Summer of Synthia

Collin Varney

In early May, Synthia moved in two houses down on Acorn Street. Boxholm, Iowa, was uncomfortably muggy again, so I rarely left the house. For one, I hated seeing the goons from school. And two, humidity made a kid my size more disoriented than a polar bear in the Sahara. I once overheard Dad, shirtless, liken his chubby body in the sticky Midwest to a jogger’s nutsack. “Nowhere to hide,” he said to his drinking buddies, smoke from the grill surrounding him like sauna steam, the Hawkeyes game crackling on the radio. The joke was stupid, but I adored how they laughed at him. People laughed at me, but not like that.

If I ventured out during the summer, it was always in a beeline towards shade. One afternoon, I made it all the way to the tree on the outskirts of the front yard. Lying down writing poetry, I heard something rustle the grass nearby: bare feet, long tan legs pinched at the mid-thigh by short plaid shorts, a white tank top and curly dark brown hair—a girl, and so pretty I knew she had an arbitrary reason for coming near.

“Whatcha writing?” she asked. “Can I see?”

Her gaze was striking and soft, and it rendered something ambiguous in me, something uneasy. She grabbed my journal and began revealing my privacy—the purest emotion my twelve-year-old self could gush on paper—to what seemed like the entire town:

The kids at school kick my ass.
None of them ever ask
my name. My father isn’t here
to show me how to fight. I
wasn’t there to pull him
from the lake that winter night,
so he stayed trapped
under a sheet of ice.

I pried the journal from her hands.

“A little depressing,” she said, “but good.”

I had never wanted to punch someone in the face so much in my life. I clenched my fist, but then she smiled and asked my name.

“Sam.”

“Synthia. Will you write me one?”

She rang the doorbell the next day. Mom called my name and winked as I approached the open door.

“Did you write it?” Synthia asked. I shook my head. She sighed. “Whatever. Come on,” and she grabbed my hand. Before I knew it we were hidden in the leaves of an oak tree throwing pebbles at passing cars below.

So it went. Every morning she arrived, and I was conned into shenanigans until dinnertime. But somehow I couldn’t deny her. There wasn’t a front I could wear to avoid her unpredictable itinerary that ensured a new degree of impishness. “Well what’s summer for?” she’d say, feeding on my hesitancy. Despite the refusals I rehearsed in bed at night, they’d wash off when we met eyes, like chalk in the rain, leaving me bare.

I desperately faked sickness once. “Must be strep throat,” I said to Mom. I faintly heard her breaking the news to Synthia, and when the door closed I unleashed a sigh. I pulled out my journal to write in peace. Stanzas flowing freely, but then I heard a noise outside my window.

There she was, blue eyes peeking through the pane. She knocked with the back of a knuckle like my room was a fish tank. I surrendered a side-glance, and she lifted the window and maneuvered impressively over the ledge. I noticed her arms and legs were dirty from the griminess of the gutter, and then her bare feet made a soft thump on the shag carpet.

“Perfect dismount!” she said, imitating the cheers of a stadium crowd, thrusting her arms.

I opened my mouth to declare my sickness.

“You’re sweet,” she said, pointing at my journal. “You were trying to ditch the day so you could finish my poem.”

Of course she could not have been more wrong, but I was horrible at telling people off.

Like the guys at school. They’d spare me daily wedgies and pummels to the gut if I got down on all fours and oinked. I never spoke up, but I began slitting my underwear so it would rip faster, and one time I even stuck a little decorative pillow from home under my shirt as stomach armor. I couldn’t tell Mom. The one time I alerted her of the harassment, she stumbled through an empty platitude. “Just—be yourself, Sam,” she said. “Eventually they’ll know who you are.” Well they knew, and they hated me.

It wasn’t her fault. Dad was the wordsmith. His absence reminded her of the difficulty in being more than herself. I heard her late one night when I got up to pee, weeping into a pillow, violently sucking air when she needed to breathe. I squinted in the dark and pissed on the ceramic wall above the water and went back to bed without flushing.

