[No shame with this outdoor concert get-up: fisherman sweater from Anthro + Rag & Bone The Cut-off shorts and B-low the belt studded belt. I think I wore the same thing to summer camp, just from the Gap.]
I was sitting in traffic behind a pickup truck with one of those roof attachments. Leonard brand. And I stared at it—this white truck—and tried to put my finger on why I always found those things to be sinister. Sinister! What a weird association to make with an automotive accessory. Then I landed on it: the summer of 96. Lifeguards in red shorts. Going places I wasn’t supposed to. With people I didn’t trust. And that girl with the shiny green bikini.
[Sometimes I dress like an adult. Current/Elliott stiletto jeans + Joie heels + some jacket, a Vanessa Mooney pendant, and a distressed, holey Stateside t-shirt.]
Those were days of so much exacting social surveying and assessing, I was never in a moment—I was floating above it, monitoring everything, weighing every word for 5 minutes before it came out of my mouth, practiced movements and carefully positioned body language so as to show I was feeling any way other than the way I was: completely terrified. She ran the show, and although I never considered her a friend, I spent a lot of time around her that summer.
It was with her that I’d sat in the back of a pickup truck once, under one of those roof things, in the sweltering summer heat. Back there there’s no AC and you can barely hear the music, no seat belts, so you’re sort of sliding around, and I was smoking a cigarette and adjusting my shirt so my stomach wouldn’t show. She was across from me, legs and ego all over the place—like a huge, freckled spider. And that huge, loud mouth that was absolutely packed with teeth.
She was a small-time model and surfer and had more confidence than anyone I’d ever met. She knew the lifeguards at the club, while the rest of us just memorized their names and their chair rotations. And she wasn’t very nice to me. To wit: we were on the beach on particularly hot day when two of the lifeguards came up to our group to say hi. Amidst the conversation, she looked at me, studied me for a moment, then said for everyone to hear: “Dude. You are sweating BALLS right now.” Awesome.
Another time, we piled into her gas-powered golf cart for a ride. “Oh, and, you’re not allowed in here with those ugly ass sunglasses on.” I took them off and put them in a cup holder, and we peeled off.
She was kind of a legend. I hated being around her. Her amazonian unpredictability put my over-anxious sensitivity in a hot frying pan.
[Celebrating a great presentation at Sabai with Roberto and a blue drank.]
Later that summer I had it on good authority the driver of that pickup truck stuck his big toe inside her womanhood while a group of them were in the hot tub after hours. This always struck me as so hysterical—just so perfect. Suddenly, she was more of a joke to me than a threat.
In traffic, behind this truck, I went from scowling to laughing over my steering wheel. A later snoop around Facebook taught me she was still around, exactly the way I remember her, but with a set of big fake cans and a kid. I shuddered a touch.
[Glass Animals at the National.]
[Best shoes on planet by Sigerson Morrison. April suede sandals + Joie skirt.]
She left her green bikini at a friend’s house once—the same week I found out she’d hooked up with the lifeguard I’d quietly pined for for weeks. A friend had tried to put in a good word for me to him, and he said, “Who’s she, the one with the red bikini and that weird sunburn on the tops of her tits?”
Those summers, your bikini was like a name tag—your identifier. We stood there looking at hers lying on the bedroom carpet like a snakeskin while Tori Amos played from a boombox. Neither of us wanted to touch it. It was the end of the summer, and the end of her reign.
My friend picked the bikini bottom up on the end of a pen and flung it at me. I shrieked.
The overthinking youth in the backs of trucks shall inherit the earth.
-C.
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