I was almost twelve years old when we first visited Jimmy in the country. My mom and Jimmy's mom were sisters. Mine was older. She drove us out to the farm. It was five hours away, on the plains, but it felt like more when I was actually in the car. It was a real hot summer, a no-cloud-in-the-sky kind of summer, and, of course, the air-conditioning broke halfway there so we had to roll down the windows. The back ones only rolled down partway and the re-echoed air that bounced around the car and off my ears was just about deafening at eighty miles an hour. So even with no way to listen to her audio book about two lawyers falling in love, Mom kept going. She was the type not to stop once she had her mind set on something. Cue always accused me of being the same way.
I guess I was just a normal suburban kid back then. This was years before Mom died and we had to move to a smaller place closer to the "heart of the city." That's what Dad called it, but then he had his accident and ever since he's just called it a shit-hole. Both were probably right in retrospect. Either way, I had no interest in leaving the house for a trip to some farm in the middle of nowhere during my summer vacation.
Of course, I had no choice. Dad was working and Cue was old enough to decide for himself all of a sudden, "and really, Jen," he said it stern, "Mom needs someone to go with her." It was bullying and it wasn't fair, no matter how hard Mom tried to convince me that the trip would be a great chance for a girls' vacation, you know, a bonding experience, I still wasn't happy about it. She was always positive. Wish she gave that to me too, but she didn't.
So after driving a few hundred miles of yellowed, dried-up-crop flatness, we left the highway, drove through the crappy-looking town of Barguss and its silly-looking blimp floating in the air and made our way to back road X and then back road Y, smelling manure the whole way because the fields had been fertilized. When Mom pulled up in front of the Chang Family Farm, she nearly knocked over the mailbox, with its smaller accompanying blue sidecar of a box for the newspaper. Of course, they all came out from behind their quaint screen door and hugged us welcome, Aunt Marin, Uncle Chun Mao, and Cousin Jimmy. Too picture perfect.
You could tell from the start that Jimmy didn't really get any visitors because he was real excited to show me all around. He was an only child anyway so he didn't know what it was like to fight for the last spoonful of food or be pushed into the community swimming pool and look like an idiot during adult swim. I saw all there was to see on the farm in the space of five minutes: the chicken coops, the empty cornfields that had already been harvested and reseeded, the corn left to die in other fields because of government grants, his favorite tree, and the main house. If they hadn't had satellite TV I would've made my mom drive us back right then, with or without air-conditioning.
Ultimately, it was fine. I can't even remember everything we did that week, apart from Jimmy teaching me some moves. See, he'd been training for years by that point and already had some national championships under his belt. That was a cool moment though, seeing the living room and all the trophies that were taller than me. They were so huge and fake golden, the biggest ones had several levels that were held up by carved wooden pillars. He showed me all of them and then he just showed me pictures and pictures of him shaking hands with people with medals around his neck. And you know, he never really looked like anything scary or special. Only about five foot four and not stocky in the least, he looked like a regular kid who played sports, not the world champion he was to become.
Jimmy's dad had converted the hayloft of the barn to a training gym. There were bars he did pull-ups on, various tilted benches for sit-ups and push-ups, and there was this mannequin-looking thing that Jimmy did pressure-point strikes on. Each one was marked with a red dot in his mom's red lipstick. His dad had rigged it up to a pulley system that could shift it any direction in a seven-foot radius and even make it jump. Jimmy's dad was a genius. Well, there was also one of those kung fu block/ strike training tools that looked like a big coatrack that had sawed-off coffee-table legs sticking out of it. Even at thirteen, Jimmy could play that thing like a drum set with his block-and-strike combinations.
I watched him a lot. That was basically what I did for a week, just climbed up the ladder and sat watching while he did morning, afternoon, and night training. We talked a lot too. He wanted to know everything about the city. What it looked like where we lived, what it smelled like. Stuff I'd never even thought about before until he asked me really. I think that was the first thing that got me liking Jimmy as more than a cousin. He made me feel important with all those questions. Out of nowhere, I was an authority on something.
Back home I was nothing. I was Cue's punching bag. I was always supposed to shut my mouth because I didn't know anything, that's what my big brother told me. The summer before, Cue accidentally broke my leg by jumping off the bed and trying to scare me but he slipped as he was jumping and fell on me funny, on my left tibia bone. It broke through the skin and bled a lot. Mom freaked out and screamed at Cue that he was trying to kill me.
"Girls are gentle! Girls are different from brute boys!" She screamed those a couple times each. Women were soft and kind and worthy of respect. She screamed that too. Something like it anyway. Cue was a perfect gentleman until it fully healed.
Well, my mom and Jimmy's parents thought it was great that we had become such close friends. They actually encouraged us to spend all of our time together. So it was okay for me to watch him train as long as I didn't disturb him, Mom said. That was where it happened, in the hayloft.
It was a typical late summer afternoon on the plains, hot and dry. Jimmy confirmed it. Felt like the hay up in the loft was going to spark up around me it was so warm with the heat rising up from the ground and getting trapped in the upside-down "V" angle of the wooden ceiling so close above us. Jimmy was working out as usual. A few solid forms and he was sweating, bare-chested, having discarded his shirt. He'd put his towel next to me so really he was leaning over for it and I thought I'd be helpful by picking it up and handing it to him but he wasn't looking at me. He was just leaning over, setting his water bottle down, leaning toward me, and no, it wasn't one of those things where we didn't mean it to happen, nothing that lame. I knew exactly what I was doing when I grabbed him and kissed him. Right like Melinda showed me. I pulled the back of his head hard toward me and I sucked on his lower lip before putting my whole mouth over his, but never with tongue.
Coming in to tell us about lunch, my mom stopped dead just inside the entrance. I'll never forget the look on her face when she saw us from down below. I saw her. Jimmy didn't, he was facing away, toward the barn wall. But he noticed when I stopped kissing him, kept my lips on his, just stopped completely. It was like she pitied me, like there was something wrong with me and I just couldn't help myself from ruining the golden boy. Obviously, it was all my fault. It was my compulsive nature, my lust, and my internal corruption. It was the same look she gave mice that were foolish enough to get stuck in one of the traps Dad would lay in the old garage.
We left the next day. That was the last time I saw Jimmy before he just waltzed into the house that night. It'd been almost four years since we kissed that I saw him and I could still feel my mother's look in the lining of my stomach like an animated wrestling ring that collapsed inward to take revenge on the bad, bad wrestlers trying to pin each other.
Mom died two months after that. I used to wonder if I killed her by doing that, made her unstable somehow, made her head break. I used to think about it a lot. I used to feel guilty.