Ferrrari by M. Price

                  ​Dan Phiffer CC



What would you tell me if you could teach me how to remember?


   In September of 2006, I should have been in youth group but was making out with Ashley Bailey in the elevated tube with bulbous ship-like windows on the church playground instead. Ashley was all stringy blonde hair and cheeks like juicy peaches when she laughed. She wore a studded belt on jeans that had holes from wear, not for fashion. Often I’d stare at the large space she left between her belly button and the button much further down on her low-rise pants. Seventh grade had just started.
  Ashley was a year above me, entering the very grown-up world of eighth grade with her best friend, my sister. When Sage started bringing her around I took notes on how to be a teenager. The first time we kissed was in the Southside Nazarene Church parking lot when Sage, her friend Lizz, and Ashley were trying on different hats of freedom. I was strides ahead, just happy that my sister allowed me to hang around them. 
   “Sage, watch this. I’m gonna kiss your sister.”
   My sister laughed and Lizz stared warily on because it made her uncomfortable never being able to predict what Ashley would do next. 
  I turned around, waited under an LED street lamp, and watched Ashley walk toward me. She met me and did exactly as she said she would. I kissed her back and loved the feeling of being publicly, defiantly, made someone’s.

   Ashley was what my mom called a problem child. Exactly what you’d expect. Fighting with other girls, cursing out teachers. Suspended more times than anyone else I’d known. Constantly skipping school, convincing my sister to do the same. They would smoke cigarettes and hide out in the swampy inlet near the country club golf course. I never dared to cut school, but they’d always be waiting for me when the dismissal bell rang to let me out. Mom never stopped allowing Ashley to come over, though, because she knew that our house was better than letting her go home.

   The night of the eighth grade dance Ashley and I pretended to watch a movie in my sister’s bed. Sage had a TV in her room, I didn’t. Earlier, my mom, Ashley, and I dropped my sister off at the gym doors of the middle school. Sage was wearing an aqua blue dress that kissed her knees and sparkled all over. She ran to meet her friends on the curb while Ashley stayed in the car with me. Because of all the trouble she’d gotten into, the administration had taken away Ashley’s right to dance. While my sister feigned adulthood to T-Pain or Kelly Clarkson in the middle school’s cafeteria, Ashley laid on her back and held me with both arms while I kissed her from above, one hand on the mattress, the other under her shirt on her ribs. We were learning how to put our thighs in between each other’s legs when someone knocked at the door. My mom slowly peeked her head in and we separated like magnets with the same electric charge.
   “I’m running back out to pick up your sister. Y’all wanna come with?”
   I looked at Ashley, my face hot, then back to mom.
   “No, we’re good, we’re gonna finish the movie.”
   Mom said Alrighty and we burst out laughing as the door closed.
   Ashley’s always started with a loud--
   “PAH!” 
   —and high pitch staccato laughs followed the rest of the way out. 
   I got up because it felt like I had to pee real bad and when I got to the toilet I noticed something I’d never seen before. On the cloth of my underwear, the part that sat directly under all of the heat I’d just been feeling, was something gooey, shining sticky and slick. 

   We ran away together, but only so far as two teenage girls could go. 
   During freshman orientation night at the high school, Ashley took my hand and led me away from my mom and sister to show me parts of the school that wouldn’t be toured by the faculty. Down a hallway behind the main gym was a smaller, dimly lit auxiliary gym. The room was shaped like a square and was built with painted-white cinderblock walls with ceilings so high that Ashley started singing “Time’s A’Wastin’” by June Carter Cash and that other guy who wasn’t Johnny to make me laugh, her ridiculous howling floating way up above our heads. 
   I’ve got arms, and you’ve got arms. Let’s get together and use those arms, let’s goooo!
   Time’s a’wastin!
   On one of the walls was a narrow, mounted ladder which reached a platform about the size and width of a small trailer home with electric boxes and other things we didn’t understand or care about. We followed the trail of her singing up to the top of the platform and sat side by side with our feet waving to the floor over the edge, Ashley’s arm around my body. I didn’t know much about love or the right ways to show it, but I noticed that it started to be painful when Ashley wasn’t touching me.

   I was fifteen when I first cried over lost love. Somewhere in between freshman and sophomore year, Ashley actually ran away and I either didn’t get the invitation or I missed the secret signal she sent out to me. My sister held onto me crying in the living room. Ellen was on in the background. And then Maury. And then life went on. I stopped going to youth group. Learned how to drive a car. Drank Four Loko (before they removed the caffeine). Got my first official girlfriend. She was shorter than me with perfect red ringlet curls, had freckled cheeks and auburn eyes that turned into honeycombs in the light. Learned how to be, and to have, a girlfriend. Reveled in being held accountable by someone else and in being one half of making joint promises. First girlfriend and I broke up. She has two daughters. I loved again, better and stronger. Now, I will be twenty-seven in July, and a year from that I will be twenty-eight. If I’m lucky, the next year I will be twenty-nine and on and on until I am not. 

   But, lately, I’ve been thinking about the last time I saw Ashley. After breaking and entering, a few counts of theft, and some photos in the mugshot yearbook section of the local paper, Ashley made her way back home, back to the place she was always trying to get away from. I was sixteen and sitting on a front porch swing next to the first person who made me feel truly loved. Except she wasn’t Ashley anymore. Her cheeks didn’t remind me of ripe fruits and the time in between us left us configured as strangers. On her neck was tattooed FERRARI in a messy, blotchy script. The nickname she’d adopted in juvie, and then in jail once she was old enough to be tried as an adult. Nothing felt the same. I left Ashley’s porch infuriated that neither of us had been able to remain in the sweet spot of thirteen, and learned, for the first time, that having had the experience of love would not always last, would not always translate to loving, to love in action, in present time.  

   Maybe it isn’t a question of how to remember. Maybe what I should have been asking is: How do I hold onto everything, all of the things that are burdened, equally, with the heavy weight of both love and grief?


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M. Price keeps trying in spite of it all. Or for it all? She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her cat, Babycat and can be found on Twitter at @notmywurst. Her writing can be found in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rejection Letters, and Contrary Magazine.

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