Which transgression against established norms has you most irate?

Wrestling with Tomorrow
Erin Halfelven

It was known locally as Fertile Beach because of how many girls had gotten pregnant there, or rather in the turnouts and byways of the twisty roads through the mountains between the shore and the inland valleys. That wasn't going to happen to me, of course, but I did wonder why Mike had chosen this spot for the talk he insisted we were going to have.

"Paul, we have to talk," he'd said to me, holding the passenger-side door of his enormous GMC pickup open and gesturing that I should climb inside. Two years before, in the eighth grade, we'd been nearly the same size, but I just stopped growing at five-foot-three, and now he towered over me.

The fake height from the three-inch lifts I wore in my boots didn't help me climb into the oversize cab, so again, Mike put a hand down for me to use as a sort of stirrup to get my ass into the seat.

"Fingers clear," he reminded me before swinging the heavy door closed and sprinting around the front of the truck to slide into the driver's seat. He grinned at me with a tension I didn't usually see. "Fasten the damn seat belt, Paul," he ordered me. "I almost got a ticket that time. And it ain't going to happen again."

I giggled, remembering. "That patrolman thought I was a girl."

Mike glanced at me as we pulled out of his family's circular drive onto the state highway, but I knew better than to speak to him before he merged into traffic and got to cruising speed. His ADHD didn't make him a dangerous driver, but you didn't want to offer him distractions when he needed his attention on a task.

After another glance at me, he settled into driving and demanded an answer. "Are you crazy?" he asked.

"Probably," I agreed. “Which transgression against established norms has you most irate?” He hates it when I use big words to deflect him when he gets wound up, though he thinks it’s funny when I do it to other people. I don’t have bangs, but I imagined that I did and looked at him from under them. He hates that, too.

“You didn’t…. You can’t! She won’t!” he sputtered.

I was enjoying this so far. We had crossed the crest of the hills, and blue water was visible below us through gaps in the trees when our curling descent matched the sightlines. I wondered which objection to my behavior would surface first, but decided it was best to let Mike reach his own talking points rather than suggest things he might not have thought of yet.

We had the windows down a crack and the cab filled with the smell of the sea and the pines—and Mike’s frustration.

“I was going to ask Margaret to the dance, and you knew that,” Mike said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, sure,” I noted, waving a hand. “I thought we could go as a thruple.”

We both knew I’d gone right up to the line and Frenched it. He made noises that would have worked as the soundtrack to a Disney feature about brave little donkey engines.

“She said no,” I pointed out.

“Now I have to ask her…and she’s gonna laugh at me!”

“Surely not,” I remonstrated. “She’d be a fool to do that. You’re the sophomore star of the JV squad in every sport you’ve gone out for.”

“And that’s the other thing!” he exploded. “You went out for the wrestling team!?”

“Well, coach said he had no one for the one-oh-six weight class and I weigh one-oh-five. Q.E.D. Besides, it sounds like fun.” I dimpled him.

“You would think it was fun…right up until you get hurt!”

“Pish and tosh,” I piffled. “You know I’m stronger and tougher than I look.”

“You’d have to be. You look like you’d lose to a soft-scrambled egg.”

“A simile!” I crowed. “I knew you had a few in you, hanging around with me and reading the books I lend you.”

“I thought it was a metaphor,” he grumbled.

I did not pinch his cheek. “You used ‘like’ so it’s a simile.”

“Stupid distinction,” he said with little heat. I knew he was glad I’d noticed his verbal sally, and I also knew he wasn’t really mad about the wrestling.

“An analogy is like a good custard,” I opined.

He frowned. “I don’t get that. How is an analogy like a custard?”

“I’aunno,” I grunted sweetly.

We both laughed, more and longer than we would have thought. The tension between us remained, but now we could comfortably dissect its froggy is-ness of what.

We pulled into the parking lot, still half a mile from the water, and Mike angled the truck so we both had a view of the blue expanse. The beach here runs east-west, not north-south, so the Pacific rolled away from us toward, not Japan as a tourist might suppose, but maybe Rapanui, Easter Island. Unless the Galapagos get in the way, I’d have to look at a map.

We settled into a companionable silence, appropriately pregnant with some future discussion the subject of which lurked like a hypothetical great white under our current situation.

One p.m. on a Tuesday, we had the place to ourselves. We would have to return to school by 2:15 for last period or get marked absent-without-love at the private school we both attended. I was missing A.P. History, and Mike was not at all there for Study Hall, but who gave a smelly shit.

“You’re right about Margaret,” he said. “She’ll say yes if I ask.”

“She’s flimsy that way,” I agreed.

He put his hand down between us, palm up, and I put my smaller fist in the cup it made.

I cocked my head, looking at him sideways. “Now I won’t have a date for the dance,” I said. “But we’d better schedule some more lessons for you.”

He snorted. “I wish I could take you to the dance. If you were a girl….”

I blinked at something between us. “Luckily, there are no wishing fish on the beach today, but I promise you, if you were to magically get your wish, I’d be a perfect demon of a girlfriend.”

He smirked. “Promise?”

I used the fist I had handy to punch him just above his elbow where his muscles did a poor job of protecting him.

“Ow,” he said without moving at all.

I put my hand back in his, and we sat for several more minutes.

“If I asked,” he suggested, “you would say yes.”

“But I haven’t a thing to wear.”

He smiled and squeezed my hand. “Even now?”

“Maybe someday,” I said. “But yes, even now.”

We turned our gazes back toward the ocean rolling toward some land we couldn’t see.

We squeezed each other’s hand, still wrestling with tomorrow.