Synthia stood with a perky grin. My silence allowed her to assume herself as my poetic muse, and she elegantly tip-toed her way to my bed and sat cross-legged on the covers.

I inhaled the smell of her hair. It was like she’d harvested the incense of summer—wallowing in dewy grass, climbing trees, palming handfuls of downhill air on her bike—and then ignited the scent on arrival. Breathing her in made me feel indifferent about her scaling the side of my house, but her dirty legs on my comforter disgusted me. She saw me looking and peeled off a white pillowcase and wiped her tan thighs.

“Better?” she asked with heightened brows. I nodded. “Read what you have so far,” she said, placing her chin in her palms. I amazed myself with uncharacteristic on-footedness, which is to say I stammered like a nervous pubescent.

“Well—I mean—I—I don’t want to read it—until it’s—done,” I said.

She squinted. I gulped. She sighed.

“You’re not sick, Sam, let’s go.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Sam?” Mom said. “Can I come in?”

The last female in my room, other than my mother, was a poster of Xena the Warrior Princess. The manager of Geek Antiques finally gave it to me after all I did was come in and stare at it for a week. Ironclad breasts. Toned shoulders. Legs. Short skirt. Dark hair flowing in the wind with a sword wielded high overhead. I feared Mom would disapprove, so in a panic that night I rolled it up like an archaic scroll and stashed it under my bed for future academic study, but I still felt guilty, so I snuck out early the next trash day and crunched it beneath a heap of leaking filth.

“Let me do the talking,” Synthia whispered.

She stood up and sat calmly on a beanbag in the corner of the room.

“Yeah, Mom.” My voice cracked.

The door opened. Apparently I could fake sickness: nervously pale, clutching the covers, sweating abundantly. She poked in and saw Synthia sprawled out, smiling and twirling her hair.

“Hi, Ms. Bolton,” she said. “I was on my way back to my house when Sam shouted from his window for me to come over, and I said, ‘I thought you were sick,’ and he said, ‘Just come over I have to read you some poetry,’ so I came over and he said he’d pay me five bucks if I could climb up the side of your house—which by the way I love the color of your house, Ms. Bolton, not like some in this neighborhood with that horrendous pea-green or boring beige, blue is so very quaint—so I said, ‘Okay,’ because as you probably know, Ms. Bolton, five bucks can get a heck of an ice cream cone in this town, and I climbed up here and Sam was just reading me some poetry because like you said he’s super sick and shouldn’t see the light of day.”

I believed if I could avoid Mom’s eyes I could stop time, crawl away. She didn’t even know I wrote poetry.

“Sam, you don’t have five dollars,” Mom said, and she laughed in a way I hadn’t heard in two years.

Dad could get anyone to chuckle into tears, especially Mom. The day before the accident, I walked in to see my parents dancing around the living room furniture to an old swing record, the 1937 version of “Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)” with Benny Goodman on the clarinet, the record that stayed on Dad’s vintage gramophone for weeks until Mom had the courage to dust it off and store it on the shelf. The light from the dying fire softly preserved their steps and slides from the encroaching darkness. Dad’s socks slipped looser at his toes, and Mom, complying with every twirl, giggled profusely at his endearingly clumsy rhythm. I watched them through the stairway banister until they called me to dinner.

“Sam!” Synthia said. “No money?”

Of course she was overacting, standing with one foot turned sideways and her hands on her hips.

“Tell you what,”  Mom said, “I’ll go grab us a cone. Mint chocolate chip would probably remedy that throat, right, Sam?”

A quiet day in my room had turned into a local gathering, and now ice cream?

“Yeah,” I said.

“Make it two mints,” Synthia said.

When Mom returned, I told her I was feeling better. She laughed and said that was quick. Synthia saw Dad’s old collection of 78’s along the wall next to the kitchen.

