The Gas Station Boy

Part One: Summer Fantasies

Summer love always seems to have a special place in the heart of teenagers. Most of them leave their normal homes and friends for summer versions once school gets out which opens up a world of possibility. If you get involved with someone, you only need to wait a month or two and everything ends very seamlessly. Summer provides the perfect time for kids to hook up.

A girl the age of sixteen years old sits in the passenger seat of her parents Volvo as her father drives her to work. She’s a city kid by trade, but a country kid at heart. While most of her classmates are in the Hamptons with their butlers soaking up the sun and doing nothing, this girl in on her way to do honest, hard work at a job that she loves.

“She you at six,” she mutters to her father. Without any more of a goodbye or a thank you, she closes the car door and starts off to what she kindly refers to as her barn. She doesn’t own a horse here, let alone the stable, but she has formed such an attachment to the horses that she feels she’s at home here.

She sets her helmet down on one of the tack trunks she has never seen open and goes to greet the horses. She talks to each of them as if they were her children and gives them kisses as she gets to work. She often has to sweep at her job, but she has come up with a couple of rules to keep her sane. Rule #1: The barn will never be clean.

After about half an hour of doing what she calls common sense work, she is joined by another human in the barn. Rarely does this girl ever have the company of someone her own species, “’morning Ian,” the girl greets the man who has walked in.

To say he was a man might be an understatement. He’s twenty six years old, but seems to act more like a toddler than someone who has been out of college for years. The girl has noticed that he seems to wear the same thing every day: a pair of old blue jeans, a white t-shirt and cowboy boots with the only thing that changes day to day to give an indication that the man can do wash are the changing colors of the bandanas he keeps stuffed in his pocket.

“More like afternoon, don’t ya think?” he asks her. As he passes the girl, he holds his empty coffee cup in his hand and continually hits the bottom of it to send it into the air as the source of entertainment he almost always occupied himself with, “Or did you just wake up again?” he laughs at his own joke. The girl laughs too.

“Actually I managed to pull myself out of bed before ten today,” the girl jokingly says even though it is the truth, “Aren’t you proud of me?” the man chuckles again. One time he had mentioned that he said his jokes to entertain himself and no one else. If people laughed along with him, that was a bonus, but he aimed to amuse himself, not others. This was one thing the girl liked about him.

“Very proud of you,” the man whispers as if to himself and no one else, “I have a very special job for you today,” he says as he points the end of his coffee cup in the girl’s face, “Very special job,” the girl looks at him intently, ignoring the fact that he always seems to be talking like the world is a joke to him. The man turns around and grips his shoulder, “You think you could give me a rub down? My shoulder’s killing me… and another cup of coffee would be great,”

He looks over his shoulder with a face telling the girl that he had successfully amused himself with his joke. The girl seems to find that his attempt at a joke he has said multiple times isn’t worth a response. Instead, she takes her camera up and snaps a picture of him. She always carries her brand new camera that she saved up all her money for around her neck for moments just like this, “You’ve got actual work for me, or just common sense work?” the girl asks him.

The man she talks to now is her boss, but she doesn’t see him as her boss. When she was honest with herself, she looked at this man who was a decade older than her as someone she wanted to be more than friends with. Every time the two of them were alone, she had to steady herself to stop her urge to kiss him. The fact that they worked in an environment with very few other people working there and the chances of more than one person being in a room were slim to none, she and her boss were often alone together, “Actually,” her boss says as he acts serious for a moment or two, “All the horses need haying, and if you could clean up the wash stall, that’d be great,”