Hammer Time

by Betsy Boyd

(TW: Some mentions of SA)

I hadn’t thought of Kevin in a long while when I got his friend request out of the blue. As soon as I saw his name on my screen, I got this annoying feeling of euphoria, which distracted me from the dog and cat catheters, enemas, and nail trims I’d been focused on at work.  

“Long time no see, Lila,” Kevin messaged after I accepted the request later that evening, after I’d toured his Facebook page and confirmed that he appeared to be single, and that he was now an assistant professor of history at Furman, “rewriting history as it actually happened.” He looked even better than he had in eighth grade. His black hair, formerly spiky, now hung to his shoulders, and his brown eyes shone with the furtive intelligence of a man who cares about more than himself or the car he drives.

“I’m wondering if you’d like to help me take down a Confederate statue this weekend,” he messaged, adding, “LOL.”

“Remember the time we made out for about ten minutes?” I typed, but deleted it.  

“Seriously? Where’s this statue?” I asked.

“Greenville, SC. General George Hammer, remember him?”

Honors history, a class I’d shared with Kevin, had been my favorite subject—but I didn’t remember Hammer, not that I admitted it.

 “Aren’t you afraid of getting arrested?” I typed.

“It would shorten my tenure clock to get arrested for something like this.”

“LOL,” I typed, wincing. Social media wasn’t my thing; I hated catchphrases. They reduced people to bumper stickers or ads lacking all nuance. I’d joined Facebook only in order to post pleas for dog and cat fosters, but recently I found myself checking my phone more regularly than I meant to. In hindsight, the fact that I’d just dumped my moody astrologer boyfriend—who’d been equally anti-social media, and with whom I’d corresponded by handwritten love letter even after we moved in together—might have had something to do with my curiosity about the network (of lies, as the astrologer called it).  

“So, will you help me, Lila?” Kevin typed. “You always were a rebel.”

“Me?” I typed, the joy rising.

“I could see your inner rebel.”  

“Well, I live in Baltimore now,” I typed, blushing from his compliment.

I thought I understood why he was asking me to join forces. Kevin and I had both experienced our share of bullying in middle school, and become close friends because of it. In sixth grade, the port wine stain on my neck brought daily misery, and because Kevin was slight and feminine looking, boys wanted nothing to do with him. He never got picked for sports teams, and all of the overgrown, domineering guys referred to him Assholioli, not a far cry from his surname of Asioli.  Kevin and I ate lunch together every day, along with a beautiful girl named Patsy, who’d been born with one hand.  

During seventh grade, I started getting more into art and began to draw detailed portraits of my two friends, which I included if I passed them a note in class, a small offering. I drew Kevin more often, practicing his face the way some girls write their crush’s name again and again. I could capture Kevin’s likeness pretty well as months passed. He complimented me: “Not bad.” When I confessed to Patsy how much I loved him, she told me she already knew.

9/11 happened at the beginning of eighth grade, and school was closed for several strange days.  When we came back, our beloved honors history teacher, Mr. Barrentine, tried to frame what had happened in New York City in humanitarian terms, which surprised a lot of kids whose fathers were ready to enlist and attack anyone and anything Middle Eastern.  

Mr. Barrentine said, “The situation is not so black and white: Imagine how Iranian students are feeling right now.”

But everything else in eighth grade, outside of Mr. Barrentine’s classroom, was black and white.  Other kids talked about their Euro origins like they were describing winning teams. In the lunchroom, a beefy boy with strawberry blond hair wanted to know what kind of a name Assholioli was.

“Asioli,” Kevin said firmly.

“Where’s it come from?” the boy spat.

“It’s Iranian,” Kevin said, making a point of making eye contact with the boy. 

Patsy and I stared at each other, eyes bulging—we knew Kevin was lying; his Italian mother was Patsy’s mother’s Mary Kay consultant; but we admired his daring.    

Shortly after 9/11, Kevin got knocked on his butt in the boys’ room and his stud earring torn through his earlobe by some kids who took his representing himself as Iranian at face value.  Throughout eighth grade, Kevin chose to continue to call himself Iranian. At the time, this seemed brave, empathetic even. But I must say, even then, the swagger with which he talked about his fictional Persian roots was somewhat mystifying.