“You guys got like a million records,” she said.

She ran the back of her fingernail along the edges, and it felt like a stick clanging the bars of an iron fence. I only played them when I was home alone, and sometimes I’d hear music outside the front door after school and wouldn’t come in until I recognized the hiss of silence.

“Can I play one?” Synthia asked.

Shut up, I thought. Shut the hell up. If I hadn’t already devoured my cone, I would have chucked it at the back of her head. Mom curled the hair around her ear and palmed the side of her neck. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting this stupid girl prod at this. Not this.

“Please?” Synthia said.

I hated her. Her voice was like a sharp blade poking a sore, ripping it open, bleeding bouts of blood. Why is she here, I thought. She’s two years older than me, but with my height, she could pass for double that. Why is she so interested in me, my mom, my house? She’s pretty; I’m plain. She’s adventurous; I’m idle. She’s athletic; I’m a tub of lard. She likes trouble; I like to write. I’m the last kid in Boxholm she should be around.

Mom didn’t move, her eyes unblinking. It’s okay, I wanted to say. Kick her out. Let’s fling open the door and let the suffocating miasma of memory waft from our home and nip the heels of this nuisance as it scurries away.

Mom walked toward the shelf, removed a record from the masses, and blew the dust free.

“Benny,” she said, as if speaking to an old friend.

She cranked the gramophone awake, set the speed, released the brake, and placed the needle at the start.

Low pumps of percussion began pounding throughout the room.

“‘Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing),’” said Synthia, holding the empty case. The horns blared, and the clarinet massaged its way into the rhythm.

Dad claimed two addictions in his life. “Your mother’s cooking,” he’d say, “and big bands!” He’d follow up with some sort of awkward shimmy to emulate the swing moves he hadn’t cared to perfect. “Doesn’t gotta be pretty, Sam,” he’d yell over the music, kicking air. “Ya just gotta move!” Sometimes before he got home from work, I’d sneak into his closet and pull out his favorite pair of black-white wingtips and practice his moves in the mirror.

“Sam,” Synthia said, “you should dance with your mother.”

Mom smiled and touched her hand to her chest. Slightly bending her knees, she shuffled her way to where I stood taut. Synthia needed to leave, but Mom’s demeanor disagreed. She stretched her hand before me, and I looked at her wedding ring.

“Find a woman who dances, Sam,” Dad would say while showing me how to cook burgers, or how to fill the mower with gas, or how to polish the scuffs from his shoes, always moving some part of his body to the ever-present aura of tunes, “like your mother.” When we went back inside he’d kiss her on the cheek, and she’d smile like she heard us talking.

I grabbed Mom’s hand. Her other hand met mine. We were sliding across the wooden floor, moving one another to the infectious bustle of the band. Mom bit her bottom lip, allowing a smirk to imprint dimples on her rosy cheeks. Her hair bounced with the bob of her shoulders that compensated for my jolts of awkwardness. Embarrassed, I closed my eyes.

“It don’t mean a thing,” Dad would sing around the house, “if it ain’t got that swing!”

I had no clue what I was doing, so I moved, convulsed, swung limbs aimlessly and hoped I was making it mean anything at all.

When the record stopped, Synthia cranked the gramophone a few times and placed the needle at the start. She watched from the side of the room, grinning, dancing her own dance, while Mom and I carried on.

Synthia must have made an impression on Mom. After that day, it was like some sort of walk-in agreement between them had commenced, and I had no say. Without ringing the doorbell, Synthia would come up to my room and wake me, and Mom had breakfast waiting in the kitchen. As we rushed out the door, a voice stretched far enough to iterate motherly concerns before we slammed it shut: “Don’t let me catch you in that tree again,” or “Be home by dinnertime,” or “Stay out of Ms. Lindon’s garden,” and always “Be safe.”

