The First Few Nights of May (Pt. 1)

There aren’t enough teen queer romance stories in this world.

Everyone loved Joyce Carrington. She was stunning, with waist-length blonde hair, light brown eyes, and a sense of style no one replicate.
Me, well, I wasn’t very important. I had short brown hair, curves in all the wrong places, and a small obsession with old films. I didn’t know much about anything else, just that I felt something for Joyce that I couldn’t explain.
The last days of April were dedicated to finals. Everyone was stressed out, especially the band students, because they had district festival in two weeks and weren’t ready.
But to get away from the flashcards and highlighters, we went to Springfest, a local festival where teens needed an excuse to get drunk off bad alcohol, and where I once hooked up with Olivia Malcolmsen in a Porta-Potty.
Friday night, the day before the last day of April, my parents finally let me go to the festival. I planned on going, maybe eating some ice cream, and continuing a screenplay I started to write last summer. The sunset was stunning, with charcoal clouds threatening a storm later on, and purple and orange skies made everything look like an Impressionist painting. I bought a cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and sat down at a picnic table to write for a few minutes.
The screenplay I was writing was based around a group of five teens in the late 1980s’ that operated a small paranormal investigating group. The plot twist was that one of the teens was actually murdered in thirty years prior; not an original storyline, I know, but it was a start to my senior project in a year.
Every once in a while, someone would come and sit at the picnic table. Sometimes they were elderly ladies taking a break from playing an intense game of bingo, and other times it was a group of teenagers drunk on love and life. I got so into my writing that I forgot about my ice cream, and it eventually melted into a minty soup. I liked to stare up at the sky, too, and daydream about what it would be like to be someone else.
It had gotten dark, but the elderly women underneath the pavilion were still intensely playing bingo, and I worked by the tiki torches and the hanging patio lights. When it got be around eight o’clock, I started packing up my stuff. Lightning was flashing over the horizon, and thunder warned us of the storm that was coming.
As I stood up to throw away my mint ice cream soup, I almost ran into someone, and looking up, I realized it was Joyce Carrington- the girl I’d had a crush on for a few months now.
“Hey, you’re Kelsey, right?” she asked. I was speechless.
“Are you looking for another Kelsey?” I replied. There were at least two others in our high school, and another one in the middle school.
“Well, you’re Kelsey Castro Rios, right?”
My palms broke out into a cold sweat. Why was I so important that one of the most loved girls in school was talking to me? “Yeah, I am.”
Joyce nodded, as if she knew that all along. “I’m doing this project in my communications class where we try to make a friend with someone we’ve never talked to.” She paused. “So, do you want to meet up sometime?”
Flustered, I could only nod. “Uh, yeah, I would love to... what do you think of meeting at Amy’s Sunday afternoon?” Amy’s was half cafe, half diner. The owner and manager, James Valerie, named the restaurant after his wife who died in childbirth twenty years ago. Now, people come from all over the state just to try their hot dogs. (“Made from real meat!”)
Joyce nodded. “Oh, yeah, I would love that!” She walked away, looking killer in a yellow tube top and mom jeans. As if on cue, the long-promised rain was finally
released from the heavens, and I went home.

Author's Note

Part 1 of ???

I’m not very good at writing in first person, so I plan on writing a lot in that perspective, so I can get better. Also, some of the last names I used from people I know, because I don’t have enough creativity to come up with a new name. Hey, thanks for reading.




((The file chosen for this cover photo is not mine. I did not create, I do not own it, and I took no part in creating it. No copyright infringement intended.))