During Ramadan, Kevin fasted. I remember Patsy offering him a Nutty Bar at lunch, and Kevin going, “That’s offensive, Pats,” at which point she and I locked eyes. “I can’t eat till sunset,” he added.

“It’s not smart to eat after, like, seven p.m.,” I told him teasingly, “especially when you’re not Iranian.”

He stormed off to talk to beloved Mr. Barrentine about our insensitivity—we felt terrible and begged his forgiveness by email.

“I’d like to help with the statue, but I’m supposed to work this weekend,” I began to message Kevin before it occurred to me how my brother-in-law, Roger, was having the ribbon cutting for his new malpractice law office branch on Saturday in Greenville, and that my sister, Cam, would be happy to fly me in.  

I guess it also occurred to me that I’d like to pick up with Kevin where we left off, with our tongues in each other’s mouths.

“I see you’re a veterinarian?” Kevin wrote. “That’s fantastic.”

I didn’t correct him that I’m a vet tech.

“Hot tattoos,” he messaged next, referencing the cat, dog, and cloud tattoos I designed myself. They cover my long neck, the widespread port wine creating a splotchy abstract-paint background. Once he paid me the tattoo compliment, I knew that I’d fly home to help him.  

My co-tech, Becky, took my Saturday double, and soon enough I was on an early flight from Baltimore-Washington International to the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. During the flight, I read a Wikipedia entry on General Hammer penned by Mr. Barrentine himself, which honestly felt like a sign I was supposed to kick Hammer’s ass to the ground.

I had followed newspaper coverage about Civil War monument removals in Baltimore with interest—Baltimore is, after all, situated below the Mason-Dixon line, as Roger likes to remind me. But it isn’t really below the line—not politically. Soon after an unarmed black teen was murdered by police, soon after widespread protest, the Baltimore mayor’s office took it upon itself to remove the most controversial statues in the middle of the night. But in South Carolina—which was the first state to secede from the Union in the winter of 1860—neither government nor law enforcement would enact such removal nor turn a blind eye toward any outright anti-Confederate gesture. I had to admit that this potential project frightened the introvert in me. I also had to admit I wasn’t sure if extracting a statue would make much difference to the world at large. Not that I wanted Hammer to stand tall—or short. As I read on, I vaguely remembered that he had been nicknamed the Napoleon of the South, as he stood barely five-feet tall, and that he’d shot his own baby brother in the kneecap for deserting his army. He’d been rumored to have burned down his own rather lavish slave quarters after two had escaped via the Underground Railroad.  

Finally, I re-learned the fact that Hammer stood in Palmetto Park, not far from my own middle school, and the same scenic spot where Kevin Asioli had given me my first kiss. Sign number two?       

My sister scooped me up in her Land Rover, and my crumpled little mama, buckled in the back, whom I hadn’t seen since Christmas, started telling me how the Civil War was “on again.”

“I heard that on Fox News,” I teased her.

“People want the South gone.”

The car smelled of fresh Krispy Kremes they’d picked up on the way. 

“I knew she’d want to see you,” Cam whispered, “so I sprung her from Memory Care for the morning—can’t believe you’re leaving tomorrow already.”

“I’ve got to work.”

“All you do is work, sweetheart.”

That was inaccurate. I had dated the unemployed astrologer for almost a year, making time for him even between double shifts at the vet office. What I hadn’t made time for in ages, not since I planned my last tattoo on a paper napkin at Starbucks, was art.

“I love my sick animals.”

“What brings you to Greenville?” Mama asked me. “And do you like doughnuts?”  

“Mama, I’m here for Roger’s ribbon-cutting party.”

She handed me a ring of hot dough.

“He’s having a party to cut ribbons?”

Cam gave me the side eye: “Why are you really here, Half-Pint?”

She’d called me that annoying Little-House-on-the-Prairie nickname since I could remember, because I’m skinny while she’s curvy as a plus-size porn star.

