The abandoned Summer Fridays outside the 7-Eleven resembled a squashed roach. A pedestrian sandal must have come down, crushed the tube, and spurted out the butter balm, which had since aged into a poppy smear across the concrete. Antonia stood stock-still at the scene of the crime.
Oscar came up for a breath after guzzling his Coca-Cola Slurpee. A droplet clung to his cleft chin and threatened to stain his fading Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt. “In my whole life, I’ve never lost anything. Not even a pencil.”
Antonia leered at his thin, unattractive lips from which he uttered the most inconsiderate commentary. He trivialized her sensitivity for life: sunshowers, ladybugs, four-leaf clovers, synchronous numerology, lucky pennies, wishbones. Oscar was a sloppy blonde native to Laguna Beach, freckle-faced and a self-proclaimed realist. Antonia lived less lavishly near Interstate 5. They first met when he was a scrawny tween juggling a soccer ball on his grandparents’ mowed front lawn, cast under the shade of a sycamore. The sprinklers were jetting cool water onto the grass and making the ball slip from his bare feet. Antonia stood in the driveway of the cedar-shingled house, waiting for her mother’s housekeeper interview to end. This was the innocent age before she began cutting the label tags off her clothes.
“Why aren’t your feet muddy?” she had asked, squinting at Oscar against the blistering sun.
“The grass is fake.”
“Then why are the sprinkles on?”
“Sprinklers.”
“That’s what I said.”
Oscar was engrossed in his sport. “No, you said sprinkles. Like confetti cake.”
He lost control of the ball and it bounced onto the street. Only then did Oscar acknowledge Antonia with his eyes. “Can you get it for me?”
“Do it yourself.”
“I’ll burn my feet!”
“Then put on some shoes.”
Antonia assumed Oscar was an only child from his daze at being denied. That signature facial expression befitted him all throughout his life, like a mole above the upper lip, a cowlick, or gapped front teeth. As is inevitable with boys, Oscar’s Adam’s apple protruded from his throat, he broadened in the shoulders, and he quit playing alone in his grandparents’ yard, but his daze never matured, not even now outside the 7-Eleven.
“Don’t you feel bad?” Antonia’s voice was thickly overcome with emotion. “For the girl who dropped this?”
Oscar glanced around the vacant gas station straight off Coast Highway, as though searching for a stranger to bear witness to her ridiculousness. “Why on earth would I feel bad for a girl who littered?”
“You’re a man, you don’t understand—”
“I don’t understand what it feels like to lose a lipstick!” Oscar mimicked Antonia with a girlish voice, flailing gesticulations, and excessive batting of the eyelashes before abandoning all melodrama and settling into seriousness. “When you lose something, you can buy it again.”
“But it won’t be the same.” Against the strobing ATM sign hanging in the 7-Eleven window, Antonia became philosophical. Did Oscar think she was unbearably petulant when she couldn’t articulate the empathy that overwhelmed her? “You can’t see the nuance.”
“What nuance? It’s simply a flattened plastic tube.”
When Antonia spotted the Summer Fridays on the ground, she recalled the Laguna Woods Dollar Tree where her mother once taught her a financial lesson in the beauty aisle. A $24 Summer Fridays, tax not included, could get you twenty-four moisturizing sticks of Vaseline or Carmex, but Antonia needed to overspend as a matter of principle.
In her vandalized high school bathroom plastered with pink outdated tiles, the girls traded Summer Fridays flavors and crowded around the wide rectangular mirror to reapply hot cocoa and sweet mint. You could only infiltrate the pit if you contributed a flavor or needed to wash your hands, so every afternoon after fourth period, Antonia would squeeze between those pouting girls and turn on the faucet while her Dollar Tree lip balm bulged from her jeans back pocket. She longed to belong to the bathroom girl cult; she wanted to brand her lips with brown sugar one day and vanilla the next. She wanted to be reborn as a sleek Californian despite sharing a bunk bed with her little brother in a rental her mother afforded as a housemaid for Oscar’s grandparents. Without telling her mother, Antonia bought her first Summer Fridays after a tanless summer spent marinating in a boardwalk Pizza shop with dough-crusted fingernails and a horrendous lime green apron, getting tipped in pennies and the occasional seashell. She snagged the last box in stock at a cosmetic boutique with a rubber-banded wad of cash.
Antonia sauntered in on the first day of junior year with her cherry lips pursed and tasting of medicinal cough syrup. She wanted to kiss someone on the neck just to leave a cerise blotch. She felt gawked at and included. In the vandalized bathroom, Antonia presented her tubed ticket, but the girls at the mirror met her with glassy-eyes, as though she were out of season. They had all moved on to E.L.F Glow Reviver—they drawled, smacking their vanilla-toffee-candied-cranberry-blackberry-sorbet knockoff lips.
“I know it’s trash, and it’ll get even filthier. It’ll be run over by tires, rained on, swept by the wind, and someday fall through a sewer grate. But in spite of all those likelihoods…” If only Oscar could invade Antonia, parse her from within. She desperately wanted him to understand the sensitivity of her soul, but her head felt stuffed with cotton. She would always be stuck at the precipice of a revelation, unable to utter a coherent sentence. Antonia supposed her lack of lucidity befit her.
Oscar’s daze took on a new appearance, more troubled than it ever used to be. His gaze fell upon the aged poppy substance ornamenting the concrete, which his sandal was precariously close to touching. Antonia expected Oscar to thrust another verbal joust in his cheeky fashion, but he committed something far worse: silence. Antonia didn’t think Oscar was capable of contemplation. Then, to her astonishment, he picked the squashed Summer Fridays straight off the ground, waltzed back into the 7-Eleven, chatted with the cashier, and handed over the butter balm.
He returned. “In case some girl comes looking for it.”
Lola Horowitz has great lips and great empathy.