ELEPHANT SUMMER!

By Ty Bluesmith

Back Then
Junior Yr.

Your giant house was quiet. Your roommates all split for summer break by Tuesday evening. We had a Thursday afternoon exam in Macro [or was it Micro] and were not leaving town until the weekend. The little window a/c unit in your room was rattling and mostly ineffective. Outside we heard other undergrads loading their cars and trucks and yelling goodbye and see you in the fall to one another and honking their horns as they drove away.

We were in your bed. I was looking at the ceiling. You were wearing boy shorts and a beater and laying on your side and you pressed your face against my scalp and said guys have stinky hair and I was half hard morning wood really and the condom wrappers that followed the celebration after Thursday night’s Macro [or was it Micro] final were next to my head on the nightstand and to tell you the truth I could smell them and it kind of made my hangover worse.

Remember how the hundreds of pictures of you and your smiling friends watched us from their spots on your corkboard wall?

Every girl was cute Amelia.

Oh.

But none as pretty as you and you slid your hand down my chest and reached into my shorts and said hey what’s this and your thick dark hair felt so soft on my skin and when I looked at your face you were smiling and the freckles on your cheek made you look like a Seventeen cover model again and your eyes man so blue so fucking blue I’ve never seen blue like that before or since and when I reached over to toss the mediciney-lubey-smelling condom wrappers in your little garbage can I knocked something over and heard it clink against the top of your cherry nightstand and you said oh no and jumped up but then right away said phew and when you plopped your long/thin/frame on the bed again you had a miniature figurine in your hand that I saw when you uncurled your perfect fingers.

A tiny elephant.

Smiling.

Trunk in the air above its head and when I apologized for knocking it over you looked at me and smiled but it was a sad smile and I thought I saw water in your eyes for a brief second and you said oh

Ty

It’s ok.

And then you smiled again.

And passed me the elephant in your open palm. Painted and lacquered. White and red and blue and yellow and green. Shiny. Smooth.

When I returned the elephant you sighed and our fingers touched and you said my dad brought it back from Nepal on one of his State Department junkets. Doug. Only it was daddy then. Back when my mom was called mom.

Not Janice.

Back when I had a family.

Like what Doug and Janice and Kyler and Evan have.

Not like me. I don’t have one. Know how I know? Becuz a family isn’t a dead mom and a figurine and a guy named Doug who lives in Silver Springs and writes checks to the university.

In fact it’s actually nothing at all.

Oh Amelia.

I didn’t know what to say. Your words came out so slowly. Without emotion. Like you’d been saying those things to yourself for such a long time that they were no longer horrible to think and hear.

You exhaled.

And put the elephant figurine in the drawer of the nightstand. It was like eleven am. You stripped off your clothes and said you were going to take a shower and as you walked away I caught a glimpse of the white scars on your right hip.

The places where you cut yourself after your mother died.

After they discovered you in the halls of Peter Stuyvesant and made you the Limited Girl.

After they put you on the cover of every teen magazine.

And then college.

And then graduation.

And then Stage Three of the same shit that killed your mother at forty-four.

Oh Amelia. Eighteen years gone and mostly forgotten. The sweetest girl I ever knew.

Tall and thin and lanky and kind. A perfect aesthetic. Like a cliche about a spring day that never ends. Or an expensive flower in hothouse bloom.

Like a dream.

Like a ghost.

Like a precious Nepalese elephant figurine.

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