We were passing lush green kudzu by the side of the highway, the vines curling like control-freak snakes covering everything in sight, including a shed somebody’d left for dead, when the sky began to turn this gorgeous lavender like it will before a hard rain. I like to think this is about the same color my birthmark has faded to in adulthood.

“I might hook up with an old friend—later tonight,” I told Cam, “but I also missed y’all.”

“Seriously? What friend?”

When I came home to South Carolina, I didn’t see friends—not once since I’d moved to Baltimore for art school. Whenever I came back, I hung out at the house twenty-four/seven to avoid being recognized as Bloody Mary, the girl taken to the cornfield, the girl described, in one poorly written front-page article, as “a monument to victimhood.”

“Just a friend.” I stuffed half a doughnut inside my mouth.

“Good for you,” Cam said, squeezing my arm and leaving track marks from her capped nails. “I’m just over the moon you’re home.”

“Who are you, dear?” my mother asked me with her mouth full.

After the twelfth time or so, this question didn’t hurt much anymore.

“Your own girl,” I said, turning around. “Your blood kin.”

“Of course, I knew that!” she corrected herself. “You’re the one with the stain.”

“That’s right,” I said, gritting my teeth.  

“What friend?” Cam repeated.

“Kevin Asioli,” I mumbled.

“Oh, that nice Muslim boy,” Mama said. “He won a diversity scholarship to a high school on the East Coast, it was just in the newspaper.”

Cam looked over at me. Mom was remembering a factoid from years before. Jesus, poor, innocent Mr. Barrentine probably fought for him to win that award way back when. But I’d never told my family Kevin’s true story. I certainly didn’t want to get into it now.    

Cam drove eighty down the endless interstate.  

“Mama, you happen to remember General George Hammer?” I asked.  

Now we were passing farmland, fields of tobacco that were once plantation grounds.

“He burned down his own slave quarters,” she said.

“Oh my God, is that really definitely true?”

“Child, yes. He was the meanest man in Christendom,” she continued.  “A good military thinker, though. A real hero for the South.”

My stomach turned as it always did when Mama, in her right mind or not, talked about the South like it was “God’s country,” like the sins of its past were water under the scenic bridge, as if our region ought to exist as its own sacred space forever and ever amen just because of perks like kudzu and grits.  

Cam winked at me to soften the strain.

“You’ve got a good memory,” I told my mother.

Cam fiddled with the radio and we all sang along with Janis Joplin’s heartbreak.  

“I’m here,” I messaged Kevin, once I realized it was almost noon—I’d told him I’d let him know when I landed.  “Are we still meeting at six o’clock?”

Fifteen minutes passed. He didn’t write back, and I feared he’d disappeared all over again, like he had when he went off to boarding school.  

Then again, his silence would mean I was off the hook. I wasn’t really prepared to help remove a monument and possibly get myself arrested. Wouldn’t I be better off getting smashed on gimlets at the ribbon-cutting and staying up all hours playing Scrabble with my niece, Hadley? Really, what the fuck was I thinking making this misguided trip?  

A text vibrated just then and I burned with joy, with this excruciating hope that lifted my spine. It was only Becky letting me know that our nineteen-year-old oncology patient had died.

“R.I.P. Smurfette,” I typed back.  

I couldn’t deny how much I wanted to hear from Kevin, nor how much one part of me felt intrigued to go through with the whole Hammer thing and see how that felt.  

“God, if you’re not a Republican, give me a sign,” I thought to myself involuntarily—irreverently.

A monster truck galloping alongside us at least ninety, doors spray-painted with a sloppy Confederate flag, wasn’t the sign I was hoping for. When it cut Cam off, she honked her horn and swerved so hard that my mother tossed her doughnuts. “Ass hat,” Mama shouted. We stopped at a Waffle House to get her cleaned up and order some sweet teas to go. 

“What were those old boys thinking?” my sister asked me as she reapplied her lipstick.

“Old boys, that makes them sound cute or innocent,” I said. “They aren’t.”

“They were probably Confederate soldiers,” Mama said, slurping her tea, “but that doesn’t give them the right to speed.” 

