Boys by Carly Alaimo

Here in this pine-addled expanse where everything is a tree until it’s a farm until it’s a subdivision until it’s sprawling strip mall with a Kohl’s, a Target, a Smoothie King and a Honeybaked Ham, there are boys with four-wheelers and helmet hair who live in mansions, who receive white Ford Broncos with rebel flag bumper stickers when they turn sixteen. These are the boys who beat us for class president because they joke about John Kerry in their speeches.

There are boys who draw on each other’s legs with Sharpies and have matching cystic acne and join ROTC. When they walk the halls they laugh too loud, snorting for attention. They skip pep rallies to smoke cigarettes by the trailers at the back of the school. In Ceramics 101, we sit next to them, note how sensitive they sometimes can be, how gentle and quiet while they knead coffee mugs for their grandmas. We tell them we liked the colors they chose, the way they shape their handle, how to cover a bleb. They act offended at first then thank us later with origami roses or paper fortunes with black lotuses and pentagrams scrawled inside the flaps. Eventually, they join the army. Marry girls from our town who wear too much eyeliner, then cheat on them. Have multiple families scattered throughout this dumb city. Home from college, we see them on playgrounds swinging their toddlers while we walk our adopted dogs over Christmas break. We wave at them from across the park and they rush over, asking, what’s it like in the city?

There are football boys who yell about our big asses before first period. We act offended, throw them the bird, but never change the route in which we walk.

There are guitar boys and the boys who want nothing to do with us because they are studying for the SATs.

There are boys who are always suspended.

There are tattooed boys and the boys with eyelashes longer than ours, those dicks.

There are boys who keep repeating senior year.

Boys that look like our dads.

And then there are our dads, who we beg to stop chaperoning prom.

There are boys with glasses who listen to Sufjan Stevens and read beat poetry before they can understand it. They tell us we are beautiful. We fall in love with them.

Boys with glasses.

They come to see us in the high school spring musical where we have small singing parts . They sit in the orchestra, arms shoved in the pocket of their sweatshirts, a hood swallowing their heads, stage lights in their lenses. We sing our solos about ephemeral and fleeting rivers to their shoes. And when the show is over, after the sound of applause scuttles under the seats and up the curtains, after we skip the cast party and drive with these boys to their father’s lake house, their stepdad’s Holiday Rambler parked near a creek, their brother’s dorm room—they slip off our costumes and we ask about the song. It was a little shaky, they tell us, then shove their tongues down our throats.  

There are boys who sleep with the new ceramics teacher and get expelled.

There are boys who are accused of sexually assaulting girls who wear too much eye liner, get kicked off the soccer team, go to prison.

There are boys who start bands and boys in bands that break up.

There are boys with real musical talent who go to college then drop out after a year and are never heard from again.

There are rich boys who stay rich and poor boys who stay poor.

There are boys who move away from our shit town and boys who don’t.

These boys do their grocery shopping at our hometown Kroger. We run into them while  weighing our mothers’ Thanksgiving turkey; smelling two for one cinnamon apple candles. They ask us how we’re doing, where we’ve been, tell us we look the same. We thank them, say we have to go, you know, the holidays, and ring up the meat, jangle our keys and climb into our father’s borrowed sedans, onto our boyfriends’ motorcycles, our mother-in-law’s SUV, cars we bought ourselves with our big city job, and drive away down that one road that connects everything—the strip malls, the subdivisions, the farms—and disappear into the pines.

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CARLY ALAIMO — Carly is a writer from Augusta, GA. She received her MFA in Fiction from Georgia State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, Phoebe Journal, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Fractured Literary, Maudlin House, Hobart, and Barely South Review. She was a finalist in Peatsmoke Journal’s Summer 2023 Fiction Contest and in Fractured Literary’s OPEN Flash Fiction Contest. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children, and reads for Split Lip Magazine. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @carlyalaimo.

Art by LINDSEY MORRISON GRANT — Self-identifying as a neurodivergent, two-spirit, elder storyteller and contrarian deeply rooted in the roar and lore that’s become Portlandia of the Left Coast, The Artist attributes success and survival to superlative supports, mindfulness practice, and daily creative expression in words, sounds, and images. Currently, their visual work is represented by The Siy Gallery of San Francisco.