It’s funny how pertinent some of the most obvious advice really is. That’s why mothers are always right. They nag you about things you already know, stuff you just don’t want to think about.

Synthia urged me to jump across the creek. But my hatred for water—and physical self-awareness (agility had always been a foreign concept to me)—told me to head downstream and meet her where the water thinned out ten blocks away. It was late June, and the stubbornness we’d built to repel each other’s will had fully bloomed. Tensions led to counter-productive stalemates, which led to temporary tiffs that came and went like summer rainstorms. I grew more comfortable saying no when I realized an argument would pass by next sunrise.

I wouldn’t jump across, and she wouldn’t jump back, so we started walking along both sides of the creek.

The trees thickened, and we could no longer see each other. Synthia would probably run to our rendezvous to prove a point, so I walked slower than usual. I knew I’d reach the tunnel hangout by myself, but ignoring the reality comforted my decision to oppose her commands.

The tunnel hangout was a breezeway underneath Field Street where the creek ran. The guffawing upperclassmen lingered there, the same guys who got their jollies from watching me oink. They spent most of their summer in the tunnel smoking stolen cigarettes and drinking leftover beer they’d garnered from older siblings. Ronny Dumar, known around the neighborhood as Rhino D, was the biggest jackass of them all, so that made him the clan leader. He had a bizarre habit of snorting at people and lowering his head into bellowing laughs, which were more like guttural uproars contrived from the depths of his bulky torso.

Ten yards from the tunnel, I heard this laugh and froze. I turned around. I’d meet Synthia some other way.

“Who the hell is that?” said Rhino D. “Little shit’s spyin’ on us. Come on out here, little pervert.”

I could’ve bolted, but I was already out of breath from high-kneeing brush, and the thought of Rhino D hearing my retreat of fear, him sprinting after me and pouncing like a ferocious beast on a pitiful prey—the inevitable failure made me stand in shame. I walked in the clear.

“Our little piggy!” said Rhino D. He pushed off a tree where he lounged and squeezed an empty can of beer, taking a few steps toward me.

“We usually have to wait for school to see a show, but you’ve graced us with your unexpected arrival.” It was the most elegant thing I’d ever heard him say, maybe the right mix of buzz and surprise. It frightened me.

He turned to his surrounding sidekicks. They burst into laughter at the sight of his cheesy smile.

“Whattaya guys say,” said Rhino D.  “Should Little Piggy give us a show?”

“Sam.” I trembled at hearing my own voice.

“Excuse me?” The laughs came to a halt.

Shit. I didn’t even have a slit in my underwear or a pillow to absorb a punch in the gut. Maybe I already felt doomed, or maybe I’d developed a habit of trying to verbally claim my stake with Synthia, but I spoke again with what sounded a bit like confidence.

“Sam Bolton. That’s my name.”

Rhino D snorted, lowered his head, and laughed. He dropped the crushed can and stomped on it, trampling a footprint of alfalfa against the dirt.

“Tell me, Piggy, who you gonna scream for when I’m destroying your fat-ass face?” he said, with his head still down, a black boot squashing the can.

He charged.

His boots sounded a tremor that echoed against the trees, drowning the instinct to bolt. My mind screamed, run you idiot, but my body seemed complacent with finally speaking up, and my newfound courage outweighed the worry of being dismembered.

So I stood, inanimately, like one of those padded dummies linebackers swarm to expel their unhealthy levels of testosterone. But just feet away, Rhino D’s boot clipped the top of an embedded rock, and he stumbled forward, a stout heap of fury barreling through the air. He flung his arms at me as he fell, and I raised my arm for protection, cowering in anticipation.

We made contact—my fist to his chin. My eyes were closed, but the hit felt clean, and I heard a pop of Rhino D’s jaw as his bottom teeth lifted to the sky from the uppercut, and he hit the ground with a thud. Wailing in pain, he squirmed on his back, blood gushing from his mumbling mouth. He moaned, and I saw his tongue had nearly severed where teeth had guillotined flesh.

