Air Conditioning

When I was fifteen, I found a girl named Fior. I met her while carpooling to a voice competition (she was musical theater, I was classical). She was loud and posturing, desperately drawing attention of any kind as if it was her oxygen. What I was, on the other hand, isn't the sort of insight I am allowed, and doesn’t not really matter.

She was part of a very large, very home-schooled family with children of various sizes and motives traipsing in and out. They would jump upstairs, or leave to see a friend, or run into the kitchen for food. It was all very natural, except the way that they recorded the food they ate on the fridge, supposedly to stay within a budget. But the budget seemed to be funded by their matriarch's essential oils and opportunities from whatever anti-vaccine/evangelical facebook groups she was a part of, or her father’s manual job (lost on me now), which only seemed to get in the way of his aging passion for community theater. Fior herself shared the passion. She was a belty soprano with little to no regard for the eardrums of those in the car next to her. But she was good. Of course she was good. We had the same instructor, which will have to be a story for another time, but she wasn’t going to let a voice like Fior’s be bad. But Fior had a slight malnourishment that made her thinness look spikey, rather than chic, onstage. She had a large nose with even larger green eyes set perfectly atop tiny, sharp cheekbones that squinched childishly as she smiled. That smile was thin-lipped, showing yellow teeth and jutting out her chin and freckles, gleaming like stars in a pale morning. Perhaps it's bleached or grown now, but when I found Fior, her hair was adorning her face in a girlish, fluffy brown pixie cut. Her impossibly long lashes made her sly eyes look doe-ish and classic. Dressed in an assemblance of hand-me-downs and whatever her brothers’ girlfriends left around the house, she was a presence.

My parents never liked her. Her social ineptitude from her exclusively theatrical and corner-store socialization they found embarrassing. She was quite loud and said words like “masturbate” as if they were “Tuesday '' or “refrigerator”. Both my parents grew up lower class, and my mother’s family specifically was not known for social graces. So my fifteen year old social rebellion found their disapproval hypocritical of them. But perhaps the luck and work it takes to get a person to rise from lower class to middle class affords one a higher order of company.

One way or another, my rural air-conditioned house was less than welcoming to the skinny seventeen year old I had met, and I found myself on the Southside of town more than once. I observed the denim shorts and three dollar flip flops, rambling vagrants (one of which was always poorly playing the guitar, with the flag of a country that was clearly not giving him healthcare access on a bandanna wrapped around his head) and 20-something white drug dealers of Hutchins Street. I was hoping that a pair of those jean shorts were holding onto Fior’s hip bones, or the homeless man was rambling on about Fior’s pretty eyes and could point a weak finger in her direction, or perhaps the sleazy 20-something year old was going to give Fi a dime bag for the roof of the tattoo and comic shop. The last two are, of course, my own hopeful ramblings. The transient left me only with only a hint of guilt, and the dealer left me with a comment and a smile, and yet another reason to let my older brother's friends buy my weed for me. It didn’t matter. I found her Y2K tank top and jean shorts feeding her older brother’s cats at a house apartment where Hutchins crossed Sumner.

“You’re here,” she said as though it was in question. “The sun is setting.”

With the peach haze beginning to set over the houses and brown trees, and summer heat glaring with one final throb, it was a fucking revelation. But before I could express some self-effacing, empty sarcasm, she grabbed my hand. She smiled as she led me to her house, letting her tongue wander to something dramatic and provocative. Her attitude surrounding the conversation was an odd mix of narcissistic self indulgence, and an eager hang-up on each of my facial reactions, and whatever little jokes I was able to fit in when she drew breath. She didn’t react long to my inputs, she swallowed them and continued on.

