The Drop Outs

We were young and we stank, girls in their boyfriends hoodies and army pants. Hibernating during the brutal cold daylights and cavorting with our parents fancy wine glasses in the street at night. Making smoking look cooler than sex as we tipsied through streetlight shadows, not talking about love or fear or death or sex. But always talking. We always talked. It was like kindergarten all over again but without teachers to yell at us to sit still and not put that in our mouths. Boys with slivers for eyes and ballcaps pulled low, hulking timidly behind massive erections with a kind of civilized hurt that would, they feared, last a lifetime.

We were young and we were killing time. Slaughtering it. We specialized in its demise. We talked for hours about how we had beat it down, found new ways to torture it, murder it, brutalize and twist it screaming into the night, and in taking the time to talk, effectively beating it down some more.

We were young and we kissed with our eyes closed. And we slept next to each other like bees in a hive saying it was too far to walk home because that might be a semi-plausible excuse. But in all truth we really just wanted to be together.

We were young and we watched the skaters in the park and drew pictures of the old buildings and wrote poems from the conversations we overheard, imagining inner lives for the panhandler going round and round and round asking for dimes or quarters, dimes or quarters, anything.

We were young and we had been taught to sit upright and speak when spoken to in the company of adults but once they had left and gone to bed we laughed at how old they were and we had our friends over, slouching back so far on that very same couch that we were practically sitting on our shoulder blades and yelling out raucous absurdities like “Dude Whatthefuck” “Dude, ohmigawd” at each other because we liked the sounds of our voices, and it felt good to smile.

We were young and we palpitated while removing our pants in the cold linoleum floor, the hot shower already steaming up the room and singing with the kind of erotic heat that we would never again know for the first time. Showering together. We stepped in, the girl feigning solemnity and the boy trying not to giggle out loud. Our pink naked bodies looking all exposed scrawny and flicked with warm light and warmer water. When the girl turns to drench her hair, the boy sees the skin at the bottom of her neck, her naked back draped with shining droplets, little silver boulders of water that he kisses off. Leaning in and breathing against her skin sweeter than ripe pomegranates that melt right off your tongue.