I ran.

I ran until I thought I was going to pass out. I heard nothing behind me, so I stopped to catch my breath. It had grown dark, and I wondered how long I’d been a fugitive. Hands on my knees, I laughed. I punched Rhino D in the face; I made him bleed. He tripped, but heck, I gave him a good shot. I needed to run to Synthia’s house. She’d understand my absence and praise my feat of strength. That I kicked the crap out of him. That he fell like a heavyweight boxer in disoriented defeat.

Red and blue lights flashed on Acorn Street. I halted and crouched behind a faraway bush. The cops were after me. I was too strong for my own good. Oh my god I killed Ronny Dumar.

No. The lights were outside Synthia’s house. I ran as close as I could before a cop told me to go home. Shouting filled the musty air, and as I reached my driveway, it crescendoed into a frenzy. Two officers, one on each arm of a burly man in jeans and a torn shirt, struggled to escort him to the cruiser. Unable to turn back to the house, the man lifted his grizzly face and blurted threats as slurred as his steps.

I had never seen him before. If he was Synthia’s father, she never mentioned him, and I only saw her mother when I’d walk Synthia home at night, standing behind a screen door smoking a cigarette, waiting out her daughter’s vacancy as if she’d escaped. “Where you been?” Synthia usually walked by without responding, and I was ignored as if the wind had blown her home. The man, the lights, the yelling—it made me realize how little I actually knew about Synthia’s life.

Outside my front door, I faintly recognized percussion. The horns blared, but I didn’t wait because I needed to tell Mom.

On the couch, Synthia cowered in Mom’s lap, sobbing. They sat inside the dim light of one lamp, and the music drowned the semblance of all life outside. The record faded to a hiss, and Mom, cupping Synthia’s head to her shoulder with one hand, signaled for me to keep it going.

As I cranked the handle, Synthia looked at me from beneath Mom’s chin. One eye had been pummeled, her mouth slit in multiple spots, her other eye swollen from crying. I felt sick, like I’d done the damage myself. She cowered back into my Mom’s dampened shirt, who motioned for me to go to bed.

The music stopped, and I sat at the top of the stairs for hours. Every time I thought of trying to sleep, Synthia faintly coughed or sniffled, and I stayed bolted to the floor.

I never saw the man again. I later learned he was Synthia’s father who’d finally discovered their new location after they’d escaped him. Mom had been gardening when she heard screaming and called the police.

I never mentioned that night to Synthia. But all I could think of was her swollen face, and it made my chest clench. Maybe if we hadn’t split up at the creek she wouldn’t have gone home alone. She could have stayed for dinner like she did every night.

Three days passed without seeing her, so I left my journal on her front porch. I bookmarked a blank page.

She came over the next day and read me some poems she’d written throughout the night. They were about her father: who he was, who he wasn’t. She’d finish one and cry. I touched her knee and thought how unfair it was that she actually had a father but couldn’t fill the void I’d been trying to fill for years. I’d been trying to displace what was onto what is, but Synthia, I realized, watching her wipe tears and turn to more pages full of unspoken ink, never even had a was worth wanting again, and yet she’d been here, with me, making her new is, helping me combine the two of mine.

“Be safe,” Mom said before we ran out the door. This was anything but safe. I stared down my worst fear. Synthia convinced me to squeeze into an outgrown swimsuit, and now I was next in line.

To be fair, the diving board was worse. Synthia said we were just going to put our feet in the deep end. Isn’t that nice, she said. And then we inched closer to feel the splashes of people free-falling through the air, and somehow I was next, Synthia behind me, her voice nudging me toward the open sky, my toes curling over the edge of everything wrong with the world, and if the lifeguard hadn’t yelled for Synthia to let me crawl back to the ladder, she would’ve never let me by.

So the slide was better. By a sliver of sanity, better.

