The 19 Year Old Virgin Next Door by Sean Brandon

The 19 Year Old Virgin Next Door
    By Sean Brandon
    I’ve lived at the beach for over ten years
and have gotten used to all manner of strays and flotsam washing up
on my doorstep. Friends will use my place as home base when they
bring their kids to the beach and almost all of them bring food. As
long they’re friends I am all for it and welcome them to my home.
The strays usually want to pee, use the phone, drink my alcohol or
just hang out on the beach.
    So the other day when I returned home from
Boston and saw a young woman covered in a mass of brown hair and
crying on my sidewalk I was not thrown but I was curious. People
are usually happy when they come to the beach, not crying. I could
hear her sobs and started to walk around her, but the closer I got
to her the more familiar she looked.
    It wasn’t what she was wearing because she
wore normal beach girl attire; soft cotton shorts in a loud orange
color and a white bikini top, with orange striped white gym socks
on her legs and white sneakers.
    As I walked up she turned her head to look up
at me, and even through the tears and mussed up hair I knew her.
She worked at the local grocery store, Darla was her name. She was
a good girl who was normally happy, so seeing her crying was
unsettling. Her parents lived not too far away from me but I didn’t
know them more than the occasional ‘howdy neighbor’ now and
then.
    “You’ve had the same hair color for a month
now, isn’t it time to change it?” I asked. It was our personal
joke. She said I was one of the few guys who noticed whenever she
“adjusted” her hair color, even though it had been neon red as
often as it had been blond.
    She laughed but then began to cry again. She
was the plain sort of pretty girl who changed her hair color more
often than she did her socks, more to experiment than to call
attention to herself. In the time that she had checked me out at
the grocery store her hair had been blond, green, red, five shades
of blue that I remembered, purple, and several combinations of
color too shocking to remember the exact combinations of.
    “It hurts when I laugh, Mr. Brandon, so stop
it,” she said as she slapped my leg.
    “But you’re on my ten square feet of grass so
I can crack jokes if I want to,” I replied.
    It was then that I saw her skateboard beside
her and it was pretty banged up. “Are you okay? I’ve never seen you
upset, let alone crying,” I said, getting serious again.
    She didn’t reply for a while so I wasn’t sure
what to do. Then she twisted around on the ground so that she was
facing me and showed me her left side. The skin of her left leg was
covered in scrapes, some of them bleeding pretty badly. One sock
was badly shredded and her shorts were all but torn off on her left
side.
    “I’m hurt,” she said, tried to stand, and
fell back on her ass then tried her best not to cry. She lost that
battle and tears streamed down her cheeks.
    She was a tough young lady and I knew it. She
had once played softball with a broken arm, was bruised regularly
from falling off her skateboard, and played volleyball like the
only way she could continue to breathe was to never let the ball
touch the sand. I knew that she was a tough one and tears were not
a part of her regular day.
    “Let me to take you to the hospital and get
you patched up,” I said.
    “Hospital?” she glared at me. “It’s a flesh
wound,” she said then broke out laughing which turned into more
tears.
    The year before I’d turned her on to Monty
Python and since then she had watched them all. And she quoted
Monty Python whenever I saw her.
    “It is certainly a flesh wound,” I said with
a laugh.
    “It looks worse than it really is. Can I come
in and clean up a little?” she asked.
    “You need a doctor,” I said.
    “Look, I have a great doctor who will look at
it later on today, but for now I need your help, okay?” When she
wanted to be direct she certainly was.
    “Um, I’m not sure that’s the best