Hop on the highway in South Carolina and you’ll see those cross-bone flag stickers on trucks every ten to twelve minutes—I’d performed this experiment on the way to the mall more than once. In ninth grade, not long after Kevin moved away, I was walking home alone from the grocery. About half a mile from my house, two well-muscled white boys, who looked too young to drive, slammed on their brakes and tossed me into the cab of their truck. I’d seen that X on their back window, and almost sensed what they were going to do before they did it.

I’d gotten an animal tattoo on my neck every single year since the incident, starting with a subtle Carolina wren that rests on the side of my neck like an elegant hickey.  

The boys in the truck had made me remove my shirt and bra at rifle point. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry. They wanted to know if my “tits got colored red too” like my neck, as they told me while I undressed—with that, I decided they were so stupid they didn’t deserve my tears. Once I’d taken off my top and showed them how pale I was below the neck, they started laughing nervously—they agreed they didn’t know what in hell they wanted to do next.  

“Let’s at least make her cry,” said one of them.

“How?” 

It had been about to storm all that afternoon. I closed my eyes. For the first and last time in my life, I prayed.

It started to rain hard, so they opted just to leave me out there, poker-faced, my hands over my small breasts, my t-shirt and bra clenched in the fists of the boy who rode on the passenger side.  Lightning scribbled the nighttime sky, and they were gone. I had to walk five miles wearing a makeshift bandage made of cornstalks before a woman in a Buick had the nerve to offer me a ride.  She insisted on dropping me at the police station to report the crime, though I asked her not to. At the station, I cried plenty.

“Were you sexually assaulted?” asked the female reporter who came to my front door.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told her, but then it occurred to me that if I did an interview, I might reach Kevin, in his fancy dorm room, in his cold new town.

“Do you attribute this attack to the port wine stain on your neck?”

I cocked my head.

“Do you consider yourself a victim?” she asked.

“Yes. No. No comment.”

All I wanted at the time was to hear from Kevin, to know that he missed me, to know that we were still friends. I wanted to tell him I hoped he was better received up North. Somehow, the cornfield incident, even as it was happening, gave me this teenage hope he might hear about it, reach out, and tell me he was on my side. Tell me we were fighters, not victims. Tell me I didn’t have to pretend everything was okay all the time, which is what he’d said before he kissed me. He never did reach out.

The ribbon-cutting would begin at six. Come five o’clock, while Cam zipped me into her flower-patterned Lily Pulitzer dress with the peplum waist three sizes too big, Kevin still hadn’t called or texted. The rain had come and gone, and now the sun blazed against Cam’s bedroom curtains creating this beautiful soft light that made us look rather lovely in her gilded mirror.

“Sorry, I didn’t bring a dress—I guess I thought it was more casual.”  

“I like your tattoos,” Cam told me. “It took me a long while, but now I think they’re sexy. Is that sheepdog new?”

“Yeah, I got it last month.  On my anniversary from, you know—”

“That looks like Creampuff.”

“It is Creampuff.”

“You’re such a good artist, Half-Pint. Aw, Creampuff—we had him forever.”

Cam slathered her face with bronzer and put on some false eyelashes that made her look like a much prettier, more voluminous Tammy Faye Bakker. She spread blusher on my cheeks and gloss on my lips. Then she cinched a rhinestone-studded belt around my waist to keep the dress from billowing like a sail when I walked. I felt pretty, styled by my glam sister, if a bit over-the-top.

“Aren’t you going to meet up with what’s-his-name at some point?” Cam asked me.

Hadley, my niece, came into the bedroom, kissed me hello, and started platting her frizzy blond hair.   

“Are you going on a date, Aunt Lila?” she asked, her braces flashing in the sunlight.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen now,” I said.

“Was it a date?” Cam asked.

I shook my head, my cheeks coloring to match my neck. My disappointment ached like a bruise in my throat.

“Well, let’s us go drink us some cocktails at Palmetto Park!” Cam cheered, and I got chills because there was my third sign.  

Roger had rented a large office in the upscale Palmetto Commons shopping center that had once been Palmetto Park, the site of The Kevin Kiss. From the space’s immense front picture window, I gazed upon none other than General George Hammer.    

