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Note: the following is a fictional short story. A shortened, edited version of this piece originally appeared in Cincinnati's 'CityBeat Magazine'. Peace out, C.A.
Snappers and Painters
by C.A. MacConnell
Man, all the time, I have to yank up my strapless shirt so my boobs aren’t showing, because it’s embarrassing. I don’t really have boobs like Mom’s, which are watermelons, but I still don’t need to be showing them to the world. Okay, so mine are so small they look like lightning bugs with no lights.
I kick off my clogs. Last year, Mom and I found the shoes in my cousin Debbie’s hand-me-down pile, which had tons of stuff, even for Debbie. That was my present for my eleventh birthday. Now I’m twelve, in case you can’t do Math.
I wear this one-piece outfit thing every day, even when it’s cold, which it’s not. Duh, it’s summer. Sometimes, I put my purple jeans on top of the shorts part, which is “bulky-looking,” Mom says, but I don’t care. It used to have a belt, and there are still these loops there, but I lost the belt part the first time Conner and I went turtle hunting. Conner tried real hard to find it in the bottom of the lake, but after about three hundred hours of looking, when I thought Conner was dead, he gave up.
My hair’s kinda like sand, but Conner has black curls. I always put my hand on his head and scrunch up his curls between my fingers. One time, I cut his hair, which was a bad idea. I knew it wasn’t too straight, because we were trying to count the minnows in our bucket at the same time. Conner’s Mom said she might cut my braids off. When she said that, Conner was smiling on the inside. I could tell.
My purple jeans are the best, but when Mom sees those pants, her mouth droops all funny like she’s gonna drool. Conner’s jeans droop on his hips. Conner jokes at me all the time that I have on my own uniform. Uniforms stink, for real. I know ‘cause I’ll be wearing one when school starts. They’re itchy ones, and they leave red marks on my tummy like I just got wrapped up in a rubber band. Nuns are in charge where I go to school. Speaking of rubber bands, nuns put them around the top of my socks to keep them up to my knees, which is stupid because I just push them back down anyhow.
I’m thinking about stinking nuns when Conner yells, “Peanut, hand me the net, it’s a snapper!”
Conner scrambles back in the boat all wet. Oh my God, P.U.
“I see the snapper, dork, but you know I want a baby painter,” I say, swatting a dragonfly.
I like the painted babies that fit in the palm of my hand. The snappers don’t scare me or anything, but I just wonder why they have to do all of that snapping when all they do is swim all day. I sure wouldn’t snap if all I had to do was swim all day. Mom does though. She stretches her neck and snaps right at me, which doesn’t really scare me either, but I act like it does.
“Would you just hand me the net before I tip the boat and pop you one?” Conner gets this look in his eyes. It’s the same look he gets when he puts his hand on my forehead, and he thinks he's all tough the way he holds me back when I try to punch him. His eyes get all huge and his face gets a frown that looks like a smile might bust out any second. Sometimes, I think his cheeks might explode. Gross.
“All right, here, geez.” I put the stinking net right on Conner’s head. That snapper slides away into the water like they do.
“I’m gonna catch you, now.” Conner comes at me with the net, making the boat rock, which is trouble.
I’m sick of fighting him, so I make the boat tip. It’s not hard. Dad calls Grampie’s Boston Whaler a “one-man ride.”
We splash around and Conner tries to freak me out by telling me the story of a monster fish that lives in the lake. He’s not making this up, but I know it’s not around anymore. Once, Grampie told me that he was having a beach picnic lunch with Grammie, and they saw that monster going “over the water and under the water.” Grampie threw a chicken bone at the thing, and the bone happened to land in its throat. So it choked and died and now everyone can relax.
Conner laughs and dives down in the shallow water of the cove. He presses his stomach to the bottom of the lake like a catfish. I go down there too, and I watch him wave his arms up to keep himself on the bottom. Reminds me of the way Father Brugger moves his arms at school, right when he wants everybody to stand up. I can’t figure out why they make us stand up and sit down so many times. Just when I think I have it right, I’m all ready to sit, and everyone around me is on their knees. I don’t get religion.
Sitting on the mushy bottom, we hold hands and mouth words, trying to figure out what we’re saying to each other. I think about how the turtles are probably out getting suntans while we’re fooling around.
Conner never gets mad at me. But I get mad at him when he tries to scare me by holding his breath forever while he sits on the lake bottom too long, which is what he’s doing. I am waiting, treading water, and he’s really starting to bug me.
Then he comes up puffing and says, “Now, you ready to catch a REAL turtle?” But by the time we get back to the cottage, I have a baby painted turtle in my hand, and Conner just has the net full of lily pads and muck, which is the way it always goes.
I love Bear Lake, even if I get a bloodsucker on my stomach every now and then. Bear Lake’s pretty clean most of the time, but this year, there are less ducks and more dead rotting fish on the beach. I heard it's because of those boys down the road who drive their trucks all crazy and throw beer cans out the windows, and the cans end up in the water which is not a "dumping ground," Dad says.
Conner and I can’t drive yet, and beer is gross. So we comb the beach at night. Conner sees things a lot better than me because he’s a whole year older. But he always lets me pick everything up so he can make up stories about the junk. He says the stones I find are fossils and Indian arrowheads. One time, I found a comb with a few missing teeth. He said it would turn my hair green if I used it. I told him he was nuts, but I didn’t ever comb my hair with it, just in case.
