Summer

I met Jay two summers after Katrina, two years after my parents separated, two years after I came out. It was June in Mississippi: the palms sagged from the heat by mid-morning, their brown fronds shaking in the weak sea breeze. If you stood on the shore, you could see the barrier islands through the haze in the distance, small specks in an empty sea.

Jay was thirty but looked like a boy. He drove a black Jaguar with leather seats. It was his only indulgence other than travelling; his apartment was sparse, his walls unpainted. I had reconnected with Michael, one of my oldest friends, the year before. He introduced us. We were all old enough to drink but Michael and I were sometimes too poor, so Jay would buy our gin and we’d show him how to dance.