To save face, his true-to-life, five-foot-tall monument had been mounted on an equally long slab of marble. These days, Hammer looked upon, not deep green grass and swaying gray willows, but the pink plastic TCBY waffle cone that measured close enough to Hammer-size that it could have served as his dance partner. I remembered the creaky wooden bench that once stood a stone’s throw from the monument; I remembered sitting there reading a graphic novel; I remembered Kevin swooping in beside me, telling me how special I was, telling me I didn’t have to pretend everything was okay all the time, telling me he wanted to try kissing me if I didn’t mind.

“Go ahead,” I said. “you know good and well I’m completely in love with you,” my heart drowning out the sound of my own voice. He began with my neck, the purple-red marks, and moved up to my cheeks, my lips…

Kevin and I had planned to meet with his select crew to take down the statue just before six p.m., “leaving enough daylight to be seen.” He was M.I.A. But I was already coincidentally in place, according to my own schedule. Could Kevin possibly have known that would be the case? Was he coming to find me after all?  

Just before the ribbon-cutting, Roger, in his yellow seersucker suit, made a performance of hand painting one of his trademark paper banners. The DIY sign would live in the window of this, the tenth branch of his enormously successful medical malpractice firm.

Former Roger signs had said stuff like, “Victim?” “Misdiagnosed?” “Infected?” “Left for Dead?” He changed them every week. He made commercials of himself painting signs.  

“H,” he painted, and the roomful of partygoers clapped despite holding drink cups.

“U,” he continued. Applause. A bearded man with a handheld camera stepped forward to get some footage, and I recognized him as Roger’s old college friend, Stu Smithy, a news anchor on the local CBS affiliate. As if the news would air such a silly report: Doc’s Worst Nightmare attorney opens yet another office, hires food trucks. What was I thinking? Of course, the news would air such a silly report.

 “It’s going to say HURT,” Hadley whispered in my ear, and I nodded.

 “R…T,” he finished the sign. The guests clapped somewhat louder. Roger added a question mark. With the pre-rehearsed help of Cam and Hadley, he taped it inside the huge picture window.  

Later, Hadley and I walked arm in arm around the law office looking at framed newspaper photos of her dad in various states of weight gain and weight loss. She told me how much she liked this kid Thad who’d been invited to the party but failed to show. She told me she knew she was ugly, her throat catching, but that she thought Thad found her funny.

“You’re not ugly,” I said, but I couldn’t deny that puberty was taking its temporary toll. “You’re going to look like your mom someday.”

“Yuck.”

“No, that’s a good thing!”

We walked on, laughing, and next stopped at a framed photo of Roger, at his recent portliest, standing beside an extremely frail elderly man in a wheelchair.

“Dad helps a lot of people,” Hadley said, as she tried to nudge a chunk of cookie from her braces.  

I must have rolled my eyes.

“Well, he helps some—this old man who got the wrong leg amputated, he helped.”

“That man deserved every effing penny.”

“Word.”

“You’re going to have your college tuition wrapped up with a bow,” I said, “and ask for a Beemer when you’re sixteen.”

Hadley laughed.  

“Ask for an extra for me?”

We returned to the picture window, looked out on the food trucks, and chose what we wanted to sample.  

“Champagne cupcakes,” Hadley said

“Sushi!” I sang.  

Sure, I was wondering what was up with Kevin, but I also felt peeved by his rude silence. I pointed out the dinky statue of Hammer and told my niece a bit about his military rap sheet. I wondered if I’d ever in a million years have the guts to take a stand without Kevin leading me, then I walked to the open bar and ordered a vodka gimlet straight-up plus a Coke for Hadley.

“What a terrible, terrible, tiny man,” Hadley said, sipping her soda.

A spot of red paint rolled off Roger’s drippy sign and landed on her ballet flat. I noticed right then that Roger had hastily stowed the can of paint on a ledge beneath the sign, his brush resting carelessly on top.

“My shoe,” Hadley whined, just as I got an intriguing artistic idea for the first time in a long time, and just as I received an actual phone call from Kevin.