Our cottage is small; a two-lane road is the only thing you have to cross to get to the beach. Mildred lives on the right. Her face looks like a shoe, and Conner keeps telling me there are rats in her house. I don’t talk to her much, but Grammie keeps sending me over to her cottage with some homemade bread.
Grammie makes everything herself, even hamburger buns. When she makes ginger cookies, I sit against a tree that’s white with the bark peeling, and I peek through Grampie’s blueberry patches to watch Mildred in her tomato garden. I get bored waiting to hear Grammie yell from the cottage, “Peanut, they’re done!” She talks to her cookies too. Probably because Grampie’s always in his garden or writing sermons.
Mom frowns a lot. She tells Grammie, “Mother, stop fiddling around. You never stop moving.” Mom does the same thing, though. When I try to show her my turtles, she keeps on stringing green beans.
Aunt Patty lives on the left. Me and Conner have to scramble through Grampie’s gardens to get there. One time, we found a garter snake hiding in the pea pods, and I picked it up right behind the neck, the way my cousin Bryan taught me back when I was ten. Bryan has a boa constrictor, which I love. I like touching it. Aunt Patty doesn’t like it too much ’cause one time it got loose, and there it was, resting on the shower curtain rod, staring down at Aunt Patty while she was peeing.
But a week after we found the garter, Conner and I saw it smashed on the road. Nothing left but a sad, smashed greenish brown “S” on the road. It turned black after people kept running over it. From that day on, Conner and I decided that snake would protect us from getting smashed, so we made up a saying. Every time we cross, we hold hands and say, “Garter snake, save us from cars and scars.”
I’m sorry, but I pick my scabs. Mom always says, “Stop picking, Peanut, you’re going to get scars.” I guess Mom worries I’ll end up with dents in my face, like people do when they get chicken pox. I had ‘em once. Conner had ‘em at the same time, which was fun being sick together and lying around doing nothing.
I don’t have any scars really. My face is as smooth as the beach in the morning. At least that’s what Conner tells me, because he’s a lot older and he knows how to say things sometimes.
Let me tell you I met Conner the summer I was nine. I was digging my toes in the ground to make the beach swing go higher. It was sunny, and my eyes hurt, but I saw him walking down the road barefoot, wearing some cut-off jean shorts. He had a fishing pole leaning on his shoulder, and a poor, dead, small perch was hanging from the hook. I asked him if he was gonna eat it.
“Yup. Fry it up and swallow it down whole.” He waved the fish in my face, trying to make me sick or something, but I liked the smell. Reminded me of sitting in Grampie’s garden while Dad skinned our supper, and how he fried it just right, so it didn’t taste “too fishy,” like Mom always says.
Anyway. So Conner finally sat down on the swing with me, and he started pumping his legs crazy, and for a second I wondered if he’d pump them right off. We waited until it was at its highest point in the air, sat on the edge, then jumped over the beach wall into the sand.
Then we took Grampie’s boat out and went to the Cove to search for peepers, which are baby toads if you don’t know. Right then and there, he was my new best friend.
I hate to break the news, but this is our last summer at Bear Lake. Grammie’s selling the cottage. So Conner and I are sitting on the swing, and it’s dark, and I think we both want to cry, but we don't. But since I'm holding all that in, my heart feels fat. I tell Conner how scared I am, and how I still haven’t kissed anything. Well, I did kiss some boy named Ethan at my friend Margaret’s birthday party. But that doesn’t count.
“Hey, Peanut, I could kiss you,” Conner says. He turns into a raspberry.
I laugh.“No way, Con.” All I can think about is how he looks after he comes up from the bottom of the lake with plants hanging from his head.
“Will you cut my hair?” he asks, just because neither one of us knows what we’re talking about or doing, and we’re all sad.
His curls are drooping over his ears, but I’m kind of glad because Conner’s ears are usually full of wax.
I go back to the cottage, stopping at the road to do the snake chant, and I come back with the scissors.
Then he goes and starts looking like red things again.
When I sit down, the swing squeaks. The chain on one side breaks, sliding Conner into my lap. Our noses bump, and he kisses me. Conner doesn’t kiss like my stuffed animals. Conner is wet, soft, kinda sloppy, and I feel like he’s using the same air as me for a second.
Then Mom opens the cottage door so fast, the hinges might bust. “Peanut, get in here. We’re leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow.” She taps her foot on the welcome mat.
It makes me want to taste Conner again. He sure tastes better than Grampie’s coffee.
“Meet me in the morning, okay?” I whisper. I almost throw up.
“No, I want to say bye now. Not in the morning. Hey, peanut, you know what?” He tilts his head down.
I drop the scissors.“What?” I’m ready for something big, because Conner always starts with a question when he’s gonna say something big.
“I think I like you better than anyone or anything,” he says.
It’s so dark that it could be talking driftwood next to me on the swing, and I wouldn’t know. “You like me even better than snappers?” I ask him.
“Yeah. Better than anything," he says like an adult person.
“Will I see you again?” I ask him.
“I think maybe in a long time. Just do this. Every time you go swimming, go to the bottom, and act like I’m right there, sinking with you.” He gives me a thumbs up.
“Let’s go, Peanut!” Mom yells, ruining the whole thing.
I look at him for the last time. Half of Conner’s face is lit. I put my hand on the light cheek, kiss the dark one, then tiptoe inside. At the door, I duck under Mom’s arm.
That night, I bury my head under the covers, which is something I don’t usually do, because it’s hard to breathe like that. For some reason, I don’t want to breathe so badly any more, unless I’m breathing with Conner.
