Literary Orphans

TEEN SPIRIT: Gasoline by Lara Navarro

It was June when the Mississippi flooded again. My mother talking about the leak in the roof, hottest summer in our county’s recorded history. Half the state was underwater but all I could see was sweat and salt and houses on fire, Greta and Robbie and Jackson and Flip, eighty thousand feet. I was sixteen, chopping tangerines with steak knives, talking to the paperboy about the girl on the front page who drowned in her own kitchen four towns over. We talked about how sad it was but he knows as well as I do how well acquainted our town is with death: there was a boy who used to go to my high school who got himself drunk off of gasoline and Greta said that if you swung by the old gas station you’d see him lying in the dust all doused in oil and begging God why we were all born burning.

The five of us spent a whole day looking for his ghost in broad daylight. We were friends, that summer, each of us our own concoction of carbon and blisters, peeling skins and bad decisions, like how Jackson was a compulsive liar and how Greta was our resident bible-thumper who took eighty-six Tylenols when we were fourteen and how Robbie was the funny guy always with marked with black and blue and Flip, whose real name was Beau, who ate too little and threw up too much and rode his bike everywhere in town.  I was the youngest, their innocent tag-along, but Greta liked my campfire ghost-stories and Flip said they needed another girl in the group and it was June and the Mississippi had flooded just that morning and I remember Robbie looking at me afterwards and asking me if that was my first time and I nodded slowly and he drove me home without a word and I woke up the next day with mosquito bites all over my body and I still felt like a child. And I remember going back to the gas station with Flip and smoking the joints Greta rolled for his birthday and trying to find the dead boy’s ashes and I told him about the leak in our roof and neither of us could stop laughing and then he said, I’m so high, I think I love you and I said Flip, I slept with Robbie and he said that he could smell something burning. I never noticed he had one blue eye and one brown eye and I didn’t know his mother had miscarried before he was born and his older brother was supposed to be called Beau and he didn’t want to be named after a ghost and so Robbie rechristened him Flip because Robbie was his best friend and Robbie knew what it meant to come from a broken family and Robbie was all jokes and charm in the back of his truck but I’d seen the marks across his back but that was another thing we weren’t allowed to talk about. Flip broke his wrist on Robbie’s jaw a few hours later and Robbie drove them both down to the hospital laughing and bleeding and I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. That was the last time we saw Flip because the doctors saw his bony elbows, protruding spine, a skeleton with eyes and a great big heart and they took him away before I could tell him I’m sorry too, not because I slept with Robbie and not because he wasn’t the Beau his Mama wanted and not because I didn’t know he loved me with all the force of the flooding Mississippi but because the boy who died in the gas station was right when he said we were all born burning.

The Mississippi would flood for two hundred days but I didn’t know that yet. I was still with the paperboy and cutting up tangerines, salt and sweat and gasoline. Greta. Robbie. Jackson. Flip. Flip. Flip. Houses on fire. Houses underwater. Drowning from the leak in the roof.

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Lara Navarro is a California Arts Scholar and native New Yorker, hoping to one day return so she may become a stereotypical writer, living in Brooklyn, drinking black coffee at 2AM, writing angsty poetry on a typewriter and growing a beard.

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Art by So-Ghislaine

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