Page 13 of August Lane
“So did he. Only I didn’t know until it was too late.” That they were talking like this, trading secrets, felt too intimate for someone she hadn’t technically met. But she didn’t want to stop. Telling him made the shame feel like something she could eventually peel off.
“We had sex,” she said. “It’s all over school. People hate me.”
He grabbed her hand. She stiffened, then wove her fingers through his. His hand was much bigger and calloused, probably from playing his guitar.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said. “No one should treat you that way.”
August didn’t want to be pitied, but this might be worse. It was genuine kindness—easier to trust and fall for. The enormity of what she’d confessed to this stranger was starting to frighten her. “I should probably go,” she said.
“Oh? Right, yeah.” He sounded disappointed. She tried to pull her hand back, but he gripped it tighter. “Let’s walk out together.”
August moved slowly as he shuffled behind her. The darkness lifted as they got closer to the exit, and the funhouse music was drowned out by the metal grind of carnival rides and screaming voices. His hand loosened and fell away. She turned around, but a wall of bodies obscured her vision. She tried to look through the crowd and spot the guy she was eager to meet properly, but no one met her eyes. She spun around, searching, but only spotted Richard and his friends holding cozy-covered beer cans.
“There she is!” Richard grinned and slung his arm over his friend’s shoulders. The guy was Black and wore a ball cap jammed over his short, curly afro.
“Come here, August,” Richard slurred. “My boy’s a virgin, and his girl won’t put out. He’s never even had his dick sucked. Told him you’d do him a solid.” Richard pointed to a porta-potty. “Even found y’all the perfect spot.”
August tried to ignore him and walk away, but Richard kept talking, yelling her name along with more lies about the amazing things she could do with her mouth. He’d said the same thing when he kissed her: that her lips were amazing, and he’d never felt that way when he kissed a girl before.Like I’m floating.
August stalked to where they were standing. She ignored everyone else, including the mute virgin buddy he was using as an armrest. “I don’t do pity fucks anymore,” she said. “Sixty seconds of heaven isn’t worth it.”
Richard’s face iced over. Someone behind him coughed a laugh into their hand, and soon they were surrounded by snickering. He glanced at his friends and sneered, “Slut.”
August laughed. It felt good. Or at least better than crying. She looked to his right, to the supposed friend he’d made the butt of his joke, prepared to tell him that the company he kept was the real reason his girlfriend wouldn’t sleep with him. But the guy wasn’t laughing like the others. He was staring at her like he’d seen a ghost.
“Come on, Luke.” Richard slapped his back. “This bitch is boring.”
They drifted away. Luke didn’t move. He opened his mouth but closed it quickly, like he’d forgotten how it worked. When he finally spoke, his voice was deep and winding, the same one she’d stupidly handed all her secrets to.
“August Lane?”
In third grade, kids had called him Cowboy Luke. He couldn’t remember the name of the boy who started it, only that he was thin and white, with a face full of so many freckles, they looked like brown splotches on his cheeks from a distance. The boy had leaned over, took a dramatic sniff, and loudly declared that Luke Randall smelled like horse shit. “Youtryin’ to be a cowboy?” he’d asked, with a sneer that implied it was an unforgivable sin.
The freckled kid moved away, but the nickname stuck, even after Luke’s mother sold off all their livestock and started using the barn for storage. At his predominately white school, Black boys were supposed to be cool and urban like the rappers everyone listened to, not country and dusty from working on two hundred acres of farmland surrounded by dirt roads. It took a while, but after a few years of excelling in every sport the school district offered, coupled with a meticulous hygiene routine, Luke left the cowboy behind him. He had better nicknames now: Lightning, because he was the fastest running back in the district. Ups, because he could jump higher than a basketball center who was half a foot taller. Sometimes he overheard girls calling him Funshine, like the yellow Care Bear from the eighties. He still hadn’t quite figured out why, but their tone made it clear it was a compliment, which was the most important thing.
Luke was well liked. People laughed with him instead of at him. So once word spread around school that he was a virgin, he felt he had to remedy that condition immediately.