 “Hey! Where are you?” he asked. “It’s almost Hammer Time.”

“Where were you?” I said, quivering at the sound of his voice, buzzed on the gimlet.

“Phone battery’s on the blink, I’m sorry.”

Hadley’s adorable friend Thad showed up after all—wearing khakis and flip-flops and a head of bright curls—and when he saw her, he turned an overjoyed pink. I felt so glad he’d come, I somehow committed myself to my art agenda.  

“Already at the statue,” I told Kevin. “Scoping it out.”

“WTF.  That’s pretty badass.”

I finished my drink too fast.

“Why did you kiss me that day, Kevin? Was that a joke?”

“Absolutely not,” he said.    

“I had to ask.”

“Why’d you kiss me back?” he asked me.

“As I said at the time, I loved you.”

He hung up, or maybe the battery blinked—either way, my secret plan left my thoughts for the moment.

While Hadley and Thad made eyes at each other, I got drunk on a second gimlet. I sat down in an office chair, dug around on my phone and found myself reading Kevin’s professional bio on his university’s website.  

It didn’t shock me that he taught classes with these amazing names like “The F*&% of War,” “Patriotism Sucks,” and “Terrorism and Dr. Seuss.” But that he’d published a personal essay about being “The Other in the Deep South,” that caused my eyes to bug out of my face.  Kevin was still pretending to be Iranian all these years later.  He was lying to his colleagues, to his students, maybe even to himself.  

What he wasn’t hiding anymore was the news that he was gay.  

This update brought tears to my eyes. I felt stung after anticipating some sort of present-day rekindling of our minutes-long adolescent romance. Then I felt plain silly.  

Good for Kevin for owning his sexuality. Good for him.  

Toward the end of his extremely long first-person bio, he noted that he lived with his husband, Alex, and their two rescue poodles, Sid and Nancy, in the historic district of Greenville, “on a street heartbreakingly named Plantation Row.”

I thought that was cool, wounded pride aside.  

Then I kept reading.

“By the way,” he added, “it gets better, kids. When I feared being gay at thirteen, I kissed a girl who’d been badly bullied by most everyone at our school due to disfigurement. In a single moment, I knew that I was gay, while I also knew that I’d given my lonely friend a special gift she might not otherwise receive for a long time: her first kiss. Today, like me, she’s a survivor—if you Google the Bloody Mary Redneck Cornfield Crime, you’ll know more—and I’m still proud to call her my friend. We’re all a victim of something until we aren’t. Am I right?”

“Excuse me,” a male voice uttered close to my cheek. It was Stu, the reporter person. “You don’t look like you belong here.”

“Thank you?” I said.  

“Disfigured?!” I said to myself. “Bloody Mary Redneck Cornfield Crime.” I’d never Googled such a term, and vowed I never would.

“I mean, do you know when precisely this statue removal is supposed to go down?” 

He winked at me.

“Huh?”

“Hammer Time,” he mouthed.

“You got a tip-off?”

Stu nodded. “He said six p.m.—it’s fifteen till. We’re very pleased to help Professor Asioli publicize the event.”

“And he wants Bloody Mary to be there,” I murmured to myself.  “A mascot for Kevin’s bullshit…a monument to victimhood. What an Assholioli.”

“What’d you say, miss?” Stu asked.

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot in five,” I told him. “Bring your camera.”

There were lots of victims in this life, but Kevin really wasn’t one of them—not anymore. He was a bully. And I was tired of pretending everything was okay. So, I picked up the can of paint and left the office suite. On my way, I stopped for a quick egg roll to help myself sober up. Then, I found Stu and gave him an arm-waving sign. I jogged over toward Hammer and splashed him front and back in bright red. Any spot I’d missed I touched up with Roger’s brush.  

When Kevin pulled up in his black Ford Focus, he wasn’t alone. His husband, Alex, a clean-cut fellow wearing striped suspenders, sat in the passenger seat. They both got out and hugged me an awkward hello. Stu stood on, smiling big, his camera rolling.

“You’ve started without us?” Kevin asked me politely. But he was fuming.

“I thought I had more to take out on Hammer than you did.”

