Why It Matters

I took up with a girl named Christie that summer.  We’d gone to school together since the seventh grade but never spoken to each other.  I thought that she was an Untouchable and I doubt that she thought of me at all.

Jarod called Christie “your Marilyn Monroe,” which was pretty accurate.  She was a tall, curvy blond with a billboard smile.  Her family lived a few doors down from Hal The Drummer’s house, just down the road from the stoplight that marked the beginning of Boiling Springs.

They were a great family: two younger brothers; a laid back stepfather; and a mother to rule them all.  The whole family came to life if one of a handful of songs came on:  Squeeze’s “Tempted,” “Had A Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy)” from Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson, or anything off of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell.

Christie’s mother was obsessed with Sting, and apparently he wasn’t the only one on her hit list.

“Momma and Miss Shelton are always talking about wanting to fuck you,” Christie told me.  “It’s so gross.”

“Who is Miss Shelton?” I asked.  “What does she look like?”

“Shut up,” Christie said, and we rolled around again because that’s what we did wherever, whenever, and however we could.  Her libido was as big as her Marilyn curves.

As much as I liked her family and enjoyed her company I never got past the awkwardness inherent to her mother’s attention.  Her stepfather didn’t seem to mind his wife hitting on me, nor did her daughter.  Very strange.

Quickly the need to sneak around vanished.  Christie would stay over at my apartment or I’d sleep in her room and her step dad made us breakfast in the morning.  Eventually it all got to be too much for me.

“What’s up with your family?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why aren’t they freaked out when you stay over?”

“They like you,” she said.

“No, I mean — come on, you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Doesn’t it bother your parents that I’m sleeping with their daughter?”

“Oh, no,” She said.  “They don’t care.”

“What?”

“They think you’re gay.”

I know that this is a terribly short story, but really — what am I going to say after that?