We stepped up to her wooden steps, in the very early stages of decay and riddled with grocery boxes. The thick and creaky white-ish door opened inward to a messy house (the way I prefer houses to be), and her mother sat with her permanent frown that only intensified when she eventually smiled at me. The big pine dinner table was squeezed into the entrance/dining room, sharing its space with baskets, half finished art, and BJ’s wholesale food on its way to the kitchen, just barely past its best-by date. These were significant obstacles, or in my case, an excuse to switch my hips back and forth, or to show off my long runner’s legs while stepping over things, or pull in my stomach while sliding behind chairs. When I sat down, I breathed in a sweet and mothy scent, with a hint of something sour that I could neither decipher nor afford too much attentive distaste. I began forcing a lively discussion with Fior’s mother. It was the one and only time I found myself sacrificing almost every political and moral belief I had held, just for some credit in this house, where I was planning to go upstairs more than once that summer. It seemed easier at the time than climbing through a window. Meanwhile, this distressing woman’s daughter was making us mac-and-cheese.

“Half a bowl each!” barked Fi’s mother.

I didn’t mind at all. I was sixteen, and starving myself at the time. I even envied her scarcity in a way that is nauseating to me now.

After a few bites of silent mac-and-cheese in a plastic bowl, we went to the stairs, sharing a side smile. We walked across a linty living room carpet, often a stage for night-time karaoke when her dad got home from work.

“Fi!” Her mom rounded that corner. “Door open, please.”

“Why?” Fior shot back fast but very calm. “You never make me do that with Coilean.”

Her mom looked me up and down. As she scanned my loose blonde hair and tight red shirt, I knew why.

“Dyke,” she thought.

She was right, of course, but so was Coilean. Hell, so was everyone else. It was a teenage small-city summer in the 2010’s, what else was there to do? But I was prettier and a little older than Coilean. Yet maybe that shouldn't have mattered to a grown woman. Besides it was common knowledge at that point that Fior tried most of her moves out on the doting, fourteen year old Coilean first. At any rate, her mother’s silence was Fior’s victory, because the door was shut and locked not ten minutes later.

As we walked tentatively up the floors to her bedroom, she showed me more clutter and spawn of her mother. She stopped completely in an awkward looking half-bath.

“This is where I found my uncle OD’d,” she said with purposeful nonchalance, but still looking at my facial expression with eager anticipation. My family had always had more meth, heroine, and molestation than the next one, so I was relatively unphased. But I’d never bothered to tell Fior that half my family was infamous in the trailer towns of the rural southern-tier, and I could tell she wanted to shock me. So I gave her my best performance of the wide-eyed middle class blondie that I was, and I let her play the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Eventually, we made our way up to a moist yet dusty attic to get to her bedroom. It had no air conditioning, and it was deep July, so the stories of the old city house grew more and more oppressively hot by the stair.

Boxes of nothing overflowed with excess nothing. Walls moved in, the air grew tight and thick, and the collective heartbeat of the attic ecosystem (now including two teenagers) seemed to speed up. Fior’s unending voice grew quieter, yet slightly higher. She was also starting to wring her hands. I am not sure if she was worrying about her evangelical mother or something bigger, but she looked anxiously at my eyes for reassurance. I guess I mustered some, perhaps because I was genuinely calm. The summer makes me less careful, I am not sure why, but I would be anything she needed to open the door to her room. I was sweating and slightly crouched from the low attic ceiling. So she opened the door, apologizing for the mess. A teenager apologizing for her messy room was another thing I brushed aside at the time. Then she shut and locked it, listening for footsteps, but otherwise casual as though this was her nightly routine.

Her bedroom was a lot like the rest of her house, except brilliantly colorful and slightly sweeter, with tubes of drugstore makeup decorating the ground by her mirror. Pinterest paintings and sweet cards from bad friends lay sideways in plastic organizational structures that reminded me of umbrellas in a hurricane. But none of this compared to the rush of cold air that washed my face and chest when I stepped in. Like a new age Eden, an oasis of young sapphic disarray and cold bed sheets and folded playbills. I exclaimed over the refreshing air and watched her smile. I am not sure why I accepted that the middle child daughter was the only one in the house with air-conditioning, and it was the last thing on my mind. Later I learned that she had saved up money from her awful paper route job that summer and found a broken air-conditioning unit in the Salvation Army two blocks down. She fixed it and put it in herself, and paid her mother for the electricity it used. All I knew was that it felt good, I didn’t know it cost something. Maybe if I had, I’d have found some guilt for my opportunism, or I would have at least gotten her some sweet black cold coffee from the gentrifying shop a block over. I kind of wish I had gotten her more things when it counted, but I guess that wouldn’t have fixed anything in my life, or hers.