His girlfriend agreed, which wasn’t surprising, because as last year’s MVP on their district champion volleyball team, Jessica Ryder valued winning above everything. She would have done something drastic if he hadn’t suggested having sex. Like dump him. Or make up a different rumor to counter the first because, as she put it, “I won’t be the loser who can’t get a virgin to fuck me.”
They’d been dating for only three months. Jessica’s family had moved to Arcadia during his freshman year when her father, a burly man with a Lionel Richie mustache, started working with the county sheriff’s department. Her mother, a Mariah Carey look-alike, was a homemaker who sold Mary Kay products for spending money. Jessica was a mixture of the two: stunning, tall, and slender, with loose curls that had all the boys mesmerized. She played volleyball and basketball, and quickly joined Luke’s group of friends, a cluster of Black athletes who’d played in the same sports programs since kindergarten. For years, she’d dated blond, blue-eyed Wesley Harris, the star pitcher of their baseball team,until their senior year when he dumped her for a freshman at Rhodes College. Jessica had pivoted to Luke almost instantly. Later, she told him her friends had hassled her about dating him forever. “They said we’d look cute,” she said while gesturing to their similar golden-brown skin tones. “A perfect match.”
Luke had always figured his first time would be momentous, ideally with someone he cared about who also cared about him. But Jessica had said I love you so early in their relationship that it hit his ears with high-pitched feedback. He’d gone rigid, with all the right responses bricked inside his mouth. Her face had reddened and she looked close to tears, so he’d said the first thing that sprang to his mind.
“I’ve never had sex,” he confessed, which only made her flush more. So he added, “I’ve been waiting for the right person,” because it implied he’d been waiting for her.
Jessica liked to believe she was special. Unique but not different. If someone served her chocolate cake with sprinkles, she’d say, “I haven’t eaten sprinkles since third grade,” not, “No thanks, I like vanilla,” because not liking chocolate made you weird. It was the same with Luke. She enjoyed having a boyfriend who was saving himself just for her, but he had to be someone everyone else wanted—her big, strong football player. And Luke went along with it because she was fun and beautiful, and he’d chosen to be that guy. But it also meant that the girl who claimed to love him couldn’t possibly love all of him.
Jessica must have been bragging about his celibate status to one of her friends because the rumor spread like wildfire. That’s when she realized that something that felt romantic in private could seem odd and pathetic to everyone else. The entire football team started giving him repulsed “Who the hell doesn’t want to fuck?” looks, so Luke let go of romantic notions about his first time being special. They were probably a side effect of cramming his brain with too many love songs anyway.
That Sunday after the fair, they had sex in her bedroom. It was too slow, then too fast, and then so intense it was humiliating. When it was over, they lay together in a loud silence that seemed to press against his skin. He said I love you because it felt like he should, and her answering smile convinced him he was right. But Monday morning, when hepicked her up for school, she barely made eye contact as she slid into his truck.
By that afternoon, everyone knew he and Jessica were having sex, often and everywhere, in positions he had to look up online. Three days later, the gossip mill decided he’d been cheating on her with three other girls, former friends who’d exacted their revenge by sucking him off behind the bleachers. He got backslaps that made him feel like shit. No one wanted to hear his denials.Luke’s a nice guy, of course he wouldn’t admit it.It was like they looked at him and saw someone else, the version of nice that ruined people’s lives behind closed doors. It made him think of Richard Green bragging he’d bagged “celebrity pussy” in their locker room.
But lately, everything reminded him of August.
He saw her everywhere now: at lunch, in the hallway, at the back of his English class, sullen and silent as she gazed out the window. The morning after the fair, he sat at a slight angle at his desk to keep her in his line of sight. The next day, he’d sat in the back of the room, convinced it would help him focus, but all it did was give him a better view of her. He was supposed to be learning about sonnets, but by the end of class, he hadn’t taken a single note on iambic pentameter. Instead, he’d memorized the constellation of freckles behind her knee.
When the state shut down Eastside High, it had tripled the Black student population at AHS. Although Luke was excited to feel a little less alone in the locker room this year, he hadn’t been brave enough to approach the daughter of his favorite country singer. He’d been intimidated by how she carried herself, like she was seconds from whipping out a knife. But that night at the fair had changed his perspective. August didn’t barrel through the hallway looking for a fight. She was bracing for an attack while covered in armor.
