“You’re a corn stalk in a field of soybeans,” he says. This, from a most vulnerable position, down on one knee, peering up at the cheer captain. In his open palm he’s holding a Ring Pop. It’s still in the packaging.
“Ew,” she replies, with a sideways glance. By now a small end-of-the-day crowd has gathered around their lockers, which have been alphabetically contiguous three years running.
Confusion rotates around his features like a slow pinwheel.
“I mean you stand out. Sure, you might look like the others now, but you’ll shoot right past ‘em. Will you go to prom with me?”
The fact that she, too, thought about him amid the rush of teenage hormones was a secret she’d been ready to take to the grave. There were rules. Her social stratum had the approval to date athletes—mostly football players—and maybe the occasional bad-boy druggie if they were known to share. Farm boys were out of the question. Social suicide.
Instinctively, Jessica gives the crowd a shrewd once-over. Wolf-whistles. Kissing noises. Why did he have to make such a spectacle? It left her little choice.
She studies the boy, bottom to top. Steel-toe Caterpillars. Wal-Mart jeans or worse. Camo windbreaker. Hat that says Born to Fish, Forced to Work. A boy wider than tall. Country strong. And that face. Sincerity itself. Everything she was not, yet knew she would need.
“Can I think about it?”
Her answer stuns the crowd into silence. This was not a ‘no’. And did girls have the power to send boys to the purgatory of ‘maybe’? This one did.
But you’d have thought Eddie had just won the Powerball. He smiles as wide as a pole barn, nods, and says: “I’ll leave you to your thinkin’ then.” With that, he stands up, pockets the candy, and shoulders his backpack in the direction of his F-150.
The next day, Eddie’s the one to discover American Gothic affixed to her locker door, his face and hers photoshopped over the pair. He’s about to yank it down, but she instructs him to leave it up. That’s when she unlatches her locker. It bursts open, a cornucopia of straw pouring out like water, a golden delta spreading across her Chelsea boots. She doesn’t move.
Again, he’s down on his knees, raking in thousands of bright straw stalks, mounding them in front of his own locker. He’s especially careful uncovering the buttermilk suede of her boots, his calloused hands removing the chaff piece by piece. He does not risk an upward glance.
All the while, she’s watching him, her pastoral prize. She fingers the keys in her pocket, borrowed from her cheer coach, who’d asked no questions about why she’d need to get into the building so early.
The crowd begins to swell—blinking, murmuring, pointing. She can hear it. The sea change. Public opinion swaying. Now this would be a match made in defiance. Now rules could be broken.
+++
Mark Abdon hails from Indianapolis, Indiana where he teaches Creative Writing at Indiana Wesleyan University. His stories are popping up in places like The Pinch Journal, The Offing, Catamaran, X-R-A-Y, Chautauqua and others. He also reads for Harvard Review.