“Sam, just do it.” Synthia said. “There’s a line a mile long.”

I stared straight ahead with my arms tucked in a knot, no intention of looking back. I allowed the snickers and insults to grow louder. I didn’t care who was waiting—except Synthia.

Her eyes could freeze you into a block of ice, and her smile could melt you into a lukewarm puddle before you even realized she was worked up. I used to think her eyes were blue-gray swirls of pigment made to induce fear, but they were only clouds filtering the billowing bits of her past. In the storm I wanted shelter from, I became the calm.

“I will throw you down, Sam!” yelled Synthia. “On three!”

I needed shelter. I pinched my eyes shut, and when Synthia trumpeted “Two!” I was shoved sideways by a girl half my size. She plopped down onto the edge of death, squinted, and stared at me with a slight tilt to her head.

“You’re supposed to go down the slide, Fatty,” she said.

I looked at my toes, white from clutching the ground.

“Sorry,” I said, but she was already halfway down, her back turned to what she couldn’t see coming, arms out to her sides—pure ecstasy—and swallowed by a glistening sea in the July heat.

Synthia let out a piercing cackle.

“Truly frightening. I mean if a six-year-old can do it—”

I was entranced by the ripples.

“Be safe.”

Mom had said the same thing to Dad the night of the accident when he went out for a walk. It’s funny how pertinent some of the most obvious advice really is.

Usually I accompanied him on his nightly strolls, but that day he was upset after failing a business pitch: “Bolton’s Swing Lessons.” The manager of the nearby recreation center looked him up and down after a demonstration.

“But you can’t even dance,” the man said.

I waited for his invite, but this time he grabbed his scarf and fedora in silence, so I didn’t press him. I had downed a third glass of hot chocolate when Mom began to wonder of his whereabouts.

So ever since: “Be safe.” Mom’s parting words.

And what else? What else to prepare me for the world, the unpredictable halt of life’s pendulum, time’s bitter defiance of itself, how it flips us by the ankles and shakes, drops us where we once stood tall? Time endures, proceeds with duty, and leaves us disoriented, stuck in the past, scrambling to find the now.

Synthia slapped my back. She giggled at how efficiently her encouragement tattooed a brilliant red on my pasty skin. Furious, I winced in pain. Synthia knew damn well why I couldn’t go down the slide, but she continued to nudge me, and I turned around with tears in my eyes, shivering.

“Sam,” Synthia said. Her voice fell to a soft plea. “You can do it.”

I began weeping, losing breath, and now cared about the people in line. How stupid I looked. Easing me down on the brim of the slide, Synthia crouched and held my shoulders.

“Alright,” she said, “you don’t have to go.” I wiped my face and looked into her eyes, vibrant with open skies. “But you will.”

She shoved me backwards. Desperately, I reached for her hands, but I hit a dip and was propelled faster, back first, speeding into what I couldn’t see coming.

Then cold.

Submerged in silence, I thought of Dad paddling for the fracture that swallowed him, his breath stripped away, his nerves sliced numb with panic.

My head breached. My chest pumped. A gasp for air muffled Synthia’s laughing from above. I paddled to the edge and clutched the concrete. What did he think when he knew he couldn’t get out? What was the advice he never got to tell me, the secrets I needed to preserve for the rest of my life?

Synthia snuck up behind me and hugged me around my waist.

Punch her. Do it. Spit in her face. Pull her hair—anything seemed right.

I turned to yell at her, but she kissed me long and good. We smiled. I kissed her back.

I’d already been living the remnants of my father, the inherent pieces I needed but couldn’t see until she combined them.

Find a girl who dances.
It doesn’t have to be pretty.
All you have to do is move. 

Collin Varney is an English teacher in Littleton, Colorado. To blend two passions, he earned an MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Most recently, his work is forthcoming in Fiction on the Web, and he creates for a Patreon community called The Write Balance.