Goodbye Summer

(Creative Nonfiction) "As a child, my mom would punctuate the end of fairytales by saying 'That’s fiction. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.'”

Photo by Annie Hendrix (2022)

Disclaimer: The names of individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

Goodbye Summer

The summer I met Chris, my childhood friend Kayla had invited me to accompany her on her family’s annual camping trip. Kayla and I rode in the backseat of her family car through West County on the way to a community campground on the Russian River. Her father had decided not to come on the trip, and while her mom listened to Nickelback on the drive, I couldn’t help but wonder how rocky their marriage must have been if she found those lyrics relatable.

I was thirteen years old and never dreamed of marriage. I didn’t believe in true love. As a child, my mom would punctuate the end of fairytales by saying “That’s fiction. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.” I believed her because I knew what her abusive marriage with my father had done not only to her, but to me.

“She looks dead,” someone had said that Spring at school, because I was a dead girl. I was emotionally numb, dissociated beyond the veil. I had ‘killed myself,’ so to speak, to survive the constant onslaught of psychological abuse I experienced both from my father and from a clinically psychopathic older sibling. Because these were my models for what ‘normal’ male attention looked like, I believed abuse was love. I thought marriage was an arrangement where a woman signs away her body for use by a man who has no interest in her as a human being, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

At the campground, after dark, the teenagers would sneak away from their parents’ campsites and pay visits to one another. Jim, James, and Jameson, a set of triplets that couldn’t seem to keep their hands to themselves, had been coming to this camp for many years and Kayla and the trio were long-time friends. Chris was the triplets’ cousin, a plus one like me. The triplets introduced him, and he spent a while talking to Kayla while I stared at the ground because I was too shy to speak.

The next few days were spent hanging out by the river, meeting new friends, and socializing in each other’s tents and cabins. Chris stayed close to me and Kayla in these social settings and I remember thinking Kayla’s so lucky a boy like that is interested in her.

Then I heard Chris say “Hey, do you want to take a walk?” and was surprised when I looked up and saw he was talking to me.

“Go!” said Kayla, and Chris and I left her with the triplets while they entertained her by wrestling, piggyback racing, and shooting each other in the behind with airsoft guns like idiot children. Because we were idiot children.

“Can I hold your hand?” Chris asked, and I said yes. As we walked the path encircling the campground, he asked me what music I liked to listen to and what books I liked to read. He didn’t ridicule my answers. He didn’t try to undermine my taste or prove his superiority. He just listened to me.

The next day when we visited the triplets and Chris, they were making s’mores over a fire pit and Brushfire Fairytales by Jack Johnson was playing on the boombox. Chris held out his hand and asked me to dance, and as we did, the triplets made fun of us. They laughed and threw pieces of graham cracker, but Chris told them firmly to stop and we continued to sway gently to the music as he sang along softly with the lyrics. I could smell the smoke of the bonfire. I could feel the warmth of my own hands around the back of his neck. I felt like a dead girl resurrected.

“Want to walk?” he asked, and again I said yes. We took the same path we had taken the day before, and this time when the canopy of dense trees opened, the Milky Way revealed itself to us.

When Chris and I didn’t return to the triplets’ campsite, Kayla got worried and rallied the triplets to go looking for us. They eventually found Chris and I in an open field, stargazing with several other nocturnal teens. They joined our group, and we all told each other stories until the early hours of the morning.

While we chatted and laughed, Chris sat behind me. “Can I put my arms around you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and he held me close, put his chin on my shoulder, and eventually fell asleep. I couldn’t bear to move, he was so sweet, and we stayed that way until the rising sun cast sparkling light on the morning dew.

What Chris and I had wasn’t love, but it was an important lesson in learning there are men who respect women, who ask for consent, and do not feel inherently entitled to the female body. He taught me to be on the lookout for others like him, and I believe he’s part of the reason I was able to find and marry my husband, and to have the privilege of what feels like a real-life ‘happily ever after.’

When it was time to say goodbye to Chris, goodbye to summer, I had a little more trust in humanity and felt a little less dead. He ran after me as I hopped in the back of Kayla’s car.

“Lover boy is here to see you,” Kayla said, and I got back out and walked around the vehicle to where Chris was waiting for me.

“Can I kiss you before you go?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” and we held that first kiss until Kayla’s mom leaned out of the driver’s seat and barked at me to hurry up and get in. As we drove down the dark drive to the highway, I pressed my face against the window and looked up past the silhouetted treetops, my eyes full of stars.

More Creative Nonfiction by Annie Hendrix: