filter system OK I said. My mom told me one time that she dreamed I was gone. I asked her where I went and she said ‘Nowhere, you weren’t anywhere, you were just gone.’ She was breathing really hard.

She took another puff and said She shouldn’t tell you stuff like that. Then she said: We’re on welfare. My mom and grandma and me.

I said My mom got a job busing tables at Porchlight Grille downtown. It’s the first job she’s ever had. She cried when she got it because she doesn’t want people to see her there.

She said My dad came home one night in the back of a cop car. It was Chief Monarch. I couldn’t hear why but I saw him stumbling and my mom had to promise to put him to bed. Right away.

We were on a roll now, so I said Sometimes I wonder if my dad wishes he never met my mom. If he’s happier now. If one weekend I’m gonna go over there to visit and he won’t be there.

She flicked the butt of her cigarette out of the pool, sent it airborne with a flick of her tanned, bony wrist. Then she said I wonder what it was like to grow up in a big house like this.

I shrugged. I was about to tell her it was boring until I realized: Oh—wait, was that your turn?

She nodded and for a second I thought she was going to cry. Before I could ask why, she said, You got to grow up like that. At least for a while. 

I— I started, but I didn’t really know how to finish. What was there to say? That your life never looks good unless it’s through someone else’s eyes? That everybody wants some of what everybody else has? That no one is ever happy? That Mrs. O’Neill and the police force and her parents and my parents, that all they ever needed was to just be looked after and loved a little better and maybe none of us would be in this mess now? 

But I didn’t know any of that yet, or didn’t know how to say it anyway. So I just said I told you I was a virgin so that we could have sex.

I know she said. But neither of us moved. The cars on the street were all parked quietly in their suburban driveways, the families in the houses asleep and safe, and the only sound left in the air were the cicadas letting out their pressure-cooker hiss.

Ted McLoof teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Associative Press, Kenyon Review, Louisville Review, Juked, Juxtaprose, and elsewhere. He’s recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. Follow him on Twitter @tedmcloof