Ghosts of Tom Joad by Peter Van Buren

dreams, she wanted her own, going everywhere she’d never been until she’d been everywhere. I never knew what to say back, but I liked listening to what she said.
    After she moved back to Reeve, we fell in hard with each other, firing up almost without effort together, a camp fire that hadn’t been put out and just walked away from. I’m not sure what she saw in me, though it was a good postcard I had selected to send back to her that first summer, one with a picture of a giant rabbit that said B IG T HINGS ARE H APPENING H ERE IN R EEVE, so that might have helped. It was like texting nowadaysbut on paper and slower. Must’ve scratched her right where she itched.
    So then I told Angel we were like Romeo and Juliet, which was the most romantic thing me and Muley could come up with from the library. Don’t know why the old librarian looked at us so weird when we asked together for the most romantic book. It was a stupid library anyway.
    â€œNo, we’re not Romeo and Juliet,” said Angel. “My dad’s dead and my mom just chases around replacing him with a new guy every week. Your mom’s a broken robot and your dad’s drunk into a coma. None of them give a twist about us.”
    Which I did not fully understand, but Angel kept on holding my hand, so I guess nodding along was the right move.
    I said, “Sometimes I feel awkward when I talk, I don’t always know what to say.”
    â€œSo why talk?” was the way Angie replied.
    Then I said to her, “You’re beautiful,” and she said, “What?” She laughed and told me she heard me clear enough, but just wanted to make me say it again. When I first wanted to kiss her, I was scared, not sure, so I asked if it was okay. She said I shouldn’t have asked, I should have just done it. That’s how things were with Angie. I mean, we were still kids, and I tasted Dentyne when we kissed. But we told each other we were in love, and I’m pretty sure we were. It was a new thing to me, but you don’t always need to know a thing, to have seen a thing before, to know it. Some things just are. I understood there was so much I didn’t know, but those nights Angie made me believe what I felt. We’d go out under the black umbrella of night and sit as close to the Baltimore and Ohio line as we dared, andwhen the diesel coalers came past she’d pull me down on her so’s I could feel her breasts and she’d scream as loud as she could as the train carried past, saying she could feel my heart even then, pounding, and I’d kiss her like I was trying to pull her heart into me with the generosity of all that moment and I’d hold her like mine were the arms of God themselves. After those nights I’d feel tired way past sleep, but I never wanted to sleep, not ’cause I wasn’t exhausted, but because being awake was so good. Lying by the railroad tracks, looking up at the sky, I said, “It all seems so big,” and Angie said, “Ain’t big enough.”
    One time she said, “I want to count all your freckles. Can we spend the afternoon doing that?” We did.
    I am a little shy to admit I was an educated virgin. There wasn’t much to do in Reeve and so we had to make our own fun, and in that respect virginity wasn’t innocence as much as simple lack of experience. You had to be flexible in a small town, however, ’cause it was always that you liked the pretty ones and the less pretty ones liked you. My first, second, and several subsequent times were with girls from school, rude jabs in someone’s car or after church outside in the woods fooling we were Adam and Eve, but the good part, us all sticky with apple juice, summer’s a messy collection of drips, explosions and squirts like I was a hyperactive Irish Setter, my tongue foraging inside some girl’s mouth. Most sex then was more of a struggle than a pleasure of its own, as teenage