Kevin smiled that empathetic smile he’d perfected long ago—one entire corner of it may have been real.

“This way, people will remember it,” I pointed out.  

All of Roger’s partygoers were now hip to the scene, a mass of onlookers watching the action that had become well-illuminated thanks to Stu’s portable light stand.

“Hammer was a monster,” Kevin sputtered. “He pretended to be so magnanimous, giving his slaves elaborate quarters, only to burn them down to the ground in a fit of rage.”

“How were you going to cart him away in a Ford Focus?” Stu asked. 

Kevin dragged his hands through his hair, trying to figure how much he had to gain, in this moment, how much to lose.

A gray pickup pulled up, with a double-wide bed, and when a handsome, fortyish-looking man hopped out and apologized for being late, I did a double-take. 

“I’m here for the statue,” he announced.

“Mr. Barrentine?” I heard myself exclaim.

“Neal,” he said, taking my hand in his. “And you are?”

I realized Mr. Barrentine had not been even a middle-aged man when he taught us but a fresh-from-college kid with a passion for truth and teaching, maybe ten years my senior.  

“It’s me, Lila Gittings,” I said.

“Lila!” He hugged me tightly. His recognition gave me butterflies.

Next, the sirens came wailing. Two cop cars, three officers with expressions ranging from pissed to bemused.  

By then, I was happy to explain that I’d done the vandalism.

“All my fault,” I said, as Kevin slinked into the shadows. 

“Lila, why?” Cam called out to me.

“Yeah, why indeed?” Stu echoed.

“Ask Kevin,” I said, finding him in the darkness, throwing him a sharp bone.  

Stu turned the camera on him.

“Mr. Asioli?”

“You’re not a veterinarian!” Kevin said to me. “I Googled you. You’re some kind of narcissist.”

The line threw me—into a rage.

I turned to Stu and said something I semi-regret: “Ask Kevin for his mother’s cannoli recipe.”

The police didn’t hold me, and Cam and Roger didn’t hold much of a grudge. At eleven, after a sloppy round of Scrabble, Cam, Roger, Hadley and I watched the whole scene on the news, me splashing the statue red, Kevin, a well-respected Furman professor, missing the opportunity altogether. Though it had been extremely gratifying to hear Kevin explain that he’d “borrowed his identity to make a point,” to see Neal’s face fall in heartbroken disgust, and to hear Alex go, “Are you fucking kidding me?” none of that made it on to TV. None of it has gone public, far as I know. And I won’t blow Kevin’s cover, it’s not my place. Leave that messaging to Alex. Of course, I did look back on his university webpage just the other day, and it reports to be “under construction.”

I had to pay a significant fine, which Roger kindly spotted me, for defacing a historic monument. And the following Monday, Roger told me how Greenville Public Works sent these guys in uniforms to blast the statue with a pressure washer. Hadley took photos for me of the before and after, which showed Hammer go from bright red to a hot pink, the exact same pink as the the TCBY cone. Not only that but the highspeed water actually took his head off at the tip-top of the neck. How perfect is that? Thanks to me, a sad little monument that will always live in my mind’s eye—and in the minds of many Greenvillians—now insists upon discussion anew. I’ve made the updated—decapitated—version of Hammer my profile pic.

Neal Barrentine is my newest Facebook friend. He messaged me this morning that the next time I’m in South Carolina, he’s hoping he can buy me dinner. We’ve messaged a whole heck of a lot in the last few days. He’s been divorced two years from some woman he doesn’t want to talk about. He says he wants the chance to be equals. Wants to “fight fair.” I said that sounds okay to me and told him where you can get good sushi not too far from my sister’s house. I don’t want to make Cam pay for another plane ticket, but maybe as soon as next month I can probably afford a red-eye. I don’t get back South as often as I’d like. It’s a beautiful place if you know who you are, who you’ve been, and what in hell you’re up against.

Betsy Boyd is a fiction writer and journalist. A native Texan, she is the recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Betsy’s fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, and at American Short Fiction, Eclectica, Del Sol Review, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize.

Twitter: @TheBetsyBoyd
Facebook: Betsy Boyd