Teenage Romance II
“You see?” Karen laughed. “It is so raining!”
I lifted my eyes to the rear windshield above us. Sure enough, several telltale drops glittered from the lights of the city below.
It was summertime. School was finally out, Karen and I had seen it through to remain together despite the events of the past few months, and both were cause for celebration. We were a bit intoxicated, making out in the back seat of my father’s car, parked in an alcove of the foothills west of town. I had passed a driver ed course, making possible our very first tryst on wheels.
“You owe me two thousand orgasms,” she declared. Her breath carried the aroma of wine and the roz we had just smoked. She was speaking of a bet we made on the weather. I was so sure that the distant lightning we had witnessed earlier on the horizon did not forebode rain that I dared agree to such an outrageous wager. Nature, it seemed, had now gone out of its way to prove me wrong.
“I wonder how long it’s going to last,” I asked the sky.
“Not more than twenty minutes,” Karen answered for it, after the smash and fury of a nearby thunderbolt had subsided.
I laughed. “You wanna bet on that, too?”
“Sure, why not? Double or nothing.”
“You’re on,” I said, and sealed the agreement with a kiss. We rode the storm out, in a manner of speaking, and somewhere in there, as we clung to one another, entertained by the shimmering, ever-changing patterns of raindrops on the windshield and the intermittent blazing flashes that froze them for an instant into brilliant diamonds, I made a daring statement. My courage was chemically and hormonally induced, I admit, but the words so expressed the way I felt, were so complementary to the warmth and comfort I shared with Karen in our upholstered metal cocoon, that they became as irrepressible as a robust belch.
“If this isn’t love, then you tell me what is.”
“This isn’t love,” she responded curtly. “How could I love someone who’s only gotten me out of the house twice in a year?” She was being kind, a diplomatic retort to my brazen attempt at breaching the unspeakable taboo. Karen didn’t really mind that our bounds of affinity seldom strayed beyond her bubbly, wavy waterbed mattress. I could have been a disappointment to her in so many ways, if she had demanded or expected things and performances I did not have the talent or gumption to execute. Nevertheless, she did what she could to help me live up to my potential. My grades in Creative Writing and Art soared because of her input. She all but dictated my final composition, a futuristic novella about the richest man in the solar system, who bequeaths planet Earth with an unusual gift in his last days: a ring made of asteroid slag. And though she did not paint she still guided my hand and eye as I produced a watercolor illustration of a timeless tropical mountain rain forest, thriving amidst a sedate, gleaming glacier. She dismissed the concept as a scene from a former life, and then dismissed the notion with an ambiguous smile. But she threw up her hands when it came to helping me through the increasingly nettling intricacies of trigonometry. “The pyramids weren’t built in a day,” she said solemnly, and left it at that. I think Karen’s only ambition for me, at least at that time: that I in some small way remain the frail, helpless, hopelessly imperfect creature I had become upon gaining admission to this vale of tears.
“Time, babe,” Karen said to me in the humid darkness.
“Hm?”
“What’s the dashboard clock say? I can’t see it with you lying on top of me.”
“Sorry,” I said groggily, raising my head above the rampart of the front seat. She was right again. Twenty minutes had passed, and the half-Moon and stars were reappearing from behind the torn curtain of nimbus. In another moment we were staring at a clear sky, Karen now lying on her back on top of me. She pointed to the stars she knew, and mused about how us lonely Earthlings had trained powerful transmitters and sensitive receivers on those twinkling pinpoints, hoping someone floating amidst them would be listening, and waiting for them to respond. We were waiting still. Out of all those uncountable stars, there just wasn’t anybody else to talk to. She rolled down the window and the sweet fragrance of wet creosote flowers wafted through, proving, she said, that the least we knew about the Creator of the Universe was that It had a nose.
“We’re up to four thousand now, right?” I asked her.
“Four thousand whats?”
“Orgasms.”
“Oh yeah, okay,” she said thickly. “Tell you what. Take me to that burger place you want to work at. Get me their vilest double meat concoction; it’s been a while since I’ve tasted blood. Then let’s go home and do this in comfort. We’ll be even.”
We slid into our clothes with far more difficulty than we got out. Hoping no one was looking in on us, it seemed as though we were suddenly in the infantry, forced to furtively slither and creep while committing stealthful acts under cover of night. I started the car and we made good our getaway. The road back into town skirted a quadruplicate array of radio towers, their signals intended solely for reception by Earth-born citizens of the Universe. They were adorned with red beacons, alternately flashing to and fro in a slow, stately dance. Because we were not listening to the radio there was no telling exactly what messages emanated from them, but by means of this monotonous telegraphy the towers communicated something very plainly. The towers were talking to flying objects. They had this to say to flying objects: stay the hell away!
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