I allowed Fior to apply a strange mix or dark and sparkly makeup to my face on the carpet by her mirror as we bragged and laughed about the creepy guys and dramatic girls we knew. I thanked her, wiping lipstick off with the back of my hand as though scratching my face. She gazed at me like I was a planet, and her eye shadow was a flag.

As we held each other lazily in her refreshingly cool bed, we began to talk slower as minutes passed. After the speech became less dramatic monologue and more of a means to an end, I grabbed her hips to kiss her steadily. She quickly rolled on top to press my mouth harder into my teeth, folding her legs into acute angles under her shorts. She then sat up, resting on my hips for a (as a friend of mine likes to say) "beautiful moment in time”. She lifted off, checking again that the door was locked, listening for movement at the door, and then turning on a movie for the sound cover. I believe it was the new cartoon Lorax. The original is one of my favorite movies, but this one has a good soundtrack and Taylor Swift as the female lead voice actress. So that was kind of fun.

I pulled her back on the bed, silently lifting her shirt to kiss her collarbones. I remember the way she let her neck relax and her head fell back on the pillow, staring back at the window behind her. Her freckles continued to sparkle in progressive scarcity down her chest plate, sprinkling onto her breasts. Fi had gorgeous and hellenistic breasts, not something I was expecting for such a thin person. They were still sticky and tasted slightly salty from the heat of her house and the warm world outside, a distant land that meant nothing to me at that moment. But it broke the spell of musk and warm bodies for an instant. I was genuinely alarmed at how nice her chest was. I discreetly felt mine with one hand to make sure they were bigger, because that had always been my contribution to situations like these. It was my upper hand. But I was pulled out of my sociopathic self consciousness when she grabbed the hand I was using and directed it between her thighs. I felt warm, damp denim.

This is where that story ends. If you want a sex scene or further self indulgence, open the incognito tab on your Kindle or watch a Tarentino movie. This story is about air conditioning.

Make no mistake, I was known to kiss and tell as much as the next cognitive transient. Buy me a coffee sometime, and you probably will learn what I did with Fior Campbell in an attic on Hutchins street when I was sixteen, in the same way that kelp can get caught on an Alaskan fishing line. It wouldn't be deliberate, nor would it hold a lot of significance in the broader context.

Anyway, it's been a few years, and Fior finally went to community college as she follows her dream of Broadway theater. I apply to law school, as I took a break from singing professionally when our voice teacher died. At any rate, we are quite far from one another, beckoning attention where we can and forced to attach meaning to what used to bore us. I see her in summer evenings and brown city trees and tiny theaters. I look for her in the eyes of academics. I can't find her. I look for her influence in the mirror. I don’t see it.

Eight months after we started dating, I had called Fior to tell her it was time to just be friends. I didn’t break up with Fior because she cheated on me, I broke up with her because it didn’t bother me. I had been growing emotionally numb from some dark nights with adult men from a year prior, and Fior began to give her kisses away for free again. I had no effort to give, and wanted none in return. One of my crueler moments, I suppose.

Now, my 2023 summer sublet has a linty carpet, and two college boys that I don’t know. The kitchen is not exceptionally functional and the fridge is bare. The architecture is old and lets light in, only to be caught by moving boxes. I move swiftly past mirrors so that I can sleep at night, after what is becoming a perpetual trip to the roof to drink and think about being sixteen. Books are piled in a corner of my bedroom, but the words move too slowly to quell the anxiety of my independence. I live on the top floor, and the heat gets unbearable in Rochester summers. But the landlord said that there is an old AC unit in the cellar, so one of these nights I should probably turn on some shitty 2000s rock and set it up. I won’t know how to fix it. It will drive up my utility bill. It will take time. It will cost something to feel good.